Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  Around him, the Hoplite’s officers had fallen silent. Ehta was chewing her nails. Candless was staring at a section of wall, very intently, as if she could see through it. Ginger’s eyes had glazed over—maybe communing with a sedated alien had left her half-asleep.

  “Look,” he said again, louder. “Damn you all—look!”

  Because up ahead was a wormhole throat. They’d reached the end, with one hundred and twenty-five meters to spare.

  They jumped up and crowded around the main display. Pointed and exclaimed as if they’d never seen a wormhole throat before. Ginger even smiled, a little. Lanoe liked it when Ginger smiled, under all that red hair. It made him think of Zhang, when things were good. When she was still alive.

  “M. Valk,” Candless said, “will you kindly exit this wormhole?”

  “On it,” Valk said.

  They emerged from the throat moving fast, nearly ten percent of the speed of light. Valk cut in the retros to slow them down—there was no telling what was on the other side. It turned out he needn’t have bothered.

  For centuries, it had been an established fact that a wormhole throat could only exist near a large source of gravity, like a massive sun. That they needed to be anchored to something big. Maybe that was even true for stable wormholes. The Choir had sent them to a patch of deep space, however. The nearest star was a red dwarf sixty astronomical units away, twice as far as Neptune was from Earth’s sun. The dwarf looked like just a bright star in a sky full of them.

  Extraordinarily full of them, in fact.

  “Where are we?” Lanoe asked.

  “I’d look for constellations to get some idea,” Candless said, “but I don’t know how you’d even begin to pick out constellations in that.”

  The forward display showed more stars than any of them had ever seen. It was almost paved with them, stars in every possible color, stars so close it felt like you could reach out and touch them. Fully half the view was just a solid blur of light—the Milky Way, but impossibly bright and thick.

  “There are four stars within a light-year of here,” Valk said.

  “That’s crazy,” Ehta said. “Stars don’t pack together like that.”

  “No,” Valk said. “Not where we come from.”

  Lanoe raised an eyebrow. He thought he might know what Valk was about to say. He devoutly hoped it was true. Even if it scared the hell out of him.

  “We’ve moved … inward,” Valk said. “Closer to the center of the galaxy. Out where Earth is, stars are farther apart, scattered all over the place. The farther you go inward, the closer together they get until they all kind of glom together at the center and create a supermassive black hole. I’m having a hard time getting a fix on these stars—I don’t recognize any of them, and even the standard candles we use for navigation aren’t in the right place. It’s weird.”

  “How far?” Lanoe asked.

  “How far from Earth? From any human planet? I’d say … ten thousand light-years,” Valk told him.

  Candless laughed. Even though Valk’s tone had made it clear he wasn’t joking.

  “Hellfire,” Ehta said.

  Ginger turned to face Lanoe. “They gave you what you wanted, Commander.”

  Zhang was standing right behind him. Her hand on his shoulder.

  “So close now,” she said. “You know what you need to do.”

  He pretended like he couldn’t hear her. The others didn’t need to know that she was there. “I would have settled for anywhere. Just getting out of the bubble, away from Centrocor, would have been something. Instead, the Choir did this.”

  “If I raise my hand all politely, will you answer my next question?” Ehta asked.

  Lanoe pointed out the red dwarf at the center of the display. The brightest, closest star. “That,” he said, “is the homesystem of the Blue-Blue-White.”

  Behind them, unnoticed, the wormhole throat shrank down to nothing, and vanished without any fanfare, folding itself back up into the higher dimensions.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my editors, especially: Will Hinton and James Long, who helped me find Lanoe’s grief, something I struggled with. I’d like to thank my agent, Russell Galen, and Alex Lencicki, who made this series possible. I’d also like to thank my wife, Jennifer Dikes, who gave me so much support through so many life changes during the writing process—losing my father, moving to a new home, and finally, gloriously, getting married to the most wonderful woman in the world. Through all of that, she stood by me and held my hand and told me to keep writing.

