The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “I am an expert!” said Boots. “When all of this is over, I’ll be rolling in honorary doctorates.” She checked her nails. “Going to show those other historians who’s boss.”

  “Okay, tell me what’s at those coordinates, Miss History.”

  “Point taken,” said Boots. “Sooner or later, we’ll have to ask the Special Branch. It’s the largest consolidated repository of information in exist—”

  Her brain squirted out an idea so simple, she felt foolish for not asking before.

  “Why aren’t we asking the Athana?” said Boots.

  Nilah tongued the inside of her cheek. “It stopped working. Query limit, remember?”

  “The guy who gave us—I mean, the guy I stole it from—told me they only got a few queries at a time. He made it sound like there was a cycle time before we could ask again. I can’t believe I forgot all about that!”

  “I feel like it’d be a long one.”

  “But you don’t know. Does it reset? Is it at regular intervals, or does the cycle start when a question is asked? Why didn’t we investigate this thing more?”

  “We were busy landing at the Vogelstrand, darling. We’re not exactly drowning in spare time.”

  Boots laughed. “We’ve been together too long. You’re starting to talk like me.”

  Nilah smiled back. “I like it. You sound tough, like a private investigator.”

  “We should hit the lockup and grab that crystal. Why don’t you get it and meet me back here?”

  “Why? Did your legs stop working?”

  “One: the quartermaster will give it to you way faster than me. Two: I’m going to make my grandma’s cocoa recipe for us while you’re gone.”

  Nilah stood but made no move for the door. “It’s just downstairs. You’re going to make a recipe in two minutes?”

  “You caught me. It’s hot water, a cocoa cube, and a few spoonfuls of clarified butter substitute,” said Boots.

  “Sounds decadent.”

  “It is. Get the cube and meet me back here.”

  Nilah returned with crystal in hand right as the cocoa finished warming.

  Boots clinked their mugs together and handed one over. “To making a discovery.”

  “Racers celebrate with bubbly, but I’ll manage, I suppose.” She took a swig. “That’s bloody good. Your grandmother made this, um… recipe?”

  “Yeah,” said Boots, throwing in another cube of cocoa. “Back when they used to ration us stuff, Grams was a genius at stretching food. Of course, that only works if there are rations to go around…” She took a sip, and it was like drinking a candy bar. “Perfect. Let’s hook this thing up.”

  She spent the next hour watching Nilah prep the data drive to connect the crystal. It was boring as hell, but they couldn’t take any chances with security.

  “Do you think there’s a penalty if we try and we’re out of queries?”

  Nilah shrugged. “It shut off last time. Probably no harm in finding out. Should we ask the captain? It’s a limited resource, after all.”

  “That would make it Orna’s jurisdiction as the quartermaster. In this case, it’s historical research, which makes it my domain. Better to bring the captain answers instead of questions.”

  Nilah slotted it into the drive housing, where it glowed. “It’s ready.”

  They stared at the crystal. It felt as though they should say or do something to commemorate the occasion, just in case they succeeded in getting the information they needed. Instead, Boots gestured to the little cube and said, “So… since it stabbed you last time, you should probably be the one to talk with it again.

  “Thanks, mate.” Nilah toggled the encrypted comm to flow through the crystal key. “Come in, Athana.”

  “Let us feel you,” came the response, almost instantly.

  Nilah let the thing stab her and jerked her hand back with a grimace. “How many other people has that thing needled? I hope it has a good sanitation protocol.”

  “Nilah Brio,” said the Athana. “Welcome back. What is your query?”

  Boots pumped her fist and whispered, “Ask it about the coordinates, but don’t say the O word. Remember that it didn’t want to tell us last time.”

  “The O word?” she asked.

  “Origin,” said Boots, as quietly as she could.

  “O… Okay,” said Nilah, tracing her glyph and connecting to the cube. “I’m going to send you some coordinates, and I want to know if there are any records about them.”

  “Justification?” asked the Athana.

