Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  A green pearl appeared before Valk. Lanoe calling. Valk didn’t bother reading the message before he replied. “Looks like we have an answer for you, boss. This darkness is going to slow us down to a crawl but we can continue.”

  The green pearl cut out—with no reply. Valk could feel the ship coming alive behind him, though, the engines building up heat as they readied to move once more. He reached over and grabbed Paniet’s arm, just before the ship began to pull away from them. He heard the engineer gasp in terror.

  “I’ve got you,” Valk said.

  “Much obliged,” Paniet said. “Perhaps … As lovely as this is, perhaps it’s time to head back inside.”

  The cruiser plunged on ahead, into the dark.

  The first day of it wasn’t so bad. Nerve-racking, perhaps. Candless had to get used to following the spiral path of the comms laser, to sticking to a course she could barely see. The wormhole proved to be mostly straight, however, and the rare curve was gentle enough that it didn’t take much steering to keep them perfectly centered in the tunnel. Piloting through a wormhole always required one to stay perfectly alert—the ghostlight and the monotony tended to lull the senses, and it was far too easy to grow complacent. Here she alternated between falling victim to pilot’s hypnosis and sudden attacks of pure panic.

  It didn’t help that Lanoe had decided that the ensigns were not experienced enough to fly during this stretch of the journey. That meant that only she, Valk, and Lanoe himself were available to take shifts in the pilot’s seat.

  “I’d be most happy to assist,” Lieutenant Maggs said, on at least one occasion for which Candless was present. “I’ve plenty of experience, and a sharp enough mind for it. But you won’t even consider it, will you?”

  “You’re on a short leash,” Lanoe told him. “Don’t tug too hard, or you’ll strain your neck.”

  The scoundrel didn’t seem to care much for being called a dog, even by implication. He stormed out of the wardroom—a difficult maneuver in the minimal gravity, but he managed with panache. Candless did not look up from the controls, of course, but she clicked her tongue.

  “What?” Lanoe demanded. “You think I’m making a mistake?”

  “Rather, I’d say you’re making an enemy,” she told him.

  “Oh, he and I already have plenty of history,” Lanoe told her. “I’m not burning any bridges that he didn’t knock down a long time ago.”

  “And when one has been wronged, and the other fellow is offering an olive branch, do we think the best course of action is to smash it out of his hand?”

  “Let me worry about Maggs,” Lanoe said. “You keep us from crashing into an invisible wall.”

  By the end of the first day she was tired, her eyes hurt, and her body felt stiff as a board. She returned to her bunk and fell asleep before she’d even switched out the lights.

  The morning of the second day she got up and did it again.

  Eight hours in the pilot’s chair. Halfway through she found herself scratching at her own skin. She pulled off one of her gloves so she could get her regulation short-trimmed nails down inside her collar ring.

  Perhaps that was the first time she noticed that it was getting cold. She gave herself a good scratch and hurriedly put the glove back on. Its heating elements soothed her fingers. Her suit could do little for how dry her sinuses felt, or how her eyes ached every time she blinked.

  “I’m here to relieve you,” Lanoe said suddenly. She looked up with a start—looked up away from the display and its endless spiral of hissing light. She forced herself to look back down, to stay alert.

  “Already?” she asked. “Never mind, don’t answer.” She could see from the clock that her eight hours were up.

  They’d felt … like less. She wondered—worried—how much of that time had passed without her noticing. Without so much as a thought in her head.

  “Does it feel cold in here to you?” she asked.

  Lanoe frowned. “Yeah,” he said. “A little.”

  She remembered that Engineer Paniet had said that all light and heat in the wormhole came from the ghostlight. She checked the sensors and saw that the ship’s external temperature had sunk to 57 Kelvin. Very cold indeed. She did shiver, then, despite her suit.

  “Shouldn’t the life support system be able to compensate for the cold outside?” she asked.

  “It has been, but there’s a limit to what it can do,” Lanoe told her. “The engines suck up most of our power. What’s left gets distributed through a bunch of systems. I’m afraid it’s not going to warm up for a while.”

  The third day she woke up to see a thick coat of frost on the bulkhead above her. Condensation from her own breath had gathered there and frozen solid.

  The third day it grew very, very cold.

  Engineer Paniet rerouted the ship’s air cyclers to blow as much warm air as possible into the middle of the ship, where the bunks and the wardroom were located. Even so, Candless could see her breath plume from her mouth every time she exhaled. By the time her shift came around the temperature inside the ship was just above freezing. She put up her helmet—they all did—and her suit kept her almost comfortable. By the end of her shift, though, her bones ached.

  The ship’s bones did, too. She could hear them groaning, far off. Down in the engineering section where the heat of the engines fought against the freezing cold in the bulkheads. “Differential cooling,” Engineer Paniet said, his voice a whisper, as if he were afraid to disturb the cruiser in its torpor. He shook his head. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t succumb to metal fatigue.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. Too cold to be arch. “I’ve been on plenty of ships in deep space before. They’ve never lost heat like this.”

  “Those ships were heavily insulated. Their heat was efficiently recycled. We don’t have that option.”

  “Why the devil not?” she demanded.

