The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  Nilah tromped out over the broken shale bed of an unregistered world with billions of argents’ worth of atmospheric processing and unclaimed land. Teacup’s scanners returned a beautiful environment, teeming with life, its atmosphere in perfect balance. This precious world was fallow ground for human civilization, yet no soul inhabited the place.

  Probably because somewhere beneath its surface, it held a derelict ship, a rogue AI, and countless horrors.

  “Do you think the Vogelstrand AI is, you know, functioning?” Nilah radioed back to the ship.

  “You’ll have to ask it when you get there,” said Cordell. “We netted up?”

  “Yeah, Boss.”

  “One dead ship at a time, then. To the Rangan.”

  Cool, misty rain condensed on Teacup’s carapace, forming rivulets along her armor. They commenced their long hike out of the canyon, with Charger and Teacup bounding ahead to secure grappling lines. Within a few minutes, it’d begun to storm in earnest, and Nilah looked down to watch a waterline rise up around the Capricious’s landing skids with some trepidation.

  “Maybe we should’ve parked on a higher level, loves,” she said.

  “Charger doesn’t think it’s a problem,” said Orna. “And between your eyeballing it, and his laser-scattered volumetric analysis, I feel like he has a point.”

  Nilah hadn’t even begun to replicate Charger’s more advanced systems, like combat estimation. A battle armor pilot had a lot of need for analytical tools to calculate everything from jump height to blast radius. A good bot could save its passenger from hundreds of lethal errors, and she’d only gotten Teacup to walk and jump correctly.

  Most of the crew handled the steep climb out of the canyon with aplomb. Malik and Aisha were naturals. Jeannie and Alister were also quick up the ropes; they must’ve had some infiltration training at the chalet. Orna led the effort in Charger, scarcely taxed at all with the aid of her servos. Teacup, though less steady on its feet, kept up the rear in case of problems—which turned out to be Boots and Cordell.

  She clambered down the rocks, talons clinking all the while, to come between the pair. “We doing okay here, loves?”

  “Hey,” huffed Boots. “We’re good.”

  “Yeah, I’m done with this,” said Cordell. “Let me just ride on your back.”

  Nilah recoiled at the indignity, surprised at how much the notion offended her. Here, she had a precision vehicle of the highest caliber, and he wanted to ride it. “Sir, this pathing module is new to me, and I don’t know if it’ll be stable enough to—”

  “Ha!” Orna barked over the comm. “How does it feel, huh? Get ready, because everyone is going to be asking for rides from now on. Cap, don’t listen; she can hold you and Boots just fine.”

  “Traitor,” Nilah said.

  Boots and Cordell lashed their harnesses to Teacup’s utility mounts, and they scaled the rock face in a jangling, clumsy clump. Charger paused every five seconds to look down at them, and Nilah had to endure an endless cycle of soft laughter.

  They crested the canyon wall to find the battered Rangan lying before them in two pieces. His hull had been pulled up in the middle by the trunk of a giant tree.

  “That’s one way to stop a ship from taking off,” grunted Cordell as Nilah helped him over the last set of boulders. Then he hacked up a huge wad of phlegm and spit it into the canyon.

  “Told you to quit smoking, Captain,” said Boots, setting down her pack and pulling out a canteen.

  “I think I’ll quit climbing,” he replied through a scowl.

  From the top of the canyon, Nilah looked across the rolling landscape. Green hills, salted with yellow hay, undulated beneath a roiling sky. A black forest of evergreens ringed the expansive meadow, their bristled trunks like jagged teeth.

  “Come on,” said Cordell, putting his hands on his hips and stretching. “I want to see this ship firsthand.”

  When they drew close, they found a fractured exterior, covered with blessedly mundane ivy. Nilah had been dreading seeing the fleshy pink plants since watching the videos of Witts’s apotheosis. Puffy weeds sprouted around the ship’s base like shocks of blond hair. Thick, soft moss and clover crept along the ground.

  “What’s with the tree?” asked Nilah.

  “Could be a botanist’s mark,” said Boots. “Enough juice could grow a tree like that in a few minutes, and it would absolutely demolish a ship.”

