Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “What?”

  “Apologies, Commander, but you don’t sound very convincing. Do you think maybe you could turn around for a moment?”

  He frowned, but then he saw her reaching for the release strip on the back of her suit. He turned around hurriedly and stared at the wall while he listened to her step out of the suit, then pull on a paper modesty gown.

  “Okay, it’s safe now. I didn’t want to get blood on my suit,” she told him.

  Oh, hellfire. Out of the suit she was … tiny. She looked very thin, and shorter out of her boots. She hopped up on the bed and leaned back on the pillows.

  The chorister opened one of her boxes. She pushed the human surgical tools to one side of their tray and started laying out her own devices. Lanoe hadn’t known what to expect—certainly nothing that looked like human medical equipment. Maybe humming eggs or devices that shot out strange rays or even that maybe she would use a tiny wormhole to insert the antenna. The surgeon’s instruments were far more prosaic, and far more unsettling for it. There was something that looked like a common laser scalpel, and a four-pronged retractor. The tools looked very similar, honestly, to the human tools she’d set aside, except that their handles were longer and thicker and deeply scalloped, clearly not designed for a human hand.

  Lanoe tried to steel himself. To make himself remember how important this was. How necessary.

  “Ginger …” he said.

  There was a knock on the hatch and then Candless hurried in, out of breath. “I find it hard to believe you didn’t have a chance to call me and let me know this was starting,” the XO said.

  “I—I didn’t think—”

  “People so rarely do.” Candless moved around the bed to stand on the far side from the surgeon. She pulled a sheet up over Ginger’s small body and then put a hand on the girl’s arm.

  Lanoe had never seen Candless act so tenderly. Not in all the years he’d known her. It just seemed—wrong. Yet Ginger didn’t seem surprised by it at all. She reached up and took Candless’s hand.

  “I’ll be here the whole time,” Candless said. “I promise.”

  “This is a little surprising,” Lanoe blurted out. The woman had been so cold, even cruel before. She’d insisted on writing Ginger up on a charge of cowardice, even when Lanoe had been willing to let the whole thing slide. She’d never had a kind word for anyone, that he could remember.

  “She was my student,” Candless said, as if that explained everything.

  The surgeon leaned over Ginger. She reached down with one claw and stroked Ginger’s hair. The girl smiled, and closed her eyes. Then the chorister turned her claw slightly and brushed the hair again—and this time it came off, shaved clean away from Ginger’s temple. Red locks fell back against the pillow.

  It made Lanoe think of Zhang’s hair. Of course it did. He fought his inclination to call this whole thing off. To say he’d made a mistake. The girl was terrified, anybody could see that. It was criminal to do this to her, to put her through this. She would never ask for it to stop, no, she was too young, there was too much pressure on her—

  “This is perhaps the bravest thing I’ve ever seen done,” Candless said, looking down into Ginger’s eyes. And then she actually smiled. Those thin lips curled up at the corners and it didn’t even look wrong.

  The alien surgeon wiped something wet that reeked of ammonia across Ginger’s temple. Ginger’s eyes searched Candless’s face. She wasn’t looking at the surgeon at all.

  “You can go, Commander,” Candless said. “I’m sure you have more important things to do. I’ll let you know when it’s finished.”

  The surgeon picked up her laser scalpel, and brought it around to touch Ginger’s skin.

  Maggs. Damned Maggs.

  There was no mistaking the lights burning ahead of them now, three lights growing steadily larger. The main thrusters of three Centrocor fighters headed right at them. Bury had no idea if they had even heard Maggs, or if they believed that he was really betraying his own people. Maybe they would open fire on him any second now.

  Or maybe they would fall into formation around him, an honor guard to take him to his new commanding officer.

  “I have placed a timer on my tactical panel, Ensign Bury,” Maggs said, his voice as smooth as fresh hydraulic fluid. “It’s counting down. When it reaches zero, I really will need an answer. Perhaps in the interest of clarifying matters, I should tell you I already have a firing solution worked out. One little squeeze of this trigger and you’ll no longer be my problem, or anyone else’s.”

