Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Candless’s eyes flashed, and he knew she didn’t like what he’d just said—but she couldn’t disagree with the facts. Ginger had to fly. There was no other choice.

  Candless waved one hand in the air, putting the point aside. “Of course, there’s one thing you’re forgetting. The ensigns are refusing to work until you tell them all your secrets. I assume that includes not participating in combat operations.”

  “Hellfire,” Lanoe said. “All right. All right!” He did slap the console this time, hard enough to dent it. He grabbed a handhold and twisted around to stare at the displays all around him. Displays that resolutely refused to give him any useful information. “All right.”

  “You’ll tell them what they wish to know?” Candless asked. There was a question in her eyes—a doubt, perhaps, but he didn’t want to engage with that. He had big enough problems already, without worrying if she agreed with his orders or not.

  He needed pilots, damn it. He needed to hold on to his secrets, too—though if Bury knew about the Blue-Blue-White, Lanoe didn’t have many left. He would give them something, a few simple answers to their most pressing questions. If it got him what he needed.

  “Tell them I’ll give them a special briefing. After we fight.”

  Candless nodded. “Very good, sir. That gives you four pilots, three of whom are unknown quantities. That should be enough to hold off a parade float, say, or a wing of unarmed racing yachts. If they send destroyers against us—”

  “I’ve fought destroyers before,” Lanoe told her. “And I’m still alive, which I guess means I’m good at it.”

  “Ahem.”

  Lanoe spun himself around to glare at Maggs. The con artist was curled in a ball near the information officer’s seat, looking quite unassuming.

  “Just wanted to point out,” Maggs said, “that I’ve been known to take the yoke in hand a few times myself.”

  Lanoe glared at him. He couldn’t really be suggesting that they trust him with one of their fighters, could he?

  Well, he was brazen enough to make the offer, Lanoe knew that. And he also knew that Maggs was, frankly, a top-notch pilot, when he actually got around to fighting.

  “Not a damned chance,” Lanoe told him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We should have imaging any moment now, sir,” the carrier’s information officer said.

  Bullam was only on the bridge as an observer. She turned and looked at Shulkin, who was strapped into a chair at the back of the cramped space. The old Captain gripped the arms of his seat with white knuckles, but his face didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge the IO’s statement.

  The bridge of a Hipparchus-class carrier was located deep inside the cylindrical hangar, the most heavily armored and protected part of the giant ship. There were no windows, of course, but a dozen displays blinked and shuffled in front of the pilot, navigation, and information positions. Most of them just showed raw ghostlight, the walls of the wormhole they were traversing. A tactical board lit up and Bullam saw a yellow dot dead ahead of them.

  “There,” the IO said. “Bringing up opticals now.” The display split into four separate images, three of them live video feeds of the space ahead of the carrier, showing nothing Bullam could see. The fourth showed the Hoplite. Lanoe’s Hoplite.

  Still a hundred thousand kilometers away down the wormhole tunnel. On the display it looked close enough to reach out and grab.

  Somewhere on the skin of the carrier, liquid lenses shifted and vibrated. Drops of oil no bigger than Bullam’s thumbnail, held in place and shaped by magnetic fields. The lenses could change their focus millions of times a second, capturing different depths of focus and different wavelengths of light. Data from those images was collated into a single three-dimensional view of the Hoplite, much brighter and more colorful on the display than it would have appeared if Bullam saw it with her naked eye.

  “Engines cold,” the IO called out. “Weapons cold. No running lights … it looks dead, sir. As expected.”

  “The vehicle bay?” someone asked. Bullam swiveled around and saw it was the navigator who’d spoken. Not Shulkin.

  “Blast panels are down,” the IO said. Even Bullam could see that much, from the image on the display. “Vehicle bay sealed. Comms—no comms. Not even navigational pings. I see no sign of electronic activity.”

  As far as Bullam could tell it looked like the service package had done its job. Someone onboard must have activated it, someone who no doubt expected to be rewarded—or at least spared—when the rest of the crew was seized by Centrocor. Somebody onboard the cruiser who had a Centrocor ID.

