Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  There had been a general announcement on the cruiser’s speakers, and then, just in case they hadn’t heard it, Engineer Paniet had come up to the wardroom to tell them. Lieutenant Candless was returning to the cruiser. All hands were expected to be in the vehicle bay to welcome her back.

  “She won’t charge you in front of everybody,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “But I doubt she’ll waste her time getting to it. You ready for this?”

  “I … guess. But why are we all being called down to meet her?” Ginger asked. “You think they found something important on the other side of that wormhole?”

  Lieutenant Ehta shook her head. “Hell, kid, your guess is as good as mine.”

  They arrived in the vehicle bay to find most of the marines already there. Ginger half-expected Lieutenant Ehta to brush her off again, to make a public show of pushing her away in front of the PBMs, but instead Ehta told her to grab a railing right next to her. The marines had their helmets up and silvered, so it was impossible to tell what they thought of their commanding officer getting chummy with a pilot.

  Engineer Paniet arrived soon after they did. He said he’d been straightening up a little so that Candless could come home to a clean ship. There was grease on his gloves and he wiped it away with a nanofiber cloth that he then just shoved in a pocket of his suit. “Exciting, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Ginger said. “We have no idea what this is about.”

  “That’s what makes it exciting. Could be anything!”

  Through the weather field that covered the open hatch of the vehicle bay, Ginger could see the dark shapes of fighters coming in for a landing. Lieutenant Candless came in first, climbing out of her cockpit as soon as her fighter was locked into its berth. She moved to one side of the bay and stuffed one foot through a nylon loop anchored to the floor, so that it looked like she was standing there. The only person in the bay who wasn’t floating like a balloon. She brushed down the front of her suit, smoothing out any wrinkles, then touched her hair, still in a tight, perfect bun at the back of her head.

  Then she looked up at the crew on the railings, her sharp gaze moving from face to face as if she were doing a head count. When she got to Ginger her face went perfectly still. She didn’t even frown. Just stared at Ginger for what felt like an eternity.

  Ginger fought down the urge she felt to jump out of her own skin and run away. Instead she tried to follow Lieutenant Ehta’s advice and stood perfectly still, looking straight forward, chin up. She tried to not make it look like she was staring at Lieutenant Candless out of the corner of her eye.

  “Don’t let her rattle you,” Lieutenant Ehta whispered.

  Ginger gave her the tiniest, most imperceptible of nods.

  Lieutenant Maggs and Bury came in next, their fighters streaming vapor after their long patrol. The two of them opened their canopies and started to climb out, but Lieutenant Candless told them not to bother. “This is going to be a quick information session, then the two of you are headed back out. We need to maintain constant vigilance.”

  Lieutenant Maggs made a harrumphing sound. “It’s been positively hours. I believe we’re entitled to a rest.”

  “Not possible,” Lieutenant Candless told him.

  “Why not, damn you?”

  The XO’s eyes flashed. Ginger knew that look—the woman had no patience for people who wasted her time, especially when she was in a hurry. “If you would do me the signal honor of sitting there and listening for a moment, you might find out. Now, as for the rest of you—Commander Lanoe sends his compliments, and his gratitude for the long hours you’ve been working, and your patience. Maggs and Bury are instructed to continue their patrols, with no change in orders. As for the rest of us, we’ve got a rather stressful shift coming up, so no one should relax just yet. My orders are to bring the cruiser through the wormhole down on the planet.”

  Engineer Paniet let out a little yelp. Ginger looked over at him and saw he had one hand over his mouth and the other flat against his chest.

  “Judging by that reaction, I can tell you think this is a dangerous maneuver, Engineer,” Candless said. “I don’t disagree. Commander Lanoe was adamant, however. We’re exposed out here. Should Centrocor find us orbiting this planet, with half of our pilots engaged elsewhere, the cruiser wouldn’t stand a chance. The best way to protect it, he feels, is to move it. I can see that you’re going to burst if I don’t let you speak. Go ahead.”

