The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  Alister blanched. “I don’t want to wait here to get eaten.”

  “There are crevices we can hide inside all over the Rangan,” said Cordell. “But it’d be better if we could repel this thing.”

  “I’ll drive the Devil,” said Nilah, glancing toward the canyon. Teacup, reacting to their plan, laid out a path and an ETA—good numbers if she got going. “No time for a decent landing, so I’ll be taking the quick way off the back ramp.”

  Cordell craned his neck to get a better look at the beast in the distance. “Who’s supposed to fly the ship?”

  “Orna can bring the Capricious. She’s a mechanist, and it’s only a machine, after all—”

  “We’ve got precious few seconds to discuss, so I’ll be brief,” said Aisha, voice knife-sharp. “That’s not how piloting works at all. You think Orna can pull a cargo ship out of a multi-level ground-effect zone, but you’re out of your league, Miss Racer. I wouldn’t talk about your car that way. You don’t talk about my ship that way.” She turned to Cordell. “Captain, I’ll ride back in Charger. It’s so easy, even Boots can do it.”

  “Hey!” Boots cut in, but Aisha hushed her.

  “I’m the cargo pilot, and if you want to get that ship up here with the ramp open without tail-spinning him into a rocks kill, you’ll do as I say.”

  It wasn’t that it was a bad plan, but Nilah couldn’t imagine Orna agreeing to yet another person riding inside the robot.

  Charger’s cockpit popped open, and Orna stepped out. “Right. I’ll drive you back remotely.” The quartermaster grabbed a few weapons from her bot’s many holsters and stepped away, nodding.

  “Thank you,” said Aisha, climbing inside. “Let’s go, Hunter Two.”

  Teacup and Charger dashed across the meadow, tall grass slapping at their legs as they went. Nilah spared a look back at the lumbering creature in the distance, finding it closing on the Rangan at an unbelievable pace.

  As Nilah came to the edge, Teacup calculated the jump, telling her to go for it, and she leapt. She came down hard, Teacup’s phantoplasm jets firing into the loose rocks of the riverbank. It took her a moment to scrabble upright from her gelatinous spell, but Orna’s pathing code had done its job admirably.

  They raced along the edge of the river toward the camo netting, ripping an opening as they passed through. The wait for the cargo ramp to open was interminable, and they jumped inside as soon as it was wide enough.

  Nilah popped her cockpit, stepping out. “I’ve got the Devil. Get to the bridge.”

  “Copy.” Charger opened, and Aisha vaulted from its interior, headed for the stairs.

  Without a moment’s pause, Nilah traced her mechanist’s mark and slapped a palm to the Devil’s door. Her magic threaded into the security systems, and it slid open with a “Welcome, New Authorized User.”

  She wound through the troop transport section and into the cockpit, slumping into the driver’s seat with a huff. “I’m in.”

  “Getting my big boy online,” came Aisha’s voice on her comm. “He’s pretty sleepy. Rain is playing havoc on the ignition. Stand by, I’m going to flush the engines.”

  Sharp static and something else cut across the comm—water? Nilah’s stomach lurched as the ship bucked underneath her. A nasty grinding noise reverberated through the hull and the two-seventy engine jumped up and down, throwing her from her seat and wedging her against the window.

  “What the bloody hell is going on up—”

  “Piloting,” said Aisha. “This is the part where you would’ve crashed.”

  Nilah pulled herself back onto her butt and strapped in before mashing the all-start. The Element logo materialized in front of her, a hard series of angles and glyphs, interlocked to form the outline of horns.

  “Hello, New User,” said the AI, its voice smooth, though a little menacing. “I’m the Element Devil, the most advanced all-terrain skirmish vehicle in history, and I’m here to assist you with any and all combat needs. What would you like to call me?”

  Through the windscreen and open cargo ramp, she spied the river dropping away. It wouldn’t be a long journey to the Rangan, so she needed to be combat ready. She kicked herself for not registering the system sooner.

  The system buzzed once. “Repeat query: what do you want to call me?”

  “Uh… the Devil.”

  “I like it. And what are you called?” asked the AI.

