by C. Gockel
There was a moment of silence between them that stretched too long. But then Ran said, “Yes, sir. Will the blizzard slow the android down, sir?”
Alaric’s jaw got hard. “I don’t know.” He did know the blizzard would kill Volka if he didn’t find her soon.
If he did find her, and he gave her over to the Intelligence, what would they do to her? What would he do? He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. He knew the answer to the first question…but not the second.
The inn room door snicked shut behind 6T9. Dean’s footsteps retreated down the hall. When he was sure there were no weere about but Volka, 6T9 looked down at Carl Sagan and said through clenched teeth, “You know, when we were back at the greenhouse, you could have told us immediately that they didn’t plan to execute us.”
Blinking up at him, Carl replied, “No, I couldn’t. I was sleeping. This body requires at least sixteen hours of shut-eye a day.”
Glaring down at the werfle, 6T9 crossed his arms and felt static dancing beneath his skin. He was sure that the werfle had waited until the last minute out of a flair for the dramatic.
Swishing his tail, Carl walked toward the door. “Fine. Don’t believe me. I’m going to go check this place out. Something is very wrong here…there is so much anger and rage, but I can’t identify its source.”
6T9 didn’t budge. “I thought you needed beauty sleep.”
“Got enough in the hover,” Carl replied.
6T9 said, “I’m not opening—”
The door opened with another snick, and the werfle slipped through. It wasn’t an automatic door.
6T9’s arms uncrossed. “Did you open the door, Carl?”
“Maybe it wasn’t closed properly,” the werfle replied, his thoughts faint.
6T9 peeked out into the hall. Carl had already disappeared.
He shut the door again and turned around. The guest room was small, and the single bed took up most of it.
They’d asked Dean repeatedly if there was any chance of getting out of the valley before tomorrow, and had been told that there was no chance at any price. Carl hadn’t sensed any deception, but 6T9 reached into the ether for Dean’s hover’s ethernet channel anyway. On the way over, he’d reached out to the hover’s computer on a whim—the channel was the same as the serial number on such machines, and he’d spied the serial on the dash. To his surprise, it had responded with, “Welcome to your new Hover 3000EX. Would you like to activate your ethernet access now?”
After being momentarily stunned that the vehicle was over one hundred years old and it had never had its ethernet activated, 6T9 had realized that it wasn’t really that surprising. The Libertians were for cultural, and likely environmental reasons, somewhat ethernet adverse. Their pre-Revelation data sharing network was more like the earliest internet than modern era ether. But the machine had been built in System 1, and he’d been able to activate the machine by providing only the solar system, planet, and postal code of Darragh’s homestead, which he’d downloaded from his Q-comm.
Now, 6T9 watched from the vehicle’s external sensors as Dean hopped in. He frowned. Dean was braving the elements again. But a minute and thirty-two seconds later, 6T9’s suspicions quelled. Dean was pulling through a pair of large wooden double doors that was just behind the inn. Inside the strange building, on the far wall, hung a sign that read, Iron Forge Hover and Auto Repair. Family Owned and Operated for Over 175 Years! As soon as Dean pulled in, a man in coveralls emerged from a side room, smiled, and tipped his hat. The car’s sensors didn’t have sound, but 6T9 could read the man’s lips when he said, “Heya, Dean!” and again later when he said, “Sure, you can park it here.”
Dean evidently wasn’t braving the storm, either .
6T9 disconnected. Dean wasn’t betraying them. They were less than forty kilometers from Sundancer, and they were warm. Things could be much worse. Dumb luck, indeed. He blinked and noticed Volka was running a hand over the bright geometric patterns of the duvet. Pausing, she frowned.
“Don’t worry,” 6T9 said. “I’ll spend the night in the closet.”
Volka looked up at him, and her ears flicked. He could see the worry for his discomfort warring with the risk of impropriety in her expression.
