Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “No,” Lanoe said.

  Valk could guess two reasons why not. Now that they knew Centrocor was chasing them, Lanoe wouldn’t want to lose any time by putting the ship in for repairs. Lanoe had told Valk it was crucial that they reach their destination before the poly—any poly—did, though he hadn’t explained why.

  The other reason—well, the other reason was all about Valk. The Navy knew now what Valk was. So did most of the Hoplite’s crew. If he showed his opaqued helmet anywhere in human space, he was liable to be picked up and taken away to be quietly dismantled, his electronic brain wiped clean and its components smashed and then melted down just in case. If the Navy didn’t catch him, Candless or one of the ensigns might turn him in, just on principle.

  It was not a particularly unattractive prospect, as far as Valk was concerned. But he knew Lanoe would never let it happen.

  “You weren’t here, when the disruptor round hit,” Lanoe said. Meaning that Valk hadn’t been on the bridge. He turned around, moving his feet carefully on the beam. Sticky pads in the soles of his boots adjusted their grip to make sure his footing stayed sure.

  “No,” Valk said. “When you called for somebody to crew the defensive guns, I called Ehta but she said she couldn’t spare anybody. So I went aft and crewed one of the guns myself. I thought I was being helpful.”

  Shadows pooled on Lanoe’s face, where Valk could see it through his helmet. It was hard to read his expression. “You weren’t on the bridge. I left you here to steer the ship, but you deserted your post.”

  “I … uh … I don’t need to be on the bridge to do that. I can talk to the ship’s computers anytime, from anywhere. I knew I could steer and shoot at the same time. Don’t even ask me how I knew, I just did.”

  “That’s a lot for one person to keep track of simultaneously,” Lanoe said, his voice guarded.

  Anger flared behind Valk’s eyes. Well, the place where his eyes should have been. “Hellfire, Lanoe. Enough with the third degree. You know I’m not … not …”

  “Not what?”

  “Not a person! Yeah, for a human, keeping track of the bridge and shooting a gun at the same time would be impossible. But I’m not human. We were in the middle of a battle and everything was crazy, displays showing me a million things, and then Ehta said there was nobody for the guns, and … and it just occurred to me. I could, you know. Make a copy of myself. Leave one version of my software on the bridge, flying the ship. Send the other along with my suit, down to the guns. So that’s what I did.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said.

  Which did nothing for Valk’s mood. “You never want to talk about this. You want to just pretend I’m still Tannis Valk, still this human pilot who fought in the Crisis. You don’t want to accept what I really am. And how dangerous that is. I can do all these new things now. Now that I know I’m a machine. I can talk to computers, it’s not even like talking to you. It’s easier. I can hear your heart beating, through this radio channel. I can split myself into multiple copies. Who knows what else?”

  “You’re still Tannis Valk to me,” Lanoe said. “The man I fought beside at Niraya, the man I’m lucky enough to call my friend, the man—”

  “No! Tannis Valk is dead! Can’t you understand this? There is no connection. No continuity—he died, and sometime later they built me. Told me I was him. But I’m not human and I have never been human.”

  “So what are you?”

  “I don’t even know!” Valk wanted to get away from this conversation, even as he was sure he desperately needed to have it. He very much wanted to head back inside the ship. Into light and warmth and air, none of which he actually needed. He had no idea what he wanted. “I’m finding out, little by little. But every time I pull one of these stunts, every time I figure out some new thing I can do, or realize there’s something I don’t need. Like sleep. Or food. Every time I realize some new fact about me, I become a little less human. Lanoe, you should shut me down. You should switch me off, for good.”

  “I still have plans for—”

  “For revenge, right.” Valk yanked at the bundle of emitters and threw them out into the wormhole. He could calculate their trajectories to as many decimal places as he liked, know exactly how long it would take them to hit the wall and be annihilated. He didn’t bother. “You want to kill the Blue-Blue-White because … let’s just say it’s because of all those alien species they wiped out. Let’s leave it there. And you need me for that.”

