by C. Gockel
6T9 was fully clothed and crossing what passed for a lawn, Carl hopping beside him, when his Q-comm informed him what the ambassador most likely needed to speak with him about. His head tic came back.
Volka stood in the ambassador’s office. Sunlight was streaming in from the bay window where she’d found Carl snoring. The disastrous party had been two nights ago, and she hadn’t gotten much sleep since then. She’d been having nightmares. In the last one, she’d been drowning. Alaric and his wife had hold of her legs and were trying to pull her down. Sixty had been trying to pull her to safety, but her hands had been slipping. She’d woken up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath. She hoped that her exhaustion didn’t show. The ambassador for his part looked well-rested. He was smiling, standing behind his desk framed by sunlight, reading some papers in his hands.
“Good news, Volka. As you know, since our arrival I’ve been pushing for us all to be granted permission to freely come and go from the premises. I haven’t gotten it for myself, but—” He handed two papers to her.
Volka stared down at a travel ID with her name on it and a recent color photo of her in her Galactican formal dress glued in the corner. She didn’t remember when the photo had been taken. Her brow furrowed. It could have been taken at any time by any of the Galacticans’ implants.
“I’ve been pushing specifically for you to be allowed to enter No Weere to see your home and have been denied, until now...” His smile turned sharp. “The spectacle made at the dinner the other night helped. I have no doubt Ms. Tudor’s household weere staff spread the story. Not something to have floating about while they try to recruit young male weere for combat.”
Volka swallowed, imagining the sort of combat assignments young male weere would receive.
“Nor was it good for it to be known that you, a citizen of Luddeccea, are virtually a prisoner of the embassy.”
She flipped to the second paper he’d given her. It was a travel ID but didn’t have a photo or a name; it did say the bearer was to be in her company.
Starcrest waved a hand. “Someone should accompany you, of course. I was thinking of Sergeant Barnaby.”
Volka’s nose itched, and her lip threatened to curl with disgust. She’d passed Barnaby in the hallway this morning. The Marine and Chung the “coat check girl” were involved, and Volka had smelled the other woman all over him after his morning shower. She didn’t want to smell that all day long. The idea made her want to growl...
Before she could, Sixty burst into the room, Carl hopping beside him. “I will not go visit Stella Tudor,” Sixty declared.
The ambassador cast an accusing glance at Carl. “How did you know that was why I sent for you?”
Carl began doing a little dance and at the same time speaking into Volka’s mind. “Don’t blame me, he figured it out himself.”
Starcrest’s eyebrow hiked. “Really?”
Sixty tapped the back of his skull where his Q-comm resided meaningfully.
Volka blinked, realizing Carl’s dance was sign language. Everyone in the embassy probably had uploaded the language to their neural interfaces by now. Even without the ethernet they could do that with data chips. Her heart sank. It would take her weeks to learn.
Carl spoke silently into her mind. “Hatchling, they’ll never be telepathic.”
Picking up another travel ID document on his desk, the ambassador continued, “She specifically asked for you, 6T9. Something about teaching her some of your Galactican cooking techniques. It’s a fantastic opportunity for us to gather intel.”
6T9 growled. “I’m not going to demonstrate my technique to her.”
Volka’s jaw dropped open. Sixty didn’t want to have sex? Was it because of the way Stella had treated her? Her heart beat faster.
The ambassador paused. Footsteps traversed down the hall outside his door.
“You’re a sex ‘bot.” Those were the words from the ambassador’s lips. They were quiet, even, controlled. Volka was perhaps tired enough to be telepathic, or maybe it was just his tone, because she also heard, “The ‘bot’s choosing now to abandon his core programming? Asteroid craters.”
Volka’s ears came forward. “You can’t make him do something so personal. He’s the chef, not one of your intelligence officers.”
Starcrest’s attention shifted to her, and his eyes widened slightly. She could smell his surprise. He forgot sometimes that she was a person with feelings and thoughts. Just because he couldn’t download them didn’t mean they weren’t there. She didn’t growl, though she wanted to.
