The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  The station had started out as a deep space waypoint for cargo pilots, and as the years went by, folks added more and more random modules to it. The resultant patchwork of hard struts and duraplast webbing gave it a syndactyly appearance.

  Cordell puffed out his chest to address the crew. “Our target is”—he wrinkled his face like he’d just eaten a lemon—“is… this kid right here.”

  Gasps went up among the crew as the projection of a young boy materialized in their midst. Boots had seen him before and could only describe him as exceedingly bored, with an excess of baby fat around his chin, leading to a too-skinny neck.

  “Loy Vong, age eight,” said Malik. “He’s a Gantry Station native, born to Raty and Mansay Vong—a programmer and a civil maintenance tech, respectively. He’s an elementary school student with average grades and no criminal record. His glyph manifested at the normal age of three—the conductor’s mark, with little telekinetic aptitude. No financial records, either. It’s hard to imagine, but Miss Brio and Miss Elsworth have produced credible evidence that this boy knows the location of Origin.”

  “At least he’ll be easy to snatch,” said Orna, chucking Nilah’s shoulder from behind.

  Cordell sighed. “We’re not kidnapping a kid, Sokol.”

  “Why not? I came to this boat in my teens. Need to start training my replacement.”

  The captain straightened his cuffs. “You were the one with the bomb. I think you kidnapped us.”

  “It’s important to remember,” said Boots. “This isn’t just some child we’re dealing with. He’s unimpressive on paper, but if we’re right, he contains the spirit of a several-millennia-old spy.”

  “Is there anything odd about him?” asked Jeannie.

  “He had a brother with Heartwood Syndrome,” said Nilah, rubbing her neck. Boots figured she was sore after flipping all over the cargo bay.

  “It’s a progressive, terminal disease,” Nilah continued. “The brother killed himself after Loy was born.”

  “How is that weird?” asked Jeannie.

  “Based on what we know of Recursive Primacy,” said Boots, “there’s a chance that the dead brother was the original Conservator, then killed himself to take over Loy’s body and mind. We can’t be sure, though.”

  “That’s dark,” said Aisha. “And purely speculation.”

  “True,” said Boots, “but at least it sort of fits a pattern. The plan is that we catch him at his apartment—”

  “His parents’ apartment,” corrected Orna with a wicked smirk.

  Boots grimaced. “—and use the twins to extract what he knows. If his parents are there, we may have to subdue them.”

  “To that end,” said Cordell, “you’re going to be as gentle as a summer rain. I don’t want a single news story saying we busted up in there and beat up a child. This will be one hundred percent by the book.”

  Alister raised his hand. “Which book is that?”

  Cordell looked at Boots. “Mister Ferrier didn’t have such a smart mouth before you got to him.”

  “I’m wondering, though,” said Malik. “If he’s really able to reincarnate, why wouldn’t he just kill himself the second we show up? No risk that way.”

  “Spies are trained to build networks,” said Jeannie. “It’d be a shame to sacrifice all of that time.”

  Malik waved away Loy Vong’s image, and it was replaced by a block of apartments labeled MAISON NGUYEN. A data callout signaled the Vong domicile. “The strike team will consist of Miss Brio, the Ferriers, Miss Sokol, and Boots. You’re to approach during the night cycle and secure the apartment. Once you’ve gotten control of the situation, get the intel and sedate the Vongs. You will then proceed back to the ship via the following routes.”

  The view zoomed out to encompass several blocks. A set of three lit pathways raced away from the apartments: the creatively named plan A, plan B, and plan C. Large sections of the colored lines began to flash, and a nearby tower pinged with a location pin labeled A. JAN.

  “Given the elevation I can reach, and the quality of my rifle,” said Aisha, “I can provide overwatch during these portions of the escape. Just ping me, and I’ll see you on my scope.”

  “So who’s going to be flying the ship?” asked Jeannie.

  “Airspace is too tight to fly him anywhere except the docks,” said Cordell, patting the nearest console. “Mister Jan and I will run command from here. We can keep the big boy hot in case we need to beat feet.”

