by C. Gockel
“He’s conserving power by not speaking, but he says to say thank you,” Carl supplied.
Volka nodded and studied his hand for a moment. It was scratched and bleeding. Picking it up, she swung it over her shoulder and pulled him forward. Sixty slumped against her, and they began making their way across the chasm.
“We’re coming to rescue you, Sundancer!” Carl declared, giving an extra enthusiastic hop, but a seed of worry began to grow in Volka’s stomach.
It was strange, since they didn’t have far to go. She didn’t detect the sound of the drones. There was nothing but open space between them and Sundancer.
…And then she heard the engines above and behind them.
“Alaric,” Carl’s voice whispered in her mind.
Volka looked over her shoulder despite herself, and there it was, Alaric’s ship. Her heart sank. He’d been so injured at the inn…if she hadn’t seen him in Sundancer’s daydream and heard him issue the command to fire, she might have been able to believe it was his second in command that had ordered them blown apart. Her face crumpled, her eyes got hot, the world blurred, but she began trudging faster. Phasers screamed, and the ground on either side of them erupted in dust. She’d thought her heart couldn’t fall further. He’d already fired on them, but somehow, being out in the open, being so exposed and having just seen his ship, made it worse. Her betrayal felt fresh, new, and raw, and fear, laced with dismay, weighed as heavy on her as 6T9.
She wanted desperately to run, to drop Sixty’s arms, and to sprint to Sundancer. She bit her lip and her eyes got hot. He wasn’t really an angel; he was a machine.
“Volka…go…” Sixty whispered. “My programming…”
More phaser fire screamed; more rocks and ice exploded. Her lips twisted, and her tears fell from her eyes. In the end, to Alaric she was only a weere and an enemy. She tightened her grip on Sixty’s arm. “No,” she snarled. She wouldn’t be Alaric. She would save Sixty or die with him just to spite her lover.
She heard the scream of phasers, and on either side of them the ground erupted in a shower of dust and stones. They weren’t going to make it. Alaric was going to destroy them. The realization sunk all the way to her bones, replacing every other emotion, and her heart cried out, “I’m sorry, Sundancer. I’m sorry.”
Alaric stared through the view screen. His stomach twisted into knots. Volka and the machine were still standing. He swore under his breath.
Ran was at the cannons. The commander wasn’t their most adept gunner and not accustomed to Libertas’s gravity. Their most adept gunners were under rubble in Iron Forge.
Alaric lifted his hand to wipe his face and found it shaking. This needed to be over, but between the damage sustained the day before, the time band and the hover power he needed for the nearly vertical lift up over the cliffs in Libertian gravity, his ship was running on fumes, and his cannons were recharging too slowly.
He swallowed. But not as slowly as Volka and the machine making their way across the gorge bottom, to what he had mistaken at first for a glacier—but now saw was some sort of craft. He wondered when it had arrived. There were pools of water around it, but now their scanners detected no engine heat and no ether connection to the android, either.
“If we can recover the craft whole,” said Father Diomedes.
Alaric eyed the cannon’s power—eighty-eight percent. He felt chilled. Shock? It wasn’t guilt. If his mind was compromised by the enemy, he would want someone to end him. He remembered the hallucination of being aboard a strange craft with Volka, the werfle, and the ghost of the android. Was he already compromised?
“What’s going on?” Ran said.
Alaric’s attention jerked back to the screen in time to see the android rip his arm from Volka’s shoulders. It pulled back, turned around, and began walking away from her, its arms outstretched, its head back, eyes on Alaric’s ship.
“What is it doing?” the father asked.
Alaric rose from his seat. It appeared to be trying to draw fire—trying to sacrifice itself. But that wasn’t right. That was not how the android or robotic spies behaved.
Alaric’s jaw got hard, his chest got tight, and his traitorous mind replayed the scene of the android hoisting Volka up on its shoulders in the tunnels. It had gotten her to safety first and was trying to spare her now. But why? Volka was of no practical use to the Republic.
“Maybe it is malfunctioning,” Ran said.
His injured leg trembled, and Alaric nearly fell back into his seat. A rattling noise from Alaric’s armrest made him look down. His hands were shaking violently. He glanced at the readouts for the phasers. Ninety-eight percent.
