Swept Away
Tags: Wilderness Survival, Hurt/Comfort, Action/Adventure
Published: 31 January 2023
Word Count: 5,838
Summary
Murderbot gets rained on. A lot. And then things get worse, because of course they do.
Originally written as a New Year 2023 Gif Exchange fic for Gamebird.
Have I mentioned before how much I hate planets?
I fucking hate planets.
Unfortunately, I was on yet another planet, as the security consultant for another of Arada’s surveys. She and Overse were here, along with Ratthi and several other survey members from Preservation, including Rajpreet, Adjat, Remy, and Hanifa. I had my usual contract with them, with the usual terms and promise of hard currency card payment at the end, but I was seriously considering asking Pin-Lee if I could amend my contract to include a Fucking Shit Planetary Weather bonus or something.
Because the weather had been, as you’ve probably guessed, fucking shit. We’d been here for several cycles already and it had been cold and damp and annoyingly windy with regular bouts of precipitation for almost the whole time. I still wasn’t entirely sure what colour this system’s primary star was, because we hadn’t seen it through all the cloud cover. We couldn’t even use the hopper to get around, because of something to do with excessive moisture build-up that I didn’t entirely understand.
This didn’t stop my humans from going out and doing their survey stuff, unfortunately. Our environmental suits kept the worst of the precipitation off (we technically didn’t need the suits in this planet’s atmosphere, but since they worked well to keep us relatively dry, nobody objected to wearing them), and the satellite’s predicted weather forecast gave no indication of the weather improving any time soon. And because my humans were out there, I had to be out there too. At least I could watch media in my head while they worked, so I wasn’t too bored.
We were currently in a rocky, hilly area leading up to a mountain range, with multiple gullies and shallow ravines carving through the landscape, surrounded by weird alien flora. Everything was damp, and mossy, and muddy, and annoying. Thick banks of dark clouds were piled up against the mountain range, and the light was dim and grey. A hazy rain was misting down over us, making everything even more damp and muddy and annoying.
I was standing under the dubious shelter of some kind of weird tree, my humans scattered around me as they did survey stuff I wasn’t interested in. Arada and Ratthi were at the bottom of a nearby gully off to my right, taking samples and chatting excitedly about some of the alien moss. Overse had been with some of the others on higher ground over on my left, examining and sampling the larger flora around the bases of the trees, but she eventually split off from them to go check on Arada.
I watched Overse carefully pick her way down the steeply sloped side of the gully, using exposed tree roots as hand and foot holds. It made me a little nervous, but so far none of the humans had managed to hurt themselves with all the clambering about, which was a minor miracle as far as I was concerned. Once Overse reached Arada and Ratthi, they began discussing when they should take their next meal break, and which meal packs they should open, and at that point I promptly tuned them out.
The wet, miserable weather made things a little difficult for my drones - they especially struggled in heavy rain - so I had only deployed enough to form a perimeter around the survey area. The rest were safely back in our habitat, where I could swap them out when my currently deployed drones got waterlogged enough to need maintenance. I was monitoring their inputs while also watching a new episode of a serial I’d recently picked up. It was about a group of humans in some magical fantasy setting, suitably unrealistic and entertaining, and I was enjoying it. The rain was starting to get heavier, but judging from the time we’d already spent here, that wasn’t unusual for this time of the cycle.
Then Risk Assessment spiked, hard.
I immediately paused the episode and checked my inputs. The drones on the mountain side of the perimeter were picking up unusually heavy rainfall pouring down from the gathered clouds; it was like the ocean was trying to reclaim the land via airdrop. That much water falling that quickly on ground that was already saturated from previous rainfall was… not good. Even now my drones were picking up the start of a flash flood.
And three of my humans were still down in the fucking gully.
I pinged everyone’s feeds with an emergency alert even as I bolted for the gully. [Get to high ground! Flash flooding!] I didn’t bother climbing down the side - the gully was deep, but SecUnits were tough, and I’d fallen greater distances multiple times before. (Not always willingly, either.) The muddy ground helped absorb some of the impact as I landed close to where Arada and Ratthi had been taking samples. They, along with Overse, were already at the side of the gully, starting the climb up.
It was a relief to be with competent humans who didn’t stand around going “what?” or asking stupid questions when I sent an alert out, unlike previous clients I’d had.