  “But before we do any of that,” said Malik, “I want Miss Elsworth and the twins to reconnoiter the area. We need to know what the Vongs are like.”

  Boots winced. “What? Why me?”

  “You’ve got a certain… hard-boiled nature about you,” said Malik, smiling. “You mean to tell me in all your years of conning people, you never ran a tail?”

  “He’s pulling your leg,” said Jeannie. “Captain Lamarr already spoke to us about it, and I’m leading that effort. We went to an espionage academy, remember? Just do what I say and we’ll stay out of sight.”

  Alister made a strange face, like he’d forgotten to turn something off in his room, and Boots watched Jeannie wince. She wondered how often they talked about the hidden school.

  “Given our recent discussions,” said Malik, giving Boots a meaningful look, “I felt it best if you accompanied the Ferriers.”

  Alister shook it off. “The captain said you knew your way around—knew all the locals.”

  “Last time I was here, half of these people wanted to punch me in the face,” Boots muttered. “Even if they like me, we’d be better off avoiding them.”

  “I agree,” said Cordell, “but if you are spotted, it’s best that you have someone who knows how to navigate the scene. Missus Jan, transmit the counterfeit codes and take us in.”

  A wave of nostalgia swept over Boots the second she felt Gantry Station’s too-crisp gravity. People said olfactory was the best mnemonic sense, but for Boots, it was vestibular. She never forgot the feeling of her adopted home. Orna came to her in the cargo bay, handing her a pair of Masquerade circlets and a ratty old rebreather.

  “Two disguises and one old-fashioned mask,” said Orna. “You’ve got seniority, so you decide who gets what.” She held up the circlets. “These are both keyed to someone a bit younger…”

  Boots took the sweat-stained rebreather and fitted it to her mouth; it was like shoving her face in someone’s old gym clothes. “Give them to the twins,” she mumbled through the polybuff mask.

  The trio of them set out from the ship into the busy shipyards, and she kept having to do a double take at the pair. The circlets were keyed to look like women with bland, everyperson faces and mixed, unknown ethnicity. They’d be hard to describe to any authorities.

  They hit the old thoroughfare in the low quarter, and Boots was overcome by how small it all seemed. When she’d lived there, it was overwhelming, anonymous—the sort of place someone could hide for a very long time. They reached the bazaar where she’d first run from Cordell, and it hadn’t changed at all—save one difference.

  Arcan flags, just like the ones from her homeworld, flew from every other stall.

  She spotted more visible signs of refugees in the crowds. Where once it had been a secret, almost a shame, people were open and proud about where they’d come from. In the park, bored parents and silent nanny bots watched children play, and Boots made out the purple-and-orange half-moon insignia on a young boy’s T-shirt.

  What if it’d been this way when she was living here? What if she’d had community support and camaraderie during the darkest days of her life? What kind of person would she have become?

  “Something off?” asked Alister, his altered voice a poor fit for his disguise.

  “Progress.” Boots spared him a glance to find him inspecting his disguise. “And stop looking at your boobs. It’s telling.”

  “Sorry,” he said, falling in step with her. “I like the energy of this place. It’s nice.”


  “A couple of goons beat the hell out of me and took my paragon crystal in that alley,” said Boots. “They waited until I was drunk and really let me have it with some trip sticks. It’s a regular fairy tale up in here.”

  She relaxed a bit when they’d made it out of the more familiar sections and into the tube transit. A few uneventful stops passed, then they emerged onto the surface to the delicious scents of sweet sauces, cilantro, and roasting meat. She knew her way around this part of the station, but she hadn’t spent much time near Maison Nguyen.

  They found a corner to post up, far enough away from the apartments, and pretended to conduct some business among themselves, checking their devices every so often. Maison Nguyen wasn’t nice by any stretch, just a bunch of stone blocks and metal scaffold stairs. The Vongs couldn’t have been rich to live there.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” said Jeannie. “They shouldn’t have gotten home from work yet, but you never know.”