  Engineer Paniet simply shook his head for a moment, as if he was too overcome to talk. Finally he took a deep breath and said, “I’m not saying it can’t be done. But this ship was never meant to enter a planetary atmosphere, much less maneuver inside one. And then there’s the damage we’ve already sustained, to the forward section—the stress of atmospheric entry will rip out half of my repairs. Let’s not even get started on the g stress we’ll have to handle, and I mean we, us, our bodies. This is—”

  “What I’m hearing is that it’s possible,” Lieutenant Candless said.

  Engineer Paniet closed his eyes. “Theoretically, yes. I’ll get to work. It’s going to take at least a full day just to lash everything down and prepare the ship for that kind of strain.”

  “Commander Lanoe wants it done in eight hours.”

  Engineer Paniet nodded, his eyes still closed.

  “Good. Now, everyone is dismissed—until this maneuver is complete, Engineer Paniet will be in charge of assigning duties. For now I want to see Ensign Ginger individually.”

  The marines started to file out of the bay, grumbling among themselves. Lieutenant Ehta stayed close by Ginger. “Just remember, she doesn’t make the final call,” she whispered. “It’s Lanoe who’ll pass sentence.”

  Ginger nodded. Lieutenant Ehta squeezed her shoulder, then followed her marines back inside the ship. Leaving nobody but pilots in the bay.

  Bury kept trying to catch Ginger’s eye. He stood up a little in his cockpit. Gave her a little wave with one hand—then settled back down as if he was afraid Lieutenant Candless would see him. Ginger refused to look at him, even though she knew it was cruel. If he made some grand show of sympathy for her plight she thought she might scream. So she simply clung to the railing for dear life and waited for what came next.

  Except it seemed fate wanted her to suffer in anxious anticipation a little longer.

  Lieutenant Maggs cleared his throat. Lieutenant Candless turned to look at him. To look at him down her nose.

  “Something I can assist you with, Lieutenant Maggs? You have your orders.”

  “I’d like to apologize for my earlier outburst.”

  “Noted.”

  “And then I would like to suggest a duty change,” Lieutenant Maggs said. His usual suave manner was gone now—he stood up straight, there was no sign of a smirk on his face. He almost looked like a professional officer. “Ensign Bury and I have been flying for too long. We’re fatigued. You say we can’t afford time to take a rest. Well, that’s as may be. We could, however, switch out with Valk. He could come fly a patrol while one of us … does whatever it is he’s doing down there, on the other side of the wormhole. Then we could switch off again, and so on. One shift down there, two in space. It’s only fair.”

  The look on Lieutenant Candless’s face was one Ginger recognized. One any of her students would have recognized. It meant she was no longer interested in entertaining that particular line of conversation. “Lanoe feels you’re best utilized out here, watching for Centrocor. Your special new targeting software, this Philoctetes package, makes your vehicle ideal for picket duty.”

  Lieutenant Maggs’s eyes grew hard as flints.

  “Picket duty,” he said. “The kind of duty you give your least talented, most expendable pilot. As opposed to me.”

  “We all have orders,” Lieutenant Candless told him, turning away. Clearly she wanted to be finished with the conversation, but Maggs shouted at her back.

  “He doesn’t want me to see what’s over there, beyon
d the wormhole. He doesn’t trust me.”

  “He trusts you enough to give you this crucial duty.”

  Red spots bloomed on Lieutenant Maggs’s cheeks. “That … bastard. That ass!”

  “I’ll remind you that he is your commanding officer.”

  “Only because he kidnapped me,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “Press-ganged me into this duty. It’s him who should be earning my trust back. And yet here I am, following his orders, fighting for him, that senescent piece of—”

  “If you say another word I’ll bring you up on charges of insubordination,” Lieutenant Candless said.

  The look Lieutenant Maggs gave her could have melted through armor plate. When she didn’t acknowledge it, he put up his helmet and sat back down in his cockpit. In a moment he was roaring out through the weather field, back out on patrol.

  Bury stuck around long enough to give Ginger one more meaningful look. Then he, too, raised his canopy and launched himself back out into space.

  Leaving Ginger and her former instructor alone in the vehicle bay.

