Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Bullam held up both hands for peace. When Shulkin failed to stop staring at her, she mimed swiping at her mouth as if she were dismissing a comms display. He didn’t nod, but he turned back to face the pilot and the IO.

  The transformation in him was remarkable. When she’d first met Shulkin, Bullam had thought him little more than a zombie, that the Navy’s treatment for his suicidal compulsions had left him more dead than alive. She’d seen a touch of fire in him back at Tuonela, when he killed one of the ThiessGruppe men for her.

  That had been nothing like this.

  Every muscle in his body was strained now, as tight as the strings of a violin. His eyes, once just glass balls lodged in his protuberant skull, were clear and sharp and white, bright with the heat of intention. He moved in quick, jerky gestures, like someone who’d had too many tablets of caff. Had his skeleton torn its way out of his skin and danced around the room with a wild abandon, she would not have been terribly surprised.

  Clearly Shulkin had been reduced, cut down by the Navy until he was this thing she saw now, this weapon. When he didn’t have a battle to fight he could be safely folded up and put away in a box. When enemy fighters were racing toward them, disruptors armed, only then could he truly come alive.

  “Imagery! Where’s my thrice-damned imagery? IO, tell me about that infrared scan I showed you. What’s it doing? What change?”

  “Sir,” the IO said. All of the bridge crew were Navy veterans but the IO looked green and scared to Bullam. “Temperature is increasing, but I can’t get a good fix on what equipment they’re powering up. Lights and engines are coming online all over the Hoplite—it clearly wasn’t affected at all by the service package, and now—”

  “The component I identified on the infrared,” Shulkin told the young officer, as if explaining something simple to a very young child, “is the preamplification power conditioner of a Mark II 75-centimeter coilgun.”

  Bullam had only a sketchy notion of what they were talking about. That red stain, she thought, the red blotch that Shulkin had found on the otherwise monochrome scan of the cruiser. But what was a preamplification power conditioner, and why did it seem to terrify the IO so much? She desperately wanted to speak, to ask questions.

  In this case, at least, she didn’t need to.

  “They’re powering up one of their heavy guns,” Shulkin said, turning his head just a little to speak over his shoulder. More or less in her direction.

  “Guns,” Bullam said, despite her earlier promise to stay quiet. She felt her heart beating at the back of her throat. “But then—just one? Shoot back at them, that should discourage them.”

  “I did tell you,” Shulkin said. “You don’t chase after a cruiser with a carrier. It’s a bad play.” He snapped his head back around, to watch the display. “Their guns have much greater range than anything we’ve got. They can sit back there and fire a steady stream of projectiles at us for hours while we try to approach to a point where we can fire our own weapons.”

  “What kind of range are we talking about?” Bullam asked.

  “We’re in it right now,” Shulkin said.

  Bullam could only shake her head. No, that couldn’t be right. Her service package—

  But of course, the service package had never been activated. It had all been a ruse. She wanted to say something, but she was worried that if she opened her mouth a moan of terror would come out of her.

  “When that coilgun reaches the right temperature,” he said, jabbing a finger at the red blotch—an angrier shade now, almost orange—“everyone on this ship dies. I’m trying to get us turned around so we can get out of range, but it’s taking too damned long.” This clearly directed at the pilot. “We only have one chance,” he told her.

  “A chance? What is it? Tell me!”

  “We can smash them up first, with our small craft. Before that gun can fire. Otherwise we’re all dead.”

  PBW fire streaked all around Lanoe, flashes of it lighting up his cockpit then fading so fast he had to blink away afterimages. The beams were still coming from too great a range to be dangerous. A wild shot struck his vector field on the left side of his nose but he didn’t even feel it. The field worked by accelerating particles away from his BR.9 at deflecting angles to their direction of motion. The tiny particles of the PBW beam were easily shunted off—as long as he didn’t suffer a direct hit.

  Worrying about direct hits was a good way to get paralyzed in the middle of a fight. Which was the best way to sustain a direct hit.