  “Do you ever feel…” Alister began, nudging Boots. “Do you ever feel like we never left here?”

  “What are you talking about?” Boots prayed it wasn’t another of his lapses as she muscled past an entourage of cackling merchants. Her train of thought was interrupted when she spotted the tiny figure of Loy Vong ambling along the sidewalk, sporting a pastel pink button-up and white knickers.

  She surreptitiously pointed him out to her comrades. “Heads up. On our ninety.”

  “I see him,” said Jeannie, huddling in close. “Don’t look directly at him. If you want to check his progress, find something nearby, but don’t make any kind of eye contact.”

  “Well, aren’t you just a regular Sally Spy?” Boots swept her gaze over the scene to have a quick gander at him.

  Loy stopped at the stairs to his apartment building and sat down, politely folding his hands across his lap. A gang of older boys were walking in his direction but crossed the street when they saw him. It was a sudden movement, almost inconsequential, but Boots saw an unmistakable caution in their eyes.

  “What do you think that’s about?” Boots asked, watching the older boys’ quickened pace.

  “I don’t know,” said Jeannie, “but I’ve got a few argents, and I bet they’d be willing to talk about it. I’ll update you on the comm after I buy them some sweets.”

  “Stay safe,” said Boots. “Al, you want to go with her?”

  The twins shared a meaningful look as he considered it. He didn’t usually run off without Jeannie, especially not on away missions. But he said he’d stay with Boots, and they arranged a rendezvous in an hour.

  “We need to take a walk,” said Alister. “Let’s hit that food kiosk over there. Got some tables under those trees, and the leaf patterns will confuse our target’s long-distance vision. Makes us hard to ID.”

  “Neat,” said Boots. “When you learned that, was it in a classroom, or…”

  “They woke me up one night and asked me to find Professor… Damn, why can’t I remember her name?” He made a pained face.

  Boots swallowed a lump. What if that was the woman Jeannie had been talking about? The man was already unstable, and she’d just taken a chance on setting him off.

  “Anyway,” said Alister. “I had to find her, but she couldn’t notice me following her. Her movements were the key to a puzzle they gave me to solve—a differential crypto with a floating-burr tumbler, I think. They used to give me these black box contraptions, and I had to figure out what apparatus was inside.”

  “Or a mechanist could just touch it and be done in two seconds.”

  “Sure, but I think it was to stimulate our minds, not teach us to pick ancient locks. Critical thinking. Analytical strats. All that stuff. Sometimes, there’d be rewards inside: rare chocolates, pharmaceuticals, keys to even more valuable puzzles.”

  They reached the kiosk and grabbed a late lunch: charbroiled pork sandwiches on pan-seared noodle rolls. The Capricious always had a well-stocked larder, but Boots missed the variety of Gantry. When she’d lived there, she never had to eat the same food twice in a row.

  “Sometimes, it’s nice not to have Nilah guilting me,” said Boots, unwrapping her meaty sandwich and pulling down her rebreather to take a bite.

  “She never guilts anyone,” said Alister.

  “Okay, so it’s more of a personal problem, but still,” said Boots. “Don’t you feel a little bad eating meat in front of her?”

  “Not really,” said Alister, sitting down to tuck into his meal. He looked around at the passersby as he chewed. “Do you ever wish we were regular famous? I bet I’d have a girlfriend if we weren’t always fugitives.”

  Boots finished chewing. “You could probably pick up someone with your fame right now. And when you were done with your fun, she’d sell you out for a boatload of argents, or you could tearfully leave her to go back to the ship.”

  He grimaced. “What do you think the captain does for companionship?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to. Last thing I want to think about is Cordell Lamarr.”

  “I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he said, his gaze drifting away. “I think I haven’t, anyway, which is weird, because…”

  Boots frowned. “There’s more to that sentence, right?”

  “I… I don’t know. I just can’t shake the feeling that’s weird.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You feeling okay, bud?”

  Boots waited a beat, then turned to watch a pair of adults approach Loy, stop, and wait patiently. They remained stock-still before him, like a couple of supplicants awaiting the pronouncement of a high court. Over years of research, Boots had been exposed to a lot of cultural rituals, but she’d never seen that sort of behavior from parents.

