Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Gillis grinned. “Ooooh, Kira’s in trouble!” he said in a sing-song voice. “Getting called to the principal's office!”

  Kira flipped him off and everyone laughed. But as she followed Rainer out of the infirmary, she wondered just why she was suddenly being called in front of the brass, because the reasons that happened were almost never good.

  Kira swallowed hard, trying to quell the icy little fingers tickling her stomach. She stood at-ease just outside the company commander’s office, waiting to be called in by whoever’s voices she could hear murmuring behind the door. Narvez and Fielder, apparently, with someone else.

  The door opened. Fielder nodded at Kira. “Wixcombe, come in.”

  She came to attention, entered, and marched toward the big desk. At the last second, though, she saw everyone gathered around a conference table set off to one side and veered that way, then she halted and saluted.

  “At ease, Wixcombe,” Fielder said, then closed the door and took a seat at the table.

  She relaxed her body, but her mind raced, powered by suspicion and experience. Fielder and Narvez were there, with a man she’d never seen before. He was older, wearing the insignia of a Commander but no other identifying emblems. He watched Kira with a purposeful stare, one that carried a hint of knowing, of secrets that were important but couldn’t be shared.

  “Wixcombe,” Fielder said. “Lieutenant Commander Narvez tells me that your performance during your upgrade training has generally been good and, in a few subject areas, very good.”

  Kira resisted letting her mouth drop open in surprise. Narvez had been chilly at best and ruthless at her worst, always professional but never giving the slightest hint that Kira—a Joiner—was welcome under her command. For the formidable woman to be speaking well of her actually stunned Kira. She covered her surprise by simply nodding.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “There’s also the matter of your rescue of Trainee Riley, despite the extreme risk to yourself.” Fielder paused, giving Kira a hard stare.

  She swallowed again. Was this why she’d been called in here? Because not long after being lectured by Fielder on how saving everyone despite the risk could be the wrong thing to do, she’d gone ahead and done it anyway just a few days later?

  “Well done, Wixcombe,” Fielder said, giving her a firm nod.

  She blinked. Okay, so not that, either.

  “In two days, Wixcombe,” Narvez said, “there is going to be an exercise. It is going to pit you and several members of your squad against an enemy force.” She picked up a paper from the table and handed it to Kira. “This is a Warning Order, giving you enough information to get your planning and preparations started.”

  Kira looked at the page. Three names jumped out at her: Rainer, Riley, and Gillis. They were to be her team. There was more information—a thumbnail outline of the mission, which was apparently taking place on another planet, along with certain, key timings and specific things she needed to prepare. Receiving the Warning Order kick-started an entire process called battle procedure, which was a standardized way of getting ready for operations, whether by a single squad or an entire fleet. She’d digest the rest of Warning Order as soon as she was cut loose from here. In the meantime, though, she had one, looming question—

  “You’re wondering why we picked you, and those three, in particular,” Fielder said.

  Apparently he wasn’t the only one who let things leak out of her psyche, Kira thought, and nodded. “Yes, sir. Why not the rest of the squad as well?”

  “Not that you’re entitled to an explanation, Lieutenant,” Narvez remarked mildy, “but our personnel screening and other assessments have told us that the four of you are naturally complementary, in terms of skills, character traits, and personalities.”

  “But Riley is still in the infirmary—”

  “He will be sufficiently recovered in time for this mission,” Narvez said flatly.

  Kira just stared back. She didn’t see how that could possibly be true, even with the best healing tech available. But Narvez’s neutral gaze didn’t encourage further debate.

  “Do you have any other immediate questions, Wixcombe?” Fielder asked.

  Kira shook her head—which was a lie, because she actually had a mountain of questions, and more piling on by the second. But she wanted to extract herself from this really uncomfortable situation to read and ponder the Warning Order and digest what was going on.

  Besides, she wanted to get away from the penetrating gaze of the third man, the unnamed Commander who hadn’t said a thing.

  “No, no other questions, sir. At least, not at the moment.”

  “In that case, Lieutenant, your timings are now dictated by the Warning Order and your own planning. You are dismissed.”

  Kira came to attention, then turned and marched out of the office. She waited until she was well outside the Orderly Room before she voiced the two words she’d been holding in for a while now.

  “Holy shit!”

  Kira activated her suit’s heat sink and crept forward. The suit would now channel her body heat to reduce her infrared signature—as long as she kept the dispersal outlet pointed away from the enemy, that is. It gave her about five minutes of increased stealth, and then the sink would be saturated and she’d either have to pull back to dump the heat from it under cover, let her thermal signature poke through the suit again, or slowly cook in her own waste heat.

  She peered through a patch of sawblade grass at their objective. Lowlight imaging showed the mock-up of a crashed ship—actually, an old hull that had apparently been stuck here as a remote training site for Code Nebula. She saw no one guarding it, though; thermal imaging showed a few flickers of heat, but nothing she could identify. If the signatures were decoys or enemy personnel, she didn’t have the resolution to say.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to rely solely on her suit’s tech. She took a breath, let it out slowly, and felt the calming effects of five seconds, then ten, and twenty—of absolute stillness.

