by J. N. Chaney
“We’re being turned into a spook ship,” Tanner said. “Mainly thanks to you. I reserve the right to be either happy or furious about that once we’ve got a few ops under our belts.”
Thorn smiled. His frustration had faded against the bright promise of doing something proactive. “Well, in that case, sir, you’re welcome—or I’m sorry.”
Scoville nodded. “Very well, then. All of you get the hell out of my CIC. I’ve got a war to run.”
Tanner, Mol, and Thorn all saluted and started to leave, but Scoville said, “Oh.”
Thorn stopped and turned back. “Sir?”
The Commodore slid open a drawer on a nearby console and extracted a small box. “Fleet wanted you to have these—a Distinguished Service Star First Class, and a Wound Medal. There’s supposed to be a ceremony to present them to you.” He handed the box to Thorn. “Here. Ceremony’s done.”
Thorn couldn’t help smiling. “Thank you, sir.”
Scoville met his gaze, and for a brief moment he saw Thorn as a soldier, and not some incomprehensible wrinkle in military doctrine. “No, not this time. My thanks go to you.”
Thorn took the Commodore’s hand who, this time, shook it warmly.
“See to your duties, Lieutenant,” Scoville said.
Thorn saluted again, making the sharpest, smartest salute he could. “Aye, sir.” He left the CIC with the new knowledge that respect earned was better than any parade or medal.
The bridge between magic and war wasn’t complete in the ON, but it was getting stronger.
Thorn worked his way along the narrow gap between the bulkhead delineating the starboard side of the Hecate’s tiny hangar and the flank of Mol’s Gyrfalcon. The fighter took up most of the volume of the space, displacing the pair of small shuttles that were normally stored here. A single shuttle had been moved to her repurposed cargo bay, an even smaller space located just ahead of her engineering section. A ship of the Hecate’s class had never been designed to act as what amounted to a carrier, but an unusual mission demanded unusual measures.
“Hey, sir,” Mol called from somewhere off to Thorn’s left.
He looked that way, saw nothing but Gyrfalcon hull, then ducked down. Mol knelt under the fighter, an access panel hanging open beside her. A set of tools were scattered on the deck around her knees, and she wore a small headlamp on a band over her forehead. She looked at Thorn as he crouched, glaring the light right into his face.
He put a hand up. “Mol, we’ve got a launch window opening in, like, ten minutes. What the hell are you doing?”
“Trixie says the port backup stabilizer is still lagging by about a tenth of a second.” She looked up again, into the open port, and stuck a tool inside. “May not sound like much, but when you’re doing forty or fifty klicks a second, it adds up.”
“Isn’t that something your ground crew would usually fix?”
“Yes, it is.” She frowned and tweaked the tool. “But the Hecate doesn’t have anyone qualified to work on a Gyrfalcon, and I didn’t bring any groundcrew with me. This was just supposed to be a ferry flight for that spooky Captain Densmore of yours, damn it. Trixie, did that make any difference at all?”
“It sure did,” the AI replied through a comm hanging on Mol’s belt. “It made things worse. The lag’s increased by fifteen percent.”
“Shit.”
“The waste reclamation system is working just fine.”
“That was an expletive, not—”
“I know. Just trying to lighten the mood,” Trixie replied.
Mol rolled her eyes, extracted the tool, and glared at whatever problem lurked inside the access panel. “I don’t have time for this,” she snapped. “Let’s just hope we don’t need the backup stab on this flight, I guess.”
Thorn rubbed his jaw, staring at the fighter. He’d been so glad to see Mol that he hadn’t asked simple questions, like where the hell would they get parts. Or maintenance crew. “What happens if you need spare parts?” He feared the answer but asked the question anyway.
Mol started sticking tools back into the bag beside her. “About ninety percent of this crate can be 3-D printed by the Hecate’s maintenance shop. I’ve uploaded all her schematics to them.”
“What about the other ten percent?”
