Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  The cutter’s wing-shaped body bit into the air and the control stick tried to jump out of Maggs’ hand. He held tight, and guided the little ship down through a bank of puffy white cumulus and then brought them in low over the water, banking around to the northwest. Up ahead they could see the leaning towers of Old Seattle sticking up out of the ocean. He brought them in lower and lower still, until they nearly skimmed the tops of the waves, then cut his speed as the skeletonized towers loomed up above them. He slowed way down until he could maneuver between the buildings, following the sunken city blocks, dodging piles of debris that hadn’t been cleared away in all the years since the end of the war.

  A couple of quick S-turns to lose even more speed and they were ready to land. There was no pad waiting for them, of course, but the cutter was designed for clandestine work and its makers had built it to perch on any level patch of ground no bigger than half its wingspan. Maggs put them down with a perfect three-point landing on top of what had, a very long time ago, been the roof of a parking structure. Now it was just a square of concrete lashed by spume.

  He powered down the engines and unbuckled his straps.

  “All ashore,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  The two of them changed into civilian clothes. Lanoe always felt naked when he wasn’t wearing his suit—there had been years, maybe whole decades when he’d never taken it off—but he understood the need. Naval personnel were rare on the surface of Earth, rare enough that anyone who saw them would be likely to take note. The brown jackets and trousers they put on didn’t exactly fit properly but they wouldn’t draw any stares.

  As they exited the cutter, he was a little surprised to find that it had changed color, taking on a grayish-beige tone to match the eroded concrete it sat on. “Chromatophoric fibers woven into the stealth coating,” Maggs explained. “Not quite invisibility, of course—it still leaves a ruddy inconvenient shadow. Still, anyone watching from orbit would have to know exactly what they were looking for to spot it. Come on. This way.”

  Maggs balanced himself with his arms out as they crossed a fallen girder that formed a makeshift bridge between the submerged parking structure and the next building over, which looked surprisingly intact. The two of them crawled through a window into a dark space with a slanting floor. This must have been an office building once, Lanoe thought, though time and looters and natural decay had emptied it of anything but debris. Tiny crabs clung to rusted columns, or scuttled across the muddy floor. Lanoe tried not to step on them.

  Together they picked their way through the building to where windows looked out over a narrow stretch of the sea. Yellow-white foam piled up against the sides of buildings on the far side—towers hundreds of meters tall poking up from the water at odd angles, their windows all smashed out long ago, their colors ground to earth tones by the wind and the salt water. Rust and crumbling concrete, exposed twists of rebar and dangling lengths of cable that connected to nothing now.

  Yet there was a smell on the wind, a smell that didn’t fit the place. The smell of cooking food. Brussels sprouts, he thought, and frying fish. Lanoe scanned the gaping windows across the water and caught glimpses of motion, the occasional flash of light. And there, ten stories above the water—a rope stretched between two tower blocks, with laundry pinned up to dry in the upper air.

  “Hellfire,” he said.

  Maggs turned to look at him through the gloom.

  “People live here?” Lanoe asked.

  Maggs leaned out over the water to take a look. “There are twelve billion people on Earth,” he said. “Most of them as poor as little mice. They live anywhere there’s space. Still, this place is as close as anyone’s going to get to privacy.”

  They came to a door that looked like it had long ago fused into its jamb, particle board stripped of its veneer and stained with mold. Maggs knocked on its surface, looking as if he was loath to touch something so filthy. The door slid back into the wall without a sound.

  The two of them stepped into a dimly lit room beyond. There were no windows or other doors and it stank of mildew, but clean tarps had been laid across the floor. Cables ran here and there, connecting various pieces of equipment Lanoe barely recognized. Mostly communications gear, he thought.

  A young woman stepped out of the shadows to greet them. “Sorry about the conditions,” she said. “Necessary, I’m afraid.” She looked like she might be eighteen years old and she had sharp features under a massive cloud of dark hair. She wore a sage green shirt and tight fawn trousers. No insignia or ornament. The only thing that gave away her identity was the fact that her hands were tattooed, tiny black stars and galaxies from the tips of her fingers all the way up to her wrists.

  Lanoe knew those tattoos. The body, the face were completely different. The hands themselves were smaller now, the fingers more slender. The tattoos, though—he’d seen hands with those tattoos back in the Century War. They’d gripped a railing in the vehicle bay of a Hipparchus-class carrier as equipment had exploded behind her. Ships torn half-apart by enemy fire came screeching in to land on either side. Sparks bursting all around, red emergency lights flickering—and the owner of those tattoos had laughed. Laughed out loud and told the pilots arrayed before her that they were one good push from victory.

  And she’d been right. That had been less than an hour before Lanoe and his wing broke through a cordon of the Argyre Regulars and won the battle of 63 Ausonia. They’d lost the carrier, but won the battle. And ultimately, the war.

  In the Navy you didn’t salute your superior officers. If your helmet was up it would be impossible, and in microgravity conditions you tended to need your hands free. Typically a quick nod was all that was required.

  Lanoe inclined his head.

  “Admiral Varma,” he said.

