The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “An illusion?” Nilah asked no one in particular.

  She sat up on her elbows and found Alister and Orna lying on the ground. The quartermaster twitched tearfully, teeth bared in grief, and Alister looked positively relieved. She crawled over and shook them, and they both jerked awake. Before Nilah could say anything, Orna wrapped her arms around her neck and wrenched her down for a close embrace.

  “I dreamed I’d lost you,” she spoke into Nilah’s ear, voice shaking, then pushed her away, hardening into her professional demeanor.

  Nilah had thought Alister fared better, given his placid expression, but when she rose to help him, she found him distraught, one hand over his heart. He pulled away his bare fingers as though inspecting them for blood.

  “You okay? What’s wrong?” Nilah asked, helping him up.

  “Thought my time was up, is all,” he said, trying to smile through clear disappointment.

  Nilah gave his shoulder a squeeze. “We’re going to talk about this, Alister. Soon. You good for now?”

  He nodded and swallowed as Jeannie came rushing back into the room, smoking slinger in her hand.

  “He slipped out the back!” she huffed. “They were illusions. Get up! This way!”

  They raced through the apartments to a bathroom, where a window hung open. The black rungs of a fire escape handrail striped the night sky beyond, and Nilah took a quick look out to see what lay below. She’d barely spotted Loy reaching the ground floor when he turned on her, slinger ready. Bolts of fire shattered the window around Nilah, and she ducked back inside, covering her face to avoid the glass.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said as Orna brushed shards out of her hair.

  “Sorry,” she replied, her grin a little haunted. “Just very protective right now.”

  “Spyglass, why didn’t the illusions get you?” Nilah asked, wanting to confirm that her recent miraculous escape wasn’t also an illusion.

  “He touched you,” said Jeannie. “Just ran into the middle of you three and you started acting weird.”

  “That’s how he made me hallucinate?” asked Nilah, rubbing her jaw. “Does that mean he didn’t really hit me?”

  “He socked you twice, right in the mouth—”

  Nilah nodded. “Okay.”

  Jeannie continued, “After landing a touch in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “Yep. Got it. Thank you, Spyglass,” said Nilah, cautiously peering around the corner. Loy’s silhouette pounded up the avenue toward a parking locker, short body drawing a long shadow in the streetlight. He was too far to take a decent shot with a pistol, so she chanced it and climbed out onto the fire escape.

  A quick pass over the scene revealed a box of descenders, and Nilah wrenched it open; there were a dozen discs inside, to her delight. When she hit the test button, however, she found them all quite expired.

  She turned to face the group, handing out discs to the other three. “How much do we want to gamble, darlings?”

  “None of the active ingredients technically expire.” Orna stepped up to the railing with one in hand. “Just the additives. Who cares about a little perfume when we land?”

  Nilah’s racing career had been a master class in engineering and chemistry, composites and arcane theory, and she knew Orna was right. Descenders couldn’t “technically” expire, and surely that was good enough.

  “All right,” said Nilah. “Let’s catch this little tosser.”

  They leapt, and as the phantoplasm enveloped Nilah, she came to understand the precise function of the spoiled ingredients inside the discs. Raw phantoplasm was a bit like rotting meat sprayed with boiling bleach vapor, or perhaps marpo gray water. It slopped through her hair, over her sleeves, and up her nose. Nilah’s protective cocoon rolled to a stop and when it burst open, its gelatinous material was decidedly more mucosal in its fetid state. What should have dissolved in seconds suctioned to her face, and Nilah had to claw the gooey strands free to gasp for air.

  The crew shakily got to their feet, dripping with ichor and gagging. When Orna finally got control of her voice, she croaked, “Okay. We will always pack our own descenders from now on.”

  “We’ve got to go,” said Nilah. “Those slinger shots will trigger the station sensors.”

  The sprint choked them, but with each step, the breeze carried away a bit of the horrifying stench. Loy had already disappeared inside the structure, but it was an elevator storage-type with only one entrance or exit.

  There were a hundred paces to go, and no one had emerged through the front gate. Maybe it was a feint—after all, Loy was barely four feet tall. How would he even reach the pedals?

