Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Yeah,” Valk said. “We’re in wormspace. Can’t you feel it?” When she just gave him a blank look, he said, “Gravity’s different in wormspace. Kind of, you know, wrong. It points in the wrong direction.”

  Candless frowned. She knew, or rather, she had read, that wormholes were formed of exotic matter with negative mass. Such material would repel matter rather than attract it. She had to assume that was what he meant. She had never felt any kind of sensation of gravity at all when in a wormhole, and she’d flown through her fair share.

  She flashed back on a moment just before the duel when he had told her that her heart wasn’t beating as fast as he expected. At the time she’d been too distracted to wonder how he could know that. She knew better, of course, than to ask him how he seemed to have more senses than other human beings. Not at that moment, anyway, in the Hoplite’s brig.

  There were other things she could ask, though. “Did you see anyone else, while they were questioning you, or when they moved you? This could be important. Did you see Cadet Marris?”

  “What, the girl with the gun? No, sorry,” Valk told her. “Nobody but marines.”

  Candless nodded. She hadn’t expected anything else, but she would very much like to know what the Navy had done with Marris. Hopefully they’d at least given her medical treatment for her severed hand. As the girl’s instructor, Candless had a responsibility for her safety.

  “Did you catch any of their names? The marines, I mean. Ping any of their cryptabs?”

  “No. Sorry,” he told her.

  “Do you have any idea where they’re taking us?” she asked next. If they were in wormspace that meant they were being transported to another planet, or to another Navy facility, surely.

  “No idea,” Valk said.

  Ginger came forward and touched his arm. Valk was a giant, well over two meters tall, and very broad through the shoulders. He towered over the cadet. She didn’t seem intimidated by him, not anymore.

  “What are they going to do to us?” she asked.

  Valk’s shoulders fell, and he tilted his head forward.

  Candless could understand that gesture perfectly well.

  “I don’t know,” Valk said.

  As the car slipped through the dark streets of Regenstadt, Bullam watched the puddles outside its windows glow with reflected purple light. Eventually they tinged with yellow, and she knew she was getting close to the Mountain.

  Back when Irkalla was first discovered, when it was still being terraformed, the Mountain had been constructed simply as a shed to contain the equipment and supplies necessary to create a world where humans could live. A full kilometer wide and nearly as tall, roughly pyramidal in shape, it had been left in place when terraforming operations concluded, simply because it would be next to impossible to tear it down. It was constructed of an elaborate meshwork of stabilized steel girders filled in with panes of rigid carbonglas. It would last for thousands of years, even in the constant wind and rain of Irkalla. Time had not so much as stained its shining sides.

  When the colonists arrived they’d faced a certain difficulty. Irkalla needed its mantle of clouds to protect it from solar storms and to keep the planet warm. Yet human bodies and human minds were never meant to thrive on a world shrouded by eternal night. People needed a little sunshine.

  For a time, the Mountain had provided for that need.

  Carbonglas was wonderful stuff. Hard as diamond, but with a flexible quantum dot structure that responded to electrical stimulation. In one configuration it became flowglas, the stuff space suit helmets and ship canopies were made of. Flowglas both melted and froze at room temperature, changing its shape as needed. Another variety of carbonglas could change its index of refraction, turning blacker than space or perfectly transparent or reflective as a mirror at the flip of a switch. A third type could be made to give off light in any chosen wavelength. The colonists had programmed the Mountain to shed an eternal glow the exact color and intensity as the light that fell on a sunny meadow back on Earth. It cast this kindly light over the city like a beacon, while inside the hollow interior of the Mountain, the very air was suffused with that perfect radiance.

  The colonists had filled the Mountain with trees and flowers and all the plants of Earth. A little paradise, hidden inside a glass shell. They would come there daily, taking turns to wander its meandering paths, to sit and talk in open-air cafés, or to simply lie on lush grass and soak up the light.

  Of course, it couldn’t last. The economy of Irkalla had collapsed just a few decades after the end of the Century War, just as it had on so many planets. The whole reason for building a colony on Irkalla in the first place had been to provide necessary resources for rebuilding Earth after the war—a relatively short-term project—and when Irkalla’s stores of rare earths and actinides were no longer required the money had stopped flowing. Irkalla had been forced to take austerity measures that were still in effect nearly two centuries later. The Mountain itself had to be given up—it was just too expensive to maintain.

  As usual Centrocor had been there to save the day. The poly had installed the purple floodlights that loomed over every street in Regenstadt, to keep the colonists healthy at a fraction of the price it cost to keep the Mountain up and running. Still, for years afterward, as the colonists adjusted to the new lighting scheme, they had looked up to the horizon to see the skeletal form of the Mountain, its glass turned to a dull transparency, and seen it as a symbol of an idyll lost. A monument to stagnation.

  It was only in recent years, as the economy had begun its long, slow recovery, that Centrocor had reopened the Mountain for occasional special events. Events that were only ever attended by Centrocor employees. At least the people of the city could enjoy its lemon light from afar.

