The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “It has been two hundred thirty years since the Battle of Dralee.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541

  IT BEGINS WITH GRADUATION DAY

  The steps creaked alarmingly under Biran’s weight as he mounted the stage, but he would not let unstable footing delay the moment his whole life had built toward. News drones buzzed like loose wires above his head, their spotlights blinding him the moment he reached the podium. Keeper Li Shun clasped his hand in her strong fingers, the black robe of graduation transforming her from the stern teacher he’d known and admired into something otherworldly. She flashed him a smile—his sponsor for all these years—the hint of a silver tear in the corner of her eye. Pride. Biran’s chest swelled.

  Shun turned to the podium, bracing her hands against either side. The mic chain looped around her throat threw her voice out to the dozen graduating Keepers, and the thousands of Ada Prime citizens crowding the stands.

  “Introducing for the first time: Keeper Biran Aventure Greeve. First in class.”

  Cheers exploded across the crowd, across the net. On massive screens suspended from drones, the faces of newscasters beamed excitedly as Biran watched himself, screen-in-screen, take the podium from Keeper Shun.

  His heart lurched, his palms sweat. It hadn’t been so bad, sitting in the crowd with his fellow graduating classmates, but now he was up here. Alone. Meant to represent them to all these people. Meant to speak to Prime citizens in other settlements, on other worlds. The first of the next generation—the vanguard of Prime knowledge.

  The notes for his speech waited in his wristpad; he could flick them open at any time. No one would mind. It was expected, really. He was only twenty-two, newly graduated. There wouldn’t even be whispers about it. But there’d be whispers about his hesitation.

  Biran took a deep breath, careful not to let the mic pick up the hiss of air, and gripped the sides of the podium. He sought familiar faces in the audience. Not his cohort—his family. Most of his cohort could rot, for all he cared. Over the years in training they’d grown into little more than petty social climbers, political vipers. Even Anaia, his childhood friend, had allied herself with the richest girl in the group—Lili—just to squeeze herself closer to the top. His fathers, Graham and Ilan, were out there in the crowd somewhere. Sanda, his sister, would watch from her gunship on her way to make a patrol sweep of Dralee. His family was what mattered.

  They believed in him. He could do this.

  “People of Ada Prime,” he began, hating the way his voice squeaked nervously over the first word. Breathe. Slow down. “It honors me, and all my classmates, to—”

  The hovering screens changed. The faces of the newscasters shifted from jubilant to fear-struck. Biran froze, terrified for an instant it was something he had done, or said, that caused that change.

  Later, he’d wish it had been.

  The newscasters were muted, but tickers scrolled across the bottoms of the screens: Battle Over the Moon Dralee. Ada Forces Pushed Back by Icarion. Casualties Expected. Casualties Confirmed.

  A newscaster’s face wiped away, replaced by the black field of space. Biran’s subconscious discerned the source of the video feed—a satellite in orbit around one of Belai’s other moons. The perspective was wide, the subjects pointillistic shapes of light upon the screen.

  Those lights broke apart.

  Biran went cold. Numb. There was no way to identify the ships, no way to know which one his sister commanded, but deep in his marrow he knew. She’d been severed from him. One by one, those lights blinked out. Behind him, a teacher screamed.

  The stadium’s speakers crackled as someone overrode them, a voice he didn’t recognize—calm and mechanical, probably an AI—spoke. He took a moment to place the voice as the same used for alarm drills at school.

  “Impact event probability has exceeded the safety envelope. Please take cover… Impact event probability has exceeded…”

  Debris. Bits and pieces of Ada’s shattered ships rocketing through space toward their home station to sow destruction. Bits of soldiers, too. Maybe even Sanda, burning up like so much space dust in the thin membrane enclosing Keep Station. Things weren’t supposed to escalate like this. Icarion was weak. Trapped. The people of Prime, even on backwater Ada, were supported by empire. Icarion wouldn’t have dared… But they had.

  War. The stalemate had been called.

