by C. Gockel
6T9 followed her. “I don’t believe it is lost, and I don’t believe that retreating to this system makes any strategic sense.”
Volka sighed. “Or moral sense.”
His Q-comm sparked. Not sure they were on exactly the same wavelength—or “page,” as Volka would say. “Moral is winning. That is how we save as many lives as we can. Retreating here would not do that.” If he thought it would, he would support it.
Pacing a rug that might have once been a bison, Volka nodded. “It will come here, and they’ll be overwhelmed. No matter how great they think the System 11 Local Guard is.”
6T9 tilted his head as data flowed into his mind. “Their Local Guard is great by standards of local fleets,” 6T9 said.
“That’s neither here nor there,” Volka said. “It’s not enough.”
“Agreed,” 6T9 said, and his Q-comm hummed.
Halting her pacing, Volka smiled. They’d given her a fitted, wool dress to wear. It reached just past her knees in the front and swooped around to brush her calves in the back. It was obviously an elongated version of the coats in the local system’s dress uniform; however, it was purple, not red. Purple had once been a color for royalty, and Volka had appeared very regal tonight. She’d been quiet, attentive, but not submissive. The presidential couple had been in awe of her. Thinking on it, they should be. She was the commander of sentient faster-than-light spaceships. The only such commander in the galaxy.
Approaching him, she wrapped her arms around his back and sighed, and all his sensory receptors lit. “For a moment there, Sixty …”
His hand smoothed down her side and made lazy circles on her back.
Body pressed against his, she looked up at him. The purple in her dress brought out the yellow in her eyes and flattered her short silver hair. “What was it,” she asked, “that had you so interested … that … gametogenesis?”
“Gametosynthesis.” His hand stopped. There was an honest-to-the-gears grandfather clock in the house. He could hear the working of those gears from rooms away.
“Sixty?”
He wavered on his feet. “I need to sit down,” he said, not sure if it was his local systems or distant processor that had prompted his unsteadiness. Volka led him to the couch, and he sank into the deerskin covered cushions—perhaps the upholstery came from the same fellow whose head was mounted over the fireplace. Once he would have found all the leather in the room gaudy and distasteful; now he recognized that every last bit of meat had been eaten, and leather, in this part of the galaxy, was cheaper than pleather.
His processors started working again. “It isn’t surprising that you don’t know what he was referring to. Most Galacticans don’t know.” Android-human couples were still rare. He took a breath. It was a delicate topic, appropriate for a couple that was courting, maybe even necessary. “They were bribing us with children.” Volka had seated herself beside him, and at that, she drew back.
“Our own biological children,” he clarified.
Her lips parted. “I don’t think … Sixty … I’ve had three miscarriages.”
Static flared beneath his skin so intensely he went hot with anger. His wrists sparkled as his skin struggled to reclaim the heat and convert it back into energy.
Pulling back farther, Volka stammered, “I didn’t think … that it was an issue … between us …” Her ears sagged.
His Q-comm sparked, interpreting her reactions: dismay, maybe even fear. That was when he realized he was frowning, and his lip was curled. Emotional expression apps run amok. Taking her hand, he said, “It’s not an issue. I’m angry at your homeworld—” He closed his eyes. Was that here? He clarified. “I’m angry at Luddeccea. With the amount of toxins in the stream near your house, not to mention the radiation levels, I am not surprised.”
Volka’s ears folded.
“It wouldn’t be an issue for you in the Republic, Volka,” 6T9 said. “If you wanted children, and had a human husband, they’d engineer nanos for you—individualized nanos that wouldn’t trigger your immune response. They’d scrub your reproductive organs for any cells that had suffered genetic damage and either repair the cells or trigger autophagy.”
Volka’s lips parted, and the light struck her eyes in just a way that they glowed. It occurred to him that she’d never considered that possibility.
He smiled wryly. “Obviously, the problem is me.”
“You’re not a prob—”
“I’m fully functional sexually, but not pro-creatively.” Though some partners enjoyed pretending.
