The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  A single touch from one of the vines could spell instant death. Even Charger might get bogged down and mobbed, and who knew how strong those flesh tendrils really were? They could certainly sling corpses around. A nightmarish vision of Charger being pried open like a clam to scoop out a screaming Orna flashed through Nilah’s mind.

  Ursula waited patiently outside, and Nilah guessed she wasn’t in any hurry. She’d already been there at least two thousand years; what was another five minutes?

  “I can selectively target threats to you with one of my six turrets, Supreme Being,” said the Devil.

  “The driver’s seat is probably my best bet,” said Boots. “I ain’t exactly quick on my feet, and I’m guessing that’s required.”

  Nilah shook her head. “This isn’t an easy drive.”

  “Engaging: Beginner Mode,” said the Devil, and Boots grimaced. “Shall I begin by vaporizing all organic matter on the ceiling?”

  “Give me ten seconds, love,” said Nilah, “but yes, that sounds quite helpful.”

  Sliding from the driver’s seat, Nilah followed Orna into the rear compartment, where Jeannie and Alister lay peacefully. They didn’t seem like they were in any pain, so at least if the worst came to pass, they’d be consumed by flesh vines in their sleep. Charger’s cockpit opened, and Orna stepped inside.

  “Ah. Home sweet home. Smells like burnt wires and old sweat,” said the quartermaster.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Nilah, extremely jealous, given the fragrant new decorations from the Ferriers. She put her hand to the door release and waited.

  The Devil’s six autoturrets gave her the only cue she needed to yank the handle and drag the hatch open. She stood aside as Charger went streaking past, slingers snapping into its talons. No sooner had the bot cleared the portal than both barrels lit up with the light of spells.

  “Okay!” said Orna. “Let’s move!”

  Nilah followed her out into the firefight, ducking behind the Devil and trying to remain inconspicuous by comparison. A tangle of vines came rushing for them, thorns sprouting from every surface, and Charger waded into them, holstering its slingers and opting for the plasma blade.

  The press of bodies proved too much, and before long, Orna was giving ground. The Devil should’ve covered them, but its targeting computers were filled with more flesh than it could handle.

  Charger scooped Nilah up and leapt the few meters to the central server cluster, landing with a jet of phantoplasm. Ursula followed their progress with mounting anger, and red warning lights popped out of the ceiling and walls, flashing.

  “Do not hack this ship, or I will destroy it.”

  Nilah pulled off her gloves for better skin-to-metal contact and traced her mechanist’s mark. “We’ll just see, mate.”

  Slapping her palm to the computer, she wound through the outer layer of coolant meshes, data relays, and power couplings, into the core data cluster. Compared to modern security, the Vogelstrand was weak—just a series of hashes to parse through like an ancient blockchain, and Nilah could force it to solve itself. On the periphery of her consciousness, she sensed the all-stations alert, and something distinctly inorganic washing their way.

  “The ship has activated its internal defenses,” said Nilah, forcing herself out of the machine to look through her own eyes. “Bots coming from the west. Get ready.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Orna, cocking Charger’s rifle.

  Nilah dove back inside the system to find her little code snippets eating away at the mainframe’s defenses. As she took over more of the processors, she repurposed them to attack their comrades. The ship tried to short out a power drive into her brain, but Nilah deftly redirected the attack toward the breaker.

  But she couldn’t stop what was coming through the halls, and prayed Orna would be enough to handle it.

  More bodies broke across their defenses as the Devil and Charger mowed them down in scores. The stench of burning hair and meat choked Nilah, but she kept her focus. Explosions thumped in her ears and rattled her teeth.

  Nilah watched the countdown from the Vogelstrand’s boarder response system. “Defense measures in three… two… one…”

  Calling up an imaging feed, Nilah spied on the battle from a god’s-eye view. The doors to engineering flew open, and hundreds of thousands of onyx marbles poured inside—swarm drones. Still more corpses flew from the rafters, arms outstretched and eyes blossoming. The Devil tore into the vines and every single bot that tried to get past it. Orna poured shots into the open corridors, filling them with deadly lances of light.

