Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “The fighting went on for days. My people fell like ninepins. Casualties on the pirate side, too, staggering losses, but they didn’t seem to care. It was like they were working out a bad grudge. On the third day I started thinking we might actually lose. That I might die out there in the dark, out where the local sun was just the brightest star in the sky.

  “That was when Lanoe came in. He was running a squadron of troubleshooters, real commando types. Long-range recon and special operations. Outside the general chain of command—there was always work for him to do, so they let him pick his own assignments. Nobody had heard from me or my destroyer in days, so he figured he’d stop by and see if we were all right.

  “The pirates turned on him the second he arrived. They must have thought a squad of fresh ships was the real threat, since they’d already declawed my destroyer. I’ll be damned if they weren’t right—and damned twice if Lanoe didn’t read the situation instantly. He pulled them into a real scrum, close-up fighting that kept them well clear of my position.

  “It gave us time to do some much-needed emergency repairs. Specifically, it let us bring our big guns back on line. While Lanoe kept the pirates occupied, we had plenty of time to work up good firing solutions. A three-day battle ended in about fifteen seconds, one pirate ship after another blown to pieces in the dark.

  “When it was done, Lanoe and his people didn’t even bother telling us we were welcome. He waggled his airfoils,” Shulkin said. He held up one hand, his thumb and little finger held out like the wings of a cataphract, then twisted his hand from side to side to show what it looked like. “Might as well have opened his canopy and given us a hearty wave. Then he was off again, who knew where. Saved my bloody life, and didn’t even let me buy him a drink.”

  He actually chuckled at the thought. The man who might have been made of wood, the dead-eyed zombie, suddenly looked almost human.

  Bullam leaned back in her chair and watched the clouds scud by along the edge of the sea. A drone brought her a glass of orange juice. “You saw him again during the Establishment Crisis, though,” she prompted.

  “Your family,” he said. His smile just fell right off his face. “You lost your family in the Crisis. I don’t want to … to …”

  Bullam frowned. The old man almost sounded as if he cared. How touching, she thought. “Never mind that.” She certainly didn’t want to talk about it. “Tell me what you did in the Crisis. How you met Lanoe again.”

  Shulkin nodded. He walked over to the railing and gripped it with both hands. “That was a very different kind of fighting. The Establishment—they never had enough fighter pilots. Not enough to break our squadrons. They had plenty of big ships, though. Cruisers and battleships, even a beat-up old dreadnought left over from the Century War. So whenever they could, they pulled us into big engagements. Whole lines of capital ships facing each other in deep space, maneuvering constantly to stay out of range of each other’s guns. Each side daring the other to move in and take the first shot. Those were … trying battles. Hours of staring at displays, of working out firing solutions you never used. Stalemates that could go on for days as one ship after another strayed too close to the battle line and was torn to pieces.

  “They couldn’t win. Everyone knew that, right from the start. We had better equipment, more vehicles. Pilots trained by generations of warfare. One by one, their planets fell. They’d vowed to fight to the last ounce of blood in their veins, and no one could deny they tried. It all came down in the end to a fight near Tiamat, an ice ball nobody would ever mistake for a useful planet. Their leaders holed up in a bunker ten kilometers deep, their last few big ships burning in orbit. It looked like they were finished. Then they pulled the biggest surprise of the war. Turned out they had three whole wings of fighters, good solid cataphracts that they’d held in reserve. Fresh ships, their very best pilots. Kept in hiding for a year, an insurance policy held against just this situation.

  “Now, a capital ship, like a carrier or a cruiser, is a formidable thing—you saw that. But one good cataphract pilot can beat a destroyer seven times out of ten. A wing is six squads of twenty fighters each. On the bridge of my carrier I watched those three wings tear through every destroyer escort I had and I was sure we’d lost. We had our own cataphracts, sure, but barely a full wing of them in a bunch of ragged squads, not nearly enough to defend us. It was a matter of time—and I’m talking minutes, not hours—before they got to my carrier. Before they blew us to hell.