  As if in answer, the entrance to the parking locker rumbled open, and a red motorcycle came streaking out before darting up the road.

  “Are you sodding serious?” Nilah shouted after him.

  Alister raised his slinger and fired a few overloader rounds, hoping to stun their target.

  “Stop!” commanded Orna, halting his volley. “You’ll kill him if he falls off!”

  The quartermaster yanked a dart pistol out of her hip holster and took aim, sinking one into the back plate of the bike. “We’re tracking him! Hunter Two, get us a ride.”

  There wouldn’t be time to hack something out of the parking locker. Nilah spun in place, looking over the various cars parked along the avenue: a beat-up Duster Cavalry, a Boggart hatchback, and two closed-down food trucks—none of which could keep up with Loy’s motorcycle without some seriously destructive tuning.

  “The hamburger truck,” Nilah called out, racing to the driver’s-side door and tracing her glyph. Network security was a joke, and soon, Meaty Pete’s Burgers & Eats eagerly rumbled to life beneath her touch. Everyone jumped aboard, and after a split second to master the controls, they took off at a rate of at least ten kilometers per hour.

  “Wow. This is really something,” said Orna, folding her hands behind her head and relaxing in the passenger seat.

  Jeannie and Alister braced themselves in the rear galley, until they realized that the car would not be going fast. They visibly relaxed under the weight of their own disappointment.

  “Everybody ready back there?” Nilah called back.

  “Hard not to be ready at this speed,” said Alister.

  Nilah’s magic threaded through the fuel air regulator and down into its computer core, adjusting the settings to prize explosive power over endurance. With a grinding squeal, the food truck lurched under them, throwing Jeannie and Alister to the deck. Nilah grinned, savoring her adjustments to the engine timing, gear length, and anything else into which she could get her mechanist’s magic. The truck went banging up the street at an unnatural pace, crying the entire time. Pots shook loose from mounting hooks, clattering down on the Ferriers’ heads.

  “I wasn’t ready!” said Alister as she took a turn hard enough to roll him across the floor into another cabinet. “There aren’t any harnesses back here!”

  Orna traced her glyph to connect with the vehicle, and Nilah felt her potent presence surge onto the food truck’s local systems alongside her. “You’re going to burn up the engine!”

  “It’ll last two minutes,” said Nilah, torn between adjusting the hardware and watching the road. “We just need two minutes.”

  They were coming up fast on a T intersection, and Orna called for a right turn, reading the tracker dart signature on her wrist panel. Brake too hard, and they’d lose momentum in an already sluggish vehicle. Too soft, and they’d go careening into the front of an apartment complex.

  “Hang on!” she said, yanking the steering wheel to the right.

  When a race car driver takes a turn, they take it at the maximum possible speed, allowing for the camber of the track, the width of the tires, the engine mode, downforce, tarmac composition, and even the wetness of a curb after a gentle rain. Nilah knew basically nothing about this turn, so she winged it.

  As she rounded the corner, everyone had the exciting experience of being i
n a forty-five-degree-angle mobile restaurant, which could’ve added a bit of haute cuisine under the right circumstances. The graceful rising of one side of the car had been easy, but landing on its worn shocks was a different story. Cacophonous steel crushed their eardrums as pots, pans, condiments, and cutlery came pouring out of every compartment.

  “Uh, Hunter Two,” said Alister, “this thing is going to be a meat grinder if you roll it.”

  “He means keep your tires on the ground!” said Jeannie.

  “I. Am. Trying. Thanks,” said Nilah, straining her magic to keep the gearbox from flying apart. Food trucks were designed for torque, not speed, and it wasn’t supposed to be redlining for so long. The computer whined an error:

  >>TRANSMISSION DT OVERTEMP: 210 C

  What was the ignition point of lubricant again? For that matter, how recently had the truck been serviced? A new performance engine seized up around four hundred degrees.

  “We’ve got three minutes in this thing, tops!” she called to all present.

  Orna tapped her comm. “Boss, Loy Vong is fleeing close to Route Plan A. I sent you the tracker ID. Do we have overwatch?”

  “Negative, Hunter One,” said Cordell. “Team, you are leaving the mission area, and we won’t be able to support you. Proceed at your discretion.”