Rolling his eyes, he said, “I need to reboot anyway.” And he needed to perform some self-maintenance before rebooting, after rebooting, or preferably both. He eyed the bathtub sitting in the corner. There wasn’t even a privacy screen; he wouldn’t be doing it there. His eyes returned to Volka. He’d have no problem assisting her with “maintenance,” but knew she’d be offended at best by the suggestion—worse, he was 88 percent certain she’d be frightened by an offer.
Her ears came forward, and her brow furrowed.
Smiling wryly, he said, “Don’t worry, I won’t explode.” His skin prickled at the memory of her outburst.
Her ears swiveled down. “Of course not…I just…don’t know what ‘reboot’ is,” she said at last. Cocking her head, she looked at his feet—more precisely, at his boots. His Q-comm warmed, and his circuits dimmed. She didn’t know what a reboot was, she thought machines with free will were liable to explode out of spite, and quite possibly didn’t believe they had feelings. Was it possible to believe that a being without emotions was an equal? Yet here he was, preparing to take her home to the Republic. What would she do? Would she just become another taker of the dole, adrift and unhappy? His shoulders fell. But if she stayed here, her future was torture and death. He could not let any human face those fates.
He began to explain, “A reboot is—”
A knock at the door interrupted him.
Running over to the entrance, Volka bowed nearly in half as she opened the door. Francisca, the innkeeper’s twenty-something daughter, stood in the hallway, a tray of food in her hands. Her lips were parted, and her blue eyes were wide with surprise.
Sixty slid behind Volka and whispered, “Darling, you aren’t a maid anymore.”
“Oh,” Volka murmured. She straightened slowly, as though dazed, and 6T9’s eyes fell on the back of her neck. Her short, silvery gray hair trailed into a V there and then vanished into tan skin. His lips itched with the desire to heat the spot with his breath, and remembering the softness of her ears made 6T9’s fingers flex with the need for touch. His hands clenched at his side. He needed that reboot.
Francisca’s cheery voice brought him back into the moment. “And if you were, we wouldn’t insist you bow quite so low.” Bustling into the room, she set the tray laden with food on the table by the bed. Turning around, she smiled at Volka, and perhaps having seen the intent of 6T9’s gaze, winked at him. With that, she left the room. Volka stared after her, not moving until Francisca’s footsteps were far down the hall.
“She and Dean are lovers,” Volka said. “I could smell him all over her.”
Huffing softly, 6T9 walked over to the food. “No wonder he was so cheerful when he was driving here.”
He sniffed the food, and his mouth watered, preparing to facilitate power conversion. There was something that might be reindeer meat—barely cooked, bread, and root vegetables drenched with butter that didn’t quite smell like butter. It was gamier…reindeer butter, perhaps?
Volka had to be hungry, but instead of coming over to the food, she sat down heavily on the bed. “On Luddeccea, weere and human relationships are barely tolerated,” she said. “Wealthy human men sometimes play patron…” She sucked in a breath and let it out shakily. Her eyes were on the animal hide serving as a carpet on the floor. In a softer voice, she continued, “Weere men aren’t allowed in human homes unless they’re married—they’re barely allowed out of No Weere if they don’t have a partner.”
Grabbing his silverware, 6T9 paused, remembering how the men on the bus had all been older, and the women were of all ages.
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of a human woman and weere man couple. And weere-human babies…” Eyes becoming glassy, her voice dropped to a whisper. “We’r
e told that it can never happen…how could we not have known?”
6T9’s Q-comm hummed with the question. “Luddeccea only has official media channels. Couple that with only one civilian flight off-world per week and carefully pre-screened passengers that I doubt are venturing much to the interior, and it’s not too hard to explain.” He shrugged. “China’s Communist Party kept a famine that killed as many as forty-five million people secret for decades—” He clamped his mouth shut, realizing he was giving into a data dump.
Staring at the wall, Volka said, “I’d thought that if a weere woman became pregnant by a human man that miscarriage was the only possible outcome…” She shook her head. “But it’s not, and everyone here knows.” Curling her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees. When she raised her head again, tears were leaking from her eyes.