“How?” Agrawal said.
Alaric’s eyes went to the screen. The craft that had been half buried in dust was obstructing their view of Volka and the machine. How had it moved so fast?
“Fire,” Alaric ordered.
The phasers streaked from the LCS. Ran’s aim was true.
“Good shot—” Alaric blinked. The craft didn’t explode, didn’t appear to have sustained any damage, and didn’t even appear to have moved under the impact.
Aboard the LCS, the crew went silent. He was about to ask Agrawal to rewind the visuals, to see if they’d really hit the vessel, when the craft began to glow. Colors swirled over its surface, and then the screen went white.
6T9 had his arms aloft and was staring up at Alaric’s craft dropping toward them, phaser cannons glowing. 6T9’s thermo controls were blaring that he was too cold, and his battery alarms were screaming that he only had a few seconds of power left.
“Sixty, no!” Volka snarled, and he knew he was angering her by trying to draw fire, but he was a slave to his programming .
And then a millisecond later he was staring at Sundancer just above his head. The ground shook, he fell to his knees, and then he was in a circular room made of a pearlescent white material. There was a hallway down one side, and what might be doors, but his attention was drawn to his feet. The dirt and snow he’d been kneeling on was still with him, but the room was warm, and the red warning lights in the periphery of his vision went to yellow, and the screaming of internal alarms turned to a softer beeping. He had minutes instead of seconds of power. Behind him, Volka burst into laughter, and Carl started squeaking. 6T9 looked over his shoulder and saw Volka rolling on her back in the dirt and snow and smiling ear to ear. Moments before she’d been angry at him for following his programming. Minutes before her lover had tried to kill them. Her joy was at odds with all that, and the wrongness of it made static prickle beneath his skin.
In Volka’s arms, Carl cheeped and exclaimed over the ether. “We made it! We made it!” Wiggling from her grip, Carl danced on top of her, squeaking like mad, and exclaiming into the ether, “We did it! We did it!”
“Where are we?” 6T9 blurted out. “And why are you so happy?”
“Sundancer!” Volka and Carl exclaimed at once.
Bouncing and squeaking, Carl squeaked, “And we’re so happy because Sundancer’s joy is overflowing!”
“She’s overjoyed,” laughed Volka, throwing out her arms and lifting her face as though basking in the warmth of an invisible sun.
6T9’s Q-comm informed him that the phasers should have fired on them by now, but he hadn’t felt a thing.
The ground beneath him shifted and sank. He looked down and saw the stones and ice sinking into a floor made of the same pearlescent material that the walls were made of. Dancing to his feet, he expected to see his shoes start sinking, too, but they didn’t.
“He can’t feel it,” Carl said.
A moment later, Volka caught him in a hug. Pressing her body to his, she gazed up at him, biting her lip and smiling, tears in her eyes. Carl bobbed on her shoulder, kneading his claws and purring loudly.
“Sixty, Sundancer is so happy!” Volka exclaimed.
His Q-comm was humming with data, but he was a sex ‘bot first, and on being caught in an embrace, his first reaction was to retur
n the favor. Wrapping his arms around Volka, he commenced a data dump. “Sundancer just moved faster than the speed of sound without a sonic boom, or even a sonic whisper. Our best dampeners cannot do that. Also, I think she must have withstood phaser fire by now.”
Volka giggled.
“We love you too, Sundancer!” Carl exclaimed, jumping, spinning 180 degrees midair, crashing to the ground and hopping around their feet in mad circles. Not releasing 6T9, Volka hopped, too. The friction against 6T9, the smile on her face, and the pressure of her tiny hands on his back was all exquisite, but his Q-comm was humming with disturbing probabilities.
“Volka, Carl, if Alaric can’t shoot us down, he may drive his own ship into Sundancer to ground us.”
The smile vanished from Volka’s face and her eyes got wide.
There was the faintest shift beneath 6T9’s feet, and Volka looked at the ceiling and gasped. Following her gaze, 6T9 saw the ceiling had become translucent, and, just as he’d predicted, the LCS was diving toward them. He held his breath—even though he didn’t need to breathe. Clutching Volka tighter, he turned their bodies so his back was to the approaching ship. He buried his face against her neck.
