Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Take that.

  Thorn slumped back in the Gyrfalcon’s acceleration couch. “Okay, Mol, I’ve done my part. We can leave any time you’re ready.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Thorn let his eyes flutter closed for a moment. The combined effects of his various ’castings—Shading the ship, using Joining to find the vulnerable flywheels while engaging a shaman in a psychic duel, then Scorching the flywheel until it failed, and finally ’jacking a squiddie—had drained him, leaving him feeling like butter scraped over too much toast. Once they were entirely clear, he’d probably take a nap.

  He opened an eye. Mol had wheeled the Gyrfalcon around and lit the main drive, powering the fighter away from the carnage they’d inflicted. Beyond her, through the canopy, he could see what had to be a spectacular light show blazing across the night-side hemisphere of the planet.

  “Uh, Mol? You planning on doing a victory orbit here?”

  “No. Stand by.”

  Her clipped tone made Thorn go rigid with alarm. “Mol, what’s wrong?”

  “Not sure.” She tapped at her console. Thorn saw things in red flash up on the flight management system. That made him sit forward, hands at the ready for an unseen threat. Things in red were rarely good news.

  “Mol?” Thorn asked, watching her tap the screen at a fevered pitch.

  “Trixie,” she said, cutting him off. “What’s up with the Alcubierre drive’s power manifold?”

  “I’m working on that now,” Trixie replied. “Please stand by.”

  Even Trixie’s normally lyrical tone had an edge to it. Thorn was now almost standing, his body rigid with concern.

  “Mol, talk to me.”

  She scowled at her flight management system. “The Alcubierre drive won’t come out of standby mode.”

  “Because of some power manifold thing?”

  Mol gave a curt nod, her eyes still on her instruments. “Power has to be delivered to the drive’s core in a particular way. There can’t be more than a few nanoseconds of difference between the power going to different parts of the core, or it won’t generate a stable bubble. That’s what the manifold does.”

  “And ours is—what, broken?”

  “That’s what Trixie and I are trying to—”

  A shrill alarm cut her off. She glanced at a new panel that had lit up.

  Thorn recognized it. They were threat warnings.

  “A squid frigate-class ship just broke orbit and, shit, it’s got two corvette-class ships following right behind,” Mol said.

  “Can we outrun them?”

  “For now.”

  “For now?”

  Mol turned to him. “Eventually, we run out of fuel. They’re bigger ships, fresh out of orbit, so they carry a whole bunch more than we do.”

  “So when we run out—”

  “We stop accelerating. And once that happens, well, Trixie?”

  “Depending on certain variables at the time our drive shuts down, they will overtake us in between ten and thirty minutes.”

  Thorn growled. “Science. It’s always breaking.”

  Between them, Mol and Trixie powered through their options regarding the Alcubierre drive. Most were very technical and not feasible. The only one that held any promise was letting Trixie try to manage the flow of power to the various parts of the drive’s core herself. In theory, she could do it, taking over from the dedicated processor that oversaw the manifold and ensure that the pulses of energy were delivered to where they needed to go within the nearly infinitesimal windows of time required to keep the whole thing stable. The trouble was that she’d never been designed to do that, wasn’t properly wired into the drive, so she’d be working from upstream of the manifold’s balky processor—meaning it stood in her way.

  “If we could access the drive,” Mol said, “we might be able to bypass the processor and connect her into the manifold on the downstream side of it.”

  “Is that possible?” Thorn asked.

  “Sure, if you’re talking about, say, the Hecate. The Chief Engineer can walk up to the Alcubierre drive and tinker with all he wants. Hell, he can drink coffee and listen to tunes while he does it. But if you’re talking about a Gyrfalcon, well, that means leaving the ship, opening up access from the outside, then digging around in a space the size of a closet, in an EVA suit. Oh, and with the drive running, taking a good-sized dose of neutron rads while doing it. I mean, someone might survive that, but—”

  “I get it. If we shut the drive down, the bad guys catch up to us,” Thorn said, rubbing his eyes. “Don’t suppose this is a fix you could do before they get in range, huh?”

  Mol just laughed.

  “Why the hell isn’t there a backup?” Thorn asked. “There seems to be redundant systems for everything else aboard this thing. Why not that?”

  “You would have to ask the manufacturer, who I assume was also the lowest bidder,” Mol said, then shrugged. “Besides, these things have a failure rate of . . . Trixie?”

  “About one in one million, five hundred thousand, which is why it’s not considered a high-priority system for a redundant.”

  “Because that would cost more money the ON doesn’t want to spend,” Mol said.

  “Great,” Thorn snapped. “Lucky us, being that one-in-a-million-and-a-half case.”

  Mol studied the tactical display for a moment, then looked at Thorn. “I am officially out of ideas, sir. How about you? Anything?”

  Thorn knew what she was getting at. Since there seemed to be no technological way of fixing this, could he do it using magic.

  He grimaced, then wiped it away with an effort. “I’ve been chewing on it. Worse comes to worst, I can probably take out one of those enemy ships, maybe two, but there’s no way I could possibly do all three before we get walloped by a KEW or missile or something. And even that assumes I don’t have to go brain-to-brain with some of the squiddies’ shaman while I’m at it.”