Sixty rubbed the side of his neck and smiled wryly. “Literally, you can’t make me. Thinking about Stella gives me a hardware malfunction...and not the fun kind.” His head tic returned, as it had at dinner, and he hissed. “See!”
Volka stalked toward the desk. “I want Sixty. He should accompany me. He knows Luddeccean culture better than Mr. Barnaby. He can only protect me non-lethally and with restraint, and that’s the sort of backup I’d need if I was attacked by weere. We don’t want to accidentally kill a potential recruit or her brothers.” She growled. “And if I am attacked by humans, it will be the Guard and there will be a platoon of them. Barnaby wouldn’t be any more able to defend me from them than Sixty.” Her ear flicked, and she turned to her android partner. “But only if you’re interested, of course.”
Sixty smirked and touched his chest. “You had me at you want me.”
Volka rolled her eyes at the innuendo, but then focused on Starcrest and narrowed her eyes, mentally daring him to say no.
He glanced between Sixty and Volka, and Volka saw a moment of uncertainty. In her mind she heard, “Will they be distracted by each other?” An instant later, she felt his mental dismissal. “Intel is that she is hopelessly bonded to Captain Darmadi.”
Volka felt the hands trying to pull her under water in her dream. She desperately wanted to escape.
Putting his hands behind his back, Starcrest straightened. “I have reservations about this, but you may accompany her, 6T9 Unit.” He shook his head. “And I’ll handle Stella.”
Volka’s eyes went to Carl. “There will be rats,” she said.
Carl’s whiskers twitched and he sniffed the air. And then his tiny head dropped, and he did a little dance—sign language again. Volka felt the words in her heart. “I better stay behind, otherwise Sundancer will follow you like an anxious balloon.”
Volka grimaced, remembering the valets’ reactions to Sundancer at Stella Tudor’s party. “Giving half the weere in No Weere heart attacks would probably be a bad thing,” she admitted.
Carl’s bewhiskered little snout shifted between her and Sixty. She tilted her head, feeling like she was missing something, but before she could ask, Carl hopped away.
19
Summer Heat
Planet Luddeccea: No Weere
6T9 walked down the road at the edge of No Weere, the ironically named weere settlement near the Exclusion Zone outside of New Prime. No Weere was nowhere a human wanted to be. On one side was a high chain link fence with barbed wire on top; inside the fence were the weere’s ramshackle houses. On the other side were human houses—small things, not much bigger than the weere shacks, but noticeably more uniform even with their wide, unkempt lawns. A roar from the road behind 6T9 made his hand shoot out. Grabbing Volka’s arm, he yanked her meters away from the roadside before he’d thought about it.
“It’s just the bus, Sixty,” she said with a smirk.
Looking back, he saw the hulking caterpillar-like vehicle smoking ominously toward them. His Q-comm sparked. It was powered by an internal combustion engine and supposed to smoke. His Q-comm sparked again, and static flared beneath his skin. The smoke was dangerous.
Skipping a step, Volka laughed. “Come on, let’s get to the stop!” Tearing away from his grasp, she took off along the dirt lined street. She looked incredibly small against the massive blue vault of the sky. Her dress was palest blue and bright against the blacktop road, red dirt, and s
ubtropical trees.
He jogged after her. The day was cool for summer, and the motion warmed the oil in his sockets and gears pleasantly. The bus passed them but stopped at a rusting sign fifty meters down the road. Volka broke into a sprint, barely swung into the bus in time, and held the door for him. He jumped in after Volka, and the door snapped shut, crushing him against her as she deposited their fares from a stash of local change they’d been given at the embassy. Electricity raced from his sensors at every contact point, and his Q-comm sparked. He was glad he’d been invited on this trip, even if the rush of electric lust was an accident.
The bus was segregated—humans at the front, weere at the back. The last time he was on Luddeccea, Volka had insisted they not sit next to each other. But this time she selected a seat midway down the aisle, patted the spot beside her, and smiled up at him.
His circuits sparked as he sat next to her. Weere sniffed the air and glowered at him, but no one protested.
