by J. N. Chaney
“You told him that? Shame, Alys,” Admiral Maynard chided.
She shrugged but did so while smiling. “And I do apologize. I’ve suspected that the Starcasters have hidden depths, because we don’t know much about any of this. Ten years in and we still have infantry commanders who think the Nyctus use satellites to pound us into rubble.” She sighed in disgust. “You killed more Nyctus than the entire fleet, and you’ve done it in three attacks. If you think you can share your abilities, I’ll be the first to open my mind to you, but I suspect you have other plans.” Densmore glanced at Kira, who flushed red at the suggestion.
“My plans are simple, ma’am. I’ll do what fleet tells me, and Mol Wyant will put me close enough to Nytcus operations so that I can torch them. Then, one day in the future, some squid will get lucky and kill me.” Thorn shrugged. “I don’t want to die, but I plan on taking a lot more of them with me before I do. If Kira—excuse me, but that’s how I think of her—can be there fighting, it will be because at some point, I was able to share this ability with her. And I know I can. I don’t know when, or how, but it will happen.”
Admiral Maynard stood, smoothing her uniform as she picked up a thin file and placed it carefully before Thorn. “Go ahead, open it.”
Thorn did.
He whistled softly and glanced up for confirmation. When the admiral nodded, he went back to reading, then turned the pages so Kira and Mol could see.
A hundred targets, spread all over Nyctus space.
“Lotta work to do,” Thorn said, smiling. “Any gas in the tank?”
Mol grinned. “Tank’s full.”
Thorn beamed at Kira, then they rose, along with Mol.
“With apologies, may we be on our way? Busy days ahead,” Thorn said, saluting.
You have no idea, came the thought, as Alys quirked her lip.
Neither do the Nyctus, Thorn sent.
Keep reading to continue the story in HEX DIVISION.
1
Thorn Stellers knew that sometime in the next few minutes, this ship was going to die.
Beside him, the Captain—a preternaturally tall, gangly, and long-limbed woman from some low-grav world—leaned forward in her command chair. “Helm, as soon as this jump is finished, I want you to”—she paused, consulting a screen built into the chair’s arm—“maneuver five degrees port, ten degrees up, and apply half thrust for a ten-second burn.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Weapons, status?”
“All green, sir. Reactive armor is powered up; point defense systems switched to autonomous mode.”
“Good. You’ll be looking for targets to starboard-low. Get that data link up to the flagship as soon as we’ve got comms back. I want our targeting solutions uploaded into the squadron fire plan before they need to ask us for them—you know, unlike the last time we did this.”
The Weapons Officer answered the Captain’s admonishment with a tight nod. “Will do, sir.”
“Alright, Engineering,” the Captain continued. “Order a ship-wide suit check.”
The Engineering Officer tapped at the console, and an alarm buzzed through the ship. Every crew member ran through a quick checklist for their crash suits. Stripped down vac-suits, they offered about two hours of life support, enough to get to a life capsule or, in theory, to be rescued from a crippled ship.
Another chime sounded, and the Engineering Officer called out, “Alcubierre Drive cutoff in thirty seconds, sir.”
The Captain leaned back again. “Thirty whole seconds with nothing to do. Enjoy the time off, people.”
Chuckles rose around the bridge but quickly cut off, replaced by the soft chatter of voices across the intercom as each Bridge Officer coordinated the work of their respective departments. Tension crackled in the air, intensifying by the second like an electrical field building toward sudden discharge. Thorn knew the stress of these last moments before battle only too well. To their credit, these people—the crew of the Orbital Navy battlecruiser Centurion—soldiered on through it, every movement and clipped syllable a study in the word professionalism.
Another soft chime came from the Engineering station. “Drive cutoff in five seconds.”
The Captain nodded and leaned forward again. “Stand by, everyone. Show’s about to start.”
The 3-D viewscreen, filling the forward bulkhead of the bridge, abruptly flickered with a hint of dull crimson. The ship’s superluminal bow wave and intense Doppler shift released particles when the drive cut, the resulting scarlet ghost tinging the screen like diluted blood.
