The Defiant Read online

  The Defiant

  Archangel Project. Book 6

  C. Gockel

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  About The Defiant

  1. Starship Defiant

  2. A Luddeccean Lady

  3. Into the Dark

  4. Unexpected Arrivals

  5. Crossing the Chasm

  6. Entanglements

  7. Alien Craft

  8. Drop Off

  9. The Best Laid Plans

  10. Gang Aft Agley (Often Go Awry)

  11. No Rest for The Wicked

  12. Invitations

  13. Homecoming

  14. Rifts

  15. Sex ‘Bot’s Paradise

  16. Unimaginable

  17. The Dark Beckons

  18. Escape

  19. Summer Heat

  20. Programmed For Love

  21. The First Shot

  22. The Manna

  23. The Visitor

  24. Fever Dreams

  25. Spaceship in a Haystack

  26. Lilies of the Field

  27. The Test

  28. Fission

  29. Aftershocks

  30. The Lovers

  31. The Key

  Also by C. Gockel

  Contact Information

  Copyright © 2019 C. Gockel

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, subject “Attention: Permissions,” at the email address below:

  [email protected]

  PRINT ISBN: 9781700104854

  Cover by Tom Edward Designs

  Created with Vellum

  Acknowledgments

  This book wouldn’t be possible without the encouragement and support of my friends, family, and readers. Kay McSpadden, a friend since my days writing Spock / Uhura fanfiction, and a Mailer Award winning short story writer, reread it twice. Fellow author, Ron Neito, along with Melissa Flores-Hossman, Sarah Easterly, Lindsay McKenna, DJ Rodriguez, and Wynnifredd FitzGibbon, all helped me hammer out consistency issues and areas that had the potential to be misunderstood. They also gave me lots of encouragement along the way. Wynnifredd named a spaceship. The flower on the cover is the fault of my sister, Susan Morehouse, Professor of English at Alfred University. I think she should definitely start writing sci-fi.

  This book also wouldn’t be possible without you, my readers. Thank you for reading and buying my books and giving me words of encouragement. Thank you also if you shared them with your friends and family in person, on Facebook and Twitter, and GoodReads. I couldn’t keep doing this without you.

  All the best.

  C. G.

  About The Defiant

  The Darkness is coming …

  When it strikes, Volka, Carl, 6T9, and Sundancer will have to join forces with an unlikely ally to learn the key to defeating it. An ally that is cold, cunning, and despises all of them—Alexis, Captain Darmadi’s wife.

  If Volka and Carl can manage not to kill her, if 6T9 can refrain from sleeping with her, and if Sundancer can keep them all from being blown up, there may be some hope for humankind, androids, and quantum wave warping werfles and starships alike!

  Strap in! It’s bound to be a bumpy ride.

  1

  Starship Defiant

  Uncharted Space

  Blood pooling in her mouth, Volka leaned her head against Sundancer’s hull. The ship’s interior was dark blue and roiling like thunderclouds—a sign of Sundancer’s fury. The emotion was infectious. Volka’s canines were lodged deep in her cheek, making her bleed.

  Snarling, she tried to close off the anger. Had she finally found herself in a battle she couldn’t win? When Admiral Noa Sato and her Fleet Intelligence Officer husband James Sinclair had asked Carl, Sixty, Sundancer, and Volka for help with this mission, she hadn’t imagined she’d fail so quickly over something so trivial.

  Taking a deep breath, Volka spoke as calmly as she could. “I know you hate to wear the armor, Sundancer, but you have to...put...it...on.” Sundancer didn’t understand words, but she did understand feelings, so Volka tried to imbue every syllable with necessity and love—hard to do with the ship telepathically broadcasting head-banging rage.

  Nothing happened.

  James, the mission’s leader, said their success was vitally important to Fleet Intelligence. Volka tried again. “It will protect you from the Dark’s weapons.” Hopefully. The Galactic Fleet scientists weren’t entirely sure, since they weren’t confident as to what the Dark’s weapons were. But the weapons had incapacitated the ship on contact, so the Republic’s engineers had developed armor that would protect Sundancer from said contact.

