Supernova

by C. Gockel

  And yet here he was.

  His younger self would have seen the situation as grim and against his nature. He thought his younger self had had nothing meaningful in his life since Eliza died. Both of them were right.

  “Sixty?” Volka asked.

  “Of course,” he said. She took a step into her room. He took a step to follow and was jerked backward by the power cable still attached to his back. He glared over his shoulder.

  FET12 held the other end of the cord in his hand.

  “FET12,” Volka said, peering past 6T9. “Sixty’s intentions are noble.”

  FET12 narrowed his eyes.

  “I’m too low on power to be anything but noble,” Sixty said, which was closer to the truth.

  FET12 straightened and said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “I’m low on power, too. Do you think that slipping through the Skimmers’ hulls might damage our batteries? It’s too soon to require a recharge.”

  Volka’s lips pursed. 6T9’s Q-comm hummed. Noa had been hellbent the past few weeks on finding every imaginable way to use the Skimmers’ unique abilities. When Sundancer had first rescued Volka, Carl, and 6T9, she’d scooped up dirt and ice as well. Almost immediately, Sundancer had let the debris slip directly through the material of her keel. It wasn’t something the ship did often—she hadn’t done it when they’d had the giant “eggs” of armor and never had done it with a human. The elderships had been able to explain that it was power intensive, and also that any living thing expelled through their hulls would die. Sundancer had thought the armor, with its associated drones, was alive—hence, she hadn’t pushed it through her hull in the same fashion. But upon experimentation—and after many assurances to the ships—it was found that electronics could pass through the Skimmers. Which meant FET12, James, and 6T9 could be dropped through the Skimmers’ hulls without the need to depressurize and repressurize their bridges. It was uniquely unpleasant. The material of the ships’ hulls filled every single orifice and empty cavity. It subverted the artificial desire to breathe, which in 6T9 and FET12 initiated a subroutine that caused screaming as a warning to any nearby humans.

  “It’s possible,” 6T9 said, mentally ordering replacement batteries and sending that data to James and FET12.

  Volka yawned.

  6T9 jerked the power cable out of FET12’s hand while he was etherly distracted. “Volka needs sleep,” he said, and guided her into her room.

  He heard the other android taking a seat outside her door.

  “I will throw up on him if he tries anything, FET12,” Volka said.

  “I know how he thinks,” FET12 replied.

  6T9 couldn’t argue with him. At the moment, Volka needed to sleep. Her life might depend on her alertness tomorrow—or rather today.

  Volka murmured, “I’m too tired for this,” to FET12, or to herself, and 6T9 guided her into her room, leaving FET12 in the hall … his circuits dimming slightly as he did so.

  There was a nightstand, with a power outlet next to it that 6T9 jacked into. His battery charge had dropped by 2.3% in the past twenty-seven minutes. His battery was damaged. Delightful. Powering up, he carefully maneuvered over the sleeping Carl and sat beside Volka on top of the covers, leaning his back against the headboard. The guard beds weren’t very wide, and they had scratchy wool blankets and linen sheets that were rough rather than luxurious. It wasn’t the presidential guest house but was probably what the average Odessian was used to.

  “I’m sorry, 6T9,” Volka whispered, curling on her side, head grazing his hip, making him wish he had more power, that she didn’t need sleep, and that her suppressants didn’t make her sick. His Q-comm sparked. “For what?”

  “The dream,” she said. “I feel like I’m cheating, even though …”

  “Shh …” he said. “It wasn’t that kind of dream.”

  Volka pressed her head against him. Someday, she would have a dream that wasn’t innocent, because dreams weren’t things humans controlled. They didn’t respect time or space or marital vows. And with Volka’s telepathy, they might wind up being shared.

  He massaged her shoulder. That was what he was getting himself into. But she could imagine a damaged ‘bot like FET12 in an ethereal light, and she’d never betray 6T9 in the real-world sense. She’d keep her promises in the real world, and that was more than many people would do. Also, she had nice ears.

  “Help me sleep,” Volka murmured, which made 6T9’s Q-comm spark. He almost told her he knew lots of ways besides hypnosis to help her relax, just so she knew he was still interested.

  Outside her door, FET12 coughed.

