The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  She glanced back at Cordell. “Captain, you can survive any fall, right?”

  “What?” His eyes went wide. “Oh.”

  She clenched her jaw as they barreled toward the balcony’s edge. “Hope you can catch me.”

  Boots noticed three things as they slammed into the railing: one, the ship’s atrium had turned into a full-blown slugfest, with slinger rounds streaking everywhere; two, tan battle armors skittered across the walls like hordes of spiders; three, the duraplast railing was a lot stronger than she thought it would be.

  The cart came to a stop. Boots and Cordell didn’t.

  Thousands of running lights pitched in her view as she tumbled forward over the steering wheel and into the wide-open space of the atrium. Her pilot’s instincts told her which way was up in the nauseating fall, for all the good it would do without thrusters. Cordell grabbed her, wrapped her in a one-handed embrace, and they went flailing. Blue light blinded her. Then came the jarring halt and a metallic crash.

  They rolled to a stop atop a crushed suit of tan armor, its chest cavity collapsed and leaking blood—whoever had made these hadn’t hardened them as much as Charger. Its claws twitched at its sides, and Boots scooted off it, ready to bolt if whoever was inside wasn’t dead. Water poured down around her ears, and she cast about, trying to orient herself in the flood. Two more suits spun to face them, their slingers loaded for bear, and Cordell rolled to his feet, pummeling them both with his shield to knock them back.

  “Run!” he shouted, grabbing the stunned Boots and yanking her through a curtain of water as slinger bolts sizzled past.

  The bots gave chase, and on foot, Boots and Cordell didn’t stand a chance. Metallic claws wrapped around Boots’s neck, and she gasped as the monstrous armor shoved them both into the flooded deck. Water filled her airway, gagging her. The bot manhandled her onto her back, bright lights blinding her as she spluttered.

  “Thought that might be the case. Got a positive ID on Boots Elsworth,” came a voice through a tinny speaker in the chest. “Is that Lamarr?”

  Beside her, the other bot planted a metal foot on Cordell’s chest, and he cried out in pain. The battle armor lowered its slinger to his face, the round charging with a high-pitched whine. “Yeah. Not for long, though.”

  Cordell shouted into the barrel of the slinger with everything left in his lungs, bracing for the end. A streak of red smashed into the pair of suits like a bloody cyclone, ripping and rending, blasting their chest plates with its slinger—and Boots recognized the outline of Charger. Before she could speak, it grabbed her and Cordell by their collars, yanking them into a nearby maintenance access hatch.

  Her elbow ached, and she looked down to find a huge, fibrous scrape on the side of her Rook Velocity mechanic’s jacket. Raw anger shot through her. “That guy out there scuffed my elbow, Orna. Kill him again for me.”

  Charger knelt down, placing a finger to where its mouth should’ve been.

  “Shut it, Boots,” Cordell growled. “Damn it, Sokol. I told you to wait on the ship.”

  The armor’s chest popped open to reveal an empty pilot’s seat.

  “H-homed in,” Orna huffed, “on your comms. See? Can… be in two places… at once.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Boots. “Why are you talking like that?”

  “Hacked Teacup. Found Ni-Nilah’s circlet data source. Piloting. Think brig,” said Orna. “Repairing jump drive. P-piloting Charger… T-takes brain, uh…”

  “Power?” Boots completed the sentence, and Charger nodded.

  The armor stood, its chest cavity still hanging open. “Yeah. Hard… because… Teacup is trash.”

  “You know where Nilah is?”

  “Homed on circlet,” said Orna. “Like comms. Brig, maybe. Found twins and Malik, too. Still alive, headed to me. Take over Charger?”

  Cordell gave Boots a worried glance. “Orna Sokol wants one of us in her battle armor? Something ain’t right.”

  “D-damn it, Cap! Trying to mount a rescue here! Moving him to local control.” Charger’s lenses went green. Without the burden of operating two bots, as well as repairs, Orna spoke much more clearly. “I don’t want this any more than you, Boots, but everyone comes home today. I’ll get over it.”

