The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

“Sending you the topo data from your overflights. Have you got a fix on us?” asked Malik, and she checked her arm screen to find a stable connection.

  “Okay, yeah.” Boots stepped out of her cockpit to scamper down a battle-pitted wing. Jumping to the ground, she scanned her surroundings for landmarks. The topography was solid, and she quickly saw the way forward. “Can you send someone this way? I’m feeling awfully squishy knowing there are tanks out there.”

  “Teacup is here, so Hunter Two is inbound,” said Malik. “ETA twenty minutes. Head in her direction.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Boots.

  “Stay safe, Boots,” said Nilah, voice reassuring. “I’ll have you back in a jiffy. Glad you made it.”

  “I decided being alive was okay,” she said. “See you in twenty.”

  But when Boots looked around at the dunes of concrete dust shuffling through the city, the breaking pillars of a bygone civilization and the haunting song of the wind, she found the promise less than reassuring. To the north, the Graveyard of the Poets and a sure encounter with enemy forces. To the west, the serpentine labyrinth of the city’s pedestrian walkways. And to the east—

  —the last plume of smoke from the Capricious.

  It’d punched through four buildings, stopping in the lower floors of the fifth. The wreckage wasn’t far from her, just a few blocks. It wasn’t a war zone, yet, so no one was really set up. Enemy snipers wouldn’t have had time to deploy. Patrols would still be scrambling to respond. Now would be the best time to sally up the street and have a look.

  She hadn’t made it a hundred meters before her comm chimed. They’d been watching her position from the Devil, able to guess where she was headed.

  “You want him to be alive,” said Malik, “but when Witts sends more people down, they’ll go to the crash site and the Graveyard. He may already have people there, sifting for survivors.”

  Dipping her head, she said, “I know.”

  “We need you back here. We must be in that structure soon, or we’ll face slim odds.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s no way I can stop you, and I’d be a fool to try, so hurry up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She took off down the street, rifle at the ready, pistol by her side, ducking into nooks and huddling behind derelict cars.

  The gray skies rumbled with thunder as she approached her destination. It was only when she drew closer that she realized it wasn’t the skies, but her target building. She surveyed its seemingly endless heights to find cracks crawling up the sides.

  It was definitely coming down soon.

  The wreckage of the Capricious wasn’t far from the ground, just a few floors. She could make it back out if she hurried.

  “Boots, what are you seeing?” asked Nilah.

  “A whole building is about to bury what’s left of our ship.”

  “Don’t go in there.”

  “Nope.” Boots ducked her head to dash out from cover.

  She sprinted across the open intersection and into the lobby doors of the building, immediately searching out cover behind a marble edifice. Shuddering creaks echoed through the blank halls like the growls of an angry predator. Looking up, she found an open atrium with a thick center spire. Flames raced up its interior like a smelting furnace, spiraling around the long column before shooting out the top.

  She recognized a piece of the Capricious’s drive housing, wedged into the main column. Boots counted the floors—four of them.

  This wasn’t Laconte. Cordell had been at full strength when he survived that crash. She could turn back before she got too deep into this death trap.

  Boots poked her head out from behind cover and spotted a patrol: two of Witts’s tan-clad lackeys, hover bikes at their sides. If the building started to come down, they could hightail it out of there in a hurry. She’d never get past them without a fight, and her marksmanship hadn’t done her a lot of favors in the past.

  There was that time she’d shot Cordell in the leg, for example, which burbled to the surface of her memory to guilt her.

  She aimed her rifle at one, took two breaths and held the last, just as she’d learned in boot camp. A light squeeze of the trigger, and the rifle bucked in her hands. The shot struck true, and the soldier went down with a flaming hole through her head. The other man went diving behind his hover bike, screaming into his comm for backup. Boots put a couple of shots through its engine block, raining hot shrapnel onto the guy. When he jumped up to return fire, she melted his torso with the remains of her magazine.

  Apparently, she was a much better shot with a rifle than a pistol. Every muscle taut, she looked around for others who might join the fray, but found no one.

