Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Lieutenant Ehta mouthed the words “going home” and slapped Ginger on the back, almost hard enough to send her sprawling.

  It seemed Ginger had made a friend. Well, she did have a knack for it.

  Ginger followed her the short distance to the wardroom. Some of the marines and two of the neddies were already there. In short order Lieutenant Candless arrived—pushing Engineer Paniet in a float chair. If they’d let the man out of sick bay, this must be an important meeting. More marines filed in, and then Commander Lanoe himself.

  “Good, we can begin,” Lieutenant Candless said.

  There was no sign of M. Valk. Ginger didn’t know what that meant.

  Lieutenant Candless must have noticed her looking. “The cruiser’s position is stabilized, for the moment,” she told Ginger. “I’ll be monitoring our attitude and drift during this meeting and I’ll make any adjustments that are necessary.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but couldn’t M. Valk take care of—”

  “M. Valk is no longer part of the bridge crew,” Lieutenant Candless told her. No explanation was forthcoming, and Ginger knew better than to expect one—certainly Lieutenant Candless would never discuss such things in front of the enlisted marines.

  No M. Valk. Ginger was suddenly aware of how few officers were left onboard. Bury and Maggs were still out on patrol. Engineer Paniet was present but he was definitely not ready for active duty. Lieutenant Ehta was there, but she didn’t count—the PBMs didn’t factor in Navy chain of command, which meant—

  Oh, hellfire. The chain of command went Commander Lanoe, Lieutenant Candless, and then herself. Ginger was third in line of command of the entire cruiser. No wonder Lieutenant Candless had addressed her concerns.

  “This will be a brief meeting,” Lieutenant Candless said. “The Commander would like to address you all, officers and enlisted, on the status of our mission and how he would like to proceed going forth. Once he’s done you can all return to your duties or your bunks.”

  Commander Lanoe approached the table where they took their meals—the only real communal space in the cruiser. He leaned on it with both hands. He looked so tired to Ginger, so old. “As you all know, Archie committed suicide last night. As a result we lost our ability to speak with the Choir. It’s a pretty big blow to our mission objectives. I was in the middle of negotiations with the aliens when this happened, but those talks are impossible now.”

  He lowered his head to look down at the table. Ginger saw he had something in his hand—a little rolled-up minder. He squeezed it as he spoke, as if it gave him strength. “I’ve discussed our options with both Engineer Paniet and Lieutenant Candless. They’ve given me excellent advice and I feel damned lucky to have people like them on this ship. Hellfire, I’ve been lucky to have all of you under my command. This crew has faced real hazards and actual combat on what should have been a milk run, and you all pulled through and exceeded expectations. I want to thank you, officially.”

  A murmur of acknowledgment ran through the crowd. Ginger saw how the marines especially lapped up Lanoe’s kind words—even though they’d spent the last several shifts cursing his name when he wasn’t there. The stress and anger that had gripped the ship in its claws seemed to just melt away. She was fascinated to see the effect it had on the men and women around her, just to hear their commander say something nice about them.

  “We’re not done yet,” Lanoe said. “There’s a fight ahead of us—we know Centrocor is here, ready to attack. They’ve only waited this long because they’re afraid of us.” That got a few chuckles. “We’ll be all right. The question is, how soon can we get out of here? How soon can we all go home?”

  Lieutenant Candless nodded and started to step forward.

  “The answer,” Commander Lanoe said, “is not quite yet.”

  Ginger watched Lieutenant Candless’s face fall. Her mouth pursed as she fought not to let her jaw drop. Her eyes went wide—then immediately narrowed down to slits, as if someone had just pulled a nasty joke on her.

  “We need to get what we came here for, and I won’t leave without it. To that end, I need to ask you—all of you—for an extraordinary act of service. I want a volunteer.”

  He unrolled the minder in his hand, a rectangular piece of nylon with a matte gray display surface sewn to its inner side. He gestured and it lit up, showing a picture of a human brain with one section highlighted.