  Then she let her awareness expand the same way she had the night of the fire when she’d been looking for Riley. This time, she found him back in the patrol base they’d established, along with Rainer. Gillis hung back behind her, ready to give cover if she needed to extract. Other than that, though—

  No, wait. There. Stray thoughts. More. Minds. That meant people.

  Kira touched three—no, four sets of thoughts. She kept her own intrusion as superficial as possible, avoiding trying to glean any information. Yet. Right now, she just wanted to confirm enemy strength and locations. Intentions would have to wait, at least until she determined if there were Joiners among their opponents. If there were, then any deeper intrusion could be perilous.

  The fact was, they were supposed to avoid detection entirely. This was a reconnaissance and recovery mission. The scenario was a crashed Nyctus ship, which contained valuable intelligence that needed to be seized, brought back to an extraction point, and then evacuated along with Kira’s patrol. They’d been warned there would be an active enemy force playing the survivors of the crash.

  The plan Kira had developed saw her using her Joining powers to do a psychic reconnaissance of the wreck, while Gillis, also a Joiner, kept a mental lookout for other threats. Rainer, a Hammer, did double duty: patrol 2ic, as well as staying ready to use her formidable psychokinetic powers to deal with crash damage that might keep them from the intelligence they’d been tasked to retrieve. Of course, if Rainer started pushing and pulling debris away, that would certainly alert the enemy and turn this into a firefight. And that was plan B, in which Rainer and Riley would use their powers as weapons, while Kira and Gillis maintained psychic overwatch. All of them were ready to use conventional weapons, the handheld mass drivers called railers, and grenades, as necessary.

  Of course, if it came to that, the mission would be considered a borderline success, at best. When it came to seizing and recovering intelligence assets, it was always optimal if the
enemy didn’t know you had their secrets—at least not until it was too late.

  Kira, satisfied that they faced four enemy, crept backward. Sweat beaded her brow and face behind her faceplate and began dampening her under-suit. When she was well back into the hole where Gillis waited, she shut off her suit’s heat-storage system and dumped her thermal waste into the cold ground. The soft, cool feeling gave her a new sense of purpose, and for the first time in what felt like hours, Kira exhaled freely.

  She pointed her helmet’s infrared emitter at Gillis’s. The pulsed infrared light would carry her comms to him, and his back to hers, while minimizing their audible footprint.

  “I make it four enemy. Two are amidships, one’s in the stern, and the other’s in or near the remains of the bow.”

  “Got it,” Gillis replied.

  “So we go with plan A. Bring Rainer and Riley forward, then you and Riley will go firm here, while Rainer and I move in on the objective. Once we’re in place—assuming the bad guys don’t intervene—we’ll take the next bound.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  Gillis turned and slipped back into the darkness. Kira again activated the heat sink and moved forward again. It was essential to keep eyes on the objective so they knew exactly what they were getting into when they started to push.

  A brief flash lit the eastern horizon, followed a few seconds later by a rolling boom.

  Kira frowned. Had there just been an accident? Had a copter or shuttle crashed? Or was this just a special effect for the benefit of the exercise? If it was the former, there’d be a general broadcast codeword standing down the exercise, with instructions to follow.

  Nothing. Just dead air.

  So it had to be part of the exercise. But what was the point—

  There was another flash, followed by an even louder boom. Then a ripping sound overhead, followed by a tremendous crack that made Kira wince. An instant later, a dazzling flash lit up the sky; after a second or two, the ground heaved, and a second or two after that, a colossal whump rolled across the landscape, air pushing hard in a concussive wave that flattened trees and lashed the ground. Dust and debris were torn up in an orgy of violence that appeared before Kira could even shout a warning.

  She immediately recognized it as the impact of a kinetic energy weapon, back in the direction of the exercise control station. They’d departed from there, a cluster of bunkers and huts that house the staff overseeing the training area.

  If this was part of the exercise, then it was one hell of a set of effects.

  “All stations!”

  The voice, its tone almost frantic, had started over the comm but abruptly cut off at the second impact, the channel dissolving into a hiss of static.

  Kira tensed. That didn’t sound like part of the exercise at all.

  It sounded like someone dying.

  Footsteps and the whisper of bodies moving through the foliage nearby pulled Kira’s alarmed attention, and the muzzle of her railer, that way. The hand cannon gave her a sense of security anywhere, anytime; one shot from it meant your opponent wasn’t just down, they were in pieces.

  A sleek, stealth-suited figure emerged from the nearby foliage, cradling a railer of his own.

  She relaxed. It was Gillis.

  He crouched a few paces away and linked his infrared emitter to hers.

  “Kira, what the hell’s going on?”

  Then came another distant boom, followed by what sounded like a pair of secondary explosions. Kira could again feel it in her feet, as shockwaves propagated through the ground.

  “No idea. But if I had to guess, I’d say we’re being attacked.”

  “Attacked—you mean, for real? By the squids?”

  She gave a grim nod. “Yeah. Turn around.”

