by C. Gockel
Holly drew back in her seat. One of her eyebrows rose, and she frowned. “A request?” And Alexis could hear the dubiousness in those simple two words. She could hear how Holly might find it beyond the pale that Alaric’s lover would ask his wife for a favor in her home—even if the relationship was only rumored, and even after a rescue. Maybe especially after the rescue. A good deed with strings attached was not a good deed.
“A reasonable request. One I must fulfill,” Alexis said. “Not for her, but for Luddeccea’s sake. She asked me for help fighting our enemy, the Dark, in a way that only we ladies might be uniquely able to fulfill.”
Holly tilted her head, her eyes bright. Alexis could see she was interested, but interest wasn’t enough. Alexis needed a passionate advocate for her aims. How could she get that from Holly? Her mother said there was a way to manipulate anyone if one just looked hard enough. Her mother was also a failed traitor, but hadn’t that failure only been because of technology her mother couldn’t have foreseen? The Galacticans had been able to find Alexis’s prison by way of technology even Alaric didn’t know of. Could everything Alexis’s mother had taught her hold some purpose? If she manipulated others to save her fellow Luddecceans, was that wrong? How would she know if she went too far? Stick to the truth perhaps? The truth in this case was persuasive enough. She shivered with memories from her captivity and abruptly knew what to say. Holly was a midwife, a woman of science but also of compassion, who wanted to help women and children.
When Alexis spoke, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “But first, let me tell you about our enemy… things that you will not have heard in the papers because they believe we women are too faint of heart to handle it. The camp I was in had humans infected with the Dark—controlled by it.”
Now Holly was leaning forward in her seat.
Alexis continued, voice still hushed. “The Dark spoke to me through the body of a boy it had possessed. It told me its aims to take over, to bring peace…but that peace came at a price. I saw a mother sacrifice her newborn—”
Holly put a hand to her mouth, and Alexis knew she had her.
“—the child the Dark spoke through called the boy a parasite.”
The cat slunk down from its pedestal and quietly seated itself next to her feet, facing Holly, as though it had become Alexis’s silent guard. As Alexis continued her story, it purred.
7
A Delicate Alliance
Galactic Republic: Time Gate 1
Volka stood outside the airlock door on Time Gate 1. Beyond the heavy glass, Admiral Noa Sato, decked out in her dress grays, waited for the second set of doors to open. Noa had the darkest skin Volka had ever seen, very short, tightly coiled black hair peppered with gray, and a lithe athletic frame. She looked like a very healthy fifty-year-old. She was actually over a century in age and had come from Luddeccea before Revelation—with Sixty and Carl, in fact.
The secondary doors beyond Noa led to the Julia, one of the Galactic Fleet’s Corvette class vessels. That was where the meeting Volka and Sundancer had hastily escorted Noa across light-years for was going to take place—not aboard Time Gate 1—and not aboard one of the larger fighter carriers. Volka wondered about that.
There was a huff of warm, moist air at the level of her wrist. Shissh, Carl Sagan’s once sister, now inhabiting the body of a giant Bengal tiger, answered her thoughts. “They want to avoid telepathic spying and influence.” Shissh wore a loose, gold necklace around her neck. It had a small speaker that dangled at the bottom and was an ethernet-to-speech device. Carl had one too, though his looked more like a collar on his tiny body. Shissh didn’t use the device to speak to Volka though; she spoke the words directly into Volka’s mind. Volka, like some, but not all weere, was sensitive to the quantum wave. She could communicate with other wave-sentient species telepathically. Unlike Shissh and Carl, she couldn’t read minds at will, and unlike them, she couldn’t influence other creatures’ thoughts, ever. Sometimes, when Volka was exhausted, the thoughts of even wave-insensitive species like humans spilled into her mind.
Now, Shissh’s thoughts flowed into her own. “You cannot read minds at will or influence other creature’s thoughts now, but even Carl and I don’t know what you and Ben will be capable of one day.”
