Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Commander Lanoe took up the rear, looping around their advance, ready to pick off any enemy fighter that dared to move away from its position in the screen.

  It was going to work. They would either destroy the carrier outright or force it to move, to fall back. It would be a hell of a fight, one to rival any desperate battle in Commander Lanoe’s memoirs, but this was how they won, Bury thought, this was how—

  “Someone check your tactical board,” Lieutenant Candless called. “Something—I’m certain I saw—something.”

  Bury glanced down at his board, just for a moment. Just long enough to catch a glimpse of what she’d seen. He gave the board a longer look.

  A ship was coming out of the wormhole throat. Something bigger than a cataphract. No—wait. It was worse than that. Two ships.

  Two vehicles, close on the tail of the carrier.

  At Rishi they’d taught Bury to recognize the silhouettes of every kind of warship ever built, both Navy vessels and the smaller, less heavily armed spacecraft employed by the poly militias. He had no trouble at all recognizing these.

  Peltast-class destroyers. Two Peltast-class destroyers—old Navy ships, a hundred meters long, what the admirals called dedicated line assets. Meaning they had one single role to accomplish in a battle: to seek and destroy enemy ships. They carried no fighters, but they hardly needed them. The destroyers were covered from stem to stern with armament, bristling with the snouts of PBW cannon and flak guns and ship-to-ship missile pods. The guns were so thick around their noses that you couldn’t even see the windows of their bridges.

  Centrocor had brought reinforcements. Half a bloody carrier group.

  “Hellfire,” Commander Lanoe said, so quietly Bury barely heard it.

  “Commander,” Lieutenant Candless said, “perhaps now would be an opportune moment to call a retreat.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Three of them,” Shulkin said. As if he couldn’t believe it. Bullam watched nervously as he pushed his way out of his chair and moved to the IO’s station, almost knocking the man out of his seat. “There are three of them down there. Only three.”

  Their new guest—Auster Maggs, he was called, she remembered because he’d been one of the pilots at Niraya—sneered and adjusted his mustache. “Are you offended, perhaps, because they won’t be giving you a proper battle after all?”

  Shulkin turned to look at the man with dead eyes. The Captain had been of the opinion that they should interrogate the turncoat and then dump him out an airlock. Bullam had advocated against that, though only on principle.

  His arrival just as they were about to enter the unnamed system had been a bit of an inconvenience. The fact that he knew they were coming suggested that Lanoe might have an ambush waiting on the far side of the wormhole throat. They had actually delayed their arrival by several hours just in case.

  Now it seemed that had been wasted time. There were only three fighters down there opposing their entire force. “Our intelligence suggested there would be more,” Bullam said. “Lanoe, Candless, Bury, Ginger, and Valk. That sounds like five to me.”

  “It was a hard journey getting here,” Maggs told her. “Bound to take its toll. Darling little Ginger turned out to have a liverish disposition when it came to fighting. She’s up on charges because she refused to kill one of your people. As for Valk, well, he’s an artificial intelligence. Maybe they did the decent thing and put him down. Or perhaps he’s flying the cruiser.”

  “Which you say is behind another wormhole throat,” Bullam pointed out. “Down in the atmosphere of a planet. Despite the physical impossibility of that.”

  The IO put his head up. He looked like he wanted to raise his hand. Shulkin was too busy staring at a display, so Bullam nodded to indicate the IO should speak.

  “I’m seeing very strange weather patterns down on that planet, just as M. Maggs suggested. That could indicate—”

  “Lieutenant,” Shulkin growled.

  “I’m … I’m sorry, sir?” the IO asked.

  “His name,” Shulkin insisted, “is Lieutenant Maggs.”

  The IO just nodded in terror.

  “He’s a commissioned officer of the Naval Expeditionary Force,” Shulkin said. “He’s to be addressed by his proper rank. Right up until the moment they shoot him for treason and desertion.”

  “That long, hmm?” Maggs said, smiling.

