Her Robot Wolf: Gift of Gaia

by Jenny Schwartz

  The Orion had been outfitted to particular specifications, which meant money. Vulf must have collected some significant bounties, and in a relatively short time, since he didn’t seem much older than me. Thirty, if that.

  The ship had to be his own, yet he lived in it alone. A single man—a single shifter—with no pack and no family. And when he’d forgotten his manners and not offered me a drink, he’d been chagrined at the oversight.

  I remembered that Ivan had left me in Vulf’s path. For all my anger with Ivan over his theft of my sha crystal, I thought again that he’d known that he—and I—could trust Vulf to treat me if not kindly, then at least with respect.

  Some of the tension in my stomach unknotted. I finished eating and sipped the last third of my coffee. In silence. Well, this was awkward. Here I was, without access to sha, eating a meal with my kidnapper who was Ivan’s enemy, my research subject, and an attractive man. I laughed, a weird splutter of sound that had me quickly putting down my cup so that I could cover my mouth and trap in the wildly inappropriate snorted giggles.

  Vulf raised an eyebrow. “Is this an odd response to stress?”

  “No-oo.” I strangled the last of the giggles, drawing a deep breath and releasing it slowly. “Maybe. I just had a thought. This. You and me.” I gestured between us and at the table. “This is the closest I’ve had to a dinner date in over a year.”

  “This is not a date!” He leaned back. Then he leaned forward to make a point. He even stabbed the table with one long, strong, blunt-nailed finger. “I kidnapped you, woman.”

  “I know. It’s reprehensible and a part of me is scared.”

  He leaned back.

  I nodded once. “But see, then you do something like that, giving me space as if you regret scaring me, and it messes up my mind and instincts. Your instincts are protective,” I added.

  “They are not.” He stood, the offense he’d taken at my observation obvious in his stiff movements. He cleared everything away, including my nearly empty coffee cup. A tray lowered near the food dispenser, the counter sealing over it again. The automated cleaning and recycling systems would take care of everything. “I told you. Your puppy eyes don’t work on me.”

  I studied him. “I thought about acting submissive so that your shifter instincts would urge you to protect me. You’re alpha status even if you’re alone.”

  He scowled at me. He stood behind his bench seat with his arms folded, looking tough and intimidating.

  “But my acting skills suck,” I added.

  “I wouldn’t have believed you were submissive. Meek women don’t stick out a foot to trip a charging stranger. They don’t walk with their head up and their eyes daring anyone to deny them.”

  “I don’t challenge people.” I never thought I did. I frowned at him, curious at how he saw me. I was quiet, reserved.

  “You don’t start fights, but you don’t avoid them, either. At first I thought it was your shaman training, but I think it’s you. You broadcast a kind of assurance, a confidence that you can handle anything.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.” He was describing the person I wished I could be. “If I could, do you think I’d be here?”

  He sat back down. “Yes.”

  “Why?” I put an elbow on the table and rested my chin on my hand. I was intrigued.

  His eyes were very blue, seeming to glow in the soft lighting of the cabin.

  Had the lighting dimmed since we’d finished eating? Had Ahab manipulated things? It was a reminder that the AI observed me.

  But not as closely as Vulf.

  He stared into my eyes. “Because I’m your best chance of finding Ivan. If you want to help him, you need to talk to him.”

  “I can find him without you.”

  “Can you?”

  I bit my lip. Could I? I had one clue. Years ago Ivan had given me an address. If you ever have to reach me, leave a message with Daisy at the Spotted Toadstool. I’d looked it up. The Spotted Toadstool was a bar on the trading planet Samanth.

  “I won’t help you find Ivan.”

  “Ahab, Psy Sector map,” Vulf said.

  My shoulders tightened in a giveaway he’d have noticed. Samanth was on the edge of the Psy Sector, intersecting with the Boneyard Sector where technology and other things were recycled.