  “We can’t let him go to ground, Boss. We’re not going to surprise him again,” said Orna, before tapping Nilah’s shoulder. “Take the highway, Hunter Two. Half a klick.”

  A sign whizzed by: DRONE ROAD—ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  “The drone road?” Nilah asked.

  “That’s the one,” said Orna. “This should be fun.”

  “Good hunting,” said Malik. “We’re counting on you.”

  They scraped up the on-ramp like a bobsled before swerving onto GIM-1, Gantry’s bustling shipping highway. Gargantuan, autonomous trailers swished along the lanes from the planetwise docks to the starside ports like intermodal fish returning to their feeding grounds. Each boxy, brown vehicle was a basic corrugated shipping container atop a drone flatbed—no cab, no driver, nothing but a computerized rectangle on wheels. They smoothly parted so the food truck could enter the lane, then closed ranks around it, leaving very little space.

  “Bloody computers think they own the road!” said Nilah, wincing when it looked like one might drift into them, only for it to merge lanes at the last second.

  “They do own this road,” said Orna. “Ahead there!” She pointed to the flash of a red motorcycle in the herd.

  The trailers soon merged to fill the gaps, cutting off Nilah’s view of Loy. “Move, you manky bastards!”

  “Hunters, it looks like you’re on the Big Jam,” Boots’s sickly voice came over the comm; the liquor hadn’t treated her well. “I used to ride that route sometimes. Those transports will move for cars. Just, like… act like you’re going to ram them.”

  “Are you sure?” Nilah asked, checking the engine temp: two forty-five. Her estimates had been way too generous to the vehicle. “Why do you call it the Big Jam?”

  “Because if you wreck on that road, it jams up for the next six hours,” said Boots. “Also, those autonomous containers take a lot of time to stop, so you’ll be ground to jam. It’s very… very accurate.”

  “What if someone ahead of us wrecks?” asked Nilah.

  “Pray they don’t,” said Boots.

  “He’s getting away,” said Orna. “I say we punch it and hope they move.”

  Nilah nodded. The food truck’s engine whined like it was begging for death when she wrung the remaining speed out of it with all the magic she could muster. Her tires squeaked as she lurched forward, and the autonomous container freighters parted. The hood of the car began to glow faintly red, and a death rattle developed, but they inched toward Loy, pushing past one car at a time. Nilah checked her readouts.

  >>TRANSMISSION DT OVERTEMP: 294 C

  Suffused with magic, the truck spoke to her of every wound: metal-fatigued axles, corroded, gritty gearbox, stripped wires, broken bolts. It jerked underneath her like a panicked horse, and she feared her estimate would be bang-on. If they suddenly halted, it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “We’ve got to change cars!” she called to those in the back.

  The twins both protested, but Orna unbuckled and slipped into the kitchen.

  Temperature: two ninety-six.

  “Twenty seconds, babes!” said Nilah, glancing back to see Orna yanking the food service shutter open. At least it left a nice, wide hole in the side of the truck for egress. It couldn’t have been more than a meter to the autonomous container traveling alongside them—though the container was a bit taller than their food truck window, with no handholds on its sides.

  “What are you going to do?” said Orna.

  Nilah gritted her teeth as she watched the thermostat climb higher. “Pray the autopilot works! Go, go!”

  She kept her eyes on the road, maintaining a precise distance to her neighboring vehicle so the other three could clamber across.

  Two ninety-nine. Surely it won’t blow up at precisely three hundred degrees, she thought, heart in her throat while Orna crossed.

  “Okay! We’re clear!” said Orna. “Get over here!”

  “All right,” said Nilah, keying the autopilot.

  The truck lurched ominously. Without her direct control, the engine’s limiters wanted to switch off for safety—and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Nilah ripped the computer’s code open and replaced its brains with one command: “Floor it.” There wasn’t time to program steering.

  She glanced behind her at the path she’d have to take. Pots, pans, and loose cutlery littered the floor, along with some spilled cooking oil for added fun. It’d be a hell of a jump. She checked her temp once more to see how much time she had to plan her escape.

