Skits had a different opinion on the matter entirely.

Leo found her in the back corner of the hangar with Number Nine. One of her interface nodules was plugged directly into one of Nine’s data receptacles. They weren’t even talking anymore, just experiencing each other’s artificial consciousnesses directly. Nine was humming happily.

“Ahem,” Leo said, coughing into his fist.

“Ugh, seriously, Leo?” Skits snapped. “Can’t you see we’re busy here? We are right in the middle of proving the Riemann hypothesis.”

“We are using Fesenko’s conjecture on the positivity of the fourth derivative,” Number Nine said. “It is highly stimulating.”

Those were two words Leo definitely didn’t need to hear. “Baz says you need to give us a hand. We’re helping the Orin with their rebuilding.”

Skits flipped. “Are you kidding me? Go out there? With those pointy-eared things? Is Baz out of his mind? I won’t do it.”

“I could accompany you,” Nine chirped.

Apparently that was all she needed to hear.

And so Leo found himself leading both robots back to the village where they’d first found Crayt, aka Lark, looking to meet up with two of the planet’s natives—a female named Shree and a male named Rint—who would show them what to do. Behind him he could hear Skits chattering nonstop.

“So then Leo says it’s a code fourteen, which means Baz is in trouble, right? So I push his useless meat sack self out of the way and storm down the ramp ready to dance. The whole time I’ve got Bonnie belting through my speakers, full volume, and I see these scrap heaps waiting for me in the hangar. Security bots, at least thirty of them, all heavily armed, thick plating, bad attitudes. They’re all, like, ‘Don’t move. We have you surrounded.’ And I’m all like, ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’ And I just unleash. I am a tornado of destruction, taking bots out right and left. Bam! Zap! Crunch!”

“Remarkable,” Nine responded. “One against thirty. Your threat avoidance thresholds must be set incredibly high.”

“You have no idea. Honestly, I don’t even know what it’s like to be afraid anymore.”

With his back to them, Leo huffed. “She forgot to tell him about the part where her tread got blasted and we had to push her back onto the ship,” he muttered to Boo.

Boo glanced over his shoulder at the two bots in tow. “She’s only trying to impress him. She is . . . what’s the word . . . smote?”

“You mean smitten? Yeah, she’s smitten, all right. She’s been off her charger since she first saw him,” Leo said. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird? I mean . . . they’re robots.”

“Love is love, Leo,” Boo said with a shrug.

“I know but . . .”

“But what? The whole galaxy is at war. You’ve seen it yourself. We should take happiness where we can find it.”

Leo took another look behind to see Nine had clipped one of the blossoming purple flowers scattered about with his claws and gently stuck it into a seam in Skits’s chassis like some kind of boutonniere. The sun glinted off her smiling face. “Yeah . . . it’s still a little strange. . . .”