Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “The Navy is willing to sacrifice an entire Hoplite-class cruiser, on a lark?” Candless asked. “Tell me something, Lanoe. If you can’t give me facts, give me an opinion. I will take a guess, if that’s the best you have on offer.”

  Lanoe inhaled deeply. Sighed the air back out. “You ever hear of the Remnant Electors? Or maybe Mad Admiral Ukiyo?”

  “I did serve in the Crisis,” Candless told him. Fighting back the urge to sniff in indignation.

  The end of the Establishment Crisis had been a chaotic time. The Establishmentarians had fought to the bitter end, refusing to surrender their command bunkers long after their space forces had been obliterated. The ground war, though a foregone conclusion, had been nothing short of obscene. Whole cities were leveled, civilian populations displaced when they weren’t simply massacred. The polys had wanted to make an example of the Establishment. To make sure no one ever tried to defy their authority again.

  Many of the Establishment’s rank and file—people like Tannis Valk—had been captured during the fighting or at least survived the final battles. Their top brass hadn’t been so fortunate. Every single member of the Circle of Electors, the Establishment’s ruling body, had been executed, often without trial. Their top-level military commanders were simply all killed in action. At least, that was what history said.

  Official history anyway. There had always been rumors. Legends really. That a small group of the Circle of Electors had been sent into deep space in cryonic sleep, to wait for a day when the blue flag should fly again. The story held they were still out there, frozen between the stars, waiting for the moment to step back onto the stage of events.

  Another story held that Admiral Ukiyo, most fervent and severe of the Establishment’s military commanders, had never actually been defeated and that he had simply refused to surrender. That he and his fleet had vanished without a trace into the dark of the void. One version of the tale held that he had found some mystical wormhole that led to the Greater Magellanic Cloud and was out there still, founding free planets and fighting off the special forces units the polys persisted in sending after him.

  All bosh, of course. Every bit of it.

  Candless had been there, at the end. She’d seen the piles of bodies. Watched as poly officials compared their DNA to known records. None of the high-level Establishmentarians had survived.

  “You are suggesting, then,” she said to Lanoe, “that we are out here chasing down a fairy tale. Very good, sir, I’ll have a unicorn horn pinned to the nose of the ship and we’ll all close our eyes and believe just as strongly as we can.”

  Lanoe laughed. “I know it sounds crazy. And I’m not suggesting we’re actually going to find Mad Ukiyo out there.” He gestured forward, deeper into the wormhole. “But like you said, whoever is out there is deeply paranoid.”

  “Which perhaps explains why you were chosen as our ambassador,” she said. “As you would have so much in common with them.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see Lanoe shake his head. “Look, paranoia is what you would need if you were truly living off the common networks. If, say, you had set up a planet all of your own and you didn’t want the polys getting their grubby fingers all over it.”

  Candless supposed he had a point. The law wouldn’t let anyone do that, not for long. Outside of Earth’s particular solar system, it was a requirement that any new planetary colony must have a poly sponsor. A Developmental Monopoly to oversee terraforming and the construction of infrastructure—and, of course, to profit from doing all that work. If someone did want to set up a free world, they would have to be very quiet about it.

  “I don’t think we’re going to meet Remnant Establishmentarians, no. But somebody inspired by them? Somebody who figured it would be easier just to stay silent, rather than have to fight another Crisis?”

  “But why would such a planet contact us now? Yes, yes,” she said, before he could answer, “your jellyfish aliens are an existential threat to humanity, I’ve heard all that. But exposing themselves like this will surely cause problems for this hypothetical free world down the line. Why risk it?”

  “I’ve considered that,” Lanoe told her. “And I think I might have an answer. There are alien fleets headed for every human planet. All of them. Look at the chart we’re using—it shows the dates and times of when those fleets will arrive, how long each planet has before it’s attacked. So maybe our hypothetical free planet is on that list, too. They know they’re looking down the barrel of a gun.”

