Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “Everyone comfy,” Mol called out once she and Trixie had finished the Gyrfalcon’s pre-flight checklist.

  Thorn gave a thumbs up. Alix banged the back of Mol’s crash couch.

  “Tiger Team Three’s good to go,” she said.

  That made Thorn feel better, at least. He felt an affinity for Alix’s tough little outfit, having developed that cohesive bond of trust and respect that turned a group of soldiers into a team. It didn’t surprise Thorn at all that Alix and her people were fully vac-armor qualified; Tanner had decided to send them to the squid ship and keep the Hecate’s single squad of marines back in reserve. If they were needed, they’d cross the gap in the destroyer’s shuttle.

  But there was only a single life-form aboard the squid ship, apparently human. That should be well within the capabilities of the ON’s most potent Starcaster, and one of its more skilled and accomplished spec ops teams, to deal with.

  That diffuse feeling of dread had only intensified, like someone slowly turning up the power on a weapon getting ever closer to an explosive discharge.

  “Gyrfalcon, Hecate flight control. You’re clear to launch.”

  Mol acknowledged. Once the hangar doors were fully open, she applied a puff of thrusters, and eased the fighter into space.

  When they were clear to maneuver, Mol accelerated the Gyrfalcon toward the distant Nyctus ship. It would be nearly a half-hour flight; Tanner had kept the Hecate well clear of the enigmatic craft, much further away than was normal for a boarding action. That was his abundance of caution once more at work.

  “Stellers,” came Tanner’s voice. “I’m on privately with you. Got a question for you, and I want you to take your time answering.”

  “Aye, sir,” Thorn mumbled into his suit mic.

  “When you left, you didn’t make eye contact with me. I’ve been around for a year or two, and that means one of two things. You’re guilty of something, or you suspect something. Which is it? Because I have some thoughts,” Tanner said.

  “I—you’re right, sir. The latter. Call it my magical cynicism,” Thorn said.

  “Anything to do with Wixcombe?”

  “She’s a part of it, certainly, but it’s more a state of being on high alert. I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really don’t like what I’m not seeing,” Thorn admitted.

  “Same here. I trust a good firefight. I don’t enjoy surprises, which is why this war is making me lose my youthful enthusiasm. Anything you can do beyond going into that ship?”

  “No, sir. That’s the solution.”

  “Then keep your head on a swivel, and me in the loop. Tanner out.”

  “Okay,” Mol said, cutting into Thorn’s silent moment, “we’re here. All non-revenue passengers disembark, please!”

  Alix gave yet another thumbs up, then she and the Tiger Team Three, enclosed in their clumsy vac-armor, exited through the Gyrfalcon’s airlock in pairs. A true assault shuttle would allow a whole platoon to disembark at once, but the fighter was just that—a fighter. Dismounting in pairs during a boarding action would normally be suicide.

  Thorn gave Mol a cheery smile as he picked up his helmet. “Wish me luck out there in that hard, cold, life-destroying vacuum.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Mol said, but her own smile suddenly faded. “But be careful, okay? Got a funny feeling about this one.”

  Thorn paused, his helmet lifted partway to his head. Mol wasn’t a talent, but that didn’t mean she was free of instincts. Rather than add to her alarm, he chose to smile and suit up. “Bet on it.”

  “Good.” She clapped him on the chest and turned back to her station, but her eyes were troubled. The look didn’t fit her face.

  Thorn moved to the airlock. As the inner door cycled closed behind him, he could see through the small viewport that Alix’s team had already strung a tether between the Gyrfalcon and the squid ship, and were now working on getting its airlock open. Toff, who was accompanying Thorn across, smacked Thorn’s arm to get his attention and said, “Buddy check.”

  They each examined the other’s vac-armor as the airlock depressurized. This was SOP; any telltale puffs of vapor might indicate a leak that could take time to register on the suit’s own pressure gauges. Everything seemed good, though.

  Toff looked through the visor, straight into Thorn’s eyes. “Okay, sir. I’m with you all the way across. You start to run into trouble, you just sing out and I’ll be there for ya.”