  Paniet sighed. “When Centrocor shot off the nose of our cruiser, they took a lot of that insulation with it. I patched the holes as best I could, but I can’t make the repairs heat-tight, so to speak. We’re hemorrhaging temperature right now—heat is bleeding out of the ship all the time, and there’s nothing out there to replace it. I’m trying very hard to keep us from radiating off what little heat we have, but I can’t rewrite the laws of thermodynamics. Check the display.”

  The external temperature had dropped to 7 K.

  Seven degrees above absolute zero.

  The internal temperature was well below freezing. “Wait,” she said. “Wait—if we keep going like this—”

  “We may be too far in to go back,” he told her.

  She shook her head. “I refuse to accept that. But if we keep going, and the temperature drops to absolute zero, then—then what will happen?”

  “Oh,” he said, and he smiled—tried to make it sound cheery, and failed—“we’ll all be dead long before then. All of us except Valk.”

  The fourth day no one talked about the cold.

  They kept their helmets up. Candless was ravenously hungry all day. Her body was burning off all its stored energy to keep her internal organs from freezing. She worried about frostbite taking her fingers—her gloves did their best to keep her hands warm, but they were too thin. She tried not to touch anything she didn’t have to. The arms of the pilot’s seat, the table in the wardroom, all were painfully cold when her fingertips even brushed them.

  She took her turn at the controls, relieving Lanoe. He said nothing as he got up and moved away, hugging himself as if that would keep him warm. An hour into her shift she noticed something alarming. The groaning of the ship, the endless, dull roar of the ice had stopped. There was silence now, silence all around. She cleared her throat, just to hear a sound.

  Engineer Paniet answered when she pinged his address. “The external temperature is point five K,” she said. Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper. Perhaps just to help conserve as much of her energy as possible, she’d barely spoken a word in hours
. “Is it time to … to worry?” she asked.

  “You haven’t been, this whole time?” he asked.

  “I’d like a serious answer.”

  “I wish I could give you one,” he told her. “I guess … when the temperature gets down to-to-to—sorry, I’m shivering. When it gets down to a tiny fraction of a degree, and I mean, when we’re down in the nanokelvins, we’ll see some very strange behavior. Chemical reactions actually speed up by a factor of a hundred at that temperature, because you see large-scale quantum effects. We’ll see Einstein-Bose condensates, maybe, where you get superfluidity and superconductivity, and concerted proton tunneling, or maybe—”

  “Please,” she said. “I’m too cold to chastise you for being pedantic.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Short answer. I have no idea.”

  “Ah.”

  “By the time anything weird happens, though—it’ll already be too late to do anything. Just … just try not to think about it.”

  By the end of her shift, the external temperature had dropped to.01 K.

  She watched the laser spiraling ahead of the ship, lighting their way. She couldn’t not watch it. She flew the ship. She didn’t know what else to do.

  Lanoe did not respond when she tried to ping him.

  Five days into the wormhole, five days in the cold, and Valk was the only one left who could fly the cruiser. The others, the humans, all stayed huddled together in a narrow space next to the engines. Paniet had covered every internal surface of the room in silvered thermal blankets, sealed it off with non-heat-conducting tape. Every bit of heat the cruiser could generate was pumped in there. The marines, Ehta, the pilots, the ensigns, everybody pressed together for warmth. They didn’t move, those shapes curled together. Even the lights in the room had been switched off, to leave more power for the insufficient heaters.

  Ahead of them the wormhole stretched on and on. Dark, lit only by the spiral path of the laser.

  There were corridors in the ship that were so cold now, the air in them froze and fell like snow. Water tanks and lines throughout the ship burst, and fans of icicles speared out into the empty companionways. Several displays had cracked, their blank gray surfaces split open to reveal the clustered emitters beneath. The air was so dry the upholstery of the chairs in the wardroom shrank and tore.

  Valk flew on, not moving at all. Neither breathing nor blinking.

  He wasn’t sure what he would do if the humans died. Logically he knew it would help his own chances. The energy that was currently being used to keep them warm could be sent instead to the engines. He could increase the cruiser’s speed. Get where he was going faster. Assuming there was somewhere to go.

  If the external temperature dropped to absolute zero, the wormhole itself might … end. Run out. It might stop functioning, collapse in on itself. Cease to be. He’d run models on what that would mean, statistical simulations, but none of them returned any results he could count on. The fact was that no one knew what absolute zero really looked like. It was one of those things that couldn’t exist in nature, a limit that could never be reached. At least, under normal conditions.

  There was nothing normal about this wormhole.

  He was certain of one thing. If the temperature readout did drop to true zero, he would die along with the others. If a thing like him could be said to die.

  He flew in the dark. He flew without displays.

  He flew without moving. He didn’t need to touch any controls. To save power, he shut down all the simulation programs that made him feel human. He had been surprised to find that he noticed when he shut down the algorithm that made him think he had a beating heart. It didn’t hurt. It just felt … odd.

  Lanoe had warned him that he needed to hold on to his humanity as much as he could. That the only way the others would accept him was if he sounded, behaved, acted like he was the human Tannis Valk, the Blue Devil.