  “And that was when Aleister Lanoe stepped in.” Shulkin’s eyes were bright. His face seemed less lined than it had before, his posture better. She thought there might even be some color in his cheeks.

  “Lanoe cut through those wings. Don’t even ask me how. He tore through them without so much as maneuvering. It was like he was touched by some kind of mystical grace. Unstoppable. Unkillable. He punched a hole right through their formation and we sailed our last destroyer through right after him, its guns sparkling in the dark … I’ve never seen fighting like it.

  “We didn’t finish off the Establishment that day, no, but it was over. The war was over. It was just a matter of mopping up.”

  Shulkin staggered over to a chair and dropped himself into the cushions. He closed his eyes and let his mouth drop open a little.

  “Oh, you’ve brought it all back,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t let myself … couldn’t afford to think about it. About what it … what it used to be.”

  He was drifting. Falling back into the well where he lived now, the safe, dead place he’d inhabited as long as she’d known him. She could tell that in a moment he would sit up and open his eyes and they would be made of glass again. That his armor was coming back up. For a moment, she thought, she’d seen the real Captain Shulkin. The man he’d once been. It couldn’t last.

  But there was one more thing, one more question she had to ask before she lost him. Something she very much needed to know.

  “Sounds like you owe Aleister Lanoe your life. Twice over,” she said, cautiously.

  Shulkin sat up a little in his chair. His mouth was a flat line, incapable now of showing any emotion.

  “I suppose I do,” he said.

  Bullam drew in a deep breath. “When the time comes—when we capture him. You know what Centrocor will do to him. You know it won’t be pleasant.”

  Shulkin did not respond.

  “Can you do this, Captain? Can you fight Lanoe? Fight against him?”

  His eyes popped open. She expected them to be empty, soulless. Instead they were like the diamonds she’d seen on the bridge of the carrier. Hyperfocused. Relentless. Colder than ammonia ice.

  “That won’t be a problem,” he told her.

  Lanoe passed back through the axial corridor, through the emergency bulkhead. When he stood at the top of the corridor, looking down the vertiginous drop all the way to engineering, he was surprised to find the big cruiser felt cramped and small. Losing the forward third of the ship had brought home just how little of it was usable crew space.

  He intended to head back to the wardroom, where Valk was flying the ship. He’d taken Paniet’s words to heart and planned on relieving Valk for a while at the helm. As he passed through the rings of bunks, though, he came across the hatch to Ginger’s quarters and he stopped and sighed as he thought about what to do.

  He didn’t blame the girl for getting nervy, really. As much as he needed her, as much as he needed every pilot he could get, he knew it wasn’t an easy job. He’d seen far too many good men and women succumb to the pressure. Hellfire, there had been times early in his career when he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep knowing that the very next time he went out in his old FA.2 fighter might be the last time. How many patrols had he flown where he was the only one who came back? How many after-action reports had he filed while desperately trying to hold his breakfast down?

  Under different circumstances, he would have simply moved Ginger off combat duty. Put her in charge of some other job onboard the
ship. They just didn’t have a big enough crew for that, though. When Centrocor came back for a second go at them—and he was sure they would—he was going to have to make her fly a cataphract again. Force her to fight.

  He hovered in the corridor, one hand against the wall to keep himself from floating away. He considered knocking on Ginger’s hatch. He’d never been very good at coming up with encouraging words, but he could try.

  This would be so much easier if Zhang were there, he thought. She’d always handled this sort of thing for him. She’d been his second in command for years, back during the Crisis, and always she’d been the one to take the scared pilots aside, to speak in low tones with them in the wardroom.

  Damnation, he missed her. He had never known how much he relied on Zhang until she was gone. And then, at Niraya, he’d had her back, for just a little while. They’d had trouble reconnecting but once they did …

  He hadn’t let anybody else get close to him since then. It was just too dangerous.

  Was that what she’d been trying to tell him? She’d said he was far away from where he needed to be. Did she mean he was drifting away from his crew, losing touch with the people around him?

