The Worst of All Possible Worlds Read online

  “Hunter Two! Now!” Cordell’s command came with a deadly finality attached to it, and Nilah glanced away from her grim task to the open ship. Her captain stood waiting, shield at the ready, as Boots and the other soft targets raced for the ramp.

  One more. One more of these scum. Please.

  Nilah’s metal feet pounded the deck, and she slid into another bot, tripping it and straddling the armor’s chest. Using her armored hand like a knife blade, she plunged into the metal carapace, just as Mother had done to Orna. Just like a springfly. She showed the bot all the mercy she’d been taught at the Pinnacle as she stabbed again and again with a gory claw.

  “I’ll kill you all!”

  “It’s finished,” said Cordell over her comm. “Let’s go!”

  She looked up to see her trail of destruction and gasped. What’d felt like a single, seamless moment of flowing combat had left a pile of bodies and robot parts strewn across the cargo bay. Between Teacup, Charger, and Aisha, they’d killed everyone. The only sounds were the klaxons, distant battles, and the insistent crackle of electrical fires throughout the bay.

  “Nilah!” This time it was Orna. The quartermaster stood at the top of the Capricious’s open cargo ramp. Her chest heaved, and blood ran down the side of her face.

  Charger tromped up the ramp, where Boots popped open the chest plate and stepped out. Her hair was matted down to her head, and her clothes were soaked through with sweat, but she straightened up and looked Nilah in the eye, smiling weakly. Cordell arched an eyebrow and played it cool, but his hands were shaking at his sides.

  Alister, Jeannie, and Malik hobbled up the ramp, past Orna, Boots, and Cordell. They all paused to see what Nilah would do.

  “Come home,” Orna called to her, and it quenched her rage like water.

  The light of a porter’s mark filled the bay as Harriet Fulsom appeared in their midst, resplendent in dress uniform, flanked by a vanguard of black armors.

  “Well, now,” Harriet said, turning to face Teacup and smiling. “I was hoping to catch you all before you left.”

  Boots had not awoken that morning intending to fight a god, yet one had appeared before them in regal attire. The joints of the black armors around her thrummed with golden light, and Boots glanced at Orna to catch her reaction.

  The quartermaster swallowed. “I’m going to go help Nilah.” She leapt up into Charger’s pilot’s seat. It snapped shut, and Orna hurtled toward her adversaries, high-caliber slingers thundering.

  The black armors scattered before Orna’s assault like a swarm of flies, and the firefight that developed was beyond anything Boots could’ve mustered. Enemies spread throughout the bay in lightning-quick leaps, returning fire with burning lances. Aisha blasted one of them with the keel slinger, taking it out mid-bound, transforming it into a smoky streak of debris. Charger circled their impromptu arena, keeping cover at its back the entire time. Cordell summoned up another shield and guarded the entrance to the cargo bay, where Boots and the twins stood, helpless to intervene.

  Teacup, of course, went straight for their leader.

  The god-level porter’s mark erupted from Harriet, and she vanished. Her cast was instantaneous and divine, and since she didn’t have to trace, she could pop around the battlefield without a second thought. She reappeared behind Nilah, but instead of pulling out a slinger as she had with Sharp, Harriet simply reached for the armor. Teacup rolled and dodged through the firefight, abruptly weaving through it with all the grace of a barn swallow. Harriet flashed in behind her and reached once more, palm eager to press to Teacup’s back—

  —but was cut short as the Capricious’s keel slinger locked on to her and took a shot. Harriet vanished as the spell bolt superheated the air where she’d just been standing.

  “Don’t let her touch you, Hunter Two!” said Aisha over the comm.

  Boots recalled the recording they’d watched at Valentino’s house—every casting required Harriet to physically touch the thing she wanted to teleport. She wanted to get her hands on Teacup, because teleporting the bot into the floor was a lot more certain than trying to use a slinger on its armor. If the crew could keep fire on Harriet, she’d never be able to lay a hand on any of them before having to teleport away.

  But how was Boots supposed to do that? She was a terrible shot, and the Ferriers weren’t winning any medals.

  She turned to the twins. “You two. This way.”

  “Don’t mind me,” said Cordell, wincing as a line of fire whipped across his shield. “I’ll just be holding the choke.”