  The Rangan was smaller than she had expected, though long. Her scanner readouts shape-matched it to a long-range expeditionary vessel, but the compositional reflections were all wrong. Its construction material was far too brittle to be a starship.

  There had only been ten or so crew in the videos, but maybe Witts had slaughtered others on board. Perhaps there had been medical staff, logistics, navigation…

  She imagined the people on the Rangan waiting for their friends to return, only to find a monster at their doorstep. Mostafa’s terrified, distorted bones flashed through her mind.

  “Captain!” called Orna, her voice amplified by Charger.

  They gathered around Charger, which stood directly beside the broken hull. At this range, Nilah spied lichen and mildew settling into any imperfections in the surface. The orange stripe of paint they’d seen from the air was little more than a chipped array of duraplast tiles.

  “What’s going on, Miss Sokol?” asked Cordell.

  “I thought I’d see if the ship had any systems online,” she said, “so I tried connecting to it.”

  “And?”

  Charger nodded to Nilah. “I think I’d like Hunter Two to confirm, because this is going to sound pretty weird.”

  Nilah popped her cockpit and stepped down, slipping off her glove. Her palm interface worked as well as Orna’s, but skin contact was always her preference. She traced her mechanist’s glyph, placed it to the hull, and was surprised to find there was nothing inside. A normal derelict ship, even one that had been rotting away for years with no power, should’ve had some kind of response. She should’ve felt its mechanical bits rising to meet her magic, or even the milling pattern of the screws. A skilled mechanist could open an unpowered lock or jump-start a steam engine, but the Rangan felt like placing her hand against—

  “Stone,” she said, looking up at Charger. “The entire ship has turned to stone.”

  “How sure can you be?” asked Boots. “Maybe the hull is stone, but deep down…”

  Nilah shook her head. “That’s not how mechanism works. With a ship of this size, we can feel its presence, even if we can’t hack it. There’s usually a lot of tech in there, and it all sort of… perks up for us.”

  “Machines, uh, ‘appreciate’ us,” said Orna. “There aren’t any machines in here, or they’d say hi.”

  Charger banged the side of the hull, and instead of hearing the hollow thump of regraded steel, there came the chunk chunk of a boulder.

  “Okay,” said Boots. “Then we’re looking at a couple of options. First and most likely, this isn’t the real Rangan, but a statue of some kind.”

  “Option two: Witts used some godlike powers and turned his ship into stone,” said Malik. “It’s not that much less likely.”

  “How did he leave?” asked Nilah.

  “Second ship, maybe? Come on,” said Cordell. “Let’s circle the perimeter and see what we can see.”

  They walked in single file behind Charger and Teacup, their lenses sweeping the ground for traps. It would hardly be surprising, since they found so many defenses at Alpha, Witts’s abandoned base in the Wartenberg Mining Colony.

  “It’s option two,” said Nilah, watching Teacup sample the air around a flower for toxins. “Malik is right.”

  Boots wiped a bit of sweat from her brow. “How do you figure?”

  “This is Witts’s style—he kills any coconspirators that aren’t useful,” said Nilah. “They murdered all of those people in the ice at Alpha, and again on the Harrow. Witts probably used the crew of the Rangan to find this pla
ce and break in, then killed them and had someone else give him a ride home.”

  “Why would anyone work with a guy who always kills his partners?” asked Cordell.

  “They don’t know about the other cover-ups, Cap,” said Orna. “That’s what a cover-up is.”

  Boots pursed her lips. “But he couldn’t sweep his existence under the rug after we exposed the Harrow.”

  “He’s hit critical mass,” said Nilah. “No need to keep silencing people if they’re going to do his bidding in spite of the evidence against him.”

  They reached the break in the ship’s hull where the old tree grew, each of its branches taller than the Capricious. Its knotted trunk was at least eight meters across, armored with long strips of bark. A bed of brown nettles covered the earth, silencing their steps.

  Nilah pressed a hand to the trunk, feeling the fibrous bark. “What kind of tree is this?”

  “It’s a cedar,” said Boots. “Supposed to be extinct. One of the species that never made it out of Origin.”

