The Worst of All Possible Worlds Read online

  “So what?” Nilah struggled to keep the edge from her voice. “The cube might be nothing, and I’m hanging Dad out to dry if I don’t bloody help.”

  “We know they offered millions for that cube, and the Children never waste time,” said Sharp. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Nilah shook her head. “We busted you out of the Pinnacle, mate. Why trust you with my dad’s life?”

  He grimaced. “That was when there was one of me, trapped behind enemy lines with no resources at my disposal. This is twelve of me with the best tech and magic available.”

  Nilah opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again, slumping into a nearby chair. If she chose to personally rescue her father, she’d lose their best current lead and endanger the lives of her crewmates. The members of the Capricious were a strange lot, thrown together by fate, not trained to carry out covert ops against gods. Resting an elbow on the nearby console, she rubbed her aching eyes.

  But then she thought of pulling her father, grime-faced and shaking, out of whatever godforsaken cell they’d stuffed him in. What look would appear on his face when he saw his avenging angel?

  “You’ve been pulling overtime killing these gods,” said Sharp. “Let us handle this one. The system may have disappointed you, but it’s not completely broken.”

  Nilah’s expectant comrades couldn’t have made their feelings any more transparent. They’d worked hard to capture Grimsby. If Nilah asked them to rescue her father, she’d be telling them to walk into a trap—with no obvious profit for the rest of the galaxy.

  But that unvoiced thought stuck in her throat like a bone; weighing her father’s life at all felt so wrong. How much was he worth? What would be a fair trade for the man who gave her everything?

  “Maybe we should let you think about it for a while.” The captain motioned for Orna to escort her away.

  “No,” said Nilah. “The longer I think the worse it gets. I know what’s right.” She looked into Sharp’s eyes, her lips set in firm resolve. “You go get my father. Bring him home.”

  “Copy that,” said Sharp. “Hope you don’t mind if we execute Harriet Fulsom while we’re at it.”

  “Best you do,” Nilah replied. “You owe me for the Pinnacle.”

  Boots held the chipped old data cube aloft, inspecting its edges with the attention of a lapidary. She knew big things could come from small places—like the Harrow from a single image of the ship mid-jump—but it boggled her mind to think of what this finger-smudged crystal might represent.

  “Does it look intact?” Malik squinted at the facets, as though he could read a crystal with his eyes.

  “Only one way to find out, sir,” said Boots. “Any bets on what it is, Cap?”

  “Something good,” Cordell said.

  Harriet Fulsom had sent her daughter to retrieve the cube. And just in case Boots wondered whether Harriet loved her daughter (killers might not have well-adjusted families, after all), the witch had retaliated with murder and kidnapping. So Boots could assume two things: the Mostafa cube was valuable, and they didn’t want her to watch it.

  “Let’s see what this is all about, shall we?” asked the captain, holding out his palm for the cube.

  She handed it over, and Cordell slotted the cube into the mess hall data port, which buzzed a complaint about the odd shape. The artifact came from a system far older than the Capricious, and Boots silently prayed they’d be able to parse through its file structure.

  “This is interesting,” said Kin.

  The three of them waited, staring at the empty projection space above the long tables.

  “You, uh, want to tell us what’s interesting, Kin?” asked Boots when he didn’t answer after a few seconds.

  “Apologies, Lizzie. This file structure comes from an Acquinar 202 imaging system, most commonly associated with a Pelphrey Tactical Corporation Wayfarer spacesuit wide-field imagers. Full FOV, omni-networked via SuitInterlink.”

  “Wow, Kin. That was totally as interesting as you led me to believe,” she said.

  “There are several videos stored within, recorded on the four-up sensor network: chest, hands, helmet. All light field sensors, capable of back-rendering bounce to twenty meters,” said Kin. “Far weaker than modern imagers. The codec used to write them is over one hundred and fifty years old. The encoding process was the first to utilize analog figuration for quantum—”

  “Skip it,” interrupted Boots. “Can we date the files?”

  “Not precisely, no. The suit itself would have to be at least eighty years old, since Pelphrey Tactical’s manufacturing facility was destroyed during the Taitutian bombing campaign on—”

  “Skip.”