  She glanced between Boots and the crystal, obviously nervous she was going to screw it up. “We believe we can… uh… We think the key to stopping Henrick Witts is at those coordinates, but we want to know if anything is there before we show up.”

  “Acknowledged. Please give us a moment to consider.”

  Nilah stood with her hand awkwardly on the cube. “All right. Uh, very good, then.”

  Boots watched as Nilah squinted. Then frowned. Then she began trying to pry the cube loose from the data port. She panicked and traced her glyph again, pressing her fingers to the locking collar that held the crystal in place.

  Boots took a step toward the crystal. “What’s wrong? What’s it doing?”

  “They’re out of the sandbox and… in our network repository!” cried Nilah, scrabbling at the crystal. A ring of red surrounded it as the drive docking lock engaged. “They just sliced past all of my security!”

  “What?”

  The look of fear on Nilah’s face froze Boots’s heart. “They’re stonking fast! I can’t lock them out!”

  “Trigger a red alert!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Can you gap the life support?”

  “It’s too late!”

  They both tried to pry the crystal from the wall, but then Nilah stopped.

  “Okay…” she huffed. “They’re… withdrawing? I’m not sure what’s going on. They just sort of… went through all of our stuff.”

  “Nilah Brio, your request is granted,” came the voice of the Athana. “There is one listing within our archives pertaining to those coordinates. Professor Justin Ishii of the DeepStar survey team listed an unknown exoplanet at that location. The object received the designator IS-01593.”

  They exchanged glances, and Boots’s heart thumped. The poem contained real coordinates after all.

  “Disconnect,” said Boots. “Let’s not waste any more queries on that. We don’t know how many we have, and I bet we can take it from here.”

  “Athana, um… disconnect,” said Nilah, and the drive clips dropped the crystal into her hand. She held it before Boots as though the little cube contained all the secrets of the universe—and to their knowledge, it did.

  “We’ve got it,” she breathed.

  “Yes, we do,” said Boots. “It’s officially game on for ol’ Witts, now.”

  “Okay, so what have you got?” asked Cordell, sitting down before them.

  The captain’s table was laid with fresh fruits and cheeses, as well as an array of bread and smoked bean curds for Nilah. It’d been an early-morning start for Cordell and Malik, since most of the research had been done during the night cycle. Malik looked chipper as ever, but Cordell had some surprising rings around his eyes. He’d been consumed with the news feeds ever since Witts parked Bastion over Aior, and grew more morose every day.

  Boots had done plenty of operational briefings for her captain over the years, so when she glanced over to Nilah, it surprised her to see her a little nervous. Boots hadn’t considered it before, but this might have been Nilah’s first time to conduct a briefing.

  “I, well, first of all, Miss Sokol and I are going to need to go over all of the network systems after the breach,” said Nilah.

  Boots winced. The bad news was never a good place to start. Judging from the look on Cordell’s face, he wasn’t all that pleased, either.

  “Captain,” said Boots, “is that a coffee stain on your jacket?”r />
  Cordell went from minor annoyance to near panic. “What?”

  As he searched, Boots leaned over to Nilah and whispered, “Start with the good stuff.” Then, louder, “Must’ve been a trick of the light, sir. My mistake.”

  Malik had been close enough to hear, and cut a tiny smile at Boots.

  “Okay,” said Nilah, “but that’s neither here nor there. The DeepStar project is what you’ll be wanting. It was chartered by Doctor Justin Ishii during the end of the 2600s. At the time, it was considered one of the most powerful scrying systems ever built and utilized a near-oracular ability to find human-habitable exoplanets. The tech was complicated, dangerous, and widely regarded as genius.”

  “Interesting,” said Malik. “What made it so dangerous?”

  “It required the use of one of the largest, purest eidolon crystals ever discovered,” said Boots. “The Star of Ranier. The VF eidolon crystal was extracted from the core of Harvest during its heyday, and through a series of complex treaties, loaned offworld to the Polis Institute, with the goal of locating more expansion opportunities for the Golden Empire.”

