Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Ahead of the scout the wormhole spooled out exactly as a wormhole should. Ghostlight flickered along the walls, occasionally reaching out with a vaporous arm toward the scout, but never coming close to touching it.

  “Temperature hasn’t changed,” the pilot called. “All conditions nominal.”

  Seconds ticked by. Bullam couldn’t forget that the charts labeled this wormhole as somehow extremely hazardous, but she couldn’t see where the danger lay. The pilot’s voice became a lulling drone, and she started to reach behind her, to snap her fingers for one of her drones to bring her something to eat.

  “Temmperrrature norrrmal,” the pilot said.

  At first Bullam didn’t catch it.

  “Alll conditionss nommminnnalll.”

  She looked up. No one on the bridge seemed to think it was odd that the pilot’s voice had deepened so much, or that he had slowed down to a drawling cadence. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe there was just interference on the line, some kind of lag.

  Though—Bullam had never heard of interference on a communications laser. The beam either connected or it didn’t. If there was a problem with a comms laser, the signal simply cut out.

  “Captain,” she said.

  Shulkin gave her a nod. Just a tiny inclination of his head. “Pilot. What is your physical state? Are you feeling ill?”

  There was no answer for long seconds. When it did come, it was hard to understand.

  “Fffiiinnneee,” he said. “Iiii’mmmm fffffiiiiinnnnneeee, aaaaalllll condittttttttt—”

  The final t-sound stretched on and on, sounding like waves crashing on a beach.

  “IO,” Shulkin said. “Give me a signal analysis. What’s going on?”

  The information officer shook his head. “It’s … it’s weird, sir.”

  “I need data, Officer. Not your opinion.”

  The IO took a deep breath. “The signal’s still coming in, just as strong as ever, only—the wavelength is all stretched out. It’s like—”

  “Time dilation,” the navigator said.

  They all turned to look at her.

  “Time dilation, like when a ship travels close to the speed of light, or it approaches a black hole. That’s my best opinion, sir.”

  Shulkin didn’t bother telling her that he hadn’t asked for it. “IO, has the scout craft accelerated to near the speed of light?”

  “Not at all, sir,” the IO replied. “It seems to have slowed down, actually. It’s … hellfire.”

  “There are civilians present,” Shulkin said. “Please avoid that sort of language.”

  The IO nodded. “Sorry, sir. Just—when the scout entered the wormhole it was moving at approximately a thousand meters per second. My sensors are telling me it’s now moving at a velocity of approximately ten centimeters … per hour.”

  The wormhole, Bullam thought. The wormhole had slowed down time for the scout pilot. She remembered from when she was in school, the day her science instructors had taught her about wormholes. One of the mysteries about them was that they connected distant planets while conserving local time. She didn’t understand all the math, but she remembered them saying that a wormhole didn’t just move through space, it traveled through a timelike dimension as well. The equations that governed wormholes didn’t recognize any difference between time and space, treating them as identical kinds of dimensions. Just as a wormhole could connect two star systems, it could just as easily connect the distant past and the far future. It had surprised the early explorers that the wormholes they traversed didn’t send you back into the distant past, or accelerate you toward the end of the universe.

  In all their explorations, though, humanity had never found a wormhole that traveled through time. It just didn’t seem to be something that happened naturally. Maybe the universe just didn’t like the kind of paradoxes that time travel might create.

  This wormhole apparently didn’t get the memo.

  “He’s slowed down in time,” Bullam said. “And the further he goes, the slower he’s going to get. The poor bastard’s going to get stuck in there if he goes any further. Time will slow down so much it’ll be millions of years before he even realizes he’s in trouble. How do we get him out?”

  “Sir,” the carrier’s pilot said. “We can dispatch a rescue vehicle. I can have one ready in a few minutes, and—”

  “We don’t,” Shulkin said.

  “Sir?” the pilot asked.

  “Any rescue vehicle we send after that pilot will be slowed down in time as well. Rescue is impossible. Ready the third scout.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Bullam said. “You can’t just leave him in there!”

