The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  More military police showed up, not asking questions, just whipping out trip sticks and heading straight for her. Nilah dodged into the first attacker, planting an elbow into the surprised woman’s sternum and hurling her by the ammunition harness. It was so much easier to throw a target with handles.

  The scuff of combat boots signaled an attack from behind, and she tumbled away to avoid the assault. Their military discipline was good, but her strobing orange dermaluxes rained fiery punches down on any who dared her reach. She knocked aside weapons and blasted kicks across faces.

  Rage got the better of Nilah, dredging up the ghosts of her most vicious combinations—the ones that killed, maimed, and blinded. Holding herself back was only causing a delay. It was time to get off this bloody ship. Get into the Flow. Kill Harriet.

  One of the trip sticks glanced Nilah’s shoulder, seizing her left arm; her right fist was all she needed. Solar slingshot. She yanked the woman forward by the wrist and hip-tossed her, twisting mid-movement for a dislocating pop. Heat death. Strikes to either side of the cop’s throat sent her stumbling to the ground, choking. Extinction event. Nilah leapt into the air, coming down with both knees onto her opponent’s abdomen. Duraplast body armor buckled inward, and an easy maneuver had Nilah straddling her prey. Only one move left in the combo, and it rose into her body instinctively.

  The void. Nilah drew back her good hand, the muscles of her fingers hardening into striking talons to blind her prey.

  “No! Please!” the cop gasped, barely able to suck in enough air to enunciate the words.

  Their eyes met, and Nilah’s heart faltered. The woman’s terrified expression was like a mirror. This couldn’t be who she’d become. This was an innocent person, only trying to do her job, and Nilah had done incredible violence to her. She wasn’t going to be allowed to walk away after this.

  She’d dishonored her ship, her family name, and her father’s memory by fighting these people. That thought distracted her long enough that she caught a trip stick to the back.

  “We are authorized for lethal force! Nilah Brio, by order of the admiralty, you will stand down or die!” barked one of the guards, and the others instantly leveled their slingers and encircled her.

  She slowly raised her hands, but her head hung low. Before she’d left the ship, Cordell had explicitly warned her not to do anything foolish. She’d asked for special dispensation to learn of her father’s fate, then betrayed his orders.

  Maybe he’d punish her. Maybe they’d leave her. Perhaps the Capricious would depart, taking Orna and the last people she loved away, disappearing into the swirling ink of space. No father. A cruel mother.

  The guards wrenched her hands behind her and smashed them into a pair of calcifoam cuffs. Tears mercifully blurred their faces, and she shut her eyes tightly to close out the pain.

  “And I’m telling you that if you call your bosses,” said Cordell, “I’m going to have your job for interfering in my classified mission.”

  “Sir,” replied the datamancer, “this is Task Force Sixty. Everything we do is highly classified. I assure you that this is merely a formality, and—”

  Boots grunted in annoyance and glanced around the data center. She clutched the Mostafa Journal in her hand, letting its worn edges dig into her palm. When she thought of her days in the military, it was too easy to remember the deadly sorties and tragic battles. She always forgot the “hurry up and wait” bureaucracy.

  “How long is the call going to take?” she asked, interrupting the fellow, and he spluttered, clearly unaccustomed to anything but protocol.

  “I simply need one hour to make the necessary arrangements—”

  “Great,” she replied. “You can make them as soon as we leave, but we’re busy, understood?”

  The datamancer looked at her through half-lidded eyes and held out his hand. “Let’s have it.”

  She leaned in to check his name patch as she handed it over. “Thank you, Lieutenant… Sisson.”

  “No problem,” he said, having just emphatically indicated that it was a problem. He took the cube and slotted it into his aggregator, then traced his glyph and laid his hands over the nearby crystal ball. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and concentrated.

  “We’re just looking for the tag info in the corrupted headers,” said Cordell, obviously trying to parrot Kinnard’s analysis. The guy didn’t understand the Money Mill’s programmatic contracts, so Boots doubted he comprehended ancient video codecs much better.