  “I almost lost you once battling the Dark, Sundancer,” Volka whispered, remembering the livid, dark gray veins that had fanned out until they’d covered every millimeter of her hull. It was a miracle that Sundancer had survived. But if Alaric hadn’t used his ship’s remote EM drives to push her into a nearby sun where the infection had burned away, Sundancer would have been lost. The words tumbling from her lips became an urgent torrent. “I can’t let it happen again.” It had felt like losing a part of herself.

  The hull and the room she was in grew darker. The floor vibrated beneath her feet, and she knew she’d only succeeded in making the ship angrier.

  Flicking her ears, Volka resisted the urge to stamp her feet like an angry toddler…even though her million-year-old starship friend was transmitting toddler-esque emotions. Instead of stamping her foot, Volka growled. She had to calm down.

  Pulling back, Volka abandoned her insistence, and the ship’s hull brightened...a little. Her stomach fluttered with confusion—not hers—the ship’s. Sundancer really didn’t understand how the armor would help. Or, at least, that was how Volka interpreted the confusion. Without words, so much nuance was lost, and they couldn’t afford misunderstandings now. The Dark had taken out one human outpost at Time Gate 33, and it had told them it would come for all of mankind. She swallowed. It had used the voices of human victims to relay that message.

  Biting her lip, trying to relax her body, hoping it would relax her mind, Volka put her hands on the small of her back and stretched. The motion brushed her elbows against Sixty’s knees. Volka blushed, but the expected quip of “careful, you’ll give me a hardware malfunction” was not forthcoming. She turned to her friend in concern. They were currently in one of the small cabins aft of Sundancer’s bridge. Maybe it wasn’t a cabin precisely—maybe “compartment” was the right word? But who knew? In this unique, sentient alien spacecraft, this “space” could be the Sundancer equivalent of a lung. In this cabin-compartment-lung, they’d put a self-contained toilet and a charger for Sixty. There was also, at the moment, a flat portfolio case leaning against the wall, four powered-down robots at Volka’s feet, and Sixty himself sitting on top of the toilet tank, his feet on the seat. Volka was standing in the only space left—right between his knees.

  Sixty’s eyes were closed in concentration. Carl Sagan, a ten-legged, golden-furred werfle, was draped around his neck. Ostensibly, Carl was meditating so that Sundancer’s anger wouldn’t provoke him into doing something he might regret, but at the moment he was snoring, his little claws were twitching, and his mouth was slightly open. Volka hoped that he wasn’t drooling venom.

  “I’ve almost got it,” Sixty murmured. His eyelids fluttered, making his long lashes kiss his cheeks. Sixty was a “sex ‘bot” and beautiful to look at. His face wa
s so painfully symmetrical—if it weren’t for a dimple on his right cheek—it might make her artist's heart break. His body was muscular, but not overly so. His makers had given him a synthetic hormone scent that made him seductive to the largest swathe of humanity. That scent was underlaid by oil, metal, and a bit of grease, with a subtle hint of plastic. She didn’t find those unpleasant, and he’d be dangerously desirable, even to a God-fearing weere like her, except that, to her sensitive weere nose, he reeked of sex with his “friend” Celeste…Volka’s nose twitched…and also Celeste’s husband Bart. She sighed. He’d finally gotten Bart to join in, not just watch. Shifting on her feet, Volka dropped her eyes.

  “Finished,” Sixty said, bolting upright.

  Volka blinked at him expectantly.

  “Volka, you don’t mind if I use Bracelet’s projector?” he asked.

  “Of course not.” She raised her wrist with the bracelet Sixty had given her. Most humans where Sixty was from had neural implants that allowed them to connect to machines and each other via the ethernet. Since Volka didn’t have an implant, Sixty had given her a voice-activated bracelet that could serve the same function. Made of coppery metal, it had a circular disc at the apex that could project holograms. “Bracelet, please connect to Sixty,” Volka said.