  “You’re the only one who can talk to the jellyfish. If I’m going to get justice from them, I need them to understand my demands.”

  Valk shook his head. His whole torso. “And then—only then—when you’re done, when you have your revenge—”

  “Justice,” Lanoe insisted.

  “Damned semantics,” Valk said. “But fine. When you have justice, then you’ll let me die. Yes? Or will you keep me around even then? Force me to keep up this farce of pretending I’m a dead man? Are you going to keep me around like your pet or something?”

  “No. I promise, Valk, I’ll let you go.”

  Valk nodded again. “I trust you, Lanoe. All the devils know I probably shouldn’t, but I do. So here. I’m going to give you something.”

  A black pearl sat in the corner of Valk’s vision. A nasty, brooding little thing that had been there ever since he found out what he really was. A final gift from the engineers who made him. It had been sitting there for months, waiting for him to flick his eyes across it just the right way. Letting go of it felt simultaneously liberating and terrifying, but he knew it had to be done. Without thinking about how he did so, he transferred ownership of the black pearl to Lanoe.

  “What the hell is this?” Lanoe asked.

  “It’s a data bomb,” Valk explained. “If I was human, it would be a cyanide capsule. You activate that thing, it’ll erase me. Delete all my files, write over every data block in my memory. Permanently. You understand?”

  “Valk—”

  “This is the price of my sticking around. You get to carry that thing. I’ve been looking at it since we left Niraya, wondering if I had the guts to use it. I guess I didn’t. As much as I’ve wanted to die, to stop—the devil help me, I couldn’t pull that trigger. But you will. Either when you’re done with me, finally. Or …”

  “Or what?”

  Valk inhaled sharply. No, damn it, he didn’t. He simulated inhaling sharply, because it felt right to do so. “Or if I go feral. You know? If I start acting more like an AI than a person, start thinking human lives are just so inefficient, such a waste of resources. Like the Universal Suffrage, or … whatever.”

  Valk turned away. But he couldn’t stop looking at Lanoe, watching his face. Trying to make sure he took this seriously.

  Lanoe nodded inside his helmet. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  Bury hardly had time to sit down and eat before the call came in. All officers to attend a special briefing. He made a point of finishing off his tube of food paste before he responded.

  With the bridge gone, the pilots had all been moved to bunks aft of the damaged areas of the ship, in the same ring of quarters as the marines. The briefing would be held in the wardroom at the center of those bunks, a communal space that already stank of unwashed suits and aggression. The marines themselves had been sent aft, ostensibly to run more gun drills, though Bury knew it was just so they wouldn’t eavesdrop. Engineer Paniet and Lieutenants Candless and Ehta were already there. Commander Lanoe arrived and looked around with a scowl on his face.

  “Where’s Ginger?” he asked.

  “She’s, uh, in her bunk, sir,” Bury said. “I asked if she wanted to come out for this, but she said she needed to be alone.”

  Lanoe looked supremely annoyed. “She was the one who demanded this meeting in the first place,” he said.

  Bury started to respond, to say the strike had been his idea, too, but Lieutenant Candless reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. He started to shove it away, but the l
ook on her face told him to behave. He remembered how much trouble he’d gotten in the last time he spoke up at a briefing, and decided maybe this time he would keep quiet.

  “She was rather affected by the fighting,” Candless said.

  “You’re telling me that after her very first battle, she’s already got the wind up?” Lanoe demanded. “Hellfire, I knew she was green, but—”

  Candless cleared her throat to interrupt him.

  Here it comes, Bury thought. A perfect opportunity for Candless to wield her sharp tongue. To say exactly how disappointed she was in Ginger, and how the girl couldn’t be trusted to—

  “She’ll be fine,” Candless said.

  “If she’s got a case of nerves, she’s of no use to me,” Lanoe said. “I need people who aren’t afraid to—”

  “I told you, sir, that she would be fine. Do you require me to repeat myself a third time? Ensign Ginger is one of my cadets, and I do not train cowards. Furthermore, I am the XO onboard this ship, responsible for both morale and discipline. I will ask you, with all due respect, to allow me to do my damned job and look after my people. Should I decide that one of my pilots is not fit for duty, you can be sure that I will let you know immediately. Now, I believe you called us here for a briefing. Shall we get on with it?”