  Big Hexagon did like to have people everywhere in case they might be useful.

  She let herself breathe a little. Just a little, though. “If we caught him off guard,” she breathed, not so loud that anyone would feel like they had to respond. “If this works—”

  “Our pilots report they are ready to launch,” the IO said. “Sir? Should I give the order to proceed?”

  Everyone turned to look at Shulkin. The old man’s face didn’t move. He reached up and scratched at a place on his jawline that he’d missed when he shaved that morning. His eyes were glass beads set into his skull.

  He gave the tiniest of nods.

  Not for the first time, Bullam wondered exactly why Dariau Cygnet had thought that Shulkin was up to this job. She was probably going to have to replace him herself, eventually, and she didn’t know a damned thing about fighting space battles. Still, she figured she could at least stay awake while one was happening.

  The visual display flashed as a pair of scouts launched from the carrier’s hangar. Even up close they looked tiny compared to the Hoplite. These weren’t cataphract-class fighters, but simple carrier scouts—little one-man ships just big enough to hold a thruster and a single PBW cannon. No room for vector fields or even armor. They were cheap and easily replaced but not much use in a real fight. Even Bullam knew that. They would be sufficient to this task, though—they were just supposed to do a close flyby of the Hoplite then return once they’d confirmed it was dead in the water. Once that was done, they could send in a transport full of marines to board the Hoplite and secure Lanoe. Everyone else onboard would have to be killed, of course, but at least Bullam wouldn’t have to see that happen.

  The scouts disappeared into the ghostlight after a few seconds, appearing on the displays only as two blue dots that marked their positions. They moved quickly, closing the distance between the two big ships.

  Shulkin scratched his face again. “Lanoe,” he said. “Lanoe. Lanoe. Lanoe.” Like a machine running through a series of iterations. “Aleister Lanoe?” he asked.

  Bullam stared at him. Had he already forgotten their mission parameters? “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That’s right.” It was like she was talking to an infant. “Aleister Lanoe.”

  Light flared in Shulkin’s eyes. Like someone had lit a candle inside a jack-o’-lantern. “Aleister Lanoe,” he said. “I know that name … I know …”

  The Captain slapped at the quick release of his straps and threw himself across the bridge toward the information officer’s position. He nearly shoved the poor young man out of his seat. Shulkin’s hands lanced out and worked two different virtual keyboards, bringing up dozens of new displays. Imagery of the Hoplite, it looked like, in several different wavelengths of light—Bullam recognized a 3-D X-ray view and an infrared reflectography profile, among others. It happened so fast she didn’t have time to suck in an anxious breath.

  On one of those views, the Hoplite appeared as a colorless, shadowy image. Like a magnetic resonance scan of a human abdomen, maybe. Inside that view was a single red splotch, little more than a stain of crimson, but Shulkin stared at it like he was looking at an image of his own death.

  “Recall the scouts!” he shouted. “Warm up all of our maneuvering and retro thrusters—we need to be moving already. Pilot—get on it or I’ll shoot you and take your position myself!”

  “What’s
happening?” Bullam demanded. “What’s going on?”

  A green pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. An incoming message—he flicked his eye across it to acknowledge. “Seventy-five hundred kilometers, on approach,” Candless said, over a comms laser. There would be no way for Centrocor to intercept the transmission. “Two vehicles. They appear to be carrier scouts.”

  She was only a few meters away to his left, in the cockpit of a BR.9 just like his own. Both of them perched on the Hoplite’s nose like seabirds on a rock. He could have looked over and seen her lips moving in the ghostlight, if he wanted to.

  On the other side of her, Bury and Ginger waited in their own fighters. The kids had protested—and Ginger had turned a bad shade of green—when he insisted they join his little squad. He had been an officer long enough to know how to give orders that people obeyed.

  It had been much harder fighting down his own misgivings about the pilot on his right.

  Over there, Maggs waited patiently in his Z.XIX.