  “‘VF?’” asked Malik.

  “Very flawless,” said Boots. “It’s the highest purity designator.”

  The first mate chuckled. “How can something be ‘very’ flawless?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Boots replied. “Blame geologists like your wife, I guess.”

  “DeepStar’s reports were classified, but we do know this,” said Nilah, “they were planning a massive gala for some big announcement when the accident happened.”

  Cordell paused, a cracker with cheese halfway into his mouth. “An accident?”

  “They exploded,” said Nilah, “wiping out an entire moon, along with the Polis Institute. The other planets inside the system had their orbits permanently altered, flinging some of them off into the cosmos.”

  “But before the gala,” said Boots, raising a finger with a grin, “the DeepStar project logged one final planet.”

  Cordell finished his cracker, mumbling, “Let me guess. Our Origin coords.”

  “Exactly, sir,” said Nilah. “And that’s why we think it wasn’t an accident that destroyed the Polis Institute. DeepStar was relatively well-known at the time. What if the Conservators got wind of the discovery and sabotaged the project?”

  “Destroying an entire system?” asked Malik.

  “Hell of a way to go about it,” said Boots, “but it would be ideal for them. There wouldn’t be any bodies or evidence to investigate, and the Conservator would simply be reincarnated.”

  Cordell folded his hands and leaned onto his elbows. “Why haven’t we heard more about this? Furthermore, why wouldn’t someone else investigate those coordinates?”

  “Because of what happened that same year,” said Boots. “The Thresher War. The Harvest government, the seat of the Golden Empire, suddenly destabilized after a series of major eidolon losses. There were sabotages at several of their storehouse planets, destroying the vast majority of their wealth.”

  “And that became the bloodiest conflict in the history of the galaxy,” said Malik, taking a thoughtful sip of tea. “There was no one to check into DeepStar when all resources were tied up killing each other.”

  “That war led to Taitutian hegemony and the founding of GATO,” said Nilah. “And once GATO existed, they placed a ban on any attempt to replicate Ishii’s work. The destruction wreaked by the Star of Ranier was too much, they said.”

  “But there was one other attempt,” said Boots.

  “And?” asked Cordell.

  Boots bit her lip. “They also exploded. Smaller project, though.”

  “Captain, Mister Jan,” said Nilah, “the Thresher War was a complex series of events with a lot of players, but one effect is undeniable: it stopped any replication or records of DeepStar from existing. We only met Loy Vong, but with a large enough cell of sleeper agents, that kind of financial destabilization might be easy.”

  “Are we experts in financial ops now?” asked the captain.

  “Since we took apart the Money Mill, possibly the biggest financial op of its kind,” said Boots, “I feel like we get to claim that. Yes, sir.”

  Cordell refilled his coffee as he searched for words. “So you’re suggesting that, well… the current political state of the galaxy is the result of one big Conservator operation?”

  Nilah wrinkled her nose. “Um… yes? I mean, it’s hard to say that much. But it’s true that Origin is a well-kept secret, deliberately hidden, and we’ve got far too many coincidences to doubt it.”

  A queer silence fell over the table as they considered the proposition. Boots couldn’t quite lay a finger on it, but her heart held some combination of elation and trepidation, dread and wonder—but not a shred of doubt. They’d found Origin, the birthplace of humanity and the seat of alchemy, and in the process, poked a sleeping giant. The Conservators would be coming to kill them—in addition to the Children of the Singularity—and that was one too many galaxy-spanning conspiracies for her tastes.

  But then, she’d always loved the treasure hunt.

  The captain’s breath hissed out through his nostrils, and Boots knew he felt the same way. “We might be in over our heads, kids.”

  “Oh, well I suppose we could just drop the whole matter, then,” said Nilah, then when no one reacted, added, “I’m kidding. You lot are too serious.”

  “Let’s talk strategy. We can’t just lay in a course for Origin, given what the Devil said about its defense grid,” said Cordell. “We’ve got a time limit. With Loy Vong dead, a couple of things are going to happen: first, we’re going to be wanted criminals for killing a kid. Call it a gut feeling.”

