Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  “I’m trying!” the Hellion called back. He waggled back and forth, his airfoils changing shape as they desperately tried to grab more air, to make his fighter more maneuverable. At this speed, though, inside a planetary atmosphere the BR.9 had the aerodynamic profile of a bullet, not an aircraft. He’d built up far too much momentum to be able to change his course now more than a fraction of a degree at a time.

  “Candless, watch out,” Lanoe called. She had wandered into the path of his fire as he tried to blast the missiles. “You’re getting too close!”

  One of the missiles exploded as Lanoe’s particle beam burned through its casing. The blast knocked the other two missiles a hair off course, giving Bury maybe a tenth of a second more time to get out of the way. It wasn’t going to be enough. Lanoe poured fire toward the other two, knowing it was useless. He was only delaying the inevitable.

  His tactical board chimed to tell him that two more missiles were incoming, streaking out of space to home in on the heat of his thrusters. Behind the missiles came squadron after squadron of Sixty-Fours. They were still thirty seconds away. It might as well have been an eternity.

  He realized suddenly that Candless hadn’t accidentally veered into the path of his fire—she was pressing in close intentionally, trying to save her student by getting into position to fire on the missiles. Her guns erupted with fire, long streams of charged particles lancing across the path of the missiles, crisscrossing Lanoe’s shots. She caught one of the missiles square on and it burst into a massive cloud of smoke and spinning debris. The last one punched through the cloud and kept going. Any second it would catch Bury and blow him to smithereens. Lanoe squeezed his trigger so hard he thought his control stick might break off in his hand.

  “Hellfire,” he breathed. “Bury! Move!”

  The missile edged closer and closer. Bury tried swinging off to one side but the missile easily matched his course.

  “Lieutenant,” the kid called.

  “I’m here, Bury. I’m right here,” Candless replied.

  “Tell Ginger—tell her—”

  “Tell her yourself,” Lanoe said. “Move, damn you!”

  He definitely tried.

  Bury’s fighter flipped end over end. Damnation—the kid had just tried to flip over, to get into position to fire at the missile himself, Lanoe thought. He’d tried to pull that maneuver at high speed inside an atmosphere. He didn’t think there was any way Bury’s crate could take the kind of strain.

  He was right. One of Bury’s airfoils snapped off under the pressure, spinning away into the air. Bury’s secondary thrusters—already ruined by enemy fire—burst apart in a shower of fragments. It was impossible, but Lanoe thought he could hear spars and struts snapping inside Bury’s fighter, the bones of the BR.9 breaking under stress.

  For a wild moment Bury spun in midair, cartwheeling end over end. His positioning and maneuvering jets fired in a wild rhythm as the kid desperately tried to even out. Lanoe was sure he wouldn’t be able to pull out of that tumbling spin, but before the missile could reach him, Bury had stabilized—flying backward, with his nose pointing at the oncoming missile.

  The kid fired a quick burst of PBW rounds right into its warhead. The missile burst apart, the ensuing cloud of debris engulfing Bury’s fighter in a wreath of flames. As the shards of the missile fell away, showering down on the ground below, Bury emerged from the explosion, still—somehow—alive and airborne.

  Not without damage, though. Lanoe could see that both of Bury’s PBW cannon were out of action, rings of polished metal showing where the barrels had been sheared off in the explosion. Bury’s canopy was shattered, the flowglas wobbling as it tried to reseal itself. His fairings were gone, exposing vital components to the raw air.

  The fighter flipped over again, righting itself so its airfoils could carry it on the wind. Something heavy and broken fell out of its undercarriage.

  “Bury,” Candless called, her voice soft, encouraging. “Bury. Can you hear me? Can you talk to me, Bury?”

  The kid sounded barely lucid. “I’m … I don’t feel great,” he said. “I, uh, I think I’m bleeding. There’s, uh, there’s blood in my helmet.”

  “Lanoe,” Candless said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lanoe told her. He looked to his left. Off in the distance he could just see the portal, floating serenely in its permanent ring of swirling clouds. “Bury, I want you to switch your fighter over to remote control. Candless can do the flying for you, from here. Let’s get you home.”