  The story continues in …

  FORBIDDEN SUNS

  Book Three of The Silence

  Keep reading for a sneak peek!

  extras

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  FORGOTTEN WORLDS,

  look out for

  FORBIDDEN SUNS

  Book Three of The Silence

  by D. Nolan Clark

  The Hipparchus-class carrier rocked from side to side, and somewhere, down a long corridor, Ashlay Bullam could hear an explosion and a muffled scream. They were under attack—which meant they must have found their quarry.

  “Get me to the bridge,” she said.

  “Nothing would give me more pleasure.” Auster Maggs had an elegantly sculpted mustache and a sarcastic leer that seemed to be a permanent part of his face. Less than eight hours ago, he’d been a Navy pilot and her sworn enemy. Then he’d seen the writing on the wall—that the Navy couldn’t win this fight. He’d immediately defected to Centrocor’s side.

  Now he was her new best friend.

  He wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her gently from her bed. The carrier was under slight acceleration, which meant there was a little gravity to contend with, but not much. He had no trouble half-carrying, half-walking her the short distance. He touched the release for her and the hatch slid open on a scene of utter chaos.

  Displays all around the bridge showed the state of the battle. Fighters wheeled and struck, guns flashing as they twisted in for quick attack runs, thrusters flaring as they raced away again, missing deadly shots by a matter of centimeters. A Yk.64 fighter—one of their own—exploded just off the bow of the carrier and the bridge was washed with orange-white light. The carrier swayed and Bullam lunged for something to hold on to as she was knocked from her feet.

  “Are we winning, at least?” she demanded.

  Captain Shulkin, the carrier’s commanding officer, turned in his seat to glare at her. “Victory is inevitable,” he said. “Which does not mean we can afford to grow complacent. Information Officer—what is the status of the enemy’s guns?”

  “Weapons hot, sir—I register all sixteen of their coilguns ready to fire.”

  Bullam’s blood ran cold. The last time they’d fought the Hoplite-class cruiser, it had fired one shot from just one of its guns, and Shulkin had been forced to make a terrible sacrifice to keep them all from being killed. Now all of the cruiser’s guns were active—

  “Except—sir,” the IO said, his face crinkling up with bewilderment, “they aren’t aiming at us. The guns are pointed at the city.”

  City? Bullam had no idea what the man was talking about. The last she’d heard the carrier was transiting through a wormhole throat. They could be anywhere in the galaxy by now. She slid into her seat at the back of the bridge and tapped her wrist minder to bring up a tactical display.

  What she saw answered very few of her questions. Instead it raised many, many more.

  The carrier wasn’t in outer space. It was in a vast cavern, perhaps a hundred kilometers in diameter, with walls of pure ghostlight. The same eerie phosphorescence you saw lining the interior of a wormhole. But this couldn’t be a wormhole—they didn’t come this big, not by a power of ten. Moreover, wormholes were tunnels, linking two points in space. This cavern had only one entrance, the one they’d come through. It was like a bubble of higher-dimensional space carved out of the very wall of the universe.


  Floating in the middle of the bubble, quite impossibly, was a city a few kilometers across. A ball of Gothic architecture, spires and towers radiating outward from a hidden center. From the tops of the highest buildings brilliant searchlights swept across the bubble, lighting up Centrocor and Navy ships alike.

  Bullam could hardly believe it. But she knew, instantly—this was what they’d come to find. This was why they’d chased the cruiser across hundreds of light-years of space.

  “Captain!” she called. “You have to stop them! The cruiser can’t be allowed to shell that city.”

  Shulkin twisted his mouth over to one side of his cadaverous face. His eyes were two points of pure nothingness that bored into her. “I assume the civilian observer has a good reason to issue orders on my damned bridge?” he asked.

  “We can’t let them fire on the city,” she said. “Those are potential customers down there!”

  It had been a long journey to get here—wherever they were.

  Bullam worked for Centrocor, one of the interplanetary monopolies, or polys, which effectively owned all planets outside the original solar system. Centrocor was in a constant state of cold warfare with the Navy of Earth. The balance of power shifted endlessly, but never so far as to reach a tipping point. Until, perhaps, now.