“Well, they’re all pretty much stuff that’s critical to keep her flying, so”—she stuck the last tool in the bag, rolled it up, then snapped the access panel closed—“unless you can magic them up for me, you’d better hope none of them get busted.” She started crawling toward Thorn. “Can you magic them up for me?”
Thorn hesitated, recalling his conversation with Densmore—and Mol was right, she was spooky as hell—after she’d done her deep reading of him.
“Not without a special sacrifice,” Thorn said darkly.
“Sacrifice? What the hell?” Mol asked, her eyes round with alarm. “Like, um, what kind?” She fell silent, expecting the worst.
Thorn leaned forward. “Money. I’m going to need all of your money.”
She lifted a finger and scratched her nose. “Riiiiight.”
They’d met in the quarters she’d been assigned in Code Gauntlet; it didn’t surprise him at all that there was absolutely nothing to indicate she was actually living in them—not a trinket, not a dirty sock, nothing except for a closed duffle bag. She might have literally just moved in, instead of having spent at least two nights in them already.
“You never fail to amaze,” Densmore said. “You truly did manage to change reality—and you made it look easy, at that. But even though I basically experienced you doing it in real time, experienced every thought and emotion that you did, I still have absolutely no idea how you managed it.”
“If it makes you feel any better, ma’am, I was as surprised as anyone. Once it worked, that is.”
“I know. And that’s what makes it so worrisome. Even if you never do that again—and, let me reiterate this, do not do that again—I’m still left wondering what else you might just do.”
Thorn bristled. “Ma’am, if you’re telling me to stick to conventional magic, that’s fine, but if I’m in another situation like that one—”
“Then you’ll do whatever you need to. I know that. And, short of yanking you off the front line and sticking you deep in some secure facility somewhere, there’s no way of stopping you.” She’d leaned toward him, the veil of mystery that permeated her aura suddenly gone. For a moment, he got to glimpse the actual person that was Alys Densmore.
“What I’m saying is this. You are dangerous. Profoundly so. If this was peace time, you would be in some secure facility, being studied, and more importantly being controlled. And, yes, that would be whether you liked it or not.” A sinister glint hardened her gaze, reminding Thorn that, no matter how pleasant this woman might seem, she really was not a very nice person—because nice people didn’t do the sort of job she did. “But we’re fighting what amounts to an existential war against the Nyctus, so we need you out here, doing the things you do.”
“I understand—”
“No, you don’t,” Densmore cut in. “You don’t understand at all. And that’s the problem.” She narrowed her eyes. “Try putting yourself in our boots. We’re aboard a ship, and you’re the fusion reactor. All your safeties have failed, except one. And that last one, the one keeping us all from disaster, isn’t under our control. We need the reactor to keep running, though, so all we can do is desperately hope that that last safety doesn’t go and end us all. Think about how it would feel to be aboard that ship.”
Thorn didn’t have to think very hard. He effectively had been aboard that ship, except it had been the Hecate, and instead of a fusion reactor on the brink of losing containment, it had been a rock the size of a mountain racing along just a few klicks behind him.
He looked at Densmore and nodded. “I get it, ma’am. I really do. When you said I’d do what I needed to, you were right, I will. I mean, how could I not? But I do understand what you’re saying,
that instead of making things better, I could make them a whole lot worse. So I’ll promise you this: I’ll keep my sights fixed on that word need. You can bet that before I do anything that’s outside the realm of conventional magic—as we understand it, anyway—I’ll make sure it truly needs to be done.”
Densmore leaned back and nodded. “All I can really ask for, given the circumstances. But I want to make sure we both understand something. Let’s put orders and military discipline and all that aside for a moment. You just made me a promise.”
It was a statement, but it was also a question.
Thorn nodded. “I did. And it’s a promise I’ll keep.”
He’d actually expected Densmore to come back with something doubtful or cynical, but she surprised him by simply nodding. “I believe you.”
“Hey, sir! You going into a trance or something? Doing something magical?”