  The ship listed to one side and one of the engines thumped before whining in a descending tone. The Devil was locked to the deck, but the ship around it swayed woozily, and the open ramp loomed large before Nilah.

  “Nilah! Can we skip the bleeding registration?”

  “One last question,” said the Devil. “What’s your rank, soldier?”

  “I don’t care, blast you! Whatever! Supreme being!”

  The glowing red lines of the assault vehicle’s control console spun into being, and Nilah tried to remember exactly what she’d done those years ago at the arms show. Through the open cargo ramp, the beast’s head came into view, its jagged gray teeth glittering like wet granite.

  “Good to meet you, Supreme Being Nilah. You’re looking at the most intense control surface for autonomously prosecuting terrestrial targets ever created.” A series of tooltips pulsed over various segments. “Let’s get started with basic viewport operation—”

  “Skip it!”

  More tooltips. “Those familiar with the Element Typhoon’s maneuvering system will already know—”

  “Skip!”

  “Like the Element Berserker, fire control can be accessed through—”

  The monster turned to look at them, burning eyes like ruby mirrors, and its dirt-clumped lips twisted in anger.

  “Skip! Skip! Skip! I need to kill something!”

  “Now we’re talking, Supreme Being. Designate your target, and let’s get down to business.”

  Nilah tapped the console’s HUD and highlighted the enormous creature in their midst. “Bring the short-range jump online.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Boarders

  Boots couldn’t be sure if she was the one shaking, or if it was the earth beneath her. With each passing second, the booming footfalls of the mountain grew louder. She’d wedged herself into a crack in the Rangan’s stony facade, and the rock face made an ominous grinding noise around her. If it collapsed, she’d be squished.

  “Stand by,” said Cordell over the comms. “I hear the Capricious. And whatever you do, don’t shoot. I don’t want that thing’s attention.”

  A tonitruous claw came down outside Boots’s hiding spot, mottled earthen flesh stained by streaks of iron and possibly blood—couldn’t walk like that and not squish something. Hundreds of wormlike cilia writhed between the scales, and Boots realized to her horror that each snaking appendage was tipped with a small, toothy maw.

  And what the hell are you supposed to be?

  “All crew!” came Malik’s voice. “It’s rearing back!”

  Boots braced herself for the beast to strike the Rangan, but instead there came a spray of sudden, heavy rain. Something mirrored and silver came flopping to the ground outside Boots’s hiding place, bouncing across the tall grass. It took her a moment to recognize it for what it was—a trout.

  She squinted at the fish. “What the…”

  Cordell’s voice shook as he called over the comm, “Hunters! I’m going to need you here yesterday! We’re—”

  A punishing deluge swept away all speech.

  Clear water crashed across the opening to Boots’s hiding spot, sucking out the air with its passing. Her lungs burned and her grip loosened. All things considered, it wasn’t as bad as being tossed out of an airlock, but it was close.

  Then it was over, and the water drained away, allowing sweet, cool oxygen to rush inside the crack. Boots gasped and sputtered, falling to her knees and trying to keep her voice down. Her comm had come loose in the flood, and droplets of water lodged in her ear canals, muting all sounds. S
he wiped her face and peered out into the broken section of the Rangan to find the stone detritus washed away and the charred tree snapped in half.

  A thick coating of algae settled over the area like bile, and thousands of fish flopped around in the soup. Long strands of freshwater kelp lay strewn across the ground in a star formation from the fluid’s impact. When she looked up, she found the lumbering creature’s mouth hanging open, a half dozen waterfalls flowing forth. It had to have dumped an entire lake onto the fire in one fell swoop. If she’d been standing in the open, she would’ve been crushed.

  Boots felt around her collar for her comm, hoping it’d gotten caught on her shirt. If one of her crewmates was wounded, it fell to Boots, as an able-bodied person, to drag them to safety. The mountain above her craned its head, eyeing the ground below with intense curiosity, and Boots squeezed backward into her hiding spot.

