by C. Gockel
“Volka, no!” shouted Alaric.
Phaser fire sped by her so close she could feel heat.
Volka crumpled, pole falling from her grasp. A strong arm wrapped around her from behind, and she was lifted from her feet as though she were a doll. “I am fully powered now,” Sixty said, running a few steps, knocking the breath from her lungs. He leaped from an enormous piece of slab, and then they were hurtling toward the drifts meters below.
They landed, sending flurries exploding around them. It was too deep to run. Behind her, Volka heard the Guard approaching the summit of the rubble pile. They’d fire and—
The pair of doors on the building behind the inn that looked like a barn door exploded outward. Dean’s hover came cruising over the snow toward them, skidding to park sideways right in front of their noses, sending more snow flying. The door popped open.
“It’s empty!” Volka cried, pulling herself from Sixty’s arm and backing away in fear. “Is it possessed?”
6T9 picked her up from behind, spun them both around, and fell back into the hover with her on his lap, Carl on his opposite arm, and their feet sticking out. Because she was sideways facing the rubble pile, and the door was still open, she saw down the muzzle of the plasma rifle aimed at her nose. Volka’s eyes went wide and then her body was crushed into the seat as the hover jolted forward. Cold air spilled into the cab.
“Pull your legs in!” 6T9 commanded over the roar of the wind. Volka did, just as the hover banked hard right. Volka gaped. There was the spaceship she’d glimpsed from afar, hovering in what had been their path. It was the size of a jumbo jet airplane she’d once ridden on with Mr. Darmadi but fatter, with stubbier wings, time bands down its length, and an enormous gun emerging from its belly, pointing right at them. She squeaked. 6T9 muttered, “Short circuits,” and then the hover lurched forward again and rose in the air just as plasma fire shot beneath it. They banked left between shadows that might have been buildings—it was hard to see in the snow—and then 6T9 sighed. Volka took a deep breath, and then her hair rose, and her whole body stiffened. “What is that smell? Chemicals…burning plastic…” Gagging, she put her hand over her face.
6T9 jerked beneath her and roughly pushed her off of him. “It’s me,” he grunted, turning around so he was facing the front. An unconscious Carl was draped across his far arm. “Belt up,” Sixty said, not looking at her. “We’ve only got a few minutes before your boyfriend’s crew is after us.”
Covering her mouth, she turned around, threw down her pack, and then held her breath as she belted on her seatbelt. She was sitting behind the steering wheel, but it was turning on its own. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “He’s not my boyfriend.” Volka practically spat the last word. She’d been his lover for half a decade and miscarried three of Alaric’s children.
6T9 raised an eyebrow at her.
“He left me for a human woman,” Volka said tightly. Alaric had offered her his patronage when he’d become engaged. She’d turned him down on religious grounds, although in her heart she knew it was nothing so noble. She just couldn’t bear to share him with another .
Eyes focused ahead again, 6T9 said, “He loved you enough to save you.”
Her chest clenched. “It was lust, not love for him.” For her it was love.
“For some humans, they’re pretty much one and the same.” His eyes flicked to a mirror, and he added, “And Carl could barely control him. If he hadn’t had feelings for you, I’d be slag and you’d be dead.”
Volka had just killed his Guardsman. If Alaric had ever loved her, he probably didn’t love her now. She took a deep breath and was once again struck with the scent of seared chemicals. Grimacing, she looked at 6T9’s chest. She instantly felt ashamed. The skin and muscle around the impact area appeared to have boiled. “Oh, Sixty…” She swallowed. “Are you…”
“I turned off the pain,” 6T9 said. “And nothing functional was injured.”
Not “it didn't hurt,” Volka noted. He’d had to turn the hurt off.
She remembered his scream. “Thank you,” she said, “for saving my life.” It sounded very small.
He glanced over at her. He didn’t exactly smile, but his face became less hard. His skin was covered with grime, and his hair was gray with dirt. Looking back out the window, he said, “Thank you for saving my…whatever.”
Did she hear bitterness in the last word?