  They exchanged glances, and Cordell said, “You should jump in. I’ve got magic to protect myself. Without the Midnight Runner, you’re considerably squishier.”

  It sucked when he put it like that, but there was no time to split hairs. She stepped up onto Charger’s leg stirrups, clumsily turning around so she could put her back against the cushion. The armor snapped closed around her, shoving her paunch into her diaphragm.

  “This isn’t made for women my size,” Boots wheezed as the articulating rings slithered around her fingers. Imager feeds painted the screens in front of her face, rendering the world in hyper-colorful tones.

  “Quit whining,” said Orna. “You’re about to have the ride of your life.”

  “Charger is now under your control!” came the cheerful voice of a young boy. Boots had never asked about it. She didn’t want to know. “Here to help, Boots!”

  Cordell waved his hand in front of Charger’s lenses, rendered for Boots in distressing detail—there was almost too much to take in. Every sensor fed into projections before her eyes, creating a full field of view that was somehow realer than real. She’d heard Nilah speak about syncing with Charger with a starry gaze. Now that Boots was inside the great metal beast, she could see why. If only she had magic of her own, so she could’ve felt everything a mechanist would’ve.

  She examined her metallic talons, impressed with their dexterity. “Can I still move him around okay without your headband?”

  “It’s a circlet.” Orna’s voice was much clearer through Charger’s top-of-the-line sound system. “And yes. You just don’t get any of the advanced stuff.”

  “What’s the advanced stuff?” asked Boots, and about two thousand lines of text filled her HUD.

  “Charger has functions!” said Charger.

  “Uh, yeah, no,” said Boots. “I’m going to get killed in this thing. Can’t I have Teacup? You called it basic.”

  One of the tan battle armors came sweeping around the corner of the corridor, both barrels hot. Without Boots’s foreknowledge, understanding, or even consent, Charger whipped the slinger from its back and sawed the thing in half with a stream of hot magic bolts. It’d moved her so fluidly that Boots was half-convinced she’d developed superhuman reflexes and shot the armor herself.

  “Yes, Teacup is basic,” said Orna. “As in, it doesn’t have joint angle safeties, so if you’re not a mechanist, you might roll your elbow backward or yank your leg out of socket. Only Nilah can handle her.”

  Boots imagined spinning her own head from her shoulders and agreed with Orna’s assessment.

  Having blown their location, they rushed up the hallway and into a side room—a storage closet, by the looks of the stacked duraplast crates. Cordell locked the door, and they turned off the lights. Charger’s lenses automatically compensated for Boots, adjusting her surroundings to be bright as a sunny day.

  “Just point your slinger at anyone you want dead and pull the trigger,” said Orna. “Charger will handle recoil comp and targeting. I’ve tracked Sleepy’s comms to a briefing room two decks up, aft side. They’re pinned down, and they could use your assistance.”

  “Charger knows how to find them!” came the boy’s voice.

  A waypoint appeared in Boots’s vision, just over a hundred meters out. A stripe of glowing paint appeared in Boots’s overlay, leading the way.

  “Stick to the side halls and the shadows,” said Cordell.

  “For that, use Charger’s stealth mode,” said Orna. “If you have to kill someone, get close and let his talons do the rest. If you must shoot someone, you know what to do.”

  “So we’ll fetch Mister Jan and the Ferriers,” said Cordell. “That just leaves Nilah.”

  “I’m piloting Teacu
p to her, but there’s a lot of structural interference,” said Orna. “And this AI is heavy on the ‘artificial’ and light on the ‘intelligence.’”

  Cordell nodded. “Once you get Teacup to her, you get the Capricious back online.”

  “It’ll take me some time to untangle Kin without hurting him,” said Orna.

  “You have until we reach the ship.” Cordell gave Boots a sympathetic look. “Then I want those engines hot.”

  “Don’t scratch my paint, Boots,” said Orna.

  Stretching her legs, Boots pulled Charger up to its full height, taller than she had ever been before. She found herself looking down on Cordell and spied a bald spot in the dead center of his scalp; she hadn’t ever noticed it when she was shorter than him. The captain looked up at her with something like worry.