  “Would you like me to play the videos?” asked Kin.

  “I feel like you should’ve started with that, Kin,” said Boots. “Play them in chronological order, please.”

  Projections spun out of the air, a flurry of sparks coalescing into three words.

 

  Boots was about to complain when a flicker of static brought a massive orange square into being before them. They all blinked until the square moved away, and Boots realized it was the back of someone’s spacesuit. Whoever had the imager was just standing too close.

  They were in a cave, or maybe a clearing. The static wouldn’t stabilize.

  The figure in the orange spacesuit took a few lumbering steps before planting a shiny black box on the ground and tapping a few buttons. The box hissed, and glowing vents opened on either side of it.

  “—sitive atmosphere… ss than one g, but not much,” came a voice, thin over a radio transmitter—male and gritty. “Negative microbial activity. No sign of life this deep.”

  “So we can take off our helmets?” Then laughter. This voice was louder, clearer—it must’ve been recorded by the suit’s imager network. It sounded like a woman, probably younger than Boots.

  “Better not,” said the man with the black box, a chortle in his own voice. “Don’t want to end up like the crew of the Titan.”

  The imager shook as someone slapped the wearer on the shoulder. She turned to see another orange-suited man sidling past. The patch on his shoulder read, KLOSE.

  “Be fair,” said Klose, a man in his mid-thirties, his suit running lights illuminating scruffy cheeks and stern eyes. “They didn’t check for life first. Mostafa, I don’t care if you want to take off your helmet.”

  The woman behind the imager was the cube’s namesake.

  “It’ll be your funeral,” said the man with the box, lugging it closer. “No microbes, but maybe something bigger down here. You don’t want to be food, do you?”

  Mostafa remained fixated on the man with the atmospheric testing equipment, and when he came close enough to see past the reflective surface of his visor, Boots found a kind, weathered face—a plump nose despite high, hollow cheekbones, a bushy brow that wagged when he smiled, and twinkling eyes. A cropped white goatee graced his chin.

  It was only when he set his atmospheric scanner on the ground that Boots got a clear view of his patch: WITTS.

  “Kin, pause!” shouted Boots, and she marched straight through the projection to peer at the patch. How could a scant array of threads bring her such a visceral hatred? She pointed to it for the officers’ benefit, but they were already gathering in close, eyes wide.

  When she’d seen Witts on the bridge of the Harrow, he’d been in full regalia, his face obscured with a ceremonial mask. His military picture was a harsh affair, though he had fewer wrinkles. This was her first chance to see him as a human being, his facade of doom suspiciously absent. Somehow, he was younger in his military file picture—taken twenty-five years ago—than he was in this recording, which was much, much older. Comparing the two images was like comparing a yellow sun to a black hole—one beaming and warm, the other dark enough to throttle light itself.

  Boots walked around the Witts figure, frozen in time, and she had a passing fantasy of placing her slinger to h
is temple and blasting his brains out.

  “Here.” Malik pointed to a patch on Witts’s respirator. “He’s the ship’s doctor. Not sure what these other symbols are.” He pointed to an embroidered coin, its face half obscured by shadow.

  “Kin,” said Boots, “I want this full size. Omni-view, twenty meters. The whole scene.”

  “Yes, Lizzie. Please use caution when traversing the mess hall, as the tables and walls will be obscured.”

  The projection swelled to human proportions, Witts growing and repositioning to be right in front of her.

  “This has got to be Henrick Witts’s dad,” said Cordell. “This recording is eighty-plus years old, and he doesn’t exactly look spry…”

  “Facial geometry matches the file image from the Taitutian Admiralty,” said Kin. “This is most likely the same Henrick Witts of the Harrow. There are other possibilities—it could be someone who has been sculpted to look like him.”

  “How does he look so much younger in an image taken… what, like fifty years after this one?” asked Cordell. “And that’s at a minimum.”

  “He’s a usurer,” said Boots. “He can give life and take it away.”