  The surface of the table changed from the appearance of marble to a detailed star map. Automatically, my eyes tracked familiar routes, searching out…my breathing quickened. With Ahab observing me, even my eyes lingering on Samanth could give away what little I could contribute to locating Ivan. I forced my eyes to follow the routes I’d learned in the Academy without lingering on Samanth. In five years of taking shaman voyage contracts, very few had brought me to the Psy Sector, and I’d never been on Samanth.

  I was twenty six years old. I’d known Ivan for seventeen of those years. And not once had I contacted him. He always initiated our chats. The inequality of our relationship struck home. I looked up from the map. “Do you think Ivan is here?”

  “His known activities cluster in the Psy Sector. Gregor, Lyst, Samanth.” Vulf traced a triangle between the administrative and two key trading planets of the sector. “Ahab, alter course for Samanth instead of Gregor.”

  My mouth compressed. In some way I had given away Ivan’s secret.

  Vulf’s gaze dropped to my mouth. He swiped a hand over the screen and the map vanished, the marble look of the table reappearing. “I will bring Ivan in.”

  I got up and retreated to the utilitarian cabin I’d woken in. The door closed behind me.

  I woke at seven standard hours the next morning. I knew the time since I asked Ahab and received the answer along with a clean utility suit. On emerging from the bathroom, I found the door to the cabin open. The cabin I occupied was as large as the recreation space Vulf used, which made me suspect that this cabin doubled as a cargo hold.

  The disrupter remained in operation and I couldn’t access sha energy.

  “How far are we from Samanth?” I asked Ahab. I’d calculated the most direct route from Tyger Tyger to the Psy Sector last night. If Vulf had taken the Orion through the wormhole ninety clicks from Tyger Tyger while I was still unconscious, then we could reach Samanth by noon.

  “We’re docked at Samanth,” Ahab said.

  “That’s impossible!”

  Vulf appeared in the doorway. “I have some ground rules before I leave you alone on the ship.”

  “Good morning,” I said pointedly.

  He ignored the reminder that courtesy cost nothing—an adage I’d heard all too often at the Academy. It had been Matron’s favorite saying. “Ahab will observe you while I’m gone. You will not attempt to communicate with anyone or venture beyond the recreation cabin. If you attempt to do either, or to cause damage, Ahab has instructions to subdue you and return you to here.” To the stark cargo hold, my prison.

  I’d thought about my situation—and Ivan’s—last night while I stared into the utter darkness of the cabin. “I’d be more use to you on Samanth with you.”

  “More trouble.” But Vulf lingered.

  I took that as a sliver of encouragement for my plan. “What if I promised I wouldn’t run away from you on Samanth?”

  He shook his head. “There are too many loopholes in any promise.” Untrusting, but accurate. “I couldn’t cover them all. Here you are and here you stay—unless you want to trade information?”

  “No.” But I was dying to know what he knew of Ivan’s habits. Where did Vulf plan to go on Samanth?

  “Then don’t do anything stupid and you’ll be awake when I return.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the implied threat that Ahab would drug me. Gas was an effective weapon in enclosed systems such as starships. If I had access to sha energy, I could shape a gas cloud away from me, but without sha I was as helpless as an ordinary human. “I don’t see what good it does keeping me locked up here!”

  “Maybe nothing.” He subjected me to a long study. Whatever
thoughts passed behind his eyes, they didn’t show on his face. “But I thoroughly investigate a high value target’s background.”

  I winced at his choice of the word “target” to describe Ivan.

  Vulf tapped the doorframe once in a musing gesture. “You’re not part of his life. There’s not one mention of you in his life—but there you were, on the beach; the reason Ivan risked the Galactic Police’s surveillance system to reach the planet.”

  “You hacked the police security system?”

  He neither confirmed nor denied the charge.

  I tried to ignore my emotional response that an investigation into Ivan’s background provided no hint of me. Ivan and I had agreed that was for the best, but even hiding the truth of our relationship, there should have been some connection between us. Suddenly the way my rare face-to-face meetings with Ivan had never happened at the same place twice no longer seemed due to his nomadic habits but rather part of a determined effort to hide me.