  The crowd rippled. As the warning voice droned on, the stadium’s lights dimmed to a bloodied red, white arrows lighting the way to impact shelters. One of the senior Keepers on the stage, Biran didn’t turn to see who, found their legs and stepped forward. A hand enclosed Biran’s shoulder. Not in congratulations, but in sympathy. Biran stepped back to the podium.

  He found his voice.

  “Calm,” he pleaded, and this time his voice did not crack, did not hesitate. It boomed across the whole of the stadium and drew the attention of those desperate for stability.

  “Please, calm. We will not trample one another for safety. We are Prime. We move together, as one. Go arm in arm with your compatriots into the shelters. Be quick. Be patient. Be safe.”

  The swelling riot subsided, the tides pushing against the edges of the stadium walls pulling back, contracting into orderly snake lines down the aisles. Biran took a step away from the podium.

  “Come,” Keeper Vladsen said. It took a moment for Biran to place the man. A member of the Protectorate, Vladsen rarely interacted with the students unless it was a formal affair. “There’s a Keeper shelter close by.” He gestured to a nearby door, a scant few meters from the stage that vibrated now to the beat of thousands of people fleeing. The rest of Biran’s cohort filed toward it, shepherded by Keeper Shun.

  Biran shrugged the guiding hand off his arm. His gaze tracked the crowd, wondering where his fathers might be, but landed on a knot of people clumped up by a stadium door. The drone ushers that handled the stadium’s crowd control gave fitful, pleading orders for organization. Orders the panicking humans ignored.

  “They need a person to guide them.”

  “You’re a Keeper now,” Vladsen said, voice tight. “Your duty is to survive.”

  “The academy gave us emergency-response training. I cannot imagine they did not mean for us to use it.”

  Vladsen cocked his head to the side, searching for something in Biran’s face. “We guard the knowledge of our people through the ages, not their bodies from moment to moment.”

  Something inside Biran lurched, rebelled. He peeled the black robe from his shoulders, tugged it over his head and tossed it to the ground. His lightweight slacks and button-up were thin protection against the simulated autumn breeze. He undid the buttons of his sleeves and rolled them up.

  “You get to safety. I have work to do.”

  if you enjoyed

  THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

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  A Humanity’s Fire Novel

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  Michael Cobley

  A speed-of-light space adventure novel of a treasure hunt that could unlock all the wonders of a vast and advanced civilization’s lost technologies.

  For Pyke and his crew it should have been just another heist.

  Travel to a backwater desert planet, break into a museum, steal an ancient tracking device, and then use it to find some old ship buried in the planet’s vast and trackless sandy wastes.

  Except that the museum vault is a bioengineered chamber, and the tracking device is highly sought after by another gang of treasure hunters, led by an old adversary of Pyke’s, the devious and dangerous Raven Kaligara.

  Also, the ship is a quarter of a million years old and about two kilometers long, and somewhere aboard it is the Essavyr Key, a unique relic out of myth and fable, a key to unlock all the fabulous treasures and technologies of a lost civilization.…

  PROLOGUE

  HYPERSPACE TIER 19: ROWKOG CITY

  Ragess Craiph, Supreme Viz
ier of Rowkog, hereditary Great Elder of the Hezrish, and Emperor of All Hyperspace, kept the hand disruptor trained on his underlings while adjusting his bulky garments. It was warm and stuffy in the rooftop aircar garage and his attire, while satisfying the all-enclosing rule, was poorly made from low-grade material. The cuffs pinched annoyingly at the wrists while his upper back itched abominably…

  Emperor Craiph then noticed that the taller of his two underlings had paused from preparing the aircar and was watching him from behind the goggles of his plain cityworker mask.

  “Continue with your task as I ordered,” Craiph said with a regal gesture of the disruptor. “Disrespect will not be tolerated…”

  “How much longer will you cling to these delusions?” asked the underling. “Even now my Imperial regiments are pouring into Rowkog, and once the marauder incursion is repelled my rescue will only be a matter of time. Be sensible and give over that weapon. As Paramount Archon of the Hezrish Dominion I give you my solemn vow that you shall not be harmed.”

