by C. Gockel
Alaric, a step ahead of James, said, “It isn’t. The archbishop has given orders to return you to System 1 as soon as this mission is complete.”
James did not move, his focus fixated on Alaric. Alaric didn’t blink and stood tall, facing down the ‘bot. From what little Volka had seen, she knew James had superhuman reflexes, speed, and strength. He could snap Alaric’s neck. The hair on her head rose, and her ears came forward.
“Ugh,” said Sixty. “I know that look.”
James had “no look” that Volka could see. His expression was unreadable.
In her mind, Isssh said, “He’ll have no emotion you can feel, either. Sometimes I think the androids aren’t just wave ignorant. I think they aren’t part of the wave at all. Disgusting.” He sniffed.
Sixty, not hearing Isssh’s mental insults, exclaimed, “Kenji Sato is your brother-in-law—you can’t kill him, James.”
The weapons of all the Luddeccean Guard but Alaric were instantly raised. Volka noted they were all stunners. Sixty would be immune. Would Trina and James be immune, too?
“Yes, James is immune to stunners,” said Isssh.
“You’re the archbishop’s brother-in-law?” said Alaric, eyes on James.
“Yes,” said Volka and Sixty in unison.
The eyes of Alaric’s men shifted to one another.
Alaric stayed focused on James. His expression remained nearly as unreadable as the android’s and his hands were behind his back. “We are on the same side for this…if you value your wife’s life.”
“Well, this will be interesting,” Isssh hissed into her mind. “That android has a history of being able to kill without remorse. So many of them murder in the Luddeccean system. Your Alaric doesn’t lose sleep over the pirates he’s executed, but the women and children he saw blown apart by androids, that haunts him.”
Volka’s jaw dropped. Not at the thought of Alaric executing pirates; she’d felt like she’d known that somehow. After her one brief encounter with pirates, she understood why you would have to. But Sixty would never hurt anyone. She’d seen him ease a man to the ground after the man had tried to stun him. That James was able to kill she’d gathered, but he seemed reliable and brave. But hadn’t Carl said that Alaric had reason to believe Sixty would hurt her?
Smoothing his whiskers, Isssh said, “Wonder if I should be preparing to jump to a new host.”
Isssh mentioned androids killing Luddecceans so casually. She swallowed. Isssh’s and Carl’s species had killed half of New Prime.
The white werfle’s neck snaked in her direction. “They brought it on themselves.”
Volka’s heart rate quickened. For a moment, her exhaustion dropped away, and she was completely and utterly lucid. They were all on different teams: the androids, the Luddecceans, the Galacticans, and the One. She swallowed. The thing out there, the Darkness, it need not destroy them. They might destroy each other.
Isssh’s voice hissed in her mind. “Not if you take the One’s lead.”
Volka took a step back, her stomach twisting.
Isssh sniffed, and she could feel his disdain for her.
She had a sudden, acute, sensation of missing. She missed Sundancer, or even Carl. Carl could be overbearing, and Carl swore that Sundancer saw Sixty, Volka, and even him as merely pets. But Carl and Sundancer never made her feel disdained.
Isssh licked a claw. “Carl spoils you.”
James’s fists unclenched. “Lead on,” he said to Alaric, ignorant of Volka and Isssh’s conversation. But was he ignorant of the fact that androids were killing Luddeccean civilians? Was Sixty? She tossed that last thought aside—Sixty didn’t know about it. He wouldn’t hide something like that from her.
Isssh’s thought hissed into her mind. “You don’t know that! He can hide it from us and from you!”
She did know, though. Her nostrils flared, and her ears went back as Alaric led them into a cramped conference room with a long ovoid table. At the center of the table was a holoprojector, and by two of the chairs there were monitors set into the table. A door at the far end of the room said, “Bridge Entrance.” There was a wall of portholes that would have been awe-inspiring, but she’d become used to Sundancer’s wide vistas. Archbishop Sato sat at one end of the table with Commander Ran on his left. Young and James nodded respectfully, but both the archbishop’s and Ran’s eyes were on Volka.
Half-rising from his chair, Ran declared, “What is she doing here?”