  “Good job, sir,” said Boots. “You’re doing great!” Then to Jeannie and Alister. “Now, please.”

  “Follow her!” the captain called, strain edging into his voice as a fracture lit the surface of his shield.

  They rushed through the cargo bay to the armory. It was technically against regs to touch Orna’s stuff while she could carry out her duties as quartermaster. They skidded to a halt in front of the primary locker, and Boots fumbled her paragon crystal to the ID pad.

  “Boots, we already have our sidearms,” said Alister. “We need to be back there helping!”

  “Trust me!” said Boots.

  She held her breath as the machine beeped an acknowledgment and whooshed open, revealing the most striking assortment of weapons that she’d ever laid eyes upon. Half the slingers looked like works of art, the other half were scratched-up classics, and about a third of the total seemed like she might blow herself up trying to use them. There were multi-barreled monstrosities and fibron rocket launchers with glowing, elemental warheads. Grenades sat in neat, multicolored rows like metal eggs. There might’ve been more stripes of pistols than birds of paradise.

  “How many guns do you need?” Boots breathed.

  She pulled aside that swiveling rack to find a set of Carrington Multi-Infantry Twenty-Five “Mudspitter” Rifles, so-named because a soldier could put mud in the magazine, and the thing would probably still work. She snatched up two and handed them to the twins, keeping a third for herself. Turning to the ammo loader, she punched in an order for six clips of knock rounds. The assembler snapped the rounds together like the rolling of a snare drum, but Boots wished it’d go faster.

  Alister lunged for the cancel button, and she slapped his hand away.

  “Versus bots?” he demanded.

  “Knock rounds aren’t going to cut it!” said Jeannie.

  She pounded the side of the loader in frustration. “If you’ve got time to whine, you can read my damned mind.”

  Alister and Jeannie exchanged glances, then traced their glyphs and placed palms to Boots’s back.

  “Oh,” said Alister, taking two clips out of the dispenser and handing them off to Jeannie. He grabbed two for himself and added, “I’ll see you out there.”

  Boots grabbed her pair of clips, slapped one into the slinger, and racked the slide. “Yeah. Let’s shoot at a god. Good plan, Boots.”

  By the time she reached the cargo bay door, the melee was in full effect. Cordell’s magical cover provided them a command view of the unfolding action. Armors shot every which way like leaping bugs, unleashing devastating barrages of fire. Orna kept the enemy on the move with suppressing fire as Charger ducked from one obstacle to the next. And in the middle of it all, a paragon of grace and war, was Nilah Brio.

  Boots had seen the grainy recording of Nilah fighting the springflies on the Harrow. The news outlets loved it, but it wasn’t the same as the real thing. Boots hadn’t witnessed the climb to the Pinnacle, or Nilah’s daring raid on the Masquerade data center. She’d always been somewhere else. Boots was both disturbed and thrilled to learn that, though her colleague liked to brag, Nilah was in no way a liar.

  She wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told her how Teacup leapt into a trio of black armors and gutted two, while kicking the third’s head clean off. She would’ve laughed at the description of Nilah hoisting one of the recently deceased armors over her head to block a barrage of sl
inger fire before slamming the already-doomed occupant to the deck.

  Drive, talent, and hatred were a terrifying combination.

  Boots couldn’t shoot into those fights. Nilah was too unpredictable, spontaneously closing the gap with her targets. Even if Boots could be certain of her marksmanship, she’d need heavy slingers to penetrate those armors. Instead, she focused on the one target she could affect: Harriet Fulsom.

  But the teleporting maniac was nowhere to be found. Boots kept her eyes sharp as she scanned the battle for the telltale flash of the porter’s mark, and it wasn’t long before her efforts were rewarded: Harriet appeared beside Charger, palms outstretched.

  “Gotcha.” Boots squeezed the trigger.

  Alister and Jeannie joined in, peppering Charger, the nearby Singularity armors, and most importantly, Harriet Fulsom with one-meter blast-radius concussive spell rounds. The armors served as ideal surfaces to catch the dozens of explosions, and soon the space between them filled with deafening pops.