“Hold simulation,” a gruff voice said. Everything around Thorn froze.
Commodore Scoville, dour Operations Chief for the ON’s Third Fleet, stepped forward from his place near the rear of the bridge. “The next forty minutes or so of the log is the approach to the Nyctus fleet and the opening engagement. The part I want you to see starts at time index forty-two—”
“Sir, with all due respect,” Thorn said. “I’d like to watch the entire log, if I could.”
Scoville scowled and crossed his arms. “I’m looking for your expertise in Starcasting, Lieutenant, not tactical ops.”
“Understood, sir. However, there could be any number of clues about how the Nyctus pulled off what they did in the meantime. I’d hate to miss them.”
Scoville narrowed his eyes, then nodded. “Alright. Resume—”
“Sir?”
The Commodore paused.
Thorn looked around. “Did the Centurion have a Starcaster aboard?”
“No. There were only a half-dozen with the whole task force. Not enough of you people to go around.”
The Commodore’s tone hovered somewhere between awe, fear, and contempt. Another old-school officer who viewed magic the same way he might a reactor with delicate safeties: potentially powerful, but also potentially dangerous to everyone around.
Thorn was used to it, though. He just ignored it with a mental eye-roll, nodding as Scoville resumed the simulation.
The Captain and her crew abruptly came back to life. Thorn watched them carefully as they worked to prepare the Centurion for the impending clash with the Nyctus. Now that they could see the enemy fleet, a sprawl of ships backlit by the dim glow of the white dwarf beyond them, their tense anticipation ratcheted up another couple of notches. But they did their jobs with confident competence, and for good reason. The ON had enjoyed a string of victories now, each won battle pushing the Nyctus further back, away from ON space.
But the aliens had established a new defensive line, its center anchored on the white dwarf and a dusty nebula sprawling nearly a light-year around it. The ON had deployed the Third Fleet, the Centurion’s parent formation, to attack here; their specific objective was a large, fortified platform orbiting a white dwarf. Intel thought it might be a forward operating base, or FOB. While an important target on its own, more critically the Nyctus presence threatened the flank of the ON’s main effort, a major offensive by the combined First and Second fleets in the adjacent sector.
The intel hadn’t had much more to say about the battlespace than that. It did acknowledge the potential for some “sensor degradation” thanks to the dust, the remains of what had been a red supergiant before it had puffed away its outer layers, leaving only the shriveled corpse of its exposed core, the white dwarf. There had been nothing else of much note in the intel briefing, aside from a somewhat petulant comment about a lack of reconnaissance prior to the deployment of the fleet.
Thorn watched as the time and range to target both ticked down. Firing solutions were developed and refined until, at the twenty-five minute mark, the flagship transmitted the first command to shoot. Across the Third Fleet, salvoes of torpedoes rippled out of launchers and accelerated away. It was a coordinated barrage, intended to tie up the Nyctus while the ON task force closed to the effective range of their main batteries. A smaller fusillade of missiles erupted from the Nyctus, racing back toward the ON fleet. The Squids avoided reliance on long-ranged missi
le fire, but leaned heavily on purely kinetic weapons—basically, rocks hurled by the eldritch power of their shamans—a capability gap they either couldn’t close or simply chose not to. For the squid, a KEW rock was cheap, fast, and effective.
As the weapons tracked, Thorn took a moment to watch the Centurion’s crew. He wanted to see if any of them showed signs of being remotely influenced by the telepathic shamans of the Nyctus. None of them did, though, nor had there been any suggestions of it in the after-action reports. Thorn had expected as much, but he watched them anyway, studying each of their faces in turn. As he wandered around the virtual bridge, he felt Scoville watching him, but ignored it and focused on these digital ghosts. Since he was spending their last moments alive with them, he paid close attention to every nuance, every gesture, in the hope that some helpful detail would emerge from the swan song of a dying ship and her crew.