  “Archie was able to talk to the Choir because he had something very small, very simple implanted in his brain. A kind of receiving device. Without it, it’s impossible to communicate with them. I need someone to volunteer to have the same kind of device implanted in their brain.”

  What?

  Ginger glanced around at the people near here. None of them were breathing.

  So she didn’t feel so all alone.

  “Obviously this is a lot to take in,” Commander Lanoe said. “It involves brain surgery, of a kind we aren’t equipped to handle here on the cruiser. It will, in fact, be performed by one of the Choir. I’ll point out that Archie seemed to suffer no negative consequences of having this operation. It didn’t cause him pain or discomfort.”

  No, Ginger thought. It just drove him to suicide.

  In her mind’s eye she saw his face, when she’d discovered him. So pale, and his eyes—his eyes had not looked peaceful.

  “I’m asking one of you to take this on, so that we can complete our mission here. It’s a huge sacrifice, but one the Navy will reward. Okay. I’ve said enough. Let’s hear if anyone wishes to volunteer.”

  Ginger felt like the air in the room was pressing down on her, squeezing her sinuses. She could feel the people around her shifting, looking away, looking anywhere but at each other. They drew back, away from Commander Lanoe, away from what he was asking. Of course they did. It was insane. It was ludicrous. Who in their right mind would agree to such a thing?

  Engineer Paniet cleared his throat. For a horrible moment Ginger thought maybe he was going to do it, that he would volunteer. Horrible because she didn’t want him to do it—but also horrible because she would be so relieved, so grateful, if he did. If only because it would break this tension. But he wasn’t volunteering. “Can we ask questions?” he asked.

  “I need an answer soon. The sooner the better,” Commander Lanoe said, but he nodded.

  “Is this something you’d be willing to do, yourself? If you don’t get any takers?”

  Lieutenant Candless hissed at him. “That’s bordering on impertinence,” she said.

  “Leave it,” Commander Lanoe said.

  It couldn’t be him, though, Ginger totally agreed with that. He was in charge of the mission, their leader—he couldn’t do it. What if something went wrong? What if he died on the operating table? But she looked around the room and wondered who else they could afford to lose. Nobody, she thought. Lieutenant Candless basically ran the ship, and Engineer Paniet kept it from falling apart. Lieutenant Ehta commanded the marines. And Ginger couldn’t stomach the idea of one of the enlisteds doing it—they’d never signed up for this mission; it just wasn’t fair to ask them to take this on.

  Commander Lanoe nodded thoughtfully, just acknowledging that he’d heard the question. He looked down at the minder, at the brain scan. She saw the muscles in his throat move as he swallowed. Then he nodded again and looked up. He was about to say something. He was about to say that yes, he would do it—she was sure of it.

  Ginger couldn’t stand the atmosphere in the room, the tension, the unbearable heaviness of this, the desperation of what they’d come to. She wanted to scream, wanted to run away, wanted to—to—

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  What the devil are you doing?” Bury demanded.

  He had matched velocities with Lieutenant Maggs’s Z.XIX and was keeping station less than a kilometer away. He could see that the man had his canopy down, and was actually outside his fighter—just floating in space with nothing but his suit
to protect him. He wasn’t even tethered to his vehicle.

  As Bury watched in puzzlement, the scoundrel pilot curled up into a ball and turned a somersault in the void.

  “Just stretching my joints,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “You aren’t feeling stiff? You’ve been cooped up in that bloody seat just as long as I have. And I’ve flown BR.9s before, much to my continuing shame. They aren’t nearly as comfortable as my luxury model.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” Bury told him. “What if new orders came in right now? What if we had to move on a second’s notice?”

  “Lad,” Lieutenant Maggs said, his tone light and airy, “we’re all going to die anyway. If you really cared so much about safety you’d never have joined the Navy, eh? So why don’t you quiet yourself. Do some meditation exercises or something. I would ever so much enjoy a little silence right now.”

  Bury shook his head and touched his control stick, veering away from the fool. The truth was he wouldn’t mind a little quiet himself. After so many hours with no one else to talk to, he had grown heartily sick of Lieutenant Auster Maggs and his fancy speech.