  “Centrocor will take care of you,” Bullam assured him. “We’re all in this together. What else can you tell us?”

  “Sadly, not overmuch. I was never allowed through the physically impossible wormhole throat. I do know it’s something to do with aliens.”

  The pilot, the navigator, and the IO didn’t actually turn around to stare at the man. The way their heads snapped back and their hands went rigid over their consoles, however, told Bullam they very much wanted to. They wouldn’t know, of course. They had never been briefed about the battle at Niraya, or what had been discovered there.

  “I don’t care about that,” Shulkin said. “I only care about how they’re going to respond to our arrival. It looks like they’ve broken off their attack, and they’re retreating for the planet. Get me a connection to the captains of the destroyers.”

  Bullam grimaced.

  Their holographic images appeared on a dozen screens around the bridge, almost before Shulkin finished asking for them.

  Rhys and Oritt Batygin were identical twins who seemed to think that if they combed their hair in different directions people should be able to tell them apart. They had been Navy officers, briefly, until they were ousted on drug charges. Centrocor, with its slightly liberal attitude toward such things, seemed to suit them better as employers. Enough so that they didn’t seem to mind if anyone knew they were high. In the holographic images their pupils were enormous, and their lips twitched constantly, even when they weren’t talking.

  The brothers’ drug of choice was a vasodilator that kept them focused and alert, they said. It allowed them to think and react faster than any unmedicated human—they said. It definitely allowed them to speak almost in unison, as if they were one person in two bodies.

  “Have something for us to kill, Captain?” they asked. “Have something for us to kill, Captain?” and tittered as if that were the funniest thing they’d said all day.

  “I have orders for you,” Shulkin replied. He didn’t look up from the display he was studying. “There are three cataphract-class fighters in this system. I want them removed from play. I don’t want them to reach the planet I’ve indicated on this chart. Do you understand me?”

  The Batygins nodded excitedly. They did everything excitedly. “On it,” they said, “On it,” in a singsong voice, and then their images disappeared.

  “What thoroughly unpleasant people,” Maggs said.

  Bullam forced herself not to smile. Dariau Cygnet had been extremely generous in loaning them his two reconditioned Peltasts. It was going to make a great difference in how this rematch progressed. As with everything her boss did, however, it came with a bit of a sting in its tail. In this case, he’d saddled them with the Batygins.

  “Captain,” the IO said. “What orders should I give our fighter pilots? Should they withdraw to give the destroyers room to maneuver?”

  “Negative,” Shulkin told the man. “Tell them to advance on the enemy—we need all the firepower we can get on this. We may have the advantage here. Three bloody fighters. But one of them has Aleister Lanoe in it.”

  Lanoe knew there was a good chance he would die here.

  As good a pilot as he knew himself to be, he couldn’t make miracles happen. Candless was a damn fine squaddie with decades of experience, but she’d also been out of the game for a long, long time. Bury had true talent but he was fresh out of flight school.

  Together there wasn’t much they could hope to accomplish.

  Even though they were so very, very close. Lanoe would have been happy to sacrifice his own life, if it meant giving Ginger more time
to negotiate with the Choir. If there was any way he could know that she’d been successful, he would have fought to the bitter end and flown off to hell with a smile on his face.

  If she could get a wormhole opened between human space and the homeworld of the Blue-Blue-White, then something more was at least possible. There was no guarantee that the Admiralty would actually take up the fight. No way to know if the corrupt and hidebound and easily distracted government of Earth would authorize military action. No way to know whether Admiral Varma still had the fight left in her to see things through.

  But Earth might. Varma might. If all Lanoe could accomplish by throwing away his life was to give them a chance to do the right thing, to seek out justice, then it would be worth it.

  If there was any way he could know. Any way to be sure that Ginger was up to the task of convincing the Choir. But there was no such way. And in the meantime—he had Candless and Bury to think about, too.

