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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by David Wellington

  Excerpt from Forbidden Suns copyright © 2017 by David Wellington

  Excerpt from The Lazarus War: Artefact copyright © 2015 by Jamie Sawyer

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover illustration by Victor Mosquera

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: April 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Clark, D. Nolan, author.

  Title: Forgotten worlds / D. Nolan Clark.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2017. | Series: The silence ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054346 | ISBN 9780316355773 (paperback) | ISBN 9781478915379 (audio book) | ISBN 9780316355742 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.L3568 F66 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054346

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-35577-3 (paperback), 978-0-316-35574-2 (ebook)

  E3-20170215-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I: CIRCUMBINARY Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART II: TERRESTRIAL Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  PART III: EXOTIC Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  A Preview of Forbidden Suns

  A Preview of Artefact

  Orbit Newsletter

  For Fred

  PART I

  CIRCUMBINARY

  Chapter One

  Behind the wall of space lay the network of wormholes that connected the stars. A desolate and eerie maze of tunnels no more than a few hundred meters wide in most places. The walls there emitted a constant and ghostly light, the luminescent smoke of particle-antiparticle annihilations. This ghostlight provided little illumination and less warmth.

  For more than a century humanity had used that web of hidden passages to move people and cargo from one system to another, yet the maze was so complex and so convoluted it was rare for one ship to pass another in that silent space.

  It was even rarer, Aleister Lanoe thought, to find four cataphract-class aerospace fighters blocking your way. Rare enough that it couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “Those aren’t Navy ships,” Valk said. His copilot, currently riding in the observation blister slung under the ship’s belly. “Look at the hexagons on their fairings. They’re Centrocor militia.”

  Lanoe recognized their configuration. Yk.64s, cheap copies of Navy fighters with big spherical canopies. He’d faced down plenty of ships like that in his time, and he knew that while they couldn’t match the performance of the Navy’s best fighters, they still wouldn’t be pushovers.

  “Huh,” he said.

  Lanoe and Valk were still hours out from their destination, a long way from anyone who could come to their aid. They could try to punch through this formation and make a run for it, but their Z.VII recon scout was slow compared to the Yk.64s they were facing. It would be a long and nasty chase and it wouldn’t end well. Fighting wasn’t a great option, either. The Z.VII carried a pair of PBW cannon, as good as anything the Centrocor ships could bring to bear, but their vector field wasn’t as strong. The Yk.64s could shrug off most of their firepower, while they would get chewed to pieces in a dogfight.

  Lanoe tried opening a channel. “Centrocor vehicles, we need a little room here. Mind letting us squeeze by?” As if this were just a chance encounter on a well-traveled shipping corridor. “Repeat. Centrocor vehicles—”

  “Lanoe,” Valk cut in, “their guns are warming up.”

  About what Lanoe had expected.

  Outnumbered four to one. Outpaced, outgunned, and no way to call for help. Well, if they had to fight, at least they had one advantage. The pilots of the Yk.64s were militia, hired guns working for the Centrocor poly. They’d been trained by a corporation. Lanoe was one of the best pilots the Navy ever had.

  “Hold on,” he told Valk. Then he threw his stick over to the side and goosed his lateral thrusters, throwing them into a wild corkscrewing dive right toward the wall of the wormhole.

  The recon scout’s inertial sink pulled Valk backward in his seat. It felt like someone was sitting on his chest, pinning him down. He was used to the feeling—without a sink, any pilot who tried a maneuver like that would have been crushed into pink jelly by the g forces.

  It made it tricky, though, to reach the gun controls. Valk grunted and stabbed a virtual menu, bringing his cannon online. The ship’s computer automatically swung him around to give him the best firing solution possible on the Yk.64 Centrocor ships. That meant he was flying backward, which in turn meant he couldn’t see the wall of the wormhole looming up toward them. He was just fine with that. If they so much as brushed the wall—a curled-up tube of spacetime—the recon scout would be instantaneously disintegrated, its atoms torn apart down to the quark level.

  Valk trusted Lanoe to not let that happen.

  “Coming in, seven o’clock high,” Valk called, and tapped another key to bring up a virtual Aldis gunsight, a collimated reticule that moved around his canopy to show him where his shots
were likely to hit. It jumped back and forth as the computer tried to compensate for Lanoe’s spinning dive and the movement of the four targets. Valk cursed the damned thing and switched it off. He was going to have to do this manually. “I think they’re angry,” Valk said.