“It’s fine, Sixty,” Volka said, leaning forward and squeezing his hand.
“Gametosynthesis is a workaround,” 6T9 said.
Volka’s eyes got wide.
Had he never told her because it was something he didn’t think he could offer? “DNA is just code. Gametes—sperm and ova—are more than just envelopes for the code; they also interact with the developing zygote … however, those functions have been mimicked by synthetic cells. All that’s needed is for there to be DNA that the synthetic cells can carry. The DNA can be coded in the laboratory. They’d create DNA that was me—my personality traits, my eye color—”
“—the dimple on your cheek?” Volka murmured.
He smiled in a way he knew that showed it. “If you like it … and they put that code into the synthetic gametes … and voila. Delivery can be in a laboratory … or not.” He might have said the last part wistfully. He shook his head. “It isn’t easy creating DNA for a person, and so they make one version and duplicate it. It’s a little easier for men, since they can create only Y chromosomes, which have a little less data, but of course you wind up with only male offspring.”
Volka’s hand went slack. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking, so he stuck to facts.
“If there are multiple children, they will all receive the same DNA from the synthetic partner. The only variability would come from the biological partner,” he added hastily, almost defensively. “However, that’s more variety than is found in identical twins.”
Volka was still staring, her eyes very glassy. His free hand curled on his knee, but otherwise, he found himself sitting very stiffly, very much like a robot.
Volka drew her hand to his lips. “I would love to have your little boys, Sixty.”
His Q-comm went white. When he could see again, Volka was sitting on his lap, and his lips were sore.
That wasn’t a question he’d dared asked himself, let alone her, because it had been so unobtainable. Hearing her say it made his distant processors combine their features and their personalities, made him envision the children that they could have. He might ask the synthesizers to fudge a bit so they’d be sure to have her ears, but he’d make sure they coded in his dimple. Volka would probably die before he finally broke down; he’d always known that, but having a piece of her that would live on …
“We can’t retreat, even for children,” Volka whispered.
6T9 yanked himself out of his mental rendering. There was a single tear tracking down her cheek. 6T9 caught it with a thumb. “Of course not. Doing so would leave them without a world to live in.”
The grandfather clock chimed the hour.
“I love you,” Volka said. He heard those words and heard her swallow hard, but he was also seeing a future, different from what he’d pictured just minutes ago. He had leaned forward, as though to kiss her again, but then his connection to the local ether began downloading more data so fast it made his head jerk.
“Sixty?” Volka asked.
He knew he was being robotic, but his Q-comm was humming, and he couldn’t stop. “It’s interesting that System 11’s Local Guard has almost the same level of troops and ships as the Luddeccean Guard was at when they broke away from the Republic. I wonder if they’ve been wanting to break away for a long time …” He accessed “System 11 Independence.”
“Ahh … they do have a vibrant independence movement. They’re just not important enough for it to make it to the
inner systems’ news. System 11 has been wanting to bring aquaculture to their second planet, but the Republic has closed it to all but scientific research, much to local consternation.”
“I’m not sure—”
Downloading more data in a rush, he said, “There is more. The food aid the Republic has been sending them has been in the form of soy products instead of credits. This has created a great deal of anger. A quarter of the population here can’t eat it—”
“Sixty, okay, that’s enough! It doesn’t matter; we have to leave!”
The data stopped. “Conditions here do matter.”
“We’re not joining them,” Volka said.
Pieces of the past day were falling into place in his mind. The lack of safety in the Inner Systems or even their asteroid in System 12. The Republic’s inability or unwillingness to fight that even Dr. Zeller had noticed. The fact that they called Volka admiral here. The fact that they offered them something worth more than a fortune proved the regard was real. “No, you have to convince them to join us.”
Volka huffed. “Sixty, that’s not—”
“It’s logical,” 6T9 said. “And moral.” It was the way to win.
