The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “You’re not—”

  “The toll will be paid, Boots. Don’t stop me.” He walked away, leaving a crumpled white ball on the floor. At first, Boots was grossed out, thinking it was his tissue. Then she realized it was a scrap of package wrapping paper, something hastily scrawled along one side.

  She leaned down, picked up the paper, and straightened it out:

  THE SHOW MUST’VE GONE ON.

  WHO IS SHE?

  Boots wrinkled her nose as she read the contents. “Well, this is bad.”

  Once again, the captain invited Boots to dine with Malik and himself. The mood was somber as she arrived, and the projections over the captain’s table depicted the destruction of more than a few Taitutian battleships. The Link news ticker at the bottom read, AIOR UNDER SIEGE BY UNKNOWN FORCES.

  “They’re not ‘unknown,’” said Boots, plopping down into her chair. “We know exactly who they are.”

  “They’re trying to avoid generalized panic,” said Malik. “If the galaxy was aware…”

  “Sir,” said Boots, “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that they should’ve been shouting about Witts from the rooftops at every opportunity. What good does sheltering the public from existential threats do?”

  “Makes me wonder how often the government faces something like this—galactic extinction,” said Cordell, kicking his boots up onto the table. “How many other stories are they keeping from us? I want to believe that Witts is the only life-ending danger going, but—”

  “You’re borrowing trouble, thinking about that.” Boots reached across for the kettle of coffee. “We’re up to our necks already.”

  “At least we’re all well, aside from a minor concussion for Nilah,” sighed Malik, sliding a mug across to her. “That child took her apart.”

  “Not all well, sir,” said Boots, trading the mug for the note from Alister’s pocket. “I think Alister is really losing it.”

  Cordell put his feet back on the floor after that.

  Malik picked up the note like he was lifting a rock to find insects underneath. “Oh, no, what’s going on?”

  “It’s not subtle,” said Boots. “Look at the capitalized bits: ‘show,’ ‘vuh,’ and ‘on.’ He’s saying, ‘Siobhán.’”

  The captain frowned. “And that’s a name we’re supposed to know because…”

  “It’s the woman you found sliced up alongside Alister and Jeannie,” said Boots, pouring a steaming cup. “You told me she was his nanny. Jeannie told me Siobhán was his lover—or a honeypot at the very least. Jeannie said he could hold it together, but he can’t. I guarantee it.”

  “Me too,” said Cordell. “I think we’ve got to act.”

  She shook her head. “Sir, how badly sliced up was old Siobhán when you found her, anyway?”

  “Doc, do you want to show her the most recent findings?” said Cordell.

  “That’s not appropriate,” said Malik, “but this is an exceptional time.”

  “Look, I just want to help him,” said Boots. “If you know something…”

  “Alister’s mental state is deteriorating,” said Malik. “You’ve witnessed abnormalities, and what’s beneath the surface is a lot more difficult. Brain scans reveal a largely normal structure, but I’m seeing epileptic ‘storms’ during passages of memory loss.”

  “He’s having seizures?” she asked.

  Malik called up a projection, showing a brain scan, activity surging across it in ways Boots couldn’t comprehend; given the context, she guessed it was bad.

  “I think what happened on the Vogelstrand was a small seizure, yes, but there’s a lot more to epilepsy than that,” Malik said. “The storms are largely confined to his temporal lobe, creating surges of emotions or memories that aren’t real—and erasing what is. From time to time, Alister’s reality is very different from ours.”

  “And he’s suicidal,” Boots added. “Nilah confided some things he said.”

  “We can’t hold that against him,” said Cordell. “Every Fallen on this crew has tried it, or thought about it—and he had it worse than us.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Malik cleared his throat. “I have to conclude that Alister is a danger to himself and the crew—but that leaves us in a difficult position. Where can he be kept safe and treated well? We can’t simply drop him off on an inhabited world like he’d resigned. Have you considered the best way to discharge him from service?”

  A burst of annoyance rattled Boots’s frame. “Whoa, whoa! I told him we weren’t going to do that!”