After all, someday he might be nothing more than a simulation derived from some combat log. In that case, he hoped someone took the same care watching him as he hurtled toward his end, because the idea of death without purpose angered him as much as the squids themselves.
“Enemy torps forty seconds out,” the Weapons Officer said, his voice taut but still measured and clear. “It looks like the escorts will take down . . . 90 percent-plus. Fleet tactical predicts 5 percent minimum breaking through the screen.”
The Captain nodded. “Leave them to point defense. Status on the rail guns?”
“Rail gun range in fifteen seconds,” the Weapons Officer replied.
“Good. Priority for firing solutions is the capital ships in that nearest—”
“Hold simulation,” Scoville said. “So, Stellers, have you seen anything useful so far?”
Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.”
“Well, this is where things start to go wrong. Resume simulation.”
“—enemy detachment. They look like they’re trying to flank us . . .”
The Captain broke off, frowning at the summary tactical situation showing on the console built into her chair. “Engineering, what’s with these uncertainty values? They’re all going up.”
Thorn leaned over the Captain, looking at her display. Sure enough, the icons representing the Nyctus ships were now each the apex of an expanding cone reflecting their possible range of maneuvers. That was normal at long ranges, where light-speed delays meant that the target ship had moved since the latest sensor return, so its current actions could only be estimated. But with the range down to just thousands of kilometers, there should be no such fuzz in the locations or trajectories of the Nyctus ships.
“Not sure, sir,” the Engineering Officer replied. “Some sort of scanner degradation. It seems to be affecting . . . shit. It’s affecting all sensors, even visual.”
Thorn looked at the viewscreen. It too depicted increasing uncertainty in the actual locations of the Nyctus ships; more fundamentally, the imagery was fading, as though some sort of diffuse fog coalesced between the Nyctus and ON fleets.
“It’s affecting our firing solutions,” the Weapons Officer called out. “Confidence levels are dropping fast.”
The Captain turned. “Engineering, this is not a good time for our sensors to crap out—”
“Working on it, sir.” The Lieutenant’s fingers danced across the console. “Everything self-tests green.” His voice rose a notch in frustration, fear, maybe both. “It’s all working the way it should!”
“I’ve got news for you, Lieutenant,” the Captain snapped. “No, it’s not.” She waved a hand at the big viewscreen.
Thorn followed her gaze. The imagery had almost completely faded away.
“Hold simulation,” Scoville said, then crossed his arms. “Okay, Stellers, time to earn your pay. Any ideas?”
Thorn frowned. The Nyctus could have developed some sort of jamming effect that targeted the ON sensors—but he was no tech and didn’t doubt that the ON had already thrown their best engineering minds at that possibility. In fact, him being here probably meant that they had come up empty. So he bit his lip and stared at the blankness of the viewscreen.
Something tickled his thoughts, but it was elusive, like a bug flying around the room—heard, but as yet unseen.
“Stellers—?”
“I’d like to see some more, sir, if I could,” he said.
Scoville nodded. “Resume simulation.”
The Captain turned back to the engineering station. “You and your people have one minute to get this sorted out, Lieutenant. If you can’t, I’m going to have to recommend to the flagship that we fall out of line, and I will not be happy about that.”
The Engineering Lieutenant gave a quick nod. “I know, ma’am. We’re working on it.”
“Work faster.”
The Weapons Officer blew out an exasperated sigh. “Firing solutions have dropped below 50 percent.”
“For which weapons?” the Captain asked.
“All of them, ma’am.”
A distant thud sounded, and the deck shuddered. Another followed, then two more, in rapid succession.
“Incoming missiles!” the Weapons Officer said. “Point defense can’t track them!”
“The reactive armor’s doing its job,” the Captain cut in. “For the moment, anyway. But we’re taking hits here, and we can’t even see them coming.” She turned again. “Engineering, last chance.”
The Lieutenant offered the Captain a bleak look. “Sorry, ma’am, we’ve got nothing—no idea what’s happening.”
“We’re getting calls from across the task force,” the Comms Officer put in. “It’s not just us. Sounds like—”
Another ripple of thuds sounded, and then a heavy bang came from somewhere aft. Damage alerts flared across bridge consoles; warnings chimed and buzzed.