6T9 put the silverware down. His hands clenched at his sides, and he fought the desire to go over and put his arm around her. His mind raced, trying to determine what he should do and what he should say. His Q-comm began furiously pulling and collating random bits of data and he said, “With all the heavy metals and toxins in the stream I landed in and the higher than optimal levels of radiation, I’m surprised that the weere have any children at all.”
Volka gaped at him.
6T9’s Q-comm kept humming. “The weere are descended from the wolves of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl wolves developed the ability to withstand chemical and physical mutations through increased apoptosis—programmed cell death—but it still isn’t ideal for even Chernobyl wolves to be in those conditions. A fetus with even less of the Chernobyl wolf genome would be less likely to survive.”
Volka said nothing, but her body rocked back and forth on the bed.
6T9’s Q-comm sparked, and he realized his mistake, or his Q-comm’s mistake. He winced. “I’m sorry, that was another long and very unnecessary data dump.”
Biting her lips, ears swiveling, she said, “No, no, Sixty…it was very necessary.” She wiped a tear with the back of her sleeve. “I never knew…until.” Scrunching her eyes shut, she bent her head to her knees.
Giving in, 6T9 went over to the bed, sat next to her, and almost put his arm around her. Thinking better of it, he shrugged off his coat and lay it across his lap. Then he put an arm around her, fully expecting Volka to pull away. She stiffened, and he almost let her go, but then Volka leaned into him and wept silently. Where he felt her trembling weight, where the warm softness of her ear touched his cheek, and where her tears dampened his shirt, his sensory receptors came alight. His primary function was unfulfilled, but his circuits still hummed. He was needed; that was, perhaps, his real, primary function…and the coat on his lap very strategically hid the hardware malfunction.
Volka lay on her side in the room that smelled of reindeer meat, strangeness, and werfle. Her hand rested on Sixty. He was warm and surprisingly soft.
Volka’s eyes bolted open, and in the darkness made out the shape of Carl Sagan where she’d dreamed of Sixty being. Her hand was resting on top of the werfle, though she couldn’t remember when he'd come back to the room.
Sixty was in the closet, “rebooting,” which she still didn’t understand.
“Nightmare, Hatchling?” the werfle asked, raising his head.
“I…maybe…” she replied. There was nothing sexual about her dream; she shouldn’t be ashamed or frightened, but she was both. Carl Sagan’s claws kneaded the bedspread, and his purr tickled her ears. “Go back to sleep,” the werfle said. “The storm is still raging.”
She heard the wind howling outside, but the bed was soft and warm. Ducking her nose beneath the heavy covers, she closed her eyes…and found herself in almost the same dream. But this time, she was sitting on the side of the bed with Sixty, his arm wrapped around her, and Carl Sagan was on the other side of her. “It’s just a dream, Volka. Don’t wake up. You need to rest—and so do I.”
She didn’t have to be afraid of Sixty, she reminded herself. Not in real life, and certainly not in a dream. She nodded against his dream chest, and then the dream Carl Sagan disappeared.
She let the dream Sixty rock her again. She knew why it had frightened her. The last man to comfort her had been Alaric. At that thought, she looked up, and instead of Sixty, it was Alaric, before he’d entered the Guard. He’d been at university, living in his Uncle Darmadi’s guest house and considering going into the priesthood. She couldn’t pull away or wake up. Gazing down at her with his piercing blue-gray eyes, he said, “I have to get married, Volka. I can’t put it off anymore…and weere and humans aren’t meant to be together. What you’ve suffered is proof of that.”
From outside her body, she watched her dream self say, “You don’t even believe in God!”
“It’s not God,” Alaric said. “It’s nature .”
Tears ran down her face. “I cannot give you children, and that is where your love ends.”
“Do not say I don’t love you!” Alaric roared, his eyes bloodshot with tears.
She heard his relatives banging at the door and their footsteps thumping into the house.