  “They’re coming in high,” Lanoe said, looking up through his canopy as if he could see them. They were still thousands of kilometers away. “They’re formed up in a standard wedge. They’re going to try to break up our formation and with this many of them against our five, it’s going to work. Switch to teams—Candless, you’re with me. Bury and Ginger, watch each other’s backs. You ready for this, Ensigns?”

  “Yes,” the Hellion said, without hesitation. Sounding sullen, as usual.

  “I’m not,” Ginger said, in a small voice.

  “She’s right, Bury,” Lanoe said. “Neither of you is ready. Consider this your baptism by fire. Candless, you take my wing. I’ll get this thing started.”

  “Ah,” Maggs called, “I can’t help but notice you’ve left me without a dance partner.”

  Lanoe scowled inside his helmet. He knew where he needed Maggs, but that didn’t mean he liked it. “That crate of yours has some fancy guns on it, doesn’t it? Next-generation stuff. That’s how you made that impossible shot back there.”

  Maggs didn’t deny it. As the son of a famous admiral, and working directly for Admiral Varma, he would have access to all kinds of shiny new toys.

  “Hang back,” Lanoe said. “Hang back and snipe. Give us some cover while we do all the hard work.”

  It meant leaving Maggs with a great view of his back, with new, high-tech guns in case he wanted to take the opportunity to end the storied career of Aleister Lanoe. Nothing for it. It was the best play Lanoe had.

  “Understood,” Maggs said.

  “All right,” Lanoe said. “On my count. Three, two—break.”

  He peeled off from the formation, knowing Candless would be right behind him and off a little to his left. His tactical boards showed him Ginger and Bury mirroring his maneuver, headed off in the opposite direction. They would have drilled in this kind of flying back at Rishi, flown these sorts of maneuvers over and over until they could pull them off blindfolded. But flying was easy.

  Shooting was hard.

  Long before he could actually see them in the ghostlight, the yellow points of enemy craft appeared superimposed on his canopy. Firing solutions scrolled across his weapons board but he ignored them for the moment. Opening his throttle wide he streaked straight at them, his finger hovering over his trigger.

  A moment later, he did see them.

  So many of them. Half a dozen right before him, all of them curving around to intercept. He lined up a shot, held it—waiting for the precise moment, the instant when he was likely to connect. They were already firing, wasting ammunition to try to break his concentration by pouring fire all around him, a hailstorm of particles any one of which could kill him in an instant.

  He could feel his finger trembling, his body wanting very much to shoot.

  Suddenly the storm of shots all around him let up, diminishing to just a drizzle of PBW fire.

  “They’re readying AV projectiles,” Candless said, barely a whisper, or maybe he was just so focused his brain was dampening the sound of her voice. Antivehicular rounds were bad news. They were designed to just puncture the hull of an enemy craft, then explode in a spray of superheated metal that would burn alive anyone foolish enough to be inside. It was an AV round that killed Tannis Valk—and created the legend of the Blue Devil.

  Of course, you had to place an AV shot perfectly or it would be wasted. And that took time. Which meant Lanoe, who was sticking with good old-fashioned particle beam weapo
ns, had some room to maneuver.

  He threw his ship sideways by goosing its positioning jets. Spun around on his center of gravity until he was flying backward, his thruster cones all cold and pointed at the enemy. As fast as he was moving, he punched through their line a second later—and was facing them, looking at their thrusters. He picked one of them at random and opened fire, even as they tried to snap around to get him in their jaws.

  His PBW rounds cut across the tail of the one he’d chosen, at first just bouncing off its vector field. He kept up a steady stream of fire and eventually his shots dug in, slicing off one of the target’s airfoils and scoring a line of tiny craters down its engine fairing. It was a brand-new Yk.64 cataphract and he felt an absurd pang of guilt at ruining its paint job.

  The Sixty-Four had a large canopy, almost a full bubble of flowglas at its nose with the pilot seeming to float around inside. With his opticals set to light amplification and edge detection, Lanoe could see the pilot crane his head around, see the terror on the man’s face.

  A virtual Aldis sight came up in front of him. Lanoe swiped it away—he didn’t need to aim. Not now.