The Captain turned to the now-blank viewscreen, and her eyes went wide. “Damn. It’s the Nyctus. Somehow, they’ve blinded us.”
The simulation abruptly froze—this time, without an order from Scoville.
“That’s where the log ends,” the Commodore said. “Based on what we’ve been able to piece together from all the logs we’ve recovered and accounts from the surviving ships, the Centurion took a catastrophic hit at this point. Run simulation Scoville-two.”
The digital ghosts of the Centurion’s crew and bridge vanished, replaced by a tactical map giving an overview of the battle. A cadre of Nyctus ships near the rear of their battle line suddenly vanished, then reappeared in pulses of blue-shifted energy within a few tens of kilometers of the ON battle line.
“I’m no expert,” Thorn said, “but isn’t using Alcubierre drives, or whatever the Nyctus version is, in such crowded space—”
“Asking for disaster? Damned right it is,” Scoville replied. “But the Nyctus had it all pre-plotted, and we assume that includes nav. They were ready for us, the bastards, and we played right into whatever disgusting appendages pass for their hands.”
The Centurion was, Thorn saw, the first of the ON capital ships to be hit and destroyed—and by nothing more than a massive chunk of rock unceremoniously dumped out of the hold of one of the Nyctus ships. There was no plasma flare from an engine, but the rock accelerated at a horrific rate until it slammed into the battlecruiser, virtually breaking her in two. She wasn’t the last, though. More ships staggered under titanic impacts, reeling out of line or just bursting into clouds of shattered debris.
“The Centurion and all the rest of these ships were taken out by boulders, Stellers. Friggin’ boulders, that they couldn’t see coming.” Scoville’s scowl was ripe with disgust. “The Nyctus and their damned shamans. There’s no way those rocks could have been accelerated that hard conventionally, not without being pulverized into gravel.” Jaw muscles clenched, Scoville stared at the miniature scene of carnage.
Thorn just stayed quiet. He didn’t need Joining to tell him that Scoville’s fury wasn’t just focused on the Nyctus, but on magic generally, a vast and unwelcome
intrusion into their once-tidy vision of space combat.
“In any case,” the Commodore finally said, “we’ve seen that capability before, so it’s not new to us.”
Thorn nodded. “The Nyctus focus on Earth magic. At least the ones we’ve encountered do, although some of the squid target human beings. What we call Lifer magic.”
Scoville’s gaze went flat, his body utterly still. There was a cloud of potential violence around the man that went against everything an officer was supposed to be: calm, controlled, reasoned. “Earth mages, Lifers, whatever. I don’t speak ’caster, and don’t especially want to. I deal in math. I want a war I can fight, not some childhood myth come alive out here in hard vacuum.”
“Sorry, sir. Elemental magic is given by elements, so earth, air, fire, and water. It’s actually more complicated than that—electrical energy falls under fire. Think of them as cousins, not siblings. Anyway, Lifers are able to interact with living things directly, and Joiners are telepathic.” Thorn shrugged. “They’re not really official names, just terms born of necessity and habit. It’s all new to me as well, and . . . it’s a part of me. It’s a natural function of the universe, and for some reason it set up shop in my body when I was a kid. I’ve been carrying it with me ever since. Now I’m going to use it to kill Nyctus, and though I may be speaking out of turn—"
“Careful, Stellers. It may surprise you to find that I’m no fan of this bullshit,” Scoville growled.
Thorn gave a shrug that was neither apologetic nor indifferent. “Loud and clear. Since we’re being honest with each other, I’ll show you this.” He pulled out his talisman and handed it to Scoville, who took it with only a minor hesitation.
“Yes? And?” Scoville said, dismissing the book as he handed it back to Thorn.
“The ashes of my parents, my home, and my planet are on each page,” Thorn said.
Scoville paused, then spoke in a softer voice. “I’m sorry for your loss—”
“That’s not why I showed you, sir.”