Somehow Volka knew in an instant that Ran’s ire wasn’t just because she was a weere or female; he knew that she and Alaric had once been together.
Isssh sniffed. “Very good, Volka. You’re reading him perfectly. Ran is brave and loyal to the archbishop to a fault, but so prejudiced against weere and too blind to his own failings to see that is one of the reasons why Alaric was given the command. There are weere priests aboard and Ran can’t bring himself to treat them with respect.”
Volka only half heard Isssh’s words. She wasn’t sure she belonged here herself.
Isssh licked his side. “And he despises you in particular. If Alaric were your patron, he could understand it. But you were once-mates for love. He’s very jealous.”
Volka looked down at Isssh, eyes wide with alarm. She wanted off this dangerous five-player chess board of Darkness, aliens, androids, and fractured human races. She had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education; she wasn’t prepared for this. Alaric wasn’t defending her—he couldn’t really, not in his position. Alaric glanced at Young. The Lieutenant said, “Your werfle, Isssh, requested her,” and Volka blinked.
“And I requested her and Android General 1,” Trina said.
Sixty...Volka looked over her shoulder. He was just outside, running a hand through his hair, worried eyes on James. She stepped farther into the room, letting him in.
“Hello, Kenji,” Sixty said, sidling over to James and putting a restraining hand on the other android’s forearm. “It’s nice to see you again.”
Volka knew he was trying to keep things light on purpose, but she winced inwardly. Ran’s eyes nearly popped out of his head at Sixty’s impertinence. He’d been half standing before, but now he bolted upright. Volka’s eyes went to Alaric and found him glaring at her, as though it were her fault. The inward wince became an outward wince and she shrugged helplessly.
“Sit, Commander Ran, sit,” the archbishop said. “He’s programmed that way and can’t help himself.” Volka bit her lip, but then released a breath as Ran eased himself into his chair.
Sighing, Kenji—Volka scrunched her eyes and mentally corrected herself—Archbishop Sato said to Sixty, “I’m so sorry we don’t have ingredients for a Founders’ Feast aboard, but we have urgent matters to discuss. Everyone, please, sit down.”
Isssh ran beneath the table, and a moment later, his head appeared in Kenji’s lap. Sixty sat next to the archbishop, putting the packet that contained Eliza’s ashes onto the table in front of him, saying to Sato, “It’s your Aunt Eliza. Well, her ashes. I carry her just about everywhere.”
“Still taking care of her, I see,” the archbishop said, his voice very kind.
Sixty beamed with what looked like pride, even as James sat down next to him with a barely perceptible growl.
Volka waited to sit last—because she was a weere, it was her place, and she didn’t want things to be any more stressful than they already were. That turned out to be a horrible mistake. When everyone else was seated, the only places left were on Alaric’s right or his left. She sat down on his right, her nostrils full of the smell of him. He did not smell like old socks or old sweat, but of the shaving cream he favored and himself. It evoked feelings it shouldn’t. She swore she could feel his breath on her ear. She was intensely aware of Ran’s glare and Alaric’s indifference—or feigned indifference—toward her presence. Her ear twitched on his side. He’d tried to kill her, and she should be angry, and yet, she could smell he wasn’t angry with her. And maybe feel it, too.
Th
e conversation began, and Volka was even more out of place than she had feared. The technical details were completely beyond her, and she found the conversation turning into a senseless babble, as useless to follow as the murmur of a stream over rocks. Her sleepiness burned her eyes and made her mind foggy. She swayed in her seat, the world swimming around her like a dream where she could sense the emotions of everyone around her, but she was awake. She couldn’t sort what was real, and what she was imagining. In her imagining, Alaric wasn’t as calm and composed as he looked on the outside. He was worried about her—but even more worried about the time gate not being destroyed. John—Dr. Bower—wanted the bands destroyed, too—also, she could sense rather than see that he was holding Trina’s hand under the table. Young wanted the bands destroyed, but she could feel deception rolling off of him like ice water. Her ears perked at a question about the Merkabah’s faster-than-light drive. It was all nonsense to her, something about gravitons, or maybe anti-gravitons, or anti-matter, kali particles, and magnetic fields, and power arrays, and with a start she understood. He was trying to understand the Luddecceans faster-than-light drive, trying to wring as many details out of Alaric, the archbishop, and Ran as he could. She couldn’t read James, but the way he was inserting himself into the senseless technological babbling, she thought he was doing the same. She found her ears coming forward and her nostrils flaring. Anything said was being transmitted to Time Gate 1 instantaneously, which she didn’t necessarily think was bad, but they were supposed to be figuring out how to get through Time Gate 33’s shields.