  “They did approach the Navy directly, and quietly,” Candless conceded. “That would fit your theory rather well. But it’s still quite the risk—they must know as well as we do how porous the membrane of secrecy is between the Admiralty and the polys.”

  “Yeah,” Lanoe said. “Which I think means they’re desperate. I can think of one reason why. They’re the ones who gave us the time line of the alien fleet invasions. They can predict exactly when those fleets arrive. I think they know they’re on the list—and I think they’re next. I think their planet is the first one to get hit, so they’re reaching out to us now because they don’t have a choice.”

  “But would they even need us?” Candless asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve clearly developed technologies we lack. Look at what they did to the wormhole back there. They’re able to modulate the very fabric of spacetime, for the devil’s sake.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they’re really good at communications, but lacking in firepower.”

  “And then there’s the fact that they didn’t ask us for help. They offered to help us. You may remember the text of the original message they sent us. It was quite short.”

  Lanoe had an answer for that, but not one that satisfied, much. “It’s a classic diplomatic move. When you’re asking for an alliance that benefits you more than the other guy, you have to convince him you don’t actually need him. That you’re doing him a favor.”

  “Very well,” Candless said. “Though you still haven’t answered my question. Are my people going to be in danger when we arrive at our destination?”

  “Your cadets, you mean.”

  Candless bristled. She did not like her motives being interrogated. “I mean everyone for whom I am directly responsible. That happens to include the ensigns, yes.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said.

  “So are they in danger?”

  Lanoe was quiet for a long time. Too long.

  “I’m going to assume that’s a yes,” she said.

  He didn’t contradict her.

  “My turn,” Valk said.

  He hadn’t thought about how Candless might take that. She’d been flying for hours, creeping along through the theoretically hazardous wormhole, and when he just took over she inhaled sharply through flared nostrils. He could sense her heart beating fast and he knew he’d just given her a bad scare.

  “Hey, sorry,” he said, moving over to float near her. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Just figured you’d be ready to switch out.”

  “Quite,” she said, and gave him a nasty look. Well, nastier than usual anyway.

  “Go get some rest,” he told her. “I’ve got this under control.”

  She did not, however, climb out of the pilot’s seat. It was clear she was in no hurry to leave.

  “You want to take another shift?” he asked her.

  She took a long, deep breath. Then she got up and gestured to the seat.

  He knew she didn’t trust him. That she probably never would. Well, there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  He climbed into the pilot’s seat, mostly just to make her feel more comfortable. He could have flown the ship from his bunk if he wanted. He knew people preferred to see the pilot of the ship actually engage physically with the controls, though. “Anything to report from your watch?” he asked.

  “Precious little. I’ve kept our speed at about one-quarter standard cruising, but the wormhole has refused steadfastly to do a
nything hazardous. Smooth sailing, without even a dangerous curve to—”

  “What’s this?” Valk asked. He pointed at the display in front of him, which showed a column of numbers.

  “I’m sorry?” Candless asked.

  Maybe the numbers didn’t mean anything to her. Maybe she couldn’t read them like he could. “This is an array of ambient illumination reports,” he said. It was one of thousands of datasets he’d just run through, not even close to the top of his list of priorities. It had jumped out at him, though, as soon as he saw it. “The ship recorded a decline in the number of received lumens over the last couple of hours.”

  “You’re saying it’s getting dark out there,” Candless said. She pulled up a display of her own and worked out a visual graph. There was a definite downward curve, sharpening almost parabolically over time.

  “The ghostlight,” Valk said. He brought the forward view display to the top of his pile of displays. Expanded the window until it filled the entire corridor.

  The tunnel ahead was darker than he would have expected. The change wasn’t dramatic, but Valk could definitely see it. The light streaming at them from the wormhole’s walls was fitful and dim, much less energetic than it should be.

  “The lights are going out,” he said.