Pointing out the window, she exclaimed, “See that tree? We—my friends and I—used to hunt for rats there. We used to take turns wringing their necks and scaring them out of the tunnels. It’s amazing we never got rabies.”
6T9’s circuits went dim imaging child Volka catching rabies. The bus bounced, and her shoulder, hip, and thigh brushed against him. His circuits relit.
“And there is the rubble pile we used to play hide and seek in,” she said, pointing at a place that looked like it was made of equal parts concrete slab, rebar, and tetanus. His circuits dimmed so much he thought he might shut down, and then the bus bounced again, and her body shifted against his. His eyes slipped closed. It was exquisite.
Volka poked him lightly, and his eyes shot open. “Sixty, after we go to my house, is there any place you want to see?”
She was turned toward him, her face very close. Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. His gaze fixated on it and then slowly rose to her eyes. She did not look away. Her ovoid pupils were dilated, even for her. Dilation was a sign of sexual attraction, but also of pharmaceutical and recreational drugs, allergies, benign episodic pupillary mydriasis, cranial nerve neuropathy, brain injury, eye trauma, or concentration. Considering it was Volka, it was likely one of the latter options.
Searching his databanks for any recent injury or illness that might be behind the dilation, he couldn’t find words to answer her question and barely noticed when the bus screeched to a halt.
Nudging him with her shoulder, Volka whispered, “It’s our stop.”
Shaking himself, he stood. His Q-comm said Volka was probably suffering from allergies, but his core programming took over. He offered her a hand she didn’t need. Taking it, she rose from the seat. The grip slipped to just fingers then away completely as he led her down the narrow aisle and off the bus. Where their fingers had touched, his sensory receptors remained lit, as though holding onto her ghost. He found himself too stunned to speak, and they passed the checkpoint entrance to No Weere in silence.
But as soon as they reached the other side, Volka nudged him with her shoulder again. If she was anyone else, he might have thought she was flirting. Every circuit in his body lit up. Was she flirting?
“Well?” she asked. “Is there someplace you want to go?”
Flirting with sex ‘bots was unnecessary. As one of the brochures for 6T9 Units put it, he was ready to “giddy up on boot up.” But Volka said “please” and “thank you” to Bracelet, so it was possible that if she was finally interested, flirting was how she would go about it. Was she finally interested? His vision went white.
“Or is there nothing from…before?” Volka asked.
Flirting was essentially expressing sexual interest without being explicit in order to not put the other party on the spot. It was a delicate dance that 6T9’s core programming wasn’t designed for. He answered her question instead. “The home where I lived with Eliza was destroyed. It was right at the center of the old city of Prime, in one of the original row houses built by the first settlers.”
Volka’s shoulders fell. “Oh, I’m sorry.” It was the first time he’d seen her frown since they’d left the embassy.
“We traveled though, and I’d like to see those places,” 6T9 said, trying to lift her mood again.
Volka’s eyes got wide. “I thought that even then, Luddecceans didn’t like an—” She glanced around nervously. Weere were coming out of their homes, sniffing the air and glaring at Volka and 6T9. “—foreigners?”
His lips turned up wryly at her euphemism for androids. “They didn’t like foreigners, either. But they didn’t know what I was. Eliza told everyone I was her nurse.” He grimaced. “Even though I was an idiot, that wasn’t technically a lie, and I never corrected her in public.” He frowned. “When we traveled, she wasn’t affectionate. I felt like she was ignoring me. So mostly I was focused on how I was displeasing her, not on what I was seeing. I have memories of the places we went, but they…are two dimensional?”
Tilting her head, her ears perked forward. “You didn’t have your eidetic memory then so you don’t remember as clearly?”
He remembered how soft those ears were. “No, I had that.” He accessed his higher processor, trying to explain. “The sight of you jogging down the dirty road just a few minutes ago, framed by the sky, means more to me than the Xinshii Gorge,” he said, referring to one of Luddeccea’s natural wonders. “The blue sky, the air that doesn’t have deadly pollen, toxic fungi spores, or harmful levels of pollution—despite your combustion engines’ best efforts—the near perfect gravity, the temperature...” He looked around at the dilapidated buildings made of old Prime’s refuse. “It’s paradise in many ways. I wasn’t capable of such context then.” This benign environment was something the majority of humanity couldn’t buy in their space stations, enclosed cloud cities, asteroid bunkers, or on planets just barely terraformed.