  6T9 and Volka sighed in unison. Carl was soft, warm, and wasn’t lecturing 6T9 or Volka at the moment. 6T9 dropped his hand on the sleeping werfle to stroke his silky warm fur, to change his soft snore to a sleepy purr.

  Twisting from beneath 6T9’s hand, Carl shrieked, his fur rising.

  Volka gasped. Carl hissed at her and then darted lightning fast beneath the bed.

  FET12 padded into the room with fast, quick steps, and kneeled beside the bed. “Carl?” he asked. Carl answered with a hiss.

  6T9’s Q-comm sparked with the results of a query on werfle hisses. “Carl’s terrified.” Swinging a leg over the bed, 6T9 prepared to join the other android, memories of the disaster in Shinar, when Carl’s terror had been their first warning, played before his eyes.

  Volka put a hand on his arm. “Stop, that’s not our Carl!”

  FET12 looked up at her. “What?”

  Beneath the bed, Carl squeaked piteously, paws scrambling over the floor, putting as much distance between himself and FET12 as possible.

  Volka bit her lip. “That is just a werfle. Carl is gone.”

  FET12 bolted upright, eyes wide and alarmed. “Gone where?”

  12

  Unauthorized Expeditions

  Galactic Republic : Shinar

  Consciousness sliding along the quantum waves, Carl grumbled, “Why am I getting this assignment?”

  Other consciousnesses responded, “Because you have experience on Shinar, and your current host is on Odessa and very secure.”

  “When I was on Shinar, I had to pretend to be an animatronic scarf. I didn’t see or interact much with the locals,” Carl snipped. That had been partially because the Shinarese believed The One were just a conspiracy theory cooked up by the collective imagination of all the lesser systems in the galaxy. It had also been because he’d been too overwhelmed by the impending eruption of Mount Little Loaf to do more than hide under 6T9’s collar.

  “Everyone knows you have no pride, Hsissh,” the other consciousnesses responded, using his name among them. And then they fled, off into the void, in tens of thousands of directions.

  Carl continued along the waves, resigned. Above the planet of Shinar, he let himself feel the tug of all the wave-sensitive creatures residing there. His mission was to find and manage any Shinar native that was Infected. His priority was high-ranking Infected. The likely Infected Senator who had canceled the Skimmer project was isolated on the planet’s moon, and there were no cats or werfles there that could play host. However, other Infected might be on Shinar.

  To find one that was important, he needed an important host.

  An overwhelming sense of noblesse oblige and royal conceit swelled along the waves. Aha! His host had been found. Carl’s consciousness followed those assured emotions and swelled into the consciousness of a cat. A cat with a supremely full belly and a warm lap-throne beneath her. A holo was playing soft music in the background. The cat’s eyes were closed, and gentle fingers deftly worshipped her, scratching her cheeks, her chin, and then sliding along her back. Purring, she kneaded her claws appreciatively in a human thigh.

  “At least Queenie is happy,” a woman close to the cat’s throne declared.

  “We’re still together, we’re still a family, I’m happy for that, too,” another woman—the throne—replied.

  “That’s true.”

  Smiling as one o
f her subjects kissed her head, Carl—now Queenie—opened her eyes to survey her domain. She almost hissed in disgust. She was in a tent. Her subjects were sitting on an air mattress with blankets over their shoulders to keep warm. Their breath misted in front of their faces. Queenie, with her full Persian coat, had not noticed how cold it was. It was cold for her subjects, though. It was one of the reasons she was sitting on her throne’s lap. She was a benevolent monarch, bestowing her warmth. Queenie-Carl quickly read the minds of her subjects. This was a refugee camp on one of Shinar’s small, rocky, Northern islands; her subjects had been evacuated after Little Loaf’s eruption. Due to the planet’s relatively slight tilt, it never got above freezing here, although it rarely dipped below -6 C, either.

  Queenie slipped her senses beyond her body. Thankfully, the Dark had not infected the island or the refugees themselves. Unfortunately, they were also not important, nor were they located near anyone important. Carl—aka Hsissh, and now aka Queenie—had spent too long as a werfle and forgotten the first rule of cats: they all thought they were royalty. Well, if this didn’t reek of onions, garlic, and grapes. Carl-Queenie blinked at this cat’s swear. Those three foods would cause her to lose her stomach.