  As he streaked away from Centrocor’s fleet, with what felt like hell’s gates breaking open behind him, he had to make a choice. Burn for the far end of the system. Lead all that firepower away from the Choir’s planet, and the portal. Keep them from descending on the alien city like a plague. Or head straight for the portal—and the possible, just barely possible salvation of the cruiser.

  “Commander?” Candless asked. “Commander, we need to know where we’re going. Otherwise we’ll just spin in circles. Which will make us very attractive targets. Commander?”

  He thought, as he so often did, of what Zhang would do.

  “Head for the portal,” he said. “We’re dead if we stay out here. Dive for the planet with everything you’ve got.”

  A wave of Sixty-Fours was already on their tail. Lanoe spun around on his long axis and sprayed PBW fire across their noses. Earlier, when they’d screened the carrier’s arrival, that would have been enough to make them back off. Clearly they had new orders now—they veered and dodged but kept coming. Behind them the destroyers were moving. Those Peltasts would be slow to get started but their engines were powerful beasts and it would take them no time at all to catch up to the scrum. Not that they even needed to—their weapons systems were designed for medium-range line combat, while a cataphract’s were meant for immediate-to short-range dogfighting. Which meant they could stand off and fire at Lanoe and his squad all day long without ever having to properly engage.

  “Bury, your thrusters are shot to hell,” Lanoe called. “Turn your nose to them. Candless—give us some covering fire.”

  “Oh, at once, sir,” Candless said, her sarcastic tone nearly freezing Lanoe’s ears off. But she pulled up into a tight loop and then rolled as she came down, directly over the Sixty-Fours. There were three carrier scouts in that wave, fighters with no vector fields. She concentrated her fire on them and they winked off Lanoe’s tactical board one by one.

  Lanoe brought up a virtual Aldis and started sniping at his pursuers, picking his shots with incredible care. He plugged one of the Sixty-Fours right in its canopy, his magnified view showing the pilot jerk and fall back as the particle beam cut right through his chest. Lanoe swiped the view away and started lining up another shot.

  “The Peltasts are five seconds from maximum range,” Candless called. “Four. Three. Lanoe? One. I see a spread of ship-to-ship missiles launching, looks like six projectiles, accelerating at three hundred g. I imagine I don’t need to call out their bearings.”

  Lanoe gritted his teeth. They were still ten thousand kilometers from the top of the planet’s atmosphere. “Noses down. Dive.”

  Bury and Candless swung around and pointed themselves straight at the planet’s core. Their thrusters lit up blue as they threw open their throttles. Lanoe took another few seconds to finish lining up his shot. He squeezed the trigger and a Sixty-Four came apart in pieces, debris that would tangle up the enemy fighters behind it. Then he swung around and punched for a hard burn, himself.

  His inertial sink pressed down hard on his old bones, squeezing him backward into the padding of his seat. Even his eyeballs were locked down, so the sudden acceleration wouldn’t flatten them in their sockets. His vision was cut down to a tiny circle of what lay dead ahead of him. All he could see was blue ocean far below, crawling with waves.

  He didn’t need to see his tactical board to know those missiles were still locked on to his tail. Alarms chimed all around his head, automated systems warning him of impending impacts. Those missiles were packed full of high explosives. If one of them so much as grazed him, it would go off with enough energy to vaporize him and his fighter instantly.

  His thrusters cut out—a safety interlock kept them from burning so hot they melted his shielding—and he was thrown forward into his straps, hard enough that they dug into his armpits and his groin like knives. The planet’s upper atmosphere hit his canopy with a noise like it was being sandblasted, air bouncing off his vector field hard enough to make it spark. His vision returned, throbbing red, and he brought up his tactical board and looked for the missiles.

  They were right behind him, maybe a hundred kilometers back. Closing the distance fast as they burned through all their solid fuel.

  Below him he saw two fireballs he knew were Bury and Candless. They were slowing down, atmospheric drag eating up their velocity. They would still be moving far too fast when they reached the portal, but not nearly fast enough to get away from those missiles.