  “I’m spotted,” she whispered into her comm, jogging across the lobby to the one operational hover bike. “Just downed a pair of scouts.”

  “Boots, get out of there,” Nilah replied. “They’ll be sending reinforcements.”

  One of the huge chandeliers snapped free from the melting atrium roof, falling near Boots in a shower of metal spears and broken glass.

  “Then they’d better get a move on if they want a piece of me,” said Boots. “This place won’t last much longer.”

  “And neither will you!”

  “I’ve got a plan,” said Boots, swinging one leg over the remaining hover bike; the key was still in it, and the engine idled beneath her. She glanced around, finding her first set of stairs stretching up the far end of the hall.

  She’d never driven a hover bike before, so why not learn how in the worst possible arena: a collapsing building, on fire, chased by murderous maniacs on the surface of a lost world.

  The bike jerked underneath her as she dropped it into drive, and Boots yelped, unsteadily speeding toward the stairs. By the time she’d reached her destination, she’d gotten her balance, but she had to brake and duckwalk up the first few steps to get a handle on the incline.

  A long mezzanine ran the circumference of the atrium, littered with debris, and on the other side, the next stairs up. Whoever had designed the building clearly had elevators in mind. Then again, the people of Origin were probably the kind of jerks to use jetpacks. She throttled up and zipped over the debris for the far stairs before pivoting and flying up them.

  She even did so without swearing or fumbling the controls.

  Another set of whines joined hers, and she saw a trio of hover bikes come coasting into the lobby on white streamers of magic. It didn’t take them long to spot her, and they went a hell of a lot faster toward the lobby stairs.

  No time for shy driving.

  Boots gripped the handlebars and throttled up, shooting around another mezzanine and onto the third floor, then the fourth.

  A shot splashed against the wall beside her head as she reached the first piece of wreckage. She lost control, laying down her hover bike, and slid across threadbare carpets.

  “Crap!”

  Boots cast about for someplace safe, but the enemy bikes were already rounding the last corner, headed straight for her. She popped off a shot with her rifle, but their suppressing fire forced her to make a mad dash across catwalks for the central spire. Flames roared in her face—just her luck that her new cover was on fire. She hopped a low wall, perhaps an old planter, and kept her head down.

  The three of them skidded to a halt in front of Boots’s column, hopped off, and emptied clips into the stones. Rock melted to orange glass, spraying onto Boots’s metal arm as she shielded her face.

  There were three discrete scents of smoke in that atrium that stuck out to Boots: the stony earthen nature of the burning skyscraper, the acrid stink of her polybuff flight suit as tiny bits of rock slag struck home—

  —and the sweet perfume of tobacco, flecked through with eidolon crystal.

  In absolute tatters, Captain Cordell Lamarr stepped to the edge, cigarette dangling from his lower lip, a weak shield forming around his arms. Then he jumped down into the trio of bikers like a bowling ball into pins
.

  His spiderwebbed shield shattered on impact, a weak imitation of his full power, and he went sprawling across the carpet. His victims, however, went flying in every direction. One was shunted into the balcony railing, only to take a nose dive off the fourth floor to a grisly fate below. Cordell tangled with the last biker in a losing brawl.

  Boots was quick to take advantage, blasting one of the fallen goons in the stomach before rushing to her captain’s aid. By the time she got there, he was beating on the soldier with bloody fists, screaming, “You can’t kill me! Nothing can kill me!”

  Boots pulled him loose and shot the soldier in the chest—twice for good measure. Then she yanked Cordell to herself and hugged him as hard as she could.

  “Ah. Bootsie, no. Ah. Internal bleeding, maybe,” came his choked voice.

  She pulled away and looked him over with eyes full of tears. The skin up to his forearms had been flayed, dripping blood from cracks along its surface. The side of his head bulged with a goose egg, and one of his eyes had swollen shut. His lips glistened with blood from a split.

  “I thought you quit smoking.”

  He grinned. “A smuggler always has a stash.”

  “How—” she began, holding in her tears.

  He smiled, then winced. “Same way I survived Laconte.”