  Shulkin lifted a hand to his mouth. Drew it away again, slowly. “They’re alive. They’re all still alive. Didn’t I give an order … didn’t I give an order to …”

  He was shaking, visibly trembling as he turned to look at his officers.

  “I’m sure I … sure I …”

  Bullam took a deep breath. “Captain,” she said. “I think that it might be time—”

  “I gave a damned order!” Shulkin said, his voice rising into a birdlike shriek. He grabbed the navigator by his hair and slammed the man’s head forward into his console. Droplets of blood floated away from the poor bastard’s face.

  Someone screamed. Bullam couldn’t see who. The sound bounced off the walls for a moment, then died out and left behind only silence. Everyone on the bridge froze in place, staring. Eventually the navigator lifted his head and wiped blood from what was clearly a broken nose.

  Shulkin threw his hands up in the air. “I gave an order! I told you to kill them! I told you to kill them all!”

  He rounded on the pilot. Bullam pushed forward, thinking she would try to grab Shulkin’s arm, pull him back before he could assault another officer. He didn’t attack the pilot, however. Instead he shoved a long, bony finger right in her face.

  “Take us down there.”

  “Sir,” she said, her face ashen. “Sir, I—”

  Shulkin reached past her and touched a control. The view showed the three Navy ships swung around until they could all see the wormhole throat hovering in the planet’s atmosphere. Missiles and heavy PBW cannon fire streaked across the view. None of it struck home. One by one the cataphracts slipped through that opening and disappeared. The remaining two missiles, unable to find their targets, cut their engines and dropped harmlessly toward the planet below.

  Soon the view showed nothing but the wormhole throat.

  “Batygins,” Shulkin barked. Their twin images appeared in inset windows in one corner of the display. “Report, damn you.”

  “Sometimes people get lucky,” the destroyer captains said. “Sometimes people get lucky. At the damnedest time, usually. At the damnedest time, usually.”

  Shulkin swiped through the air with one hand and the Batygins blinked out. Then he snapped his fingers at the pilot. “There,” he said, pointing at the wormhole throat. “Take us through there.”

  “Sir,” the IO said, “this ship is already dangerously low in the planet’s gravity well. Any lower and we’ll have to leave orbit. We can’t fly down there. The ship can’t take the stress of atmospheric entry.”

  Shulkin nodded and pushed back to grab the arms of his seat, now just bare metal tubing since he’d torn the armrests off. He sat down carefully and strapped himself in.

  “There,” he said. “Take us there.”

  “Sir,” the IO said again. “Sir!”

  “It can’t be done, Captain,” Bullam said. “We can send fighters down there, to give chase. We can absolutely do that. Once whatever’s back there is cleaned up, we can go down personally in my yacht. But really, it can’t be done.”

  “The Hoplite managed,” Maggs pointed out. “Looked like they had a touchy go of it, but they made it.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Maggs,” Bullam said, glaring at the fool. “That was not at all helpful. Let me remind everyone that this is not a Hoplite-class cruiser. This is a—a—well, I’ve forgotten the class designation, but—”

  “Hipparchus,” the IO said.

  She nodded at him. “E
xactly. This is a Hipparchus-class carrier and that makes all the difference. Let’s give the order to send the fighters through. Then we can see about getting the poor navigator to the sick bay, and—”

  “Shut up,” Shulkin said. He reached into a pocket of his suit and pulled out an old-fashioned pistol, blocky and flat and made of dull metal. He pointed it at the pilot’s head. “If my orders aren’t followed in five seconds, I’ll kill her. Five.”

  Bullam floated next to her chair, with no idea what to do. She could try to take the gun away from Shulkin, but she knew perfectly well how that would end. Shulkin would just shoot her instead. The IO and the navigator edged away from the pilot, clearly having no better plan than she did. The pilot looked like an animal frozen by a spotlight, unable to run away. Slowly she lifted her arms to cover her face, as if that would do anything.

  “Four,” Shulkin said, very calm now. “Three.”

  “Damn it! Do what he says!” Maggs shouted, from the back of the bridge.