  “So let’s call that our backup plan. How about just getting us the hell out of here?”

  Thorn shook his head. He’d been thinking about that, too. No magical theory he was aware of allowed for a Starcaster to duplicate the effects of an Alcubierre drive.

  Except for one—one that he, alone, seemed to be capable of. But he’d not just been ordered to not attempt to rewrite reality again, he’d promised Densmore he wouldn’t. There was no way to predict what effect trying it might have, especially since there was no artificial constraint on it this time. When he’d deflected the impactor from Code Gauntlet, he only changed the nature of Alcubierre drives inside the confines of the little bubble of reality generated by the drive itself. It had effectively kept his fiddling with reality limited to a temporary pocket universe. In retrospect, had he done that without that being true, he might have precipitated a universe-spanning catastrophe.

  Which was a profoundly sobering thought, one that gave him a new and gut-wrenching insight into Densmore’s words.

  . . . 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 so all we can do is desperately hope that that last safety doesn’t go and end us all.

  He definitely got it, suddenly understanding how she felt. His ability to change reality effectively made Thorn the most potent weapon ever to exist. One so potent, in fact, that it could never be used, which meant he might as well not have the ability at all.

  “From all this silence, I take it your answer to my question is no, huh?” Mol said.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  Mol fixed on the flight management system, a finger tapping the fuel indicator. “Suggest you think harder and faster, sir. We’ve got about two hours left, and then it’s reckoning time.”

  Thorn settled back in his acceleration couch. So fixing the drive was out of the question. Magic could help them, but probably not save them. A quick scan of surrounding space showed nothing of signifi
cance, mostly a whole bunch of black empty—

  Wait.

  “Mol, there’s one gas giant in this system, right?”

  “Uh, yeah. Long way out. I thought about using it for some sort of gravitational slingshot, but there’s really nothing we can do that our friends behind us can’t just duplicate.”

  “Sure. But that nav chart shows it’s got rings, right?”

  “It does. Two sets of them, in fact, inclined at about forty-five degrees to one another. Which is pretty cool, actually.” She shook her head. “Anyway, yes, rings. Why? So what? What are you thinking, sir?”

  “If I’m reading the nav right, we can get to those rings before we exhaust our fuel.”

  Mol nodded. “We can, sure. But if you’re thinking we can hide among all those rocks—well, again, we can. But even if the air recycler is able to keep us breathing and the squids somehow don’t manage to find us, we’re eventually going to run out of food and water.” She shrugged. “It could buy us time, but time to do what?”

  “Time, Mol, to call for help.”

  It turned out that they were being jammed, because of course they were. It meant that they couldn’t communicate with the Hecate, the nearest possible help, by conventional means.

  “And there’s no other Starcaster aboard her,” Thorn said, watching as the vast gas giant and its complex rings grew in the view ahead.

  “So you can only talk, or whatever you call it, with other Starcasters?”

  “That’s right. I can sense other minds, but so far, at least, if they’re not ’casters, I can’t communicate with them.”

  “Oh. So this is really just a waste of time then.”

  “Not necessarily. Just because I can’t contact the Hecate directly, doesn’t mean I can’t contact anyone.”

  Mol glanced from the flight management system to the tactical display. “Well, sir, whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it soon. Those three Nyctus ships are still pretty determined to catch us—which means I’m going to have to do some fancy flying here. Better buckle in tight.”

  “There a problem?”

  “A problem?”

  Thorn actually smiled. “Okay, another problem?”

  “Well, in order to establish a stable orbit around that gas giant, I should flip and burn and decelerate us to about, oh, a third of our current velocity, give or take. But if I do that, those squids back there will be in missile range in about three minutes—and we’d be about thirty minutes away from the nearest edge of that bigger ring.”

  “I’m sensing bad news coming.”

  “You think?” Mol said, flashing a grin. “Anyway, instead of slowing us down with the drive, I’m going to take us right in to the planet, use the gas giant’s upper atmosphere to aerobrake us, then take us back out to the inner ring with just enough excess velocity to settle us into a stable orbit.”

  “That sounds dangerous. Alarming, even.”

  “Again, you think? It’s the sort of thing I might try in a simulator, just for kicks. But in real life—”

  “There’s a high probability of failure, you know,” Trixie said.

  “Thank you, dear. You’re really helping,” Mol replied, eyes lifted to the ceiling.

  “Would you like to know how high?”

  “I would not. How about you, sir?” Mol asked Thorn.

  “Oh, hell no. Ignorance is bliss, right?”

  While Mol went to work with Trixie on setting the right inputs on the flight management system, Thorn settled back and closed his eyes.

  He would contact Kira.

  He’d studiously avoided doing that while she was in training, notwithstanding his weird and disturbing dream about her. The temptation had definitely been there, but she was no doubt immersed deep in her upgrade training. He not only worried about interrupting her at an inopportune time, he didn’t want her to suspect he was somehow watching over her.