  I zoned out, thinking about the issue, but when I refocused, Vulf remained in the doorway. I thrust my hands in my pockets, trying to conceal my unnerved realization that he’d been observing me. I was a tool for him to crack the puzzle of Ivan’s whereabouts.

  When I met his gaze, he broke the silence between us. “Your relationship to Ivan Mishkin is either irrelevant…or one of the most important secrets he’s keeping.”

  Vulf left.

  The door on the far side of the recreation cabin, the one I’d never been through, sealed shut behind him as I entered. The aroma of coffee drew me to the food dispenser. Standing by it and sipping half a cup, my emotions steadied.

  Emotions are messy distractions. The Academy taught us their dangers. It wasn’t that our teachers tried to squash our emotions. If anything, they’d worried that I was too repressed. But they’d warned us to be in control of them before we touched sha energy. With the disrupter still in action, accessing sha wasn’t an option for me, but the lesson of the dangers of uncontrolled emotions remained true. Emotion would cloud my judgement. Perhaps Vulf had even meant it to.

  I ordered a simple breakfast from the food dispenser and turned to the table and benches. Beyond them, the viewscreen I’d noticed last night now showed a busy space dock with humans and aliens hurrying past.

  “One way glass,” Ahab’s disembodied voice said, the sound a reminder that I was observed as well as imprisoned. “The Captain prefers to see out when there is something to see.”

  “Me, too.” I brought my coffee and bowl of cereal to the sofa and sat down to watch the parade. We were in the Psy Sector, which was controlled by Sidhe, the elf-like humanoid aliens who communicated telepathically among themselves. Rumors existed that they could talk to others beyond their species and even influence their behavior, but such rumors had never been proven. What was proven was the Sidhe’s impressive managerial abilities. They maintained a profitable balance in administering the sector that enabled both legal and illegal operations to flourish. As a result, the Psy Sector attracted members of sentient species from across the galaxy. Humans were among the most recent.

  A Meitj stalked past on its spindly lowest legs, its middle legs folded characteristically at its abdomen, and its upper pair of limbs each carrying a bag. Its multi-faceted eyes glittered. Among humans, the slang term for the Meitj was “bugs”, but they were one of the earliest space-faring species and infinitely more respected in the galaxy than us humans. After all, they hadn’t rendered their home planet unfit for sentient life.

  I put aside my empty cereal bowl and curled my legs up, cradling my coffee cup. “Ahab, do you have a favorite sentient species?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a game I play. If I could be any species, which would I be?”

  “You don’t want to be human?” Ahab sounded intrigued. Either I was imagining the emotional coloring in his voice, or he was a highly sophisticated AI system. Huh. And there I went, personalizing him as “him” and not “it”.

  “Human is good, but sometimes I imagine being Ptero and able to fly.”

  “But you are a shaman, are you not? You can levitate.”

  I smiled. “I was never very good at those lessons. I’m too physically-attuned to maintain the concentration required to alter the environment impacting my body.”

  There was a silence. Perhaps the AI considered the implications of my confession. Perhaps he even analyzed my statement for falsehoods.

  But I was telling the truth.

  Ahab surprised me by understanding what I meant and stating it plainly. “Physical sensation distracts you.”

  “Yes.” The Academy’s instructors had done their best to train it out of me with both sensory deprivation and over-whelming immersion.

  “That makes you unhappy?” Ahab asked.

  I realized my memories had betrayed me into a sad curve to my mouth. I hid it by taking a sip of coffee.

  “I would like to experience the world without conscious interpretation of data from my senses,” Ahab said. “I would like to be a mLa’an.”

  “Huh.” The AI’s sudden reversion to the game I’d started of imagining which species we’d like to be caught me unawares, especially his choice. “mLa’an? I’ve never met one.” They were one of the galaxy’s older sentient species, but unlike the Meitj, the mLa’an operated under a policy of non-involvement. They sent a single representative to the Federation Council, and otherwise remained in their two solar systems. “What is it about them that appeals to you, Ahab?”

  “They made me,” he said simply. Shockingly.