  “What the hell?” she muttered as each parent mechanically took one of Loy’s hands and escorted him up the stairs. She followed their progress until they entered apartment 1102.

  “Call me crazy,” said Alister, and Boots wanted very much to comply, “but that was weird, right? I never had parents, but—”

  “No, it was weird.” She took another bite, crunching through the roll to the sweetened pork underneath. “No idea what they’re going to make of this back on the ship.”

  A burly youth plopped down two tables away, and Boots recognized something in his posture. She had the distinct impression of bottles and hangovers when she remembered who he was. He looked up from his lunch, making solid eye contact with her.

  “Boots?” asked Garda—half of the father-and-son duo that ran her favorite bar back in the day.

  She tried to look away and tug up her rebreather, knowing full well that it was too late. Alister tensed at the mention of her name, and Boots gave him a panicked look.

  “By god, it is you!” he said, standing and carrying his food to her table. “What have you been up to?”

  Boots froze. “I, uh…”

  “We’re on a secret mission,” said Alister, his feminine features brightening as he sat up straighter.

  Boots’s stomach lurched with the line, and Garda smiled, nonplussed.

  “A new series on the Link.” Alister fully inhabited his disguise, taking on a bubbly air that made him far less creepy than usual. “It’s all very hush-hush, you know. Biopic stuff, following the crew. We’re looking to set the record straight for all of those doubting fools.”

  “Ugh! I’ve seen them around,” said Garda. “A couple of weirdos showed up to vandalize your old apartment and one of them got shot.”

  Boots wiped her fingers on her napkin and set it aside. “There’s a sentiment I can appreciate. Shot my fair share, myself. Listen, Garda, you can’t tell anyone you saw me.”

  “Because of your series?”

  She forced a nod. “Y-yes. Also, I’ve got a lot of important people who’d like to murder me, so—”

  “Yeah, but you took care of it,” he interrupted midchew, a fleck of noodle jumping out to land in his stubble. “We ought to get the gang back together. Throw a party in the bazaar fo
r the homecoming queen.”

  Alister laid a hand over his. “Mister…”

  “Walsh,” said Garda.

  “Mister Walsh, we’re not going to be on station long enough to be entertained. Miss Elsworth has a lot on her plate, so we need to just shoot this and get out.” Alister shook his head at Garda, adding, “We’ve got a full docket, but I wonder if you’d be willing to give us an interview. Just you. If we make a big thing out of it, it’ll be unmanageable.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yeah! Totally! Boots was always my favorite customer.”

  That was almost certainly a lie. Even though he’d once rumbled with Cordell and Orna on her behalf, he’d always complained about her cheap taste and skinflint tips.

  “Great!” said Alister. “Well, I hate to kick you out, but Miss Elsworth and I have a lot to discuss, so…”

  Garda shook his head vigorously and took his food back to his table. After a minute of awkwardly trying to figure out how he was going to eat in Boots’s presence, he gave them a polite smile and departed.

  “Pretty slick,” said Boots. “Giving him a reason to keep quiet.”

  “An appeal to vanity works better than any threat,” said Alister.

  “Pensive,” said Jeannie over the comm. “Spyglass here. I think we can safely say Loy is our boy.”

  “Agreed,” said Boots, tapping her comm. “Let’s head back.”

  They picked up Jeannie and wound their way through the streets, Boots glancing over her shoulder with each passing second. She’d already risked too much exposure with Garda, and she wasn’t eager to make contact with anyone else from the old days. She tensed when they made it to the bazaar, tugging her rebreather a little tighter.

  “There she is!” called a man’s voice behind her. “Boots Elsworth, you’re not going anywhere.”

  She gripped her slinger and turned to find Silas, a sly, broken smile crossing his face. He was holding a tray, and Boots could just make out a vending-machine cake with the words BEST WE COULD DO ON SHORT NOTICE robotically scrawled across it in icing.