  “I’ve got a hundred percent of external processing!” called Nilah. “I just need time to break the defenses!”

  “Trying to concentrate, babe!” was Orna’s curt reply.

  The bots started to get through. Nilah zoomed in to find the little metal balls rolling around and reconfiguring themselves into magnetic turrets and anthropoid killing machines, only to dissolve and re-form whenever they were blown apart.

  Nilah called up the ship’s alerts network and found the horde’s ancient batteries on critical, which explained why Ursula hadn’t used them against Witts—it had underestimated him. It wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

  “The bots are low-battery! You’ve only got to fight through for two minutes!” Nilah shouted over the chaos.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” said Orna.

  An explosion showered Nilah with hot bits of metal, and she realized to her horror that she was being pelted with those ball-bearing bots.

  “Damn it!” She ramped her dermaluxes into the infrared, pulsing odd codes, and disconnected from the machine. Her attack programs could handle the rest without her.

  The nearest cluster formed a magnetic cannon, propelling its members at her faster than a slinger round. Nilah ducked away in a spray of infrared light. Charger rushed forward, smashing the configuration into the darkness like scattering building blocks.

  “Get back on the server!” barked Orna, switching to scatterburst rounds and blowing apart anything big enough to pose a threat.

  A wave of marbles shot under Nilah’s feet, tripping her before stacking into a heavy tower to collapse on her like a hammer. She rolled out of the way, tracing her glyph and pushing her hands into the pile. Like the springflies, their security was rudimentary, and she changed their central programming to self-sabotage. She leapt to her feet before they could close around her and crush her, scrambling back to the data cluster.

  “Ammunition at twenty percent!” called Orna. “Status!”

  Nilah reconnected with the server to find her attack programs bridging with its central repository. Another ten seconds, and she could eject the AI’s data crystal core, along with most of the information the Vogelstrand possessed.

  “Almost there!” Nilah replied, adding her own skills to her programs.

  “You will not leave here alive!” roared Ursula, triggering a piercing screech from all its speakers. Nilah closed her eyes and squinted through the pain to feel a new alert forming on the network: reactor critical.

  “It’s trying to blow the whole ship!” said Nilah.

  “She said she would,” Orna grumbled. “Boots, get ready! We’re coming back!”

  The main system drive popped open, revealing their prize: a data crystal containing almost two thousand years of mysteries in its facets. Nilah disconnected and clambered over to it, trying to pry the thing loose.

  Ursula rushed forward in a wave of writhing flesh, overwhelming the suppressing fire of the Devil. “I have you.”

  “The hell you do,” said Orna, and hurled one of Charger’s biggest grenades into the mass.

  It sort of swallowed the explosive, churning for a moment before it lit up like sunlight through closed eyelids. Charred, smoking bits of skin went flying in every direction, pelting Nilah as she hit the deck. She shook the ringing from her ears and felt a queer sting on her leg.

  When she looked down, she found a bone-tipped segmen
t of vine wriggling through the fabric of her trousers—into her flesh.

  Nilah screamed as fire raced through her veins and leaves began to sprout around the wound. She frantically smashed her leg against the central server housing, hard enough to fracture bones—anything to kill the creature growing inside her.

  Orna’s voice was distant in her ears. “Nilah!”

  Then a flash lit her vision, burning her like the heat of a star—

  —and her leg was gone, replaced only by a smoking stump.

  Charger snapped closed its fusion blade as darkness surrounded her.

  “Friendly down,” said the Devil, and Boots’s stomach dropped. “Detecting low vitals from the Supreme Being.”

  The console projections switched to a scanner’s-eye view of Nilah and Orna. Marble drones and vines whirled through the field of view, obscuring any details. The Devil highlighted both of them, but there was something wrong with Nilah’s outline—her right leg was missing just below the knee. The battle armor carried her.

  “Hunter Two, status—”

  Charger scraped across the roof of the Devil and into the boarding door. Bots poured in beneath its feet, but thankfully, none of the vines. Under one arm, Charger carried a huge data crystal, under the other, Nilah’s unconscious body, her right leg capped in a smoking stump.

