The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “And how would you know that?” asked Cordell.

  “Captain Lamarr, the Harrow was technically a Taitutian ship when I was connected to him. Taitutian Admiralty has unlimited access to Special Branch knowledge bases. With your Compass clearance, you should be able to view any of their records from the proper warship.”

  The captain considered the proposition for a moment. “They might even have a datamancer we could borrow. Good idea, Kin. Contact the Fifth Fleet and get them to send us a rendezvous point. Mister Jan, please have your better half lay in a course.”

  “The Children of the Singularity are oddly quiet this time,” said Special Agent Weathers, his disembodied torso hovering over the table in the mess.

  Boots and Cordell had just finished sharing what they learned from the cube’s contents with their superior officer, though it curdled Boots’s stomach a bit. Weathers had proven himself useful after recruiting them to Compass, handing them solid intel and great leads—and she wanted to believe he was a good cop—but she’d been burned by the Taitutian government too often.

  This was the first time she’d chosen to fully trust him, and it was a hard mental adjustment.

  “What do you mean, ‘oddly quiet’?” asked Boots, propping her elbows up on the table.

  “We have a few assets in place with them,” said Cedric, “and based on historical cases, I would’ve expected a bigger reaction from their group. Once upon a time, they used to chase you with starships.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Cordell leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “So they haven’t reacted to us getting the scoop on them with the Mostafa Journal.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Cedric, and Boots’s shoulders drooped.

  She would’ve liked it to be easy for once.

  “Our sources have caught wind of a cell activating to retaliate against you. You’ll recall all the propaganda they made about you? The Harrow deniers?”

  “Who could forget those charming mouthbreathers?” said Boots.

  “Well, the cell they activated… they’re kind of like that,” said Cedric. “Hackers, mostly, but some psyops types. We’ve got dossiers on a few of them, and we know their location. Their operation isn’t amateur hour, but I wouldn’t call these people battle-hardened assassins.”

  Cordell shrugged. “So take them out or arrest them.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” said Cedric, adjusting his tie. “Given the mole situation in the Special Branch, I’m only using Compass assets for this, and we’re, well, rare. I’ll personally have to lead the fire team.”

  “Combat?” Boots snorted. “From you?”

  Cedric inclined his head. “I got to this job through twenty-five years on the Aior Capital Police. I know how to hold a gun and make an arrest, Miss Elsworth.”

  Cordell walked over to the table and rested his palms against it. “So then what’s the plan for us? What do we need to do about the hacker cell? We’re already mid-jump to Task Force Sixty.”

  “Nothing. I’m handling it, but I wanted you to be aware they were in play,” said Cedric. “Hopefully, not for long.”

  “We’re pretty locked down on this ship,” said Cordell. “It’s comms-off most days, so I’m not sure how they’d even manage to hack us.”

  “Probably not targeting us directly,” said Boots. “Could be going after the distillery or another crew asset—or family member. We must assume there will be more retaliations, like with Nilah’s dad. If you’ve got any relatives that need warning, now is the time. I’ve got no one left, but surely the rest of you have people.”

  “Good instincts, Miss Elsworth,” said Cedric. “We’ll assume that the threat is real and active, and strike soon. Continue your path, rendezvous with the armada, and get that cube into the Compass classified network for intensive processing. I want to pick over its contents myself.”

  “And what do you want us to do once we have the recording location?” asked Cordell.

  “We want to run it down ourselves,” Boots interrupted, and they both stopped to look at her. “What? You’ve got the mole, and a confirmed cell to take out, Agent Weathers. We’re the only people cleared on this operation that you can trust for sure. Send us, first.”

  Cedric looked impressed. “To a mysterious planet? Are you currently equipped for that?”

  She folded her hands behind her back, falling into her old “at ease” pose for addressing a superior officer. She never liked showing deference to Cedric, but if it meant having his support, she’d entertain his ego. She inclined her head, trying to conjure the discipline she’d had in the Civil Air Patrol, and said, “If it’s chasing down Witts, sir, then we’re ready for anything.”

  “Boots speaks for all of us,” said Cordell, nodding in her direction.