  “Of course, Miss Volka,” Bracelet replied. Sixty was holding a digital tablet that served as a “local ethernet hub” on his lap, and it flared to life.

  Volka stroked Bracelet’s sides. “Thank you.”

  Stretching on Sixty’s shoulder, Carl snorted and yawned. He had his own ethernet device, a “necklace” he called it, not a “collar” as it looked like. It allowed him to speak to humans. Carl didn’t need a “hub” to connect to his device because he “surfed the quantum wave, Baby!” As Volka understood it, he was his own little private hub…not that she understood hubs.

  Carl’s necklace crackled. “You don’t have to say please and thank you to Bracelet. She isn’t an AI. She’s a dumb machine, a glorified holophone-cum-calculator.”

  Lifting an eyebrow in triumph, Volka pointed out, “You just called her a she.”

  “Nebulas, it’s contagious,” Carl muttered.

  “What’s contagious?” Sixty asked.

  “Stupidity!” the werfle hissed.

  Jaw hardening, Sixty pinched the werfle’s snout between two fingers. Carl jerked away with a hiss but didn’t bite.

  Focusing on Volka’s wrist, Sixty said, “Thank you, Bracelet, I’m connected…Download complete. Begin holo.” Sixty’s eyes met Volka’s. “Some of the renderings are simplistic, but I think she’ll still be able to understand it.”

  Sixty had been rendering a holographic explanation of what they needed the ship to do. The central disk on Bracelet sparkled, and an image nearly the size of Volka’s torso was projected into the air. It showed Volka on the planet S33O4, wearing the envirosuit Fleet had given her, firing a phaser rifle at birds and beasts infected by the Dark. The rifle abruptly sputtered out. Holo Volka tossed it aside and swung a large stick around and began beating back the beasts with it.

  Volka’s eyes grew wide, certain she really hadn’t looked so fierce and graceful as Sixty had depicted her.

  The scene changed. Holo Volka was battling pirates aboard the pirate ship Copperhead, armed with only a titanium femur. She blinked and a holo version of herself was fighting the Luddeccean Guard aboard the Leetier with a broom handle. Had the odds been as overwhelming as Sixty portrayed them?

  The scene changed again, and Volka was twirling a closed umbrella, fighting off foes in the streets of the weere settlement on her home-world, Luddeccea. The scene wasn’t one Sixty had seen, he’d only heard about it, and the attackers were vague and blurry. Holo Volka was sharp and clear and looked more confident and resolute than Volka remembered being. And then Volka in the holo became cartoon-like. The cartoon became smaller and childlike and was walking in the woods beside a sketch of a woman with long black hair, only slightly pointed ears, and blue eyes that weren’t quite human. Volka’s lips parted. It was a sketch she’d drawn of her mother. She’d shown it to Sixty a few days ago. Her “mother” lifted a bow, aimed at a rat, and hit it. The young Volka tried and missed. The sketch of her mother gave her another arrow. This time the smaller Volka hit the rat. The Volka in the holo shrank again, her eyes and wolf-ears became proportionally larger, her nose smaller, her lips daintier. She held a stick awkwardly, but a sketch of a weere man with silver hair, black fingernails, yellow eyes lined with kohl-like natural pigment, and wolf-ears just like Volka’s showed her how to hold it right.

  In the real world, Volka’s breath caught. It was a holo of a sketch of her father…

  The image faded away and was replaced by a holo of Sundancer orbiting an alien star, pearlescent hull gleaming. From her keel dropped the armor made by the Republic’s scientists and engineers, a carefully crafted covering made from interlocking pieces of metal coated with a material that reminded Volka of oil on water. In the holo, Sundancer tried to slip into it…and the material got hopelessly tangled around her short wings and rudder—exactly as it had happened the first time she’d tried to put it on. Holo Sundancer disappeared, and a tiny toddler holo version of Volka tried to pick up a stick and just barely succeeded, and then Sundancer appeared again, slipping on the chainmail. This time it fit, and the chainmail was outfitted with phasers above and below each wing. Sixty showed child-Volka learning how to stick fight again, learning how to shoot a bow and arrow, and then showed a holo of Sundancer, phasers blazing into the shuttle that had dropped the Dark’s weapon onto her on the planet S33O4.