  Sadly it seemed the request for silence hadn’t been serious. “What do you suppose they’re up to, just now?” Lieutenant Maggs asked, before a whole minute had passed. “Over there on the other side of the mirror? We know it’s about aliens.”

  “We don’t know a damned thing,” Bury told him. “Which is clearly intentional.”

  “Will you honestly tell me you’re not curious at all? You must at least be wondering what fate has befallen the lovely young Ensign Ginger. If my lover were under charges and probably locked in the brig—”

  “Ginger and I are just friends,” Bury said.

  “Really?” Lieutenant Maggs laughed. “You mean the two of you never twined beneath a starlit sky, whispering sweet words of love? Never succumbed to the siren song of teenage hormones, truly?”

  “No! We’re not like that!”

  “What an absolute waste. With that fiery red hair of hers, I’m sure she’s a bearcat in the bunk. Well, perhaps the next time we lay eyes on her I’ll have to whisper a few sweet words her way myself.”

  “Damn you, Maggs. Damn you, if you—”

  Lieutenant Maggs laughed again. “You’re so easy, son.”

  Bury seethed. He’d fallen for one of Lieutenant Maggs’s verbal traps, yet again. He hated to accept that he really was that vulnerable to the man’s insinuations. “Why?” he said, biting off the word. “Why do you keep riding me? Huh?”

  “Oh, it’s just a bit of rough camaraderie,” Lieutenant Maggs told him. “Affectionate ribbing, hmm? Or don’t they go in for that sort of thing in flight school anymore?”

  “We do,” Bury told him. “Which is why I know there’s more to it. I know the difference between joking around and actually twisting the knife. You want something from me. You want me to—I don’t know. Get angry, for some reason. And don’t tell me it’s just because it entertains you, either.”

  “Oh, but it is infinitely diverting,” Lieutenant Maggs said.

  “Are you trying to provoke me? Damn me but I can’t see why. Do you honestly think I won’t rise to your baiting? I challenged my own flight instructor to a duel, back on Rishi. I’ll give you a fight if you want one.”

  “Oh, of that I have no doubt. You’re a real tiger, aren’t you?”

  Bury roared in anger and reached for his comms board, intending to cut off the link between their two fighters. He couldn’t take much more of this. But no, he was under strict instructions to stay in radio contact with Lieutenant Maggs at all times. It was one of the first things they taught you about patrols—you don’t lose track of your squaddies.

  “Oh, son, I am so deadly bored. I am so bored I think I might let you in on the grand secret after all,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “I might actually tell you why I’ve been teasing you so relentlessly. Then again, I might tell you two reasons. One true and one false. Then I can have the pleasure of watching your brain overheat as you try to decide which is which.”

  “Hellfire,” Bury said.

  “Does that mean you’d rather not know, after all?”

  “Hellfire,” Bury said again. “Just bloody tell me!”

  “Because I need an ally,” Lieutenant Maggs said. Sounding completely sincere, for the very first time since Bury had found him locked up in the cruiser’s brig.

  “Bosh,” Bury said.

  “No, no, it’s quite true. I need a squaddie. A friend, if you like. Someone I can actually confide in.”

  “I imagine there are better ways to make friends,” Bury suggested.

  “Oh? Should I flatter you, tell you how impressed I am with your flying, with your intellect, with your shiny, shiny face? Or perhaps I should take the time to build up a relationship of mutual respect and trust.”

  “That’s kind of the traditional way to do it,” Bury said.

  “Where you come from, perhaps. Hel is a serious place, I’m sure, where everyone plays by the rules. No, young Ensign Bury. I ride you because I need to see your true self. I need you angry. Because I’ve seen how you act when you’re around Lanoe. You push it down. Fight your natural instincts. You can’t be you around him.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Lieutenant Maggs wasn’t finished, though. “He doesn’t respect you. Just as he doesn’t respect me. He thinks you’re an angry little twerp. You work so hard proving him wrong. Here’s the thing, though. You are an angry fellow. Everyone knows it. But with me, dear pal, you can actually let it show.”