  Right where Lanoe could watch him. He still didn’t trust the scoundrel—how could he, ever again?—but he had grudgingly come to accept that he needed Maggs. Once they’d realized what was pursuing them, a Hipparchus-class carrier with a full complement of small craft, he’d known he needed every pilot he could get.

  And that of course meant leaving Valk on the bridge. Candless wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stomach flying formation with an AI.

  It wasn’t what Lanoe might have hoped for, their little half of a squadron. Five fighters and only one pilot he could truly count on. It was what he had to work with.

  “Any sign they’ve noticed us?” Lanoe asked.

  “It seems unlikely,” Candless told him. “They’re coming in quickly, but on a minimum energy trajectory. I would wager they don’t expect trouble.”

  The five cataphracts were clumped together on the nose of the Hoplite because that was the carrier’s blind spot. It was coming up behind them, straight on, and even its best sensors couldn’t see all the way through the cruiser. With a little luck—no, with a lot of luck—any watchers on the carrier would assume that the service package had done its job, that the crew of the Hoplite was locked inside a dead ship, gasping for breath.

  Lanoe couldn’t communicate with Valk—any communications between the fighters and the cruiser would give away the game. Valk knew the plan, though. If this worked—

  “Five thousand kilometers, on approach,” Candless said. A few moments later: “Four thousand. Thirty-five hundred.”

  Whoever was back there, whoever Centrocor had commanding the carrier, they were smart. They’d sent two expendable ships ahead to test the waters. When those carrier scouts came around the front of the Hoplite, the game would be up. Lanoe intended to hit them hard the instant they came into view, to at least keep them from sending useful information back to the carrier. Then he and his tiny squad would spin around and burn hard, head straight for the enemy’s teeth. They were all carrying disruptor ammunition, heavy explosive missiles that could tear through the carrier’s hull and explode inside its crew spaces. The damage they could do would be apocalyptic—assuming they got their firing solutions just right.

  They had a chance. Of course, the carrier had its own defenses, and a talented commander would keep them from getting such a clean victory as that. There was a very good chance one or more of Lanoe’s squad wasn’t coming back from this.

  It was part of what made them pilots that they were willing to try anyway.

  “Three thousand … Lanoe, they’re slowing down.”

  “Hellfire,” he said, his voice hoarse with stress. “Have they seen us?”

  “I haven’t a clue. But—there,” Candless said. “They’re turning. Heading back.”

  Damnation. They knew.

  Somehow, they knew it was a ruse. That the cruiser wasn’t as dead as it appeared. Lanoe had no idea what had given them away but it didn’t matter. The battle started now, whether he liked it or not.

  He reached for his comms board and jabbed a virtual key, opening a channel to everyone in his squad. “Now!” he shouted. “Move, move, everybody out!”

  He didn’t wait to see them comply. He shoved open his throttle and twisted around on his maneuvering jets, getting his nose clear of the Hoplite and then shooting down its length while his inertial sink pushed him back, hard, into his seat.

  All along the length of the cruiser, lights started blinking back on. Engines and jets and thrusters warmed up, glowing a dull red as Lanoe rocketed past. By the time he passed its tail, the cruiser was already turning, pivoting on its center of gravity. It moved like a sick whale compared to the nimble cataphracts, but it was exactly what he would have ordered Valk to do. Good man, he thought, perfectly aware of the irony.

  The carrier scouts were still three thousand kilometers away. In the dim ghostlight he couldn’t see them even in a light-enhanced view. It didn’t matter—his sensor board brought up a display that marked their positions for him, yellow dots on a three-dimensional computer-generated view. Behind Lanoe, the BR.9’s reactor screamed as he tore through a vacuum, closing the distance.

  “I’ve got the one on the left,” someone called, on the open channel. Bury—Lanoe could see the Hellion’s fighter surge forward, the kid pushing his engine to dangerous levels of output to build up speed.

  “Young man, you will stay in formation!” Candless called.