  Ragess Craiph, Supreme Vizier and Emperor over all he surveyed and much else besides, gave a throaty laugh.

  “Such babbling delirium can only be fuelled by some kind of mental derangement.” He paused to rub an itch on his back against a section of the ribbed surface of the garage’s bulkhead interior. “Resume your work—the Imperial limousine must be spotless inside and out if I am to fly forth and greet my triumphant battalions.”

  There was a clatter as an empty canister flew tumbling across the oil-stained garage floor. The second underling rose from where he had been working on the aircar’s rear offside suspensor. He wore the rough, grubby garb of a manual worker, possibly a low-level tech. One gloved hand was clenched in a fist, the other held a large shift-wrench.

  “I can stomach you drivelling fools no longer,” he snarled. “Having abducted me from the Imperial palace and brought me to this stinking hovel, you now attempt to undermine my sanity by engaging in an impersonation charade so pathetic a child could see through it!” With the wrench he gestured casually at the garage door. “My stealth-marines are drawing near even as I speak and when they come through that door—”

  “Your insolent mouth has signed your death warrant,” snapped the first, swinging the disruptor around.

  “Illiterate!” said the one with the wrench. “How do you sign something with your mouth?”

  There was a bright stutter from the disruptor’s muzzle. The unfortunate target cried out, one gloved hand grabbing at his wounded shoulder as he staggered back, while still holding onto the wrench. But when he lifted away his hand and saw only a smouldering patch of material, laughter came from his masked face.

  “You cretin!—You’ve had it on the lowest setting all this time…”

  Whatever else any of them began to say next was drowned out by the metallic shriek of the garage door being wrenched away from the outside. His Imperial Majesty, Craiph the First, bellowed at the shapes hovering outside, but before he could get off a blast with the disruptor a burning flash blinded him and a brace of needle rounds caught him in the neck. As the numbing narcotic spread through his veins, the Emperor sank to the floor, proclaiming his regal privileges and vowing to inflict all manner of revenge upon his enemies.

  Once the roof garage was secured and the three unconscious parasite-hosts were tagged and tanked, a Rowkog City council airbarge floated over to park on the rooftop. Rensik, Construct drone and Mission Invigilator, watched for a few moments as the Hazcon-suited Hezrishi loaded the iso-canisters into the barge then opened a channel to Gelkar, mission auditor and his second-in-command.

  “Please tell me that this is the last of them,” he said.

  “My estimation matrices indicate that 100 per cent of the Rowkog populace is now accounted for,” said Gelkar. “That’s based on a 99.3 per cent certainty rating.”

  “That’s an improvement,” Rensik said. “It was 93.5 per cent a few hours ago.”

  “We were still converting various migration and tax records at that point, cross-correcting for duplication and so forth,” said Gelkar. “All those sources have now been merged into a single dataface which gives us—”

  “0.7 per cent uncertainty,” Rensik said. “Does that mean you’re uncertain about 0.7 per cent of Rowkog’s six hundred thousand-plus population, which runs to four thousand two hundred individuals…”

  “We don’t apply uncertainty that way, Invigilator. Undetected hosts could not amount to so many—there would be outbreak incidents everywhere.”

  “Gelkar, I need complete certainty,” Rensik said.

  “We will have it—it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Just so long as there’s no more of these hosts sitting in hidey-holes, thinking the same thing. Keep me updated.”

  With that Rensik severed the connection, swivelled with his attitude jets and shot straight up, passing through the atmosphere field, heading for the heights of the cavern. The drone slowed to a hover and mused on their progress. Ego-parasites were rare enough back up in the prime cosmos so an infestation down here in the depths of hyperspace was unlikely to the point of suspicion. Rensik speculated that one of Rowkog’s competitors, one of the other crannytowns, had had a hand in it. Not a shred of proof to be had, thus far, but he was keeping it in mind.