  By the time Lanoe and Paniet reached the wardroom, Candless could see the change for herself. It scared her enormously.

  “There,” she said. “And there. And there.” She pointed at the forward view, at small patches along the wall of the wormhole that had gone dark. Pitch black. Absolutely devoid of ghostlight. They looked like sunspots, perhaps. Or dead pixels on an old flat display.

  “That’s … odd,” Lanoe said. He leaned forward, as if he could get a better view by getting closer to the holographic image. Candless was old, too, and she knew that came from growing up in a time when displays all tended to be two-dimensional and low resolution.

  “Oh, it’s so much more delightful than ‘odd,’” Paniet said. “It’s physically impossible!” The engineer’s eyes glowed with excitement. “Ghostlight is a natural by-product of the exotic matter that keeps a wormhole stable. Can you look ahead a bit, please, to see if the effect continues?”

  Candless adjusted the controls on the display. The view zoomed forward, down the wormhole, out to about a million kilometers from their position. As the camera appeared to travel down the tunnel, it became clear the effect didn’t just continue—it got worse. The dark spots on the tunnel walls became more common. Some of them grew until they touched one another, until entire sections of the wormhole were dark. When the camera reached the farthest limit of its magnification, only half the tunnel was shrouded in ghostlight. The rest was a solid, light-eating black.

  “I think we’ve found why this wormhole was marked as extremely hazardous,” Lanoe said. “Paniet. Can we even fly in a wormhole if there’s no ghostlight?”

  Paniet tilted his head back and forth, from side to side, like a needle on a scale trying to find its level. The ring of circuitry around his eye glittered in the wardroom’s lights. “Every teensiest scrap of light and heat inside a wormhole comes from the ghostlight. I guess—and really, don’t quote me on this—but if you were to travel far enough down an unlighted wormhole, eventually the local temperature would drop to absolute zero. And that would be … you know.”

  “What?”

  “Bad,” Paniet said. “Very bad. You would freeze solid, sure, but worse than that, even your individual molecules would stop moving. Which is typically fatal. But, then, it’s not as simple as that, because you’d be in a vacuum, with nothing to conduct away your heat … Honestly, it’s not something you find in nature, so I can’t say for certain that—”

  “Enough,” Lanoe said. “Valk, will you be able to fly if there’s no light out there?”

  “Hard to know where the walls are without the ghostlight,” Valk said. “And I’m assuming that we still wouldn’t want to touch the walls.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Paniet said, nodding enthusiastically.

  “I really don’t think we should try this,” Valk said. “It’s just a lot of unknowns, and—”

  Lanoe nodded. “I don’t intend to reverse course,” he said.

  Candless started to protest, but she knew better. Lanoe wasn’t the type to retreat, even if he had no idea what he was getting into. She knew how important this mission was to him, as well—he was unlikely to abort until it was absolutely necessary. “All right,” she said. “We won’t turn around. For the moment, at least, however, I’m cutting us down to half speed.”

  Lanoe scowled, but then he nodded in agreement. “Until we have a better idea what’s happening, sure. But we keep moving forward. Whoever sent the message that brought us this far—they think we can get through a dark wormhole,” Lanoe said. “They wouldn’t have sent us this way otherwise.”

  “Unless this whole mission was a ruse,” Candless pointed out. “A trap.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “I don’t believe that. There are easier ways to kill people. No, there’s a way forward. We just have to figure out how. Maybe,” he said, “this is just a temporary thing.”

  Two million kilometers on, and there was no possibility that the darkness was just temporary. The ghostlight was gone altogether. Not even a wisp of smoky radiance, not so much as a tendril of foggy light.

  Only inky, stygian darkness. Carbon nanotubules in a coal mine reflected more light than the walls of the wormhole.

  Everyone onboard was accustomed to the blackness of space, but that was a dark punctuated by the distant, hot stars, the wispy glories of the nebulae. This was … nothingness. Shapeless, directionless, infinite.