Volka froze. Ben had been a Galactic Marine in Special Forces and part weere. He’d contracted the Dark before the treatment had been developed and committed suicide to keep the Dark from learning every defense secret in his mind. Shissh had been as close to Ben as Volka had been…maybe closer. Shissh had nearly killed herself trying to destroy the Dark within Ben.
Swallowing, Volka looked down at the tiger. The big cat’s head was bowed. Volka gave a gentle scratch to the rough fur between her shoulder blades, and Shissh leaned into her fingers. A chill crept from her fingertips, up her body, and to her heart. Volka swore she could feel the tiger’s grief oozing into her. A vivid picture of Ben’s orange eyes came to her mind—from Shissh or from her own memory, she wasn’t sure, but she knew if it continued, she might cry. She jerked her fingers away at the same time Shissh jerked her body away—as though they’d both been burned.
There was movement in the airlock. Volka’s and Shissh’s heads raised, ears full forward instinctively, just as when they hunted together and saw a deer through the trees. The airlock door between the Julia and Noa had opened—that was the motion that had set off their instincts. Noa was looking back at them with a raised eyebrow and a bemused smile. Volka wasn’t sure if she imagined it, or if Shissh planted it there, but she swore she heard a not unkindly, “my predator friends” in Noa’s voice in her mind. But then the admiral’s smile melted. She gave a curt nod to Volka and Shissh and entered the Julia’s airlock. The door slid shut behind her.
A few minutes later, in a nearby window, they watched the Julia pull off from Time Gate 1’s terminal. Her thrusters engaged, and she appeared to vanish, though Volka knew the Julia had just left the gate at lightspeed; it couldn’t travel faster than light. Nonetheless…
“Do they really need to go so far away?” Volka asked. Carl and Shissh could communicate with each other at any distance, but their ability to read the minds of wave-insensitive humans was limited to a few thousand meters.
Shissh huffed. “It is overkill.” The tiger shook her great head. “They no longer allow high-ranking members of the military, intelligence agents, or scientists working on sensitive projects to be kept as pets by The One.”
That translated into, “High-ranking military and intelligence officers and scientists can’t have cats or werfles.”
“No,” Shissh said, reading her thoughts. “They can have cats and werfles—just as long as they aren’t inhabited by our species.”
Volka’s lips parted in shock. “They can tell?”
Shissh’s tail swished rapidly, a gesture of annoyance that could give a human a concussion if he or she happened to be at the receiving end of said swish. “Yes. Newly developed technology. It only works in a radius of a meter or so, but that is enough.”
Volka stared out at the spot where the Julia had disappeared. The werfle Solomon had sat on Alaric’s shoulder when he’d rescued Sundancer on the pirates’ planet; Archbishop Sato was never without the white werfle Issh; and Carl had told her the cat Snowball, “owner” of Stella Tudor, the Luddeccean Premier’s mother, wandered freely between the houses of Luddeccea’s elite. “Really, Snowball owns all of the Luddeccean higher ups,” Carl had said. “They all feed her.”
Flicking her tail, Shissh turned and began sauntering through the terminal proper toward Sundancer’s berth. The big cat’s movements were languid and easy, and Volka had no trouble catching up. The almost tortuously slow pace hid the fact that the tiger could sprint up to eighty kilometers an hour if she so chose.
“The Republic moves so fast,” Volka whispered. They’d developed a treatment for the Dark, too. It was extraordinarily expensive: it needed to be modified for each new wave of infection, required round-the-c
lock intensive care of the patient and quarantine, was excruciatingly painful, and it only worked on the newly infected—but it was more than Luddeccea had. Now Galacticans could detect The One?
“They can detect us if we use the quantum wave,” Shissh said, one ear flicking as they walked through the crowds. “Which we do most of the time. The creatures we inhabit aren’t capable of higher thought. We outsource our higher thought to the wave—much as the AI have remote servers do their higher thinking.”