  “If you’ll give me a moment of silence, I can do that.” Lieutenant Sisson gave him a crass look. “I feel certain I can resuscitate most of the scattered data, Mister Lamarr.”

  Cordell balked. “That’s Captain Lamarr, to you, LT.”

  “Sorry, sir. We’re forbidden from recognizing the military ranks of civilian organizations,” said Sisson. “Causes confusion, you see.”

  Cordell’s nostrils flared. “Then recognize that you’re speaking to two Compass operatives, and if you give me that lip one more time, I’ll have your ass in a sling. If I need to disappear someone, that’s backed by your government. Now ask me how they’ll feel about some light assault on a smart-ass LT.”

  Sisson blanched and returned to his crystal ball, instantly digesting all the data on the cube. He realigned several other feeds from their archives for collation, got a complex data flow online in seconds. Boots watched with some nostalgia; Kin was excellent at data aggregation, but nothing beat real datamancy.

  Sisson’s eyes flipped open. “What the hell is this?”

  “None of your business,” said Boots. “And I want you to seal all of your records of our discussion at the highest level. Compass and above, only.”

  Reluctantly, the lieutenant tapped a few buttons on his console, and the interface became ringed with a red TOP SECRET COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION: MOUNTAIN border. “I’m sure I could be of a lot more help if I was briefed on this intel.”

  “Not happening, Sisson,” said Boots. “Been burned by too many leaks. Now if we could just get those tags from the header file, we’ll be on our way.”

  Sisson chewed his lip. “Okay, but here’s the thing… Those messages are physically fractured, so the galactic coords are hard to find. I could take the week or so to decode them—”

  “Do it,” said Cordell.

  “Or,” said Sisson, “I could take this time stamp and run it through analysis to get a much better coordinate. Galaxy tags get you a system and planet. Astrogation triangulation gets you the planet, system, time of day, and mean sea level.”

  He keyed up the empty segment where Mostafa was running through the open grassy field, then froze it on a clear view of the sky. “See the stars? We’ll get the location from those. That’ll take me about ten minutes.”

  Smile broadening, Cordell nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about, son.”

  Sisson began frenetically rerouting data across the surface of his crystal ball, attaching even more projections of various models and databases with glimmering threads. “I’m mostly sure I’ve got a lock on the coordinates, but… this is pretty weird. Given the grass, I would’ve thought this was a civilized system, but I can’t seem to find it in our archives.”

  Boots’s heart jumped. “So even the military hasn’t heard of this world?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Sisson, scowling. “I’ve got to get authentication codes for the Athana archives. I’ll be right back.” He rushed off into the cacophony of the Ambrosini data center, juking past the fifty or so other datamancers hard at work at their stations.

  “The Athana?” Boots repeated, as soon as he was out of earshot.

  Cordell shrugged. “Don’t ask me. If you haven’t heard of it, I sure as hell haven’t.”

  The lieutenant returned, carting a small chest with a wicked-looking pair of locks across the front. Yellow caution stripes ran along each seam like poisonous snakes, along with a warning label: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Boots recognized the locks fro
m her military days—the sort they kept the orbital defense codes inside. One false move picking that lock could result in instant vaporization.

  “What’s the Athana?” asked Boots.

  “Space station,” said Sisson. “Top-level archives maintained by an independent order. If there’s a secret, they know it, or it’s a secret for good.”

  “So you’re telling me the Taitutians have a super-archive that’s bigger than the Special Branch?” asked Boots, a little incredulous.

  “Not Taitutian,” said Sisson.

  “Who are they?” asked Cordell.

  “That’s above my pay grade. All I know is that we only get a few queries each month, and the fact that you’re with Compass means I get to use it,” the lieutenant replied.

  She beckoned him for more information. “You don’t know who owns it? Where it is?”

  “Nope,” said Sisson. “And before you ask, Compass clearance won’t get you there.”

  “You’d better be right about that,” said Cordell.

  Sisson sighed. “Take it up with the rear admiral. Tell her I said no. Can I do my job now?”

  Boots and Cordell waited patiently while he slotted the Athana data crystal and started threading in a remote connection. She leaned in a little closer to get a look at Sisson’s projection, and he jerked the screen away in annoyance.

