The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  But she didn’t fire, at least, Boots thought, as the most awkward silence of her military career descended over the bullpen.

  Cordell gaped at her in absolute horror. He didn’t look mad—after all, she’d saved his crew—but any serenity had been scoured from his being.

  She winced at him. “I panicked?”

  An insistent beeping filled the room—another call from the bridge. Sisson tapped a button, and Bishop reappeared, hair slightly askew from where she’d probably pulled it.

  “Your quartermaster indeed regained control of the Capricious, and it will be spared,” said Bishop. “Our scanners show the ship has gone completely dark.”

  “Thank you,” said Cordell.

  The admiral turned to face Boots. “What is it you’re called again? Socks?”

  “Boots. Boots Elsworth.”

  “Well, Boots, you’re under arrest for disrupting operations during lawful combat duties, under Article Sixteen of the GATO Uniform Code. You endangered ten thousand souls to save your friends,” said Bishop. “How does forty-five days in the brig sound to you?”

  At least my still-living friends will get to visit me, Boots thought, but kept it to herself. “As long as we’re somewhere else when Henrick Witts gets our coordinates, I’ll live, ma’am.”

  “We’re well aware of the security breach,” said the admiral, her Taitutian continental accent coming out when she didn’t have to sound so mean. “And we’ll have to coordinate a jump, which will cost significant resources. Rest assured, your leadership at Compass will be reprimanded for redirecting the course of a fleet. Your days as agents are done.”

  Boots gulped. It was hard to imagine getting off the Ambrosini any time soon after an incident like this. Jumping a single ship was expensive. Jumping a fleet consumed millions of argents’ worth of fuel and resources. Still, it was better than a space battle worth billions. She’d just have to pay it off by cooling her heels in the brig.

  “So we’re getting underway soon, right?” she asked.

  “Miss Elsworth,” said the admiral, “have you ever commanded a fleet? No? Then your opinion isn’t necessary. Henrick Witts will never come close to Task Force Sixty for two reasons: jumps take time, and we’ll be long gone, and even if he did manage to catch up with us… our jump cannons would blow his ships apart before they even emerged from the Flow. We have time to plan, so our next jump won’t be wasted like this one. Give our guests an armed escort to the brig. Shoot them if they try anything else.”

  The call terminated, and Sisson wrinkled his nose. He looked at Boots apologetically before drawing his sidearm. A few others gathered at his side, similarly armed.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to relieve you of your weapons.”

  Boots wasn’t satisfied with the admiral’s assurances. Witts had tipped his hand the second Kin activated. He would’ve known Task Force Sixty would go on high alert and jump away. That also meant he’d lose his valuable sleeper agent on board the Capricious, a high cost for an impotent move.

  But what if he didn’t have to use a jump drive to get around? It took time for a ship to travel through the Flow, but a teleportation spell was instantaneous. Task Force Sixty would take a few days to arrive at its next destination, but with enough juice behind her, Harriet Fulsom could move Bastion in the blink of an eye.

  What if the day Cordell feared most had finally come, and all the Gods of the Harrow had focused their attention on their tiny starship?

  The klaxons sounded once more as warning flashers popped out of every wall. The admiral’s voice boomed from every loudspeaker:

  “Battle stations! Battle stations! All hands man your battle stations. Stand by for combat gravity.”

  Chapter Eight

  Bastion

  The intel offices swirled into a burst of activity as every workstation went into targeting mode. Projections appeared from all angles, and each member of the intel group dropped backward into a datamancy throne, ready to relay reports from across the galaxy.

  Combat handholds ejected from the walls as gravity diminished to less than one-sixth of normal. Non-intel personnel began making superhuman leaps to race for their stations. Fire kits and first-aid stations flipped out from hidden recesses, ready to serve the crew in the event of catastrophic damage. Courier bots emerged, pincered arms eager to accept data cubes and take them to ready rooms across the ship.

  Boots jumped out of the way as one of them raced underfoot, almost breaking her ankle.

  “It’s your lucky day. No time to arrest you now. If you’re not combat trained, get out of the way,” said Sisson, pulling a set of sims together and hooking their models across a tangle of data. “Courier bots don’t move for you—you move for them.”