  “That’s not quite how that works,” said Malik. “Even usurers can’t rejuvenate aging damage that bad. They can only prolong their lives if they never allow themselves to age in the first place.”

  Boots leaned in closer to inspect the wrinkles and rifts through his helmet. “Maybe he’s wearing makeup.” Then she looked back at her comrades. “Or maybe this is the guy who figured out how to drain the life force from an entire planet, so he has other tricks.”

  “So you think this journal is…” Cordell left the sentence unfinished, his golden eyes cold in the blue light of the projection.

  “The path he used to gain power? Only one way to find out,” she said. “Kin, play.”

  Chapter Six

  Expedition

  Mostafa laughed as she placed her helmet on the ground, drinking deeply of the air. Her seven colleagues all turned to look, but she merely sucked in a breath and laughed again. The world rippled as her suit’s imagers re-meshed to compensate.

  “If you want to keep your helmets on, be my guest, but I’m tired of sweating my ass off.”

  She twisted the imager on her helmet and pressed a few buttons, creating a 360-degree view. Caverns stretched above and away from her as far as the eye could see, illuminated by dancing motes of magic from a lumon.

  “Vogelstrand, we know you’re in there!” she yelled, the echo returning from every direction.

  “God, do you have to be so chipper?” asked Klose. “Maybe we could appreciate the majesty with some quiet reflection.”

  “Or,” said Qualls, clicking off her helmet with a sucking hiss, “we could celebrate.” She unslung her pack and dug around inside, removing a transit case the size of a house cat. She popped it open to reveal a bottle of Hvide Hollows, marked with the date 2765. Qualls smiled. “Old, vintage, Protheran. What’s not to love?”

  Song removed his helmet and scowled. “Drinking on a mission. We’re here to run down the old man’s salvage, not to party.”

  Mostafa scoffed. “Lighten up, Captain Song. We’ve been hiking for hours, and—”

 

  The armored hull spread before them, entirely filling one wall of the tremendous cavern. Scratched red letters, each as high as a human, read, VOGELSTRAND.

  Curtains of vines sprouted from the ceiling, their palm-sized leaves translucent and white as the flesh of cave animals. They looked dead. Mostafa reached up and touched one with her gloved hand.

  “No light down here,” she said. “Shouldn’t be any plants without photosynthesis.”

  Witts joined her and pulled a leaf to himself, caressing the surface. “There’s an unrestrained magic source down here. Something immensely powerful.”

  “Or a reactor breach.” Song crunched across the cave floor toward the towering metal hull. “Quit acting like everything from Origin is good, Doctor Witts.”

  Witts stroked the white leaf, shining his flashlight through its surface to reveal a spiderweb of red veins. “Origin is the source of all magic. It may not be good, but it’ll be powerful.” His bushy brows furrowed, and he traced his green glyph. The leaf wilted in his hand, turning the mottled gray of a corpse.

  He gave the others a dark look. “This is human. No other life energy feels like this.”

  “Doctor Witts,” said Qualls, pointing to the patch on the vine where the leaf had been removed.

  A tiny trickle of blood issued forth, dripping down the vine in a crimson trail.

  “I hate this place already,” said Song. “Mister Klose, get the cutting crew over there. The—”

 

  “Shut the door!” screamed Mostafa. “Qualls, shut the goddamned door!”

  “Where’s Friday?” said Song, clicking on the light on the side of his slinger. “Has anyone seen him?”

  They stood in a small junction, dimly lit portals in three directions and a half-closed door leading in the fourth. Gilded scrollwork adorned the eggshell walls, snaking around them in decorative ligatures, but time and mildew had gnawed upon sections of it. Witts, Klose, Costes, and Blackburn stood around Mostafa, frantically digging through their mission packs, drawing out slingers and arming themselves. Qualls messed with one of the wall panels, fumbling her tools across the polished tiles of gold and quartz.

  Ungodly screeching echoed through the dilapidated corridor, punctuated with glottal gibbering.

  “I’m trying! The—” Qualls grunted next to the pried-open electrical panel. “This system isn’t exactly modern!”

