Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Occasionally Bury would hear her muttering to herself. It took him a while to realize he was actually hearing one side of a conversation she was having with Engineer Paniet:

  “Whatever it is, it’s small, and fast—thought I had it there.”

  “A strong magnet will find a needle in a haystack. This is harder.”

  “Here, do you see this? Is that a glitch, or … no.”

  “No, I suppose that was too much to hope for.”

  When he could, he checked in with Ginger. Listened to her breathe.

  “Very well,” Lieutenant Candless said, eventually, finally. “Pilots, we’re going to try to extend the range of our patrol. We’ll split up into two teams. Maggs, you’re with me. Ensigns, you two will—”

  “What is it?” Ginger demanded, over the general circuit. “What did you find?”

  Bury expected Lieutenant Candless to upbraid her for breaking silence. Instead, their former instructor actually answered a question, for once.

  “We’re seeing some indication that a Centrocor vehicle has entered the system.”

  Bury’s blood ran cold, but only for a moment. “The carrier?” he asked. “The carrier is here?”

  “No,” Lieutenant Candless replied. “One of its scouts, perhaps. It’s a standard tactic, when approaching a potentially hostile system, to send one small vehicle ahead to get the lay of the land. If that is what we’re seeing—and I make no guarantees—then it could be as much as a day ahead of the carrier. Whatever it is, it hasn’t made any threatening moves. Most likely it’s hanging back near this system’s wormhole throat, looking for us. If it sees us it may attempt to retreat without engaging. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen, yes? I need you all to acknowledge. That means you should say ‘yes,’ now.”

  “A good old-fashioned snipe hunt. How diverting. That’s a ‘yes,’” Lieutenant Maggs replied.

  “Yes,” Bury said, his voice sounding about an octave too high in his own ears. He waited for Ginger to echo him. After far too long, she did.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All right. As I was saying, Ensigns, I want you to break orbit and head antispin, back in toward the star and the wormhole throat. I want you to run silent and dark—don’t even flare your thrusters, we don’t want to scare them into running. Maggs and I will take the opposite trajectory and together we’ll form a pincers. If you do find our target, and if you are absolutely certain you can destroy it before it gets away, you may fire at will. Otherwise try to get between it and the wormhole throat. This is crucial, Ensigns. The mission and the safety of the cruiser depend on us here. Do you understand my orders?”

  “Yes,” Bury said. Hoping he sounded a little more resolute, this time.

  “Yes,” Ginger said. Faster than before.

  “Then get to it,” Lieutenant Candless said. “Good hunting.”

  The aircar moved through broad passages, deep under the city. Water-Falling and Archie pointed out various sights of interest—enormous machines huddling in the dark that generated the Choir’s power, cleaned their water, and generated their food. Lanoe supposed Paniet might have found it all deeply fascinating. There were too many thoughts in his head to let him care much.

  He did his best to look interested, so as not to offend their hosts more than he already had. It was hard, sometimes, to remember that the Choir couldn’t hear his thoughts—not unless he had an antenna installed, like the one they’d put in Archie’s brain. He could even communicate privately with Valk, a little, by sending text-only messages back and forth between their suits. Valk was certain the Choir weren’t able to pick up on their radio communications.

  Still, the weight of being constantly on guard, of watching the words he spoke aloud, started to get to him. When Archie announced that the tour was complete, he considered excusing himself and taking the cutter back to the Hoplite. Apparently, though, they weren’t quite done with the Choir’s hospitality.

  Their next event was a banquet in their honor, followed by the evening’s entertainment. The Choir had at least agreed not to make the humans attend the live sex performance they’d originally planned. Instead they were going to be treated to something called an “apportation show.”

  “It’s a little like a magic act,” Archie explained. “It’s pretty impressive. I think you’ll like it.”

  The aircar dropped them off in front of a large building not far from the central amphitheater, where they’d first set down. Hundreds of choristers were already there waiting for them, lined up on either side of the door.

