“Ivan, we saw two other starships on Earth—tramp ships—and indications of an underground settlement. Do you know anything about it?”
Part of the wall slid open and a robotic arm presented Vulf with his spacesuit.
“They’re mining gold.” Ivan knew about the settlement. “Been there nearly a decade, long enough to be complacent that they won’t be discovered. They don’t know I’m here and won’t have noticed you, not in a mLa’an starship.”
“Why mine gold on an irradiated planet? Gold’s not that rare.” I panted a bit as I contorted my way into the borrowed spacesuit. I’d debated including one tailored to me in my pocket dimension, but they were expensive and the chance of losing one to the randomness of the pocket dimension’s retrieval process had decided me against it. Just now, I regretted that decision.
Vulf was dressing quickly in an expensive combat-grade spacesuit.
“There’s a market for gold extracted from the center of a nuclear blast,” Ivan informed us. “Besides, the mining operation has a secondary source of income. They take prisoners.”
My hands froze in sealing the spacesuit. “What do you mean prisoners?”
Ivan answered readily. “The mine could use robots, but it’s surprising how many people will pay to vanish a person to hell.”
“You mean they…oh.” I shuddered violently. Radiation burns and disease were agonizing and irreversible, even for the most advanced medical techniques. There was no healing high level radiation exposure. “Have you reported them? Why haven’t you stopped them?”
“I mind my business, they mind theirs.”
“But Ivan! People are being tortured.”
Vulf’s expression was grim before he put his helmet on and it hid his face. He checked his weapons.
“Are you landing or not?” Ivan asked impatiently.
My hands trembled as I put on the spacesuit’s helmet. By his inaction, my grandfather had condoned torture. I was suddenly glad that despite our earlier agreement on how we’d approach Ivan, Vulf had unilaterally changed our plan and that he’d be with me for moral support. When we finished talking with Ivan I would be reporting the illegal mine and prison camp to the Galactic Police.
Inside his helmet, Vulf looked at me, taking in my progress with the spacesuit. “ETA twenty one minutes.” He ended the communication beam.
A minute later I’d strapped into the co-pilot’s chair. “Ahab, if something goes wrong, I’d like you to report the illegal mining operation, please.”
“Affirmative.”
The Orion landed lightly on Earth. Vulf kept the engines engaged, ready for an emergency launch, as sensors checked for any dangerous shifts in the snow that cushioned the starship.
“Solid ice,” Ahab reported.
“Maintain the ship in readiness for immediate departure,” Vulf ordered. “Ready?” The question was for me.
I fumbled the buckle on the co-pilot’s chair open. It was my nervousness, rather than the spacesuit’s clumsiness, that hindered me. The gloves of the spacesuit were refined enough that I could operate a touchpad. “Ready,” I said resolutely.
Exiting the Orion I had my first glimpse of the flows of sha energy on Earth. A technology capable of capturing an image of sha had yet to be invented, so the only way for a shaman to study its patterns was in person. After that, we could create maps for other shamans. With no such maps existing for Earth, I was startled at how powerfully sha seethed here. Ivan must have based himself at a site that Earth shamans had called a nexus, a place where two or more sha energy flows intersected. The sha almost had a physical aura here.
“Problem?” Vulf’s voice sounded in my headset.
“No.” I’d paused too long. “Just experiencing the sha energy of Earth. It’s powerful.” For the first time, I stood on the planet that had birthed humanity. It was an awesome and humbling experience, one filled with grief and regret for what we had lost, but also filled with hope. We had survived.
The hatch to Ivan’s bought, borrowed or stolen starship opened. Vulf and I crunched over snow to finally climb up and into the kite’s decontamination unit. We stood silently through the standard radiation decontamination procedure, then exited the decontamination unit directly into the kite’s combined cargo hold and recreation space.
Ivan waited for us. “You could have left your spacesuits in the unit.” He wore a utility suit in the khaki color of humanity’s arm of the Galactic Police.
“We won’t be here long.” Vulf didn’t remove his helmet, only setting his headset to broadcast.