I grabbed their sample cases and tossed them up onto high ground, then helped to boost Overse up to the top of the gully wall first - she was the strongest of the trio, so she’d be able to help pull the others out more quickly. Arada was next - Overse grabbed her partner’s arm and hauled her over the edge even as I turned to grab Ratthi and help him up the side of the gully. Even over the drum of the increasingly heavy rainfall, I could hear the sound of oncoming water moving fast. I called my drones in from the perimeter and assigned a couple to stay with each human, while simultaneously shoving Ratthi high enough for Arada and Overse to grab his outstretched arms.
They latched on to him and hauled him upwards, his feet scrabbling against the side of the gully. I had to jump up and dig into the gully wall to give him another boost when all the rain made their grip slip and he began to slide back down. “Go, go!” The roar of the water was getting closer by the second.
Ratthi finally cleared the edge and I started climbing up after him - but it was too late. A wall of foaming, frothing water full of debris roared down the gully and slammed into me even harder than a hauler bot. I tried to cling to the gully wall but the impact tore me free and I was swept away.
I hastily closed my eyes and sealed my lung so water wouldn’t get into it, and tried to curl up into a ball as the churning water slammed me around uncontrollably. I felt myself being repeatedly smashed against the ground or the gully walls or other debris in the water - it was impossible to keep track of which way was up, or where I was in relation to anything else. Damage alerts flared with every impact, and I had to dial my pain sensors down to their lowest setting before I got overwhelmed.
There was no fighting or resisting the weight and strength of so much water moving so quickly. All I could do was try to ride it out.
I felt more debris or something slam into me - or I slammed into it, I don’t know - and pain flared in my shoulder, my knee, my chest. More damage alerts screamed for attention even as I tried to shield my head, but something else smashed into me—
Performance reliability catastrophic drop.
Involuntary Shutdown.
The first thing I noticed when I cycled back up again was a Low Oxygen alert alongside a Fluid in Lung alert, on top of all the other damage alerts clamouring for my attention. Not that I really needed either alert - I could feel the water in my lung and the tightness in my chest.
Luckily for me, SecUnits don't drown anywhere near as easily as humans do.
The second thing I noticed was that I was no longer being swept along and slammed into things. I was lying somewhere underwater, lodged up against some rocks or something. The water was moving more slowly here - it must have swept me out of the gully system and down into a more open area somewhere.
The third thing I noticed, once I tried to move, was that my right arm and left leg weren’t working properly. Diagnostics indicated that the knee had been twisted out of alignment and the shoulder wrenched out of its socket.
Well, shit.
At least both limbs were still attached. That already made this situation better than some of the other predicaments I’d been in before. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost any bits of me here. Who knows if I ever would have been able to find them again, and Preservation was not exactly capable of making replacement parts for constructs. Maybe ART could have machined something for me, eventually.
But I hadn’t actually lost any parts, so there wasn’t really any point in thinking about it. The low oxygen alert was getting more insistent, and the feeling of fluid in my lungs even more unpleasant. I managed to lever myself up out of the muck, then clambered awkwardly up the pile of rocks and tree trunks and whatever other debris that I’d gotten lodged against, despite only having the use of one arm and one leg. The water was too deep for me to breach the surface just by standing up, but climbing up onto the pile of crap gave me enough height to finally get my head above water.
I immediately began coughing the liquid up out of my lung, trying to clear it out as quickly as I could. Ugh, it was all gritty and full of silt and little bits of flora and who knew what else. Gross. It took a good two minutes of coughing and hacking before I gave up on trying to clear the gritty feeling out of my lung. At least I could breathe again, and the low oxygen alert finally vanished.
Okay. Next step. Get out of the water and back onto solid ground. If I knew anything about my humans by now (which I did), they would most likely be freaking out and trying to find me and probably getting themselves into all kinds of trouble without me.
Assuming that none of them had gotten caught in the flash flood as well, anyway. If any of them had…
I hurriedly pushed that thought out of my mind. I didn’t want to consider it. I’d gotten Arada and Overse and Ratthi out of the gully. They were fine. The others hadn’t even been in any of the gullies. They were all fine.
The worst part was that I’d been swept far enough away that I was out of range of all my drones, and my comms weren’t working either. I had no way of letting my humans know where I was. So I had to get back to them as soon as possible before anything else happened to any of them.
