"Okay," Halsey grunted as she set the crate of produce she was trying to sell down on the stall. She, well, she didn't hate farmer's markets, quite the opposite in fact. They were a good place to support local people, and get decent-quality fresh food.
She did not like the idea of being the one running a stall, especially not with seventy-six hellions to keep an eye on. Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration. She didn't take all of the kids with her, only about seven of the most reliable, dependable ones.
John was there, of course, along with Cortana. Halsey refused to let either of them out of her sight now, after he showed her how to make an improvised mortar cannon out of a metal garbage can and some of the fertilizers and chemicals laying around, and in turn she showed him how to increase its explosive power to such a degree it put a hole through one of the concrete walls surrounding the farmstead. Halsey half-expected that, if she left the two alone long enough, one day she'd go outside and find a missile made out of scrap, with one of the terrors strapped to the top and trying to ride it to orbit.
Jorge had volunteered to come along, something Halsey was immensely grateful for as he spoke quite a bit of Hungarian, something that the locals in the highland mountains spoke with quite a bit of frequency, and a language that Halsey did not speak. He was to be her translator. Still, she found herself cursing whoever was the mysterious benefactor in ONI that sent them out here, and resolved to file a formal complaint, in triplicate, with lots of graphs and charts proving how it would've been a much better decision to send her to a planet that spoke her ancestral language, Italian.
…well, actually, it wasn't her ancestral language. Halsey didn't have a lick of Italian blood in her. She just got confused when she was about six and thought Italian and Latin were the same thing, and since Latin was the language of science and she wanted to be a scientist, she had to learn Italian.
But don't tell anyone that. She had an image to maintain.
…even if that image was of a twenty-thirty-something year old already going grey in her hair because of a platoon's worth of teenagers she had to take care of single-handedly.
The rest of the "excursion team" was therefore designed to minimize the potential for shenanigans in the highly public farmer's market. The four remaining teenagers were, in order of no particular reason, Maria, Kurt, Musa, and James. The Spartans least likely to make trouble- No, scratch that. The Spartans most likely to remember they were in freaking public and therefore not do anything that could blow their cover of being a nice if eccentric family of seven children and their long-suffering single mother who don't get out much.
"Look at that." Kurt commented, glancing across the way at positively enormous ears of corn. "There's no way they're all-natural."
"Actually, there are plenty of natural subspecies of maize that grow that large." Cortana clasped her arms behind her back. Halsey noted the act, raising a curious eyebrow at it. Most of Halsey's memories and personality she tried to impart on her young clone didn't survive, but a few of her quirks did, and parade rest wasn't one of them. Looking over, though, she could see John in a similar stance.
"Is it selective breeding?" Musa asked in response.
Cortana blinked, tilting her head as she thought about it. "Well… Yes, I think."
"Then it sure as hell isn't natural." Musa shook his head.
Kurt began to rub his hands together. "Then let's do something about it. Make the people aware of what exactly it is they're buying."
"You will do nothing of the sort." Halsey gestured to the truck. "Now, help me unload this."
"Come on, Doc." Kurt groaned. "We'll never be able to sell our… pitiful crap with that just across the way."
"Kurt, like it or not, we're part of a bigger community now." Halsey began to lecture, "And part of that is not sabotaging our neighbors' attempts to make a living."
"Lame." James huffed.
The woman slammed the box down at the stall she had picked out, turning around to fix the Spartans with a look. Anyone who didn't know her would be hard-pressed to find it threatening, but it was Halsey. The woman who could kill them in thirty different ways without even needing to lay a finger on them, or make their lives a living hell in about a thousand, all through the wonders of science.
Yet, in that moment, they had noticed that the doctor had… bulked up, just slightly, by working on the farmstead, and the look she was giving them practically dared them all to try and make trouble.
"We're out in public." She put her foot down, really trying to reign them in now. "You can all act like impulsive fools in the privacy of our home, since the only ones you're hurting out there are yourselves. But while we're out in public, you're going to behave like civilized people, and not terrorize innocent strangers. And if you do, then I will make sure to devise a punishment for you that will make Chief Mendez's training look like a light jaunt. Understand?"