  Shulkin turned his diamond gaze on her.

  “I am the captain of this vessel,” he told her. “I can do as I please. I gave an order. Ready the third scout. Let’s find out what the third wormhole has in store for us. And let us all hope it’s something we can survive, because I intend to take this carrier through it, and I intend to catch Aleister Lanoe. Would any military personnel like to comment on my orders?”

  The bridge crew all looked to their displays.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I think I ought to point out,” Paniet said, over an encrypted channel, “as the closest thing you have to a scientist—that thing shouldn’t exist.”

  “The wormhole throat?” Lanoe asked. As if he could be referring to anything else. It loomed before the cutter, dwarfing the little ship. A sphere of distorted air. A miniature planet with a ring of clouds.

  There was no possible way to determine where it went, or what they would find on the other side.

  “Where they occur in nature, throats are always anchored to large gravity wells. Stars, in other words. The planet isn’t big enough to hold on to it. And please, dear, don’t get me started on how unlikely it is to find such a thing inside a planetary atmosphere.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. “Can you think of any reason why we shouldn’t go through?”

  “None whatsoever. Other than the obvious fact that it’s incredibly dangerous to fly through a wormhole throat when you don’t know what’s on the other side. But don’t let that stop you. I’m burning with envy that you get to go through first.”

  Lanoe cut the connection to the cruiser and established a new one to Candless, up in orbit around the planet. “XO, you understand the situation?”

  “I do, Commander. I’ll sit up here and monitor the planet until you return. If, of course, you don’t come back after a reasonable interval, I’ll assume command.”

  “I have no idea what I’m getting into here. Wait for that reasonable interval—and then a little longer.”

  “Understood.” Candless cut the connection and suddenly it was very, very quiet inside the cutter.

  Lanoe looked back at the marines sitting behind him. If they were worried about what was about to happen, their mirrored helmets hid it.

  “Take us through,” he said to Valk.

  The AI didn’t hesitate. He touched the throttle and the cutter moved almost silently forward.

  Lanoe didn’t know what to do with his hands. He grasped the knees of his suit. The throat grew until it filled all of their forward view and then they nosed through, into the wormhole beyond—

  —except there was no wormhole beyond. It wasn’t a throat, it was a portal. Wisps of ghostlight just had time to reach toward the cutter before they disappeared again and the cutter flew free into … another place.

  Lanoe’s first impression was that they had entered a vast cavern, dark but full of glittering lights like jewels. They were not in space, certainly no stretch of space he’d ever visited before. He could feel that this was an enclosed place, though it was large enough that he could barely see the walls.

  Walls shimmering with ghostlight. Yet this was no wormhole. It couldn’t be. It had to be hundreds of kilometers wide. A bubble, then, an enormous bubble made of the same material that made wormhole walls, but self-enclosed. As far as he could tell the only entran
ce or exit was the portal they’d just traversed. It sat behind them like a pearl embedded in the bubble’s wall.

  “Where are we?” Lanoe asked.

  Valk shrugged. “Technically we haven’t moved much at all. Technically we’re still in the atmosphere of the planet. We’ve just shifted into another geometric modulus space. It’s the same algebraic stack but we’ve broken isomorphism—passed through a complex Riemann transform and—”

  Lanoe glared at him.

  Valk shrugged again. “We’re in another dimension,” he said.

  Floating in the bubble, not far from the portal, was a city.

  A shapeless collection of spires and galleries and arcades. A Gothic fantasia, a cathedral that had metastasized into a massive fortified cosmopolis. Fantastically intricate, almost organic in its encrustations, yet clearly something that had been built. Towers stretched upward from some unseen central mass, towers and long, stately columns and things like—but not exactly like—pyramids and obelisks. City was the best word he had to describe it, yet unlike a city sitting on a flat plain, this one hovered unsupported and it sprawled out in every possible direction at once. The vast majority of it seemed to have been constructed from the same dark basalt as the sculptures that had sung to open the portal. Dark stone, pierced by a million blazing windows full of yellow light.