  “At ease, Commander.” The girl looked up at Maggs. She was a good twenty-five centimeters shorter than either of the pilots. “Lieutenant, maybe you could go take a look around. My devices here screen out most forms of surveillance, but they can’t stop anyone from listening in the old-fashioned way. With their ears, I mean.”

  “I’ll endeavor to do my best, Fleet Admiral,” Maggs said, using Varma’s full rank. The highest rank there was.

  The Navy was commanded, at its top level, by a Strategy Council—the six highest-ranking admirals of the Naval Expeditionary Force, plus one general each from the Planetary Brigade Marines and the Naval Engineering Division. Theoretically every member of the Council was equal in standing. Fleet Admiral Varma, however, was the only one of them old enough to have served in the Century War. She had commendations on her service record that they didn’t give out anymore. She chaired the Council and set its agenda.

  This woman was, for all intents and purposes, the commanding officer of the whole Navy and all its branches. Maggs didn’t waste a microsecond in obeying her order.

  Varma closed the door behind him.

  “Good,” she said. “Now we can talk.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, so let’s get it out of the way. No, I didn’t body-swap,” Varma told him. “That’s illegal, of course. This is a new thing, a new—procedure. Full genetic rejuvenation. Like a butterfly climbing into a cocoon and coming out a caterpillar. Believe it or not, this is what I looked like as a child.”

  Lanoe didn’t deny that he’d wondered. Varma was one of the few people he knew who were actually older than he was. People who lived that long tended to find one way or another—legal or otherwise—to get a new body. He knew even he was going to have to do it, eventually. At three hundred years old, his knees were starting to give out and he woke up every morning feeling like hell. He supposed he didn’t blame Varma for wanting to stay young and active.

  “Sit down,” she said. She dragged two folding chairs into the middle of the room. “I can’t offer much in the way of hospitality,” she told him. “I have some water.” She dug into a cooler and brought out a plastic bottle. “Hmm? Here, take it.”

 
; Ah. There was a problem, there. “With all due respect,” Lanoe said, “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  Varma sighed. “Why the hell not? Lanoe, just speak candidly. We don’t have time for protocol. I have meetings to get to.”

  Lanoe took a deep breath. He’d been trying to get to the Admiralty, to give Valk’s information to people he trusted. Admiral Varma wasn’t on that list. Not that he had any reason to suspect her of being paid off by Centrocor or one of the polys—he just didn’t know where her allegiances lay. Technically she should be incorruptible. She answered only to the Sector Wardens and the International League, who together comprised the elected government of Earth. Centrocor shouldn’t be able to corrupt people like that. And yes, he’d served under her before, and done so with pride.

  But that was a very long time ago.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Your people—Lieutenant Maggs, that is—abducted me by force and dragged me across fifty light-years without even telling me why. You and I go back a long way, but … I still don’t know what’s going on. I thought at first I was going to be executed. Now I assume that isn’t the case, but I’m still unsure what’s going to happen to me. If that water is drugged, or—”

  Varma squinted at him as if he’d just accused her of stealing from the Navy’s petty cash fund. “Abducted,” she said. “We probably saved your bloody life. Centrocor has been trying to grab you since you left Niraya. Did you think they were going to offer you a cushy job? They’re planning to torture you for information. They won’t care what’s left of you after they get it. You say we dragged you here, but I’ll remind you that you serve at the pleasure of the three-headed eagle, Commander. I needed to talk to you, so I summoned you. As for keeping you in the dark, the Navy has a right to keep secrets, doesn’t it?”

  “As you say, ma’am,” Lanoe said. He found he was standing at attention, with his hands behind his back. He forced himself to sit down in the chair she’d offered him.

  “You were brought to Earth because I have to be here,” Varma said. “I’ve been in briefing sessions for the last two days. I had to talk to each of the Sector Wardens individually, because they refuse to actually be in the same room with each other. Then I had to run down the whole thing with the International League. Every blasted governing body on Earth wants a piece of my time. You don’t want my damned water, suit yourself. But don’t take that tone with me.”

  Lanoe brought his chin up. He’d been chewed out by admirals before, and he knew the drill. You stood there and took what was coming to you.

  Damned Maggs. The fool had been sent to bring Lanoe to a meeting—and in the process he’d blown off a cadet’s hand and scared the devil out of everyone on Rishi. He’d probably done it all just to see Lanoe squirm.

  “You’re not a prisoner,” Varma said, her tone softening, though not much. “You are, however, under my command. And you know why you’re here.”

  “Niraya,” Lanoe said.

  “Aliens,” the Admiral corrected. She took a minder from her pocket and unrolled it across her knees. Text scrolled up the display, but he couldn’t read it from where he sat.

  “Aliens,” he agreed. “They call themselves the Blue-Blue-White. They look a little like jellyfish, and they live in the atmospheres of gas giant planets. In fact—”

  “I know all of this,” Varma told him.

  “You do?”

  “We scooped up your pet AI, the same time we got you.”

  Valk. They had gotten Valk’s information. So much for keeping it in the right hands.