Easier said than done, though. It was still raining, but not as heavily as before. The pile of debris I was perched on seemed to continue to the edge of the water, at least, so I was able to awkwardly make my way towards the shore. My knee kept flashing alerts at me, but being waist or chest deep in water as I was, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Finally I managed to wade into the shallows and drag myself up onto solid ground. There were a couple of trees nearby, so I kind of slid-crawled over the soaked, muddy ground until I was beneath the dubious shelter of their branches. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. I gingerly leaned back against a tree trunk and took stock of myself.
It was… not great. Apart from the twisted knee and dislocated shoulder, I was battered and dented all over. There were large tears in my environment suit and underlying clothes where water-borne debris had smashed into me, leaving cuts and scrapes and gouges in my surface organics. Most of them seemed to have stopped bleeding, at least.
The faceplate of my environment suit had also been smashed at some point, letting water and junk inside, and I was completely soaked. My temperature controls were shot, probably from the impact of something or other against my torso shaking some important internal bits loose, and now that I was out of the water, I was getting cold. It wasn’t as dangerous for me as it would have been for a human, but it was unpleasant.
Whatever had gotten my leg all twisted at the knee had also torn the environment suit around it, and my pants beneath it as well. That was annoying, but it also meant that I could at least see my knee without having to actively take anything off, which made things a little less annoying. After peeling back some of the mangled organics and examining the inorganic damage for a bit, I decided that I could probably untwist my lower leg and get the knee joint back into place. Probably.
It was going to be awkward with only one fully functional arm though. I tried to get the shoulder joint back into place a couple of times, but I just didn’t have the right leverage to do so, and my few attempts made more damage alerts pop up. I gave up on the shoulder and looked around. I’d need to use something else to brace my leg and hold it in place.
A partially-exposed tree root looked like it might do the job. I shuffled over to it and dug out some of the dirt and mud beneath it until there was enough room for me to shove the foot of my busted leg under it and wedge it into place. Once I was mostly sure that it would hold firm, I took a few breaths, then threw myself sideways in a twisting motion.
Pain flared despite my sensors being as low as they could go, and I felt the knee joint pop and then clunk back into place, mostly. I didn’t have much time to celebrate that though because more alerts flared, as fluids began gushing out of a major line around the back of my knee.
What the fuck.
It didn’t take me long to realise that the twist of my leg had kept the line pinched closed, but now that I’d untwisted it there was nothing stopping the fluid from leaking out, and the automatic sealing wasn’t working. I had to act fast - my performance reliability was already dropping from the fluid loss.
In one of the serials I’d watched once, a survival drama involving humans that had been shipwrecked in the wilderness, one of the humans had needed to stop another human from bleeding out, and they didn’t have enough material or anything else to use as bandages. So the human had resorted to cauterising the wound with some scrap metal heated up in a fire.
I didn’t have any scrap metal, and there was no way I’d be able to start a fire in this weather, but I did have energy weapons built into my arms. If I was careful, then maybe I could cauterise the severed line with it. I adjusted the power level of my arm gun to its lowest setting, aimed carefully, and began firing. I had to tweak the power level a little before I could see any real effect. Steam hissed up from my knee as falling rain and other fluids evaporated, and I had to adjust my vision filters to see through it so I didn’t drift off-target.
I’d had clients order me to shoot myself before, out of malice or mere boredom, but this was the second time I’d had to shoot myself of my own choice. It didn’t make it any better.
But at least it worked, eventually.
Once I was sure the leaking had stopped, I just… sat there for a couple of minutes. With the line sealed off, my performance reliability had mostly levelled out, but it was uncomfortably low. The thought of indulging in a recharge cycle was kind of tempting, but I didn’t want to waste the time. I had to get back to my humans, make sure they were all okay.
Eventually, I dragged myself up to my feet, using the tree trunk as a support. I tested my leg and found out that it could support my weight, mostly, but I couldn’t bend the knee much at all. Which was probably just as well, because I didn’t want to risk too much movement messing up the cauterisation. I really didn’t want to have to do that again.
I managed to get hold of a suitable tree branch to use as a makeshift walking aid, then bid a silent farewell to the tree and began limping away. Without my comms or drones, I couldn’t accurately position myself, but at this point I didn’t really need to. All I needed to do was follow the flow of water that had swept me away back uphill. Once I got back within range of my drones, then I’d be able to locate my humans more accurately. (Assuming they’d all managed to avoid getting washed away, anyway. Again, I tried not to think about that. I wasn’t being very successful.)