  “Yes, sir,” the navigator said, and turned to her console, laying in a new course.

  “Two,” Shulkin said.

  “Don’t! Don’t shoot!” the pilot screamed, and reached for her own controls. “Course laid in,” she squeaked.

  “No,” Bullam said. She couldn’t believe it. The madman was going to do it. “No, it’s too dangerous. Listen—just give me a moment to get to my yacht. Let me get out of here.”

  “One,” Shulkin said.

  “Please!” Bullam begged. “Please—I have a medical condition, I—”

  “Beginning maneuver,” the pilot said. And then she pushed her control yoke forward, and the carrier fell out of the sky.

  Lanoe shot through the portal too fast and had to bank hard to avoid crashing into the City of the Choir. He cut a series of sharp S-turns to bleed off his velocity, then headed for the cruiser’s open vehicle bay. Candless and Bury made a couple of extra loops around the cruiser before they followed him in. As soon as Lanoe had parked his BR.9 in its docking cradle, he ran to the open edge of the bay and looked out. So far no one had followed them through the portal, but he was sure that wouldn’t last.

  He tapped his wrist display. “Valk,” he said. “Damn you, we needed you out there. We still do.”

  There was no response.

  “You bastard,” Lanoe said. “Bury’s hurt. He’s probably going to die—because you wouldn’t come out and fight with us. Don’t you even care?”

  Nothing.

  “Valk—Hellfire, Valk, talk to me!” When there was no immediate response he scowled and tapped for Ehta instead. “We’re about to see ten kinds of hell coming through the portal. Do you know where Valk is? Physically, I mean.”

  “He’s in the wardroom,” Ehta replied, instantly. “At the helm. Lanoe—what happened out there?”

  “Centrocor happened. Bury’s hurt.” Lanoe shook his head. “The carrier,” he said, too worked up to actually speak in sentences. “Plus two Peltasts. Guess we were too tough for them last time. Stand by.”

  Candless and Bury came gliding in just then and he had to duck to miss getting decapitated by their landing gear. In the harsh lights of the vehicle bay, Bury’s fighter looked worse off than it had out in the sunlight. Candless didn’t even bother berthing her ship properly. Instead she jumped out before her canopy had even fully retracted and ran over to check on Bury.

  Lanoe came up behind her. It looked bad. His suit was torn open, layers of insulation flapping free. His chin was slick with blood, and a lather of foamy pink drool covered his lips. His eyes were wild, rolling back and forth.

  “Bury,” Candless said. “Bury, it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  The kid was past responding. Lanoe didn’t know if he was going to make it.

  “We need to get him to the sick bay. The surgical drone there can save him, but we need to move him right now,” Candless said.

  “I’ll do it,” Lanoe said, thinking he needed to get over there anyway, to talk to Ginger.

  “You will not, damn you,” Candless said. She was frantic with worry. “He’s my student. I have a responsibility to make sure he—”

  “You have a responsibility to Ginger, too,” Lanoe told her. “And as XO, you’re responsible for everyone on this ship. Candless—Marjoram. Listen to me. The battle isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. The best thing you can do for him—for both of them—is get back out there. Guard the portal. Our only chance is to make sure they don’t get enough fighters in here to overrun us.”

  She stared into his eyes for a second, and he felt like she was judging him. No. Evaluating him. It was a teacher’s look.

  “Go,” he said. “As soon as I think he’s going to be okay, I’ll come back out and join you. Go!”

  “Is that an order, Commander?” she asked, through pursed lips.

  “You damned well know it is,” Lanoe told her. “Go!”

  She went. Her fighter lifted out of its cradle, turned around, and shot out of the bay, only seconds after she’d arrived.

  Lanoe turned back to Bury’s fighter, and reached down to pull the kid out. Only to find that the Hellion’s suit had fused to his seat, so he was stuck inside the cockpit.

  There was no good way to be gentle about it. Lanoe tore Bury free. The kid spasmed and fresh blood leaked from his mouth. Lanoe let him rest for a second. He tapped at his wrist display and got a direct line to the wardroom.