  Vehicles—aircraft? spacecraft?—zoomed hither and yon around the city, plunging into openings in the mass of architecture, describing lazy figure-eights over and under and around its mass. As the cutter approached, the vehicles skated away, like nervous insects.

  Lanoe could hear Valk talking, calling ahead to hail the city, to ask for instructions. To get clearance to land. He was too busy taking in the strangeness of the place to listen, to give orders. As the cutter edged closer he was constantly discovering new features of the city—a long boulevard, lined with sculptures like the ones back on the planet. A pair of high towers linked with so many suspended bridges they looked like cobwebs strung between the buildings. Structures like lighthouses all over the city, tall, thin columns topped by rotating lights, their beams sweeping across the impossibly complex architecture below.

  There was no sun in the bubble, no moon to cast light upon the city. The ghostlight that played along the bubble’s walls was too thin and gray to do more than dapple the outermost towers in a faint, coruscating radiance. No stronger than starlight. All other light in the place was artificial. A city wrapped in perpetual night.

  He didn’t know what to make of it. He had no idea what any of it meant.

  “Lanoe,” Valk said.

  He pulled himself back from the view. Faced the AI.

  “I’m not getting any instructions,” Valk said. “If there’s a traffic controller here they’re ignoring me. But I think maybe we’re supposed to put down there.”

  He pointed at a broad plaza below them, a circular, dishlike space. It resembled very much the amphitheater bowl on the planet they’d just left behind, its sides terraced into endless rows of seating. At its center a ring of light appeared, bluish-white in color, far brighter than even the lighthouse beams. A second ring lit up inside the first, then a third, like the concentric bands of a bull’s-eye.

  Lanoe nodded. Valk took the cutter down for a landing.

  The city had an atmosphere. Identical to that of the planet they’d come from, and therefore breathable. Lanoe kept his helmet down as he climbed out from under the cutter, but the marines behind him kept theirs up and silvered.

  He stepped out onto flagstones joined together so perfectly it was hard to find the seams. Once he was clear of the ship’s wing he stood up to his full height and looked around. The landing lights had gone out and there wasn’t much to see—just the silhouettes of towers all around the plaza, their lights too distant to show him any features of the place where he stood.

  Valk came up beside him and together they looked around, trying to see if anyone was going to come to welcome them—or maybe shout at them for landing in the wrong place. Lanoe had a distinct feeling he was being watched. It made his back itch, right between his shoulder blades. He turned around in a full circle and then, finally, he saw them. Presumably the people he’d come so far to meet.

  They sat on the terraced benches, hunched forward in shadow. Hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. He could see their heads move back and forth and he presumed they were whispering among themselves, but he couldn’t hear any words. None of them were close enough for him to make out their features.

  “Do we go and introduce ourselves?” Valk asked. “Or would that be rude?”

  “Maybe,” Lanoe said. “But after all the games they’ve made us play, I’m thinking it’s time for answers.” He started walking toward the nearest ring of benches, taking long strides he hoped looked confident. Before he’d gone ten meters, though, he stopped in place.

  The beam of one of the lighthouses had speared down into the plaza, shining a perfect circle of orange light onto the flagstones. Lanoe started walking forward again, but then a man stepped into the pool of light, one forearm up to shade his eyes.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’re here.” He gave them a warm smile. “Damnation. I’d stopped believing. I’d stopped hoping.”

  Lanoe studied the man as he approached them, the spotlight following his steps. He took in the thick growth of beard, the shaggy hair. The nasty scar that ran across the man’s right temple. He wore a heavy pilot’s suit with deep scuff marks on the knees. The outermost layer of fabric over his elbows had worn away completely. When he tried to ping the man’s cryptab, Lanoe got nothing back. That worried him—until he realized it was burned out. The suit’s batteries must be dead.