  That had been put by the wayside now. Now he was simply an AI. A computer program, if a very complicated one. A set of processes capable of making decisions, capable of a convincing simulation of consciousness.

  Not that it took much in the way of processing power to fly. He merely followed the spiral path. Bending with it, where it curved. Holding steady where it flew straight. He did not get bored. Computers don’t. He didn’t get tired. Computers can’t.

  Perhaps, though, there was a little humanity left in him. Enough of the old human failings. Because when something changed, it took him a long time to notice it.

  Candless stirred, and the people around her grumbled, annoyed by the movement. Any small adjustment of a body in the heap let some heat out, and they all felt it.

  At first she wasn’t sure why she’d moved. She’d been asleep, her body conserving its energy as best it could. There had been no dreams. Yet something … some small stimulus had broken through her lethargy. A flash of light. Probably just a hallucination, her brain so starved for visual information it started generating its own inputs.

  Hellfire, she thought. You’re starting to sound like Paniet. Or Valk.

  Put it in different terms, then. She was seeing things. Except—was she?

  Her suit was in low-power mode, every joule its batteries could produce being used to keep her warm. Its systems were idling, nonfunctional. Except for one system, one that kept ticking over quietly, waiting for the right moment.

  A tiny green pearl rotated in the corner of her vision. She could barely make it out, could just see that it was a message from the wardroom. From Valk.

  Her eyeballs felt like they were scraping against sandpaper as she flicked her gaze across the pearl, accepting the message. It was composed entirely of visual data.

  The view of the wormhole ahead. The darkness, the spiral path. Was Valk just calling to warn her, to tell her they were all about to die? She wished that he … that he would just … that he hadn’t—

  Along the wall of the wormhole she could just make out a tendril of smoky light.

  Ghostlight.

  The view swept forward, moving down the wormhole faster than the cruiser could carry it. Up ahead a spectral cobweb of light crawled across the wormhole’s walls. Tendrils of ghostlight stretching out, reaching translucent claws through the darkness. Toward other, more robust patches of light.

  The message cut out.

  Moving her head hurt. Her joints were frozen stiff and her body shrieked with pain every time she tried to move a muscle. She looked over at Lanoe, at where she thought he was, buried in the pile of bodies. It was hard to tell—their helmets were all silvered, better to trap in their body heat.

  Her tongue was glued to the side of her dry, dry mouth. She felt it tear free as she tried to speak. All that came out at first was a dry cough. Eventually she managed to croak out a few words. She gathered them into a message she could send to him.

  Across the pile, his helmet turned transparent and she could see his face. Pale with sleep and cold, his lips a bloodless line, the skin around his nostrils dry and cracked. She was sure she looked just as rough.

  He didn’t nod. She didn’t blame him—she didn’t want to move any more than she had to, either. But he blinked at her. Crusted eyes opening and closing.

  She knew what that meant. That he’d seen Valk’s message, too. That he understood.

  They’d made it.

  PART III

  EXOTIC

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It took Lanoe more than an hour to climb all the way up to the emergency control stand. The cruiser was accelerating, providing just enough gravity to make it a chore to pull himself up, hand over aching hand. He had to keep moving so his fingers didn’t freeze to the metal rungs of the ladder—as much as he wanted to stop and just shiver, just curl into a ball to conserve his warmth, he stayed at it, ascending one painful meter after another.

  When he reached the wardroom he slumped against a wall and closed his eyes and gave himself a long minute before he went in to see Valk.

  He close
d his eyes. His head reeled, his heart thundering in his chest from the exertion of getting to the wardroom. He wanted to just sit there, to rest, for days. To wait until he was strong enough to do what came next.

  He half-expected Zhang to start talking to him, the way she seemed to do every time he tried to sleep. Maybe there was a point of exhaustion where even his subconscious just decided to leave him alone, though, because he couldn’t hear her at all.

  He opened his eyes. It took some work, but he managed it. It was going to get better, he told himself. Already the cruiser was warming up. They were going to survive.

  He forced himself to stand. He staggered over to where Valk lay slumped in the control seat, looking dead to the world. The AI didn’t move as Lanoe called his name, but a green pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision.

  He swiped it away without answering it. “Talk to me,” he insisted. “Out loud.”

  “Okay,” Valk said. In front of him a display flickered to life. Chunks were missing from the view where an emitter had shattered in the cold, but Lanoe could get the gist—the wormhole ahead of them looked like every other wormhole he’d ever seen in his life. Its walls shimmered with ghostlight.

  “What changed?” Lanoe asked.

  “No idea,” Valk said. He shifted a little in his chair. He was trying to sit up, Lanoe realized. He hadn’t been immune to the cold, either. “Somebody took mercy on us. That’s good enough for me.” With a jerk, Valk shoved himself upright in the chair. His left arm flopped off his lap and hung limp at his side.

  Lanoe narrowed his eyes. “What happened there?” he asked. “Don’t say frostbite.”

  Valk shook his torso left and right. The equivalent of a human shaking his head. “No. No, I … I thought about it, too much.”

  “What?” Lanoe asked.

  “I had to shut down a lot of systems to keep going. To conserve power. That meant I had to list out my own process tree, and—”