  Streamers of PBW fire like tiny burning comets flashed across the recon scout’s thrusters as the enemy opened fire. Lanoe twisted them around on their positioning jets and most of the shots went wide, only a few sparking off their vector field.

  “That was a warning shot,” Lanoe said. “You think they want to take us alive?”

  “Why don’t you pull over and ask them?” Valk replied.

  Lanoe actually chuckled at that one.

  The recon scout shook and groaned as Lanoe threw them to one side, narrowly avoiding the looming collision with the wormhole’s wall. Valk realized why Lanoe had cut it so close—hugging the wall kept the enemy from getting around them. The recon scout’s top side was vulnerable to attack, and Lanoe wanted to make sure they couldn’t get a bead on it. This did mean that Valk, in his observer’s blister, was right in the line of fire.

  Wouldn’t be the first time. He swiveled around to face the closest Yk.64 and squeezed his trigger. The PBW fire tore off one of the enemy’s airfoils, but the bastard didn’t need them—there was no air inside the wormhole, so he could afford to lose a wing. Valk started to line up another shot when his view swung around and suddenly he couldn’t see the enemies at all. Lanoe must have pulled some fancy maneuver without warning him.

  “Give me something to shoot at, at least,” Valk called.

  “Don’t worry,” Lanoe replied. “You’ll get another chance.”

  In the pilot’s cockpit at the front of the recon scout, Lanoe worked his boards with one hand while the other stayed tightly wrapped around his control yoke. On a secondary display he saw a three-dimensional view of the four militia fighters with their projected courses streaming out before them like ribbons of glass. The four of them were cruising along well behind and above him, lined up in a textbook formation. They had him boxed in, at a distance where they never came close enough to get a good, clear shot at him. It was a solid play—they were keeping their distance because they knew time was on their side. They could afford to pepper him with long-distance shots, knowing they only needed one lucky hit to disable his engine.

  He couldn’t outrun them. If he tried to fall back, to let them get ahead of him, they could just close the distance and then they could carve him up or just shove him into the wall of the wormhole, and that would be that.

  Militia pilots weren’t, as a rule, all that talented. The Navy aggressively recruited promising young talent—by law, they got the first pick of recruits—and the polys had to make do with whatever was left. Some were cadets who washed out of the Navy and found the only job they could get was flying for a poly. Others were recruited from the civilian population, given ten hours in a flight simulator, and sent out to do their best. This batch, though, were clearly a cut above—smart, adaptable. Patient.

  He very much wished he knew who had sent them. And why they wanted to capture him.

  If he was getting out of this trap, he was going to have to get reckless. “Valk,” he called, “don’t worry about wasting ammunition. When I pull this next trick, you hold down your trigger and don’t stop until your gun overheats, okay?”

  “Wait,” Valk said. “What are you about to do?”

  Lanoe didn’t waste time answering. He punched in a sequence of burns on his thruster board, then yanked his stick straight back and simultaneously kicked open the throttle.

  The Z.VII had been built for long-distance patrols. It carried an impressive package of sensors and a very energy-efficient fusion engine. All that extra equipment made it bulky and slow to respond to commands, though. It had never been designed for close-in fighting, and definitely not for stunt flying. The complicated maneuver Lanoe executed just then ran the risk of tying its frame in knots. He could hear its spars groan as the ship twisted around nearly 180 degrees on its long axis. It took more strain when the dozens of jets and miniature thrusters built into its nose and sides all fired in a complex rhythm. If Lanoe was unlucky, they might have torn themselves right out of their mountings.

  Luck was on his side. Everything held together. It only appeared that he’d lost all control and sent his ship into a wild, uncontrolled vertical spin.

  The Z.VII tumbled up and backward, right into the path of the pursuing militia fighters. They reacted quickly, breaking formation to make room and avoid a full-on collision. Quickly, but not flawlessly. One of them sideswiped a second in a great shower of sparks as their vector fields fought to shove each other away. A third pilot started to bank, to try to get a shot in as Lanoe’s ship went cartwheeling past. It would have been an easy hit, and it would have ended the battle as quickly as it had started.