Volka didn’t know what to say. Biting her lip, she faced forward and then realized there was something she had to say. Reaching forward gingerly, she caressed the center of the steering wheel. “And thank you, Hover, for rescuing us. I’m sorry I called you possessed. You’re a machine, like Sixty. ”
“It’s not like me,” Sixty said.
“Well, no, but it’s smart like you,” Volka protested. “It’s driving.”
“It does have an autopilot; however, I’m driving,” 6T9 said, scowling out the window from the passenger seat.
“How?” Volka asked, gaping at the steering wheel.
“With my mind. It’s so ancient it has ether control,” 6T9 replied. “Snow keeps getting on the external sensors, so I have to stay focused.”
“All…androids…can control machines with their…minds?” Volka stammered. That was terrifying. 6T9 had always been kind, but she wasn’t sure she’d trust any android.
“Every human in the Republic with a neural interface can, too,” 6T9 responded.
Volka’s lips parted. She wanted to ask questions, but he looked very serious, and she bit back her curiosity.
Sixty’s chest rose and fell, and the reek of burnt plastic increased. “I don’t know how we’ll get into the Red Gorge without the hover pack. Or even how we’ll get to the top of the Red Cliffs.”
Volka swallowed. She knew of both from a few Luddeccean Geographic magazines in Mr. Darmadi’s library. The Red Cliffs shot up from the Iron Valley floor, and the Red Gorge cut between them and the Iron Range.
She glanced about. They’d left the town minutes ago and were now cruising through low rolling hills. The landscape was nothing like she’d seen on Luddeccea. Jagged boulders, some completely covered in snow, others showing red rock, jutted out like wicked teeth. Scraggly dark trees whipped at the craft.
Sixty shook his head and glanced at his jacket that she was still wearing. “You’ve got what’s more important.” She instinctively touched the ashes. He smiled minutely and returned his attention to the windshield.
Ahead of them the clouds broke, yellow light spilling onto the snow, and Sixty said, “Guard reinforcements will be here in a few minutes.” Adjusting the rearview mirror, he glanced up. “Your captain’s found us.”
Volka looked backward. Hurtling toward them just above the snow was the Guard craft she’d seen earlier. It was like a giant, malevolent, metal bird of prey skimming across a lake of snow. Besides a gun protruding from its underbelly, it had two more cannons on either wing. Her heart sunk and her eyes grew hot.
Would Alaric grant her mercy one more time?
Alaric sat in the bridge of the LCS, his broken leg outstretched in a rapid-caster, the needles of electric nerve disrupters stabbing his skin held in place by medical tape. He burned, not with the pain from needles or even his broken ribs, but with rage.
Volka had killed Huang. Gentle little Volka who’d been so innocent, who he’d held in his arms, who’d been so soft beneath him, and begged him to bury himself within her. His hands balled into fists on the arm rests as he thought of Huang’s shattered skull. The machine had corrupted her—just as it had let Alaric’s eyes slip over it, it had distorted Volka’s vision.
“They’re in visual range, Captain,” Ensign Peters said nervously. The man had been part of the skeleton crew. Normally he was deep in engineering, but now he was on the bridge in the navigator chair .
Ran had been the only person to walk away from the wreckage of the inn virtually unhurt. He’d pulled himself out and over to Alaric as the android an
d Volka had escaped and whispered, “I saw them pull you and Huang from the wreckage…why?”
Alaric had been nearly incapacitated by pain, but Chief of Engineering Agrawal, another member of the skeleton crew that had been safe inside the ship during the attack, had answered for him. “For hostages.”
At the firing console, Ran asked, “Should we use phaser cannons, or try to fry their engines with a disrupter, sir?”
Hostages. That had to have been the reason. The android had planned to torture Alaric for access codes and intel.
“Sir?” Ran said again, voice tense. Had Alaric’s nearly sycophant commander finally taken him off the pedestal?
Alaric gazed out the viewport. They were drawing closer to the small civilian hover. He thought of the android that had made his eyes slide over it and poisoned Volka’s mind. It should be captured and taken apart bolt by bolt.
And then he thought of the interrogators and what they’d do to Volka, how they’d take advantage of her body, and make her death as slow and as excruciating as possible. Pain radiated up his arms from the force of his grip on his armrests. His lip curled. “Slag them.”