  Unable to see where they were going, Candless had brought them to a dead stop. If the wormhole curved ahead, even by a fraction of a degree, they could have flown right into its wall without any warning.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine how our hermits did this,” Paniet said. The circuitry around his eye pulsed with activity, but Valk could tell it wasn’t picking up anything useful. The data that flowed from those cutaneous sensors came back all zeroes, confirming over and over again that the engineer was staring into an abyss.

  The two of them floated near an airlock near the vehicle bay, tethered closely to the ship. Even with the safety line, Paniet kept grabbing at stanchions and spars, any part of the ship he could hold on to.

  Valk understood the impulse, though he no longer shared it. Human beings evolved under gravity. The vertigo they felt when standing on a high place looking down could be overpowering. The void all around them, the perfect absence of anything that could be seen, had to be terrifying. Paniet must be imagining that if he were to let go of the ship now, he would fall forever.

  For Valk himself—fear of heights was one more thing he seemed to have left behind. He’d spent so much time now in dimensionless virtual space, inside computers. There were no heights there, no widths or breadths, either. Certainly no light. To him the darkness that surrounded them on every side felt like home.

  “You don’t think this is natural?” Valk asked. “Just a different kind of wormhole we’ve never seen before?”

  “Oh, hellfire, no.” Paniet shook his head. “This was done on purpose. I suppose if you have the ability to modulate ghostlight to send a radio signal, you might know how to switch it off as well. Whoever these fellows are that we’re going to meet, they have technologies the Navy hasn’t dreamt of. Goodness. Tell me something, M. Valk. You’ve worked with Commander Lanoe before. When he goes out adventuring, does he always run into things this bizarre?”

  Valk wished he had a mouth so he could grin. “So far? Yeah.”

  “I’m so glad Ehta brought me here. This is exactly why I signed up for the Neddies, to travel and see things like this. Well,” Paniet said, leaning close as if he were confessing an intimacy, “that and to get away from home. I grew up on Adlivun and the people there weren’t terribly sympathetic.”

  Valk thought he unders
tood. The planet Adlivun was famous for being socially conservative. In the century and a half that it had been settled, it had never even had a woman as its Planetary Governor. Someone like Paniet would have had a hard childhood there.

  “So now that we’re out here,” he asked, “do you see any way to cope with this?”

  Paniet shrugged. “I already had some ideas before I asked to go out on this spacewalk. I just wanted to see this with my own eyes. Tell me, you’re linked into the ship’s systems. Can you activate a communications laser? Point it at the wall, see what happens.”

  Valk only had to think about it and it was done. The laser speared out into the dark, visible only where it passed through debris and waste gas from the cruiser. When it touched the wall of the wormhole, it painted a single, fizzing green dot. Even after he switched the laser off, the dot persisted, though only for a moment.

  “Aha, there, you see?” Paniet said. “No ghostlight, but otherwise the wormhole acts like you’d expect. It’ll still annihilate anything that touches the walls. Including collimated photons, thank the devil.”

  “The wormhole’s still out there, you mean,” Valk said. Before the darkness had seemed like an infinite void. Suddenly the walls of the wormhole seemed very close.

  “Yes, yes, of course. And we can still go forward. We just have to be extraordinarily careful about it. We just need a way to make sure we know when and where to adjust our course. Let’s have that laser again, but sweep it around in a circular scanning path.”

  The beam of light reached for the wall and then arced along its circumference, making a perfect circle as it spun around, catching the cruiser’s exhaust gas in a fan of spectral green light. Just ahead of the ship, along the invisible walls of the wormhole, a thin ring of sparkling light cut into the otherwise perfect darkness. Valk saw what Paniet was suggesting, and kept the laser moving in a spiral path, each sweep taking the point of impact a little farther down the length of the wormhole. The momentary persistence of the light traced a rudimentary path ahead of them. A path they could follow.