  “Damn you, Maggs,” Bury said. For perhaps the fifteenth time. The bastard! The unmitigated fulminated bloody damned bastard.

  “You’re hardly the first to say that to me,” Maggs called back. “It stopped stinging a while ago. Do you know, Bury, that my father was a famous admiral? It’s true. I spent many of my formative years in the Admiralty. Navy man through and through.”

  “And now you’re going to throw that away,” Bury said, wanting to spit. Instead he worked his engine panel and threw his control stick over to the side.

  “The funny thing about growing up as a Navy brat is that you get to see what’s hiding behind all the paint and gilt and bunting. You get to find out what words like ‘honor’ and ‘glory’ actually mean. They mean ‘death.’ All the words the Navy loves so much mean ‘death.’ All that bosh about camaraderie, all those noble traditions. It all comes down to this. Old, fat men send boys out to risk their lives, and when the boys die they make a little tick mark on a chart, and at the end of the day they tally up all the tick marks and that’s how they know if they won or they lost. Do you wish to be a tick mark, young Bury? Is that the destiny you’ve always seen for yourself?”

  “They trusted us. Put us out here to stand watch,” Bury said. “Everyone back on the cruiser—Lieutenant Candless and Lieutenant Ehta and Engineer Paniet and—”

  “Ginger, let’s not forget Ginger,” Maggs said.

  “Yes, damn you! Ginger! Ginger will die because you couldn’t keep faith with the memory of your father!”

  “The memory of my father … it’s funny you should mention that, as—”

  While he’d had Maggs talking, Bury had thrown his BR.9 sideways, skidded around on his maneuvering jets and burned hard—not away from Maggs, but straight toward him. Trying to get close, to eat up the distance. If he could just get close enough, get within range, he could shoot Maggs out of the sky before he could engage his fancy Philoctetes targeting package. If he could just—

  “Oho,” Maggs said. “Nicely done. You almost had me distracted enough for it to work.” Bury was close enough to see Maggs’s main thruster come on line as he burned away, keeping Bury at a distance. Well out of dogfighting range. “You know, most people get stupid when they’re angry. I’ve taken advantage of that fact many times. But you, Bury, you’re the exception. Rage fuels that clever little brain of yours. It clarifies things. So use those smarts now. Say ‘yes, please, M. Maggs, I’d very much like to come with you and have a future.’ That’s all. Not those exact words, of course, that would take too long. You only have a few seconds left.”

  Bury tapped virtual keys on his weapons board. If he couldn’t get in range to shoot Maggs with his PBWs, maybe he could fire off a disruptor or an antivehicle round. Normally those munitions were fired at short range because they were expensive and a cataphract could only carry a few of them. Actually hitting Maggs with one of them would be an incredible long shot, but—

  “Time’s up. Answer, please,” Maggs said.

  Bury’s spine went rigid with fear. He smashed his stick sideways, fired his positioning jets to send himself twisting away in a corkscrew, trying desperately to get away from Maggs, to get far enough away that he had a chance.

  “I’ll take it that’s a no,” Maggs said.

  For a split second, Bury actually considered it. Shame made his face hot but he gave it real, lucid thought. Ignoring everything that would happen, ignoring the fact
that Centrocor would kill everyone on the cruiser—

  Maybe Maggs had a point. The Navy had never shown Bury any love. He’d been bullied and hazed his whole time at Rishi. At various times he’d been slighted and singled out and—worst of all—ignored as if he didn’t exist by classmates, by instructors, by officers. Time and time again they’d told him he had an anger problem. This despite the fact that the absolute worst way to treat someone with an anger problem was to accuse them of it, to treat them as broken and wrong. Lieutenant Candless had insulted him to his face, so grievously he’d felt he had no choice but to challenge her to a duel.

  Then they had grabbed him up just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stuffed him in a brig without telling him why. Commander Lanoe had let him out … only to inform him that he’d been volunteered for a dangerous mission. Dragged halfway across the galaxy to stand picket duty outside some weird planet, when the Commander knew perfectly well it was just a matter of time before Centrocor showed up to kill him.