  Despite the humbleness of her subjects and her domain, her throne was comfortable, she was warm, and her belly was full…

  The wave erupted in a chorus. “Carl, Hsissh, Queenie, remember the mission!”

  Putting her ears back, Queenie hissed.

  “Oh, no, what’s wrong, Queenie?” her throne asked her.

  Inclining her head to a small holo on the tent floor, the other woman said, “Probably that.” There was such vehemence in her voice, the waves practically curdled.

  The holo had been playing music, but now a news announcer was saying, “The resort island of New Skye isn’t just a refuge for the rich and famous—” Faces of Shinar celebrities and Shinarese politicians appeared in the holo. Queenie recognized them in her subjects’ minds. The “rich and famous” faces were superimposed above sprawling mansions and a lush, temperate, paradise. “—It’s also for the displaced animals from the Bestiary.” Queenie’s ears perked at mention of the name of the exotic zoo of genetically engineered animals; she’d visited it in her Carl form with her other subjects, 6T9 and Volka.

  The face of a man appeared in the holo. He was smiling, and Queenie’s current subjects recognized him as the highest paid actor on Shinar. “Only 230 kilometers of New Skye is inhabited.” The holo switched to mansions on enormous grounds. “We also have 475 square kilometers of forest reserve, and what better use than to let the Bestiary’s critters roam freely on it?”

  One of Queenie’s subjects hissed. “We’re less than animals to them.” Both of her subjects shivered, and pictures of outside the tent filled their minds, dirty snow on the foot trails, and ice clinging to the nearby mountains, children in clothing that wasn’t warm enough, and a baby that died of hypothermia while the structures were being built.

  “Shussh,” said Queenie’s throne. “We are alive, and the Bestiary animals deserve a refugee camp, too.”

  The holo showed a dragon, sleeping on a rock in the sun.

  “You saw the mansions! They could put us in one of their backyards,” Queenie’s other subject protested.

  The holo switched back to the famous actor saying, “I even gave up my own backyard for unicorns.”

  Queenie’s throne whispered bitterly, “See, Honey, their yards are already filled with unicorns. You can’t argue that we’re anywhere near as pretty.”

  Her other subject snorted and said, “Well, you might be.”

  On the holo the actor said, “Actor Leon Camio gave his back yard to dire wolves. But I’m not that brave!”

  Queenie’s ears perked. Dire wolves? On an island that was utilized by the rich and powerful?

  Queenie’s subjects kissed again, the cat discreetly left her throne, and Carl left the cat. He soared through the waves into the mind of an animal that did not think of itself as royalty, but as a prisoner.

  Carl opened his new dire wolf eyes to the twilight of New Skye. The rank of the Dark was on the breeze, and the rest of his pack lay curled tightly close together, despite the relative warmth of the place. Carl lifted his nose above the tops of the long grasses they hid in. The Dark wasn’t close, but it was here on this island. Uncurling, he rose in a body much stronger and larger than he was used to.

  There was a deep canine whine. “Bone-Crusher, what are you doing? There is danger.” The question was directed at him, and the words were half in the wave and half in the whine. How curious.

  Carl as Bone-Crusher turned not to his subjects, but to his pack. They were larger than even the arctic wolves he’d seen in the mind of Noa when she’d first met Volka. They were more barrel chested, and their snouts were shorter. Their heads were larger and broader. He saw their hearts and minds in the wave. They were not as clever as humans, but they were at least as clever as chimpanzees, perhaps cleverer, and if they could learn to use the wave fully, they could be even more intelligent than humans. They were more timid than chimps or humans, though. They were genetically recreated organisms for the Bestiary, and they had probably been bred to be timid, to not be dangerous to tourists.

  The Dark made his whiskers tremble. It wasn’t dangerously close, but it was still too close.

  Swift-foot, a sister-she-wolf, rose from the long grass. “Brother, danger! Hide in the grass!”

  Father-All-Pack leader rose with Mother-All-Pack leader. “Hide, son!” they implored in whine and wave.

  Bone-Crusher-Carl found himself growling. “No more hiding! I’m going to kill the Dark. We are dire wolves!” He looked among his brothers and sisters, mother and father, fifteen in all of a wave-manipulating species, genetically engineered and kept as less than house pets by the humans of Shinar. Queenie was a queen. These animals were entertainment. Bone-Crusher barked savagely. “Who is with me?”