Volka’s ears sagged, and her eyes scanned the floor. “Admiral … Noa … had a plan. I saw it in her mind. It needed conventional ships and weapons.” She shook her head. “I can try, but I think we had better come up with a secondary plan.”
6T9 stared at Volka. She hadn’t once confronted him about blasting a hole in a wall or nearly slicing out Lauren G3’s Q-comm. Growing up where she did, maybe his behavior wasn’t that outlandish to her. That rough and tumble upbringing had served her well during their adventures. It had kept her alive. It wasn’t serving her or the galaxy now.
He touched her cheek. “Volka, you are an admiral.” His processors whirred, thinking of the deference the presidential couple had shown them. He’d had such deference in New Grande from Gate 5, but not from the human leaders. He hadn’t convinced them of the full danger of the Dark, maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough, or maybe that was something they could only learn for themselves. These people understood the Dark better. “You have to lead.”
Volka’s ears sagged, and all of her regal bearing fled. “I don’t know how,” she said in a tiny voice, and he thought of her living by herself in her tiny house at the edge of the weere settlement. So much had changed for her—she had changed so much—but perhaps all those years alone were still with her, like his sex ‘bot programming was with him. She had to reprogram herself, but for humans, reprogramming wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch.
Kissing her, he whispered, “Volka, you’re not alone.”
Two days after their arrival in System 11, Volka climbed the steps of Odessa’s Congressional building. Sasha was at her right, 6T9, Noa, James, Orion, FET12, Carl, and Shissh behind her. The building loomed up above her. It had a thick roof covered in long grasses. It almost made the hall cave-like and partially explained the nickname for the place—the Den.
Sheep grazed on the Den’s roof and peered over the edge as they approached. Every square inch of Odessa that could be used for agriculture, particularly livestock, was being turned into Victory flocks, herds, and schools of fish. Seeing Shissh, the goats bleated and fled. Like most of the buildings on Odessa, there was a wide overhang. Beneath that, there were titanium beams framing glass walls and doors.
“Leading is like playacting,” Sixty had told Volka, and she kept her head high, even though her mouth tasted faintly of bile beneath the flavors of mouthwash and toothpaste. She’d thrown up this morning, either because of the hormone suppressors she took or because of nerves—or both.
Surely, Sasha could smell it.
Noa had offered Volka more practical tactical advice. Odessa was a constitutional Republic. Volka needed to convince its Congress and its people that they couldn’t hide. On Noa’s advice, Volka had convinced Sasha to let her speak to the legislature. Volka already had the president half-convinced, but he wouldn’t—and couldn’t—do anything without support.
Guards in scarlet opened immense glass doors at their approach and stood aside. A somewhat familiar, yet slightly novel, scent came to Volka’s nostrils. She blinked. There was another tiger sitting on the polished granite floor of the lobby, bigger than Shissh, and male.
“Ivan the Terrible has returned to us,” Sasha said with real fondness in his voice.
“Hello, Pet,” said Ivan through an ether-to-speech device that dangled from his neck. He tipped his head. “Shissh, Carl … Volka. I look forward to listening to what you have to say.”
Sasha’s worry fluttered through the waves. “He wasn’t successful. His killer is still at large.”
She’d already known that from Carl and Shissh. The slayer of Ivan’s former host had not been found. She had a plan for that. She glanced back at Carl and got the impression he was pointedly trying not to look at her. He and Shissh had been unusually un-opinionated since they’d arrived. It was very odd from a species that had opinions on everything. Ivan chuffed and said, “Volka, I’ll lead the rest of your party to the balcony. Good luck.”
Volka glanced at Sixty. In the past day, he’d done nothing but fill her head with data dumps on System 11. He and the others had tried to come up with every objection they could imagine the people of System 11 would have to their plan, and Volka had practiced responses. Now he only gave her a nod.
Noa’s thoughts echoed in her head. “You’ll do great, Volka.” Noa oozed confidence in Volka, and not for the first time, Volka wondered if the admiral was really the one who was master of the waves. Eyes bright, Noa added silently, “Remember, if you have a question, just ask.”