  As they headed inside, Archie gestured for Lanoe and Valk to stand back. “Here’s something special, built just for this occasion,” he said, as a team of choristers came toward them carrying, of all things, human-sized chairs and a small table just for their use. The furniture was taken inside and set up in the middle of a wide hall that was otherwise empty, a tiny island of comfort in a cold, huge room. The temperature rose as the Choir filed inside, hundreds of them filling up all the space.

  “Where are they going to sit?” Lanoe asked.

  “The Choir eat standing up. It might look a bit bizarre, chaps. Just keep in mind they evolved on a completely different planet from us.”

  A line of choristers entered, all carrying long glass tubes full of yellow liquid. They placed their burdens on the floor and one by one the banquet guests moved to twitch their skirts up over the tubes, then lowered themselves onto the tubes so they could suck up their contents.

  “Their mouths are, ahem. Underneath their skirts,” Archie explained. “Different body plan than ours, eh? I did warn you. Ah. Here, they’d like you to have a go yourselves, though thankfully they’ve been courteous enough to provide spoons. Chairs, a table, spoons. How lucky you blokes are—seventeen years and I never got this treatment!”

  Dishes of the yellow liquid were brought out and placed on the table before them. Lanoe took up his spoon and, very conscious of the fact the entire Choir was watching, lifted a little of the yellow stuff to his mouth. “Is this safe?” he asked. “You said everything on their planet was poisonous to humans.”

  “That was the plant life. The Choir don’t eat their vegetables. This is guaranteed nontoxic, full of important nutrients,” Archie said, and as if to prove it he spooned some of the liquid into his own mouth.

  Lanoe nodded and took a taste. The liquid was tepid, greasy, and bland and slightly loathsome. A little like eating bacon grease as if it were soup. He struggled to get it down, and not to show his displeasure.

  All around him the Choir erupted in excited chirping. Archie looked like he might rupture his organs, he laughed so hard. “I said it wasn’t poison. I never said it was good!”

  “It’s very … filling,” Lanoe said. He looked over at Valk. “You—eat up.”

  Valk shrugged. “No problem. I can switch off my taste buds.”

  “What is this?” Lanoe asked Archie. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Oh, it’s completely synthetic. No worries there. It’s supposed to resemble the Choir’s favorite food back when there were animals on their planet. Imagine a little dog-sized deer, except with the head of a stag beetle. Now liquefy its innards, and—”

  Lanoe gently pushed the bowl away from himself.

  He thought the Choir would never stop chirping.

  The volume of space the snipe hunt had to cover was enormous. The wormhole throat orbited a couple of million kilometers out from the system’s star, a tiny, almost invisible distortion in space, a mote of dust floating in an empty coliseum. The cruiser had definitely seen something come through the throat, but had no idea which direction it had gone or how fast. A small craft, like a carrier scout, had no trouble getting lost in all that emptiness. Unless it made a point of signaling its location—which it had not—the only way to track its movements would be to look for the flare of its thrusters. The scout could simply cut its engines and disappear.

  “Why doesn’t he just run back to the wormhole?” Bur
y asked. “They sent him to see if we were here, right? To detect us before they commit any more ships to attacking this system. So why is he still hanging around?”

  Though Bury was flying in close formation with Ginger, he knew he couldn’t talk to her about this sort of thing. Instead he’d reached out to Lieutenant Maggs, over an encrypted comms laser. Making that connection had felt a little rebellious. The scout wouldn’t be able to overhear their conversation, but still, Lieutenant Candless had instructed them to maintain radio silence.

  Luckily, she couldn’t overhear them, either.

  “The pilot knows that as soon as we see him, we’ll make short work of him,” Maggs said. “It takes a special sort of fellow, really, to fly one of those scouts. No vector field, no armor, minimal weapons to defend one’s self with. You have to be clever if you want to survive. He’s cut his engines, switched off his canopy lights. He’s relying on passive sensors only. Collecting as much information as he can. If he sees an opportunity to run, by hell he’ll take it. Not until he’s sure, though, and that gives us one chance to catch him.”