  “Spare comm, spare comm,” she muttered, digging around in her cargo pockets as she shook the water from her ears. She had to get her orders—if they decided to make a break for it without her, and she missed it… There was a knife, some keys, her paragon crystal, and a set of crumpled-up ration wrappers from the last time she’d worn the pants. Drawing forth the wrappers, she spotted the gray rubber of her earpiece—as it bounced down to the ground and out of her hiding place. She muttered a short verse of swears and poked her head out to see if the beast was looking at her.

  Something else held its attention, so she scrambled down the slippery, jagged rocks to paw around for her comm.

  “Boots!” It was Cordell—the bastard was completely dry, probably from his shield. “What are you doing?”

  “I dropped my comm!”

  “Get your spare!”

  “I dropped my spare!”

  A gale-force gasp filled the meadow, and she looked up to see the mountain taking another deep breath. It waved its head, tracing the elemental glyph of water with its horn, and this close, Boots could make out motes of aquamarine magic gathering about its enormous belly, a scaly expanse dotted with hundreds of sharp, chitinous legs.

  The triple-whines of the Capricious’s engines were like the bells of heaven to Boots’s ears. The ship came soaring over the edge of the canyon, rain haloing its engines with reflected light.

  “It’s going to puke again!” shouted Cordell, and he rushed Boots, grabbing her with one arm and tracing his shieldmaster’s mark with the other. “Stay down!”

  She watched in terror as the beast yawned once more to spew water across the open meadow, but the Devil ramped out of the back of the Capricious in an ambitious stunt jump—its hull crackling pink.

  Boots’s eyes went wide as the vehicle vanished in a jump strobe. “Holy crap.”

  The Devil came streaking back into existence over the creature’s head, a burst of fusion ripping off bits of its plant-crusted flesh and hurling them away in brilliant streaks. Boots could only watch for a split second before she screwed her eyes shut to stop her retinas from burning.

  When she looked again, fire rumbled across the clouds like sunset lightning. She squinted at the blurry silhouette of the creature—it was missing a substantial portion of its head, and its jaw hung askew from long strands of torn meat. Water spewed forth in every direction, and an earth-shattering howl cut through her deafness.

  Cordell helped her to her feet, and they watched the thing sway from side to side.

  “I can’t tell if that’s the worst or best tank I’ve ever seen,” she said.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  The mountain lazily tilted toward them.

  “Run!” she said, and they took off over the algae-slicked ground.

  To Boots’s great relief, she was joined by Malik and Orna, as well as Jeannie and Alister. They’d emerged from their own hiding places in the wake of the explosion only to find themselves in danger of being squished. They hit the tall grasses at top speed, though it wouldn’t be enough. The beast was simply too large.

  “Eyes front!” Cordell yelled at Boots, ushering her forward. “They’re going to hit it again!”

  The Devil carved a donut into the meadow as it landed, spun, and peeled out for the beast once more. It jumped, knocking all of them down with another shock wave. Boots covered her face as she went skidding across the grass, buried rocks raking across her back. When the flash faded, she saw the Devil landing hard in a spray of mud and weeds, and she turned to see the gargantuan creature reeling like it’d taken a right hook from some divine entity.

  It collapsed onto the earth with a quake, spilling gore across the landscape.

  Boots sat up, eyes smarting slightly more than the rest of her, and squeegeed the caked mud from her front. It smeared more than she would’ve liked, but she made a valiant effort. Itchy heat prickled her cheek, and she patted her palm against it to find blood from an array of scratches. Then she frantically began to search her first-aid kit for her cleansing spray, since she had no idea what foreign pathogens she’d just rubbed into her cut. The others hadn’t fared too terribly—a few bruises, some sprains.

  “If Witts has creatures like that,” said Cordell, picking the grass bits out of his tight curls, “why the hell haven’t we seen them before?”

  The mountain heaved a final sigh, then fell still. Something about its form, its lumbering motions, rang a bell in the back of her mind. She thought of the fish and kelp boiling forth from its belly.

  Green women, seeding the landscape.

  “That was a Gardener,” she breathed. “Captain, I think that was a Gardener! That means… That means—!”

