by C. Gockel
He nodded and stepped out of the room. She heard one step, two steps, and then, poking his head in the door again, 6T9 said, “I have been told by the doctor in charge that I absolutely must not sleep with Alexis because it could put the whole Luddeccean-Republic alliance at risk. So, I don’t have to sleep with her.”
“Good to know,” Carl said, not sounding like he particularly cared.
Sixty gave one last look at Volka and a tentative smile, and then he left. His footsteps disappeared all the way down the hall this time.
“Let’s eat, Hatchling,” Carl said, rubbing six paws together.
But Volka was staring at the door, her mind catching on the words, “I don’t have to sleep with her.”
She heard softer footsteps in the hallway, and a moment later, Admiral Noa Sato appeared in the doorway. “I got here as fast as I could.”
In her mind, Carl said, “Noa has been in similar tough spots, Hatchling. I may be a genocidal weasel, but she’s not.”
Volka blinked, and Carl had already scurried away. He’d taken a hard-boiled egg with him.
31
The Key
Galactic Republic: Time Gate 1
Two Months Later
6T9 walked through a dim corridor between deactivated ‘bots in the maintenance section of Time Gate 1. Two timers were counting down in the periphery of his vision. According to the first timer, it had been sixty-one days, twelve hours, and sixteen minutes since he’d last seen Volka in person—two months. Another informed him it had been six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-six minutes since he’d last spoken to her through the Luddeccean Embassy’s Q-comm.
In four minutes, he’d speak with her again.
Finding an empty spot along the wall near a charge outlet, 6T9 sat down and jacked in. For a moment, he seized up at the rush of power, but then pulled out his tablet, balanced it on his knees, connected, and waited for Volka to appear. He would prefer to see Volka in holo—but hologlobes weren’t heat resistant. He’d been in and out of the “oven” in the past four weeks as he’d attended Alexis in earnest, and the tablet had been his constant companion.
He took a deep breath. Nearby, the head of an ancient cleaner ‘bot swiveled toward him on its square vacuum-mop base. It began to hum, and its “eyes” lit up. “Human, if you are lost, I can show you the way toooooo—” Its voice died. It hadn’t called 6T9 “Android General 1.” It didn’t have a Q-comm and it wasn’t registered in System 5 where Time Gate 5 was loading that unfortunate moniker into all the ‘bots and androids registered in that system.
Generals made hard choices. 6T9 was not a general. Even as hard as treating Alexis had been, it hadn’t been a choice. They’d had to restrain her during treatment. Every single time that he had given her an injection, she’d resisted as though he was killing her… He had been killing her infection with antibacterials modeled on Alexis’s own antibodies and fever inducers that would have knocked her into a coma, left her with brain damage or organ failure if nanos hadn’t protected her tissues. Then there had been more nanos to locate and destroy the RNA-like debris the infection transferred to her neurons. Every treatment, he’d been told, would have to be customized. The pathogen’s cell membrane mutated quickly, and the RNA-like debris was a jumble of seemingly disorganized amino acid chains that had not been the same in the other patients.
The RNA-like debris, the doctors said, that was how her mind was controlled. “By what mechanism does it control her?” 6T9 had asked. “We don’t know,” they’d replied. Carl said the debris “Resonated with the quantum wave. If it didn’t make humans crazy, it might make them telepathic. A shame, really.”
Alexis had screamed and raged through the treatment. Sobbed. And then begged. “Why do you want to keep this peace from me? Why do you want to destroy this happiness? Why are you doing this…please. Stop. You’re boiling me alive! You’re ripping my cells apart from the inside out. It hurts!”
Just as he could cause pain to reset a bone, 6T9 could cause pain to help a human resist an infection. But he couldn’t help thinking as he hurt her, that it could be Volka tied to the bed, screaming, moaning, sweating through the mattress, and bleeding from abrasions caused by fighting the restraints.