  “Valk,” he said. “Valk—you’re going to talk to me whether you like it or not.”

  “I’m here,” the AI replied.

  “We could have used you out there,” Lanoe said. “Bury’s hurt bad. Why the hell didn’t you fight with us? You’re angry at me, is that it? We don’t have enough pilots for that kind of petty bosh.”

  “It wasn’t that. I mean, I was angry. But I got over that. I stayed behind because I had to fly the cruiser.”

  Lanoe closed his eyes. “You and I both know you can do that and fly a fighter.”

  “You don’t understand. When I make copies of myself, I can’t trust them. I can’t guarantee they won’t turn on me again.”

  “Find a way to help. Find a way to make it work. We need you, Valk.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Lanoe. I know—I just—I’m scared. Scared of what I’m becoming. Scared of how much I’ve lost.”

  Lanoe opened his eyes again. He couldn’t handle this. “Do what you have to do,” he said. “But get over it. Now.”

  He cut the connection and opened a new one.

  “Ehta,” he sent, and she responded instantly. “I’m headed for sick bay. Have your marines clear a path.” He grimaced as he lifted Bury out of the cockpit and slung him over his shoulder. “In fact—get them to the gundecks. Get as many of our coilguns warmed up as they can manage.”

  “You got it, boss,” Ehta said. “Though—listen—I don’t want to have to be the one to say this, but—”

  “Just go ahead,” Lanoe grunted as he carried Bury through the hatch into the axial corridor. Even in the minimal gravity, the kid weighed a ton.

  “You really want to get in an artillery duel in here? In the bubble, I mean? Let’s say we actually get lucky. Let’s say we blow away one of their destroyers, or even the carrier. That’s going to create a hell of a lot of debris. All of which will rain down on the Choir’s city. The locals might not approve.”

  Lanoe closed his eyes for a second. Opened them and stomped on down the corridor. “I don’t intend for you to shoot at Centrocor.”

  “No? Oh. Oh, well, then—”

  “I want you to work up a firing solution for the city. I want you to be ready to bombard the place on a second’s notice. If Ginger can’t convince them to help us, we’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Persuade them at the end of a gun barrel.”

  The carrier groaned as it hit the top layer of the planet’s atmosphere.

  Then gravity reached up and squeezed it, and it screamed.

  Bullam reached for a
handhold at the side of the hatch leading out of the bridge. It was vibrating so much it made the bones of her arm feel like they would snap. She staggered out into the corridor, and the ship lurched so hard she slammed into the far wall.

  “Oh, hellfire, oh hellfire,” she chanted. The carrier rolled around her and she had to drop to all fours, pulling herself along the floor as the walls seemed to bulge inward and then bow back out. Her cabin was only a few dozen meters away, but she knew it was going to feel like kilometers.

  Far away, deep in the cylindrical body of the carrier, something burst and a dull roar came echoing up the corridor. An alarm chime sounded from the ceiling above her and lights flashed everywhere. She couldn’t hear anyone else in the ship, no sound of running feet or shouting voices. Maybe everyone had the good sense to get in their bunks and stay there.

  Something she desperately wanted to do, herself. There were lots of things she wanted, just then. A captain who wasn’t homicidally insane. A mission that wasn’t likely to end in her death. A mirror.

  She desperately needed a mirror. She needed to look for the dark spots of broken blood vessels under her skin. She needed to check her eyes, and make sure they weren’t filling with blood.

  The way things were going she would be lucky just to make it to the hatch of her cabin. She dragged herself along, arm over arm, getting closer, just a little bit closer—

  The alarm chimes turned to shrieks of pain. The carrier bucked wildly, tossing her into the air and then throwing her violently back down to the floor, knocking the wind out of her. She saw spots swim before her eyes, felt her blood coursing through her veins, and she cried out, begged for anyone to help her, but there was nobody there.

  Just a meter or two more—she dug her fingers into the seams between floor panels. Cracked her fingernails but she didn’t care. Just a little farther—a little—

  The carrier swung upside down for a moment and she was flying, she was upside down, on the ceiling, looking at the floor, she was falling, she was—she was—