  “It’s coming!” Song slapped another clip into his slinger. He rushed past Qualls and jammed his rifle through the gap in the door. The hallway beyond flashed with the light of a hundred scatterburst rounds, and through the orange strobes came the writhing silhouettes of vines.

  “Get back!” said Song. “Get back!”

  “I’ve got it,” called Qualls.

  As the door began to slide closed, the mass of vines vomited a man’s body into the gap, his orange spacesuit bearing the patch FRIDAY. The door’s safety alarm buzzed, and it began to slide back open. Song roared a battle cry and emptied his clip into the man’s chest, melting his duraplast torso armor and blowing his ribs open. Qualls cried out and backed against the junction wall. Friday’s head swiveled drunkenly in her direction.

  With a bone-crunching slurp, a writhing series of bloody vines shoved Friday through the gap and into Qualls, where the pair went sprawling to the ground. Fleshy leaves and tendrils penetrated Friday’s back and neck, yanking him around like a puppet. Despite the horrific chest wound, the man wrapped his hands around Qualls’s neck as she begged for him to stop.

  Friday’s only response was a cascade of blood all over the bare face of his victim.

  His jaw unhinged, and more of the vines spilled forth from his mouth, winding into Qualls’s eyes, nostrils, and ears. The vines were pink, the healthy shade of new skin. She convulsed, even as Song blasted apart Friday’s head and neck, then hacked the vines apart with a glowing bayonet.

  “It’s too late!” said Witts, as fresh shoots sprouted from every orifice on Qualls’s head, her skin giving way to their sharp points.

  Witts ran, and Mostafa followed. They dove down corridor after corridor, and Mostafa began to seal the pathways behind them. Each time, a crewmate slipped through at the last second, but so did the body of Qualls, hands outstretched and grasping frantically like a ghost.

  Then, Mostafa accidentally sealed off Song, the lock thunking into place as the hatch dogged.

  Skidding to a halt, Mostafa hit the ground hard and went dashing back to the red-ringed portal, desperately peering through the viewport. Already, vines had begun to fill the hall behind Song, and he hip-fired into them with his slinger rifle while banging the hatch.

  M
ostafa fumbled with the controls, but the creatures were close.

  “I’m sorry!” she wailed, and he wheeled on her.

  “Don’t be sorry, damn you! Open the door!” Song bellowed, eyes wide. “Open the—”

  Friday and Qualls slammed into him like a pair of crashing ships, breaking him against the duraplast window. His neck snapped at an awkward angle, and his hands went wide as the vines burrowed into any exposed skin they could find. Mostafa stumbled backward as fresh growths pushed through Song’s eyes. The three corpses began to thunder against the hatch.

  A pair of hands pulled her back, and she screamed, convulsing with panic.

  “It’s me!” soothed Witts. “It’s me. It can’t get through. You’re okay.”

  He helped her to her feet, and she seized him in her shaking arms.

  “I killed him,” she whimpered. “I—”

  Witts reached up to pat the back of her head, pressing it to his shoulder. “You made a mistake, but we have to think of why we’re here. Why you gave up your fortune, your family.”

  She nodded, a little too vigorously. “Save the light.”

  “Save the light,” he repeated, barely audible over the bashing of human bodies outside.

  They released each other, watching as their comrades blossomed into strands of flesh. They intermingled, bones weaving like reeds into a battering ram.

  “Over here!” called Costes, gesturing to an open elevator shaft.

  Mostafa didn’t wait to see if the ram would come through. Klose and Blackburn secured rappelling gear and tossed the line to Costes, who hooked it to her suit. She nodded down the hole.

  “There ought to be a sealed area down there, the closer we get to engineering,” said Costes, her breath ragged from their flight. “Those things shouldn’t be able to get in. Where’s Song?”

 

  Sickly light washed over them like moonlit haze. They’d shucked their spacesuits for standard mission wear—orange pants, and shirts emblazoned with the name RANGAN. They’d donned expedition recorders on their wrists, tiny lights gently pulsing in time with their hearts, a signal of their health to the others. Mostafa’s bare arms glistened around her tank top, and she wiped away the sweat beading upon her dark brow.