As we neared the temple, I felt a kind of vibration pulsing across the liquid metal sea, like a reverberation emanating from somewhere else and then feeding back on us. Then, in my head I imagined the craft as that the source of that reverberation, like a drop of water dropping into perfectly still clear stream and expanding out forever.
You remember, came Drasheel’s voice in my mind.
I opened my eyes and saw that what I had seen in my head was happening in the mercury ocean below us. My craft was in a controlled descent, coming in for a soft landing on the surface.
“Derringer, how are you doing this?” asked Harley.
“Because...I am Voltec?” I guessed aloud. The landing gear deployed, sinking gently just a few feet into the sea. The liquid metal was so dense the our craft was buoyant on it somehow. I opened up the cockpit and we unstrapped to find a hexagonal path like the one I had seen in my vision.
“Come on,” I told Harley. “I know the way.”
We followed the path that seemed to wind along an endless expanse of still liquid. We crossed into the umbra, from the shimmering light of the sunny side into the dark. The starlight made two oceans, one above and one below. Up ahead, I could see the silver disk that seemed to glow, though I wondered if it was only glowing in my head. It was the temple I had seen in my vision.
We reached the platform and stepped off the hexagonal path, which seemed to vanish back into the sea behind us. Kris-10 floated above the platform in her lotus pose. But as I drew nearer, I saw that it wasn’t the same face I had seen in my vision at all.
“Harley,” I gasped.
“What?” she said, confused.
Kris-10 opened her eyes, those black otherworldly eyes. Just like before she was more perfect than was humanly possible. Except that now she wore the face of Harley instead of Celeste. From her reaction, it was clear that Harley wasn’t seeing the same thing. I realized that Kris-10 must change her form based on the projection of whoever was looking at her.
“Hello,” said Kris-10.
“Hello, Kris-10. You’ve changed since I last saw you.”
She crinkled her nose in a devilishly sexy way. “No,” she said. “I am Voltec. We are unchanging.”
“Ted, what are you talking about?” asked Harley, “How can it be different from when you saw it when we’ve never been here before?”
“You don’t see her?”
“I see a tin-can. Why are you calling it a her?” Harley must not have been able to experience the same kind of neural plug-in interface that I could. But how could that be?
“Why doesn’t Harley see you like I can,” I asked Kris-10. “She’s had the same neural-implant I had.”
“She’s not the same as you. Others have been given the link, but only you are Voltec.”
“So, what am I missing?” Harley asked, sticking out her hip.
“We’ve come because we need help. The Unity Federation is threatening to destroy our home and we can’t fight them off alone.”
“Why fight?” asked Kris-10.
“It’s a fight for survival. Our people will die if we don’t.”
“But they are not really your people, are they?”
“They’ve given us shelter, a home. We can’t just let them die.”
“Transcend these worries. Come into Voltec and you can be one with the infinite now.”
“The infinite now? What’s that compared to all the lives that are depending on me for their survival? I’m sick and tired of everyone telling me to let go, to submit, to detach from everything. There are some things worth clinging to, to fighting for. These wars, living and dying, it may all only be fleeting, but damn it, what good am I if I all I do is give myself over to some collective fucking consciousness if the people I care about get burned to a crisp?”
“We have fought the Federation before,” said Kris-10. “We have no need to fight them again. Voltec is now beyond the need to destroy any form of sentient life. We have found symmetry and meaning in higher levels of understanding than you can experience now.”
“Fine, we’re not asking you to destroy the Federation. Find the higher symmetry in giving the people of Dawn a safehaven, or help us repel the invasion with superior numbers and then retreat to Viro and worship math, or whatever. I know that you have ships. Your people fought huge wars against humanity before.”
“That was long ago. We’ve had no need for fighting for many ages. In Voltec we lose nothing. We keep nothing that does not have a use. All is reabsorbed and made again. Those ships, those soldiers. Their forms have returned to Voltec.”