  The look on Lanoe’s face was one Bury knew he would treasure for years. The big man, their commanding officer, looked as chastened as a first-year cadet who’d just been told he flunked basic suit training.

  He could only wonder about the look on his own face. The last thing he’d ever expected Lieutenant Candless to do was to actually stick up for Ginger.

  “I suppose … yeah, okay,” Lanoe said, running his fingers over his cropped gray hair. “Fair enough.”

  He looked around at all of them, his eyes much softer than they had been before. He even smiled a little when he looked at Bury, though Bury had no idea why.

  “It goes without saying that what I’m going to tell you is secret and not to be shared with anyone outside of this room. Except Ginger—Bury, you’ll fill her in, when she’s ready to hear it. Oh, and you’ll notice Lieutenant Maggs isn’t here. That’s intentional. He definitely shouldn’t hear any of this. As for the rest of you, you’ve proved your loyalty now to the Navy, and to me. You deserve to know what you’re doing here. I’ll give you a quick overview, and then I’ll take individual questions.”

  He tapped a few virtual keys on his wrist display, and a holographic image of a yellowish-brown planet appeared over the wardroom’s display. “I’m going to start at the beginning. This is a place called Niraya. A while ago, it was attacked by aliens …”

  “It all looks pretty standard,” Valk said, bending low to examine the PBW cannon of Maggs’s Z.XIX. Stubby barrels mounted in standard housings. There were four of them instead of the two you found on most cataphract-class fighters, and they were a little shiner than usual—though that might just be because they were new. PBWs were powerful weapons and they wore out over time, the barrels growing rough as stray particles cut through the metal. Valk stuck a gloved finger inside one of the barrels and rubbed it around, then examined his fingertip, looking for residue. A little gray dust, nothing unusual there.

  “No, the guns themselves are quite ordinary,” Maggs said. He sounded distinctly annoyed. Impatient. “I explained this to Lanoe once already—”

  “And he asked me to check it out personally,” Valk said. “You’ve got some fancy new system that lets you snipe enemy ships at, what, twice the normal range?”

  “It’s rated out at a seventy percent increase in collimation and a fifty-nine percent improved target acquisition rate,” Maggs said. “But as I told Lanoe, the improvements are all in the software. You can’t tell from the outside that it’s anything special.”

  Valk nodded—bobbing his entire torso back and forth—and reached for the key that would open the fighter’s canopy.

  Maggs moved to stop him. “There’s nothing to actually see. And I’d prefer not to let a bloody AI dismantle my vehicle just to see how it works.”

  Valk would have smiled, if he had a mouth. He would have given Maggs a big goofy grin. He’d never much cared for the scoundrel pilot, and the fact that Maggs was clearly uncomfortable just being around an artificial intelligence filled Valk with a sort of sadistic glee. He supposed he should be more charitable. Hellfire, he made himself uncomfortable a lot of the time.

  Still.

  “Lanoe asked me to take a look, and—”

  “May we discard this pretense already?” Maggs asked. “You’re here to keep me busy. While Lanoe tells the other officers what our mission is.”

  “He feels you can’t be trusted,” Valk explained. “Otherwise I’m sure he would have included you.”

  “Yes, he’s allowed me no illusions when it comes to my trustworthiness. He’d rather confide in a walking computer than in a decorated officer of the Navy, who, I feel I must note at this juncture, was instrumental in getting him this command in the first place. Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I can do my job without knowing all the little details. Obviously it’s about the aliens. That’s the only reason they’d drag him back out of retirement, eh?”

  Valk held himself very still. Face or no face, he knew there were other ways people could read you. He didn’t want to give anything away. “Why don’t we stick to what we’re supposed to be doing?” he said. “Tell me more about this new technology.”