  Bosh, he thought. Zhang was dead. She couldn’t advise him from beyond the grave. It was just his subconscious talking to him.

  Then again—if his subconscious was trying to tell him something, maybe he should listen.

  He made a fist. Reached out to knock on Ginger’s hatch.

  But … no. That wasn’t a job for a commanding officer. And knowing himself, he’d probably just make things worse. No, it was up to Candless to handle her. After all, the XO had said as much in no uncertain terms.

  He sighed and moved on. Though he didn’t get very far before he stopped again.

  Voices echoed from the wardroom up ahead. He heard Ehta’s big laugh. He smiled, thinking he would go in there and ask what the joke was—but then he heard Valk’s voice, too.

  “Ahem,” Lanoe said, pushing into the wardroom.

  The two of them were strapped down around a narrow table. Ehta had a tube of green food paste in her mouth, clamped between her teeth. When she saw him she reached up very slowly and removed it.

  “Sir,” she said.

  “As you were, Lieutenant,” he said. Then he looked over at Valk, who was leaning back against the wall. If there had been any gravity, Lanoe imagined the big pilot might have had his boots up on the table.

  “Ahem,” he said again.

  “What?” Valk asked. “What did I do?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be flying this crate?” Lanoe asked.

  “Uh. Yeah.” Valk lacked the ability to duck his head, or blush in shame. His opaque black helmet inclined forward a little. “I mean—I am.”

  Lanoe pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his index finger. He hadn’t slept in quite a while, and caff tablets couldn’t keep you going forever. “I’d prefer it if you were actually, you know, at the controls.” Paniet had set up a pilot’s seat in the wardroom, a workstation to allow them to run the ship’s various functions. Currently, the seat was vacant.

  “It’s really no problem, I mean, I can monitor the ship from over here, and it’s doing just fine—”

  Lanoe shook his head.

  “Okay,” Valk said.

  “Anyway,” Lanoe said, “there was something I wanted to ask you about.” He looked over at Ehta. “Lieutenant,” he said to her, “how are your marines shaping up? Are they improving in their gun drills?”

  Her face went white for a second, but she recovered quickly. “They’re, you know. Getting there. I’ll, uh, I can send you a full report if you think that’s—”

  “Good,” he said.

  She nodded. Then she unstrapped herself and kicked her way out of the wardroom, back toward the guns. She must have understood that he wanted to speak with Valk privately.

  He couldn’t help noticing the look she gave Valk as she passed him. Eyebrows raised, mouth held tight. He had no idea what that meant.

  So much easier when he had Zhang to take care of people for him.

  “All right, never mind any of that,” Lanoe said. “If you’re going to act like a computer, maybe we can actually use that. I asked Paniet to take a look at the message, the one that brought us out here. I thought maybe he could make some sense of it—not the actual content, but the metadata, the way it was sent, even little things like the color palette in the images, the typeface they picked … anything that might give us a sense of who sent it. As we get closer, I’d really like to have a notion of who I’m dealing with, and I thought—”

  “Done,” Valk said.

  Lanoe squinted at him. “Sorry?”

  “You wanted a meta-analysis of the message. I did that.”

  “Just now?” Lanoe shook his head. He knew he had to get used to this, to Valk being able to interface with the ship’s computers much faster and more efficiently than any human being could. “Never mind. Did you find anything?”

  “Maybe. It’s actually kind of weird,” Valk said. “Just how plain this thing is. I don’t know … It’s like whoever created the video wanted to strip out any kind of personality. The video standard they used is very old, very basic, but still in use—any display could read the message, no problem. And there’s no encryption on it at all. No compression, either. I can’t remember the last file I saw that wasn’t compressed just a little.” Valk lifted his hands in surrender. “You asked about the typeface—it’s one of the basic system fonts that’s built into the universal operating system. Anybody who has a computer built in the last hundred years has access to that font. Which means that nobody ever uses it—it’s just too clichéd. Like I said. Kind of weird.”