I hesitated, and compromised between the two men’s opposing attitudes, taking off my helmet and tucking it under my arm. The air quality here was significantly inferior to the Orion. Given all the sha energy swirling around, I wondered why Ivan hadn’t augmented the kite’s air filtration system with a shamanic construct. Vulf had been wise to keep his helmet on. I hadn’t even thought to take an air assessment reading before removing mine. I corrected my mistake by pulling a tiny amount of sha to filter the air around my head. Instantly, the dryness irritating my eyes eased.
“It’s impressive that you found me,” Ivan said to Vulf.
“I found you,” I said.
“And you led the bounty hunter straight to me?”
Perhaps if he hadn’t so recently dismissed the suffering of the people in the illegal mining camp I would have felt some guilt. Perhaps. As it was, I had my own personal problems with him. “It’s amazing what I’ve learned since I committed myself to trying to help you. I know that my mom’s name was Sonya and that I spent the first three years of my life on Faust. What I never understood was why you dropped me off at the Academy. You’ve never shown anything but scorn for them.”
“Prissy bastards,” Ivan spat, proving my point.
I kept going. “But now I understand. You couldn’t be bothered training me yourself, but by popping up every now and then, you kept my loyalty. You calculated that I could be useful to you. Why do you need my sha crystal?”
“Would you deny an old man some sha energy? You have decades more in which to explore the flows of sha.”
I shook my head. “I want an answer, Ivan, not evasions or attempts to manipulate my emotions. Did you take my sha crystal to help you steal the Meitj Imperial Crown?”
“Of course.”
“Why is the crown so important to you that you’d betray me?”
He waved aside the issue of his personal betrayal. “The crown should be important to you, too.”
My heart jolted as I glimpsed the edge of my sha crystal hidden in his left fist, the one furthest from Vulf and me. Why was he holding onto an immense store of sha energy to talk with us, especially when a veritable storm of sha swirled through this nexus?
Unless this wasn’t a nexus? They were an old concept, one I hadn’t encountered before. If we weren’t on Earth, would I have identified the intensity of sha energy collected here as a nexus, or as a marker of another shaman’s sha workings?
“Ivan, what are you planning?” I asked warily.
“Vulf was the only bounty hunter I feared. I thought you might deal with him, Jaya.”
I was confused. “What? How? Distract him?”
“No. Eliminate him in a fight. I guess I should be grateful you destroyed his disrupter.”
“Ivan.” My hands clenched around the edge of the helmet. If I hadn’t been wearing the spacesuit’s protective gloves, my hold would have been tight enough to draw blood. “Vulf isn’t here to capture you. Or not simply that. He’s not an enemy. He’s my…friend.”
“Wrong choice,” Ivan said, and sha energy flashed out from him, triggering a sha construct. It wasn’t a portal, such as he’d used on Tyger Tyger and Station Folly. This was a trap, and it was one capable of holding another shaman. Me.
I slammed the helmet back on my head, the spacesuit sealing automatically, even as I lunged against the incorporeal shield that encased me.
“I didn’t want to waste the sha e
nergy you’d collected on holding you,” Ivan said. “But I need time to make you see sense. You can help me, Jaya.”
“To do what?”
I was dividing my attention between analyzing the shield that held me and watching my grandfather. From the corner of my eye, I saw Vulf’s spacesuit compress. While Ivan trapped me, he had something else planned for Vulf. Something violent.
To my shamanic senses, the sha crystal blazed in Ivan’s hand.
I was a strong shaman, but how could I compete against the power of five years of sha energy collection?
The decontamination unit opened and Vulf was pushed backward into it.
I knew he’d be fighting with everything he had, but Ivan’s weaving of sha energy locked either Vulf’s spacesuit or his muscles.
Then his spacesuit began to shred under the force of sha energy that Ivan sent against it.
I screamed as the door to the decontamination unit closed. Ivan’s plan was obvious. He would destroy Vulf’s spacesuit and send him to certain, agonizing death in the irradiated snowfield. “No! Let him go.”