6T9 glanced at the rearview mirror and saw flecks of glowing orange in their pursuer’s cannons. Wrapping his hand protectively around Carl, he dropped the hover craft into the snow drifts below them. Rapid deceleration threw him against the safety straps, but the phaser cannon fire streaked overhead. They plowed forward beneath the snow out of visual range, and hopefully, out of view of heat sensors, too.
He exhaled, Carl’s double hearts beating against his arm. The tiny alien had made the phaser blast that struck 6T9’s chest veer to the side—6T9 suspected in the same mysterious way Carl had slipped through the door at the inn. 6T9 hadn’t had time to switch to his masochist applications before the surge of power to the filaments had overwhelmed him, and the blast and the aftermath had been agony so hot and terrible he hadn’t been able to quantify it. And yet, when it had ended, he had been ridiculously grateful to still be in his battered shell, and not just a stream of data in Time Gate 1’s server stacks.
His Q-comm hummed. According to his ancient topography maps, they only had fifteen more kilometers to a sixty-percent grade that would allow the hover to ascend to the chasm’s edge. If he did a barrel roll, he and Volka might be able to drop out of the hover at the cliff peaks unnoticed. He could command the hover to zip off on autopilot and be a decoy while they descended the canyon on foot…in the cold…and snow. And then they’d have to walk on foot another ten kilometers. Even with his power reserves full, he didn’t think he’d make it in the cold.
“We aren’t going very fast…” Volka whispered, her ears swiveled back.
“Lizzars,” 6T9 swore. They were tunneling through the snow at thirty kilometers an hour which would put their pursuer above them in less than a minute. He lifted them out, veered hard right, and aimed for the space between two enormous rocky outcroppings the other craft could not follow through. Swerving left to cut through, 6T9 almost sighed with relief when they emerged from the other side…but then swerved again just in time to miss phaser fire from the captain’s ship. The captain hadn’t followed them, he’d gone around and turned about, anticipating their emergence and course.
“Up there!” Volka cried, pointing. 6T9 glanced up to see a starfighter emerging from the clouds, plasma cannons already primed and glowing orange. Cursing, 6T9 pulled up, flipping them upside down and backward, almost out of the hover’s altitude limit, barrel rolled them back through the boulders and upright again. Volka gasped.
“I’ll stay with you until you die,” he promised her. “And I’ll put that off as long as possible.” For himself as well. His Q-comm heated. They would be destroyed if they stayed out in the open.
In the periphery of his vision, he saw her look at him with wide eyes. Gunning the engine to its maximum velocity, he altered course, just missing being hit from above. Ahead he saw men toiling in the snow, magni-freight cars carting away rock, and a dark gash in the side of the Red Cliff’s face.
Swerving madly to keep from being an easy target, 6T9 said, “We have to get in that magni-freight tunnel.” Phaser fire turned the snow on their left to steam.
Covering her head, Volka said, “That sounds like a good plan.”
“Not really,” he replied. A shock wave from a dropped charge lifted the hover out of altitude range. Teeth clattering as they belly-flopped into a snow drift, navigating through tunneling equipment, workers, and a few paltry phaser rifle blasts, he didn’t have a chance to explain. The tunnel wasn’t yet complete. It wasn’t an escape. It was a dead end.
“Full-stop,” Alaric ordered, and the LCS craft came to a halt just meters from the construction site for the new magni-freight line, sending a wave of snow before it. Alaric scowled at the gash in the cliff face, and the workers and security personnel gesturing into the tunnel. Ostensibly to help with carting ore, the tunnel would allow the transport of troops beneath the Iron Range in blizzards like the one that had nearly destroyed his ship.
Father Diomedes was manning the comm station. Lieutenant Torres, the man who usually manned the station, had been in the inn when it was attacked. “Captain, there are reports of resumed fighting at Iron Forge. Captain Tschev suggests he send in his starfighters to supply air support.”
“The tunnel is a dead end,” Ran said, looking over his shoulder at Alaric. “We can neutralize the android and the heretic ourselves.”
Alaric nodded at Diomedes. “Tell him we’d appreciate it. We’ll handle the android.”