“It’s okay, Sixty. We’re moving,” she whispered.
That was impossible. There was no thrum of engines—but just as he thought that, he detected the barest hint of acceleration beneath his feet. He opened his eyes and found they’d left Libertas’s surface and were now cruising through its outer layers of atmosphere. Directly in their path was a Luddeccean starfighter carrier. As soon as he realized that, short range starfighters emerged from its depths, followed by two dozen drones. Phaser fire erupted on the ceiling and spilled along Sundancer’s hull in rainbow colors. The floor disappeared beneath them. Volka and Sixty both gasped, but then realized it had merely become transparent. Charging up from the surface of Libertas was Alaric’s ship. Its phasers weren’t glowing. His Q-comm supplied him with the helpful probability that it was probably damaged and had power supply issues. “It’s going to ram into us,” 6T9 murmured.
A drone aimed squarely at them. 6T9’s emotion apps kicked in and he flinched as it sped up. Seconds later, it hit the hull and bounced away. The ship hardly trembled. 6T9’s eyes widened, his Q-comm processing the amount of force Sundancer had just deflected. He looked down at the ship barreling toward them and tilted his head. His Q-comm calculated the force and he blinked. He doubted even the larger ship would hurt the alien craft.
“Sundancer,” Carl said. “We must leave.”
The walls, floor, and ceiling lost their transparency and then began to glow. Volka began to glow, and Carl, also. 6T9 gaped down at his body. He was glowing, too .
For less than milliseconds, they were statues of light, and then they were whole again. The craft’s walls, floor, and ceiling became translucent and they were staring out at an unfamiliar starscape. As 6T9’s eyes took it in, his Q-comm sprang into action, calculating the stars’ distances and positions and comparing them to known star maps.
“Where are we?” Volka gasped.
Carl squeaked. “I have no idea—but I’m not worried.”
Volka giggled. “She wants to know where we want to go!”
Carl hopped and squeaked.
“Where should we go, Carl?” Volka asked, pulling away from 6T9.
“Would you like to see the planet where I was a gixelloopalop or the moon where I was a crab with my sister Shissh?” Carl chattered. “She’s not a crab anymore. She’s on Earth now, living in a cat, but all the glowing fish on the moon are—”
“Hold up!” 6T9 said. “We need to think about this.”
“What is it, Sixty?” Carl asked.
Internal alarms started screaming again. Fumbling, he managed to take out his power pack. The zipper of his coat got stuck at the bottom, and instead of fighting it, he just let the coat sink to the floor and attached one end of the cable to the power pack and the other to his belly button. As the alarms stopped their screaming, he sank to the floor.
Volka cried out, “Sixty, I forgot about your back—did I hurt you?”
He shook his head in the negative. “No, I turned off the pain, and frankly, with what we’ve been through, I think I needed that hug.” His skin was crawling with static now, and he frowned .
Volka sank beside him, and a moment later, she put a small cool hand on his shoulder. Where she touched, the static vanished, but the tension didn’t leave his jaw.
“What’s wrong, Sixty?” Carl asked, crawling onto Volka’s lap and gazing up at 6T9, his whiskers twitching. “I can’t read your mind,” Carl added, swishing his tail.
6T9 really should have turned off his emotion apps. His eyes slipped to Volka. Her brow was writ with concern. “I’m all right,” he lied.
“What is it?” Volka asked.
He deflected. “We’re almost on the exact opposite side of the galaxy as we were on before.”
Volka laughed with delight and put her free hand over her mouth.
He hated to see the laugh die. Volka didn’t look at him with quantum wave bending intensity, but being next to her, having her care, was maybe not better than sex, but it was close.
“Sixty?” Carl prompted.
Sixty’s skin was filthy; there wasn’t anything to be lost by petting the werfle. He gently scratched the werfle behind the ears. Carl purred but said over the ether, “I think there is something you’re not telling me.”
There was, but 6T9 was enjoying seeing them both happy, enjoying them both being unafraid and not having to worry about Carl losing his body, or Volka dying.