  Valk touched Lanoe’s arm. “Right shoulder,” he whispered.

  Painted on the man’s sleeve, weathered but still recognizable, was a blue flag with black stars. The flag of the Establishment. The same flag Valk had flown under, back when they called him—

  “The Blue Devil,” the man said, a look of awe in his face. “I can’t believe it. They sent the damned Blue Devil!” He rushed over, brushing past Lanoe, and grabbed Valk’s hand. “Hell’s bells. Hell’s bells! Sir, it’s so good to meet you.”

  Lanoe’s teeth ground together. He’d run out of patience a long time ago.

  “Who are you?” Lanoe demanded.

  “What?” the man asked. “Oh, terribly sorry, old man.” He grinned and reached for Lanoe’s hand. “You’ll have so many questions. I’m afraid I don’t know where to start.”

  “How about with your name,” Lanoe suggested.

  “My … name,” the man said. A strange transformation overcame him then. His head jerked back as if he’d had a shock. His eyes lost their focus and drifted to the side. His mouth opened, a little, and his lips moved as if he were speaking but he made no sound at all. Lanoe worried the man might be having a seizure.

  But then the intelligence came back to his face, as abruptly as it had gone.

  “Pleased to meet you, very pleased,” the bearded man said, as if nothing had happened. “I’m Archivolt Klebs, Third Lieutenant Archivolt Klebs, Ninth Territorials, if we’re being formal. But let’s not, eh?” He grinned again. “Archie. Just call me Archie. You’ve come a long way, we—I know that, and I’m very grateful. Are you tired? Thirsty or hungry? We can do something about that, if you’d like—”

  Lanoe took a step back and turned around to face the multitude of people hiding in the shadows. “You sent for us. You said you could help.”

  “Please don’t address them directly,” Archie said. “Not quite yet. It’s for your benefit, I promise.”

  Lanoe tried to stare the man down. It didn’t work. “Look,” he said. “You summoned us. My name is Aleister Lanoe. My crew and I nearly died getting here, and now we’d—”

  He saw Valk lifting his hands as if to tell him to take it down a notch.

  Damn. That used to be Zhang’s job. She always knew when he was about to go too far. She always called him on it,
too. How many times had he let Zhang do his talking for him? Any situation that required diplomacy or tact, she’d been there to back him up. Make up for his lack of social niceties.

  Could he even do this, without her?

  Lanoe fought to control himself. “We’d like to talk,” he said, a little more gently. “What I’d really like is to know what’s going on. I understand why you’re hiding out here, and I understand why you’re so cautious, but if we’re going to help each other we need to start trusting each other. That should start now. Let me see their faces.”

  Archie rubbed at the scar on his temple. “Just a second,” he said.

  His face went slack again, just as it had before. Drool formed in the corner of his mouth.

  Lanoe looked to Valk, but the big pilot could only shrug.

  What the hell was wrong with this man? That scar—had he suffered some kind of brain trauma?

  There was so much at stake. So much to win or lose here—were they really going to have to negotiate with—

  “Ah. A thousand apologies, I daresay,” Archie said, as the light came back to his eyes.

  “Who are they?” Lanoe asked, pointing at the people in the shadows. “Just tell me that much.”

  Archie nodded and sighed deeply, as if he regretted that things had to move so quickly. “That,” he said, “is the Choir.”

  “The Choir,” Lanoe repeated.

  Archie lifted his arms in a sweeping gesture. His cockeyed grin suggested they shouldn’t take the drama of the moment so seriously, but it was hard to feel amused when Lanoe was stuck in the dark, surrounded by invisible and mysterious multitudes. “The Choir Indomitable. The Choir Invisible. The Choir in Exile. The Choir That Chose to Be Forgotten. They’ve been debating what you should call them, for weeks. Personally, I think they should keep it simple. The Choir.”

  “Please,” Lanoe said, fighting back his urge to grab the man and shake him. “Please. Let me see their faces. I have my own trust issues. Do you understand?”