  Centrocor had spies inside the Navy. Those spies had reported that the very top level of Naval command had approved a mission of utmost secrecy. The Admirals had sent one of their officers—Aleister Lanoe—to meet with some unknown group, some third party, in the hope of creating an alliance. Centrocor couldn’t allow that to happen—anything that could strengthen the Navy had to be crushed immediately.

  So the poly had sent Bullam to capture Lanoe, or at the very least to find out what he was up to. She had been given an enormous amount of support. A Hipparchus-class carrier a full half a kilometer long, which held a crew of over a hundred people and fifty smaller Yk.64 fighter craft. Two Peltast-class destroyers, only a hundred meters long each but so covered in guns they looked shaggy. Powerful, extremely fast, very deadly.

  Perhaps most importantly, they’d given her Captain Shulkin. An ex-Navy officer who, for all his limitations, was a brilliant tactician and a ruthless leader.

  Lanoe had only one ship, a Hoplite-class cruiser, and a handful of fighters. He was working with a skeleton crew and a tiny number of fighter pilots.

  He was also the luckiest bastard who’d ever lived. Lanoe had fought in every major war since Mars had rebelled against Earth three hundred years ago. He’d always been on the winning side. He was the most decorated pilot in Navy history, having survived more dogfights and attack runs than should have been possible for one man. He was smart, quick, and sneaky, and somehow he had kept his people alive and his cruiser intact, despite everything Centrocor had thrown at him.

  That couldn’t last. The odds were undeniably in Centrocor’s favor—they outnumbered him in every statistic that mattered. In previous encounters, it had been considered crucial to capture Lanoe alive. Now that they had reached this mysterious city, that was no longer necessary. They could throw everything they had at him.

  It was just a matter of time. Lanoe was going to die. Centrocor was going to win. Bullam would gain unfettered access to the city, and she would make a deal with its inhabitants. Steal the Navy’s new ally for the poly. She would return home to a promotion, to stock options, to guaranteed medical care. All she had to do was sit back and watch the battle play itself out.

  We’ve already won.

  She kept telling herself that. Repeating it, over and over, like a mantra. She was certain that eventually she would start to believe it.

  “Where the hell is Lanoe?” Shulkin demanded. The IO didn’t even bother to answer out loud. He just brought up a subdisplay that showed the Navy cruiser twenty kilometers away. The Hoplite was three hundred meters long, nearly a third of that taken up by its massive fusion engines, much of the rest comprised of its deadly coilguns and a large vehicle bay that could hold a dozen fighters. The ship was scarred by explosions, scorched by dozens of hits from particle beam weapons—PBWs. Portions of its armor were just missing altogether. Its vehicle bay was open to the elements; its hatch torn away.

  It was not, however, undefended. A single BR.9 fighter—a Navy ship—spun circles around the big ship, a minnow twisting around the body of a wounded shark. Centrocor Yk.64 fighters darted in wherever they saw an opening but incredibly, impossibly, the BR.9 was always there to drive them back with salvos from its twin PBWs. The view magnified still further and Bullam saw that the enemy fighter’s canopy had been blasted away, that its fuselage had been stripped down to exposed wiring and burnt-out components, but still it fought on. Through the damage she could actually see the helmet of the pilot—could even get a glimpse of short gray hair.

  “It’s him,” Shulkin breathed. “Put a call in to the Batygin brothers.”

  A pair of holographic images appeared on either side of the magnified view, showing the commanders of the two Peltast-class destroyers. Identical twins, their hair combed in opposite directions as if that would allow someone to tell them apart. Their pupils were enormous because both were drugged with a vasodilator that supposedly enhanced their response time and combat effectiveness. It also let them speak almost in unison.

  “Ready, Captain.”

  “Ready, Captain.”

  Shulkin didn’t look at them—he only had eyes for Lanoe. “Focus your attack on that BR.9. As long as he’s alive we haven’t won anything.”

  “Understood.”

  “Understood …”

  “What?” Shulkin demanded. “Why are you hesitating?”

  “We’re currently under attack, ourselves.”

