Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  So what happened?

  Then it hit him like a rail gun shot. Kira had gone on this op with three other people. A total of four.

  And Gillis had three severed fingers jammed into his pockets.

  Wixcombe and her detachment were engaged in conducting a rehearsal for their op. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that the Nyctus conducted a raid in the middle of things. It was very targeted and very deliberate, to the extent that we can’t rule out the possibility that it was the actual objective of a whole series of raids that happened about the same time. The squids might have been trying to confuse us as to their true purpose, by launching—

  Ma’am, to repeat. What happened? Thorn asked her, but all of that strange, diffuse dread was suddenly beginning to coalesce. That menacing figure looming behind him was stepping into view.

  The Nyctus arrived in force. They knocked aside a pair of frigates that had been assigned as cover, then used surgical KEW strikes to take out command and support for the rehearsal exercise.

  Thorn sagged, trying to catch his breath. KEWs had killed his family and ended his childhood, and now they’d taken Kira from him, too.

  Except, no. This would be worse than death, in its own special, terrible way.

  Then, Densmore went on, they landed and, as near as we can tell, took Wixcombe and her detachment prisoner. Then they left. That’s all we know.

  There it was. That sinister presence that had been his lurking shadow now stood before him, revealed in all of its terrible truth.

  A long moment passed with Thorn as empty and cold as space.

  The nav alarm sounded. The Hecate was about to fire up her Alcubierre drive.

  Thorn ignored it. He ignored everything.

  Until he didn’t, and a vast swell of emotion erupted like a supernova, filling that cold void inside him with incandescent heat.

  Rage. Fear. Frustration.

  Guilt.

  Thorn had to get to Kira. He had to save her, rescue her from the Nyctus, who could be doing anything to her.

  Thorn threw his consciousness out into the cosmos, desperately seeking Kira, even a flicker of her as he howled into the dark, his rage taking shape, twisting, pitching, and tearing at the fabric that carried the Hecate forward on her great engines. Thorn’s rage caught their speed, passed it, rendered it silent, and seized the ship in a cocoon of his anger, flawed and dark and moving.

  The Hecate’s Alcubierre drive activated, but instead of warping herself toward Code Gauntlet, the drive and the ship rode on Thorn’s cataclysmic power, and the stars changed in a smear of wan light, leaving concepts like speed and location far behind.

  19

  Kira dragged herself to a sitting position, propped against the cold alloy bulkhead of her cell. She took a moment just to breathe.

  Then she spit blood and laughed, smearing the repulsive gobbet with a foot.

  There was no humor in it. There wasn’t even an elementary particle of humor in any of this. But she still found it funny.

  The Nyctus couldn’t break her.

  Or, more specifically, they couldn’t break through her psychic defenses, which rose around her titanic, unmoving—implacable. They were an extension of the power blooming in a magical center, a place that had always been there, but never truly tapped. A new place. A dangerous place, for the Nyctus.

  Physical torture hadn’t worked. If anything, it forced her inside, to explore the halls of power that continued to rise, running into the deepest recesses of her mind even as nerve endings shut down, refusing to play their part any longer.

  The squids gave up on that and tried shifting tactics. They began torturing Rainer and Riley in front of her.

  In desperation, Kira tried offering them information, something to get them to stop abusing her friends. But she really didn’t know much of any value—nothing that seemed to satisfy the squids, anyway. She begged and pleaded with them to find out just what it was they did want to know, but they remained mute. And still that psychic barrier endured, an unbreakable wall sealing off her mind.

  Then the Nyctus abruptly changed tactics again, encircling her with several powerful shamans who bathed her mind in raw destructive force—unfocused, savage energy far different than the carefully crafted attacks that tried to invade any cracks in her defenses. The air hummed with a discharge as their massed attack rose and fell in waves, each subsequent attack spiraling to new heights of punishing fury.

  They failed.

  And that was what was so humorlessly funny about this. Kira had been able to hold out against the most extreme suffering of both body and mind—and she wasn’t even sure how she did it. It was as though there was another presence deep inside her, one unfazed by her horrifying situation.

  She let her head slump against the wall. For a while, she just sat like that, knees drawn up, eyes closed, trying to think of nothing, nothing at all—

  Kira’s eyes blinked open. Wait. There was a cloud of silence around her.

