Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  In the PBMs you learned not to worry about the dead. She switched her display to tactical and saw the local map slathered with green—estimated positions of enemy units, and way too many of them. Her orders had changed, and she grimaced as she saw that the city of Olmstead had been declared a loss. Three days of fighting, with no break in the action, and all for nothing. TG would never be able to hold the city—if they tried to entrench, the Navy would just bomb the place from orbit—but for today, at least, it was No Marines Allowed.

  The good news was that the retreat had already been called. A transport was inbound, coming to lift them out. If they could reach the extraction point.

  Ehta clambered up the basement wall, sticking her head out just a few centimeters to try to get a visual fix on their next objective. Particle fire lanced left and right around her but she ignored it. There—dead ahead, no more than two hundred meters away. The only tall building still standing in the neighborhood. They needed to get to its roof so they could be picked up.

  She ducked back down and looked at her people. They were too busy staying alive to look back. “Get ready to move on my mark,” she told them. Gutierrez, her corporal, nodded and slapped the side of her rifle with one of her massive gloves.

  Overhead, against the reddish sky, Ehta saw the Navy scouts go flashing past, their airfoils changing shape as they raced off to some new adventure. That had to mean they’d broken TG’s air support. It was the best sign she was going to get.

  “Now! Go!” she screamed, and they helped each other climb up out of the basement, even as the enemy opened up with a new salvo of particle fire. Some of her people were smart enough to shoot back. Ehta waved Gutierrez toward the extraction point while she lobbed rounds toward the TG positions. She could just see them over there, half a kilometer away. Poly troops—untrained, unmotivated. So poorly equipped they weren’t even wearing proper suits, just mismatched pieces of plastic armor hastily stenciled with TG’s green Maltese cross.

  Their guns still worked. And there were a hell of a lot more of them than there were marines to go around.

  At least she seemed to be holding them at bay. They stayed behind cover and didn’t rush toward her as she advanced in the direction of the intact tower. They kept up a steady stream of fire but as long as Ehta kept moving, she could pretend like none of them could hit her.

  She grabbed Binah by the arm—he’d started running the wrong way—and shoved him in the direction of the tower. One whole side of the building had been brought down by artillery, so it was easy enough to get inside. Away from enemy fire, for the moment. Inside Gutierrez was crouched in an open stairwell, rifle pointed up toward the higher floors. Ehta waved Mestlez to take point. Fire had gutted the place, leaving long black streaks up the walls. It looked like it might have been a residential building once but it would have been evacuated long ago.

  Which might be why Mestlez freaked out when something moved in the rubble. She opened up with her rifle, glowing craters erupting in a ragged line across one wall, and then there was a shower of sparks and something white and the size of a human head bounced across the floor.

  “Hold your damned fire,” Gutierrez said. Binah grabbed the rifle out of Mestlez’s hands and smacked Mestlez across the side of her helmet with the butt of his own weapon.

  Ehta ran over and put her foot on the head-sized thing. “Nice work, marine,” she said. “You just took out a concierge drone. If the enemy needs somebody to sign for a package they’re going to be out of luck.”

  Binah doubled over with laughter. Anselm shouted for him to shut up.

  “Come on. We need to get to the roof,” Ehta told them.

  “No! Shut up! Shut—can’t you hear that?”

  Ehta swung around to look at Anselm. She couldn’t see his face through his silvered helmet, but his body language indicated he was terrified.

  Then she heard it, too, and understood why. A crackling in her speakers, a wash of static and underneath it a pure tone, so high-pitched she could barely make it out.

  “Earworm!” Gutierrez cried. “Shut down your comms! Shut down your comms!”

  The communications gear in their suits would have already recognized the threat. Ehta checked her wrist display and found that her suit had switched off everything—from tactical feeds to transponders to intra-unit chatter, anything that could pick up an electromagnetic signal, just in case.