  If Valk hadn’t already started shooting anyway. He’d done as asked, releasing a wild spray of PBW fire that lit up the canopy of the Yk.64. The militia pilot inside probably didn’t have time to scream. The shot tore the Yk.64 fighter to pieces, and the three remaining militia pilots had to scatter farther to avoid the superheated debris.

  Lanoe pulled the recon scout out of its tumble and leveled out, skating along just a few dozen meters from the wall of the tunnel. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He opened his throttle as far as it would go and burned for speed, headed in exactly the wrong direction.

  Chapter Two

  Valk rotated his observer’s blister around 180 degrees. Behind them, through the haze around their thrusters, he could see the remaining Yk.64s banking hard, regrouping to chase after them.

  “You know the Admiralty’s the other way, right?” he asked.

  “They’re not going to let us get to the Admiralty. Not today,” Lanoe answered.

  Valk switched off the intercom so Lanoe wouldn’t hear him cursing. He tried focusing on the pursuit, tried lining up a long, impossible shot on one of the fighters, but there was no point. He switched the intercom back on. “Lanoe, you promised me. You said we would go to the Admiralty and download all this stuff in my head. And then you would let me—”

  “I didn’t forget,” Lanoe replied.

  There was no point in arguing. Valk could see perfectly well how things were stacked up against them. “Ignore that last comment,” he said. “What’s the new plan?”

  “Get out of this in one piece, if we can. Listen, we’ve bought ourselves about fifteen seconds’ worth of a head start. There’s still no way we can outrun them. So I need you to keep them off balance—lay down suppressing fire as soon as they get close, keep them from forming up again. Got it?”

  “Yep,” Valk said. He brought up his weapons board. There was still plenty of ammo in his cannon. He checked his other displays and nodded to himself. “Mind if I get a little creative? I might have a few surprises for them.”

  “Whatever you can do, do it,” Lanoe told him.

  Valk tapped a few virtual keys. This might be interesting, he thought. If they could stay alive long enough to see it.

  The wormhole stretched out before Lanoe, its walls snaking back and forth, spitting out ghostly fire. He brought a display up into his main view, showing a camera feed from directly behind them. The Yk.64 Centrocor pilots hadn’t expected his crazy maneuver and it was taking them a little time to get themselves turned around.

  Not as much time as he might have liked. One of them pulled a perfect half loop, a maneuver that was a lot harder to do in vacuum than inside an atmosphere. The other two banked and rolled, slower but safer. Behind them light flashed again and again, sudden and bright as lightning, as debris from the downed ship touched the walls. Those little annihilations would give off a lot of gamma rays, but it was too much to hope that any of the remaining pilots would be fried.

  The ship that pulled the half loop burned hard in pursuit, enough so that Lanoe could see the ion trail of its wake as if the Yk.64 were standing on a pill
ar of fire. Valk put a couple of pointless PBW shots across its nose and its airfoils but it didn’t even bother rolling to evade.

  The Yk.64’s powerful engines ate up the distance. Any second now the militia pilot would be close enough to get a perfect bead on Lanoe’s main thruster and then it would all be over. Lanoe considered a couple of different tricky maneuvers, just to make it harder for the pilot to get that shot, but any deviation from their course right now would slow the Z.VII down, and he would still have the other two pursuers to worry about. They weren’t far behind.

  “Valk,” he called, “if you’ve got something—”

  “Close your eyes,” Valk said.

  “I’m a little busy flying this crate,” Lanoe pointed out.

  Valk reached for his sensor board. His finger hovered over a virtual key.

  “Damn it, Lanoe—close your damned eyes.”

  He stabbed the key.

  The Z.VII came with a whole suite of advanced sensors and communication gear. Included in that package were several hundred microdrones—basically satellites no bigger than Valk’s thumb. Each of them contained a camera, an antenna, and a tiny thruster. There wasn’t room for anything else. In normal conditions these would be released one at a time as the recon scout made a long patrol across a battlefield, stringing them out like a trail of breadcrumbs. They were designed to work together to create a distributed communications and imaging network, providing a comprehensive picture of a massive volume of space.

  Valk released all of them at once. They burst out of panels recessed into the Z.VII’s hull, flaring away on their tiny thrusters, headed in every possible direction, a whole cloud of them zipping away and behind like chaff. They would ruin the Yk.64’s ability to get a clear lock on the Z.VII’s thrusters, but it would only take a fraction of a second for the pursuer’s computers to compensate. That wasn’t what Valk was after.