  “See, Sundancer,” Sixty whispered. “If you want to be a mighty warrior like Volka, you have to practice.”

  Blushing again, Volka glanced at Sixty. His expression was as earnest as his words had sounded. If he were a human and had emotions that Sundancer could feel, Volka thought the ship wouldn’t hesitate to put on the suit.

  “Is it working?” he asked.

  Volka held her breath.

  Around them, the walls darkened, and Volka had a terrible thought. “Maybe she was angry because she knows it won’t work.”

  Sixty’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

  Carl sat up. “Let’s deal with that issue if and when it—”

  The walls began closing in and Carl squeaked. Bracelet crackled with the voice of James, currently in one of Sundancer’s other aft cabins. “What’s happening?”

  Sixty replied. “We don’t—”

  Metal scraped against metal, and Volka exclaimed in pain and shock as the closing walls shoved the robots on the floor into her calves.

  Drawing his legs back, Sixty said, “On the seat.” Volka was desperately scrambling up before he’d finished the sentence. His hands wrapped around her lower back, stabilizing her. His thighs brushed her legs, and her chin was just above his hairline. She kept her eyes on the wall, but she could still see Sixty’s face tilted up toward her in the periphery of her vision. Her nose twitched. He’d showered since his latest “sexcapade” and put on clean clothes—she could smell shampoo and detergent—but she could still smell Celeste’s perfume in his hair. She felt an inexplicable stab of loneliness.

  Sixty’s hands drifted up her sides. “Are you all right, Volka? They didn’t cut you, did they?”

  James’s voice burst over Bracelet. “Volka, are you hurt?”

  The little robots they were transporting had sharp appendages. Her calves stung. They well might have cut her. “I’m fine,” she said.

  On Sixty’s shoulders Carl made a sound like a sigh, and the walls retreated, as though Sundancer was releasing a breath.

  Volka hopped back down to the floor, nudging the robots back with her foot.

  Chin dropping, eyes scanning nothing, Sixty said, “Sundancer did it. She released the armor. To answer your original question, James, Sundancer holds air in her walls when she opens her hull in vacuum.”

  “Did she put on the armor?” James asked.

&nbs
p; “Not sure yet.” Sixty’s eyes glazed. “Volka, I’m transmitting what I’m seeing through external cameras to Bracelet.”

  Bracelet flared to life again, showing the chainmail hovering in the vacuum just below the ship. The empty armor hung in readiness. It looked like a metallic sweater with a zip front that had no hole for the head, and arms that had zippers down the back.

  “A zipper sweater is nearly what it is, Volka,” said Carl, evidently reading her mind. Creatures that “surfed the quantum wave” could do that.

  In the holo, Sundancer sunk into the chainmail, and Volka almost released a breath, but then the ship began to shake. Volka put her hand on the ship’s hull. “It’s all right. I know it feels odd. Wearing the envirosuit was odd, too. I couldn’t hear very well or smell at all, and it was like…like…being blind.”

  “I couldn’t even move in my suit,” Carl said, standing on Sixty’s shoulder, radiating empathy, a rather unusual emotion to feel from the cantankerous werfle.

  “That’s right!” Volka said, going with the feeling. “Bracelet, show Carl in his envirosuit please!”

  Bracelet’s scene switched to Carl in the envirosuit he’d worn on S33O4. James had called it a “sausage suit.” It had made Carl’s legs helpless little stumps, but it had protected him from the onslaught of Darkness-infected creatures, giving him a chance to set them on fire and explode their coronary arteries with his mind.