“Those with shamanic talent must stand together,” Ivan said.
But his breathing was rough. He might be in control of more sha energy than me, but the cost of controlling it was wearing on him.
The shield he’d enclosed me in shut me away from the sha energy that composed the shield and which swirled beyond it. But I had the sha that sustained my life; my personal sha energy, the same that danced in each person. I drew on it ruthlessly, honing it into a blade.
On the Capricorn, I’d entertained the pirates with a relatively benign sha weapon, the wraith; one which the Academy trained us all in so that we could shield ourselves and our starships from energy blasts. Ivan’s shield was the antithesis of the wraith. Where the wraith sucked energy out of the atmosphere, Ivan’s shield repelled everything.
But sha energy blades were a construct taught to me by a fellow Academy graduate when our vacation time had crossed and we’d both been observing unwanted downtime on the Academy’s planet. Sha energy blades didn’t disrupt in the scattergun approach of a disrupter. Nor did they use brute force. They broke a sha construct by inserting themselves into its patterns, then subverting them.
The question was, did I have sufficient personal sha to hold a blade against the repelling power of Ivan’s shield trap?
If I didn’t, Vulf would die.
I plunged the sha energy blade into the construct that encased me. I fell to the floor as my personal sha shuddered and tore out of me. It was so hard to hold my concentration against the waves of agony that rippled through me, and my fear that I’d be too late to save Vulf.
The spacesuit cushioned my fall, and cushioned me against the kick Ivan landed in my side.
“Stop that!” he yelled. “I’m opening the hatch.” He meant that he’d signed Vulf’s death.
Something more than sha energy tore out of me and into the sha energy blade. It had the burning heat of the mating bond.
Ivan’s trap exploded.
He staggered.
I grabbed for the sha energy that rioted around us. I needed to block the radiation from Ivan’s starship and from the atmosphere between it and the Orion. I had to keep Vulf safe.
But the sha energy wouldn’t flow in the pattern of protection I needed.
I wept and stumbled to the door to the decontamination unit. I could feel Ivan shaping sha to protect himself from radiation. Damn it. Why would the sha respond to him and not to me? For me, the sha danced in a pattern I didn’t recognize, focusing itself just outside Ivan’s starship.
Was it mourning Vulf?
I scrambled through the decontamination door, not caring when it closed behind me. All of my horrified attention was on Vulf’s shredded spacesuit, abandoned just inside…the open hatch.
Of Vulf, there was no sign.
My spacesuit’s internal maintenance system was working overtime to dry my hot tears.
I jumped out of the starship and froze.
I wasn’t alone.
But Vulf was nowhere in sight.
Instead, a giant wolf, its head as high as my shoulders, stood on the snow. No animal could survive Earth’s nuclear winter, but this wasn’t an ordinary animal.
Blue eyes studied me from a silver face. The animal lacked fur. Its body was a metallic shell. It had an animal’s form, but it was a robot. A beautiful, stunningly threatening creation.
Who had sent it?
I couldn’t take my eyes off the massive creature that studied me so intently to look around, but I had other ways to search. The sha energy was responding to me now, and it assured me that the only life near me was this robot wolf and Ivan. And by Ivan’s movements within the kite, he was preparing to leave.
I needed to be back on the Orion before he launched. Given my grandfather’s behavior, I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t launch regardless of where I stood, and would consider me collateral damage. However, I couldn’t leave without finding Vulf’s body. I was so panicked that I completely ignored the anomaly of a robot having a sha life mark. My subconscious, though, was screaming at me to pay attention. I ignored it in favor of my immediate survival. I needed to find Vulf’s body and get us onto the Orion before Ivan’s launch killed us. Me.
I bit my lip. With so much sha swirling around, I could do many things, but not restore life.
“Where is Vulf?” I asked the robot. “Did you eat him?” It was a stupid question. A robot didn’t eat. I was reacting instinctively to its lupine form.
The robot wolf shook its head. Then it nodded. Then it shook its head again. A frustrated whine escaped it.
“I have to find Vulf.”
The wolf lunged forward and nosed my hand.