It really did make her sad to have to give them that lecture, that they were so emotionally repressed it was a fight to keep them from causing a fracas out in public, but if the Spartans' light jokes crossed the wrong person, or wound up causing someone who couldn't take it to get hurt… Goodness, she couldn't spare the thought.
"We understand, ma'am." John spoke on behalf of the group, Jorge nodding in agreement, before the others followed. Even Cortana, who didn't even need to. She wasn't half as bad as the rest of them on her worst day.
…then again, she had only been alive for about two weeks now. So, there were probably plenty of opportunities for trouble from her.
Halsey sighed, continuing. "Look, I know you all only want to help. So, please, help me by doing what I say, okay? We'll get all of this handled, then we'll go back to the farmstead, and I'll think of some alternate methods to bring in survivable income. Until then, just calm down, suffer through this with me, and don't try to pick fights with the locals. Can you all do that for me?"
The teens looked between each other, then back to Halsey, nodding.
The scientist let out a sigh, getting back to work. Still, she was worried, but at least on the bright side, whatever trouble was liable to happen would be entirely confined to the farmstead.
From the vehicle storage building on the… let's say Halsey Farmstead for the sake of brevity, came the sounds of ratcheting and grunting, a teenage boy hard at work on the inside of the 'shop' as he tended to the body of the old muscle car he'd found within. Over the course of the month or so since they'd arrived, he'd been hard at work turning the car from a jalopy, into a road-worthy vehicle.
It was going quite well so far, too.
With the replacement tire in place after the last one had, well, snapped off, Fred took a step back, admiring his handiwork. The body panels were all in place and sanded, though there still weren't doors… or seatbelts… actually, really, the only thing the car had going for it was that the engine wasn't exposed.
But damn it, he was putting in the work, he could feel a sense of pride and accomplishment!
"Still in here toiling over your tinker toy?" Fred heard Kelly's voice remark from the door, and he turned to look.
"Well, since you asked, yes." Fred smiled back in that sarcastic way of his.
"You've been working on that thing since you found it." She noted, approaching the vehicle. "When are you just going to admit it's a deathtrap and be done with it?"
"When hell freezes over."
Kelly scoffed, looking at the ancient car with distaste. "You know these things don't have any computer navigation? Or auto-brakes. Or smart steering."
"That's the beauty of it!" Fred excitedly gestured in reply. "There's a risk every time you go out onto the road! Not like now, where the only risks are if some jackass throws his garbage into the street. Car like this, place like this, the only way of guiding yourself back being your brain… you could get lost."
Kelly raised an eyebrow, looking at the car with a slight sense of understanding. "There is a certain… romanticism in it, I suppose."
Fred snapped his fingers, pointing. "See? You get it! Besides," He turned back to the car with a shrug, "I've watched a lot of programs for living on a farm. Having a car like this is practically required!"
"For what?" Kelly questioned.
"Running moonshine." Fred answered, dead serious.
"…you want to run bootleg alcohol in that thing?" She demanded, pointing at the car. "In that ancient deathtrap that looks like it could shake itself apart?"
"Why not?" Fred shrugged. "Halsey's already talking about making alcohol."
"No, she isn't! She talked about planting a vineyard!" Kelly retorted.
"And when we grow the grapes, we're gonna need a vehicle to outrun the law in."
"Fred," Kelly rubbed her face, "How much do you actually know about wine-making?"
"Nothing, because I'm not an alcoholic."
The girl sighed and rubbed her face, the urge to smack him rising, but being quashed. "Vineyards are very rarely the ones that actually make the wine. The wine company just buys the grapes. We're not going to be fermenting and bottling it."
"Then I'll tell Li to hurry up and finish that still he's working on." Fred shrugged again.
"Are you thrill-seeking, or just stupid?"
"Probably both," Fred answered in a beat, "What about you?"
"Excuse me?" Kelly demanded, cocking an eyebrow at him.
"You're so far into my business, a guy can't help but think it's signaling interest." Fred cockily leaned on the car.
Kelly's face went red. "Me? Interested in you?"
"What?" Fred blinked. "No! Interested in bootlegging!"
"Oh," Kelly crossed her arms, blushing even harder, though this time it was from embarrassment, "Maybe, maybe not… and those mean the same thing, thinking about it." She blinked, shifting awkwardly.