  “The Philoctetes Targeting Package, they’re calling it. Revolutionary stuff, absolutely. Bleeding-edge targeting algorithms that can predict the movement of an enemy craft. No need to rely on fallible human instincts anymore. With Philoctetes software you simply choose your targets and let the computer do the work for you,” Maggs said. “Honestly, as good as it is, I’m afraid it’s going to mean the end of dogfighting. When you can snipe your targets from so far away, there’s no need to get in close and tussle with the other fellow. It means the end of an era, especially for knights of the sky like old Lanoe.”

  “I’ll believe that when it happens. Cataphract pilots have been the stars of every war since he was a kid.”

  “Well, all good things must et cetera. But—oh. It occurs to me … are you cleared for this information? It’s all tip-top secret.”

  “Lanoe—”

  Maggs lifted his hands in something like a gesture of apology. “No, no, of course you are. Lanoe trusts you implicitly, I must have forgotten that for just a moment. That’s why he can spare you for this inspection, after all. No need for you to be in that briefing, since you already know everything.”

  Valk sighed in exasperation. “Maggs—”

  “Which means I was right.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Our mission must have something to do with the Blue-Blue-White.”

  “How did you figure that out?” Valk asked.

  “I can’t think of another reason Lanoe would see you as being so crucial he would break the law just to keep you on the team. So we’re going alien hunting again, and—”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything,” Valk insisted.

  “No, of course not. Terribly sorry. I’ll drop it, I swear,” Maggs said, a sly smile creeping across his face.

  Commander Lanoe reached over and switched off the display. “All right. Questions, now. I’ll answer whatever I can.”

  All around Bury, people started talking at once. He ignored them. There was only one thought in his mind.

  Aliens.

  Really?

  Aliens?

  As a boy growing up on Hel, of course he’d watched plenty of videos about humanity making first contact with aliens—fictional videos. Typically the aliens all looked like humans with bumps on their foreheads or slightly differently colored skin. Often in the videos the aliens wanted to conquer and enslave human planets, or drain them of their vital resources, and they had to be stopped. Brave human pilots had to step in to fight them.

  So the idea wasn’t
completely new to him.

  Yet … this wasn’t exactly like the videos, was it? These aliens, these giant jellyfish, hadn’t even been aware of humanity’s existence. The invasion of Niraya had been, what, a mistake? Not even that. Human lives hadn’t even entered the equation.

  And now, this mysterious message, which had something to do with fighting the aliens, but nobody knew what.

  “This is all bosh,” Bury said.

  Lieutenant Ehta scowled at him. “The Blue-Blue-White are real, I can tell you that much. I was at Niraya. So were Maggs and Valk.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Bury said, his blood rising in him. “No. I mean this new … signal, this message. This ‘key.’ Who sent that? Why didn’t they send more information? If they want to help, why not just identify themselves? Bosh!”

  “Personally I find it very exciting,” Engineer Paniet said. “Who doesn’t like to dig into a good mystery?”

  Lieutenant Ehta snorted with laughter, and Paniet smiled. So maybe he’d been joking.

  “How do we know we can trust whoever sent this signal? This could be a trap,” Bury said.

  “That’s why the Navy sent a cruiser,” Commander Lanoe said. “Not a yacht full of politicians.”

  That got several laughs.

  Why wasn’t anyone taking this seriously? Maybe it was just too much to take in.

  Lanoe nodded at Bury. Was that a grudging look of respect in his eye? Unlikely. Probably just dust or something. “Lots of mysteries,” the Commander said, eventually. “It’s our job to solve them. I won’t lie. This is a weird mission and it’s already proving dangerous—clearly Centrocor knows something of what I just told you, at least enough that they’re willing to kill us to find out more. And what we discover at the end of the road—I have no idea. I do know one thing.”

  Lanoe looked from face to face around the room as he went on. “I know the Blue-Blue-White would have killed every human being on Niraya. We got lucky there. I know there are a lot more of those drone fleets, and that they’ll never stop coming. I know we won’t get lucky every time.”