  “Maybe they used such generic stuff to hide their identity,” Lanoe suggested. “Like a criminal using a pay-as-you-go minder to avoid leaving a data trail.”

  “Maybe,” Valk said. “Maybe. Whoever they are, they like their privacy. There’s no address header on the message,” Valk said. “And that’s very weird. It was sent to one specific ship, right? But there’s nothing included with the message telling you what to do if it can’t be delivered. That’s pretty basic stuff. I don’t know, Lanoe. It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

  Lanoe nodded. “I didn’t expect to find much. Whoever sent that message has done a pretty good job of keeping themselves hidden. Maybe they’ve got as much reason to fear the polys as we do. Maybe—”

  He stopped because a green pearl had appeared in the corner of his vision. Metadata scrolled across the surface of the green sphere, telling him Candless wanted to speak with him.

  “Hold on,” he told Valk. He swiped his eyes across the green pearl and his wrist display lit up, showing Candless’s face.

  “I’m more than happy to take over the piloting duties,” she told him. He’d forgotten that he’d told Valk to call her in as his relief. Valk must have done so while they were talking about the mysterious message. “Frankly, I’d feel more comfortable with a human at the controls.”

  Lanoe winced. “M. Valk is right here with me,” he said. “Listening.”

  “Good. I detest people who will talk behind someone’s back but keep mum when they’re face-to-face. I imagine M. Valk has no illusions as to how I feel about artificial intelligences.”

  “No, ma’am,” Valk said.

  “I assume he also knows that it isn’t personal. At any rate, Lanoe, if you’re done trying to make this awkward, I hadn’t finished what I was going to say. If I may?”

  Lanoe sighed. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “I was going to tell you that while I am perfectly happy to take over the controls for a shift, I will require a decision from you. I don’t know how recently you’ve examined the map that we’re following. Now that we’re past Avernus, however, and approaching our destination—things are about to get complicated.”

  Lanoe pulled up the map to take a look at what she meant.

  “Life can never b
e simple, can it?” Bullam asked.

  One of her drones was displaying the map she’d gotten from Harbin. The map of wormspace that everyone seemed to find so compelling. It was supposed to be much more complete than any map Centrocor possessed.

  It reminded Bullam of a dried portion of ramen, before it was boiled. The noodles twisted up and crisscrossing each other, getting lost in their own convolutions.

  “Our navigator asked me this morning where we were going next. I found I couldn’t give her a good answer,” Bullam said. She waved at the map and it expanded, only growing more complicated the deeper you went.

  Shulkin observed it with his usual lack of interest.

  “So far, Lanoe’s route has been straightforward. We knew he was headed for the junction that leads to here, to Avernus. We knew he intended to go farther, outside the known wormhole routes. Where he’s actually headed is a mystery. He didn’t bother telling Harbin before he dumped her on Tuonela.”

  She pointed at a wormhole and the colors of the map shifted, a line of yellow worming its way through the display to show Lanoe’s route so far, from Earth to Tuonela and then bypassing Avernus. “Up ahead there are three stable routes he might choose from.” A dashed yellow line split off to show a wormhole forking and then splitting again. “None of them are particularly appealing.” In point of fact, all three of the routes ahead were marked with red crosshatching. Navigational glyphs indicating they were extraordinarily hazardous.

  “Lanoe’s course takes him this way,” Bullam said. “No matter how dangerous those wormholes may be, he’ll need to take one of them. So we do as well. If we’re going to chase him down again, we need to pick one of these—and we need to pick the right one. Otherwise we may never find him.”

  Shulkin’s eyes moved a little in their sockets. He seemed to be paying attention at least.

  “We have almost nothing to go on. Nobody’s seen a map like this before, so we don’t know where—if anywhere—these three routes go. There’s no good way to track a ship in wormspace, so we can’t pick up his trail. I’m open to suggestions, but right now it looks like we’re just going to have to count on our luck.”