Shissh was still speaking telepathically. The terminal was crowded, but strangely quiet to Luddeccean ears. There was very little audible conversation—most of the conversation was via the ethernet. Humans in the Republic had neural interfaces implanted in their temples as infants before the bones of their skull fused together. They could install apps into their interfaces that allowed them to do all sorts of things—keep an encyclopedia in their mind, calculate extraordinary sums, tell the time, the temperature to the hundredth of a degree, record everything around them, and more—but what they used it for most was to connect to one another and machines via the ethernet, in Sixty’s words, “a vastly more sophisticated form of the internet.”
People stared at Shissh as the giant tiger walked through the terminal, but they did not scream or show fear. People of the Republic knew about The One, and Shissh had been the subject of a few holo interviews. Her semi fame, or maybe just that she was an enormous tiger unleashed in a public place, had the humans touching their neural interfaces, probably recording and sending news of the encounter to friends. All this communication was silent, and when people did speak to one another—if they didn’t know the ethernet code of someone they wished to communicate with, or if they were a child whose neural interface hadn’t been activated—the voice carried through the hush.
As if to punctuate the thought, a child cried out, “Mommy, iz a One?” Volka’s eyes shot to a boy who was probably about four, pointing at Shissh with one hand and clutching a stuffed toy of a creature that looked like a pentapus, but had eight arms, in the other.
“It must be, Andrew,” a well-dressed woman replied, putting her hand on his shoulder. The woman did not look the least bit afraid. A Luddeccean mother would be afraid for her child’s life—or, suspecting demonic possession of the tiger—afraid for her child’s soul.
The boy tottered over to Shissh. “May Iz bet you?”
The necklace on Shissh’s neck crackled, and she bowed her head and chuffed. “You may, Little One.”
Andrew touched her head and scratched very gently. Too gently, Volka knew, for Shissh’s liking. But the big cat only chuffed a little more.
“What do you say?” his mother prompted.
Drawing himself up, Andrew said smartly, “Have a nice day, Tiger. I haz to catch a spazeship now.”
“Thank you,” his mother corrected in a voice that was exasperated, but not unkind. “We say ‘thank you.’”
“Zank you, too,” Andrew amended, touching his chest.
“Yes, thank you,” said his mother, bowing ever so slightly to Shissh.
“You’re very welcome,” said Shissh, resuming their walk. “Have a nice trip.”
Volka looked over their shoulder. Andrew and his mother had resumed their journey to their “spazeship.” Andrew was saying, “It waz a big tiger!” and gesturing with his hands. His mother was smiling down at him beatifically. “A very nice member of The One.”
The people of the Republic were so open and accepting. The leaders of Luddeccea, by contrast, hadn’t even admitted to humans that The One inhabited werfles and cats among them, and that was far better than how they had initially reacted. When word of The One’s presence on Luddeccea had first gotten out, the Luddeccean government had tried to exterminate all the cats and werfles on the planet under the excuse of “demonic possession.” The One had retaliated, unleashing a virulent form of plague that had wiped out half of the Luddeccean city of New Prime. Now there was a truce between The One and Luddeccea’s government. Luddeccea didn’t officially acknowledge their existence, but the pogroms against The One’s werfle and cat hosts had ended.
Shissh’s voice entered her mind. “Is the Republic more open? They’ve locked my kind out of strategic operations and away from strategic people. The few weere they’ve recruited from System 11, where you people originated before emigrating to Luddeccea, they’re keeping at arm’s length as well, even though none of them are telepathic to the extent you are.”
“Not as telepathic yet?” Volka ventured. Carl Sagan theorized that being exposed to true telepaths like himself and Sundancer had developed Volka’s abilities. It was possible weere who were exposed to The One would also develop more advanced abilities.
“Not as telepathic yet,” Shissh amended.
Volka bit her lip. She didn’t mind so much that Carl was telepathic or that Sundancer was. Weere, telepathy or no, tended to know each other’s embarrassing secrets. They could smell when a weere woman was in season and who was sleeping with whom. They could smell pregnancy, some cancers, and a host of other ailments, not to mention addictions and what everyone had for their last meal. But that wasn’t how humans were, at least not on Luddeccea. It seemed fairly incredible to her that the people of the Galactic Republic would be so nonchalant about a telepathic species in their midst.