Sonic booms sounded as the starfighters shot off toward Iron Forge.
Eyes gleaming with confidence, Ran said, “We may be able to take them alive if we send in a team.”
“It’s a trap,” Alaric said. “He’ll draw us in and then initiate a self-destruct and take as many of us as he can.”
Ran looked out the view screen. “You’re right. ”
The radio began crackling, probably with the head of the tunnel security.
“Father,” Alaric commanded. “Tell the foreman to get all of his personnel out of the tunnel.”
“Yes, Captain,” the father replied.
Alaric stared into the void cut into the cliff face. Would the thing release Volka’s mind before her destruction? He didn’t know what to hope. To the commander, he said, “Deploy the drones. Shoot to destroy and kill.”
“We’re close to Sundancer, aren’t we?” Volka said. She felt as though she was being pulled forward by a cord—or as though someone had thrown her a lifeline when she was sinking. She felt profoundly relieved, even though the darkness of the tunnel was claustrophobia inducing, and stretched seemingly endlessly before them. Every few meters, the light fixtures protruded from the walls that emitted a sickly green glow. There had been no more phaser fire, only a few startled miners—tunnelers? They’d jumped out of their way when 6T9 blew the horn. She felt like she could finally breathe.
“Yes,” Sixty said, focus straight ahead and jaw tight.
Volka whispered, “We’re almost to you, Sundancer! I saved Sixty and Alaric and we’re coming!”
“Um…” said Sixty.
“Of course, that won’t work,” Volka murmured distractedly.
“You know that?” 6T9 whispered.
“To talk to her, I have to feel .” Closing her eyes, Volka took a deep breath…and let herself be joyful, let her anticipation overflow, and pictured Sixty, Carl, and herself in Su ndancer’s interior. Somehow, her imagination, or her heart, couldn’t help conjuring Alaric there, too. Together they zoomed toward a distant sun.
“Volka?” said the Carl in her daydream. She blinked, startled by his appearance. He wasn’t amorphous this time. She could see every wisp of fur on Carl’s coat, the tremble of his little whiskers, the light shining in his eyes, and his ten legs and all his claws.
“I have quite the imagination,” she said.
Rising to his hindmost paw pairs, Carl studied a claw. “I don�
��t think this is you.” He looked up at her, eyes widening adorably. “Sundancer. She’s waking up. This isn’t one of her usual dreams.”
As he said it, the distant sun was suddenly an enormous ball of flame leaping off the port side. The starship equivalent of opening one’s eyes to a sunrise? Volka felt like it was.
“She’s waking…” Volka said, smiling in wonder. “I feel…like I am coming home!” She laughed and felt like her heart might explode with happiness. Or maybe it was Sundancer’s heart? Carl danced.
“Who’s waking?” dream Alaric asked.
Carl drew back, and Volka turned to her former…well, whatever Alaric had been. She could see the shadow of stubble on his chin. He was standing, but wearing a rapid cast on his leg, and circular nerve disruptors were plugged into his hip. “Volka,” he whispered. “Where are we?”
“Uh-oh,” said Carl.
Alaric’s eyes shot to the werfle. “Why is the werfle talking?”
Alaric was here, in this dream. He’d always told her she was imagining things when she told him about her feelings of connection before, but he was here . That had to mean something important, that they were connected in some intrinsic way. He was injured. Maybe he wasn’t the one commanding his ship. Maybe it was Ran who had fired on them. It had to have been.
Alaric’s eyes shot beyond Volka’s shoulder, and he demanded, “Is it his doing?”
Volka followed his glare to Sixty, and her lips parted in surprise. Sixty was semi-transparent, all his features were indistinct, he was staring at nothing, and didn’t even have feet.
“Sixty’s not really here with us,” Carl said, his voice resigned. “It’s just our memories of him. Probably good as someone has to drive.”
“But Alaric’s here with us,” Volka protested. “Is he telepathic, too?”
“No,” said Carl, shaking his head. “Sundancer knows you love him, and is exceptionally strong and has brought him into this…well…vision, I guess you’d say. She’s very powerful, but even I can enter human consciousness when they dream or—”