  “I’m not sure I could stop you if I wanted to,” said the agent. “All right. Find the location and check it out. Dismissed.”

  The jump to the Fifth Fleet seemed to stretch on forever for Nilah. Sharp and his operators were out of contact for their rescue mission. Though plenty of major news sources reported Kristof’s and Yu’s murders and Darnell Brio’s kidnapping, they didn’t have much to add.

  No new facts.

  Nothing to be done.

  Her listless wanderings took her up to the bridge, where Malik made sure she understood she didn’t have to show up for work while dealing with the immediate depression and anxiety. Then it was down to the galley, where Jeannie made her a terrible cup of tea and awkwardly hung around giving her sympathetic looks. After tiring of that, Nilah went to the cargo bay, where Orna was calibrating the slingers on the Midnight Runner with Charger’s help. She hung from the docking assembly by a harness, and Charger dangled by her side, only using the strength of its arms.

  “Okay, then. What do you think?” Orna asked Charger. The bot gestured wordlessly at the open maintenance panel, and she laughed. “Really? High-index refractors are going to melt the ports.”

  Charger tapped a few more spots and shrugged. Orna’s circlet pulsed in time with the telepathic conversation.

  “Remove the armor plate so it’ll run colder,” said Orna, and then noticing Nilah, she shook her head in annoyance. “Why does he always want to take off the armor plates?”

  “Charger, there’s no heat dispersion in space,” said Nilah. “Removing armor won’t help.”

  “He says he knows that. His big idea is mounting a coolant tank.” She looked at him expectantly. “Which will ruin the aero in atmosphere.”

  Her circlet flashed once more, and Orna looked at Nilah, mock-aghast. “He says you’d design something that would work.”

  “Aw, Charger.” Nilah’s face prickled. “Did he really say that, or are you just trying to make me feel better?”

  Charger waved at her, making a pleasant chime, and its lenses flicked pink. Maybe Orna was puppeting it through the circlet, maybe not. It was a nice sentiment all the same.

  “I give up,” said Orna, feigning exasperation. “I think the big traitor is sweet on you.”

  “I’ve always loved you, Charger.” Nilah’s heart thawed a bit. “You know, when I was little, my dad asked me who I wanted to marry, and I said, ‘a race car.’ You’re no race car, but…”

  Her cadence faltered, the light draining from her weak smile. She hadn’t meant to imagine her father’s laughing face, his boisterous hugs, because it didn’t take long for her to remember what Harriet was probably doing to him. Every time she thought of her dad, the air settled over her like lead.

  “I need something to do. Please.”

  Orna rappelled down to her like a spider, clipping out of her harness and taking Nilah into her arms. The dam holding back her emotions instantly threatened to break, and she pushed her fiancée back.

  “I’m so sorry, and I love you,” said Nilah, “but if I have one more minute of people pitying me, I’m going to… I just want something to do. Anything. I’ll even reorganize your pointless ‘random screw’ d
rawer in your tool chest.”

  “Hey, sometimes the most satisfying solution is a random screw.”

  “You make that joke every two weeks. Now, please don’t try to take my shift from me.”

  The quartermaster softened. “I get it. It’s your lucky day. We’ve got a huge backlog of maintenance.”

  She could see herself getting lost in some maintenance. “Grueling, grubby, difficult maintenance? The kind where tools get broken and knuckles get scraped?”

  “Uh, if you don’t wear your mechanic’s gloves.”

  “Maybe it’d be nice to get a little scratched up. Be good to feel something.”

  She’d only intended it casually, but Orna froze up. “Babe, are you serious? You always wear PPE on maintenance.”

  A racing veteran and mechanist, Nilah had heard some version of the “personal protective equipment” speech hundreds of times. “I’m not going to—”

  “Get hurt in an accident?” Orna interrupted. “You obviously want to. I know I come off as brutal, but I still wear protective gear.”

  Nilah jutted out her chin, drawing a thin smile. “I’ll be careful—”

  “No, you just said you wanted to hurt yourself. You’re not going near the backlog. Quartermaster’s orders.” And before Nilah could protest, Orna added, “No. But I’ve got some good news.”