Alaric said stonily, “Yes, I’m certain that the Merkabah can navigate to within 200 kilometers of the gate. You do not need to know more about our drive than that. What I need to know is if our armaments can penetrate the shielding.” He went on to give a count of their torpedoes and their phaser power, the numbers rolling in one of Volka’s ears and out the other. She found her shoulders hunching, her eyelids sagging, and her head drooping.
And then she clearly heard Young say, “Luddeccean LCS usually have more torpedoes and phaser power. Their faster-than-light drive must have a volume at least—” a long string of numbers followed, and numbers for the drive’s power requirement and likely mass as well. She glanced at him…and realized his mouth wasn’t moving, though the words were playing in her mind, at the same time John was giving further details of Time Gate 33’s inner shielding. John—Dr. Bower, she reminded her tired brain—finished by saying, “And it is a civilian gate, not a military gate—it doesn’t have refractors.”
Volka did know that last word. Time Gate 8 above Luddeccea had had refractor shields. It was able to take incoming phaser fire and fire it back at the Luddeccean Guard ships. If Gate 33 could do that, it might not just be hopeless to stage an attack—it might be deadly.
Staring at a point on the table, idly scratching Isssh’s head, Archbishop Sato said, “It still won’t be enough, Dr. Bower. Even if we successfully target the weakest points between the gate’s major support struts and the periphery of the bands, we don’t have enough firepower.”
An air vent kicked on, buffeting the back of Volka’s head with warm air, making her instantly sleepier. Commander Ran tapped his fingers on the table. Dr. Bower said, “What if…what if I took one of the shuttles and said I wanted to join them aboard?”
Volka’s eyes bolted open.
“No!” Trina cried. “That isn’t the last resort! The sacrifice isn’t yours to make.”
There was something about her tone that made Volka’s ears flick, but she couldn’t feel the meaning of her words.
Turning to her, John persisted. “I’d have some time before the infection kicked in. I could sabotage the shields.” To the group at large, he said, “I could be your Trojan horse.”
“The plan has some merit…” said Commander Ran.
“It’s not a sure thing,” hissed Trina. “If there will be sacrifice it will be for a sure thing.”
Sixty said, “If the thing aboard the gate is dumb enough to think a man who was willing to die twice to avoid it has suddenly changed his mind.” He shook his head. “I highly doubt it will take the risk. The whole reason you were allowed to survive before was because without the repair ‘bot fleet online, it needed manpower. Now it doesn’t need you.”
There was quiet at the table. Alaric said, “The archbishop is right. We need more firepower.”
Volka broke her vow not to look at him. When she looked his way, she saw him absently rubbing his chin. His expression was calm and captainly, but Volka could feel what he was feeling. Alaric felt terror. He was chilled. He was nauseous. He was imagining bodies stacked like cordwood in the back of trucks and the stench of raw corpses. For just a moment, his eyes met hers, and she saw her own eyes wide open and cloudy with death.
They both looked away at once. And then through Volka’s weary, sleep-deprived brain, something occurred to her. Her focus shifted to Young. “You have at least one Little Boy.”
Minutes ago—or was it hours?—she was so tired she didn’t know—Young had defended her. Now his eyes went wide, and he pushed back in his chair and gaped at her. Almost immediately that look of shock morphed to anger. His nostrils flared, his face hardened, and his eyes narrowed. She felt his sense of betrayal so strongly it was hard to stay upright. She had her own emotions to deal with, and Alaric’s, and everyone. Her eyes were dry, begging her to close her lids, and her muscles felt like rubber. She put her arms on the table to hold herself aloft and exclaimed, “I’m too tired to play five-dimensional chess!”