  But if it was one of the mythical creatures, if it was, this hidden, backwater world was—

  Her chest grew tight, and she thought she might asphyxiate. The Gardeners, which had heretofore been myths to Boots, were first-generation terraforming tech. According to legends, they could breathe fire, conjure seeds and even some wildlife. This one wasn’t a big naked lady, but it fit the other myths to a T. Gardeners had roamed the first colonized worlds, creating lakes, rivers, forests, and anything else humanity might need to survive. There was nothing like them in modern terraforming, and a specimen like that would probably provide arcane biologists with several new fields of study.

  And they’d just killed it.

  “Okay, Boots, okay,” said Malik, coming to her and crouching down with a penlight in his hand. He began feeling the back of her head for bruises. “I’m going to need you to take some deep breaths. What’s got you so upset, aside from the obvious?”

  “That thing, the one we just blew up, is a Gardener. It’s… like… uh…”

  “Let’s take our time, shall we?” Malik pulled out his medkit and swabbed her face. He threw a spare to Jeannie. “Miss Ferrier, could you help everyone else?”

  As the cool sting of disinfectant hit her cheek, Boots looked into Malik’s eyes. “Gardeners. Immortal terraformers from Origin. Those creatures were seeded onto worlds to prepare them for colonies. I’d always assumed they were a myth, or an exaggeration.”

  “And they still might be myths,” said Cordell, coming to crouch beside her. “First off, we proved it was pretty dang mortal. And you don’t know that was a Gardener, or whatever. It attacked us when we blew up Witts’s little tree.”

  Boots shook her head and laughed. “No, it didn’t. It came to put out the fire. This proves the Vogelstrand isn’t just a colony ship; it was one of the original colony ships. We’re exactly one step removed from Origin here.”

  Cordell rubbed his chin. “Maybe…”

  Nilah pulled up in the Devil and hopped out, the vehicle’s armored plates steaming in the rain.

  “That… was awesome! Tell me you saw that!” Nilah called, staggering toward them.

  In the distance, Aisha landed the Capricious, and Charger came bounding out the back. Orna took off in that direction, probably because she wished to be back in her armor if something bad happened.

  “Captain,” said Boots. “I’m telling you that this could be s
o much more than any other treasure I’ve hunted. We might be standing on one of the original five colonies from Origin… like from the Quintet War.”

  Cordell patted his pockets and swore at himself for his lack of smokes. “Assuming you’re right, that Witts found an Origin colony ship, why wouldn’t he stay and exploit that tech?”

  She chewed her lip for a moment. “Let’s just imagine that the big bastard we just killed really was a Gardener. If the stories are true, it would’ve been bound to a colony ship. If Witts pissed off the Vogelstrand but couldn’t destroy it, the ship would’ve made sure he was never safe on the surface of this world again. Hence the reason a Gardener was stationed right next to the ruins of the Rangan.”

  Alister walked over, brushing the dirt from his legs before removing a large kelp leaf from the back of his neck. “So Witts got what he wanted, then turned tail and ran from a stronger enemy. Sounds like his way.”

  “But he waited to erect a monument?” asked Jeannie.

  Boots shrugged. “Hey, this is Henrick Witts we’re talking about. The dude is pretty vain.”

  “Captain!” Nilah shouted in the distance, pointing to the bloody corpse of the mountain.

  Black motes gathered around the Gardener’s crushed skull, fusing to open bone and muscle. A glow flickered in its dead eyes, rekindling after taking so much blunt trauma to the face. One of its forefingers twitched, creaking like a dozen tree trunks snapping in a storm.

  Cordell frowned. “Okay, so looks like it’s actually immortal. Boots, I swear to god if you say I told you so—”

  Boots cracked her neck and began jogging toward the Devil. “I’d never.”

  “All right, everybody pile in! We’re moving out,” said Cordell, then he tapped his comm. “Missus Jan, we’re coming aboard in the Devil. I want dustoff immediately once we get him into the bay.”

  Boots took one last look at the Gardener, whose corpse had begun to shimmer with healing lights, its massive lungs drawing pained breaths. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was watching something sacred, like the planet itself was resurrecting one of its noble guardians.