Shissh huffed and spoke into her mind. “The ordinary people don’t believe we are truly telepathic. They think as long as their software is up-to-date, they don’t have to worry about eavesdropping.”
“But it was on the news,” Volka protested.
“Lots of things are on the ‘news,’” Shissh said. “So many contradicting stories—there are people in the Republic as suspicious of the ethernet and neural interfaces as Luddecceans are, you know—humans in the Galactic Republic scarcely know who to believe.”
Volka swallowed and thought of Michael, a human she’d met during the protests in System 5’s city of New Grande. He’d believed that the Dark was just a lie invented by his planet’s government to force a draft into their Local Guard. Even the counselor of New Grande who’d been pushing for a draft for the planet’s Local Guard believed the threat of the Dark was made up. So, she’d known that not everyone believed in the Dark…but she hadn’t realized that skepticism extended to other things.
Shissh huffed. “It’s easy to fake a holo and there is just so much news to follow in the Republic.”
That was an understatement. Multiple news channels ran news all the time. Everything was delivered in short segments that Volka, not familiar with the Galactic Republic’s recent culture and history, found too confusing to grasp. That’s one reason she’d started studying history; she’d been convinced if she just started at the beginning, everything would make sense. On Luddeccea, there was one central news service with local departments. There was an hour of local news each evening and an hour of Luddeccean System news. The segments were longer, and she supposed, often boring. In the past three weeks the local news in New Prime had been dominated by a running debate as to whether a local suburb should have its electricity delivered via poles or underground. It was decided just before her departure that underground would be better, and digging had commenced. When she’d described the live broadcasts of community meetings to Sixty, he’d said that on the Galactic Republic’s old worlds the debate would have been whether any houses should be built at all, and said debate would be delivered in short thirty second segments. The debate between the Department of the Environment and the Department of Worker Safety as to the size of the trenches or the height of the poles would have begun in secret without any regular persons knowing anything about it, and construction would be stalled indefinitely, because, in his words, “Efficiency is boring.”
Shissh continued. “Because there is too much news to analyze, and because it is so easily faked, most ordinary people don’t believe anything unless it fits a narrative they’ve already created for themselves. Those narratives usually follow what is more convenient to them
or puts them in a virtuous light.”
Shissh gazed up at the skylight above them. “I’m worried about the Republic excluding my kind.”
Volka shivered, and it wasn’t just because the terminal was always too cold. Shissh was very old, and, in Volka’s opinion, wise. Carl had told her Shissh had been the first of The One to have anticipated an entity like the Dark. Shissh had known that The One had to ally with humans to fight it, too.
They reached the little sitting area next to the airlock adjacent to Sundancer’s berth. Volka tried to perk up for the ship’s sake. Gazing out the gate window, she pictured the ship in her mind, a luminous pearl against the Milky Way. She was the prettiest ship in the galaxy. Volka’s cheeks got warm, the ship flushed pink at the same time, and Volka did perk up genuinely, a smile coming to her lips. Her spaceship friend liked being known as the prettiest starship…even if it embarrassed Sundancer a little to be thought of so.
A mechanical whir made her ears swivel, and Shissh and Volka both turned fast. Volka’s knees bent, and Shissh crouched, predator instincts activating. But the source of movement was only a little cleaning ‘bot. It was no larger than a shoebox and nearly the same shape with a glowing red robotic eye atop. The rapidly spinning brushes beneath the ‘bot was the source of the whirr. Shissh and Volka relaxed, turned back toward the berth’s airlock, and began walking in that direction. The little ‘bot beeped wildly. Tires screeching, it whisked itself in front of Volka and Shissh, blocking their path. Shissh growled. “A creature with a red light on top should not do that in front of a cat!”
Barricading the door, a speaker on the little ‘bot erupted in static, and then a familiar voice came from it. “Duly noted, Shissh.”
The voice was a deep baritone. Usually, when Volka heard the voice, it boomed, but through the tiny speaker it sounded tinny.
