Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Lanoe kept his mouth shut. Low profile, he told himself.

  The weapons were checked. Ginger made a big show of working the action on Bury’s pistol, taking out the single cylindrical round and holding it up to the light before putting it back. Then she handed the two carved boxes over to the giant with the polarized helmet.

  The big second gave the guns a quick examination. “They look fine,” he said.

  Bury kept his eyes on Instructor Candless’s face. She looked back at him with that infuriating expression she always wore, the bland but stern countenance that never seemed impressed with anything.

  The rules of the combat forbade the duelists from speaking to each other at this point. That was fine. If Candless had said one word he probably would have grabbed one of the pistols and shot her where she stood. Anger had always been Bury’s best friend. This was one of those rare occasions when he needed to keep it in check.

  “The rules are simple,” Ginger announced. “You will stand back to back on the field. You will take ten paces and then—”

  “I think everybody knows what happens then,” the giant said. “Shall we?”

  Ginger’s face flushed as red as her hair. She ran off to one side, the giant going to stand next to her.

  Bury gave Candless one last glare, putting all the hate into it that he could muster. Then he turned his back on her.

  “One,” Ginger called. He took a step.

  “Two.” He felt the muscles in his back squirm.

  “Three.” He could feel it, almost. The way the bullet would tear through his flesh.

  “Four.”

  “Five.” He dry-swallowed.

  “Six.”

  “Seven.”

  “Eight.” He was almost there.

  “Nine.” In his head he saw himself turning, raising his weapon.

  “Ten!” Ginger called. Bury felt like his heart had stopped beating.

  “You may turn and fire when ready,” the giant said.

  Bury swung around, the pistol in his hand already moving, lifting—he wouldn’t get a lot of time to aim, so he jerked his hand upward, he had to fire high to counter the effects of Rishi’s spin, and—

  Candless’s arm stood out from her body just a little. Her weapon pointed at the ground.

  She pulled her trigger. There was a roar and a puff of smoke. The bullet tore a little crater in the soil by her foot, blackening a few blades of grass.

  Then she just stood there. Watching him. With one arched eyebrow.

  The crowd of spectators didn’t know what to make of it. They were supposed to remain quiet until the shooting was done, but they couldn’t help themselves. “What’s going on?” someone demanded. “Why did she do that?”

  “What does it mean?”

  Out on the field, Bury lifted his pistol and aimed it. Lanoe could see the boy’s hand shake, see his face contort with anger, with frustration. With confusion. Bury let out a kind of gasping shriek, then extended his arm and pointed his weapon right at Candless’s face. His eyes stood out from his head as a paroxysm of rage swept through his body.

  His knuckles turned white as he squeezed the pistol’s grip.

  And then—it was over. The blood drained from Bury’s face and his arm fell slack at his side. His weapon remained unfired. It dropped from his hand and fell into the grass. “I vacate my challenge!” he shouted.

  “What does it mean?” someone asked. “What do the rules say about this?” Everyone seemed to be asking the same question. “She gave him every opportunity. Why didn’t he fire?”

  Lanoe had the answer.

  “Because she already won,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  Explain this to me one more time,” Valk said. He was deeply confused.

  Lanoe smiled. The three of them had retired to a room at the guesthouse where they could get away from the disappointed crowd. Perhaps in spite of the lackluster ending of the duel, perhaps because they needed some kind of resolution, the spectators had swarmed Candless as she walked away from the field. Some of them wanted her autograph. Others wanted to ask her why she’d fired into the ground. More than one of them had demanded a rematch.

  It seemed they’d all missed the point. So at least Valk wasn’t alone.

  Lanoe glanced over at Candless, but she shook her head. It seemed she was perfectly willing to let him explain.

  “The duel was a matter of honor, right?”

  Valk shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what they’re all about.”

  “Sure. But here’s the thing. There are all kinds of rules about honor, and some of them contradict each other. Honor required Candless to accept Bury’s challenge, but if she actually shot one of her students, that would be a dishonorable act. She has a responsibility for his safety. So she couldn’t shoot him, and she couldn’t not shoot.”

  “Okay,” Valk said.

  “But if she fired at him and missed, she would have looked like a fool—and even worse, a bad shot. So her only option was to fire into the ground.”

  “That sounds like losing to me,” Valk said.

  Lanoe laughed. “No. It just shifted the burden on to Bury. Forced him to make the choice. If he shot her he would be less honorable than she had just proved herself to be. Shooting someone who has just disarmed herself is kind of the definition of dishonor. It would have been even worse if he missed—it would mean he had no honor, and he was incompetent, as well. So he had no options left, either.”

  “He could have just shot into the ground, too,” Valk pointed out.

  Lanoe leaned forward in his chair. “Ah, but there, you see—if he did that he would just be copying her. He would be a student repeating the actions of his teacher. Which would be admitting she was right all along, and she had every right to insult him. By forfeiting the duel, he acknowledged that he was wrong to issue the challenge in the first place, but that’s all. So he saved some face, though not very much. She put him in a situation where that was the best outcome he could possibly achieve. Not a complete loss, but nowhere near winning.”