  “Just leave it to us,” said Boots, flexing Charger’s claws and drawing out its slinger. She’d never felt more badass in her life. “We’ll bring the others back in one piece.”

  Then she marched straight for the door and into a wall with a loud bang.

  “What was that?” asked Orna.

  “Explosions,” lied Boots. “Lot of fire down here.”

  “Do not get blown up,” said Orna.

  “Count on me,” she replied, and when she walked for the door once more, she involuntarily ducked, slipping through without incident.

  “Charger is helping!” said the robot.

  When Boots tried to walk down the hallway, Charger sank low, forcing her legs to make unnaturally soft movements.

  Upon approaching the nearest intersection, a pair of battle armors rounded the corner, slingers at the ready. Boots raised her weapon, but when she clicked the trigger, Charger bolted forward.

  “Oh, no.”

  Charger sunk low before racing across the ground and leaping up onto the wall in a graceful corkscrew. It came down blasting away at the chest plate of the nearest attacker before rushing the remaining bot, using the first’s body as a shield. Closing the distance, it ripped off the armor’s toffee-colored head before sinking a claw through its chest. Boots drew back her arm, which dripped with gore, and examined it in horror.

  “Charger is helping!” repeated the bot, and Boots whimpered.

  “What was wrong with using the slinger?” asked Boots, dazed from her assault.

  “PAK levels too low,” said the chipper bot. “Charger needed to get creative.”

  “‘PAK’?” Boots repeated.

  “Probability All Kill.”

  Her hips burned and her shoulders ached; she’d be a wreck in the morning, provided she survived. “What. Is. Happening?”

  “It’s easy mode,” said Orna. “You get to make the decisions, but Charger won’t be relying on you in combat. Keeps things simple.”

  “Are you at least going to let me shoot?”

  Orna laughed. “God, no. You’ll hit a friendly. Now stay off my comm. I’ve got to murder some people with this trash my girl built, and I need to concentrate.”

  “Nice work, Bootsie,” said Cordell, gently patting Charger’s back with a clank. “You’re a natural.”

  They crept along passageways, following Orna’s illuminated path until they reached a set of elevator shafts with sealed doors. Boots easily pried them open.

  “Says we’re supposed to climb up,” she said, leaning in to examine the illuminated pathway projected onto her HUD. It ran up the wall with a couple of nauseating circles emblazoned with the words JUMP POINT.

  Boots remembered riding on the bot’s back while it jumped through the buildings of Mercandatta Station, and how she’d managed to throw up all over its exterior. Orna would certainly gut her if she did the same to the interior.

  Torrential rain fell through the shaft from the ruptured water tanks above, and Boots watched it splash into a deep pool before her. That couldn’t be right. The shaft below would only be full of water if the lower decks were entirely flooded.

  Then she remembered: that’s where the brig was, and Nilah. What if she was trapped but not drowned? What if every second counted, and Charger was the closest aid? It would survive the water—those pressurized seals worked in space, so a small lake was nothing.

  As if sensing her quandary, Cordell climbed up onto her back. “We’ve got to get a move on, Bootsie. Orna said she’d rescue Nilah. You really think you’ll do a better job?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I know I am,” said Cordell. “Now let’s get out of here before more of those bots show up.”

  Nilah awoke in a daze, head throbbing and joints on fire. There had been klaxons, a warning to brace, and… something. She couldn’t quite remember. One minute, she’d been gazing out of the prison shield, and the next, she was on the ground with what felt like a knife in her eyes.

  She smelled singed hair, and her face was a little cooked. Picking herself up with eyes screwed shut, she realized she’d been thrown against the hot energy shield. The barriers were designed to absorb all sorts of kinetic attacks, so it must’ve caught her and pitched her back against the cell wall.

  She shook her head and forced her eyes open. There was something wrong with her cell barrier; the magic was milky and blurred. She couldn’t make out any details beyond. Then, she saw the bubbles. Water boiled outside her cell, a layer of steam striking the energy field as it tried to get inside. Convection currents brought the silhouette of a drowned guard sweeping up the front of the shield before the corpse disappeared into the depths beyond.