  For a while neither of them spoke. Nor did they look each other in the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Ginger,” Lieutenant Candless said, finally.

  “You’re … what?”

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this. There’s no choice, though. Come with me,” Lieutenant Candless said. “There’s a form to fill out.”

  “A … form?” Ginger asked.

  “Yes, of course. The charge against you needs to be officially logged. One count of cowardice in peacetime. We’re going to do this exactly according to protocol. Then you’re going to go to work for Engineer Paniet.”

  “You’re not going to lock me in the brig?” Ginger asked.

  “Not when there’s so much work to do. We need every pair of hands we can get.”

  Candless splashed some water on her face—well, in microgravity, she mostly rubbed it across her cheeks and brow, then soaked it back up with a sponge.

  She tried not to think of Ginger. She tried not to think about how angry she was with Lanoe, for pushing the girl until she broke. He should have known, he should have understood that Ginger was never going to make it as a pilot—

  No. She couldn’t really blame Lanoe. Not when the real failure here was her own. Had she been a better instructor, perhaps …

  Candless squeezed her eyes shut. Forced herself to push away such thoughts. There was far too much work to be done now. She could wallow in self-recrimination later.

  The eight hours passed in a blur as she moved crates of foodstocks from one cabinet to the next, as she locked down the more fragile mechanisms in the gundecks side by side with Ehta and her marines, as she climbed in and out of maintenance hatches securing loose cables. Everyone onboard pitched in—everyone worked as hard as she did—and still they knew it wouldn’t be enough. Her final duty before they moved the cruiser was to make an inspection of the damaged forward section. Paniet waited for her by the emergency hatch that had now become a makeshift airlock.

  “You haven’t seen this yet, have you, dear?” he asked. “The wreckage of your old bridge. It’s terribly sad. Come on, I’ll walk you through it.”

  Together they headed into the evacuated section, their helmets flowing up over their heads. There were no lights in the damaged areas so she followed a beacon that pulsed slowly on the back of Paniet’s suit. She climbed through the ruins of an old section of bunks, pulling herself along hand over hand, reaching for broken spars and burnt-out electrical conduits, for anything that she could hold on to.

  “This, right here, is going to be a problem,” Paniet said, over a private communications band. He gestured at a bulkhead that had been torn in half, then lashed back together with silver tape and a few ugly spot welds. “I guarantee you this will tear open. It wasn’t a major problem when we were out in the deep vacuum, but once we hit atmosphere the wind will get in here and rip those panels right off. I’m of half a mind to just knock them out right now, just to get them out of the way.”

  “If you think it best,” she told him.

  “Mm-hmm. Then there’s this section. If it doesn’t look familiar, this is what’s left of the information officer’s position from the bridge.”

  Candless frowned. “It’s farther back than it should be.”

  “Strange things happen when you redecorate with high explosives,” he told her. “Now, of course, the real reason I wanted to walk through this with you,” he said, “was to get you alone up here. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I swear you’re getting as paranoid as Lanoe. I just wanted to talk.”

  “About what, exactly?”

  “About Lanoe, deary. And his paranoia.”

  “I … see.”

  Paniet lifted his hands in the air, in mock surrender. “No, no, perhaps I should put it another way. Lanoe and his obsession.” The engineer grabbed a spar that had bent away from a bulkhead and flipped over it, putting it between them. “You’ve known him a very long time. You clearly think highly of him.”

  “I do,” Candless said.

  “Was he always like this? Willing to sacrifice everything—including people—to achieve his ends?”

  Candless inhaled sharply and prepared herself to give Paniet a proper dressing down. Who was he to question the motivations of his commanding officer?

  Yet all she could think of was what he’d told her, in the City of the Choir. That they had come all this way for … bosh. But that he was ready and willing to wring something, some kind of win, out of an alien species that—loathsome as she might find them—had done nothing but offer their help.

  “He doesn’t always explain the reasons behind his orders, it’s true,” she said. “Have you ever known a ranking officer who did?”