  Gillis hesitated, then did. Kira snapped open a single pouch mounted high on the back of his tactical harness and extracted a magazine. Their rifles were loaded with simulation rounds, since this had been intended only as an exercise, after all. But SOP had them cart around a mag of live rounds, sealed in its own specific pouch, one that was essentially impossible to get at without deliberately removing the harness or getting help from a buddy. It was the last thing issued before training, the first thing collected afterward, and tested, via an embedded chip, to determine if it had been accessed in the interim. Kira found this particular bit of intense safety protocol to be kind of dumb, considering what any one of them could do with a mere flicker of thought.

  But Navy’s gotta Navy.

  She handed him the mag and he snapped it into his railer, then turned and retrieved her mag for her. There were no more blasts in the meantime, and a ponderous, ominous silence had settled over the dark forest.

  She seated her mag, stowing the one containing the practice rounds. Thirty railer shots. That was it. It was a powerful weapon, sure, but thirty shots didn’t seem like anywhere near enough if the Nyctus had chosen to drop by.

  She turned around and relinked her line-of-sight comms to Gillis. “Okay, let’s go find the others.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t make it back to them when this all started. Figured I’d come back to cover you.”

  “And I appreciate it. But right now—”

  Somewhere not far away, a man screamed.

  They both spun toward the nerve-rattling sound that abruptly cut off. It had come from the direction of the mock-up crash site.

  Kira turned back to Gillis, the anxious dread that had been starting to twist and turn her gut intensifying. “Shit. That must be the enemy force.”

  “They’re—what, under attack, too?”

  Kira hissed in frustration. Instinct told her to help the enemy force; they were enemy in name only, actually ON Ratings drafted into the role for the exercise. But she wanted to find Rainer and Riley, because—

  Something burst through the undergrowth a few meters away. It was big, round, and glittering in the wan light, surrounded by writhing tentacles that never stopped moving

  Which was all Kira and Gillis needed to see. They both aimed and fired on instinct, the hypersonic cracks of their railer shots snapping the stillness in half. Both rounds hit, blasting fragments from whatever the hell this was. It immediately fell back and vanished into the foliage.

  Kira switched to thermal and could see a faint heat signature shimmering through the tangled leaves and branches. But there was no psychic signature, none of the incidental mental mumbles and mutters that leaked from every mind she’d ever encountered. Who or whatever this was, it either had mental shields so formidable she couldn’t even detect them, much less penetrate them—

  Or it wasn’t alive.

  “Kira!”

  Gillis just shouted it through his faceplate. Kira rose, smacked his shoulder, and shouted back.

  “Come on, let’s find the others!”

  She raced off through the brush, Gillis taking her six and hanging three meters back. They both hurried, but with minimal noise and only the most economic movements. Fortunately, and per SOP, they’d dabbed otherwise invisible splotches of paint laced with small amounts of radioisotopes on trees as they’d come this way; the small amount of heat given off gave them a path to follow with their thermal imagers.

  They reached a clearing. Kira knew they had to cross it, then carry on through the brush on the far side downslope to where Riley and Rainer should be hunkered down in the patrol base. She raised a hand to Gillis and paused and crouched, taking a moment to just watch and listen. That thick, ominous silence had draped itself over the night again, broken only by her own breathing, the rhythmic rush of blood in her ears, the odd, incidental noise from Gillis behind her.

  And that was it.

  Still, she tentatively extended her awareness in the surrounding night. Again, she touched no other minds. That should mean they were alone and safe, but—

  “What was that thing?” Kira said, breath fogging her faceplate. Her heat sink was struggling to keep up after the raw chaos of close combat, and she took a series of lo
ng, calming breaths, returning both pulse and mindset to something closer to that of an ON officer.

  She turned back to Gillis, made a hand gesture that said turn on your heat sink, then waited as both of their thermal signatures faded. Then, Kira waved for Gillis to follow and resumed her way forward, straight across the clearing. She moved as she’d been taught without thinking about it, putting her foot down outer edge first, then rolling her weight inward, compressing the grass and twigs under her foot slowly, rather than simply brushing through the forest mast.

  Between them, she and Gillis made almost no noise, their suits reflected virtually no light, and with their body heat being dumped into the sink, they offered almost no infrared signature, either. Going around the clearing might have been more secure, but it would have taken them too long.

  Something smashed out of the bush to her left. It was another of the enemy spheres, whose body formed the hub for a series of radiating tentacles. Kira caught a metallic gleam, which suggested something mechanical but could also just be armor.

  And as she noticed this, her training had already kicked in, so she instinctively raised her railer and snapped out a shot. She didn’t bother aiming through the sight; she didn’t need to, because the thing was barely ten meters away. Her hyper-velocity round smacked into it dead-center, and it staggered. Gillis’s round hit a second later, and the thing dropped to the ground, levitation tech apparently failing. It landed with a gong-like boom, then lay there, tentacles flailing around it, thrashing through the brush and leaves in a serpentine dance of death.

  Another appeared right behind it. Then two more, and a third coming up the path they’d followed from behind them.

  “Gillis, let’s go!” Kira shouted, her racing mind telling her to break contact and get away to—wherever, it didn’t matter as long as it was somewhere they could defend. But the constructs—because she was now sure that’s what they were, just machines—raced in, closing on them from two directions.