  Boots swallowed, her stomach churning with his words. “Would you please not put it like that, sir? That thing wasn’t a kid.”

  “The public doesn’t know that,” said Cordell. “Second, and this is more pressing: Vong is going to respawn and start hunting us. If he knows where Origin is, he might beat us there.”

  “I’m hoping he’s currently a baby,” said Boots. “We could use a break.”

  Cordell nodded assent. “If our luck holds. If not, he’s already called his friends. Even barring intervention by Vong, we don’t know what awaits us when we land, and given some of the mind-bending crap from the Vogelstrand, we can assume it’s going to be weird.”

  “‘It’s going to be weird’ should be our official motto, sir,” said Boots.

  He began to pace around his quarters, circling the table. “But we’ve got some advantages, too. Henrick Witts doesn’t have a clue what we’re up to, or where we are.”

  “I’m guessing,” said Malik, “that means he ignores us, since he’s engaged in a shooting war with the Taitutians.”

  “Agreed,” said Cordell, tracing circles in the air as he spun out ideas. “We have the location of this Graveyard of the, uh—”

  “Poets,” Boots prompted.

  “Right,” said Cordell, pointing at her. “So we know where to land, and we have the single greatest head start we could’ve asked for. All we have to do is get past that defense grid.”

  “By ourselves,” said Nilah.

  Boots crossed her arms. “In a sixty-year-old ship. Don’t forget that our big boy was old when the Famine War started.”

  “And he’s never looked better,” the captain said, his eyes daring Boots to insult the Capricious one more time.

  She immediately switched to a more contrite tone. “I’m just saying it will add to the trickiness. That grid probably has nothing to shoot, except us, and I bet it’s bored.”

  “Captain,” said Malik, oddly mischievous, “the Capricious is a marauder, designed for heavy combat supply drops in crowded airspace.”

  Cordell jammed his hands in his pockets, a wide grin dawning on his face. “Oh, my friend, I know exactly where you’re going with this, and you’re nuts.”

  Both men shared a meaningful look.

  Boots sat up i
n her chair. “What? What’d I miss?”

  “It’s old schoolyard strategy,” said Cordell. “I call it, ‘let’s you and him fight.’”

  She didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

  “The Taitutians have lost a lot of ships trying unsuccessfully to pry Bastion off their homeworld, but they still have the other armadas throughout the galaxy on patrol. What if we could fill up Origin’s atmosphere and defense grid with a massive military action?” asked Cordell. “We’ve got four players in this scenario: us, the remaining GATO forces, Witts, and the Conservators, all of which would absolutely love to have the intel we have right now. If we disseminated it, say, right before we arrived, we would be looking at a full-blown space battle the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a long time. And that, my dear friends, is the ideal environment for a marauder to make a landing.”

  Nilah balked. “Wait, you want Witts to know where Origin is?”

  Cordell’s eyes positively sparkled as he paced faster, snatching up a handful of seeds and chewing them. “Oh, I don’t want the bastard there, but we can assume that if the Taitutian fleets show up, so will Witts. Someone, somewhere in the admiralty is going to leak to him. And believe me, Taitu will show up for Origin. It’s an entire planet full of powerful lost tech and magic. This is going to be the biggest salvage run of all time.”

  “So he won’t be able to stop us,” said Nilah, “because it’d be like trying to target a snowflake in a blizzard.”

  “On the plus side, if we survive,” said Malik, “we can spend the rest of our lives in court defending our claim on a monstrous treasure.”

  “We’re going to need air support,” said Cordell. “The Capricious needs his wing, and I’m tired of watching you mope around the bridge.”

  “And we’ll need a resupply,” said Nilah. “The quartermaster tells me we’re running low on munitions, and I would very, very much like to replace this leg with something reasonable.”

  Cordell nodded. “As for that stuff, let’s get DosSantos on the horn. If we’re supplying up, I want someone I trust.”