  Paniet gave her a warm smile. “In the Neddies, we make a point of not asking too many questions. The brass tells us go here, go there, but at the end of the day they let us build lovely things, and that should be enough. Neddies don’t cause trouble. Yet sometimes … sometimes we do have to wonder. Currently, I’m wondering why you’re going to beat the devil out of my beautiful ship just to get it moved a few thousand kilometers. About why I only had eight hours to do a job most engineers couldn’t do without going back to school for four years.”

  “Lanoe gave me very specific orders—”

  “I’m sure,” he told her. “Did he explain why he issued said commands?”

  A negation died on Candless’s lips. She was too tired to keep secrets anymore, and anyway, this was Paniet. So far he’d been the only person onboard who hadn’t disappointed her in some way.

  So she told him. About the city beyond the wormhole. About the Choir.

  “They’re … a bit terrifying, if I absolutely must be honest. I’ve never cared for insects. Frankly I find them abominable, and—”

  “Aliens,” he said, before she could even finish. His eyes went wide behind his helmet. He brought up his hands and clapped them together excitedly, even though they made no sound in the vacuum. “How lovely! We get to make some new friends. Except, of course, Lanoe isn’t sure he wants to be friends.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Paniet rolled his eyes. “I’m figuring that’s why he wants sixteen coilguns that he can point on them if things get dicey. It’s why he wants the cruiser in there, and why he wants it in there right away. Even if it means breaking the ship in half.”

  “He didn’t say as much,” Candless tried.

  “But you suspected it, didn’t you? That to get what he wants, he’s willing to threaten these aliens. To take what he wants, at the end of the barrel of a gun. And he’s not the sort of fellow who bluffs his way through card games, is he?”

  Candless sighed. “And how, exactly, did you come to such a conclusion?”

  “Keen analytical mind,” Paniet said, and went to tap his head. Instead his hand rebounded clunkily off his helmet. “Oof,” he said.

  Candless did not grin. She shook her head, a bit. “Lanoe h
as always been … obstinate,” she said, because it was the kindest word she could think of. “He’s a good man, though.”

  “No one’s questioned that,” Paniet protested.

  “No, you’re just questioning his fitness for command.” Before he could react to that she held up one hand for peace. “I’ve heard what you had to say. I’m not discounting it. But for now, we have to give him a chance.”

  “Darling XO,” Paniet said, “not one breath of mutiny has crossed my lips. I never said I would disobey orders. I just wanted them clarified. Of course … as I said before, I’m a neddy. We don’t make waves.”

  “No.”

  “No, we leave that to the others. The pilots and the marines. When they take you aside for a little talk just like this one, that’s when you should start to worry.”

  “Understood,” Candless said.

  And she did take his point. Especially because she thought that when the time came, when Lanoe had pushed things too far—it might not be necessary for someone else to take her aside. If Lanoe ever acted in such a way as to endanger them all, if he forgot that the first duty of command is to keep one’s people alive … well. She might have to be the one who relieved him of duty.

  “You don’t sound like M. Valk. You’re not actually … Valk, are you?” Ginger said.

  “That’s kind of a tricky question. Interesting one, though.”

  The maneuver had already begun. Objects in orbit around a planet travel upward of eight kilometers per second. If the cruiser was going to survive its trip through the planet’s atmosphere, it needed to shed a lot of speed before it hit air. That meant a series of short, perfectly timed burns followed by the occasional sickening lurch as they lost altitude. Basic maneuvers for a ship in space, of course—any pilot could have handled them. The real fancy flying wouldn’t happen for a few minutes yet.

  M. Valk was the only one who could handle the constant, pinpoint-accuracy calculations necessary to keep the ship from cracking up before it reached the wormhole. Reluctantly Lieutenant Candless had permitted the AI to take charge. Now she was helping Engineer Paniet and his small crew of neddies, down in the aft of the ship, where actual human hands might be needed to effect repairs when things got bad. Lieutenant Ehta and her marines were stationed along the axial corridor, strapped down in the safest places they could find—ready to jump up and perform emergency welds or simply hold the ship together with their bare hands if that was what it took.