She’d raved about killing babies because they were parasites, how disgusting sex was, how machines were an aberration, 6T9 in particular, and how humans would fall eventually, just like the other worlds they’d conquered. 6T9 had tried to take advantage of her during those rages—or to take advantage of the Dark in her mind—by showing her more symbols from the alien script. Sometimes she translated it. Sometimes the Dark just laughed at him.
Since the fever broke, Alexis had been able to continue translating the texts. By showing her the symbols while she was sick, 6T9 had unwittingly transferred the Dark’s memories, stored in its RNA debris, to Alexis’s long term memory. Alexis didn’t remember much about the aliens—any knowledge not actively dredged up by 6T9’s prompting and transferred to her natural memory was destroyed with her cure—but because he’d exposed her to so much of the written language so frequently, she remembered the aliens’ written language more than anything else. And now she was continuing to help the away team translate the texts they’d found. Hazy memories and impressions of the aliens from her time under the Dark’s possession gave her contextual understanding Lishi’s team didn’t have.
They hadn’t found any accounts of the aliens’ military response to the Dark. The Luddeccean Guard and Galactic Fleet were sure there had been one. 6T9 had his doubts. So did Alexis, but she confessed her memories of everything apart from the aliens’ language were “spotty.” Alexis and Lishi’s team were poring over the texts now, looking for anything they might have missed in the machines’ first scan.
The tablet flashed and beeped, bringing 6T9’s attention back to the present. And then the screen filled with Volka. She was sitting in the ambassador’s study. Sundancer was bobbing outside the window—was the ship making herself visible so 6T9 could see her or because the ship was watching over Volka?
“Hi, Sixty,” Volka said, beaming, her ears forward.
She looked happy. He smiled back at his friend.
Alexis had told him yesterday, “The Darkness hates machines…it hates you, ‘bot. Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?”
“I’m not your enemy,” 6T9 had replied. “And I might be an ally, but you’ll have to do more than tolerate me for me to consider you my friend.”
Volka more than tolerated him. Thinking of how he contributed to her despair, how he almost had put her in Alexis’s place or worse, made him not sure he deserved her friendship.
“How are you?” Volka asked, her brow furrowing slightly. “Where are you? It’s dark…”
He told her where he was, and added, “It’s quiet here. I didn’t want there to be distractions while I spoke to you.” Distractions like amorous come-ons. Fortunately, “I’m not here as a cybernetic consort. I’m working with a patient who has an extremely aggressive, infectious, mentally damaging illness with an agonizing treatment and uncertain outcome,” had served as a brilliant deflection to those advances these past few weeks. He didn’t want to have to deflect, though.
“Oh,” said Volka, gaze wandering past him.
“The art classes going well?” he asked. Noa had gotten Volka out of her “padded prison” in the Diplomatic quarters. And Admiral Noa Sato had had an invitation to visit Luddeccea from Archbishop Kenji Sato himself, and of course the only ship that could take her in a reasonable time frame was Sundancer. Noa had “talked” with Starcrest upon her arrival. Whatever reservations Starcrest might have about Volka’s reliability, he was overruled. Noa was still on Luddeccea, though James had some “personal business” to attend to and wasn’t with her. 6T9 hadn’t seen James since their conversation in his mindscape.
Volka had chosen to remain on Luddeccea with Noa and resume her job recruiting weere for the Galactic Fleet. Part of that job was the art classes in No Weere. It was
really the only part of her job she could talk about, since the embassy was undoubtedly bugged.
Smiling again, Volka held up a painting. It looked like a caricature of a wolf in a tee-shirt and pants. At the bottom, in a child’s scrawl, it said, “Daddy by Waya aged 7.”
“It’s going well,” Volka said. “I have children and adult classes…remember the lady we met in No Weere? She’s joining. It seems to have improved her morale a great deal and given her something to look forward to.”
His Q-comm sparked. It was code. The suicidal weere woman from Hotel No Weere was joining the Fleet.
“That is good to know,” 6T9 replied, because he cared or was programmed to care? He wanted to know the answer to that question.