  “Okay, then.”

  A river of stone came crashing down through the atrium, burying what was left of Witts’s dead soldiers in the lobby. The building seemed to inhale with the new hole in its roof, drawing more oxygen inside and bringing the fire to a fever pitch.

  “Time to go,” she shouted over the flames. She stumbled to the balcony railing and dragged the hover bike upright.

  “Thank you. Didn’t know how I was supposed to hobble out of here,” he said, climbing aboard and wrapping his bloody arms around her.

  She winced for him as the wounds across his skin met her rough flight suit. “Hell of a way to make an entrance, Captain.”

  “Let’s make a similarly impressive exit,” he said as she revved up and took off.

  “Boots!” Nilah’s voice came over the comm. “The building is cracking! The top is falling in!”

  “We’ll be right out,” Boots said, taking a corner extra hard. Cordell gripped tighter, sucking in a breath.

  “‘We?’” Nilah repeated.

  Teacup’s strobing arms flooded the air with confusing projections as Nilah descended into a pair of patrolling battle armors. What Flicker could do with flashes, her projectors could do with ribbons of water, butterflies, and random noise. She pinwheeled wild illusory sparks before striking directly into the pilot’s chamber of the nearest bot. When the other bot hesitated to fire into the melee, she whipped out a slinger and blasted it through the torso.

  Then she turned back to the collapsing building, heart in her throat. The upper floors had already begun to flop inward, billowing gray dust out into the stormy sky. Her lenses remained fixed on the few remaining exits with her heart in her throat. She couldn’t lose Boots here, too.

  Then a hover bike came rocketing out the lobby at the head of a roiling wave of debris. She zoomed in on it to find Boots and—

  —Cordell was hanging on to her back, eyes screwed shut in pain.

  “Come in, Captain! Boots has the captain!” she shouted. “Uh, I mean, Commander Jan, Boots has Captain Lamarr! Oh, my god, uh, yes! I see him! He’s hurt badly, but he’s moving!”

  “… Acknowledged,” came Malik’s relieved response, almost drowned out by all of the claps and whoops on the comm. “Missus Jan, get a stretcher ready. We’re going to have to bring him into the site with us.”

  “And, Hunter Two,” Malik added, “tell the captain I’m glad to be back under his command.”

  Nilah fell in behind Boots, galloping alongside as fast as Teacup’s legs would go. Orna’s code had done wonders for her speed, and she could corner like a cat after a mouse. She drifted to and fro behind Boots’s dust cloud, and it brought back memories of the few rallies she’d done.

  With a shaking hand, Cordell grabbed one of Boots’s earpieces. He wiped it off on his jacket, saw that he was only smearing it with more blood, and put it into his ear.

  “Hit me with the sitrep, Sleepy,” he said, wincing with each bump. “Where are we at?”

  “Far from alone,” said Malik. “Witts has been landing people. GATO can’t be far behind.”

  “Can’t be good,” said Cordell, casting the tiniest mark to shield his mic against the wind. “I think we can assume they’re pissed.”

  Nilah smirked. “Probably would’ve responded to us a lot faster if they weren’t fighting a major battle up there.”

  “I’m just going to point out that was my idea,” Cordell added, lifting a shaking, bloody finger. “And it’s working really well.”

  “We’ve found an… airlock of some kind,” said Malik. “It’s a revolving chamber with designated spots for four people. The exterior door opened when we approached.”

  “You just… walked up to it?” Boots laughed. “What about traps? Autoslingers? What’s wrong with you?”

  “It was that or stand in the open,” said Malik. “We chose to get under the edge of the dome. We’re not inside, though. Still don’t trust that airlock.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Nilah, scrabbling around a corner after the hover bike.

  “So the Graveyard is powered,” said Cordell. “And it’s acting like it’s not hostile.”

  “There’s more, Boss,” said Malik. “The twins are complaining about pain, just like on the Vogelstrand. The closer we got to the structure, the worse it was.”

  “How bad?” asked Nilah.

  “I can manage!” said Alister. “Spyglass, you good?”