  “That was outside of your authority, Bootsie,” said Cordell. “If the doc says someone is a danger, they’re a danger. If he’s careless on a mission, people die.”

  She opened and shut her mouth a few times, and her reply got caught on the lump in her throat. “I thought you were going to say we should confront the situation head-on.”

  “This is as head-on as it gets,” replied the captain. “This isn’t something I take lightly. If someone said I couldn’t go after Witts, I’d lose my mind.”

  “So would I,” said Boots. “There’s going to be another solution. We just need to work for it.”

  Malik smiled. “You’re right, of course.”

  She laughed in return and made a show of pointing him out to Cordell. “Told you he’d be a great first mate. Admitting I’m right is leadership material.”

  “We can’t be sure Alister will be safe off the ship, so it’s best if we keep him close,” said Malik. “Until you hear otherwise, expect that he remains behind during the next mission.”

  “All right,” said Boots. “As long as we don’t try to ditch him.”

  “The captain and I will take it from here,” said Malik. “We called you up here to review the mission data as our expert archaeologist.”

  “Two-fisted archaeologist,” Cordell added.

  Boots smirked. “Historian. I’m not robbing graves yet. Aside from the Vogelstrand.”

  “And Alpha,” added Cordell.

  Malik did a quick calculation in his head. “And the Harrow. We rob a lot of graves, actually. Let’s see what you make of these—they’re the notes the twins gathered from Vong.”

  He waved up a projection of their notes.

  A cherry blossom of five petals

  Inexorably, one has fallen away.

  Only by sharp conductor’s light,

  Did they launch into elegiac night.

  “Okay, Bootsie,” said Cordell. “Please tell me this isn’t the ‘Legends of the Landers.’”

  “It’s not,” she said, looking over the half dozen other verses. “At least, not the modern one. The one we learned as kids has the passage about Admiral Boggs seeing the hill where he’d place the Arcan capital. This song doesn’t have any references to Arca at all.”

  Cordell leaned forward to get a closer look. “Oh. You’re right. It’s been a while since I sang those in school.”

  Boots took a sip of her hot coffee, invigorating her brain. “I tried selling a treasure map based on this kind of folklore once—didn’t work out. However, I did a lot of looking into Arcan military history, and did you know that we didn’t write that song? It predates Arcans among starfarers by at least a hundred years.”

  “And what about the lines?” asked Malik. “I thought they were just the first parts of every word, or the first syllables, but then you have ‘inexorably’ and ‘conductor’ there.”

  “Man, I wish Armin was here,” said Cordell. “We could use that big brain of his.”

  The others stopped and watched as he flexed his fingers before rubbing his chin. He fiddled with a nearby stylus, taking it between two fingers like a cigarette. He wiggled it, tapping the point to the table before saying, “I need a smoke.”

  Malik reached over and gave him a single pat on the back. If any other crew member had dared such a gesture, Cordell might’ve yelled at them, but he just sighed at Malik’s touch. “It’ll get easier. You want me to make you some tea?”


  “Add two ounces of whiskey and hold the tea.”

  “After this,” said Malik, “you and I can go to the bay and grab a little exercise. That’s always good for stress.”

  Boots sniffed once and took another sip of coffee. “I was going to try my hand at eating an entire chicken, if you’d prefer something exciting, Captain.” She rapped her hand on the table to imitate a mallet, striking at the front of each word. “Going to flatten the crap out of it and fry…”

  She looked in the direction of the song lyrics as her closed fist hit the table once more, and a connection snapped into place.

  “The lines…” said Boots. “It’s steganography.”

  Cordell’s pen slipped from his grasp. “It’s what now?”

  She leapt up to point at the projected words. “It’s steganography! Messages encoded in plain text. These lines represent stressed and unstressed syllables! Look at ‘inexorable’—the ‘nex’ is accented. Same with the ‘jai’ sound in ‘elegiac.’”

  They quickly ran down the pages, testing the theory and occasionally arguing about an individual word. They found no glaring exceptions, just a few words that might’ve been pronounced differently at another time in history.