  Valk put one massive hand against his helmet, the closest thing he could do to rubbing his forehead. “It sounds more like a game of chess than a gunfight.”

  “That, of course, was the whole point,” Candless said.

  Both of them turned to look at her. She hadn’t spoken since leaving the field of honor. She’d barely glanced at either of them.

  “The point young Bury needed to learn,” she said. “He’s studying to become a fighter pilot. He needed to understand that war isn’t about how much you hate the enemy, or how righteous your cause is. It’s about applying the exactly correct force against the obstacle in front of you.”

  Lanoe nodded happily. “If more admirals understood that—”

  “If they all understood that,” Candless said, “we wouldn’t have to have wars at all. And then we would all have to find something else to do with ourselves, wouldn’t we?”

  Lanoe got up and went over and shook her hand. “I’m glad it worked out. I’m damned glad you didn’t just get yourself killed.”

  “I’m actually quite proud of young Bury. He saw the problem—and the solution—right away,” Candless said. “I knew he had promise.”

  “Wait,” Valk said. Because he’d just seen the checkmate—and why they played the game at all.

  “Wait,” he said again.

  Candless and Lanoe turned to look at him.

  “That’s why you went through with this whole thing?” Valk asked. “To bring out his potential? You risked your life to teach somebody a lesson?”

  Candless blinked, but her expression didn’t change. “I’m a flight instructor. That’s my job description.”

  She rose from the table and took a deep breath. For a moment she just stood there, looking a bit pale. Then she began to sway.

  “Are you okay?” Lanoe asked.

  “If you two will excuse me for a moment,” she said, “I think I might have to go be sick. I’ll be back
shortly.”

  She left the room as if she were in no hurry at all.

  Valk shook his head when the door closed behind her. “She’s one of your old squadmates,” he said. “A—a friend of yours, you said.”

  “One of the better pilots I ever flew with,” Lanoe agreed.

  “Is that why you put up with her? With the way she looks at you? You know, like you forgot to check your armpits this morning, and she forgives you, but she still wants you to know she noticed?”

  Lanoe shrugged. “She wasn’t as … well, she wasn’t as intense back then. But she was always this smart. Let me ask you a question. A woman like that—would you prefer to have her on your side, or to be fighting against her?”

  Candless returned, patting at her lips with a napkin. “So, now that my squalid little drama is over,” she said, sitting down on the guestroom’s bed, “we have time to talk about your troubles.”

  Lanoe glanced over at Valk, half-expecting the big pilot to blurt everything out. Then he considered it, and decided he might as well do the blurting himself. Candless was an old friend—he was pretty sure he could trust her. “It’s about a planet called Niraya,” he said.

  “I believe I’ve heard of it,” Candless said.

  Lanoe frowned. “You have,” he said, carefully.

  “I may have been busy recently, with a full course load and the occasional duel, but I do try to keep up on current events.” She sighed. “It’s been on every newsfeed for weeks now. Some sort of battle there, between Rear Admiral Wallys and … some sort of fleet of armed drones, was it?”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. “It’s a little more nuanced than that, though.”

  “These things always are,” Candless replied. “The stories I read had that particular clipped style that always indicates they’ve been heavily censored. Though I have to say, I haven’t seen the Navy be so tight-lipped about a fight since the end of the Establishment Crisis. I take it something rather serious happened there.”

  Lanoe nodded.

  “Perhaps, then,” Candless told him, “you should tell me about this Niraya.”

  “It’s a religious retreat that’s only about half-terraformed. Nobody had heard of it before, because nothing ever happened there. It’s going down in the history books now, though, as the first place we made contact with an alien species. Alien drones, to be specific. An entire fleet of them, and they weren’t friendly.”

  Candless didn’t laugh. Her eyes, perhaps, narrowed a bit. “Aliens,” she said, with the same tone she might have used if she’d caught one of her students watching videos when they should have been paying attention in class. “I take it you’re serious?”

  “Afraid so.” He understood her incredulity. For hundreds of years humanity had spread out across the stars. They had looked everywhere for other intelligent alien species, across thousands of planets. They’d never found anything brighter than an insect. For generations scientists and philosophers had debated why that was so. Now Lanoe knew the answer.

  It had been a terrible, stupid mistake, played out on a cosmic scale.

  The aliens that attacked Niraya had never intended to kill anyone. They’d sent out a fleet of robotic ships to prepare new planets for them, to make them over into places where the aliens could live. The fleet had even been given instructions to make contact with any intelligent species it happened across during its mission.

  Unfortunately, the fleet’s alien masters hadn’t considered that intelligent life might not look exactly like they did. They had evolved on a gas giant world, and they looked like twenty-five-meter-wide jellyfish. The fleet had discovered countless species of life but, unable to communicate with them, unable to understand even what they were, it had instead identified them as vermin. Vermin that might interfere with its terraforming mission.

  Vermin that needed to be eradicated.

  The aliens had written some incomplete code, that was all. They had failed to make their terraforming fleet smart enough. As a result, every intelligent species their drones had encountered in the galaxy had been wiped out. Humanity had been next on the list.