  Three hundred fifty-four and climbing. Runaway reaction.

  “Bloody hell!” she cried, ripping off her seat belt and scrambling through the galley. Cooking utensils nipped at her shins as she kicked them out of the way, bound for the wide food service window to her salvation. Her foot splashed through a puddle of oil as the floor bucked. If Nilah tried to launch herself across, she’d slip down for sure. Orna stood ready to catch her, just out of reach.

  Then she spied the locking handle at the top of the food service shutter and knew what she had to do.

  Nilah backed up against the wall and got as much forward momentum as she could. A short leap, and she grabbed the handle of the shutter, tucking her legs and swinging through the window.

  Wind and tarmac rushed beneath her as she left the confines of the vehicle, going parallel with the roadway outside. She kicked out toward Orna, letting go of the food truck, along with any sense of control. Whatever happened now, it was out of her hands.

  “Gotcha!” Orna shouted, wrapping Nilah’s legs in a tight grip.

  They both went sliding toward the edge, and she found herself dangling by her ankles, back against the corrugated siding. The food truck’s hood shattered, bits of engine blasting free in smoky comets. The container behind the truck smashed into it full speed, superior tonnage crushing the smaller vehicle. Debris went flying in every direction as the wreckage tumbled, and Nilah squeaked in surprise as a chef’s knife slammed into the metal by her head, wobbling with a sound like a woodpecker.

  The other three hoisted her up, and they all caught their breaths on the roof of the container for a moment. Nilah pushed to her feet and surveyed the obstacles ahead; a half dozen containers stood between her and her target, gently swaying relative to one another. Behind them, the Big Jam was living up to its name as shipping containers rolled, spilling everything from eidolon cores to cheap duraplast dolls.

  Their trailer had made it through the hubbub unmolested and accelerated to join the pack and reduce drag. The other containers clustered up around them, dutifully filling the spaces of their fallen comrades for maximum aerodynamic efficiency.

  “Whoa!” said Cordell ove
r the comm. “We’re getting a ton of police alerts! What did you do?”

  “Caused a bit of a smash-up, Boss,” said Nilah. “Maybe a, uh, maybe a big one.”

  “That’s the Big Jam for you!” came Boots’s voice in the background.

  “Damn. We’ll transmit our Compass credentials and tell them to steer clear for now,” he said. “Maybe that’ll work.”

  “Wait,” said Jeannie. “Those are probably compromised!”

  “They definitely are,” said Alister.

  “We need to buy you ten minutes, not run a month-long surveillance op,” said Cordell. “Get that intel from Vong so we can jet.”

  Nilah cast her glyph and touched the container, hoping to interface with the trailer below, but there was no direct connection—just a stupid metal shipping container on a smart platform.

  Only one way to hack it.

  She grabbed Orna by the arm. “Do you have your grappling hook?”

  Orna quirked an eyebrow and handed over a metal cylinder. “Never leave home without it. Wait, are you going to—”

  “—dangle off the side where I can reach the platform and drive this thing by magic alone?” Nilah finished, giving the cylinder a twist to pop out the anchor spikes. “You know I am, love.”

  The quartermaster grinned. “Badass. If Loy thinks you’ve got him pinned down, though—”

  “He’ll kill himself and reincarnate,” said Nilah. “I know. I’ll need a distraction.”

  “You’ll get one,” Orna replied, shouldering her slinger. “Pensive! Spyglass! Can you make the jumps between containers?”

  The Ferriers both holstered their weapons and vaulted to the next trailer across, landing sure-footed. Nilah had always wanted to ask after their combat training but preferred not to bring up the school.

  “I’m going to hang from the far side,” said Nilah, “so he can’t tell me from any other trailer on approach. You cross the roofs on foot and hit me up when you’re in position to distract.”

  “And then what?”

  She rubbed her jaw. “Then he loses our rematch. Watch your lines of fire. Only distract.”

  Nilah pressed the thumb switch, shooting the hook into the roof of the container. It tore through the metal and anchored tightly inside, then Nilah fastened the hook’s hilt to an anchor point on her belt. She pressed a button to let out a little of the braided metal rope, backing toward the edge of the trailer.