It was rough going, though. The ground was little more than thick, sucking mud and tangles of wet flora. With my messed up leg and all my other damage, every step was a struggle. I had to keep a close eye on my footing, testing the depth of each treacherous puddle with my stick before walking through them, so I couldn’t even watch my new serial to keep my mind off things. I switched to Sanctuary Moon and started playing that in the background instead. The familiarity was comforting.
Time passed, and the rain kept falling; a slow, unrelenting onslaught of raindrops drumming against my tattered environment suit, soaking through my clothes, pooling in my already-overflowing boots, plastering my hair to my skin. The low light made everything look grey - the clouds were grey, the sopping flora was grey, the mud was grey, the water flowing past was a darker churning grey flecked and foaming with paler grey. The wind whipped the flora against me as I tried to push through it and gusted the rain around, driving water into my face and cutting through my soaked clothing and making me even colder.
It fucking sucked.
Still, stopping wasn’t an option. I had to get back to the others as soon as possible. Thoughts of them coming to look for me and falling into the water, or getting stuck in deep mud, or having a tree fall on them, or slipping and breaking a limb, or any other number of other disasters kept playing through my head despite my best efforts.
I had to get back to them.
I awkwardly pushed my way through another tangle of alien flora, trying to find a path through the whippy branches and wet, clammy leaves—
— and then I cycled back online and found myself lying face-down in the mud.
What the fuck.
I turned my head enough so that my nose was at least out of the mud and I could breathe, then ran a diagnostic. I’d been so busy worrying about my humans, and trying to make my way through the shitty terrain, that I hadn’t noticed my performance reliability had started falling again. The combination of damage, cold, and exertion had sent me into an involuntary shutdown before I could even register the drop.
Great. Just great.
I couldn’t just lie here though. I could feel the mud seeping in through the rips in my environment suit and clothes. It was disgusting. I groped around until I found my tree branch, then used it to help lever me back up out of the mud and onto my feet again.
At least the rain kind of washed some of the mud away. (It didn’t help much.)
I took a moment to gather myself, then started forward again, one slow, limping step at a time. The mud gathered on my boots and legs weighed me down, and my dangling arm felt like it might pull free of my shoulder entirely at any point. I did my best to tuck it into the waistband of my environment suit to help support it, but it kept slipping loose again, and eventually I gave up.
I kept a closer eye on my performance reliability this time, and stopped for a breather whenever it started dipping too low. Once it levelled out a bit, I continued on again. The further I went, though, the more quickly it fell, and the longer it took to stabilise again. I was making abysmal progress, but it was still better than making no progress at all.
The dim light was getting dimmer, and I knew that nightfall was approaching. That would make things even more difficult for my humans; I hoped they had the sense to go back to the habitat for the night, instead of flailing around in the dark.
Then I was on the ground again, sunk into the mud, and the dim grey sky was now entirely black. With all the cloud cover, there was no hope of any starlight getting through. The darkness was eerie. Even my various vision filters were struggling. The only other times I’d been anywhere this dark was when I’d been deep underground in the mines, and the power to the lights had gone out. But the sounds of a mine were vastly different to the sounds out here, of drumming rain and rushing water and wind rustling the flora.
Yes, it was still raining.
It was harder to get up out of the mud this time. I’d been out for a while, and I’d gotten even colder. Diagnostics indicated that the damage to my internal components that had busted my temperature controls was getting worse. I tried to check my knee to see if it had started leaking again, but it was too dark to see clearly and everything was so wet I couldn’t feel if more of my own fluids had soaked into my clothes or not.
I sighed, and pressed on.
I lost track of how many times I had an involuntary shutdown, and then cycled back online some indeterminable time later, facedown in the mud. My lung felt even grittier than it had before. My organic parts were so waterlogged that they were going all wrinkly and soft. Getting back up was becoming more and more difficult.
Still, I struggled back to my feet every time, and kept on going. The closer I could get to where I’d left my humans, the easier (hopefully) it would be for me to find them. Or them to find me. At least with all the shutdowns, I no longer had the energy to waste on worrying about what might have happened to them.