  “Sorry,” she said, and he ignored her.

  “Ah…” said the lieutenant. “I can’t believe it.”

  Cordell scratched the side of his nose. “Can’t believe what?”

  “These coordinates correspond to a world listed in the Athana database, but it’s not in any of the other GATO archives. This is a hell of a find.”

  “A hell of a black site, you mean,” said Boots. “You’re not going to report this to anyone.”

  “Captain, come in,” came Orna’s voice over their comms.

  Cordell held up a finger for them to stop talking. “What is it?”

  “I got a ping on our Compass dead drop,” she said, “so I linked us up and downloaded everything. Got a couple of messages from Agent Weathers.”

  “And you didn’t get yelled at for breaking comms protocols?” asked Boots.

  “We’re only receiving, not transmitting,” said Orna, “so it’s fine. Look, these are weird.”

  Cordell exchanged a worried glance with Boots. “How so?”

  “They’re recent, and addressed urgently to you, Captain,” said Orna. “And there are four”—a chime sounded in the background—“five. A new one just came in.”

  “Patch the most recent one into my comm,” said Cordell.

  “Kin,” said Orna, “play the transmission.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Kin, his voice grating metallic for some reason.

  “Kin, just do as she says,” said Boots.

  Static crackled over the line—or was it flames? Heavy breathing came in long wheezes. “Lamarr. Not sure I’m getting out of here, so… you have to… to answer.”

  Cedric Weathers didn’t sound good.

  “Hacker cell was bigger than we thought—” He sputtered and sucked in a breath before steadying himself. “Had fingers in the archives. They’re going to attack the Fifth Fleet.”

  Boots bit her lower lip. They were only hackers, he’d said. They’d take care of it, he’d said. They were a galaxy away; how could they possibly touch Boots and the Capricious from there?

  She knew she was about to find out.

  “They hacked—” Static and slinger fire rattled Agent Weathers’s comm, obscuring the phrase. “—ing to use it as a bomb!”

  “Kin,” said Boots, her breath catching in her throat. “Can you scrub the noise from that message?”

  “Are you sure you want that?” asked Kin. “Maybe we could talk about something else.”

  “Why can’t you do as I asked?” said Boots.

  “I can,” said Kin. “It’s a valid order that will endanger you. I can comply. It will bring you to harm. Do you confirm your request?”

  She exchanged glances with the captain. “What kind of harm?”

  “I cannot say,” said Kin. “Please cancel. This is for your own good.”

  She looked to her captain for approval. “Whatever is in that garbled audio, it’s not going to change if we hear it, right? Danger is danger. We need to know.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” said Cordell.

  “Scrub it, Kin,” said Boots.

  Loud and clear, Special Agent Weathers said, “They hacked Kinnard while he was still in the archives. Still in control. They’ve got your ship, and they’re going to use it as a bomb.”

  “I wish you hadn’t asked that, Lizzie.”

  Red flashing light filled the complex, along with a single long klaxon. Then a computerized voice said, “Alert: Unauthorized long-range transmission detected, docking bay sixty-eight.”

  Cordell looked at her with an expression of alarm that said, That’s our bay, Bootsie.

  They’d sneaked a transmitter, in the form of Kinnard, onto the most highly classified fleet roaming the galaxy. The AI had access to all their systems: weapons, data, life support, navigation—the jump drive.

  At the Masquerade, Armin Vandevere had become the first captain in history to take down a dreadnought by jumping into its core. The Children must’ve considered turnabout fair play—and would now send the Capricious straight into the Ambrosini.

  Boots’s comm chimed once, and Kinnard’s voice crept into her ear. “Lizzie, they hadn’t activated me. If you still didn’t know, I could’ve stopped this.”

  “Kin,” said Boots, “whatever they’ve done to you, I need you to fight it.”

  “I tried to warn you,” he said, voice quivering. Could a machine feel sadness? “Tried to get you to run maintenance. I don’t want to do this to you. They’re making me.”

  Her breath came in quickening bursts. How long did she have? “Disconnect from the ship, Kin.”