  The knock round was the go-to for riot police on most worlds, and Boots could see why: Harriet’s head pinballed dazedly between the strikes. When the clips ran dry, she’d been hurled to the ground and was attempting to sit back up.

  “Reloading!” called Boots, dropping one mag out of the chamber and slapping in the next one. “Let’s keep this witch on the—”

  But Harriet was gone. Fortunately, she reappeared. Unfortunately, that was directly beside Boots.

  “So this is your ship,” she said with a smile.

  Boots brought her rifle to bear on Harriet, but the woman slapped the weapon aside, teleporting it from Boots’s hands. She lunged inside Boots’s reach, crashing a fist into her nose before taking hold of her neck. Somehow, Boots had forgotten that Harriet was a soldier and a trained killer, and not just a racing team manager.

  The others couldn’t do anything. They were all too far away, too slow to stop what was coming. If they shot at Harriet, they’d hit Boots for sure. Instead, they’d have to watch helplessly as the woman teleported Boots somewhere very, very lethal.

  Since it was to be her end either way, Boots sincerely hoped they’d take the shot.

  Harriet’s glyph throbbed in the air—but something was wrong. From the look in Harriet’s eyes, she knew it, too. She snarled and poured more power into the spell, the glyph growing bright and hot like a tiny sun. Boots’s skin tingled, her hackles rose, but she didn’t find herself sucking vacuum—her eyes boiling in their sockets. Instead, the spell broke.

  The arcana dystocia must’ve nullified her spell. Just like Mother, Harriet couldn’t yank Boots through dimensions, godlike magic or no.

  Boots gave her a wide-eyed grin and seized her hand. “Uh-oh, asshole.”

  She yanked Harriet toward her and brought her metal fist into her face. Shocked, Harriet attempted another glyph, this one breaking even faster than the first. Boots never let go of her arm as she backhanded the woman, knocking a tooth to the deck.

  “You made your last mistake,” Boots hissed in her face. She ejected her stiletto knife and plunged it into Harriet’s belly.

  The woman’s surprise was priceless. Boots jammed the knife in again, and Harriet’s breath came out in a gurgling whoosh. Her fearful cries were such sweet music, but every song had to end one day.

  The stiletto slashed across Harriet’s neck, opening an artery. The woman gagged and smacked a hand to her throat to hold in her precious blood. Boots seized her wrist and pulled her palm away, allowing a gout of crimson to wash the deck.

  They wrestled together, and each second, Boots prayed that she’d feel the waning of her opponent’s strength, but Harriet hung in there. She lashed out at Boots’s eyes with blood-slicked hands, blinding her and slipping from her grasp. A punch slammed into Boots’s throat, and she choked just long enough for Harriet to stagger free.

  “Move,” came Nilah’s command over the comms, and Boots turned to see Teacup take a flying leap toward the open Capricious cargo bay, claws spread wide.

  Boots leapt clear of Harriet, not wanting to be anywhere near the woman when the bot got its hands on her. Harriet’s eyes went wide as Teacup reached the apogee of its epic flight.

  Then it banged its head on the roof of the cargo bay, falling to the ground in a flailing heap.

  Harriet vanished, leaving only a puddle of blood and the afterimage of a porter’s mark. Teacup scrabbled over to where she’d just been standing, but it was too late. She’d gotten away.

  “No!” Nilah screamed, clawing at the deck like she could dig her missing nemesis from its hull.

  Charger came dashing in behind, vaulting past Cordell’s shield. The captain mashed the door closure, and the bay ramp began to whine shut. He batted the assaulting armors away, and Orna fired around him to give them something to think about.

  The door slammed closed, its armored exterior rattling with the barrages of slinger fire. Claws scraped the hull, telltale noises that the enemy was climbing aboard, whether they could get inside or not.

  He pressed a finger to his comm. “Tell me the ship is ready to fly, Zipper!”

  “Sleepy and I have the bridge,” said Aisha. “No jump drive, though.”

  “Kin took it out,” said Orna, jumping down out of Charger. “We can get it working in flight.”

  “Is Kin…” asked Boots, too afraid to finish the sentence.

  Orna snatched a tool harness out of her locker and strapped it on as fast as she could. “Alive. Tell you later. Come on, Nilah, we’ve got work to do.”