  Bury saw all of it, every miserable moment of his life in the Navy so far, in the blink of an eye.

  He also saw something else. The fact that he’d never wanted anything in his life more than he wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot. An ace, with a blue star in his cryptab. He’d never worked so hard to achieve something. Never been so close to earning a dream.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  He closed his eyes. Waited to die. His fighter kept streaking away from Maggs, accelerating so fast he was squashed down in his seat by his inertial sink.

  “Why don’t you go first and save me a seat?” Maggs told him.

  Bury tensed up, every muscle in his body contracting as he waited for it, the burst of particle fire that would cut right through him, tear him to pieces, destroy his fighter and send his blood boiling out into the vacuum.

  His pulse and blood pressure spiked. His lungs burst because he was holding his breath. His eyes hurt from being squeezed shut for so long.

  Eventually he had to open them.

  “Valk,” Maggs said, the name dripping with venom.

  “What? Is he—is he here?” Bury asked.

  “The devil himself shall one day spring up from a crack in the earth and tread upon that artificial beggar with his proverbial cloven hoof, and I will watch on, and I will say to the devil, ‘harder, my good man. Grind him harder.’”

  Bury took a deep breath. “What—what are you talking about?”

  “A while back he asked me to show him the Philoctetes package and how it worked. I didn’t realize at the time that he was monkeying about with it. He added an IFF interlock. Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s … it’s a thing we used back at Rishi, for live-fire exercises.”

  “It’s a bit of bloody code that makes it impossible for me to shoot anyone that my computer identifies as an ally. IFF stands for ‘Identify Friend or Foe.’ You have a transponder in your fighter’s equipment that identifies you as my friend. For a very specific definition of ‘friend.’”

  “What does—”

  “What does that mean, child? It means you get to live. At least long enough to run back to Lanoe. Well, you do that. You run straight back there and tell them Centrocor is coming, and Auster Maggs is with them.”

  Bury swung around and burned straight for the unnamed planet, for the mysterious wormhole throat in its atmosphere. He didn’t need to be told twice.

  “And when you get there,” Maggs said, “you tell him this time, he earned it. If he had shown me one ounce of respect, perhaps—”

  Bury reached over to his comms board and switched off Maggs’s voice.

  Candless had been right—Lanoe did have plenty to do. Now that the Choir’s repair crew had left the cruiser, he had to help the two remaining neddies as they tried desperately to complete repair tasks that should have taken a team of twenty people working in concert.

  He was on the outside of the hull, walking upside down with just his boots holding him to the skin of the ship, when he noticed something. Or thought he did anyway. He was trying to help the neddies lay in a new curved section of carbon fiber ballistic armor over a spot near the gundecks that was currently exposed to the elements. The neddies cursed and jumped back and forth as they tried to get the big sheet to fit perfectly in place. Carbon-fiber cladding was almost impossible to trim to size once it had been electroset, and—

  “Hold on,” he told the engineers. “Quiet down for a second.”

  He could have sworn he’d heard something. It wasn’t there when he listened for it, though. Not even when he held his breath. He adjusted his helmet ’phones for maximum gain and closed his eyes.

  Silence.

  Which was when it hit him. That was exactly what he’d heard—silence. No wailing. No disorganized chirping wafting up from the city far below.

  His eyes snapped open and he looked down at his wrist display. No message from Candless—well, he would have seen a green pearl if there was one. But if the Choir had stopped grieving, at least audibly—that had to mean—something. No way to say exactly what. Maybe Ginger was awake and talking to them. Maybe they were just anticipating meeting their new human friend.