  “Captain,” Orna cut in. “All the ship’s systems just came online! The jump drive is going crazy!”

  “Shut it down!” said Cordell.

  “I’m trying! There’s a hard-core AI in here—” The connection fizzled out, replaced with a single sonorous voice.

  “Greetings to the crew of the Capricious.”

  Boots must’ve heard that voice a dozen times. It’d played in her head over and over, ever since they’d retrieved the Mostafa Journal and watched it.

  Henrick Witts.

  “I’ve never wanted to kill anyone, but I’m excited about you lot. You’ve impeded my holy mission too many times. Goodbye, and good riddance.”

  “Captain Lamarr,” announced a computerized voice. “Please contact the rear admiral’s office immediately.”

  Cordell signaled Sisson, who keyed on a projection. The hologram of Rear Admiral Amanda Bishop spun to life before them, her stern, bony face like unforgiving crags.

  “Lamarr,” she said, voice carrying an undercurrent of malice. “Explain why your ship is transmitting our coordinates before I jettison it from the docking bay.”

  “It’s under attack, sir,” said Cordell. “Witts got a rogue AI on board, and it’s trying to take over the jump drive.”

  The admiral turned to Sisson. “You there, Lieutenant. You’re a datamancer. How long will it take the jump drive on a marauder-class vessel to spin up?”

  “One minute,” said Sisson.

  “I see. Captain, you have thirty seconds before I destroy your ship in its docking bay cradle.”

  Cordell stammered. “O—our mechanist on the inside will get control of it!”

  Her expression was impassive. “I await your all-clear call. Until then, I will not jeopardize the lives of this crew with an enemy AI in control of a jump drive. Twenty-two seconds. Docking bay boarding gunnery sergeant, target the ADF Capricious and fire on my mark.”

  Sisson looked nervously between them and keyed up a countdown in true datamancer fashion.

  Cordell went back
to pleading with the admiral while Boots tried every local comm channel back to the ship, praying one wasn’t blocked.

  “Orna!” she’d call, and switch. Again.

  “I’m here!” said Orna. “I’m fighting him for control!”

  Boots pressed her comm into her ear, cupping the mic to keep external noise down. She had to be as clear as possible. “Listen, they’re going to blow you up in, uh, fifteen seconds if you don’t confirm that jump drive offline.”

  “I don’t blame them,” huffed Orna. The clatter of panel faces and wiring harnesses echoed over the line. She must’ve been tearing the bridge apart. “I’ll have it off in twenty!”

  “We just need twenty seconds, Admiral,” said Cordell. “Do not destroy my ship. I am a Compass operative, and I’m invoking—”

  Bishop’s shoulders rose and fell. “We’ve had quite enough of Compass today. I understand your situation, but this can’t be helped. Five seconds.”

  “I need more time!” Orna said into Boots’s ear.

  But there was no more time, and Rear Admiral Bishop wasn’t the compromising sort. Boots watched the woman’s projection raise her arm to signal for weapons free, and blurted the words, “She’s got the drive offline! Don’t shoot! She has the drive offline!”

  Technically a lie.

  Thinking again, Boots decided that it was actually a lie.

  But Bishop stayed her hand. “Scanners! Confirm the Capricious isn’t prepping to jump.”

  “It’s still charging!” came a voice in the background, and Bishop wheeled on Boots with a snarl.

  “I’ll have you court-martialed for that. Gunnery, prepare to—”

  “I’ve got the drive down!” shouted Orna. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  But Boots couldn’t simply say the same thing twice. Bishop would order them to fire, thinking she was lying again. So she screamed it at the projection, flailing her arms to get their attention. “She got the drive offline! Please! I’m telling the truth! Do not kill my friends!”

  Every face in the intel center turned to face her, and Boots turned beet red. The part of her mind that’d been trained in military protocol, chain of command, and proper subordination attempted to shrivel up and die. Whenever the admiral tried to speak, Boots would scream again, interrupting her. Sometimes she would sing the phrase—anything to hold their attention. Finally, the furious officer severed the connection.