  A sure-footed fellow, a lieutenant commander, emerged onto the bullpen balcony above Boots and Cordell, hair cropped close and black boots shining. “What have we got?” he shouted to all assembled.

  “Single unidentified craft!” responded one of the intel people in the back. “Looks like Bastion.”

  “Why didn’t the jump guns take it out?” asked the man.

  “It just appeared, sir!” The officer at the scanner station struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. “No jump strobe.”

  “It’s teleportation,” Boots said to Cordell.

  A projection appeared in the air above everyone’s heads: a tremendous, bright white hull, its spokes swept backward like a falling star. Two of the spokes were unfinished, skeletal to the hilt with metal struts and glowing components jutting out at odd angles. Its central mass was at least as large as the Ambrosini, etched with thousands of arcane conduits. Glittering drones rotated around the rear-swept points of the star, and Boots understood exactly what they were for: casting glyphs the size of a PGRF racetrack. It was a repeat of the Winnower Fleet design and the Harrow, but much more advanced.

  “We’re hailing them,” the nearest starfarer called across the bullpen.

  “Let’s hear it,” said the lieutenant commander.

  A chime filled the intel group. “This is Rear Admiral Amanda Bishop of the Taitutian National Service Ambrosini. You have approached within attack distance of our vessel, and will disarm and prepare for boarding—or be in violation of GATO treaties. Any attempt to resist will be construed as an act of war, and we will show no mercy.”

  Boots watched in awe as wings of fighters erupted from Task Force Sixty like angry bees from a hive, streaking across the projection. Reports came flooding into the central aggregator from the dozen intel personnel. The new information merged with the projection, identifying possible weak spots, hard defense points, theoretical weapons capabilities, and more.

  Boots looked to Cordell to find his worried eyes on the massive craft in their midst.

  “Let’s hope this son of a gun just made the last mistake of his life,” he muttered.

  “He doesn’t make mistakes,” Boots replied.

  “Ambrosini, this is Grand Admiral Henrick Witts, of the space station Bastion. You’re a striker fleet, but today, you have a humanitarian mission—save the thousands of lives on board your vessels by surrendering those ships to me.”

  The lieutenant commander on the balcony above Boots laughed. “This ought to be a good show, folks. Tell the bridge we’ve identified eighty-six structural weak points, and we’re dispersing the runners now.”

  Caution lights illuminated various floor tiles, and crew members jumped out of the way for courier bots. The intel group couldn’t radio the classified information for fear of being intercepted, but the runners rocketed to their destinations.

  “Do we know who’s on the ship?” said the commander.

  “Not yet, sir!” came an answer from the bullpen. “Working on it.”

  “Let’s assume the worst, then: Witts and his whole crew. Get me the list of active Gods of the Harrow and their spells,” said the lead officer. “Drop them on the aggregator so everyone has this at their fingertips.”

  Six
faces emerged from the aether: Captain Harriet Fulsom—porter; Captain Chul Jeon—mechanist; Captain Ota Novak—trickster; Captain Nsia Owusu—conjurer; Captain Zinerva Slatkin—conductor; Admiral Henrick Witts—usurer. Boots knew the last one to be wrong. She wasn’t sure what Witts was after his sojourn to the Vogelstrand, but he wasn’t a simple ship’s doctor anymore.

  She was about to tell them so when Bastion’s drones began spinning about its points, drawing a glyph. The aggregator identified it as the conjurer’s mark. Intel stations barked out stats on the glyph, relaying them to the rest of the crew.

  “We’ve got a match with admiralty records, sir!” Sisson called up to the lieutenant commander. “That’s Captain Nsia Owusu’s glyph.”

  The commanding officer opened his mouth to speak but stopped dead when he saw the massive, spiky asteroid emerge from empty space before the fleet. Once more, the drones of Bastion spun, this time painting the conductor’s mark on open space—they planned to shove the huge rock at the Ambrosini.

  “All hands brace for evasive maneuvers!” came a voice over the intercom, and Boots and Cordell grabbed on to the nearest combat grav handholds.