  Instead of an open cross section of the Rangan at the break, they found cleft walls, like a boulder split open. Broken bits of rock had tumbled from the wound to create a small embankment, and Nilah clambered up it to see if she could feel anything within the ship. There was nothing but solid rock, as far as she could tell. If the vessel had been transmuted to stone, it would’ve taken incredible power, probably more than she’d seen from Witts in the Mostafa Journal. He was potent, but the glyphs she’d seen simply didn’t have the bandwidth for that sort of effect.

  With an amp, that could’ve been achieved—more evidence that a second ship had come for Witts.

  “Hey!” called Jeannie. “Come here!”

  They raced around the other side of the tree, hurdling the high roots to get to their comrade. Nilah found her standing back from the tree, her eyes fixed upon some target two meters up. She turned, and it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.

  The wood had grown into dozens of knots, or that’s what it looked like at first. The touch of a sculptor became more apparent the longer she stared. Her mind resolved the shapes of torsos, legs, arms… faces. The figuration was raw, unadorned by any serious detail, but Nilah could make out Captain Song, Klose, a few others… and Mostafa. The statues held in their hands thick cords of vines, as though they’d been bound to the tree. At their feet, someone had inlaid a plaque, like a historical marker.

  HERE IS THE SOCIETY OF THE SILVER COIN,

  BLINDED BY MOONLIGHT, MADLY IN LOVE.

  IN MY GOLDEN WANING DAYS,

  THEY WERE A BALM,

  THEY LISTENED TO ME.

  IF I AM TO SUCCEED, THEY MUST BE REMEMBERED.

  WHEN HUMAN LIGHTS STILL BURN, THEY LIT THEM.

  THERE IS SUCH A THING AS TOO PURE,

  TOO PERFECT OF HEART,

  TO DO WHAT I MUST DO.

  THIS DAY, I LAID THEM TO REST IN THE MISTS,

  THEIR GRAVE MARKER A TREE THEY CANNOT SEE,

  A SHIP THEY CANNOT FLY.

  THEIR TRUE CREDIT WAS FAITH,

  AND THEIR SOJOURNS ARE FINISHED.

  —HENRICK WITTS, 2791

  “That’s over a hundred years ago,” said Alister.

  “Looks that way, too,” said Jeannie, peeling off a lichen from a nearby root.

  “Here’s my theory,” said Malik, leaning in to inspect the grotesque tree trunk more closely. “The Rangan touched down, Witts and company took the shard from the Vogelstrand, and then he killed them. His new friends arrived to pick him up, and he used their ship amps to test his new powers by creating this monument.”

  “Wrote them a poem and planted a tree,” said Boots. “Swell guy.”

  “What I wouldn’t give,” said Cordell, “for me and my slinger to have met him in a dark alley before he got all of those powers.”

  “I wouldn’t need the slinger, Cap,” said Orna.

  “He keeps hiding his monuments.” Nilah looked up at the faces sculpted into the trunk. “The one at Wartenberg would’ve survived just about anything, buried like it was. And this one is on an unregistered world, where no one will visit.”

  “So why make the monuments at all?” asked Boots. “What’s the point, if no one will see them?”

  “Think about the Taitutian records at Alpha,” said Nilah, “all of the artworks and books, sealed away in their vault. Think about all of the comms equipment perfectly preserved. He’s documenting his travels for someone, and I think it’s for himself.”

  She reached up and touched the base of the massive plaque, running her fingers along its hammered surface. “I think he’s documenting his life for a post-human civilization.”

  Charger drew out a pair of incendiary explosives from the clips on its back. “I say we burn this thing to the ground. If he wants history remembered, I want it erased.”

  “I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said Malik, stepping up to Charger. “We may need to involve the authorities, and they’ll want to see evidence of—”

  Charger’s chest plate opened up so they could all see Orna’s annoyance. “Why do we care what the authorities want? They’ve betrayed us at every turn! I’m tired of a civilization that isn’t pulling its own weight. I swear to god if all of you weren’t in it, I’d let Witts tear the universe apart.”