I stared at the large metallic muzzle touching me. I felt the strength of the robot body standing between me and the growing threat of Ivan readying his starship for launch. My question choked on hope and utter disbelief. “Vulf?”
The robot wolf nodded, glanced at the snow melting as the kite’s engines heated, then herded me to the Orion.
I stumbled obediently into the Orion’s decontamination unit and Ahab sealed the hatch. Even if Ivan launched now, we were safe. I stared at the robot wolf that stood so close to me. “Are you really Vulf?”
The wolf lay down, giant head on metal paws, blue eyes glowing.
The decontamination unit hummed, cleansing us of radiation and anything else we might have encountered outside the Orion.
I put my gloved hands on either side of the scarily large wolf’s head. “Did you change form before the hatch opened? Are you safe from radiation exposure?” As an inorganic robot, rather than an all-too-vulnerable organic human, he’d be immune to radiation and a number of other dangers.
The wolf nodded.
I fell forward, my spacesuit’s helmet bumping Vulf’s head as I hugged him. “Thank God.” I didn’t know what strange miracle this was, but Vulf was safe.
There were a lot of things that I could have thought about as the decontamination procedure had us separate so that every bit of our external surfaces could be cleansed. The Orion’s decontamination unit was, not surprisingly, more thorough than the one on Ivan’s kite.
Finally, the procedure finished, the internal door slid open, and I began undoing my spacesuit as I entered the cargo hold. Despite the efficiency of the suit, I’d sweated through the planetside ordeal. “At least I know how to change out of my spacesuit. What do we do about you?” I asked Vulf. I had so many questions, but Vulf needed to be in human form to answer them. Plus, I had a lurking fear that maybe the shift was a one-off event and he’d be trapped as a robot wolf.
“Is it really you, Captain?” Ahab asked.
Vulf nodded his massive metal head. Despite his size, as large as a horse, his robot wolf form had a sleekness to it; as if designed to deliver lethal justice. He nudged me toward the ladder that led up to our living quarters.
I resisted. “You can’t climb the lad
der in that form.”
“The Orion has an elevator…he might fit,” Ahab finished dubiously. “In case you are interested, Ivan Mishkin’s starship has just launched.”
Vulf nudged me again to go up the ladder.
I sighed for his stubbornness and began climbing. As I climbed through the hatch, sha energy swirled in a tight eddy that was almost a whirlpool. I peered down and saw Vulf at the heart of it, human again.
I descended the ladder in a rush and threw myself at him.
He hugged me hard.
We stood like that a long time before the adrenaline of fighting for his survival ebbed. His arms relaxed and he ran his hand up and down my spine in a petting caress that soothed both of us.
“How did you shift form?” I asked.
“The second time, from robot wolf to man, I simply thought of my human body. But the first time…I think you did something. I was in the decontamination unit. The door to it closed, I couldn’t get back to you, and my spacesuit was shredding. Something—sha energy—was howling and pushing me toward the external hatch. I knew Ivan was about to open it and send me to my death and there was nothing I could do. He’d locked my muscles.”
I hugged him tightly. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked down at me, his expression serious. “I think you saved me.”
“Me?”
“I felt the sha build to this panicked storm and then it seemed to burrow into me. The instant before Ivan opened the external hatch, I shifted into a robot wolf.” The blue of his eyes burned as if with a cold fire. “I shifted, Jaya. Ivan wanted to kill me, not help me. So it must have been you who shaped the sha energy into a pattern that facilitated my shifting form.”
“Into a robot wolf. Do you mind that you shifted into an inorganic form?”
He shrugged. “It’s what saved me. As a real wolf, I would still have died of radiation poisoning or hypothermia. Ivan destroyed my suit.”
Which reminded me. “You’re naked.”
His mouth twitched. “I am.”
“Would you like clothes, Captain?” Ahab asked.
Vulf studied my expression, a smile dancing in his eyes. Then he ran his hands down from my shoulders, along my sides, to my hips. “Not yet.”
Her Robot Wolf: Gift of Gaia Page 14