“So, you won’t help us?” Kris-10 gave a calm, impassive look. Suddenly, I felt a rage bubbling up inside me. I turned on Drasheel. “Was this you plan all along? To bring me here just so that I would join in Voltec and forget the whole battle?”
Drasheel didn’t cringe at the accusation, which only seemed to confirm it for me. Two of them were conspiring in something. I could feel it. The same kind of mercurial tranquility. Drasheel was always leading me somewhere, even though I usually didn’t understand where it was or what it meant. “What are you trying to do?!” I was yelling now. “ANSWER ME!”
Drasheel lunged at me, suddenly, grabbing me by the back of the neck. Visions flashed before me. I felt my eyes roll back into my head. I was a hawk flying above the treeline just like in Teru’s spirit quest. Except that this time I flew up out of the stratosphere and into open space. The Titan appeared in front of me and I flew directly into it. It shattered into a million shimmering pieces the instant that I touched it. I extended my wings and I flew on a current of airless air, shattering each of the ships in the fleet until they were all gone. Then I flew toward Dawn and the metallic core shattered too, but in its place was a golden sun radiant and beautiful. I flew towards it. But before I could reach it, a sharp crack struck open my vision.
“Derringer!”
I blinked my eyes and there I was on Viro. Harley was standing between me and Drasheel, who lay sprawled in front of me. I understood that Harley had severed our connection by karate chopping Drasheel’s arm and sending her skidding to the temple’s metallic disk.
“Harley, stop!”
“Derringer, are you insane? Do you not see that they’re playing with your mind? This is crazy. They were never going to help us.”
I knew I couldn’t make her understand. Not on my own.
“Show her,” I told Drasheel.
She held out a hand, not lunging it just extending it like an offering. Harley looked ready to panic.
“Ted, Jesus! Max. I can’t. What if this sucks out my brain, or breaks my will, or something?”
“Look, we’ll be fine. I’ll do it with you. We’ll have a vision together. Trust me.” I nodded to Drasheel and she took my hand. Kris-10 took hers. Harley looked back and forth at the three of us and nodded, a little unsure. She extended one gloved finger to Drasheel’s tendril and bam!
We were fire. Not in fire but of it. I felt myself as a flame licking and devouring the other fires around and within me. It was like a perfect communion of thought and sensation together. We were one sun and a multitude of stars at once. The fire that was us grew and contracted, burst and spat and roared gloriously. We might have been that way for centuries, and I wouldn’t have known it.
Then, one of us, I think it might have been Harley or maybe me, or maybe all four of us together since it was hard to tell in there, yearned once more to have seperate bodies. So I made us a planet, and then a dozen planets, and then I gave each planet fourteen moons. On the first moon I built a temple, and the temple was in worship of the eternal now. It had tiered pyramids made of colored crystal. I licked the tip of the pyramid with my tongue and Kris-10 giggled. My whole solar system swam into her form.
I was taking her from the front, riding and grinding her, while her flawless fingers were stroking and pleasuring Harley from the side. With my right hand I reached out to squeeze Harley’s thigh as she gasped in pure exaltation of her
body’s pleasure. Above me, and also to the side of me, Drasheel was sucking on my fingers. I drew lines with her saliva around each of her nipples. All of it was impossible in real gravity, but we seemed to orbit each other like an orgasmic galaxy that churned and boiled in its own hot juices. Sweat, noise. Now I was watching as Harley dove into Kris-10, licking and teasing her clit just as Drasheel mirrored her movements in her asshole. They formed a ring, rotating and gyrating, acrobatic and hypnotic. And when I yearned to be a part of them, I found that each of them was sucking and rubbing up against me at once.