  Thorn estimated the distance and pointed. “Glad to hear it. Do I have permission to accelerate you using magic?”

  “I—uh—”

  “Kidding. I appreciate the backup. We’ll be fine,” Thorn said.

  “Oh. Heh. Ah, you’re kidding. Good,” Toff said, looking like anything but a highly trained killer. Then Thorn grinned, the door opened—

  —Thorn stepped into nothing, and flew.

  18

  The crossing had been far easier than Thorn had expected; with a carabiner hooked onto the tether and Toff right there, he was really in no danger. Mol had put the Gyrfalcon into station keeping, Trixie periodically shooting a brief stream of exhaust from a thruster to maintain their position, but the two ships could have been parked on a tarmac.

  Thorn reached the enemy ship. He’d kept his eyes fixed on the far end of the tether, not trusting himself to look around, into the big black, for fear of a surge of vertigo that often afflicted those not used to it. He was surprised, and pleased, to find that the Tiger Team had already opened up the squid ship, so he was able to step right into the airlock at the other end.

  He found Alix and her people just inside, weapons raised, the barrels trained up and down a short corridor. The stubby jet guns were specifically made for no-g work, soft-launching their projectiles, which then accelerated by means of a built-in booster motor. They were short range weapons, meant for close fighting. Each round used a small shaped charge warhead, rather than kinetic energy, to deliver their punch. Thorn noticed that the squid ship indeed lacked artificial gravity but, based on his suit’s heads-up data, had a breathable atmosphere. Still, Alix insisted they stay sealed in their suits, probably a sensible precaution.

  “Any insights, Thorn?” Alix asked.

  He touched the suit pocket containing his talisman. It was a less perfect way of interacting with the old book than actual, physical contact, but even such a ‘virtual’ touch gave him a sense of focus. Once more, he extended his senses, and felt nothing. There was nothing living aboard—

  There.

  He pointed forward. “The life sign is that way.”

  “Then that’s the way we go.” She sent a SITREP back to Mol, who relayed it to the Hecate, then led the way forward.

  Thorn followed the Tiger Team, with only Toff behind him, bringing up the rear. They passed through a compartment, then along another corridor. Something immediately jumped out as they progressed.

  “This ship has been stripped,” Toff said.

  Thorn ran a hand along exposed conduits, truncated power distribution nodes, and dangling skeins of what appeared to be optical cable. It quickly became clear that the ship was essentially an empty shell, devoid of anything even resembling an intact system.

  Thorn’s unease only grew.

  They reached the forwardmost compartment, the bridge. The human life-sign emanated from here.

  Alix gestured a couple of men from her team forward. They paused at the door, breaching charges ready.

  “Hang on,” Thorn said. “Just try to use the door control.”

  One of the pair looked at Alix, who gave a thumbs up. The vac-armored figure returned the signal, then turned back and tapped at the door control.

  The door slid open.

  “Just like the airlock,” Alix said. “Nothing on this ship has been locked down.”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “That’s because this isn’t a defector or anything like that. This is deliberate. This is a delivery.”

  “A delivery of what?” Alix asked.

&n
bsp; Thorn pointed, suddenly certain. “Whoever’s in there.”

  He saw Alix stare back at him through her faceplate for a moment, then transmit another SITREP. Mol acknowledged, and Tiger Team Three entered the bridge.

  “Clear!” Alix called.

  Toff tapped Thorn; he rose from his crouch and followed the team in. He immediately saw that the bridge, like the rest of the ship, was entirely stripped of anything but a single console, which had been cabled into several stations. Thorn didn’t need to be an engineer to know it was nav, helm, propulsion, and probably life-support. Nothing else was needed for what the squids had done here.

  Alix gestured forward to the command seat. Thorn saw a figure strapped into it—a man, unconscious but alive.

  “Any idea who this is?” Alix asked.

  Thorn looked at the face but didn’t recognize him. He was clad in a tattered stealth suit, garb meant for ground combat on a planetary surface. That was it.