  His PBWs blasted away, cutting a neat line down the middle of the Sixty-Four. A few of his shots were deflected by the vector field, but most were not. The fighter came apart in pieces, debris spinning off it, bouncing away. He hit something volatile—maybe a fuel line, maybe an ammunition cartridge—and that big canopy lit up from the inside, the pilot disappearing in the flash of deadly light.

  Lanoe didn’t waste time mourning the man. It was hardly the first pilot he’d killed in his three hundred years, and he doubted it would be his last. He shoved himself away from the wreckage with his maneuvering jets, then woke up his main thruster and shot upward into a corkscrewing evasive maneuver. Just as he’d expected, five Yk.64s came following hot on his heels, ready to avenge their squadmate.

  Just as he’d hoped, Candless raked all of them with her PBWs, swooping in to break up their formation before they could surround him. The enemy squad broke ranks and tore away in random directions, just trying to get away from her heavy attack.

  Which gave Lanoe a moment—just a fraction of a second—to think tactically. He saw Bury and Ginger on his tactical board, flying long, looping trajectories as they played tag with their own wing of enemies. Despite his reservations about the ensigns—and Ginger, especially—they were holding their own. They’d established their own tactical rhythm, it looked like—Ginger playing bait, drawing cataphracts after her as she executed sloppy maneuvers, making her look like a wounded bird, then Bury pouncing whenever one of the Centrocor ships made a try at her. When that stopped working, Bury would lunge at them in hopelessly direct maneuvers that would send them spinning away—where Ginger could corral them with suppressing fire. Good, reliable tactics that every pilot learned while they were still in training. Not terribly effective against seasoned pilots but it kept the enemy occupied, kept them from mounting a full attack in formation.

  Maggs was firing at range, a single burst of PBW fire every few seconds as he picked his targets with care. Exactly as Lanoe had ordered him to do. As much as he wanted to keep an eye on the scoundrel, Lanoe knew he didn’t have the time for it.

  Especially since, when he counted up the enemy fighters, he found some of them missing. Six had engaged him and Candless. Six more were playing games with the ensigns. Four were nowhere to be seen.

  No. Damnation. He’d been so busy—so distracted. He’d missed what was happening right in front of his nose.

  He threw himself into a series of S-turns, just so he would be a difficult target, and brought up his sensor board, searching desperately for the missing four cataphracts. When he found them he swore off-microphone.

  They had shot past Lanoe and his squad in the chaos, ignoring the fighting altogether. Burning hard for speed, on a course that would intercept the Hoplite.

  He’d been so busy with his fancy dogfighting, he’d missed the whole point of the Centrocor attack. They weren’t trying to kill him and his pilots.

  They were going after the cruiser. And if nobody stopped them, they had a good chance of taking it down.

  Shulkin’s hand had turned white with strain as he picked at the armrest of his chair. The hand had already looked skeletal, fleshless and thin, but now it looked like an animal’s claw. He didn’t seem to notice that he was tearing at the padding. His eyes never left the display before him. Specifically, he never stopped staring at the orange stain in the midsection of the cruiser.

  “They were smart, very smart,” he said. Was he talking to Bullam, or just to himself? She had no idea. “They knew we would run infrared cameras over their guns as we approached. They couldn’t have them ready to fire, no, we would have noticed that. We never would have approached so closely. But those guns take long minutes to warm up. Most battles don’t last that long. So they kept the preamplifier ticking over, ready to pour energy into the coils as soon as we were within range.”

  His fingernails gouged into the upholstery of his armrest. He nodded slowly to himself.

  After the panic and chaos of the first few seconds of the battle, a hideous calm had settled over the bridge. Everyone had their orders—no need to bark new ones. All the displays were showing exactly what they needed to show. The carrier was swinging its nose around inside the tight confines of the wormhole with aching deliberation. Move too fast and it might brush one of the walls, which could kill them. Move too slowly and they wouldn’t be able to get downrange of the cruiser’s gun in time. There was nothing the pilot or the navigator could do to make the process any faster or smoother. They sat at their positions with their hands hovering over their virtual keyboards. Waiting to see what came next.