Volka held up another picture: a carefully rendered skull of a rat.
“You did that?” 6T9 asked, but then noted that the rendering was done with a heavier hand than Volka’s, the darks exaggerated, though there was the same keen eye for proportion. He leaned back. “No, it was done by a student.”
Volka nodded. “This was done by Rex, he’s sixteen. Silas wants to steal him from me.”
“Silas?” said 6T9.
Her ears drooped sideways. “Mr. Darmadi asked me to call him that recently.” Surveying the drawing, she said in a defensive voice, “Working for Silas is a good job, Sixty. Better paying than most—for weere or human. I’m going to recommend Rex talk to him.”
She looked back to the screen. “But, how are you? You haven’t really said.”
He was hiding among abandoned, broken ‘bots. He had been avoiding “maintenance” because he needed to know he could avoid it without running away to live with a rude prude on an isolated asteroid. He didn’t know how much of himself was him and how much was programming. He didn’t want to burden Volka with such things. She would worry, because she always worried about him, but she was already worried, so he gave a simpler answer. “I am…it has been…difficult. The treatment was not as bad as the disease…but only just.”
“I’m sorry, Sixty. But it worked, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “It worked. She is cured and no longer contagious.”
“But?” Volka cocked her head, ears forward and attentive.
Sixty exhaled.
“Silas is worried about her.” Volka said, ears drooping. “Her boys worry about her—they worry about Alaric, too—but mostly her.”
6T9 did like children, genuinely. They tended to like him, without understanding his function, and they were often as confused as he had been before his Q-comm. “I am sorry for them, but I don’t know if she can come home.”
Alexis had been cruel to Volka in person and hadn’t had a kind word to spare behind her back. Nonetheless, Volka’s ears snapped forward, she sat up straighter, and exclaimed in a tone that declared a frustrated sense of justice, “But why?”
Alexis sat at a desk in quarantine. The room was so chill she wore fingerless gloves and had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The Galactican doctors would raise the heat for her if she asked, but she couldn’t ask. For weeks it seemed they’d boiled her from the inside out. They’d injected her with tiny machines to keep the heat from killing her, but they’d kept her conscious to help monitor her for signs of cognitive decline. She never wanted to be hot again.
The memory made her shudder, and ironically, draw the shawl tighter.
Shaking her head, she focused on the “digital tablets” before her. To her left, she had one with alien symbols; to the right, she had another and a stylus which she was using to faithfully transcribe the symbols and their meanings.
The excerpt of the alien writing seemed to be a fable. This fable concerned some children in a forest that were confronted by a beast. The beast was a large circle with a smaller filled circle inside of it. She saw the symbol before her and also, in her mind’s eye, the beast itself—four limbed with venomous fangs and a prehensile tail that allowed it to hang in trees and drop onto its prey. She knew, from hazy memories that were like memories of a dream, that the beast immobilized its prey with a venomous bite. It then feasted on the still-living victim while the victim experienced bite by excruciating bite, unable to fight or even call out. In this fable, an alien child had fallen prey but had telepathically transmitted their pain so acutely the beast had stopped eating the child. It had turned on the child’s friends instead, but the injured child had transmitted their fear for their friends, and the beast had felt such terror that it had run off into the forest. The child was recovered by their family unit and went on to live a long happy life.
She focused on the story, trying to ignore the scene going on outside quarantine. Someone had turned off the intercom and pulled a screen over the window between her rooms and the viewing area. But she knew Luddeccean doctors and priests were there discussing her fate with Alaric. She’d been saved by nanos, “tiny machines” designed to let humans work in situations where hyperthermia was unavoidable—usually those situations involved heavy doses of radiation. The “little machines” were staying behind, something about preventing mutations and inhibiting telomerase. She was, in effect, a cyborg. Cyborgs weren’t allowed on Luddeccea. The doctors and priests had very politely explained this to her as her husband had stood back, arms crossed, frowning at the floor.