  “We’ve got to go now,” said Orna. “You’re driving!”

  Boots looked from the controls back to Nilah, wondering if she was the right person for that task. Surely Orna would do a better job untrained. Her mechanism would give her unique insights a normal person would miss.

  Charger banged the emergency closure, slamming the door shut, then carefully laid Nilah across one of the seats. It wheeled on Boots with eyes aglow. “Did I stutter? I said let’s go!”

  “Okay, okay,” Boots said, snapping the hatch closed and keying the Devil into drive mode. Making a quick survey of the controls, she found the throttle, steering yoke, various engine controls, and detector readouts.

  “For your convenience,” said the Devil, “I’ve estimated the time it’ll take for the ship to go critical.” One minute and seventeen seconds appeared on the HUD. “Predictive analytics are one small part of the Element advantage—”

  “Shut up!” Boots shouted.

  It did so. She searched for reverse to no avail. While the cockpit was like a fighter, those didn’t have a full reverse anywhere in them.

  Boots gulped. “Okay, don’t shut up. I need a tutorial, fast.”

  Behind the windscreen, Ursula approached with hordes of bots and writhing bodies in tow. The Element Devil logo spun to life in the HUD, obscuring her view of their onrushing doom.

  “Congratulations on purchasing the most advanced combat armored personnel carrier to—”

  “How do I get the hell out of here?” she cried, beating on the steering wheel.

  “May I take over?” asked the Devil.

  A pair of bodies splattered against the windscreen, sticking and scrabbling at the surface with their mangled claws.

  “Yes! Yes! Let’s go! Jump or whatever!”

  Boots was glued to the driver’s window as the Devil whipped around before dashing down one of the corridors. It ramped up onto its side, far less careful than they were on the way into engineering. It was taking the same way out of the ship.

  “Skip the corridors and jump to the surface, Devil!”

  “I’d like to,” said the AI, “but I need to build up enough speed.”

  “Or what?”

  “The jump portal lasts milliseconds. We’ll be pinched in half, each side struck with its own particles traveling at nearly the speed of light.”

  An inflatable cushion spared Boots a nasty knock against the window as it slithered around another corner on its side. “Oh.”

  “I remember the way,” said the Devil. “We’ll arrive in forty-six seconds.”

  Boots checked the clock. “There are fifty seconds before we’re crispy!”

  “Things might be better if traffic is light.”

  Nilah could whip the thing around corners and up and down mountains. Boots couldn’t even move the Devil on her own, and its AI wasn’t as quick on the throttle as Nilah. The racer would’ve been so much better at this, provided she wasn’t missing a foot for the pedals.

  A tangle of vines slurped into the open hallway ahead, and the Devil’s autoslingers laid into them, blasting them into a smear of blood and ash. It made to turn left, but the slickness on the ground carried the vehicle through the intersection.

  “I’m afraid I’ve missed my turn. My nearly perfect analytical systems now predict we’ll arrive in forty-seven seconds, three seconds after the ship goes critical.”

  Before Boots could respond, she spotted a fly in her periphery—at least she thought it was, until the marble-sized object jumped up and poked her in the eye.

  “Son of a—” Boots snatched the little bot from her face, but it spun furiously, burning her palm. A half dozen others raced into the cockpit, mercilessly fluttering in her vision and slapping against her cheeks.

  “Orna!” she called, but one of the bots jumped into her mouth, making an accelerating beeping noise. Boots spat the thing out just as it popped like a firecracker. It wasn’t much—just enough to blow off her jaw if it had succeeded.

  “Vicious little shits!”

  “We’re under attack back here, too,” said Orna. “Charger can snatch them and crush them, but—”

  “Try to hack some of them!” Boots’s fingers covered her mouth. The little bastards still rapped her knuckles. “Neutralize them if you can.”

  “Oh, believe me. I’m gonna fry them.”

  Boots couldn’t believe she was about to say this—they were fleeing for their lives against a losing clock. “Those are first-gen Originata. We are bringing back at least one of these to the ship.”