  Shulkin’s armrest creaked painfully. He’d gotten his fingers under the seam of the upholstery and yanked upward, levering at the pad, straining at it until his strength gave out. He relaxed his hand for just a moment before he started to pull on the pad again. The Navy had built that armrest to withstand a lot of heavy use, but eventually, Bullam knew, it would give way.

  “Of course, there are sixteen guns on that ship, sixteen seventy-five-centimeter guns. That’s a lot of preamplifiers, a lot of heat, even in standby mode. We would have noticed the heat of them all working together. So Lanoe only readied one of his guns. Kept it simmering at a low temperature, low enough it wouldn’t show up on standard IR. He was betting we wouldn’t bother with a deep reflectography scan. And the thing is—I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have thought to look for that heat signature. Who would ready just one gun in preparation for a battle like this? Who would hamper themselves like that?”

  The armrest was putting up a good fight. Not looking at it, not seemingly aware at all of what he was doing, Shulkin dug his other hand into its stitching. Tugged and pulled until Bullam could hear fabric start to tear.

  “Lanoe would,” she said.

  Shulkin nodded. His skin was waxy and damp with sweat. Maybe from fear, or just from the exertion of tearing up his own armrest, she couldn’t say. His eyes were the eyes of a hawk, of a hunting bird. He saw nothing, she thought, sensed very little other than that deepening orange stain on the cutaway diagram of the Hoplite. A stain that was turning lighter all the time. When it turned white, he’d told her, the gun would be ready to fire.

  One end of the armrest pulled free from the metal underneath with a final, terminal squeak. It only took a second for Shulkin to yank the whole thing loose. He held it in his fingers like a prey animal, and she would not have been surprised if he brought it up to his mouth and started to chew on it.

  “You know him,” she said. Her voice was a whisper. The level of volume one might assume when speaking inside a cathedral, perhaps. She glanced over at the crew and saw the pilot, the navigator, the IO frozen like statues, not daring to turn around. They were doing their utmost not to listen in on her conversation.

  Good Centrocor employees, all. They knew who paid them.

 
“Lanoe. You’ve fought with him before,” she insisted. “Or—or against him.”

  “Ha,” Shulkin said. It was not a laugh.

  “Ha?” she asked.

  “If I’d fought against him before, if he was always this smart,” he said, and nodded at the display. The orange was the color of a pale sunset on an icy world. “I’d be dead.”

  His fingers dug inside the severed armrest. Started pulling out tiny fragments of foam padding. Tore them into minuscule bits that floated gently toward the right-hand wall of the bridge.

  A reminder that they were moving. Accelerating, even though Bullam could barely feel it.

  “Where are our pilots?” Shulkin asked. He sounded like he was asking after their welfare. “How close to the cruiser?”

  He meant the fighters, the cataphracts, that he’d sent to attack the Hoplite. The four pilots who were the only ones who could save the carrier from destruction.

  “Fifteen seconds out of range,” the navigator said, her voice trembling, just a little.

  “Bury, Ginger, cover us—we’re going in,” Lanoe called, wheeling around to chase the four Centrocor pilots who were headed for the cruiser. Candless pulled a snap turn, all the thrusters on her BR.9 firing at once, and fell in behind him without leaving him exposed for a moment. PBW fire smashed into the side of his fighter, most of it deflecting away harmlessly. A red light popped up on his damage board, showing him he’d lost one of his disruptor launchers. He could live without it. The fire kept coming, flashing across his nose, carving into his airfoils. The Centrocor pilots must have been ordered to keep him back, to stop him from heading in to defend the cruiser. They were doing their damned best.

  Behind him Candless pivoted around until she was flying backward and fired just one shot that took out one of their attackers, a perfect shot right down the long axis of his ship. The ship exploded like something from a video, a blast wave so perfectly symmetrical it didn’t look real. Debris shot away at incredible speed and hit the wall of the wormhole, light flashing as each piece of shrapnel annihilated. It was a hell of a kill, Lanoe thought, but it cut into her acceleration and suddenly she was well behind him. If the enemy could get into the gap between them they would be easy targets—the Centrocor pilots could pick them off with well-placed AV shots.