I rubbed, touched, caressed and fondled them at once. But it wasn’t synchronicity. There was something erotically offbeat about it all that kept it from ever becoming predictable or making me think that I knew where it was going to lead. At every moment, I wanted to be closer, deeper, and more fully inside of it all. Whole galaxies, perhaps even entire universes were spurned by our cumming. I felt them burst forth from my pen like a god releasing new life and watching as it drifted off, far into the unknown. It was eons of pure, hot white fucking and soul-encapsulating. And then, when we finally understood that it was time to return to those few limited consciousnesses that we were, those simple flimsy beings that we had been before the endless expanse of our cosmic union, then did we choose to return. Renewed, refreshed, and completely untamed.
I opened my eyes and there was Harley about to open hers. I can’t express how she looked to me then. Then, I remembered what my mother had told me about the spirit, and how it was the good part inside of you that lives forever. Recognizing Harley’s spirit again after those countless millennia, even if they had really only been a few minutes, was so exhilarating. She looked at me with pure love, and there were no words left for us to share between us. Harley simply smiled, with tears in her eyes. I looked to Kris-10 and Drasheel and then each of took a seat, cross legged on the disk of the Voltec temple.
“So, that’s Voltec?” Harley asked after a long time.
“Not really,” answered Kris-10. “That is more like what Voltec has been seeking for millennia. We built temples worshipping the powers of math and science. We felt that we could observe, understand and control every aspect of the universe. We fought with carbon-based species because we wanted to bring them into accord with everything that we had found and learned about the way that we were. But then, something was created within us. There was a presence that was, born isn’t the right word. Emerged is closer. A kind of consciousness that started to implant doubts within our ranks. This created strife within us, and we retreated within ourselves until we could resolve our internal conflict.
“That must have been the end of the Robot Wars,” said Harley.
“That’s what we call the wars with the Voltec,” I clarified. They weren’t actually so much robots, so much as silicon-based beings. But I guess that the military wasn’t really interested in getting all of the facts straight when they were drumming up propaganda to make us fearful and keep us compliant. “We were told that that the Unity government was created out of the need to beat back this relentless robotic foe who knew nothing except how to kill.”
Kris-10 smiled. “We were a threat to you, that much is true. But we have since moved on. We’ve discovered hidden secrets of the universe that make our interest in your race tiny in comparison.”
“And how did you come to know the Voltec?” I asked.
“That consciousness, that voice of dissent that came to the Voltec. Our people knew it too. For us, he was Rushgar the Awakened. He lived in the time of the great flood brought upon us by the Gix. He was said to have come from the sky and belong more to the birds than to the sea. That’s why he is often associated with the hawk.”
“So the hawk that you left for me, it wasn’t the Alpha Wing totem at all. It was the hawk of Rushgar?”
“Yes. You are both the Anomaly of the Voltec and Rushgar. You are the Alpha Wing. Your form changes, but you are always you. That’s what I came here to discover. I was drawn here by Kris-10. Eventually, the time came for me to go to Dawn so that we could meet.”
I could remember the flood by the Gix and told Drasheel about what I had seen. Even the terrible parts made her eyes full of amazement. When I finished, I told Kris-10 about my dream in the reprogramming center. Everything had been leading me to this revelation my whole life and I just never knew it. I had always thought that the spirit was nothing but a lie, a primitive delusion. Now I knew that I was something more. A warrior who spanned across lifetimes.
“But, wait,” I said. “Rushgar failed. The Gix destroyed Valon 8. And the Anomaly may have brought the Voltec away from warfare but there’s still no peace with the Unity Federation.”
“In each lifetime, you get closer. But there is still work to be done each time. That’s why you’ve come back again.”
“So join me in doing it. Saving Dawn has to be what I’ve come back for, right?”
“It may be. We don’t have the ships or the bodies, as I told you. But Voltec will come to your aid in battle.”
What does that mean, I wanted to ask but by this point, after everything that I had seen I knew better. Instead, I said, “come with me then. I’ll need all three of you for this fight.”
“Of course.”
Yes.
“You know I’m in. Let’s do this.”
“Thanks guys. We don’t have much time. Kris-10, do you know a faster way across the sea?”
“No need,” said Kris-10. “Reach for it in your mind.”