  It didn’t matter. By the time you actually heard an earworm it was already too late.

  Dariau Cygnet lived well away from any population centers or agricultural regions, in a house far up the coast. Far from anyone who might bother him. Bullam felt like she was going to visit some enlightened mystic who lived in an uncharted land. She set her yacht down on the nearest municipal pad but she still had to take a drone cart three kilometers just to get within walking distance of his house. She was sweating by the time she arrived.

  The house was built into the side of a mountain that overlooked a deep fjord, a finger of water that jutted well inland from a sea that gently bobbed and plashed, almost perfectly black except where it reflected the house’s lights. At the bottom of the cliff a little dock jutted out into the water. An old man was there, wrapped up tight in a thick coat. He had a minder unrolled on the dock’s railing and it was manifesting three crowded displays that held his attention. He didn’t even look up as her footfalls creaked on the boards of the dock.

  “Hello,” she said. “Hello? I have an appointment to see M. Cygnet. Are you his …?” She struggled to find the right word. Secretary? Security guard? The old man looked like a sailor waiting for his ship to come in.

  He didn’t speak, or even look up. He was lost in his displays.

  Out on the water she could see dozens of tiny boats—toys, none of them longer than her arm. The old man’s displays controlled them as they tacked back and forth across the gently heaving water. As she watched, one of them turned and a miniature gun on its deck discharged, firing a projectile. It crashed through the sails of one of the other boats, knocking it over on its side. Three more of the boats came rushing in to the rescue.

  “His,” the man said, finally. “Yes. I’m his.” There was no real inflection to the words.

  “Should I—? I’m expected, maybe I should just—?”

  “You’re his, too.”

  She leaned against the rail to get a better look at the old man’s face. He didn’t turn away or indicate discomfort as she interfered with his displays. She thought his eyes might be made of glass, there was so little intelligence or life in them.

  Out on the water one of the tiny boats had caught fire. The orange light flickered along the dock’s railing.

  The old man jerked his head to one side. Bullam looked over and saw a flight of stairs heading up to the house.

  She guessed she had her answer.

  Inside the house she passed through a series of quiet rooms where the sound of her own soft shoes touching the floor seemed like a violation. Rooms full of tasteful, elegant furniture, spun wood and real leather, candles in long holders and beautiful wrought ironwork stretching like ivy across the walls. No one came forward to lead her to her destination, nor did the house seem to have any drones to assist her. She’d thought she saw a light on in a room near the back of the house, so she headed in that direction.

  When she found Dariau Cygnet he was sitting alone in a room made of glass, his tail flicking against the back of a long divan.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Bullam hesitated in the doorway. The room beyond looked out over the sea, over dark water crashing against dark rocks. It seemed to hover in the night, as if the doorway opened into thin air. There was a floor ahead of her, she knew that perfectly well. On a conscious level anyway. Yet the room—its walls, its ceiling, its floor—was almost perfectly transparent. The divan and a few end tables seemed to float unsupported by anything. If she took another step, her hindbrain told her, she would fall down into the rocky fjord. She would fall in
to the chilly water far below, be battered by the waves—

  She took the step. The floor supported her weight just fine. It was made of spun carbon, obviously, as hard as diamond but with much greater clarity. Perfectly safe. She hurried across the room toward the divan, trying very hard not to look down. She was not a large woman but she was disproportionately aware of her weight as she made her way across. When she reached the divan she grabbed its arm and she saw her knuckles turn white. She had not yet been asked to sit.

  A sly little smile played across Cygnet’s mouth. “Vertigo can be a useful negotiating tactic. People have trouble lying when their hearts are already pounding. Go ahead and sit. We need to talk.”

  “M. Cygnet,” she said, levering herself into the divan, resisting the urge to tuck her feet under her so they weren’t touching the invisible floor, “I want to begin by saying that—”

  “You let Aleister Lanoe get away.”

  “Yes,” Bullam said. No point in denying it.