  “We are currently under attack, ourselves.”

  “There!” Bullam said, jabbing a finger at the display no one else was watching. The one that showed the battle raging just outside the carrier’s hull.

  A single BR.9 had been streaking toward them the whole time, virtually ignoring every Sixty-Four Centrocor had in play. Even as whole squads of the poly’s fighters plunged toward it, the BR.9 kept coming, burning hard in a blatantly suicidal charge.

  “That’s Candless,” Maggs said from behind Bullam’s shoulder.

  She swiveled around. She’d nearly forgotten he was there.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Marjoram Candless. She’s Lanoe’s Executive Officer. Until recently she worked as an instructor at the Navy’s flight school, but don’t let that fool you. The old adage that those who can’t, teach? Not frightfully accurate in this case. She’s a real devil behind a control stick.”

  “She can’t hope to achieve anything by herself,” Bullam insisted.

  “Ah, well, there’s the rub,” Maggs said, and nodded at the display.

  Out of nowhere eight more BR.9s came swinging into the battle, their PBWs blazing away indiscriminately. Sixty-Fours burned and exploded left and right and suddenly there was a hole in their defense, a vulnerability big enough for Candless to punch right through. She continued her course, straight toward one of the destroyers, not deviating so much as a fraction of a degree.

  “No,” Bullam said. “No—our intelligence said Lanoe only had five pilots left. Who the hell are these eight?”

  “Tannis Valk,” Maggs told her, stroking his mustache.

  “Valk—he’s one of the five,” Bullam said, “but—”

  Even he looked worried now. “I’ll save you the trouble of asking how one man can fly eight ships at the same time. He isn’t. A man, that is. He’s an artificial intelligence loaded into a space suit.”

  No. No, no, no. That wasn’t … For one thing, that was illegal. Just allowing an AI to exist was a capital crime. Giving one access to weapons and military hardware was so incredibly unlawful, so incredibly unethical, that Bullam couldn’t even imagine someone doing it. Not even a devious bastard like Aleister Lanoe. “No,” she said.

  “I’m afraid the answer is y
es. And now—”

  “Sir!” the IO shouted. “Sir, the enemy BR.9 has loaded a disruptor. It’s within range of the destroyer.”

  One of the Batygin brothers opened his mouth as if to speak. The other mirrored the gesture, a split second later. “Brace for impact,” he said.

  “Brace for impact!”

  In the display, Bullam could actually watch it happen. A panel in the undercarriage of Candless’s BR.9 slid open, and the missile extended outward on a boom. A meter long spear with multiple warheads—one round like that could tear a destroyer to pieces.

  And at the last minute, the very last second, Candless pulled a snap turn—and fired the missile not at the destroyer, but right at the carrier.

  Bullam could see it coming right at her, head on.

  The destroyers had already started to turn, hopelessly attempting to outmaneuver the disruptor. They ended up having to burn all their jets in an attempt not to collide with each other—or with the carrier.

  The pilot of the carrier was far too busy to do any fancy flying. Everyone onboard the giant ship was simply trying to hold on.

  The disruptor round detonated just before it touched the carrier’s outer hull, the shock wave of the blast peeling the ship’s armor back like the rind of a fruit. It kept exploding as it plunged through power relays, crew spaces, cable junctions, computer systems. It passed through the cavernous vehicle bay without meeting much resistance. Still exploding, it tore apart a pair of reserve fighters, a maintenance cradle and three engineers—and kept going.

  On the bridge every display flashed red, and the air was full of screaming chimes. Damage-control boards popped up automatically and the pilot, the navigator and the IO tried desperately to issue commands to the crew, tried to lock down vital systems or bring up blast doors to keep fires from raging through the life-support system.

  Then the carrier turned over on its side, rolling with the blast, and everyone was thrown over in their seats. Bullam’s body bent the wrong way and she felt her bones twist in their sockets as she was thrown to the side, her neck whipping around and her arms flying in the air. Behind her Maggs smashed into one wall, his hands grabbing at anything he could reach, anything that would hold his weight.