  “Okay,” said Cordell. “That holds water. But that just means we’re looking at someone’s linguistics homework. This is hardly a treasure map.”

  Boots held up a finger. “Isn’t it, though, sir? I’m going to put this out there—and I know it sounds crazy, so hear me out—but what if the ‘Legends of the Landers’ wasn’t written to be good poetry, or even commemorate an event? What if they were designed to hide a map in plain sight?”

  The two men exchanged glances.

  “Back when Arca was founded, there was a purist resistance to changing the ‘Legends’ to include Arcan politics. Besides the fact that it was stupid, opponents of the day argued that our oral history must be preserved without a single change—for any reason.” Boots took a moment to pull up the information on the songs. “There are three legends, each one with more than a few hundred syllables. We can treat stressed syllables as ones and unstressed as zeroes. Three legends—three numbers. What’s the oldest form of galactic positioning, Captain?”

  “Three-point navigation,” Cordell answered. “Azimuth, pitch, and distance from the galactic centroid. But how are you going to prove it? I could say the same thing about any set of lyrics, and Loy Vong could be screwing with us to cover his tracks.”

  “That’s true,” said Boots, “but space is a big old place, and the odds of a planet at those coordinates is almost nil. Less than nil. As the saying goes, astronomically low.”

  “Then let’s do the math first and see if there’s survey data,” said Malik. “Though, if there is, that’s probably a bad sign—Origin is supposed to be missing, after all.”

  “I’ll do you one better,” said Boots. “Let’s see if they convert to coords at all, eight bits at a time.”

  Boots called for the computer to display the oldest known version of the lyrics, using the Linguistic Heritage Project to get pronunciations and stressing of the day, and thanked her lucky stars for government-funded academics.

  She plugged the whole set into a binary converter, then a base-eight Standard converter, concatenating the numbers into three long strings. They appeared: three numbers with the decimals in exactly the right places.

  Since azimuths could never be more than three hundred and sixty degrees, Boots figured that was the easiest place to start. If the first coordinate was bigger than that, she’d know she was wrong.

  “Azimuth: almost two eighty-five,” said Boots, noting the hundreds of decimal places after. There was a lot of specificity in that number.

  “Holy hell,” said Cordell. “You did a lot of fancy work on that sim. Are you certain you weren’t forcing the numbers to make sense?”

  “Yes!” she said, barely able to keep the reins on her voice. She felt like screaming at the coordinates in elation. “Look at them! They’re perfect! If this was just happenstance, why are the only characters numbers—except the decimal points? Sirs, we need this right now. Witts is getting bold, and we… we could frankly use a win.”

  Malik called up GATO survey data to check the location and found empty space.

  “Nothing here,” he said.

  “Nothing doesn’t mean… anything,” said Boots. “The resting place of the Vogelstrand wasn’t on any maps, either. Captain, I am telling you that this is the greatest find of a lifetime!”

  “Or it’s a very well-constructed trap by a group of people with two thousand years of training,” said Malik. “Though for what it’s worth, I do believe these coordinates lead somewhere.”

  “But the twins would’ve sensed that,” Boots protested, but she winced inwardly at the annoyance in her voice. She wouldn’t be convincing anyone with that argument. “Listen, Captain, Mister Jan, I don’t expect you to spin up the jump drive this second. Just give me a wide berth to investigate. If I find anything there, we should definitely check it out.”

  “Doc?” asked Cordell. “Thoughts?”

  “I’m all in favor of Miss Elsworth’s plan,” said Malik. “This is the best lead we’ve got.”

  The luminescent verses of the “Legends” lit Cordell’s dark skin as he leaned in close to examine them. “We’ve been saying that a little too much lately.”

  “And it’s gotten us on board a first-generation colony ship,” said Boots.

  “Okay,” said Cordell. “Go get us our proof. Designate your research team and get to it.”

  “I just need Nilah,” said Boots, rising to leave. “Everybody else fell asleep last time.”

  Boots came to regret her decision.

  “I should be celebrating,” sighed Nilah.