  “You got two of our best pilots killed.” Cygnet shrugged.

  “Good people, I’m sure,” she said.

  “One of them was a drug addict. The other one had a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia,” Cygnet told her. “You don’t know all the details of my special project. For a long time now I’ve been worried about the quality of the troops we use. When we have to fight the Navy, we end up sending poorly trained conscripts. Utterly unsuitable people. I’ve been working on changing that. For the last eight years, every time the Navy or the Marines or the Neddies cashier someone—after every court-martial, every disciplinary discharge, every time one of them gets fired, for lack of a better term—I scoop them up. Give them a second chance. If they agree to wear the hexagon, all their sins can be forgiven. On the quiet, of course.”

  “The pilots I sent after Lanoe—”

  “Four of Centrocor’s best,” he said.

  Bullam’s mouth went dry. “If you like, I can have my resignation drafted within the hour.”

  Cygnet watched her face for a long while, perhaps savoring her anguish. Eventually his eyes drifted away and he favored her with a toothy smile. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

  The obscenity made her flinch. People—cultured people—did not use that word anymore.

  “If I fired everyone who ever made a mistake,” Cygnet told her, “I wouldn’t have any employees left. No, M. Bullam. I don’t want you to resign.”

  “Thank you, M. Cygnet, I—”

  “It turns out I have a second chance with your name on it. There’s a very old saying in business,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “That there is no such thing as a crisis that isn’t also an opportunity.”

  “I’ve heard it,” she said. Even to her own ears her voice sounded small and weak. Like the chirping of a mouse.

  “Complete horseshit, of course,” Cygnet swore. He glanced at her, as if trying to determine if his casual profanities were shocking her. She forced herself to fake a flinch, as if she’d never heard the word spoken aloud before. “Though in this case maybe it applies. If you’d succeeded, we could have missed out on something. The Navy scooped Lanoe up on Rishi—right out of our clutches—and took him to Earth. Now he’s headed for a planet called Tuonela. Do you know it?”

  “Not personally,” Bullam said. “It’s a war zone. One of Soltexon’s planets, right? But ThiessGruppe tried to take it from them. The Sector Wardens stepped in to keep the peace, and the Navy—”

  “Is currently pacifying the place,” Cygnet said. “And by all accounts they’re making a real hash of it.”

  “They’ve sent Lanoe there?” Bullam asked, confused. Not least by why she was being told all of this. “I suppose he could be useful—he has a habit of winning wars. But he’s not on their active list. He retired from his commission years ago.”

  “Yes. Which makes me very interested in what he’s up to,” Cygnet told her. “Some kind of secret mission. If we’d captured him at Rishi—and this is where the opportunity comes in—we wouldn’t know about this.”

  “What do we know about his mission?” Bullam asked.

  “I don’t think it will surprise you to learn that we have … friends placed very highly in the Admiralty. People who can do us favors. People who know things. In fact, for the last ten years or so, the Navy hasn’t made any significant move I didn’t know about in advance. Until now.”

  Bullam frowned, because she assumed that was what was expected of her.

  “I couldn’t find out what his orders are. Not the details anyway. He’s doing something so secret, so very, very sensitive, that even some of the admirals are being kept in the dark. That tells me it’s very important. At enormous cost I was able to learn that the Navy is attempting to make an alliance with some other group.”

  “One of the other polys?” she asked.

  “Perhaps. Or maybe there’s a new player on the board. Whoever it is, they’re powerful enough that the Navy—that Earth—is willing to put a lot of resources into making contact with them. Perhaps powerful enough that they could tip the balance. For years we’ve managed to hold on to our planets because the Navy wasn’t big enough to challenge our authority. Believe me, they would crush us, if they could. If the balance of power should change … No more Centrocor.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” Bullam said.

