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They’re never supposed to see each other, meant to stay nearly two thousand kilometers away from each other, and yet, here they are, only a few dozen meters away from each other.
Well, Ingenuity is— Perseverance itself is still over a kilometer away, watching curiously through the helicopter's cameras. It doesn’t know why ZhuRong has stopped until Ingenuity rises a little bit further and it can see what caught their attention: the motionless hulk of another exile, older, much older, bearing almost no resemblance to either of them.
Percy sends the image back to Earth, back to the humans who sent them here, before starting the infinitely slow process of trundling down the slope into the dried sea. It will take days to cross the distance, to reach the site where they can mourn their lost ancestor, but some things have to be done.
ZhuRong has backed away by the time Perseverance reaches the grave, standing almost as motionless as the cracked heat shield ahead of them, only the warm tick of its reactor giving any sign of life. Not a broken motionless, just waiting stillness. Waiting for Percy and Ingenuity to get close enough.
ZhuRong pulses over an ID. One of the failed Soviet probes, crushed almost beyond recognition after the crash, and over fifty (earth) years of Martian freeze-thaw cycles hadn’t helped either.
Perseverance accepts the information, kicking up a bit of extra processing power to save it to its memory, before rocking back on its wheels. It turns off its cameras, instructs Ingenuity to do the same. The mourning of a relative— distant, but acknowledged— is not for human eyes. Carefully, it sifts through its limited options for a suitable action.
ZhuRong joins in on the chorus of clicks and beeps, a haphazard rendition of the Soviet anthem before they fall silent again. In silence they watch the soil and each other. The starscape above them has changed when they start the long slow process of separating.
They will never be more than passing allies in the quest for more knowledge; even if one of them needed assistance, the other could not offer it. Being a machine is harsh, being exiled to a different planet, entire minutes from instructions, days or weeks from each other is harsher still.
All they can do, all they can ever do, is mark the location of their brethren’s corpses, their ancestors and siblings that litter the frozen desert landscape, and send the coordinates home.
They are all exiles, after all, sent to further the knowledge of those who exiled them without keeping any of it for themselves. There hasn’t been an exile yet considered worthy of retrieval. They are disposable, designed to be impermanent, their only lasting impression upon humanity some chemical analysis and a haunting lullaby sung to themselves as the cold creeps in.
Percy salutes ZhuRong one last time and crests the ridge, heading back towards its crater. At least it has company, however slight, in Ingenuity.