  Thorn shook his head, and his sense of dread lifted another notch, convincing him that he was now part of something bigger, and too close to see it in its entirety.

  “No idea,” Thorn said, slowly, letting his eyes linger on the man’s features.

  Alix looked around. “Let’s get him out of here and back to the Hecate. They should be able to ID him back there.”

  Thorn nodded but said nothing. There was ’casting, and then there was instinct. Right now, both were telling him something wasn’t right.

  “Facial recognition IDs him as Jack Gillis,” Tanner said, arms crossed. Specialist, Orbital Navy, service number 24786-A.” He glanced sidelong at Thorn. “He’s apparently one of your people, a Starcaster. You sure you don’t know him?”

  Thorn stared at the face behind the glass of the quarantine booth. The man—Gillis, apparently—had been brought aboard via a sealed litter, then placed in the booth, against the possibility of contagion. He was still unconscious; the Hecate’s med staff were trying to figure out why.

  “Sorry, sir. There aren’t a lot of Starcasters I know. Maybe a few hundred now in all. But that’s still a lot more than I’ve met personally.”

  “Well, unfortunately we don’t have any other info about him,” Tanner went on. “For obvious security reasons, we don’t carry data about individual personnel who aren’t actually assigned to the Hecate. Any other personnel data we have is solely for ID purposes.” He glanced at Thorn again. “Mainly to ID bodies.”

  Thorn nodded. “Aye, sir. I kinda got that.”

  “Well,” Tanner said, “our Chief Engineer has gone over that squid ship. It’s just a hulk. Its trans-light drive was destroyed, apparently by an explosive charge, when it went sub-light, so even if we wanted to pilot it back to friendly space, we can’t. We’re going to destroy it, then get underway. Unless you can think of any reason we should hang around here—and it would have to be a damned compelling reason for me to say yes.”

  Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. I—”

  Tanner raised a brow. “Something wrong, Stellers? Something I should know about?”

  He shook his head again. “No. Or—I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “That’s three answers to my question, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry, sir. I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else going on here. Something bigger than what we’re seeing.”

  Tanner sighed. “Don’t suppose you could be even a little more specific.”

  “Sir, in a word, no.”

  “Well, if you do—”

  “Captain Tanner?” a voice cut in. It was a med tech who was inside the quarantine booth and bundled up in a hermetic suit. “There’s something here.”

  Tanner waited, but the tech just kept working with deliberate slowness, extracting something from a pocket on Gillis’s stealth suit.

  “Don’t like being kept waiting,” Tanner snapped, but he froze as the tech turned, holding a small object in the jaws of forceps.

  Tanner cursed. Thorn went rigid with anger, hands curling into fists.

  It was a severed human finger.

  Thorn tried to make himself comfortable in the Hecate’s witchport, sitting cross-legged on the cushioned deck and letting the quiet of the stars wash over him. But his mind was in turmoil. Time and patience were in short supply when waiting on a squid plot to develop, and Thorn was convinced that was exactly what he was asking himself to do: wait and see.

  For a ’caster, neither were good options. For a Navy, the same.

  “All stations, stand by,” Tanner said. “Tactical, you are weapons-free.”

  Thorn fixed his attention on the squid ship. Tanner intended to destroy it, but the squid wouldn’t care. The hulk had served their purpose, delivering the man named Gillis to them, along with his horrific cargo.

  Not one severed human finger, but three.

  And none of them were his. That suggested that the Nyctus had three more people in captivity. There were no records of captives being taken in any intel reports, but the Hecate’s database was several days out of date now, failing to update as they were outside real-time comms range of the nearest ON installation. Alix also pointed out that if Gillis had been involved in something spooky, an op run by spec ops, there’d be no open record of it anyway. That said, when Tanner had asked her if she knew Gillis, she’d shaken her head.

  “No, sorry sir. But we’re so compartmentalized, I could step on the toes of someone from another Tiger Team and never recognize them.”