  “No. So as for you, Ashlay—your job hasn’t changed in the slightest. I still want Aleister Lanoe. I want him alive. I need to find out what he’s after. Perhaps we can make a deal with this secret power ourselves. That would be nice. If not, we can at least keep them from allying with the Navy.”

  “I’ll leave at once,” Bullam said. “We’re all in this together.”

  “I’m so very glad to hear that, Ashlay. You know, I’ve always been fond of you. I’ve always thought you had so much potential.”

  “That’s—that’s very gratifying to hear,” she said.

  “I always like an underdog. There were plenty of people who told me you couldn’t do this job. With your disease, and all. They said I was a fool to keep promoting you. I told them that your disease actually made you work harder. It made you more loyal, more dedicated. And more ambitious.”

  Bullam looked down and smiled at her lap. “I won’t fail you,” she said.

  “No, of course not,” Cygnet replied. “Though … perhaps you could use some help.”

  “I’m … sorry?”

  “You did let Lanoe slip through your fingers. Twice. I think maybe this job is too much for you alone. So I’ve asked someone to come by, someone who can help you. Do you see, Ashlay? Do you see how I take care of you?”

  “I’m … I’m …” Someone to help her. Someone to watch her, he meant. Someone to be there to fix things if she botched them. Someone to supervise her. Inside her head, Ashlay Bullam screamed in rage and frustration and shame. Outwardly, she nodded prettily and said, “I’m very grateful.”

  “Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, it’s hell, it’s hell, I’m in hell, I’m in—”

  Ehta could barely hear the screams. Her heart was thundering in her chest, her pulse beating in her temples—she could feel it in her fingertips, she could feel her fingers swelling up, bloating, throbbing to the beat.

  Her boards were all lit up red, warning lights coming on across her comms panel, her weapons panel showing faults everywhere, her thrusters overheating and that was more red lights, collision alarms blaring red red red—

  No. No, damn it. Hell no.

  She felt weightless, felt herself tumbling through infinite space. There was no falling because there was nowhere to fall, no ground to stop her, she would keep falling forever, falling through nothing, through vacuum, through the plane of the galaxy, tumbling, spinning, falling, and she was screaming except—except—except—

  She wasn’t the one screaming, it was—it had to be—

  No. No damn way was she going to let this happen again. She forced herself to suck in a deep breath. She was lying on he
r back, on a floor strewn with rubble. Her helmet was down and she had her fingers dug deep into her ears, painfully deep. She was looking up at a ceiling scorched by some long-past fire.

  Red lights blinked on, one by one, up on that ceiling. Warning chimes sounded. Her communications laser reported nonfunctional. Her PBWs were down. Her airfoils were nonresponsive. Her fuel supply was depleted. Her ammunition reserves were—

  No. “No,” she said, aloud, her voice sounding far away.

  She fought it, fought back from that place, that nightmare place she went to when she slept, even years later. Even years after the last time she’d been in the cockpit of a fighter.

  Ehta had been a pilot, once. A long time ago. She’d been good at it. She’d flown every mission they gave her, often taking back-to-back patrols for weeks straight. She’d spent more time in the cockpit than anywhere else. Over time, little by little, she’d started having bad dreams. Dreams where her fighter broke down around her, her panels and boards lighting up red. Warning chimes ringing just behind her left ear. The dreams had spread to her waking life.

  She couldn’t fly anymore. It was why she’d joined the Marines, so she didn’t have to fly. She wasn’t flying now. She focused on the ceiling, stared hard at it until the red lights faded away.

  The chimes kept sounding. Except it wasn’t the sound she expected. It wasn’t the soft but insistent chime of a collision warning. It was the buzzing, pulsing tone of the earworm.

  She fought her way back to focus. Her vision kept swirling around and her ears were still ringing with the sound, but she could just about make out where she was. It took her a while to make sense of it.

  She wasn’t in the apartment tower anymore. She wasn’t on the front at all—she could see tents all around, see marines running through muddy alleys between lines of low structures.