“Tell us,” Volka encouraged with another squeeze of his shoulder. Her brow wrinkled charmingly. “Maybe you’re concerned about nothing.”
If he told them, they could be prepared, and maybe it was nothing.
He took a deep breath. “We didn’t save Sundancer—she saved us. She escaped the glacier by herself. She withstands phaser fire and impact. She never needed our help.”
Volka laughed. “That’s really all that’s bothering you?”
Carl’s head bobbed. “But we did save her! Our presence and our proximity in the quantum wave woke her from her nightmare. Haven’t you ever woken a human from a nightmare, 6T9? Without us, Sundancer might not have woken up for a thousand years! She would have been trapped in her terror!”
6T9 stared at the creature, but his vision blurred, remembering a time before he had a Q-comm. Eliza had cried out in her sleep. He’d gently woken her, and she’d curled into his arms. “Oh, Sixty,” she’d whispered in a tearful tone. “I dreamed of the ‘bot parts we saw in the dump and the family in our neighborhood that vanished.”
Patting her shoulder, he’d whispered with innocent obliviousness, “Eliza, you have nothing to fear from ‘bot parts, and the family must have moved.” She’d sighed and buried her face against his chest. She’d said nothing, but she’d known that he, and her for keeping him, were in dire danger. Sometimes nightmares were very real.
Volka’s happy voice drew him from his musings. “We woke her up—and then Sundancer saved us, and she’s so happy to have us! She has been alone for such a long time…having us, being connected to us…I feel…she feels…”
“Like we’ve come home,” Carl squeaked.
And 6T9 couldn’t feel it, which was maybe why he could feel so chilled now and why his circuits were threatening to dim.
“But you said she was afraid of the Luddecceans,” said 6T9. “That’s the whole reason we went on our journey.”
For a moment, Volka’s smile faltered, but then she shook her head. “Just nightmares,” she whispered, pulling away slightly.
6T9 bowed his head.
“I think,” said Carl, “it may be time for The One to introduce themselves to humans.”
6T9 met the werfle’s eyes and saw comprehension there.
“Sundancer,” Carl said. “Take us to Earth.”
Nothing happened.
Sixty’s body went stiff,
his Q-comm unhelpfully imagining Sundancer remaining here until Carl had to abandon his body, and Volka slowly died of starvation.
Volka leaned her head against his shoulder. “Don’t worry, she just doesn’t understand what we’re trying to say. Carl, can you imagine it?”
Rising to his hind paws, Carl closed his eyes and stretched out his forelimbs. The translucency fell away from the walls of the craft. They were light again, and then they were hovering above the brilliant blue marble that was humanity’s homeworld.
6T9’s ethernet channel immediately began pinging with Admiral Noa Sato’s number, and 6T9 remembered he had a message from Kenji to deliver. He swallowed. And maybe more disturbing news than that.
Before he could answer, Time Gate 1’s voice rumbled through his mind. “Welcome home, 6T9. There’s a warrant out for your arrest for stealing a spaceship and cruelty to animals.”
“Lovely to see you again,” 6T9 grumbled over the ether .
There was the flare of static 6T9 associated with laughter. “Since you can’t see me, that must be an idiom. They always make my circuits spark. Don’t worry about the charges. Admiral Noa Sato has posted your bail, and Lauren G3 has been preparing your defense for months.”
Sixty’s circuits dimmed. He couldn’t let Carl fall into the hands of Bernadette’s heir. He didn’t think the werfle wanted to give up his body any more than he wanted to upload himself. He sighed and grumbled aloud, “Does that mean I’ll be going back to that deer-infested rock again instead of jail?”
Time Gate 1 “laughed” again. “Afraid so.”
6T9 sighed. Carl squeaked. Volka smacked her lips. Glancing at her, 6T9 saw her tongue dart out.
“Deer infestation?” She wiggled slightly. “Like the creatures we saw on Libertas?”
Carl coughed. “Very close to them. But the place isn’t just filled with deer, it’s crawling with rats, too.”
Volka licked her lips and then quickly covered her mouth, eyes going wide, and cheeks getting pink.