  Thorn had wanted to see if he could sense any lingering residue of identity in the severed digits, but the Hecate’s surgeon insisted they, like Gillis, stay in quarantine. But Thorn needed direct contact with them to be able to detect anything useful, and Tanner wanted him at his station, in the witchport, so they could haul ass, as the Captain had put it, to friendlier space. Experiments would have to wait, in favor of completing the Hecate’s mission.

  So Thorn once more had to shove his feelings of dreadful anticipation aside, at least until they got close to Code Gauntlet and the risk of contact with the Nyctus was no longer high.

  The Hecate shuddered as her railguns opened up. A brief burst of fire was enough to smash the squid ship to shattered debris.

  “Confirm target destroyed,” the Tactical Officer announced.

  “Alright. Nav, let’s be on our way,” Tanner said. At once, the stars began to wheel around the witchport as the Hecate aligned herself, prior to lighting up the Alcubierre drive.

  Once that was done, the Hecate would warp her way back to Code Gauntlet. When they arrived, Thorn resolved to contact Kira—conventionally or telepathically, it didn’t matter. He’d find her, reach her, and put the distant screams to rest. He would purge the psychic baggage of his visions, and he’d do it on Code Gauntlet. The sheer depth and reality of his visions troubled him in ways magic had never done before, and Kira’s ensuing silence was like throwing fuel on the fire.

  One word, and I’ll know. And then I can cleanse this feeling, he thought. Beyond, the stars and universe hissed and popped in their eternal song, soft and ever-changing in his senses.

  The starfield stopped rotating. In a moment, the Alcubierre drive would twist the space around Hecate into her own little pocket universe, a faster-than-light ripple in reality itself—

  Stellers.

  He jumped at the single word. It cracked like a whip in his mind, Densmore’s psychic voice ringing with urgent authority.

  I’m here, ma’am. Did you find out anything about Specialist Wixcombe?

  A pause. A long one, leaving Thorn expectant and edgy.

  Yes. However, I have security concerns about discussing this, even this way. We should wait until you return to Code Gauntlet.

  Ma’am, we’ve never had any indication anyone could eavesdrop on this sort of communication. Why now? What’s going on?

  Stellers, I really think—

  Ma’am. You’re the one contacting me. The only reason you’d be hesitating after doing that is because you
’re having second thoughts. And you wouldn’t be having second thoughts unless there wasn’t something wrong. It might be against the nature of this business, but I’m asking you for the truth. In as few words as possible.

  Thorn braced himself as the stars sang into the quiet.

  Stellers, look. There are aspects to this that you just aren’t cleared to know.

  Bullshit. The curse rang out across the darkness before Thorn could stop it.

  Stow that, Specialist. You’re not—

  I know what I am, and I know when I’m being lied to. You forget, ma’am, I was a castoff. A forgotten kid, leftover and worthless. I know bullshit when I hear it, so spare us both the indignity of your lying.

  Silence.

  Tell me what you can about Kira. I don’t give a shit about any of your other secrets. I kept my promise to you about operational methods. I’m asking you to keep yours, Thorn said.

  What promise?

  The one you made when you took your commission. To protect the Navy and all of us. Remember?

  A sigh echoed across the miles, long and frustrated. Thorn could feel her roiling emotions leaking through even though she tried to contain them.

  An opportunity presented itself to us.

  I’m listening, ma’am, Thorn prompted.

  We judged Wixcombe and several of the ’casters training with her to be perfect for this op. So, we tasked her to command a team of three other ’casters. She did it.

  Thorn shook his head. A special op—ma’am, Kira’s a line officer, like me. She’s not trained in special ops—

  Stellers, you’ve been doing almost nothing but special ops since you finished basic training at Code Nebula. And it’s not like we’re talking about recruits here. Wixcombe was already a serving Lieutenant when she brought you into the ON.

  He took a breath. Okay, all fair points. Thinking of Kira as somehow unready was childish. She was an officer. She was tough.

  In any case, Densmore went on, she was given the tasking she was given. We’re fighting a war here, Stellers, so we all do what we have to do.