He blinked. Mol now crouched beside him, under the shadow of the Gyrfalcon. He’d been so deep in remembrance he’d actually lost a bit of time. The last time that had happened, he’d been thinking about his dream, and Kira.
“Sorry, Mol, no. I was just thinking about something.”
“Good, because if you’re going to do magical stuff, a little warning would be nice.”
“I won’t do any magical stuff without letting you know first.”
Unless I need to.
She pushed past him. “Appreciate it.”
“Oh, and Mol?”
She turned back.
“To answer your question about using magic to make spare parts for your ship—no, sorry, I can’t.”
She shrugged. “No biggie. The Hecate’s slated to RV with a combat supply ship in a couple of days, and it’s supposed to have a full support suite for the Gyrfalcon, including a mechanic. So we should be good.”
He followed her out from under the fighter, toward the open hatch. As he did, he reflected on how nice it would be if every problem he faced was solved so easily, and without using magic even he didn’t understand.
Thorn watched as the Hecate fell astern. He was throwing his mind ahead, into the op, but couldn’t help but feel a bit of a pang at seeing the destroyer fade away behind the Gyrfalcon. He’d started to think of her as home, more than he’d thought of anywhere as home since the destruction of Cotswold that had, in a single instant, made him both orphan and refugee. Not Code Nebula, not the FOB, and certainly not the toxic mud-ball where he’d been working when Kira first came to him.
“Theta-two-alpha, this is flight control,” a voice intoned over the comm. “You’re cleared to maneuver.”
“Theta-two-alpha here,” Mol replied. “Roger that.”
Thorn watched as Mol fired up the drive, now that they were far enough from the Hecate that the Gyrfalcon’s exhaust wouldn’t risk damaging her. The residual acceleration not offset by the fighter’s stabilizers pushed him back in his seat.
“So I’ve got the flight plan ready to run,” Mol said. “You wanna check it out before I have Trixie implement it?”
This was a little ritual that happened at the start of every op he flew with Mol. He’d long since learned, of course, that there was no need for such a check; he could absolutely trust her and Trixie to get him exactly where he wanted to go, and then bring him back home.
Yeah, home.
Still, he gave Mol a wicked grin. “What would you do if I said yes, I do want to review the flight plan?”
Mol shrugged. “I’d let you review the flight plan,” she replied, then her face fell. “And then I’d be very, very hurt.”
“Really?”
“Nah, ’course not.”
“I would,” Trixie put in. “I would be very, very hurt.”
Thorn gave a jaunty salute, knowing Trixie would see it. “Don’t worry, Trixie, I trust you,” Thorn said.
“That’s good, because if I make an error in even a single one of the several million calculations per second I perform just to keep the reactor stable—"
Thorn held up a hand. “Is this a shakedown for affection? Do you need to discuss your feelings, Trixie?”
“Actually, I do. I think my problems started when Mol refused my request for a sassier paintjob. Naturally, I—"
A chime sounded from Mol’s flight management system. “We’re thirty seconds from our first jump,” she said, looking at Thorn. “That’ll bring us to waypoint alpha. From there, you need to decide which target you want to go after.”
“Sorry, Trixie. We’ll work through your issues later,” Thorn said. Their primary target for the op was a Nyctus comm relay located by the ON’s ELINT—electronic intelligence—folks. It was definitely a high-value target, but to Thorn, kind of prosaic. Destroying it would gum up the squid’s comms for a while, and probably kill a few of them, but it came across more as a pain in the ass for their enemy, rather than something that would truly hurt. They had two alternate targets available, and one of them, a command and control node, was located in orbit around a water world. That implied squids planetside, maybe a lot of them, and causing a spectacular meteorite shower composed of fragments of their orbiting node stood to be a lot more demoralizing.
“You want to go after alt-two, don’t you?” Mol said, more statement than question.
“You’re getting to know how I think, aren’t you?”
“Yes, which is a scary thought.”
He made a rude gesture, and she laughed. A few seconds later, the countdown to the first jump shrilled through the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit.