Begging the doctors and priests would make no difference. Working might make a difference. She bent down, tapped the tablet, and “flipped” a page. From her right came a soft sigh and a click, and she saw a shadow moving behind the screen. A rush of words entered the cell through the intercom. She recognized one of the priests’ voices. “But even if we accept her back to Luddeccea, can we be assured that she is really cured? For all we know this pathogen lies dormant.”
Alexis froze. Ah. So, it wasn’t principle that was keeping her detained, it was fear. Her jaw hardened and she gulped, her eyes blurring. She hadn’t begged. She hadn’t. She was ridiculously glad of that.
A doctor responded, “I agree. We cannot be certain that the RNA hasn’t been left behind. It would leave her susceptible to control by the alien menace.”
Her stomach felt like lead. She’d denounced her children during the worst of her treatment. But then, as she’d begun to recover, it was their faces that she’d held onto. Sam, Lucas, and Little Markus…and oh, God, Alaric had said that Markus was taken care of, and maybe he was now, but as he aged, would his caretakers abandon him to low expectations? Alaric was gone too often do anything about it if they did. Her heart rate sped up and she felt her face flush. She put cold fingers to her cheeks to douse the heat.
Another priest said, “Or perhaps the nanos will even allow her to be controlled by the Republic. She could be an unwitting spy.”
“What is he—?”
The voices fell silent. There was a click from her door. Alexis flipped back her hair and bowed over her work again, determined not to show weakness. “I’ll take tea, ‘bot,” she said to the machine.
Alaric’s voice came from directly behind her, not through a speaker. “I’ve been told I make the worst tea on either side of the Kanakah Cloud.”
Alexis straightened in her chair, a chill shot from the back of her skull down her spine. She turned slowly. Alaric was gazing down at a book in his hands. Solomon sat on his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Alexis whispered.
Walking toward her, he sat at the foot of her bed, steps away from her chair, the book between his knees. “Do you want to come home?”
What did that have to do with anything? Alexis glowered at him. “Are you trying to get us both quarantined?” Who would take care of their children then?
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Alaric muttered, “Sometimes I think I was born on the wrong side of the Cloud.” Dropping his hand, he met her eyes. “You’re cured. The Galactican doctors say so. Superstition is the only reason our own people are keeping you in here.”
The werfle squeaked and bobbed on the bed, paws kneading the air.
Raising an eyebrow a
t it, Alaric huffed. “If they won’t take you, they can’t take me.”
The werfle nodded.
Alexis gaped and knew that the priests and Luddeccean doctors must be doing the same. He was the hero of S33O4. What’s more, he was the captain of a faster-than-light ship…technology that the Galacticans, with all their wonders, did not possess. If Alaric threw up his hands and said, “Grant me amnesty,” she had no doubt that the Republic would comply, immediately, and with relish.
Clearing his throat, Alaric said, “Do you want to come home, Alexis?”
She couldn’t answer. Her mind was spinning. What sort of game was he playing?
Exhaling, Alaric gazed down at the book he was holding. “I found this in the boys’ room. I wanted to give it to you earlier, but you wouldn’t believe the security the Galacticans subjected it to. You’d think I was trying to smuggle a shiv.”
He handed the book to her. It was On the Origins of War, the book she wasn’t supposed to have. She had a response for this. The correct response. “It’s not mine…I…got it for you, as a gift.” She swallowed. Her bookmark, the one she’d made with pressed lavender was still in it, but it was the form of the lie that was important more than its believability.
He didn’t withdraw the book. “You didn’t get this for me.” His voice became sharp, frustrated. “Why would you even lie about that?”
Alexis became flustered despite herself. Alaric rarely spoke to her like that, and also, the answer was so obvious, she was uncertain why he was questioning her. “It’s not a lady’s book.”
“Who said that?” he demanded, volume not dropping a bit.
The bookshop owner, for one, but she found herself whispering, “My father.”