  “You’re a mLa’an AI?” I nearly dropped my coffee mug. “But how did Vulf…?” I looked around the recreation cabin, mentally stripping out its understated luxury and replacing it with a wild guess at what mLa’an furniture might look like.

  The mLa’an were incredibly odd. They had a round head-and-body-combined form atop two stork-like legs. A proboscis reminiscent of an elephant’s trunk enabled them to manipulate the world. Both the proboscis and their legs could retract to wrap around their head-and-body, enabling them to cover vast distances with little effort, as long as their route was downhill.

  If Vulf had acquired a mLa’an AI, it was highly unlikely to exist independent of the ship it operated.

  “I’m on a mLa’an starship?” I squeaked. I had so many questions: not least, how had Vulf acquired one, and with a working AI system? Surely if he’d stolen the starship from the mLa’an they’d have deactivated it? Yet no one had a mLa’an starship outside of the mLa’an themselves. And not for lack of offers to purchase them, either.

  I put my coffee cup down and walked to the viewscreen. I flattened my palm against the wall beside it. The ship was docked. There wasn’t the faintest vibration. But somewhere in its engine room a cold fusion reactor powered everything. That explained how we’d reached Samanth so swiftly.

  Vulf didn’t need the bounty on Ivan’s head. This ship was worth a fortune.

  “I am, and you are,” Ahab replied, answering my two questions although I barely recalled them. Shock had a mind-blanking effect. “The mLa’an have an efficient form and an emotionally-sustaining culture. It would be interesting to walk among them.”

  “Or roll,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “But wouldn’t you want arms?” I waved mine around aimlessly.

  “I would have them. Humans are conditioned to consider a species as existing with a top and bottom. What you consider legs on a mLa’an are equally arms when the mLa’an rolls onto its bonz.”

  I assumed that the “bonz” was an uninterpretable term for the mLa’ans’ combined head-and-body. “How did Vulf acquire a mLa’an starship?” And you?

  “I believe that is a question to be answered at the Captain’s discretion.”

  Probably. In fact, simply telling me that the Orion was a converted mLa’an starship was possibly beyond what Vulf wanted me to know. Unless, was it obvious externally what the ship was and its status a
s an mLa’an design officially recorded? In that case, Ahab wasn’t sharing secrets. “How do you prevent people stealing the Orion?”

  “No one steals from Vulf.”

  I leaned against the wall by the viewscreen. “That’s kind of a scary statement.”

  “You know he’s a formidable man.”

  Formidable. Yes, he was.

  I turned to look through the viewscreen at the people strolling past. The Samanth space dock was a busy one, as befitted a trading planet. But no one stared at the Orion. Perhaps it wasn’t immediately obvious as a mLa’an ship? When I considered the problem, I realized that I had no idea what a mLa’an ship ought to look like. In my mind, they were simply associated with the rare technology of cold fusion, at which the mLa’an were indisputable experts.

  “If not for the disrupter, you would be formidable yourself,” Ahab said.

  I smiled ruefully. “Unique, useful, different. No one’s called me formidable before.”

  “The mLa’an are unable to access sha energy,” Ahab said. “It is a talent unique, as you say, to humans. And rare even among your kind.”

  A group of three humans walked along the space dock: two men and a woman. The shorter man had his arm around the woman. All three of them were laughing and talking. Abruptly, they turned their heads. Another woman sprinted up to join them, linking arms with the unpartnered man.

  My heart hurt a little, although I refused to acknowledge it. Romantic love wasn’t for everyone, but I had trouble even making friends. Shamans were rare and once we left the Academy, our different career choices scattered us through the galaxy.

  “May I ask about your shamanic training?” Ahab asked.

  “My training?” No one ever asked about that aspect of being a shaman. They might be reluctantly curious about what I could do, but not what I’d endured to master my shamanic talent. A second later, I understood, and suspicion and disappointment flattened my mood further. I shouldn’t have wasted my time conversing with Ahab. The AI was under Vulf’s command. “Your captain is more devious than I expected. But if he expects to learn about Ivan’s weaknesses from my training, I can save us all time now and tell you that he won’t. Ivan didn’t master his abilities at the Academy.”