“It is a beautiful day,” Volka said. “And Luddeccea is beautiful.”
His eyes caught on her smile.
What he’d said was true, but there was more. The day was more profound because she’d asked—no, demanded—that he come with her. She saw the beauty in the day despite dirt roads and bumpy rides in internal combustion engine buses, like she saw more in Bracelet than a dumb machine, and more use to him than as a sex ‘bot.
The sound of a low growl made him look quickly to his right. A weere man with a wolf-like snout turned his head and spit.
“Don’t worry,” Volka said. “They can tell by our clothing that we’re with the Galactican embassy. They won’t attack.” She tugged at the long sleeves of her dress. The cut was modest, but the pale blue fabric turned to darker blue at the cuffs and hem and swirled faintly there. His shirt was similar, and his trousers had a slight sheen. His shoes had picked up the color of the dirt, and were brownish orange at the moment, but would return to their original black when they returned to the road. Volka’s shoes resisted the dirt completely and were the same shade as the hem of her dress.
Springing over a puddle, she said, “We’ll just keep showing up, they’ll get used to us, and then we’ll be able to start talking to them.” That was Starcrest’s plan. 6T9’s brow furrowed. Usually, Volka disagreed with Starcrest.
A weere man with shaggy black hair whistled. “Hey, girl, what are you doing with him? I’ll stay with you. Not just use you for your time.”
Volka kept walking, and the man shouted at them, “You got it all wrong, Bitch!”
6T9 looked back. The man was following, eyes heavy on Volka. 6T9 put his hand on Volka’s shoulder and pulled her close. The man’s eyes got wide. Halting abruptly, he shook his head as though pulling himself from a stupor and turned away.
Volka laughed sadly. “That poor man. It’s the wrong season.”
She was, in 6T9’s opinion, taking the hostility far too lightly. But she was the expert. He kept his hand on her shoulder, though, as he guided her around a group of young men. Their eyes fell on his arm, and then they turned away, too, lips
turning up in disgust. A natural reaction to a gesture their monogamous minds took for possessiveness? At least they said nothing—
“Strange it’s so crowded,” Volka said as he led her around another group. “I wonder what’s going on.”
6T9 craned his neck. Ahead, the density of the crowd increased around a building that looked decrepit as any of the others. On its side was a billboard that caught his eye. Volka was too short to see over everyone’s heads, so he read aloud. “‘Join the Weere Guard. Good Pay. Good Benefits. Defend the Homeland from the Alien Menace.’”
A passing weere man growled in their general direction.
Turning so her breath brushed his cheek, Volka whispered conspiratorially, “Living off world, we’re sort of half-aliens to them, so I guess the anger is understandable.”
He was going to kiss her if he didn’t break contact. Pulling her toward a side street, he dropped his arm and put some space between them. “Just the same, let’s try to avoid them.”
Volka shrugged.
His eyebrow rose. “You’re much too happy.” Volka was serious, determined to fight the Dark, upright, and always conscientious of social rules even when she broke them.
“Am I?” Her ears perked. Shrugging again, she resumed walking. “I am happy. Maybe it is just that I’m home.” For the first time, she sounded uncertain.
6T9’s circuits dimmed. Their asteroid wasn’t home?
Laying her hand on his arm, she smiled up at him. “And I am in good company.”
His circuits relit.
She smirked. “Tell me more about places you’ve been on Luddeccea. Maybe we can convince Sundancer to take us to them. It will probably cause an interstellar incident, but at least it will be a fun one.”
He decided he didn’t mind inexplicably happy Volka. “Well,” he said as they passed from a cluster of buildings to the wide open area that surrounded her former home. “There was my escape from Luddeccea. We briefly stopped in Atlantia and—”