  The four-meter-high iron gate was set into a four-point-five-meter stone wall. The gate was uncomfortably close to the mansion of the holostar hosting the wolves. Bone-Crusher-Carl studied it through narrowed eyes, whiskers quivering on his brow and short muzzle.

  “The wall and gate have lightning in them,” Swift-foot said. “You see, we cannot pass.”

  By that, she meant the wall and gate were electrified. Bone-Crusher’s muscles contracted and released, like a shiver before sleep. If the wall hadn’t been electrified, they could have jumped it.

  The grounds and the wall stretched for many kilometers. The dire wolves had tested it everywhere for breaks in the current. Electrifying such a barrier seemed a lot to achieve in a time when half a continent was in refugee camps. “Was there always lightning in the barrier?” Bone-Crusher wondered silently.

  His sister heard and her lip curled, revealing long teeth. “It’s always been there. To keep out the tourist riff-raff.” The last was a memory of a human talking. The same human Carl had seen in the holo. He peered back at the naturalistic enclosure. Beyond the carefully cultivated prairie was a cultivated forest. New Skye wasn’t tropical; the scents of foliage made Bone-Crusher suspect that the climate was like that of Scotland in late spring. It would be comfortable for humans, and the whole camp would fit easily in this mansion’s prairie-scape.

  A breeze ruffled his fur, and with it came the reek of the Dark.

  “Let’s go back and hide, Brother,” Swift-foot whined. “Please.”

  Bone-Crusher growled, turned back to the gate, and focused on the gate’s lock. “Watch.” He was larger than his werfle form. More mass meant more power and more waves to twist to his whim. Nonetheless, the bolt was heavier than he’d anticipated, and it wasn’t a simple sliding mechanism, but part of a complex apparatus that resisted the pressure he put upon it. The bolt trembled, clattering as though the gate were caught in a fierce wind, but Bone-Crusher trembled, too. It was too heavy; the waves he commanded were not enough. He felt like his legs might give out, that his c
onsciousness would slip, and he’d be trapped within a comatose body. His growl turned to a whine.

  “I see what he is doing!” Father exclaimed in a yip and a telepathic spark. The older wolf braced his legs and growled at the bolt, tugging at the waves. His pull was unskilled and tentative. Bone-Crusher’s limbs still trembled, but he no longer felt he was on the verge of passing out.

  “Ah, yes!” Mother Dire Wolf yipped. “Children! Observe what your brother and father are doing!

  The other wolves gathered nearer. Ruffs rising, they growled at the gate. Like Mother and Father’s wave manipulation, theirs was uncoordinated and clumsy, yet not unhelpful. Bone-Crusher’s legs stopped trembling. He imagined the way all their efforts could work together more efficiently, and the dire wolves modified their efforts. Father Wolf gave a ferocious growl, and the lock gave with a clang. With another nudge of the wave, it swung open.

  Bone-Crusher’s head drooped, and he panted. How had they learned telekinesis so quickly, and his pup, Volka, had not? He blinked, realizing the answer. These wolves had been wave aware and telepathic nearly since birth. Volka had only recently come into the ability. His tail wagged. She probably would become telekinetic with time.

  Giving a low growl, Father said, “Follow behind Mother and me,” and he trotted through the opening. Bone-Crusher blinked again, a memory from his current form explaining why they always traveled like this: oldest in the front to set the pace, but also to take the worst of whatever danger they were heading into.

  The youngest followed the eldest. This was also normal. They were the least experienced.

  Bone-Crusher and Swift-foot took their usual positions at the rear. They were the eldest of their generation and most prepared to tackle threats from behind. Sniffing, Bone-Crusher noted that not all the wolves in the pack were kin. The genetic engineers that bred the dire wolves were trying to prevent inbreeding. At that thought, others’ memories came to him—pups being taken away from the group and “auctioned” to support the Bestiary. The memory came with a flood of anger and sorrow. There were other memories of new, orphaned pups appearing in their enclosure occasionally. The dire wolves always adopted them. Father and Mother said they must treat them as they would hope for their own stolen kin.