  “Back to work,” he called, and the neddies grumbled but they moved. Lanoe picked up his corner of the carbon fiber sheet. It was six meters square, but vacuformed to conform to the curve of the ship’s hull. So dark it was like holding a piece of spacetime. Thin as paper, almost as light, but incredibly stiff. Debris would just bounce off it. “Okay,” he said, and he moved carefully to get his corner into the right position. “Lay it down … gently … gently …”

  Something went boom right behind Lanoe’s head. He instinctively dropped the sheet and crouched to the hull, his hands up to protect his cranium. It took him a long second to realize that the noise had come from far away, that he was in no immediate danger. He cursed and got back up on his feet, just in time to see the sheet of carbon fiber go twisting and spinning away, into the atmosphere of the city. As it fell he saw it cleave through a long ribbon of pale smoke.

  A contrail. The exhaust plume of a fighter, it looked like. That explained the boom. A cataphract-class fighter had just come shooting through the portal faster than the speed of sound.

  The neddies were shouting at him, but Lanoe ignored them. With great leaping strides he ran around the circumference of the cruiser, looking for where the fighter went. He crested the top of the ship and saw a lone cataphract banking around inside the bubble, trying to bleed off some of its velocity. The fairings around the cockpit showed orange and tan, desert colors.

  “Bury,” he said, touching his wrist minder to place a call. “Bury, come in. You’ve got news?”

  The response came instantly. Bury sounded terrified, his voice clipped and shaky. “Maggs,” he said. “Maggs betrayed you—Centrocor’s here—three fighters so far—got to get back!”

  The fighter turned in a long bank, spilling lift from its airfoils. It shot past the cruiser again, accelerating toward the portal. Clearly Bury intended to head right back out there and return to the fight.

  If he could have waited a few more seconds, Lanoe could have arranged for him to get some support. But of course the Hellion couldn’t wait—

  “Bury!” he called. “Bury!” But the cataphract slipped through the portal and was gone.

  Lanoe ran back over the side of the cruiser, headed straight for the vehicle bay—they hadn’t managed to replace the missing hatch there, so he could just climb right inside and get to his fighter. “Candless,” he called, “I need you in the vehicle bay. Centrocor’s found us.”

  “Ginger’s still sleeping,” she said, though he could hear the uncertainty in her voice. She’d been a pilot long enough to know that when your squad leader called for all pilots to scramble, you did not hang about.

  “Then wake her up,” Lanoe said, in his best command voice. “We need to move out. Now.” He touched his wrist display. “Valk,” he said. “V
alk. I need you in the vehicle bay. Centrocor’s here.”

  There was no response.

  Lanoe scowled at the display. “Valk? Did you hear me?” He knew he’d left things bad between them, but he couldn’t believe Valk wouldn’t even take his call. Not at a time like this. “Valk?”

  “I’m here, Lanoe,” Valk replied, finally.

  “Good. I need you to get to a fighter now. Centrocor’s come and they—”

  “I can’t do that. I’m flying the cruiser.”

  “You can keep doing that. Just get to a fighter.”

  “Lanoe—no. I’d have to copy myself. You want me to go through the portal and fight them out there, out in normal space. But I can’t. The last time I split myself in two, I nearly killed myself. Damn it, I mean the copy of me in the cruiser’s computer nearly killed me, the me you’re talking to, and—”

  Lanoe didn’t have time for this. “So figure out what you did wrong, and this time, don’t do that. I need you in a fighter.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Valk said.

  Lanoe started to shout at him, to order Valk to get to the vehicle bay. But then he noticed that Valk had already cut the connection. He tried raising the AI again—and found that his call was blocked.

  He was the commanding officer of the ship. That shouldn’t have been possible. Then again, most cruisers didn’t have AIs onboard.

  There was no time for running over to the emergency control stand and arguing with Valk in person. Lanoe knew he had to get to his own fighter, to go help Bury. Even if it meant running off to battle with his forces cut back by a full third.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Bury couldn’t begin to comprehend what he saw beyond the portal. A city floating in a bubble of wormspace, the cruiser sailing serenely overhead …

  No bloody time for sightseeing, he thought, and swung around to hit the portal again. There were Centrocor fighters out there, enemy ships, and he was the only Navy pilot ready to fight them. He watched the portal swell in front of him, a lens of distorted space, and nearly closed his eyes as he shot through.