  Nilah regarded her fiancée with a pained look. “Please tell me I’m not relieved of duty. I can’t take any more bloody relief.”

  Orna pointed to where Teacup rested in its storage cradle, lenses softly pulsing. Its armor had so many scuffs from various hallway obstacles: transit cases, pipes, conduits, and basically every door frame. When she’d first decided to build her own battle armor, Nilah had been prepared for the inevitable combat damage—but Teacup couldn’t even navigate the ship.

  “No, the good news is that your robot sucks and still needs a ton of development work.”

  Nilah grimaced. “She’s not that bad.”

  “That thing tripped onto me.”

  “That’s why I stopped keeping her in the bedroom, love. It only happened once…”

  “Uh-huh. That was two hundred kilos of corners and sharp angles rolling all over me while my life flashed before my eyes.” Orna took a step closer. “Do you know what it’s like to take a robot to the face in the middle of the night?”

  “She was only looking for the storage cradle,” protested Nilah, but she could feel the debate slipping through her fingers.

  “Which she would’ve found if your imagers were properly aligned. Battle armors have a ton of subsystems that race cars don’t—and Teacup’s need a lot more polish.”

  “This therapy session is turning out a bit more harsh than I expected.”

  Orna took her hand, and unlike the embrace, it wasn’t unbearable. The quartermaster’s rough thumb caressed the smooth skin under her wrist, reassuring and sweet. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I respect the hell out of you for trying to roll your own battle armor—but that’s why it’s slow-going. I’ve been working on armors all my life, and… you know… Charger was the first one I ever built from scratch. Even then, I used some open source stuff for interop and data links. There’s nothing wrong with taking help.”

  Nilah stared wistfully at Teacup. It was such a magnificent frame, beautiful to behold—and mostly useless. “I just wanted her to be uniquely mine.”

  Orna nodded. “Then you’ve got a lot of work to do reinventing the wheel.”

  Nilah dragged out her toolkits and got started. It was rough at first, her motivation drying up at odd moments, replaced with overwhelming dread for her father. However, design problems gave her a structure to switch off some of the crueler parts of her mind, and she found she could muscle through. Minutes blurred together as she dove into Teacup’s systems, and for the first time in a while, she relaxed.

  It seemed like the blink of an eye before Orna called to her, holding a mug of tea—a habit Nilah was proud she’d imparted to her. The overhead lights in the cargo bay had shifted into night mode without her noticing, and she became aware of the growing nausea of skipping meals.

  “I’m going to bed, babe,” said Orna, taking a sip of her drink and yawning. “I love you. Need anything?”

  “I’m good. I love you, too.”

  Orna gestured to Nilah’s projected readouts of Teacup’s various motor functions. “Looks like progress. You’ll nail it soon enough.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I know I am,” said Orna. “You’re a star. You know what you’re doing.”

  Nilah watched Orna exit the cargo bay, then sighed at Teacup’s tests. Inside of a simulation, Teacup tried and failed for the eight thousand and twenty-sixth time to leap a ten-meter gap onto a two-meter platform, caroming off the edge with a sad flail of its arms.

  She keyed up Charger’s pathing code, but her pride wouldn’t let her crib notes. This was her weapon to forge. That way, it’d be so much more personal when she used it to put Harriet Fulsom down like a dog.

  She reset the sim once more to watch Teacup attempt its leap.

  Chapter Seven

  Refraction

  Nilah never tired of watching the jump bubble around the Capricious break, so when Aisha announced they’d be dropping out of the Flow soon, she headed to the bridge. She was eager to get a look at the fleet that had been harassing the Children of the Singularity.

  When the crew had destroyed the Masquerade, it’d been like turning over a rock to see the bugs come skittering out. The hidden assets at Henrick Witts’s disposal gradually revealed themselves: shipyards, mines, infrastructure, and major capital equipment, largely staffed with loyal, well-paid followers. And because they hadn’t managed to get the index to the Money Mill, there were more resources lurking in the shadows. Law enforcement could trace some of the conspirators from the fallout of the Money Mill collapsing, but they couldn’t catch them all.