I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, testing each step with my stick before committing. Even in areas that were more rock than mud, the fine layer of silt washing over everything made footing treacherously slippery. I’m pretty sure at least a few of my involuntary shutdowns were caused by me hitting the ground after slipping and falling, unable to recover my balance in time. Sometimes my path was interrupted by another branch of flowing water, and I had to either wade through it if it wasn’t too deep, or find some way around it. Either option slowed me down.
The sky finally began to lighten, though it took me a little while to notice. Eventually I realised it was getting easier to see, even though the rain hadn’t let up. I briefly wondered how my humans were doing, whether they’d spent the night safely in the habitat and out of the rain. I tried not to think about any of them being stuck outside in the cold and the wet all night - at least SecUnits didn’t have to worry about shit like hypothermia.
I was so tired.
I paused for a bit to look up at the gradually lightening clouds and try to contact my drones. They were still out of range - or I just didn’t have the power to reach them right now. Same result, either way. I tried to figure out how far I’d come, how far I still had to go, but there weren’t really many visible, distinct landmarks. It was all just rocky hills and running water and hindering, tangled flora with the occasional scattering of trees. I had no idea where I was.
I just had to keep heading generally uphill. As long as I was travelling in the opposite direction to the flow of the water, I was (probably) going the right way.
After a minute or two of just standing, I took a breath and began moving again. One step, two steps, three—
— then my foot slipped on yet more of the slick, treacherous silt, and down I went. Something in my torso cracked with the impact, and—
Catastrophic failure—
I came back online slowly, groggy and disoriented. I felt… weird.
It took me a little while to realise that I felt weird because I was no longer soaking wet.
That realisation prompted more systems to reboot. Eventually enough systems came back online for me to actually register my surroundings.
I could still hear running, falling water all around, but I wasn’t being rained on any more. I was lying on the ground on my back, but my head and shoulders were propped up against something solid and soft and warm. My environment suit and soaked clothing and boots had been stripped off, and I was wrapped up in a couple of emergency blankets. I could see the ceiling of an emergency tent above me, with the shadows of tree branches overhead filtering through.
And Arada was sitting beside me, safe and uninjured as far as I could tell. She saw that I was awake and smiled at me, shaky and relieved. “Hi, SecUnit,” she said quietly.
Before I could respond, another voice replied from right behind me. “Oh! SecUnit’s awake?” Overse’s face moved into view above me, and I belatedly realised that it was her lap that was propping up my head and shoulders. Normally I would never have tolerated such contact, but this probably counted as an acceptable emergency situation, and I wasn’t really in any shape to object in the first place. “Hey there,” she added, also smiling down at me, though she was careful to look at my shoulder and not my face. “How are you feeling?”
I ran a diagnostic. The results were not particularly encouraging, so I didn’t reply to the question. Instead I asked something much more important. “Is everyone else all right?” My voice sounded almost as gritty as my lungs felt. “And what are you two even doing out here?”
“Everyone’s fine,” Arada reassured me. “Nobody else was hurt by the flash flood - you gave enough warning for everyone else to get to safety.”
“As for what we’re doing out here - we were looking for you, obviously,” Overse added, in a tone that made it very clear that she thought it was a stupid question. “We weren’t just going to leave you out here.”
My face must have done something, because Arada quickly assured me, “We were sensible about it though, don’t worry. After the flood, we regrouped back at the habitat first, and organised the rescue packs that you recommended in the security briefing.” She gestured to the survival blankets wrapped around me and the small emergency tent shielding us from the worst of the environment. “Nobody went off by themselves. Everyone went in pairs, and we remained in contact with each other the whole time. Once it started getting dark we went back to the habitat for the night - there were some arguments about that! But we knew how mad you’d be if you found out we’d been tromping around in the dark without food or sleep. So we went back, ate and slept, and started looking for you again as soon as it was light out.”
I was having an emotion. Maybe several. My humans hadn’t abandoned me, and - much more importantly - they’d remembered my security briefing, and then followed it. They hadn’t panicked, and had done everything they could to keep themselves safe while I wasn’t there to do so myself.
Overse added, “We’ve let the others know we found you, and they should be back at the habitat by now. As soon as the rain eases off, they’ll bring the hopper here and pick us up.”
I just nodded - I was still having that pesky emotion - and then I paused for a moment before asking, “How did you actually find me?”