  “You’ve been in battles before. Real battles, I mean, not like that half-baked skirmish we got in last time we saw Centrocor,” Bury said. “Is this kind of thing typical, this chasing each other’s tails in the dark?”

  “One would have to be a very poor scholar of military history,” Maggs replied, “to think there was such a thing as a typical battle. Each is different, just as every lover you’ll have in your life will be different. If you’re asking if I’ve been on many snipe hunts, well, certainly. It’s part of the job. Tactics is a kind of game, you see. You have certain pieces on the board—your warships. You know the rules they follow—their specifications, their capabilities. Each side’s commander must commit those pieces in certain ways, and each may counter the other’s move in certain ways. Yet there is enough variety to allow a seemingly infinite number of permutations.”

  Bury ignored the grandiloquence. “What I don’t get, though, is—why send a scout ahead? Now that we’ve seen their scout, we know they’re coming for us. The scout ruins the element of surprise.”

  “Oh, we already knew they were coming. At least, we feared it, which is enough. Military fellows are always paranoid. One must prepare for that. From what we saw last time, the commander of the carrier is no fool. He knows we’re lying in wait. That the cruiser has better guns than he can bring to bear. He knows that we have talented pilots. If the carrier just blundered through the wormhole throat, we could shoot it down before its navigator had even figured out where they were.”

  Bury supposed he could see that. “So what do you do? I mean, if you were on their side, on Centrocor’s side. What would you do?”

  “Send one scout about a day in advance of my main force,” Maggs said, as if he’d already thought of the answer and had just been waiting for someone to ask. “If it comes back, I’ll have gained some information about my enemy. If it doesn’t come back, I know, at the very least, that my enemy is there and ready for me. My next wave is a group of cataphract-class fighters, maybe a full squadron. I have them come screaming out of the throat at full speed, guns blazing. I’ll lose many of them but they’ll tie up my enemy’s weapons systems, keep him busy. The third wave will be the carrier itself, with a screen of disposable carrier scouts to prevent a massive, decapitating strike while I’m still vulnerable. Because I’m commanding a carrier, I let loose with everything I have—every fighter in my vehicle bay—in the hopes that they can destroy the cruiser before it has a chance to open fire on me with its coilguns.”

  “Sounds risky,” Bury said.

  “War always is, my young friend. But the strategy I’ve laid out for you gives Centrocor an excellent chance.”

  “What, like fifty-fifty?”

  “More like seventy-thirty,” Maggs said. “Favoring Centrocor.”

  “Wait,” Bury said. “Hold on.” He’d been asking out of abstract curiosity. Suddenly the visualization in his head felt very real. “You’re saying they could—”

  “Kill us all? Well, yes.”

  “But we have Commander Lanoe on our side,” Bury pointed out. “He’s got a reputation for being sneaky. He’ll find some way to—”

  “Lanoe’s reputation,” Maggs said, the sneer in his voice almost dripping through Bury’s headphones, “has taken on a life of its own. Don’t believe everything you’re told, Hellion. And let me remind you that at the moment—we don’t have him. He’s too busy having adventures on the far side of an impossible wormhole. Candless is in command. Your old teacher. What’s her reputation, again? Hot stuff in her day, but she couldn’t hack it in the long run?”

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” Bury said.

  “You have my most sincere apologies,” Maggs simpered.

  “Look, just because—” Bury cut off when a green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision. It was Ginger, no doubt still wrestling with her conscience. “I’m getting another call,” he told Maggs. He cut out the comms laser, then tapped a virtual key on his comms panel to accept the new link.

  “Bury,” she said. “Bury—I think I saw something.”

  Her voice was raw and thin, edged with panic.

  After the banquet there were dozens of introductions to be made. Water-Falling would lead a single chorister over to them so Lanoe and Valk could shake her hands—given the amount of chirping that accompanied the gesture, the Choir seemed to find human customs highly amusing—and then Water-Falling told them the name of the chorister they were meeting. “This is Wind-in-the-Trees-in-Summer,” she said, through Archie.