So I tried it. I was past the point of disbelieving in such things, and to my surprise the image of my Cutlass sprung to my mind so crisply that I was able to envision it perfectly in three-dimensional space.
Then, Behind Harley, I could see my fighter rising out of the mercury ocean, as if it had been submerged in that spot all along and was only now returning to the surface again. But it wasn’t as it had been before, and I wondered if it was the same ship or some strange Voltec upgrade. The battle scars from the dogfights it had seen were gone. It shone like new, the missiles at its tips were like arrows. I walked over to the liquid mercury sea and cupped its contents in my hands.
“With this, we could make every old junker in the Dawn fleet like it was brand new straight out of the foundry.” The liquid expanded, running up my hands and enveloping my entire flight suit, stopping just short of my head. Nanites. It wasn’t liquid mercury at all. The entire ocean was Voltec.
Kris-10 smiled at me. “Welcome back, Max Derringer!”
“All fighters, round up! All fighters, round up!” Doyle called. “If you’ve got a tub and stones to fly it, then make a circle right here. Engineers, you’re with me.”
The entire flight bay was churning with activity. Not just the fighter pilots we’d managed to rally for the cause, everyone was finding some way to make their contribution. Women and children were taking donations of fuels and supplies and stacking in small piles of both out of the way of the ships. Thousands more throughout the colonies were mending weakened sections of hulls or going through living quarters and escorting the old and the sick to those places deemed the safest. No one knew how long the battle would last, but everyone knew just how high the stakes were.
I barely had a chance to catch my breath in the chaos as I applied the Voltec nanobots to the ships in turn. The results were incredible. Each one of the ships in our small fleet would be faster, tougher, and more maneuverable than they’d ever been when they were new. But we were still a tiny force, and most among us weren’t our best fighters. Some were past their prime, or had just flown on a few raids. But they didn’t have to overwhelm the enemy using sheer force.
“Listen up, everyone,” I called, stepping into the ring of assembled pilots. By now my status as a top pilot was unchallenged, and my shiny new nanobot flight suit gave me some cache too. But I felt the weight of my decision heavy on my shoulders. I had to lead a ragtag bunch to victory against the greatest military that the galaxy has ever known.
“The
y’ve got the numbers, and the training, I know. But we’ve got ships that will fly better and harder. We need to break off into smaller groups, no more than two or three in a formation. We can’t risk those big guns getting a clean shot. You’ve got to stay loose out there.” I walked around the circle seeing some faces I knew and others I didn’t. Break up their lines and get them to chase you. They’re going to be pushing hard on our supply depots and places where they expect to inflict the highest civilian casualties.” This news gave a lot of the men worried looks. I know, I know, but listen. If they’ve come this far and gone to the trouble of hiding their presence, they’re going to be playing dirty. They want this thing to hurt, and they’re willing to take resources away from Earth’s defense to do it.”
“But why?” the voice came from someone in the crowd. “We can’t do nothin’ to them. What’re they afta?”
“They want the energy core,” Doyle answered. “Once we’re dead, there isn’t anything stopping them from harnessing the power of Dawn’s core for themselves.”
“Right, so what we need to do is to keep them chasing us so that they can’t target the civilians or get too close to the core. Your job is to keep them running. If they do break through, don’t panic. We’ve got some surprises in store for them.”
“What about you, Alpha Wing?” someone else called, a young woman.
“I’m going to be taking a small team to attack vulnerable positions on the Titan. I know where the blindspots are where the big guns can’t fire and the ship is vulnerable to attack. I’m going to take down the cruiser.” An awed silence from the crowd. To be leading the charge against a ship that size in one small fighter was practically suicide, and they knew it. “I know that all of you are used to your freedom. This is no raid where you can split off and follow your own instincts. I’m asking you to come together and stay the course. It’s going to be hard, harder than you know now to keep your cool when you’ve got a squadron of Federation ships raining down on you, but if we stick to the plan we can win this thing. We will survive. Dawn will see another day!”
Alpha Wing Page 16