  The projectile came hurtling toward the fleet’s center mass at a devastating speed. Destroyers crackled with pink energies as they spun their jump drives for a flash maneuver. The Ambrosini, being at the edge of the formation, went full burn, its rocket rumble filling the hull with a deafening roar. Boots’s guts stretched uncomfortably as the gravity drive accordioned to keep up with the sudden inertial demand.

  And once more, Bastion began to cast.

  The light of the trickster’s mark filled the projection—a spell that enabled the caster to redirect and smear magical energies at their whim.

  Hijacked by godly magic, the first destroyer to jump leapt directly into the path of the spiky asteroid. Its silver hull burst like a water balloon against the surface, spilling globes of fire and wild magic across the rock face.

  “The Grey Dawn is down!”

  “We won’t get clear in time! Incoming!”

  “Impact in five seconds!”

  “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  Gritting her teeth, Boots threaded her metal arm through the handhold and grabbed on to Cordell’s leather captain’s jacket, bunching it in her regraded steel fingers. They locked eyes, and he gave her a desperate look. Task Force Sixty didn’t stand a chance.

  The room took a sharp left turn as the spiked asteroid slammed into the back of the Ambrosini.

  The force of the blow nearly took Boots’s arm from its socket, but she held Cordell tight to the handhold. Anyone not strapped down went flying into the far wall, battered against furniture, consoles, and debris—bones snapped, joints reversed, and heads bashed.

  Sisson wasn’t at his station anymore. The lieutenant commander was a crumpled heap against the mezzanine bulkhead. Casualties ship-wide would be traumatic—they wouldn’t be fighting any time soon, if at all. The projection overhead chopped and fizzled, and in it, Boots saw the Ambrosini spinning lazily in the wake of the asteroid’s passing, its primary thrusters sheared from their mounts. Despite the advanced gravity drive, they couldn’t compensate for the hit. Had Nilah and the others lived through the blow?

  “B-Boots,” Cordell coughed, and she let him go, realizing she’d been choking him by the collar. If his jacket hadn’t been leather, it would’ve torn right off him.

  “All sections, damage report—” came the voice of the bridge.

  No responses were forthcoming.

  “Witts’s whole gang is here, Captain,” Boots said, straightening up against the nearby console. “We’ve got to go.”

  He gave her a pained look, massaging his neck. “I’m all ears, but the jump drive is offline. Even if it wasn’t, how the hell do we get past that trickster’s mark?”

  Boots surveyed the decimated intel division—the remaining officers picking themselves up in a daze—and plucked the Athana data crystal from its contacts. This entire fleet was about to be captured, and she’d be damned if she let the link to humanity’s most classified archive fall into enemy hands. She jammed the Mostafa Journal into one jacket pocket and the Athana into the other.

  “We fought through the trash bubble outside Clarkesfall for five years, Captain,” she said. “We can get out of this. Now let’s go.”

  Chaos dominated the corridors beyond—fires, bodies, and debris littered the hallways.

  They reached a wide thoroughfare, and a half dozen vehicles went thundering past, bound for damage control on basically everything. Water streamed into the hall, covering the decks in an ankle-deep river. The initial hit must’ve ruptured the vessel’s valuable reservoir. Dozens of personnel lay unconscious, many of them facedown throughout the ship. Every minute medical help was delayed, more starfarers were going to die from drowning.

  “—nyone?” came a weak signal over Boots’s comm. “Come in.”

  Thank god. Orna.

  Cordell stopped and said, “Sokol, is that you? What’s your status?”

  “The jamming stopped,” she huffed. “Comms are open. Missus Jan and I heard the brace warning and jumped in the crash couches. Hurt like hell, though.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “I’ve got Boots here. We’re alive. No major damage. How’s my big boy?”

  “No major damage to the Capricious. The docking clamps are sheared off and he’s sitting on his belly, though. One more hit like that, and he’ll be smashed. Jump drive is down—the control board is fried.” Then, a pause. “If I have to boot up the ship, I’ll need to destroy Kin. I’m sorry, Boots.”