  “But you have to admit,” said Boots, “it’s important to document this stuff. Get the word out. Share knowledge where we can, because… well, historical archives are the only thing that saved us in the first place. We’re a big part of history now, and we have a responsibility to the future we’re creating.”

  “This monument isn’t history,” said Orna. “It’s Witts glorifying genocide.”

  “If he’s attached to his little epitaph,” said Cordell, “then I’m with our quartermaster. Sokol, do we feel certain we can keep control of the blaze?”

  “It’s pretty soggy out here, sir,” said Orna.

  “Then please remove this eyesore,” said Cordell. “The rest of you, fall back.”

  “With pleasure.” She closed her cockpit and unclipped a couple of thermal charges. “Step away, everyone.”

  The bot leapt onto the tree, clawing up its trunk and placing charges as it went. It traversed the length, into the canopy and back down to the roots. Then it retreated to the mist-soaked crew and detonated the bombs.

  Despite the wet conditions, the tree caught fire like a tinderbox, crackling flames roaring through the open meadow. Silver smoke rose from the pyre to feed the overcast sky, and Nilah regarded the monument for a long while. It’d cost Witts nothing to erect it—just a few powerful spells into some even more powerful amps—but the price in lives was far too high. She turned away in disgust.

  Then her keen eyes picked up something strange on the horizon. In the distance, flocks of birds rose into the air, as a mountain began to move.

  Through a black forest smeared bluish-gray by atmosphere, the land swelled as countless more birds joined those above. It kept inhaling, more and more, until part of it broke free with a spray of earth. Eight legs unfolded, crablike, from beneath the mountain. The bluff face gave way, boulders rolling beneath it to reveal the face of an armored lizard with one long, hooked horn atop its nose. Two eyes fluttered open in the gloom like spotlights, luminescent irises wreathed in iridescent flame.

  It opened its mouth, and in the shock wave, they heard its voice, terrible and shuddering. Each reverberation of its cry suffused Nilah, and she sank to her knees to cover her ears. She’d been calling the wrong things gods this whole time. The magnitude of the creature—from its stony pincers, to its back, spiked with a layer of evergreens, to the thousand carrion birds in wailing circles over its head—threatened to crush her conscious mind under the press of panic.

  The world bowed in silence, subdued by the scream, save for the calling birds wheeling above. Nilah took her shaking hands from her ears and placed her palms atop the wet earth, gentle blades of grass sweet against her skin after the battery
of sound.

  Metal claws wrapped around her stomach as Teacup skidded up to Nilah and stuffed her into its cockpit. Actuator rings locked around her fingers, and the dull aftershock vanished in the acoustically dampened compartment. She’d have a bruise after being snatched up like that, but the safety of Teacup’s armor stilled her heart.

  “Is that supposed to be, like, a turtle or a crab?” asked Orna, snapping Nilah from her stupefied gaze.

  “What have we got? Vogelstrand defenses?” Cordell asked, his shout cutting through the buzzing in her ears. “Boots! Tell me you’ve heard of this thing.”

  “Not ringing any bells, Captain,” she said, eyes wide, “but I’m guessing it’ll head this way.”

  “Hunter One, give me a range,” said Malik.

  “Three and a half klicks, sir,” she responded. “Charger isn’t sure how long it’ll take to close ranks, but the mass estimate is off the charts.”

  Nilah checked her readouts, finding a hundred tons of creature shambling their way. Her AI targeting system registered unlimited weak points—because an animal of that size wasn’t supposed to exist, and her scanners didn’t know how to interpret it.

  Cordell holstered his slinger. “Everybody back to the ship. We’re not taking that bad boy on.”

  Malik laid a hand on Cordell’s shoulder. “Are you sure that’s wise? That’s a lot of us running across an open field at a pretty slow pace. That’s clearly a magical creature, and if it fires on us somehow… Better to hide and send armored runners to get the ship ready and pick us up.”

  Aisha added, “Even if we got to the ship, sir, something like that could crush us while we were heating up.”

  A rolling thunder filled their ears, the striking of colossal bones as the beast charged for them. Teacup’s warning indicators gave her a speed: sixty kilometers per hour, three-minute ETA.