  She took a few teetering steps backward. “What the bloody…”

  She called out for help, her voice weak from the hit, but who would hear her? If the brig outside was flooded, no one would be listening. There were imagers in her cell, but they were probably monitored by the nearby guard station. It was hard to imagine those people would be dry in all this.

  Nilah shook her head to clear away the stars. She crept closer to the shield, trying to peer through the arcing energy field, but she couldn’t make out much. The containment was wearing thin in places, but it still held fast—for now.

  For the second time in her life, she needed to hack her way out of a starship brig. When she’d tried it on the Capricious, it’d shocked the piss out of her, but she’d experienced a lot of military systems since then. She only prayed she could be more delicate about it this time; after the first hit against the side of the cell, she wasn’t sure she’d survive a good zapping. Hopefully, the water had taken out the dispersers.

  Tracing her mechanist’s glyph, she placed her hand against the wall beside the shield, feeling for a connection to any of the underlying circuitry. A tendril of her spell snagged on a single chip, and she wound inside to search for any openings.

  Instead of trying to dismantle the system, she searched out its other connections in the hopes that it wouldn’t react. She found a two-way data connection used for reporting cell status and rode it to a central repository. A defense program gently prodded at her, trying to ascertain her purpose, but didn’t attack.

  “Easy, now. Let’s see what you’re guarding.”

  The repository brimmed with ship alerts, including a flood warning. The primary reservoir had cracked, dumping a lake down through the Ambrosini, flooding all the lower decks. She was able to find a map and located herself at the very bottom.

  And that was game. If she popped her force field, the water would crush her unprotected body instantly.

  “Damn it.”

  She searched through the other data feeds, looking for anything to help her, but only found cells filled with dead or dying prisoners. She managed to catch a stray message across the feed, broadcasting from the alerts server.

  >>UNDER ATTACK BY BASTION

  >>ALL LOST

  >>HOSTILES DESTROYING RETREATING SHIPS

  >>NEED EVAC SUPPORT

  >>REQUESTING FLEET INTERVENTION

  >>CURRENT LOCATION: [VIEW GALTAG]

  >>AWAITING ACKNOWLEDGMENT [ATTEMPT: 62]

  Th
e water, the damage, the death—there were ten thousand souls on the Ambrosini. The rest of the armada would be worse.

  “No…”

  That meant she was probably alone down there, maybe on the whole ship. What if they’d killed everyone and left her to slowly suffocate inside a derelict hulk? This section was flooded, after all—there would be no survivors. The capital ship suddenly felt like a very large coffin. No help; just empty space and failing life support.

  The message repeated ten seconds later with a sixty-three. Nilah timed it and did the math. They must’ve been under attack for about ten minutes—a lifetime in combat, but not enough time to clean up the stragglers. Was Orna alive out there?

  The defense program came snaking after her, and Nilah retreated, throwing up blocks of nonsense code for it to devour. The program grew bloated, and when it was stretched thin, she sliced it open. She’d always had the most finesse when she was furious, and she was getting quite good at hacking.

  When she returned to the cell feeds, she found a system beginning to fail. Eidolon cores were shorting out in the shields. A mad rush of air issued from the cell beside hers as it collapsed. Someone had been in that room—probably a broken corpse, but what if they’d still been alive? Could she have saved them?

  Everyone here is dead. Get it together and think.

  The shield magic on her cell, ordinarily stiff and brittle, had gone rubbery with the failing power. It bulged in places where it was weak, swelling into polyps across its surface. The water pressure was making little balloons in the shield—except some of them were getting as big as Nilah, resting on the ground like tumors as water furiously boiled inside them.

  It’s like the captain always says. One problem at a time.

  Which made even more sense when the only problem was Nilah Brio is going to die in under thirty seconds if she doesn’t fix this.

  She pressed a hand to one of the polyps, thinking maybe she could push it back through, and the shield shocked her in return. Even failing, the field was powerful.