Orion was still somewhat disbelieving of what he considered Volka’s “alleged telepathy,” and at the moment, he was looking at Volka and thinking, “She is in way over her head.”
Volka didn’t let her ears flick. Instead, she said to Sasha, “Lead the way.”
A few minutes later, she was sitting near Sasha on a dais, staring out into a sea of dark heads. The congressional hall reminded her of pictures she’d seen of theater stages. There were lights, there was an audience on the ground floor—the Congress—and there was a balcony filled with citizens and the press. A member of the Congress, leading the assembly, was speaking at the podium. Volka tried to focus on him, but he was giving alpha-numeric codes of bills before the assembly, and his speech might as well have been the drone of bees or the distant whoosh of ptery wings. Her mind fell into the quantum waves and tumbled through the consciousnesses of the audience.
They were watching her with awe and curiosity. Everyone was wondering if the admiral of the sentient ships had come to System 11’s aid. She felt her heart rate pick up, felt her pulse fluttering in her wrists. Yes, the Skimmers would give practical immediate aid to the planet, but they would ask much of it in return—the System’s collaboration in the defense of the galaxy. Maybe it was the wrong thing to ask? Maybe the Dark would inevitably win, and if that was the case, wasn’t it moral to retreat to this world and enjoy a last fleeting century or decade of freedom?
Her hands were linked on her lap, and she squeezed them so tightly she felt the bite of her nails. She remembered what Noa had said. “Right now the Dark has a vulnerability, one that it has never had before and may never have again.” They had to succeed, and they had to succeed soon.
The man at the podium stopped talking in alpha-numeric code and started talking about Volka. He started listing her accomplishments, although they weren’t her accomplishments; it was all the things she’d achieved with Sixty, and Carl, and the Marines.
“I’m not a real admiral.” That is what Volka had said to Sixty when he told her she had to do this. She didn’t have the training, the experience, the education. “And I’m not a real general,” he’d replied. “But sometimes we have to be more than we were programmed to be, and if that goes against our programming, we have to change.”
Noa’s thoughts rang
above her doubts. “The general says you can do this.”
Volka looked for Sixty on the balcony but couldn’t see him.
Applause pounded through the Den. They loved her, because she was weere, because they believed she was a hero, because the things they imagined she had done they imagined made her wise. Sixty didn’t think she could do this because she was a weere. He thought she could do it … because … because he’d been with her when they’d done all those things.
Rising, Volka approached the podium. She waited for the applause to stop. Fighting the urge to let her ears swivel to the sound of her voice echoing through the speakers, Volka thanked the president and the Congress for allowing her to speak … and then she really began. “Ladies and gentlemen, President Voy has told me System 11 can be a city on a hill, and I believe him.”
Orion hadn’t understood this part of her speech and had called it “superstitious” and “backwards,” but cheers rose in the Den. The waves surged around Volka, and she felt herself carried up in a tide of optimism, her soul connected to everyone in the room. She was speaking their language. Volka waited for the hall to be silent, and then she borrowed from the rest of that biblical verse. “A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Ladies and gentlemen, System 11 cannot retreat, it cannot hide, it must shine—”
Applause roared up from the assembly, so loud 6T9 switched down the sensitivity of his auditory sensors. He added to it, standing from his chair, and banging his feet with the weere. Volka stood below, dwarfed by the podium, hands behind her back. She bowed her head briefly, and when she looked up again, her eyes glowed. The assembly roared louder.
Congress still had to debate and vote, and that would take several days. However … “I think they’re convinced, Carl,” 6T9 said over the ether.
Carl’s whiskers twitched. “I think so,” the werfle concurred.
The werfle had watched the proceedings on the handrail of the balcony, Shissh and Ivan, too large in their tiger forms, had to sit in the aisles. “You don’t sound excited,” 6T9 said. “Do The One support Noa’s plan?”