Thorn braced himself, feeling the anticipation building as the Gyrfalcon’s drive spun up.
When the count hit zero, Trixie activated the Alcubierre drive. The universe briefly vanished, collapsing down to a bubble of warped space little bigger than the Gyrfalcon itself. During the jump, Thorn had a wild thought.
What if I’d been more ambiguous and caused all Alcubierre drives everywhere to function the way the Hecate’s old one had? It would have turned humanity into a multitude of isolated worlds in an instant, perhaps never able to exceed lightspeed again.
Densmore was right to worry.
The universe reappeared. Thorn swallowed against that faint, pervasive wave of nausea that accompanied the transition.
“Jump complete,” Mol said, waiting as Trixie confirmed their new location against a set of pulsars whose specific periods of rotation made them fixed beacons in space.
“We’re confirmed as being at waypoint alpha,” Trixie said. “Now, where to from here?”
Mol glanced at Thorn, who just smiled back.
“Target alt-two, the command node over the water world.” He smiled back. “Hey, like I said, you guys have gotten to know me too well.”
11
Mol let out a whoop as the Nyctus command and control node started to break up, the fragments glowing with the fierce heat of their atmospheric re-entry. Meteorite shower was what Thorn had wanted, and meteorite shower is what he’d delivered.
It hadn’t even been that difficult. He’d Shaded them from detection as they made their approach run, then brushed his own awareness against that of the squids aboard the node—a risky move, but a necessary one if he was going to find a weakness to exploit. One of the Nyctus had been a high-value shaman, and he detected him as soon as their minds touched; after a brief struggle for control, Thorn managed to have the squid step into an airlock and blow itself into space. Unfortunately, that alerted the node to the fact that something was up; fortunately, it also gave him the very weakness he was looking for.
Attitude control for the node as it orbited was maintained by a series of massive flywheels spinning on each of the node’s three axes. When they all spun at the same rate, their mutual centrifugal effects cancelled out. By varying their spin, though, the unbalanced forces could be used to adjust the node’s orbit. It was a clever mechanism that required no fuel for reaction thrusters, but it was also easy to break.
Even as the node began banging away with active sensors, searching for the
Gyrfalcon, Thorn drew on his Scorch powers to apply the most intense heat possible to the bearings of one of the flywheels. He actually managed to cause one bearing to start melting; the flywheel wobbled, immediately tearing its mountings apart. Automatic safeties instantly started braking the other flywheels before the unbalanced forces threw the station out of control, but it’s not easy to bring something that weighs thousands of kilograms, and is spinning several thousand times a minute, to a quick halt. The station began to tumble, at the same time deflecting downward into an ever-lower orbit. When it brushed against the first wisps of atmosphere, it was all over. Escape pods rocketed away as whatever crew could abandon the dying station did.
So, mission accomplished. Now, they just had to get the hell out of here, but not before a parting shot. Thorn felt a Nyctus shaman coming into the game, too late to help but close enough to exert some magical presence in his mind. The shaman reached out, a sorcerous hiss splitting Thorn’s mind and providing a clear path to the core of alien being, a seething place of anger and frustration.
“Never lose your temper, squiddies,” Thorn muttered. “It’s only business.”
“What’s that?” Mol asked, but Thorn waved her quiet with a gesture.
“He’s a hardass, but—there. I’m in,” Thorn said. He pierced the Nyctus’ vision and saw a bulkhead shattered by some unseen impact. The alloy edge was a ragged knife, extending nearly a meter into the corridor. Thorn turned the Nyctus toward it feeling the mounting alien horror as his plan came into focus. With agonizing slowness, he walked the Nyctus forward into the razor-sharp wall section feeling—by proxy—as the metal slid quietly into the alien’s two hearts. Thorn grunted in satisfaction, looking through the squid’s eyes as it faded from existence.
The Nyctus hung stone dead on the length of metal. The last sensation Thorn had before leaving the shaman’s cooling body was a sound—pattering body fluids on the alloy deck. The sound of defeat.