  A needle of ice pierced her heart, and Boots replied weakly, “Don’t. Please, if you can save him…”

  “I’ll try. Have you heard from Hunter Two?” asked Orna. “She’s not responding on comms.”

  “Not yet,” said Cordell, pulling out his slinger and checking the mag. “They haven’t finished us off, so expect boarders while they take out the other destroyers. They’re going to want to loot what they can from the Ambrosini—ciphers, plans, and so on. Probably want the tech for those jump guns, too.”

  “That has to be what this is about. They didn’t bring Bastion for just us.” Boots drew her own slinger, loaded up with flame rounds. She nodded to Cordell, and they slogged through the corridor. “Orna, we’re trying to link up with the other crew. Can you locate Hunter Two from the ship?”

  Orna drew in a sharp breath. “Hell no! I’m going to find her, myself.”

  “Listen, Sokol,” said Cordell. “Boots is right. You can’t be in two places at once. You and Missus Jan prep to launch. We can’t stay on this vessel, and you’re the only one who can get us ready to split.”

  “Cap, no! She might be dying, and you can’t ask me to—”

  “Did you just say ‘no’ to me, Miss Sokol?” Cordell’s voice sent a shiver up Boots’s spine. Despite their desperate circumstances, he took the time to enunciate every word.

  “Sorry, sir, I—”

  “Do as I say or we all die. Waste my time again in a life-or-death situation, and I’ll teach you what it means to be sorry.”

  Only the gush of waterfalls from fractured pipes filled Boots’s ears for the long silence.

  “Acknowledged,” came Orna’s reply, then a buzz as the call terminated.

  Boots surveyed the thoroughfare for their location. They were a few decks below the docking bay and half a ship away. She spied an overturned tram cart near a stack of toppled transit cases, its wheels still spinning. She sloshed over to it and began trying to push it back onto its base.

  “Move,” said Cordell, frustration tinting his voice. He traced out his glyph, and a blue shield coalesced in front of him. He held up his palm, and his magic bashed the side of the cart, flipping it over.

  A waterlogged soldier lay strapped to the driver’s seat, his neck twisted at an awkward angle from where the vehicle had landed on him. Together, they unbuckled him and dragged him clear before hopping on.
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  “They better not take out gravity,” Boots grumbled, making a three-point turn. “I’m not down to drown in midair.”

  “Just drive.”

  They splashed along the corridor, past wreckage, weaving around bodies and desperate medical crews. A long klaxon sounded out, followed by three short whistles.

  “All hands, all hands, this is acting Commander Hutchton. The admiral is dead. Abandon ship. I repeat. All hands abandon ship.”

  “At least they’re showing some damned sense,” said Cordell as Boots veered around a downed loading mech. “Should’ve jumped instead of using thrusters.”

  Boots nodded. “You saw how well that worked out for that destroyer, sir. You always said there was no room for regret on the battlefield.”

  “And so I did.”

  A flash lit the junction behind them. Boots craned her aching neck to see a trio of tan battle armors with heavy slingers teleport onto the scene. Without a second’s pause, they started mowing down any soldiers slow enough to catch. One of them spun and leveled its slinger toward the cart.

  Boots swerved, barely avoiding a discus round. “Crap!”

  “Drive!” Cordell scratched out his glyph and leapt onto the flatbed, a shield appearing between them and a volley of fire. He batted aside two white discs, each of them notching his shield as they passed. He could redirect a discus, but he’d never stop one.

  Boots skidded around the next turn, splashing a wave of gray water in her wake. She glanced over her shoulder to see them loping after her in hot pursuit. If this was Witts’s new combat force, he’d been inspired by Orna. The bots scrabbled for her, leaping onto the wall to take the corner at full speed.

  Cordell knocked away another stray round. “Floor it, goddamn it!”

  Boots pressed the pedal harder, willing it to pass through the floorboard and into higher revs, but it was an industrial vehicle with a speed limiter. The armors gained on her with each merciless second. Up ahead, the passageway widened out into the ship’s central atrium, a duraplast railing standing between them and a long fall.