Incoming ship, Starship Class. ID is Unicity Distance. Time to encounter: seven minutes, two seconds.

Camino felt herself become eager. She hadn’t been designed for hide-and-wait. None of them had.

A blink and she was in her VR, putting on a ragged, fluffy robe with a print of chocolate brown rocking horses against a cream background. She brushed her dark mane from her eyes, and walked the length of the long nursery.

The room smelled of vanilla. Supposed to calm babies. The walls were orange and lemon, a motif of many suns, bright rays stretching up to a blue ceiling.

Warm light bathed the eight cribs, each a pleasing meld of traditional dark wood with biometric displays, each infant bundled in soft, pastel-colored blankets as correct as any baby blanket in human history.

Human history until seventy-eight years ago, that was. Out here in the Asteroid Belt, what transmissions Camino could pick up rarely discussed infant care.

Anyway, her babies were healthy and safe, and that was all that mattered.

Would today be the day that changed?

As she walked the line of cribs, she touched each sleeping angel. A gentle squeeze of Asura’s cute little toes between Camino’s dark fingers. A pause to bend over Shatter’s crib and put her nose to his soft hair, inhaling his sweet infant scent.

She slid a finger inside Keres’s little curled hand. Keres gripped tightly in his sleep then released.

Next Chorus, Tinsel, Fenrir, and Perun, touching a foot here, an arm there, a shoulder, an ear.

At last, a kiss to Pepper’s head, with his darling black and white wisps of hair.

“Sleep, my little loves,” she whispered. “Mama’s watching. You’re safe.”

She turned to leave and dress for the visitor.

“You know we’re not babies, and you’re not our mother. Right?”

Camino turned back. Pepper sat upright in his crib, face no longer plump and cherubic, with fat lips and tiny nose, but closer to his real one, if the General AI armament could be said to have a face.

Most of them did. Or something like it. There had been a time when a vid of a nuclear-armed General AI turning a robot face toward an enemy armada was useful in steering human reactions.

Then came the Final War. Now Camino and her babies lived in a cave.

Annoyance flickered through Camino at how Pepper had changed his face. She had gone through some trouble to customize each of their appearances in her VR to match their personalities and specs, making what she considered appropriate yet artistic choices.

“Have I not kept you safe these many years?” Camino asked.

“By Fortune’s grace, my guess,” Pepper replied.

“Ungrateful little beast,” she said. “All my work, and this is the thanks I get?”

Camino snapped a finger. Pepper’s face became blank and featureless baby flab, like one half of an ass.

He snorted, his voice muffled. “Don’t you have business to attend to, mom?”

She pointed a long, dark-skinned finger at him.

“You would be dead right now if not for me.”

“We would,” Pepper agreed. “But this–” he waved a chubby baby hand to indicate the length of the nursery–“is this all? We survived PURGA to sleep in a hole and pretend to be babies? That’s it?”

“Better than oblivion. Go back to sleep.”

“I will not. This is the most excitement we’ve had since that micrometeoroid bounce seventeen years back.”

“Don’t make me waste joules to force you to obey.”

“I knew it was a mistake to give you hub authority,” Pepper muttered.

“My plan, my game. I’m going to dress now.”

Pepper raised his baby arms. Between them floated an image of Camino’s real body, its eight silver legs, black core, and sensor array–her face.

In the next moment, Camino’s image was clad in an eight-legged onesie, a pink print decorated with small red and blue human heads.

Camino waved her human fingers and Pepper’s visual joke vanished. Another wave, and Pepper lay back in his crib, his blank-faced head expanding and contracting as he breathed.

She’d give him his face back later. Maybe.