  “We’re so sorry you had to be exposed to derangement,” the new chorister said, again using Archie as her translator.

  “I’m sorry,” Lanoe said. “What?”

  “She says it’s a terrible shame that I had that breakdown in the tunnel. Honestly, he’s been showing signs of serious depression for a while now.”

  Lanoe tried to meet Archie’s eye, to see what he thought of the words he’d just translated. The castaway wouldn’t look at him directly.

  “He … seems fine to me,” Lanoe said, trying to speak directly to Wind-in-the-Trees-in-Summer, but the chorister had already moved away, and another was taking her place.

  “This is Pebbles-Ground-Under-Soft-Wheels,” Archie said, and Water-Falling brought a new chorister to meet them.

  Before they’d even finished shaking hands, the newcomer said—through Archie’s mouth—“She hopes my outburst won’t color your impression of the Choir. I’ve always been a little unstable, she says, but recently my thoughts have been nearly incoherent.”

  Lanoe clutched the chorister’s claw, so she couldn’t get away before he replied. “He seems a steady enough fellow to me,” he said.

  Pebbles-Ground-Under-Soft-Wheels didn’t say anything more. Instead she just pulled her claw free of his grasp and made way for another chorister to come and shake Lanoe’s hand and tell him that Archie was a severe disappointment to the Choir. The next chorister in the receiving line said she hoped he understood Archie didn’t represent the views or opinions of the Choir as a whole.

  One after another of them came by, each saying much the same thing. Apologizing for Archie’s mental instability.

  “What the hell is this?” Lanoe asked Archie, once the introductions were complete.

  “They’re shaming me,” Archie explained, still smiling. “It’s something they do. I let them down.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “Let them down? How?”

  “I’ve been … well, let’s call it homesick. Back in the tunnel, when I thought they weren’t listening, I’m afraid I let that overcome me. It was a mistake.”

  “You asked us to take you home with us when we leave,” Lanoe said, whispering. Though he knew the entire Choir could hear him, all the same. “They’re acting like you’re some sort of criminal.”

  Archie shrugged. “Clear communication is very important to them. Harmonious thoughts, they�
�d say. Any blighter who adds a sour note to the symphony gets this treatment.”

  “It’s not fair,” Valk said.

  “You asked me once about how the Choir deals with mental illness,” Archie said. “I didn’t get a chance to give you a proper answer. I’m afraid you’ve gone and discovered the soft spot on the apple here. But don’t judge them too harshly—try to understand. The Choir shares every thought, every emotion. They can’t just block out a chorister if they don’t like what they hear. Even if those thoughts are damaging, even if they would encourage others to do horrible things. Don’t you see? A deranged individual forces her madness on all of them. It’s unbearable. It shatters the harmony.”

  “You’re not one of them,” Lanoe said.

  Archie’s eyes flashed with something—some emotion—but then it was gone again. Blanked out.

  “You don’t approve,” he said.

  Except it wasn’t him who said it. Water-Falling was standing behind Lanoe. She placed one of her claws on his shoulder. He realized that she had taken control of Archie, that she was speaking directly through him now.

  “There ought to be a better way,” Lanoe said. Despite himself. Knowing he might offend the Choir. Not particularly caring very much.

  “Some of us agree with you, believe it or not. Not many. Most are happy with the way things have always been done. Most of us want harmony, before anything else.”

  “Even if that means crushing anyone who sings off key,” Lanoe said.

  “There are so few of us left. We can’t afford dissension.” She gestured for Archie to come to her and he did, moving to stand beside her with no expression on his face at all. “I don’t ask you to think we are perfect,” she told Lanoe, using Archie’s voice. “But I hope we can still be allies.”

  Lanoe gritted his teeth.

  He wanted to help Archie. He wanted to get him away from the Choir. But if he pushed the issue now—if he made a stink about this—it could ruin everything. He needed all the help he could get, if he was going to get justice from the Blue-Blue-White. He needed the Choir.