  “They’re trying to kill us, Boots!”

  She didn’t have time to argue. If the bots came back, great. Surviving took priority.

  Though sideways, Boots recognized this part of the ship; they were close to the elevator bank, and there had been a decent stretch of shaft below engineering. They’d almost fallen down it, after all.

  “Devil! We can get up enough speed diving down the elevator shafts!”

  “Confirmed, User Boots Elsworth,” said the Devil. “I hope you live through this.”

  They rounded a corner as two of the little asshole bots pelted her ears, and Boots spied the elevator shafts through the haze of warnings and projections. Twelve seconds on the clock.

  A pair of grappling hooks shot out of the front bumper, spearing the deck plates directly before the elevator shaft, and the Devil rocketed forward. The tethers whined as it reeled them in and snapped taut just as they crossed the threshold.

  It was like a head-on collision. The front went down, the rear went up, and Boots’s stomach lurched as they went from a hard stop into freefall.

  The Devil buzzed. “Jump drive primed and firing in three…”

  The walls lit up and gravity surged against them, smashing Boots against her seat back. She grabbed the fire controls and began blasting the elevator shaft gravity rails, shattering them into flaming debris. Then, nauseatingly, they began to fall once more.

  “Three…” the Devil repeated, obvious annoyance in its voice.

  The ship tried to energize what remained of its gravity systems, but they shorted out, filling the shaft with brilliant sparks and shards of glass.

  “Two.”

  The HUD clock continued its merciless countdown from ten as they plummeted toward a fiery crash at the bottom of the shaft.

  “One.”

  Pink energies crackled over the hull and bright light filled her vision. Boots felt as though a great hand crushed her against the bottom of her seat, and she struggled to keep her head upright.

  Then she saw a field of grass as they rolled to a stop, flattening wild wheat under their tires.

  “Congratul
ations!” said the Devil. “You are alive! We have jumped three hundred and fifty meters straight up.”

  The HUD clock reached zero, and the ground bucked beneath their undercarriage, transforming from a flat slope into a huge hill ahead of them. Boots knew what would come at the end of the explosion—a massive canyon, blown open by the destruction of the Vogelstrand.

  “We should back up before we’re swallowed,” said the Devil.

  “Reverse! Reverse!” she cried, and she was yanked against her restraints by the spinning wheels.

  The Devil raced backward, and Boots watched in horror as the ground before them fell away through her viewport. Ahead of her lay a hail of ruined dirt and boulders, churning as the caverns collapsed inward.

  “Capricious, this is the Devil,” said the AI. “We’re not going to clear the blast radius. Please commit to an overflight action, and I will handle the rest.”

  “Capricious copies!” said Aisha, interrupting any response from Cordell or Malik.

  The collapsing earth was catching them at a good clip, and Boots swallowed hard. Even if the Devil survived the fall and crushing forces, they’d probably be buried alive without a real hope of rescue. Then a bright blue dot came screaming across the detector projection—the Capricious.

  And when the earth parted from the Devil’s wheels, a loud clank sounded from the roof, followed by the screech of a high-speed winch. They didn’t fall away with the collapsing dirt, but sailed into the skies.

  Boots checked the roof imager to find a magnetic hook secured to the belly of their marauder, with a long sling cable stretching to a winch on the roof of the Devil.

  “Thank you for using the Element Devil. I hope this has been a satisfactory introduction to my combat systems.”

  Boots heaved a long sigh, swatting away another of the obnoxious swarm bots. “Buddy, you have no idea.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Balance

  The rest of the pickup was a blur for Boots. She and Orna rushed Nilah to the med bay, and then they had to flee the planet. In its death throes, the Vogelstrand had triggered some odd behaviors in the Gardeners, sending them into a berserk rage. As the Capricious lifted away from the hidden planet, Boots watched the long-range imagers and tried to stifle tears. The ancient race emerged across the world to demolish one another—along with some of the last shreds of evidence of Origin. The crew had new data that could save the galaxy, at the cost of the most historic archaeological find of their time.