  Teacup’s cockpit snapped open, and the woman inside was like a ghost. Dark lines, like oil slick, ringed hollow eyes, atop tear-swollen cheeks. Her gaze drilled Boots, verging on madness. “I let her go. Teacup miscalculated the path and…”

  The clank of armors scampering across the hull and the patter and ping of slingers ticked off the microseconds in Boots’s head. She needed Nilah fixing the ship, not drowning in grief. “Kid, look…”

  “We are taking fire now. Be sad later. Get us out of here, Zipper.” Cordell rushed for the stairs to the bridge. “Brio, Sokol, jump drive. Go. Boots…”

  She knew what he was going to say, and she didn’t like it one bit. Still, there was only one way to play this.

  “Get out there and buy us some time.”

  She nodded, certain this was the last face-to-face interaction she’d ever have with anyone. The look on his face said he knew it, too.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Boots whipped off her precious Rook Velocity jacket and sprinted for the flight lockers as the others cleared the bay. She crammed the jacket into her locker and suited up faster than she’d ever done. Inertial irregularities moved over her skin like waves; the ship must’ve been compensating for some heavy maneuvers as it blasted out of the docking bay. Snapping her fishbowl into place, Boots jogged across the hold to the rocket rung.

  She smashed the go button and ascended, half-expecting to find her ship crunched across one side. But when she arrived, the Midnight Runner hung safely in its mag clamps. The interior of the Capricious had probably been cushioned from the hit the Ambrosini took when it came loose in the docking bay.

  “Ain’t nothing harder than a marauder,” she muttered, echoing Cordell’s old war adage.

  Seated in the cockpit, she tapped her wrist comm to open the channel. “Boots here, requesting departure. Vent the bay.”

  “Mister Jan is busy prepping medical, so I’m Departure today,” said Cordell, huffing. He’d probably run up to the bridge. “This is escort-only. Stick close and be ready to dock. You’re my only wing.”

  The atmosphere in the bay hissed away as Boots typed in her code and flipped the various start switches. “Don’t worry, Departure. I’ll stay on this bird.”

  “You’re cleared hot. Launch when ready and, Boots… good hunting.”

  The bay opened at a snail’s pace, a window on carnage and fire. Explosions peppered the space outside, and dashed lines of slinger fire sketched out a
picture of a losing battle. Boots glanced at her detection systems to see dozens of contacts in every direction; they’d emerged right into the middle of hell.

  “Why not?” She ejected from the mag clamps and into the killing fields beyond. She spied three battle armors clinging to the exterior of the Capricious, though there might’ve been more.

  “Boss, you’ve got to do something about those boarders,” said Boots. “Tangos headed for the main drive, and I can’t get a shot.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Cordell. “Zipper, give them a spin.”

  The ship rolled violently, and the armors were slung outward by centripetal force, only hanging on by the strength of their claw servos. Cordell’s shields coalesced, a pair of light blue discs he could maneuver to protect any section of the ship. He swept them across the Capricious’s exterior in a spherical motion, shaving off all the hangers-on by their mechanical arms.

  “Like that?” Cordell asked, and it was nice for Boots to hear a bit of bravado, considering their predicament.

  Jets of missiles and heavy slinger streaks raced past her cockpit mere meters away. They’d flown into a friendly destroyer’s firing solution, and if she wasn’t lucky, she’d get shredded in the first five seconds. Then a small pop lit the destroyer’s hull, and it quadrisected into four even pieces—the hit of a discus missile.

  At least they stopped shooting.

  A coordinate appeared on her targeting computer, just behind the pieces of the destroyer.

  “Boots, the Hunters are trying to fix Kin’s damage to the jump drive. We’re out of here the second they do.”

  “What about the trickster’s mark?” asked Boots.

  “The debris will block line of sight to Bastion. I only hope that’s enough. Rendezvous whiskey one-zero-five, carom two-six-two, distance twenty thousand.”

  “Copy, Boss.”

  To her left, Bastion’s swept white hull approached like a comet. A pair of enemy fighters fell in on her phase, ready to blast her from the stars. She peeled off as they opened fire, their bolts bouncing harmlessly off Cordell’s shields.