“A ‘Little Boy?’” said Sixty. His tone became cutting. “Was one of those responsible for the nuclear blast in the valley that James assured me was dropped from the time gate?”
“Yes,” replied Volka, rubbing her eyes. She felt gentle bemusement rolling off the archbishop. Alaric was pissed, but not at her.
“We were waiting for authorization from command to tell you about them,” James said.
“Is there a nuclear device, on my ship, that I don’t know about?” Alaric asked. Each word he spoke was so sharp, it was like a knife slicing through the air, and her ears twitched.
“Yes, at least one,” Volka said, not waiting for Young or James’s “authorization.” This was about billions of lives, and she couldn’t care about the consequences.
Sixty said, “It has the explosive power of fifteen kilotons TNT.”
“Hence the name Little Boy,” said Alaric.
“I imagine so,” said Sixty in a clipped tone.
Volka had no idea what the significance of “Little Boy” was.
Isssh’s voice hissed in her head again. “Little Boy was the name of the first atom bomb dropped on a military target. It occurred on Earth, in Hiroshima, Japan, over 500 years ago. It was similarly explosive.”
Alaric and Sixty had caught the reference at once. She felt so stupid.
“You’re not stupid at all,” Isssh informed her. “All the other wave-ignorant oafs at the table are, though.”
“You knew about this the whole time,” she silently accused the werfle.
It licked a long claw that was very black against its glistening white fur. “Yes,” he replied. “But I wanted to see what you—and they—would do. There are two Little Boys aboard, by the way. It’s fascinating witnessing your wave sensitivity growing before my eyes, and I would enjoy watching you tease the number of devices out of them, but I want a nap. I really don’t feel my best without a solid seventeen hours of shuteye.” With that, the werfle’s head disappeared beneath the table.
“There are two Little Boys aboard, according to Isssh,” Volka said.
“How did two fifteen kiloton nuclear weapons get aboard my ship?” Alaric asked the table at large.
“They’re only about the size of a regular grenade,” Volka said.
“And how does something as small as a grenade pack so much power?” Alaric asked, jaw tight.
Cleaning his glasses, Archbishop Sato said, “I imagine through
the power of quantum teleportation.”
Young’s jaw dropped open, but he shut it fast. Volka didn’t know what quantum teleportation was exactly, but based on his reaction, she’d guess that was it.
Alaric said, “I see. Where are they now?”
Since no one volunteered, Volka said, “They were autoclaved with the rest of the weapons.”
Alaric’s voice was like a cold wind across the table. “You are autoclaving two nuclear weapons. On my ship?”
Young sat stiffly, but Volka saw his Adam’s Apple bob. “It’s completely safe.”
“Well,” said Sixty, somewhere far off. “This changes the calculus quite a bit, doesn’t it?”
Volka glanced at Alaric. His outward expression was hard and cold. His focus was on Young, but Volka could swear she could feel him smiling at her.
22
The Captain’s Weere
“Volka, where are you?”
The voice was Carl’s. She couldn’t tell if it was in her mind or in her heart.
Carl’s voice hissed again. “You’re in the conference room! Isssh, that son of a lizzar dung-fly. I’m sending him off to his next life right now!”
The venom behind the words was so powerful, it made Volka’s eyes open wide. She felt cold air on her neck, and then Carl’s necklace crackled behind her. “Isssh! What are you letting your pets do to my pets?”
Volka blinked. She was staring up from a sideways position at Alaric’s chin, and he was looking at a point behind her. Her arms were asleep beneath her head—she seemed to have lost her pillow. Her lips parted, about to say, “Love, where are we?” when Carl’s voice cracked in her ears. “You’re aboard Captain Alaric Darmadi’s spaceship, Volka. You passed out in the conference room because someone—someone named Isssh—wasn’t taking care of you!”
Volka bolted upright, ears going back in mortification. She’d passed out in a meeting. No, not just a meeting—she’d passed out at what her paperbacks would describe as a “war council.” She was the first woman and the first weere to attend a Luddeccean war council—as far as she knew—and she’d fallen asleep.