  Hyperspace Tier 19 was an oddity. The collapsed and compacted vestiges of a partial universe from some billions of years ago, it was studded with large and mostly spherical caverns, all of which were home to small or medium-sized mining settlements established to extract the plentiful ore and mineral seams. Down the millennia the few fissures and chasms which broke through the tier’s ancient packrock were widened and added to, allowing trade routes to spread through this part of the tier. Travel and commerce between the crannytowns no longer required hyperdrive ships, and long-haul merchanters became the mainstay of cross-tier traffic. As the tier’s largest city, Rowkog was a crucial hub for trade and supplies, and when the city’s leaders realised that something was driving the population crazy, they despatched a request for help to the Garden of the Machines on Tier 9, the home of the Construct and its machine allies and underlings. After brief consideration, Rensik’s Redact & Reclaim unit was despatched.

  Yeah, so brief that I didn’t have time to switch my chassis-shell to something less feral…

  His previous assignment had involved peacekeeping along a transient-boundary between Tiers 22 and 23, trying to keep two vestigial civilisations, the Drestel and the Kralon, from unleashing huge batteries of horrific weapons that they’d been hanging onto for millennia. Yet for all the colossal potency of their semi-automated arsenals of death, the post-post-decadent nature of their mores and courtesies compelled them to frame all demands, counter-demands, penultimate threats and threat-addendums in intricate language and exaggerated politeness. Rensik, seldom patient with what he termed “sweaty organics,” at first considered adopting a mild approach and an innocuous, non-threatening drone shell before departing. But a closer look at the military histories of both sides forced a rethink, hence his slotting into the type 21 combat chassis, also known as the Dissuader.

  Dark grey with matte silver and deep scarlet contrast trim, the upper hull was a smooth curve broken by rounded ridges running front to back, emphasising the aerodynamic sleekness. To either side nacelle wings curled down, almost clawlike, the undersides blistered with weapon pods. Beneath, the more rectilinear fuselage sported additional task nodes while the forward section angled up to where a broad, beaklike prow concealed a battery of launchers and beam projectors. Three pairs of glowing apertures gave the impression of stern, unblinking eyes. Rensik knew that the Construct had a reputation for subtlety and nuance, and therefore reasoned that a blunt lack of nuance might usefully disrupt matters.

  Rensik soared through the gravityless void at the top of the two-kilometre-wide cavern. There was gravity down in Rowkog City and its immediate vicinity, derived from a couple of ancient generators planted in the bedrock. Seven m
edium-sized asteroids hung in the zero-gee vacuum between, each cable-tethered to the upper rock face, each haloed in its own microbiosphere, each a little green island crammed with hydroponic hexadomes, soaking up rays from the facetted grobeams that orbited them all.

  You can never be sure how some organics will react to that all-important first impression, he thought, recollecting how the Drestel got all affronted by his straight-talking, cut-to-the-chase manner. The Kralon delegates then, of course, had to demonstrate their superiority by being even more ruffled in their dignity but in the end his apparent lack of sophistication—allied to dogged persistence—earned a grudging respect from both sides. Then I turn up here and the mild and peaceable citizens of Rowkog give me a standing ovation every time I float past, weapon ports gleaming.

  As he floated high above the city and its tethered greenhouse asteroids, Rensik continued to monitor update streams from Gelkar and the other oversight drones. Just in the last few minutes one of the scanner teams had cornered an ego-parasite carrier in a series of connected sub-basements which were now being sealed off. Rensik didn’t need to intervene with suggestions or directions—all his taskforce drones were combat-hardened veterans with extensive experience. He was watching relayed streams of the cordoning operation when one of his mid-range detects gave off a contact alert from one of the asteroids.

  Shifting his scrutiny to local inputs, Rensik observed a shadowy but unmistakably biped form creep along a pathway between masses of greenery beneath a transparent hexadome. The city council had assured Rensik and his team on arrival that the greenhouse asteroids had been placed off-limits and subsequent surveys had showed only the presence of authorised personnel. And yet here was an intruder sneaking around while somehow managing to avoid tripping any surveillance alarms.