  The car’s windows dimmed as the light grew intense enough to hurt Bullam’s dark-adapted eyes. The car slid in through one of the Mountain’s many broad entrance bays, then drew to a stop to let her out. A servant in red livery offered her a hand and she blinked her way past the registration desk. Inside, in the complicated halls and galleries of the Mountain, a party was in full swing. She could hear three different genres of music competing for attention, and underneath it the oceanic roar of hundreds of conversations. From a distance she heard someone laugh, a high-pitched nasal snort.

  Her drones swept after her in train as she made her way through a garden of stunted apple trees, none of them taller than her waist. Their fruit, the size of grapes, lay rotting on the grass around them. Servants bustled toward her with trays full of champagne flutes or complicated-looking pastries, but she held up one hand and they spun away from her without a word.

  She wasn’t here for fun.

  The man she’d come to see would, of course, be in the most central of the Mountain’s halls, a cavernous space with a ceiling so high it looked blue like a summer sky. Around the sides of the giant room stood machines like colossal pipe organs—devices that had been grown rather than constructed, so they had an unsettling organic appearance. Some of them looked downright rude, like the genitals of demigods. Once those machines had pumped out the oxygen that bolstered Irkalla’s atmosphere. Now they had been left to rot away in silence. An effort had been made to drape them in rich tapestries of gold and blue, all of them showing fractal derivations of the hexagonal Centrocor logo. The tapestries weren’t big enough to cover much, though, and they just looked like the fig leaves on ancient statues.

  People filled the hall, Centrocor employees dressed in lace and silk. The men wore hose and short jackets, the women dresses of fanciful design, with enormous puffy sleeves and constellations of jewels in their piled hair. It was required by employee regulations to show some form of the hexagon on one’s dress at an official function like this, but it had become fashionable to hide the logo as much as possible. It was a sort of game, where the wearer of a given outfit would dare you to find their hexagon. It could be worked into the subtle laddering of a man’s hose, or a woman’s dress c
ould be lined on the inside with bold, colorful hexagons that she would only show once she’d had a few drinks. Bullam, who spent most of her time away from Irkalla, had hardly bothered to disguise her own hexagons, which were picked out in gold thread on a ribbon that tied up her hair. She got a few snooty glances as she worked her way through the crowd but not many—she had a higher spot in the org chart than most of these people and could afford to be a little severe in how she presented herself.

  The higher up you were on the ladder, the more you could afford to ignore the silly games and constant displays of status. The man she’d come to see, for instance, was a member of the Board of Directors, one of the six most powerful people in the entire Centrocor power structure. As a result he was easy to spot. He wore a dark fur-lined coat over an open shirt and baggy tweed trousers, like a crow hiding in a troop of peacocks. Even worse, he’d defied social convention—and the general consensus of good taste—by having a prehensile tail grafted to the end of his spine. At the moment, it was holding his martini glass, its round pale tip curled outward like a pinky finger.

  “Ashlay,” he said, before she’d even managed to worm her way into his orbit. He lifted a hand and beckoned her. “Ashlay, over this way,” he said, as if she couldn’t see him. She elbowed her way through a knot of young women with white-painted faces and smiled as she reached the patch of grass where he stood.

  “M. Cygnet,” she said, and took the hand he offered. She bowed her forehead over his fingers, then released them. “I got back just in time, it seems. So glad I didn’t have to miss your party.”

  She had in fact nearly killed herself returning to Irkalla in time for this event, which had been scheduled months in advance. She’d known she would actually get some face time with Dariau Cygnet here—trying to make an appointment to see him in his office would have been impossible, and the things she needed to talk to him about could not be put into any kind of electronic message.

  This, of course, was another kind of game. The top level of Centrocor employees might not try to outdress each other—instead they showed status by being as unavailable as possible, even when fortunes and careers were at stake.

  “It’s for charity,” he told her. “We need to build a new orphanage. I’m counting on you here, Ashlay—for a contribution, I mean. We’re all in this together.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll have one of my drones see to it immediately.”

  “Oh, there’s no rush. And I’m being rude. I heard you weren’t feeling well. Your disease,” he said, and lifted his tail to take a sip of his drink. It made his coat flap open in an unattractive way, but he didn’t seem to care. “Was it bad this time?”

  Before she could answer a woman wrapped in a fiercely brocaded blanket came up and kissed him on the cheek. He turned his face toward her and gave her a wink. She whirled away, giggling. Bullam didn’t even want to know what that was about.

  “It was nothing serious,” she said. “I just needed a quick treatment, and—”

  She stopped because just then a drone came zipping down from on high, green lights flashing on its face. Some urgent message for the Director, one that couldn’t wait.

  Cygnet dipped his fingers in his glass, then flicked liquor at the drone. A man with fluorescent red hair rushed through the crowd, pulling off his jacket. He flung the garment over the drone with a flourish, and the blinded machine twisted and swooped up over the crowd, bucking wildly as it tried to free itself. Cygnet laughed and clapped his hands together, and the red-haired man took a bow.

  “Uilliam,” Cygnet said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder, “that was well done. Tell me, have you met Ashlay here? She’s one of my best people. Best people. She has EDS; do you know what that is?”

  “Never heard of it,” the redhead said, staring at her.