  The chief design flaw of a cataphract-class fighter was that it could only shoot forward. Lanoe had no way to train his PBWs on those missiles. He could turn around to face them, but there was a chance that his ship would break up under the strain if he did. At the speed he was traveling that chance was less a probability than a certainty.

  Below him the ground spun as his airfoils tried to catch the air. Lanoe hit his positioning jets and stabilized, then reached for his comms board. “If only one of us makes it, don’t hang about,” he told the others. “Get in there and tell Ehta to take command of the cruiser. Tell her—”

  “Lanoe!” Candless called.

  He didn’t have time to curse. One of the missiles was right on his tail, barely five hundred meters behind.

  He just had time to swing out of the way. His airfoils groaned and nearly snapped off, and the whole fighter around him vibrated hard enough to make his teeth feel like they were coming out of their sockets, but somehow his fighter held through the maneuver. The missile shot past his canopy, no more than a pale blur.

  Lanoe’s reflexes, honed by centuries of dogfighting, were just enough to let him snap off a burst of PBW fire. The missile exploded in midair and he shot through a cloud of fire and smoke and debris that left deep score marks in his canopy.

  His tactical board chimed to tell him three more missiles were right behind him. He reached for his control stick but before he could even move they were past him, zip zip zip. They hadn’t been aiming for him.

  They were locked right on Bury’s tail.

  “Take us down,” Shulkin commanded. “I want to see him die.”

  The pilot didn’t hesitate. Gravity returned to the carrier’s bridge, if only for a moment, as she adjusted their course. “Circularizing orbit,” she said. “One hundred kilometers above the datum.”

  “Lower,” Shulkin said.

  Bullam sighed and looked over at Maggs, who was clinging to a nylon strap on the back wall of the bridge. “Almost seems anticlimactic, doesn’t it?” she said. “We came this far, through all manner of adversity, just to execute three Navy pilots.”

  “There are the commercial possibilities to consider,” Maggs replied, lazily rolling his shoulders.

  “Oh?”

  “Sixty kilometers,” the pilot said.

  Maggs gave Bullam a wicked smile. “There’s an entire species of aliens over there, on the far side of the planetary wormhole. A whole new population who have never experienced the wonder and convenience of Centrocor products.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “M. Maggs. With an at
titude like that, you could go far in business. Perhaps we can recoup our expenses, at the very least—”

  “Lower!” Shulkin barked.

  “Sir—the carrier isn’t rated for atmospheric flight,” the pilot insisted. “Any lower and we risk structural damage.”

  Shulkin stared at the woman with eyes like obsidian, like glass honed and darkened by an ancient fire.

  “I’ll—I’ll expand the display, sir,” the pilot said.

  The view grew to fill half the bridge. The three fighters were the size of Bullam’s thumbs, shaking and swinging back and forth in the middle of a cloud-streaked sky. Labels popped up to identify the pilot of each craft. The missiles were moving too fast to stay in focus as they closed the gap. One of them had locked on to Lanoe’s tail, and in the next few seconds it was sure to—

  “Damnation!” Shulkin cried out, his voice cracking. Bullam saw spittle rolling off his lip. It took her a moment to realize that Lanoe had managed to dodge the missile—and then blow it up in midair.

  “That shouldn’t be possible, should it?” she asked.

  Maggs rolled his eyes. “We’re talking about Aleister Lanoe. This is hardly the first time anyone tried shooting a missile at him. But don’t worry. No one’s lucky forever.”

  The missiles streaked toward Bury’s fighter flying straight as arrows, bypassing Lanoe’s and Candless’s ships as if they weren’t there. Bury’s thrusters, Lanoe thought—his thrusters had sustained a lot of damage. They must be leaking an enormous plume of waste heat, as if he were waving a flag for the missiles to follow.

  Lanoe held down the trigger built into his control stick, spraying PBW fire across the thrusters of the missiles. His shots went wide—already the missiles were too far below him to be caught by random shooting. “Bury,” he called. “Bury! You have to shake them. Bury, I know you can fly. Fly like hell, right now!”