  “Belay that,” Lanoe told them. “Bury, if you have a shot, take it. Ginger, you’re falling behind.”

  “Don’t be afraid to use your engines,” Candless told the young woman.

  “Acknowledged,” Ginger said, sounding embarrassed. She’d been trailing back, as if she could somehow avoid this fight by being in the back of the formation. Lanoe started to wonder if she would even be an asset in it.

  He supposed he would just have to give her a chance, and see.

  The carrier scouts didn’t even try to engage. Their pilots knew they had no chance in an open fight. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Their tiny craft lacked the vector fields that would protect them from the worst of the cataphracts’ fire. They were straining their own engines, just trying to get away. “Don’t let them escape,” Lanoe called. “Make sure they—”

  “The other one,” Maggs said, breaking in. “The one on the right.” The four PBW cannon on his Z.XIX discharged, bright streaks of charged particles cutting across the vacuum, perfectly straight like lines on a display. They converged on a point in the far distance.

  On Lanoe’s tactical board one of the two yellow dots blinked out.

  He scowled at the display. The Z.XIX was an advanced fighter design, its weapons systems were the best the Navy could field, but still …

  “That was an impressive shot,” Candless said, sounding guarded.

  “What can I say? I’ve always been lucky,” Maggs told her.

  “Engaging!” Bury shouted, loud enough to hurt Lanoe’s ear and make him, for the moment at least, forget that he’d just seen Maggs snipe an enemy at an impossible distance. Up ahead, he could just make out the blue flare of Bury’s engine, and then a tiny double flash as the Hellion fired his cannon.

  A moment later the second yellow dot disappeared, clearing Lanoe’s tactical board.

  “Good,” Candless said. “Now get back here and—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Maggs said, using an archaic expression Lanoe barely remembered from his youth—long before Maggs had been born. “If I may kindly direct your attention to the larger issue.”

  “What are you yammering about?” Lanoe demanded.

  It was Candless who responded, however. “We’re just now getting decent imagery from the carrier, Commander.”

  Lanoe swiped to bring up his sensor board. He saw it, even before she told him what he was looking at.

  “The carrier,” she said, “is scrambling its fighters. Its entire complement.”

  On the sensor board, yellow lights started flash
ing into existence—two, then four, then eight of them. Then sixteen.

  “Spread out—don’t let them clump you,” Shulkin said, his words being carried straight to the cockpits of the carrier’s fighters. “He’s smarter than you. Do not let him think, don’t let him get clever. Keep him busy with withering fire—make him dance. Distract him.”

  He lunged across the bridge, jabbing a gloved finger at a display hovering before the information officer. The crew had to push back, out of his way. “Any change—any change at all in the thermal profile there, you say something. Don’t ask for my permission, damn you.”

  A tactical display filled most of the bridge, arms and legs breaking through it even as it changed second by second, yellow dots growing thick clouds as numbers and data strings surrounded them. The IO was busy trying to figure out which of the enemy fighters was being operated by Aleister Lanoe, mostly by analyzing how it flew—how efficiently its engines were being used, the flatness of the craft’s trajectory, even the occasional stutter of its jets as the pilot’s hand trembled on the control yoke. These tiny datasets were being compared to known examples of Lanoe’s piloting—videos of some of his more famous battles, records drawn from his after-action reports. All very secret stuff that Centrocor had stolen from the Admiralty’s databases back when it became clear that Lanoe was a real threat.

  It was vitally important that the carrier’s pilots not accidentally kill Lanoe in the middle of what was looking to be a pitched battle. Bullam needed him alive, so he could be interrogated. Horribly maimed and burned was fine, but alive.

  “You can rule out this one,” Shulkin said, swatting at one of the yellow points of light as if it were a pesky insect. “The one that killed our carrier scout. Lanoe would never run ahead of the pack like that, he knows better.”

  “You know him,” Bullam said. “You have some connection with Lanoe. From back in your Navy days.”

  The Captain spun around in midair to glare at her. “The civilian observer,” he said, “is asked to be silent while we carry out military operations.”