  “We pulled a lot of information off of it, Commander,” Varma said. She looked down at one of several minders that lay open around her chair. “A lot of very interesting information. Your machine was able to communicate with the drone fleet, when nobody else could. It spoke to them. Learned all about them. Even got a picture of what they look like.” She brought up an image of one of the Blue-Blue-White on her minder. Lanoe saw the orange, globular body, the hanging tentacles. “Fascinating. About half a billion years ago they sent out one fleet of drones, and that fleet made copies of itself—oh, that’s interesting. It looks like there could be millions of those fleets out there now, spread throughout the galaxy. Deeply interesting. I have one burning question to ask you.”

  “Ma’am,” Lanoe said. He knew what was coming.

  “Why in the name of all of hell’s chapels didn’t I know this already?” she asked.

  Lanoe knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.

  “When you left Niraya, our ships were already there studying the wreckage you left behind. Learning everything they could about these aliens. Rear Admiral Wallys has been working for months sifting through every bit of data, every blasted-up piece of alien technology that remains. He sends me an update every time he learns something new. Yet I didn’t know what the aliens looked like. I didn’t know there were other fleets—until we brought you in. For some reason you didn’t feel you could share this data with him.”

  Lanoe made a point of not looking away as she stared him down.

  “I have everything now, Commander. Everything. I have a recording here of you talking to the AI, after the battle. The AI requested to be dismantled, which is admirable of it—and the correct response. You know how strict the law is concerning AIs. You know we cannot allow them to run free. Yet when the AI asked to be shut down, you said no. You refused its perfectly legal request. Would you like me to tell you the exact words you used, Lanoe? I can read them back to you.”

  “No need, ma’am,” Lanoe said.

  She was still staring at him. Waiting.

  “I said,” he told her, “that I intended to use the information he’d gathered. That I planned on going to find the Blue-Blue-White and make them shut down the drone fleets. Failing that, I intended to make them pay for what they’d done.”

  Varma nodded. She picked up one of her minders and studied its display.

  She was silent so long he found he couldn’t resist saying more. “Ma’am. I chose not to share this information with Rear Admiral Wallys because I—”

  “Because you didn’t trust him to use it the way you want it to be used,” she interrupted.

  It was a fair assessment.

  “I know his reputation,” Varma said. “He’s spent half his career chasing aliens without ever finding a shred of evidence. Until now. That’s made him something of a laughingstock.” She shrugged. “I’ll admit when he first reported to me about Niraya, I assumed he was full of bosh. That he had found some ancient fossil that might, if you squinted, resemble an alien. I discounted what he said, at first.”

  “Ma’am, there are a lot of vested interests who wanted the information I had,” Lanoe pointed out. “Centrocor, for one. I’m sure they’ve already figured out a way to make a profit off of it. There are others who—”

  “Enough,” she said. “You realize that failing to turn over this information could be seen as a traitorous act? That you could face disciplinary charges with penalties including, but not limited to, summary execution?”

  Lanoe was a tough old bastard but he couldn’t help but feel a chill run down his spine when she said that.

  “You’ve put the entire human race at risk,” Varma told him. “Care to explain why?”

  “Ma’am—this information is important. It can’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. There may never have been a more important moment in human history. You’ve seen Valk’s files. You know his theory, then. About why we’ve never met aliens before, despite spending centuries looking for them. He thinks there aren’t any others. That there were, once, but the Blue-Blue-White’s drones killed every single one of them. That we’re only here now because they hadn’t gotten around to exterminating us yet.”

  Varma set her minder down. Took a long drink of water.

  “What they’ve done—what they’re still doing—is unforgivable. It cannot be allowed to go on. What they did—”

  “They killed Lieutenant Bettina Zhang,” Varma s
aid.

  Lanoe opened his mouth, intending to say something more. Anything more. And found he couldn’t get a word out.

  “She fought by your side, at Niraya. She died in the final battle. She gave her life to save the planet,” Varma went on. “They killed her. That’s what’s really inexcusable, isn’t it?”

  He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.

  “The woman you loved. The woman you had proposed to.” She checked her minder. “On at least a dozen different occasions.”

  “This isn’t … this isn’t about—”

  “It’s not just about Zhang,” the Fleet Admiral said. She nodded in understanding. “Not all of it. I know you, Lanoe. I know that you’re tough as nails, but underneath you do actually care. That you’re a good man. You want revenge for all those poor dead aliens you’re never going to meet. In some abstract fashion, you think you’re after justice on their behalf. It’s not,” she said, repeating herself, “just about Zhang.”

  It took every ounce of strength Lanoe had to lift his chin. To meet Varma’s gaze. “Taking the fight to these aliens,” he said, “is the right thing to do.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  Lanoe set his mouth in a hard line. Refusing to show the slightest emotion.

  “Perhaps it is. But that’s not your choice to make.”

  “Ma’am, if you’ll forgive me—”

  “Shut up and listen. Those alien drones didn’t attack Niraya. They attacked humanity. Those other fleets are still out there and eventually they’ll attack other human worlds. The response that might be made to this aggression isn’t going to be chosen by one lone commander and his squaddies. It should—and it will—be made by the leaders of humanity. By people like me, and the Sector Wardens, and the International League. Do I make myself clear?”