  “Uh-huh,” mumbled Boots, looking at her screen through bleary eyes.

  “I think we really found Origin. So… yes. I can barely contain myself, so I think I’m going to go snog my fiancée.”

  Boots looked up at her with a if you take one step toward that door, I am telling the captain expression, and she sat back down on the mess hall bench.

  They’d been stationed in there for hours, though Cordell had given them free run of the larder to make up for it. Boots had eaten her fill of the various cafeteria snacks. If she ever had another candy bar or gulp of coffee, it’d be too soon. Her nausea made an excellent dance partner for her brain, fogged by drowsiness.

  “I don’t know how you can think about leaving right now. So exciting,” said Boots, flicking away an ancient survey report.

  Cordell’s orders had been clear: find something—anything—at those coordinates, and they’d investigate. The closest Boots had gotten was a marpo breeding facility in a system four light-years away from their target.

  “Oh, I’m not thinking about it ‘right now.’ I’ve been thinking about it for hours,” said Nilah. She tapped her data sources pane and spun it around for Boots to see. GATO PLANETARY SURVEYS was selected. “Do you really think we’re going to find confirmation of secret coordinates in a public archive?”

  “Best to go in order of increasing risk,” said Boots, returning her eyes to her screen. “If we start searching the Special Branch Archives, we might be exposing ourselves to the mole.”

  “I hope Special Agent Weathers is okay,” said Nilah, adding, “despite the fact he never liked you much.”

  Boots picked up another candy bar from the tray, chewed it, regretted it, and swallowed it anyway. “That’s why I trust him. Anybody who openly likes me is lying.”

  Nilah smirked. “Well, I like you, Boots.”

  “Yeah, but you’re rich, and rich people are assholes.”

  “You’re rich now, too!”

  Boots gestured to herself, leaning back in her chair. “And thus, I am inherently unlikable. I swear, it’s like you have no idea how the universe works.”

  “I’ve got plenty of rich friends.”

  “Lady,” said Boots, swallowing to get a piec
e of errant chocolate down her gullet, “you’ve got exactly seven friends you can trust in the universe.”

  “Not true,” said Nilah, arching her eyebrows. “I’ve got my dad on Taitu, and—”

  They froze.

  “They…” Nilah began. “They had a little funeral for the family who could make it.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up over that.” Boots gave her the most consoling gesture she could muster at the time—tossing her a candy bar. “This might be out of bounds or whatever, but I know exactly what you’re feeling. Toward the end of the war, you couldn’t just drop everything when someone was killed. It wasn’t practical. So, I missed a few funerals. My mom and my brother, to be exact.”

  “When did this go from a treasure hunt to a war?”

  Boots cooked on that thought for a moment, trying to find the distinction for herself. “When the threat didn’t end. You can’t go home, because your home is under attack. You’re fighting to liberate everyone you still love. At least… that’s what war is supposed to be. God knows we’ve fought them over stupider crap. The way I see it, Nilah Brio, you’re just as much of a veteran as any of us.”

  “Do I get a Master’s Diamond for my combat wound?” asked Nilah, kicking out her leg. She jolted in surprise at the force of the movement, like the leg was far too powerful.

  “I didn’t get mine, but… my government was kind of bombed to glass at the time.” She thought back to all the other Arcan soldiers who’d been denied pensions, medical care, and basic decency. There had been programs to help veterans, but they amounted to “swallow one’s pride or starve to death.”

  Boots smoothed back her hair. “You, on the other hand, are going to get all kinds of medals after we put Henrick Witts to bed.”

  “I already have two. Technically, so do you, even though you skipped the ceremonies.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get back to it, okay?”

  Nilah leaned back in her chair, folding her hands behind her head. “Back to what? Parsing through survey reports one at a time?”

  “You’re the one who said we shouldn’t use the Devil for this research.”

  “I’d prefer not to leave him connected and unattended on the Link, given the number of slinger cannons on him. If we didn’t notice an incursion, the hacker would probably kill us all. I’d give anything to ask an expert.”