  “It’s a disease so rare nobody ever got around to curing it. Isn’t that just horrible? And now she’s come here to give me some spectacularly bad news.”

  Bullam bit her lip. Cygnet already knew. Of course he did.

  “Bad luck,” Uilliam said. “Maybe we should throw one of these parties to raise money for it.”

  “Now that is a great idea,” Cygnet said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk about it.” The Director smirked like an imp and touched the end of his nose, which Uilliam seemed to find unbearably funny. He nearly fell over from laughing so hard.

  “M. Cygnet,” Bullam said, “I don’t want to impose on your time, but I have some thoughts on how my bad news can be mitigated. It might even be turned into a kind of opportunity.” She was flailing—she had no ideas at all—but this was her only chance to save her job. She tried to keep the desperation off her face.

  “That sounds boring,” Uilliam said.

  Cygnet shrugged. “Sorry, Ashlay. Uilliam here is the cousin of a Sector Warden, did you know that? I have to make sure he stays entertained. Got to keep the wheels of commerce humming, right?”

  Uilliam seemed to think that was very funny, too.

  “Why don’t you go home and get some rest?” Cygnet said. “You look terrible.” Then he grabbed Uilliam by the bicep and dragged him off behind a stand of bonsai trees.

  Bullam, left alone, could hardly believe it. She’d worked so hard. For years she’d worked so hard. She’d taken terrible chances with her health. She’d had to prove over and over again that her disease couldn’t stop her from being good at her job. She’d done things she hated. She’d done things for Centrocor that no person should ever be asked to do.

  And now … and now it was over. She would lose her job. She would lose her access to health care. It would only be a matter of time before her disease caught up with her.

  “Don’t be sad. It’s a party!”

  It was the young woman in the brocaded blanket. She pushed her face very close to Bullam’s and put an arm around her shoulders. Her other hand emerged from inside the blanket, presenting a gold, heart-shaped box. The lid popped open and it played a trite little song. On a velvet pillow inside the box sat five tiny white pills.

  Bullam shoved the woman away from her, sending the pills tumbling to the grass. The woman cried out in terror and dropped to all fours, gathering them up as if they were precious stones. The crowd couldn’t seem to decide if this was shocking or hilarious.

  Bullam headed back toward where she’d left her car. If anyone else had gotten in her way she would have knocked them down, too. Luckily the party thinned out near the exits and she managed to get away without being further disturbed.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She refused to let these people see her do either of those things.

  Sinking into the back of the car, she touched a key to raise the windows and polarize them so she would be hidden from view. Only then did she start to rock back and forth, in anger and fear, and beat on the upholstery with one hand.

  And then—she stopped. She froze in place. She’d caught a glimpse of one of her drones out of the corner of her eye. A pale blue light showed on its face. She nodded at it and a display popped up.

  Her calendar showed a new event. One she hadn’t scheduled. She had a meeting, the display said, in two days’ time at a Centrocor facility sixty kilometers up the coast. A meeting with Dariau Cygnet.

  She checked the log and found that the appointment had been made only a few seconds ago. Cygnet must have wanted to talk to her after all—just not in public.

  The drone’s light blinked to ask if she wanted to confirm the event.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Yes!”

  The pale blue light winked out. The drone had heard her the first time.

  PART II

  TERRESTRIAL

  Chapter Eight

  Lanoe had no idea where they were headed. He didn’t know what would happen to him when they arrived. Maybe he would be quietly executed. Maybe he would be interrogated first.

  No point in worrying about the future, if there wasn’t going to be one. At least he could be well rested before it
happened, he thought. At least he could finally get some sleep. It had been a while.

  In the Navy they taught you how to sleep anywhere, anytime. A pilot could be called upon to scramble at any second, to rush out into a fight in the middle of the night, first thing in the morning. You took what sleep you could get.

  He stilled himself. There was no gravity in the cell, but Lanoe had learned a long time ago how to sleep in the absence of weight. He folded himself into a ball, stilled himself. Closed his eyes.

  Thoughts drifted through him, away from him. He put aside fear, put aside worry. Light filtered in through his eyelids. He blocked it out. He could hear the drone of air being pumped into and out of the cell through the ventilation system. He let that sound pass through him, unnoticed.

  Soon his mind was clear, empty. Soon he was sinking through layers of soft nothingness, falling through limitless space, falling—

  “Lanoe, I’m falling.”

  His eyes snapped open. That voice. That was Zhang’s voice.

  Zhang was dead. Lanoe didn’t believe in ghosts. It was just his subconscious playing tricks on him. Reminding him of the one thing he could never forget.

  Zhang—the woman he’d loved—had fought with him at Niraya. In the final battle against the alien queenship, her fighter had taken damage, had been half-destroyed, but she’d survived. Her engines had been wrecked, but even then he could have saved her. He could have—

  “I’m falling,” she whispered.

  Lanoe gritted his teeth.

  Zhang had been caught in the gravity well of an ice-giant planet. She hadn’t been able to escape its pull. She’d fallen into its atmosphere and been carried down into its depths, into the crushing pressure and heat at the center of a world without a surface. She had just disappeared from view, in a place where he couldn’t even recover her body.