  “They tried to kill every living thing on Niraya,” Lanoe said. “We made sure that didn’t happen. We also found out there are other fleets out there. A lot of them. They move slow—these aliens never figured out how to use wormholes, so when they spread from star to star they have to take the long way round. That’s probably the only reason we didn’t meet them until now.”

  “But it won’t be the last time,” Valk said. “They’ll find other human planets, and try to kill the people there, too. Unless somebody stops them.”

  Candless inhaled sharply. “That’s what the two of you are trying to do, obviously—stop them. I suppose I approve. What’s your next step?”

  “We were headed for the Admiralty. We have information we need to get to the Admirals as soon as possible. If we’re going to take the fight to these aliens, we can’t do it alone. We need help from Earth. The aliens live closer to the center of the galaxy—ten thousand light-years from here.”

  “That’s rather a long way to go. Even for a noble cause. Why head there in person? Why not just send them a message?”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t that simple.”

  Candless pursed her lips. “Lanoe, with you nothing ever is. Tell me why.”

  There had been a time when Lanoe trusted his superiors implicitly. Admirals gave him orders and he followed them to the letter. There’d been a time when he truly believed that Earth and its Navy were on the right course, that the stewardship of all humanity depended on the triple-headed eagle.

  Then he’d lived too long. Seen too much of history.

  “You know as well as I do that half the Navy is in the pocket of one poly or another. If I just turn the information I have over to the Navy, if it gets to the wrong person first, it might just disappear. The polys own half of the admirals, and could probably buy the rest of them tomorrow if they needed to. Polys have deep pockets. So I have to keep this mission discreet. Even an encrypted message could be intercepted, decoded. If I can get to the Admiralty unobserved, well, there are still a few people there I think I can trust. People who I know will take this information seriously, who will actually do something with it.”

  Candless frowned. “I will … concede that some of your paranoia is justified. The Admiralty isn’t the incorruptible cadre it used to be. Very well, then—I have a solution. Give me the information and I’ll take it to whomsoever you choose. I’m just an instructor from a far-flung flight school. No one has any reason to suspect me.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. There was one flaw in it, though. Lanoe didn’t want to have to explain to her that the information was locked up inside Valk’s head. That might mean explaining what Valk was, and he couldn’t do that.

  “This is too important,” he told Candless. “Somebody—someone very close to me died so we could get this. If her death is going to mean anything, I need to personally hand this over to an admiral I can trust. After that it’s out of my hands. But until then, it’s my responsibility. Mine, personally.”

  Candless got up and grabbed her gloves. “Very well. But you came to me for help, so I assume you trust me a little. What do you want from me?”

  “I just need an escort, that’s all. Someone to fly with us, and watch our backs until we can get to the Admiralty safely. Will you do it?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I will,” Candless said, as if he’d asked to borrow a piece of razor paper. Well, they had been squaddies, once. Watching each other’s backs was ingrained pretty deeply in their relationship. “The fighter I use for training exercises will do, I think. It’s fully armed and I can have it fueled up right away. Just one difficulty. I’ll need to let my people know that I’m leaving for a few days.”

  “Is that necessary?” Lanoe asked.

  “I’m a teacher, Lanoe. I live by a schedule. I have classes all day tomorrow, and an exam to give the day after that. I can’t just disappear—som
eone will have to substitute for me. Don’t worry. I don’t need to tell anyone where I’m going. I’ll just say I need to take some personal days. Once that’s cleared up, we can leave immediately.”

  Lanoe looked over at Valk, but he already knew. That would suit the giant pilot just fine. The sooner they delivered the information, the sooner Valk was allowed to die.

  Candless moved toward the door, and Lanoe and Valk rose to follow. Before she left the room, though, she turned back to look at him.

  “You were talking about Bettina Zhang, weren’t you? The woman who died so you could have this information.”

  Lanoe frowned. “You never met her,” he said, in a quiet voice.

  “No,” Candless said, “but I felt like I did. Back when you and I were still in touch, you used to talk about her all the time. You said—you told me you were going to marry her. I take it that didn’t—”

  “It didn’t happen,” Lanoe said.

  His face must have given something away, no matter how he tried to control it.

  “I know that look,” Candless said. “Lanoe—I’m so sorry.”

  Lanoe pushed past her to the door.

  “Sure,” he said.

  The road from the field of honor to Rishi’s administrative center was overgrown with lush vegetation. Spindly trees like green fingers locked together overhead, forming a constant tunnel of flickering, shimmering light. The road surface was crisscrossed by roots and creepers. As they drew closer to the barracks Valk saw teams of cadets out on brush-clearing duty, hacking away at the encroaching herbage with machetes, in some places holding it back with flamethrowers.

  “Couldn’t you just have drones do this?” Valk asked. “They could spray defoliant from overhead, or something. Probably be more efficient.”

  “That would mean denying the cadets a chance to get some physical exercise,” Candless told them. “Good for both body and mind. And it makes an excellent punishment detail. I imagine Cadet Bury will be cutting vines for the rest of his time here.” She drove them in a tiny electric cart, with Valk riding backward on a padded seat mounted over the wheels. He had to keep his knees up so his feet didn’t drag in the road.