  “We can take it,” said Jeannie. “We want this just as badly as you.”

  “If it gets too bad,” said Malik, “I can knock them out. Better than sending them away from here on their own.”

  Cordell looked up at Nilah from his spot behind Boots. “All right. Rally up at the airlock, then.”

  “I’ve dropped a pin on our location,” said Malik, and Teacup relayed the path to her HUD.

  It needled her a tiny bit to know just how much better Orna’s pathing code was.

  A warning from Teacup’s sensors drew her eyes upward to find pink jump strobes peppering the heavens—quite a sizable force. “Not sure I like this development, darlings. Friends or foes?”

  “They’re GATO vessels,” said the Devil. “I’ve identified all six in my database as destroyer-class—”

  “It doesn’t matter, because it’ll bring a metric ton of attention,” wheezed Cordell. “If you’re right, and that’s an airlock on the side of the Graveyard, it’s going to have a cycle time.”

  “Hunter One here,” Orna cut in. “That means we should chance it and get this thing started. Looking for two volunteers to be lab rats for our friends.”

  “Not an option,” Nilah snapped. “Don’t you dare get in that building before I get a look at the door. Boots, remind her about the traps and stuff.”

  “Traps and stuff, Hunter One,” said Boots. “I’d wait it out.”

  Streaks of orange plummeted from the ships’ lengths: orbital drop pods.

  “Something’s up,” said Cordell, eyes skyward. “They know this place is special.”

  “No shit,” said Boots. “GATO figured out the most important lesson in life.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Boots Elsworth has a nose for treasure,” she replied. “Those incoming pods have changed my vote. We need to be on the Wellspring before GATO. I don’t trust any of them to do the right thing with a power like that.”

  A bit of anger sparked through Nilah’s heart. She understood Boots’s point, but the skies had taken on a decidedly apocalyptic tone; it made her long to be with Orna, just in case the end was near.

  “Zipper here,” said Aisha, voice like smooth steel. “There’s no one in the universe I trust with it, eith
er. I’m going with Hunter One.”

  “Then I’m your fourth volunteer,” said Malik. “Captain, if this is acceptable, Pensive and Spyglass will meet you outside.”

  “I’m with you, Hunter One,” said Cordell. “We need people on the inside.”

  “Give us one minute to join you!” said Nilah.

  She could almost hear Orna’s sneer in her words: “You have one minute. After that, you come in here second, racing champ.”

  “Run on ahead,” came Boots’s voice, calm and easy. “We’re loaded down, and you can go faster.”

  She pounded up alongside Boots and Cordell, not meaning to illustrate her point. “It’s good to have you back, Captain.”

  “I’ve got him,” Boots reassured her. “Go be with your wife.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Starlight

  Nilah topped the hill at breakneck speed, Teacup taking long, bounding strides. Nestled into the basin of the dead city, the low dome of the Graveyard gleamed up at her like the sun. Her HUD overlaid Orna’s location at the edge of the circle, and she bolted for it.

  As she came to the last stretch, she peered into the shade—and found Orna, Malik, Aisha, and the twins prepping to make their ingress.

  “I see the finish line!” she huffed, leaping over a dusty dune to come scrabbling into their midst.

  “Nicely done, Hunter Two,” said Aisha with a smile.

  “Thanks,” said Nilah. “I’m taking your spot. Let’s go, babes.”

  From directly beside the structure, the Graveyard of the Poets had a low dome overhanging a wide, two-story base, like an oversimplified mushroom. It cast harsh shadows in Origin’s setting sun, but as Teacup’s sensors picked out more details, Nilah saw dozens of conduits carved into the walls of the base, a melding of circuitry and artistry reserved for the Expansion Era of humanity.

  From the underside, it appeared the rest of the structure was constructed from orichalcum, too, because the bloody thing wasn’t ridiculous enough.

  Inset into the wall, she found the clear entrance—an iris door, ringed in white light, leading to a small airlock chamber. “Seems a bit obvious, doesn’t it?” she asked, sidling in beside Charger.