  “That might be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard,” Bury told him.

  “You can be yourself with me. Can you even say that about dear Ginger? Your bestest chum in the barracks?”

  Bury put his helmet down so he could reach up and rub at his forehead. He needed this conversation to end. He needed Lieutenant Maggs to shut up.

  “If I say that you’re right, will you be quiet?”

  “I do enjoy being correct. It might help.”

  “Then go be damned, because I’m not saying it,” Bury told him. “You can annoy and wheedle and irritate me all day. You’re not going to win.”

  “Ooh,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “You’re angry! Believe it or not, everything I said was true. I like you when you’re angry.”

  “Shut up!” Bury screamed.

  “Do you think young Ginger is very afraid right now, all alone in that cell?” Lieutenant Maggs said. “Worrying whether she’ll be sent to prison when we get home? Perhaps trembling a little, her little rosebud upper lip quivering, with no one there to dry her tears?”

  Oh, that was bloody well enough.

  “I’m going to do another sweep of the wormhole throat,” Bury told Lieutenant Maggs. “Laying in a shallow trajectory run now, with a burn time of seven point four seconds. Don’t come after me.”

  “Never worry, my new friend. I’ll be right here waiting when you get back.”

  “You can’t be serious about this. I won’t let you do it! She’s just a kid,” Ehta said.

  Lanoe sat patiently, waiting for her to finish.

  “She’s barely out of flight school and now you’re going to—what? Turn her into a pet mouthpiece for those … those damned lobsters?”

  Ginger sat in front of him, her hands folded in her lap. She was shaking, a little. She was frightened. Lanoe didn’t find that surprising. He watched the girl intently, never looking away, even when Ehta got down in his face and her spittle flecked his cheek.

  “You have no right. You have no right to do this to her. You used your position as her commander to—to—”

  “Lieutenant Ehta,” Candless said, in that tone she had—the authoritarian, no-bosh tone that could cut through armor plate—“remember who you are speaking to.”

  “Remember? I know him, lady. Maybe not as long as you. But I’ve followed him through hell and out the other side. I’ve taken orders from him I was sure were going to get me kil
led—and I followed them anyway, because it was him, it was Lanoe, and if he wanted me to lay down my life I knew it would be for a good cause.”

  Red hair. It had to be Ginger, with her red hair, Lanoe thought.

  “I went to Niraya with him. You weren’t there. You don’t know how bad it looked, with a fleet of drones howling down out of the sky. You don’t know how bad we wanted to run, me and Valk and Zhang. And you know what? We stayed. Because it was him. So I think maybe I’ve earned the right to give him my opinion now and again.”

  The last time Lanoe had seen Zhang was the night on Niraya before the battle against the queenship. That night they’d finally understood what they were to each other, that the thing they shared was never going to go away, even if they wanted it to. That night Zhang had red hair. It was curly, and Ginger’s was straight. It was shorter than Ginger’s. It didn’t matter. The color was almost exactly the same.

  “And my current opinion, which he’s going to hear whether he likes it or not, is that he is not allowed to do this. Not to her. Not to—” Ehta made a horrible strangling gurgling noise then. It took Lanoe a moment to realize she was holding back a sob.

  Ginger looked down at her fingernails. Bit her lip.

  The girl wasn’t anything like Zhang. Zhang had been confident and brash and alive. Zhang had been so wise, sometimes, and sometimes she just knew what to say. What to tell him, the words that would unlock the knot of his life. This—this girl, this ensign, Ginger, was nothing like Zhang. She was diffident, unsure of herself. She needed the approval of others, and she couldn’t handle combat. Her eyes were the wrong color. She was linked permanently, in Lanoe’s mind, with Bury, who was an ass. Ginger was nothing like Zhang.

  Except for her red hair.

  Lanoe remembered the first time he’d seen Ginger. It had been in the guesthouse at Rishi, on his way to meet Candless, before the duel. He’d seen that red hair in the crowd and without thinking he’d reached for Zhang, grabbed her arm. He’d been too embarrassed by his mistake to even register who she really was.