  Task Force Sixty was GATO’s answer: an indomitable set of the best strike warships they could muster. They were the fastest, the most advanced, and likely the most expensive ships in the Allied fleet—supplied by Taitu, Nilah thought with some pride. Then, she remembered that the Harrow had been supplied by Taitu as well, and wasn’t sure how to feel about her homeworld anymore.

  As Aisha counted down the seconds to normal space, Nilah stepped closer to the pilot’s station to get the best view through the bridge canopy. The jump bubble stretched and smeared, long strands of starlight snapping into a wild spray of heavenly bodies. With a slight lurch, the Capricious emerged from the Flow.

  Floating in their midst, like an array of titanic swords, were the many destroyers of the Taitutian Fifth Fleet’s Task Force Sixty. A single capital ship led the pack, his hull ablaze with lights.

  “Hailing, sir,” said Aisha.

  Cordell nodded. “Patch them through.”

  “Approaching vessel, transmit identification codes within the next thirty seconds,” came a woman’s voice.

  “Contact bogeys,” said Malik, looking into the scanners. “Fighter patrol inbound.”

  “So impatient.” Cordell scoffed. “All right, all right. Missus Jan, shoot the codes over.”

  “Codes accepted, ADF Capricious,” came the voice on the other end of the line. Projections spun up across the bridge as the Capricious connected to the fleet scanners, revealing the gathered ships as glowing dots. A vanguard of chevrons swept toward the tiny Capricious, and a tag appeared over them, designating them as ESCORT: GRAY WING. “Please proceed with the fighter escort to bay sixty-eight of the TNS Ambrosini.”

  “Capricious copies, marshall,” said Cordell. “Missus Jan, take us in.”

  Nilah thought she’d never see a bigger ship than the Harrow, but the Ambrosini defied all expectations. Every time Nilah thought she had the size of him, he swelled larger in her view, until she could see nothing except his gray hull. His keel bristled with slingers, as well as a row of five gargantuan cannons she didn’t recogniz
e.

  Joining Nilah at the window, Orna peered at the cannons and smiled. “Wicked… Didn’t think they’d fielded those.”

  “What are they?” asked Nilah.

  “Jump cannons. You know how we can never start shooting until we come out of jump? Those cannons can triangulate and fire out of the Flow… or into it. If Witts tries to zip in and start something, they’ll blow his ships up before they can even appear.”

  The Flow had always struck Nilah as particularly safe—a respite from Henrick Witts and his corruption. A ship couldn’t be ambushed within the confines of a jump bubble, so it always felt like the last refuge in the galaxy.

  Orna handily popped that misconception.

  “Great…” Nilah sighed as one of the docking bays yawned before them to engulf the Capricious.

  Inside the bay of the Ambrosini, Aisha deftly maneuvered the marauder into dock, settling him onto a giant set of scarred-up mag clamps. Fighters roared past, returning to their ready stations along the ceiling mounts. Beside Nilah, Boots whistled appreciatively at the spacecraft.

  “Hoo, boy… Scramsax Eighties,” she said. “It’d be a short freaking fight if I tried to take one of those in the Midnight Runner.”

  “That much of a difference?” asked Nilah.

  “Oh yeah,” said Boots. “Like trying to fight a dragon with a hang glider.”

  Somehow, that made her feel a little bit better about her dad’s precarious situation. The military strength leveraged on her behalf was second to none, and—despite the spies infesting their ranks—her father had been publicly kidnapped. Taitu had to help him, or risk being considered a terrorist ally, right?

  She found herself wishing those fighters were doing the rescuing, since Boots was so scared of them. Nilah wanted the very best on the case. Sharp was tough. She’d fought him. He could save her dad. But some Scramsax Eighties and enough missiles to carbonize every Child of the Singularity might’ve been a nice addition.

  “Glad they’re on our team,” said Cordell, and then he clapped his hands together. “Listen up, people. This is a galactic control group dedicated to clandestine strike operations. Best of the best. That means you will all behave yourselves. I don’t want to hear that you stole something. I don’t want to hear that you went somewhere you weren’t supposed to. Hell, I don’t even want to hear about your goddamned harsh language, are we crystal on that?”