Her consciousness stuttered. His family hadn’t done that…but the footsteps kept coming. She turned toward the door, and instead of the Darmadi clan, a wave of black water surged through. It covered Alaric, turning him into a gaping statue, the droplets crawling over his body like tiny beetles. It surged over to her and slinked along her skin, chilling her to the bone. The water splashed into her eyes, her ears, and mouth, and she couldn’t speak. For a moment, she was terrified…and then she recognized the dream and remembered it was not her own. It was Sundancer’s. She couldn’t speak, so she called out with her heart, willing the dark to stop…
And it did. The black water flowed away, taking Alaric and the guest house with it. She was in Sundancer, staring out at a field of stars. Carl Sagan was in her arms…
Swishing his tail, Carl said, “Thank you, Volka. My fear infected Sundancer, and her fear infected me. It was a vicious circle.”
Volka stared at him, her dream ears swiveling. “Do I hear boot steps?”
“Yes!” said Carl, the werfle’s eyes going wide. “That was the source of my fear. We must wake up.”
Volka’s eyes shot open. Carl was batting at her face. “Quick!” he said. “Make the bed!”
Slipping off the bed, she threw Sixty’s coat and her pack underneath. Pulling up the duvet, her ears swiveled to the sound of boot steps on the stairwell.
“It’s the Luddeccean Guard,” said the werfle. Worse than that, Volka smelled a dog.
Alaric stood in the lobby of the Iron Forge Inn, snow melting on his shoulders and hair. The startled innkeeper, his wife, and their daughter, were standing behind the counter. He heard his men making a sweep of the inn’s rooms above them .
Commander Ran was beside him. “If you hadn’t rerouted the power to the de-icing grid, we wouldn’t have made it.” Additional snow had accumulated while they’d hovered, and they’d been blown above the hover-safe range. The hover rings had blown out in the stress. He’d diverted all remaining hover power to the de-icing grid and brought the LCS down on the nearest suitable flat surface, which happened to be Iron Forge’s main street. They’d still sustained damage to several systems, including life support. Without life support, it was too cold to bunk aboard the craft. Except for a skeleton crew working in engineering and Diomedes monitoring the systems, they had to take shelter here.
They were standing in a small, cozy sitting area with two overstuffed chairs, a table, and a wood burning stove. His fingers flexed with the desire to heave the table against the wall. Just as Ran and he had informed Command, they never should have flown in the blizzard. They’d found the escape pod but had been unable to land for a visual inspection due to the presence of trees. It had been too windy to send out their hover drones. They’d tried to take life-sign readings, but the snow had made their sensors next to useless. The mission had endangered his crew uselessly. He had no idea if Volka and the ma
chine were still in the pod, and if she was alive or dead.
Some of the men were laughing about how it was typical of their perfectionist captain to bring them down two hundred meters from an empty inn. At least they were in good spirits. The snow was falling at a rate greater than fifteen centimeters per hour. Was Volka out there? Trapped in the snow? His eyes fell on the chair, and his nails bit into his palms .
Boot steps made him snap his hands behind his back. Commander Ran said, “Report, Airman Huang?”
“No guests, sir. We checked out the basement with Cecil,” Huang said, referring to their explosive-detecting dog. “There is a wine cellar down there. Floor was wet.”
Alaric and Ran exchanged glances. Spilled wine wouldn’t throw Cecil from the scent of explosives, but were they trying to hide something else? Evidence of tunnels, perhaps?
“I dropped a bottle of wine!” the innkeeper’s daughter protested.
“Could definitely tell there’s been a weere down there recently—you know how they make Cecil growl—but not our targets.”
“Put a security team down there,” Alaric said.
The airman nodded.
“Upstairs?” Alaric asked.
“No one that we’ve seen, but Cecil is still doing a floor-by-floor sweep, sir,” Huang replied.
Alaric turned to the innkeeper; he was exchanging a look with his wife. “In your guest book, it said that there were two occupants in room forty-two,” Alaric said.
“It’s possible they went out to a bar,” said the daughter.
Alaric’s jaw ticked, thinking about the wall of snow outside, the cold, and the driving wind.