"Well then, how about a test drive?" Fred suggested, tapping the hood of the vehicle.
"…we won't end up on any roofs this time, will we?"
"No, no roofs."
Kelly nodded. "Then let's go."
Halsey sat, keeping herself supported by her hand as she looked at the person touching and inspecting every bit of food she had in the stall, but not buying anything. The guy finally sat the produce down, and continued on his way.
"Thank you for your patronage, jackass." Halsey muttered with a disappointed shake of her head. They'd managed to pull in some money, but not a lot. Enough to pay for electricity and water, maybe, but that was it. A bulk of their haul had still gone unsold.
She hated farmer's markets. Every other form of retail work had been largely taken over by automation. Not the job of producing the goods, mostly, but the job of being the cashier. Everything was through automated kiosks.
But farmers, and people who bothered to go all the way to the farmer's market for produce, were a notoriously finnicky bunch. Using a kiosk like the automated ones bred an image of sterility and coldness-that the people behind it really didn't care about the product they were selling-and when it came to food, that was no bueno. So, in order to make it seem like the stuff she was trying to sell was made with attention and care, Halsey had to do it in-person.
Which she loathed, because she was not a people person. Everyone around there was so… sociable. So chatty. It was like the image the deep south started cultivating, of being a place where folk would welcome you with open arms, a glass of a drink so sugary it would send you to the hospital with hyperglycemia, and a warm disposition.
It was endlessly frustrating. She just wanted to get the stuff sold, and go home. She still needed to figure out why the tank spat Cortana out as a teenager, so she could fix the problem, and continue with Operation: I NEED A DAMN NAP.
Yeah, that's what she was calling the "clone myself and split the workload" plan.
"Maybe we should place a sign that says: 'touch it for more than ten seconds, you buy it.'" James suggested.
"Good plan," Halsey looked at him with a slight smile, "Does anyone have a piece of cardstock and a marker?"
"Er, no." Jorge looked in the truck for a moment. "Sorry, ma'am."
"We could steal a piece from somebody else." Musa suggested, sitting down against the side of the stall.
"Maybe it's our image?" Kurt shrugged, looking across the way. "Look, those guys have a vidscreen, folding chairs, a fan, and a cooler full of drinks, and all we've got are…" He gestured around. "Our asses and the hot ground."
"Language, Kurt." Halsey chided since they were in public. Her gaze fell on the competitors across the way, and she blinked, straightening up as she witnessed what they were watching on the news.
Two teenagers in a half-junked Barracuda were giving the NAPD quite the chase since, you know, New Alexandria didn't have roads. Apparently, the car had come tearing out of the woods from the nearby mountain range, broke through a restricted area, and kept going even after the police tried to stop them.
"Good God Almighty…" Halsey slammed her head on the stall. She let out a breath as she sat up, flicking a bit of hair out of her face. "Well, if they're caught, I'm not paying their bail." She turned to Cortana and John, the two sitting on an overturned crate, watching something on a compad. Wait, they didn't have a-
Halsey's hands shot down to her pocket, finding empty space, and she sighed. Clearing her throat at the two, she pulled their attention up to her. "And what are you two watching?"
"Educational programming, ma'am." John answered first.
"Really?" The scientist skeptically questioned.
Cortana nodded for him. "Newtonian motion in zero-gravity vacuum environments."
"Oh, I know that one!" James pointed. "Basically, it boils down to-"
"Yes, yes, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space." Halsey finished. "MAC operators have to learn it day one so they don't miss their targets and send a six-hundred-ton tungsten slug whizzing off into deep space that's liable to hit a planet in a few thousand years. Well?"
"Well what?" Cortana blinked.
"Are you going to hog the screen, or are you going to let the rest of us join you?" Halsey raised an expectant eyebrow.
Quickly, John hopped off the crate, carrying Halsey's compad over, setting it up on the stall in front of her. He and Cortana sat back down, this time next to her, along with the other five teenagers as they all focused on the program to pass the time.
From the vidscreen across the way, sirens blared in the pursuit of Fred's car.
…they'd be fine, they were Spartans after all.