Arada smiled brightly. “Your drones showed us the way! You left them with us, remember? So they were just following us around the whole time. Overse and I were about five hundred metres away from here when the ones with us suddenly took off, so we followed them, and that’s how we found you.” Her smile went all shaky again. “I don’t know if we would have been able to find you otherwise. With all the mud and rain and everything… you were really hard to see until we were right next to you.”
I had yet another emotion. If I hadn’t assigned my drones to all my humans…
But I had, and it had worked out. And now that I was thinking about it, I reached out to my drones, and managed to reconnect with the four that were with Arada and Overse. They’d been perched on their shoulders, clinging to them protectively. It was such a relief to have at least some drones again that my performance reliability managed to tick up half a point. Given my current state, even that half point was a big improvement.
“Thanks,” I said, somewhat belatedly. “I… thanks.” I was still too overwhelmed to think of anything else to say.
Not that I needed to say anything else. Arada and Overse knew me. They understood. “You’re welcome,” Arada said gently, smiling at my shoulder.
“And thank you, too,” Overse added. “You got us all to safety - if we’d been any slower, if any of us had still been down there when the water hit…” She had to stop to take a breath. She didn’t need to go on - I knew.
Arada gently patted her shoulder, then said, “But you did get us all out - and saved our samples, too!” The corner of her mouth quirked wryly. “Although next time, I hope you prioritise yourself over some samples. Those can be replaced. You can’t.”
Given how quickly everything had happened, I didn’t think that me leaving the samples behind would have made any difference in this case. But I knew better than to say that. I just nodded. “Noted.”
Overse snorted and shook her head slightly. “Typical,” she muttered, then asked, “Anyway, do you think you can sit up now? We didn’t want you just lying on the ground, but you’re heavy and my legs are going numb.”
Oh. Right. I quickly checked my diagnostics again, then gingerly sat up, using my mostly-undamaged arm to prop myself up. My other arm had been carefully strapped to my torso to support its weight and relieve the strain on my dislocated shoulder joint. It was a little awkward, but a lot more comfortable than having it just dangling loosely and flopping around and getting in the way.
Overse wriggled out from behind me and stretched her legs. “Ow, ow, pins and needles,” she muttered as she rubbed at her calves and thighs.
“Sorry,” I said. I knew exactly how heavy SecUnits were.
She waved my apology away. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We really didn’t want you resting entirely on the ground. You were so cold before.”
I probably didn’t have to explain, but I wanted to anyway. “Temperature controls got busted.” Along with several other internal systems, judging by my diagnostics, but my humans didn’t need to know the messy details when they weren’t in a position to do anything about it. I’d stabilised enough by now that I wasn’t in any immediate danger, at least.
“That would explain it,” Arada said. “You looked like hell, all cut up and bruised and battered and—“ She cut herself off and took a deep breath as Overse moved to sit beside her, wrapping one arm around Arada’s waist. “Anyway,” Arada continued after a moment. “We were really worried. We did what we could to patch you up and get you warmed up again.” Her brow creased slightly. “What happened to your knee, anyway? It’s a mess.”
I hesitated, trying to decide how much detail I wanted to go into. “… It got twisted out of place, and a fluid line got severed,” I said. “Had to cauterise it to stop it from leaking.”
Arada nodded slowly. “Well, the cauterisation seemed to hold up pretty well - it was starting to leak a little by the time we got to it, but not too badly. We’ve cleaned it up and bandaged it, and splinted the joint to keep it immobile until we can get you to a proper MedSystem.”
It was a relief to know that I wasn’t in immediate danger of bleeding out any time soon. I could survive losing the majority of my inorganic fluids for a while, but I knew from experience that it was incredibly uncomfortable and made a mess of my systems, which took ages to fix. That was one less concern now, at least. Arada and Overse had done a good job patching me up, too. As long as I didn’t attempt anything strenuous (like walking), I would probably be able to avoid any more involuntary shutdowns until I could get to the MedSystem. “Thanks. Um. Again.”
Both Arada and Overse smiled at my (totally deliberate) awkwardness. “Don’t worry about it,” Overse replied. She looked out at the still-falling rain through the emergency tent’s little window, then glanced back in my general direction. “It looks like we’re going to be here for a while before the rain eases and the hopper can get here. Got any media to pass the time with?”
What a stupid question. Of course I did. I didn’t bother answering verbally - I just tapped both their feeds and started the new serial I’d been enjoying earlier from episode one.