  But facing imminent death at the hands, tentacles, whatever of the Nyctus seemed like a good reason to give her a call. He could alert her and then get her to transmit a message to the Hecate via a priority comm channel. It would take several hours for the Hecate to receive a message, and then she had to respond, but it was better than waiting the twelve hours remaining before Captain Tanner considered them overdue and came looking for them.

  They just had to hope that hiding in the ring would buy them the time they needed.

  Thorn thought about Kira, visualizing her face, and then seeing her sitting beside him in the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit, close enough to touch, easily close enough to talk to. It wasn’t hard to do—not only did Kira’s image come more easily to him than just about anyone else’s, she’d actually once sat in this cockpit with him and Mol.

  Kira?

  He waited.

  Nothing.

  Kira? You there?

  Nothing but mental silence and the white-noise hum of his own background thoughts.

  Kira, I need you. Please answer.

  Nothing.

  Kira, this is a genuine emergency. I need your help.

  Silence.

  Thorn opened his eyes, then waited for his vision to clear from the effects of a long-range contact. His confusion was evident, even to Mol. It couldn’t be that Kira was just refusing to answer; he’d still have a sense of her being present. Of course, she might have learned how to thoroughly shield herself, but it was unlikely she’d close him out of her psychic loop.

  Unless the Nyctus could jam Joiners.

  That was also unlikely, because his mind had, indeed, reached out, with nothing inhibiting it. If it was blocked, it was blocked at Kira’s—

  —screamed, a shrill, piercing scream of pain and terror—

  —end.

  His gut twisted. Instinct alone told him something was wrong. Coupled with the vivid nature of her screams, her face, the pain—it was all too much to discount.

  Right now, he needed to contact someone for help, and he could think of only one other person. Mol was still immersed in calculating trajectories and the like, so Thorn closed his eyes again.

  Captain Densmore?

  A flicker, a stirring in the distance, and then Densmore’s mind began to take shape, distant but powerful.

  Stellers?

  Yes, ma’am. We need your help.

  He explained the situation to her. Even before he’d finished, she’d told him to wait out, then she’d gone to get a message to the Hecate. A few moments later, her thoughts reappeared in his.

  Word’s on its way to the Hecate. We also have a patrol in the adjacent sector, led by the Draco. We’re alerting them too, though it’ll take them longer to get to you.

  Much appreciated, ma’am.

  Actually, the appreciative one here is me.

  Sorry?

  I know you could have used other means for the sake of security, to get out of your current jam, and you didn’t. That makes me feel a lot better about you roaming around out there.

  Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate that.

  There’s one other thing.

  Ma’am?

  I just want to reinforce something from your pre-op briefing. The Nyctus cannot capture you, take you alive. It could be disastrous if they do. Do you know what I’m saying here?

  Thorn let himself just breathe for a moment. He absolutely knew what Densmore meant.

  Stellers—?

  I understand. That won’t happen.

  Won’t be an issue anyway, though. Help is on the way. You just hang on.

  That’s the plan, ma’am.

  Thorn flicked his eyes open to find the gas giant a solid wall of pastel stripes and swirls blotting out half the star scape.

  He glanced at Mol. “How long was I—?”

  “About an hour. I figured I’d just let you be and hope you came to again with good news.”

  “The Hecate’s on her way, with a patrol to back her up.”

  Mol nodded. “So now we just have to survive this aerobraking, then insertion into the ri
ng, then the next thing, then the next thing after that . . .”

  Thorn offered her a smile. “That’s the plan.”

  Thorn had been through atmospheric entry more than a few times. Rushing through a planet’s atmosphere fast enough to turn it to ionized gas didn’t terrify him, but it wasn’t something he’d want to do any more than he had to.

  Or for longer than he had to, but that was what aerobraking was. Instead of a brief period of anxious incandescence, this just went on and on.

  The Gyrfalcon shuddered as it passed through pockets of thicker atmospheric gas alternating with wispy patches. The variations kept the ship in a constant state of vibration. The view ahead was nothing but searing flame hot enough to make a Scorch proud. Thorn just hung on, waiting for it to end and for space to go back to being space again, quiet and empty and not on fire.

  “Trixie,” Mol said, raising her voice over the rumble of abused atmosphere thundering past, “status!”

  “Very, very hot.”

  Mol rolled her eyes. “Can you be more specific?”

  “Everything’s currently green, as you can see on your panel.”

  “Sure, but you’re the one who can see trouble starting.”

  “Nothing to report. Hull temperature is near design limit. And if I may editorialize, duh, but all other systems are optimal.”

  “Okay,” Mol said. “We’re coming out of aerobraking in one minute. Once we do, we’ll be able to see what our friends out there are up to.”

  The envelope of ionized gas enclosing the Gyrfalcon blinded them, both physically and electronically. Thorn was tempted to cast out a mental ping and see if he could fix the squids’ locations, but he decided to save his magical resources until they were truly needed.

  “Ten seconds,” Mol said.

  Thorn braced himself. Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if they came out of this and found the Nyctus somehow right on top of them?

  The drive lit, shoving the Gyrfalcon back into a higher orbit. The bass rumble faded and the fierce glow around them dissipated.

  “Not on fire is good,” Thorn said.