  Mental silence.

  For days, she’d been pummeled with attacks of every kind—frontal, mass incursions by more than one shaman, sly, sideways attempts, prying at the edges of her mind, but always an attack. Always a need to defend.

  But now, there was nothing. Her mind was blessedly empty of strife and turmoil. It was just her, Kira Wixcombe, inside her own head.

  They’d tried to use Rainer and Riley—but not Gillis, for some reason—against her. Or, more correctly, use her fondness for friendship with them as a lever to break her. But they hadn’t similarly tried to use her against them, for one simple reason.

  The squids weren’t interested in using her to apply pressure to Rainer or Riley because they weren’t really interested in them. A Hammer and a Scorch were potent in their own ways, but the Nyctus seemed to be more than capable of producing inordinately powerful elemental and physical effects with magic already. They were also potent Joiners.

  But so was Kira. Her Joining was a similar kind of magic to their variety. She sat up, her stomach growling impolitely, reminding her that she was hungry and thirsty. Other than a repulsive nutrient paste that tasted of salt and dirty laundry, she’d had nothing. Licking her lips, she settled herself, reinforcing one thought, one purpose.

  One truth.

  Everything the Nyctus tried had failed.

  She remained unbroken. Hungry, sore, angry, and wounded, but unbroken—and retaining enough of her facilities to begin piecing things together. Hints. Shadows. Whispers, in a tongue she didn’t need to understand to use, gaining mental traction as she worked carefully toward a conclusion she knew the squid wanted hidden from her mind’s eye.

  Kira had one resource at her disposal, and it was something so dangerous even considering it made a chill climb her spine, unwelcome but energizing.

  Lots to lose, she thought. Squaring her shoulders, she tried to regain some measure of comfort, breathing carefully for every part of her body. In great, gusty sighs, she filled her lungs to bursting, fizzing her mind with an energy born of desperation.

  She took a final deep breath. Only one way to find out.

  Kira almost toppled into disaster.

  While experimenting with what seemed to be far more psychic potential than she’d realized, trying to consciously shape it into something other than a wall, the squids tried probing her thoughts.

  As soon as she felt the first brush of an alien mind against hers, she panicked and almost prevented her psyche from properly erecting its own defenses. Only on the very edge of being too late did she surrender control to her mind’s construction, a soaring power that grew naturally from within, as easily as her earlier deep breaths. She had the measure of it now, a fine-tuned strength that expanded with each push of her mind, flowing outward in fits and starts.

  In seconds, she faced her first test.

  The incoming probe crashed headlong into the barrier as soon as it was in place. Nerves humming, she sat still, her mind as quiet as it could be, wondering if th
e squid detected her efforts—

  —or it was a standing attempt to infiltrate her mind. Feeling her way, she decided that yes, it was merely a barrier left in place by the Nyctus, no doubt maintained by junior shamans who were tired, distracted, or both.

  She let her nerves settle, growing confident enough to try again with great care. Drawing from the deep pool of her own power, she deliberately weakened her defenses to try sending out a tendril of thought, seeing if she could scry anything about her surroundings. A crack in her armor through which she sent a thought, nebulous, wandering, and thin.

  Wispy, her presence drifted, and Kira began to touch other minds, squids elsewhere in this complex, or station, or wherever she was. And maybe that was a good first goal, finding out exactly where the Nyctus had brought her. First, she would find a where. Then, she could craft an escape, or at minimum, an attack of her own. She vowed that no matter what her fate, it would not be without a high cost to the squid. Of that, she was certain.

  It took hours of slow, methodical effort, her touch lighter than a whisper, and with the motion of a shadow. Any time she felt her awareness brush against something she thought might be a shaman, she hastily withdrew, as though touching something hot. Eventually, she began to get a feel for what she was trying to do and started probing a little more vigorously, moving her mental presence from a zephyr to a soft wind, shifting, fleeing, never in one place for too long.

  Clever. Fleeting. Watchful.

  She became much better at detecting countervailing attempts by the squids to probe her in return. It proved to be as simple as just stopping whatever she was trying to do. Her mind, driven by primal instinct, simply and instantly slammed those impenetrable shields into place, a gray wall of nothing that the squid saw, in their mind, as empty space

  Exhausted, she reached her limit and had to rest, arms slicked with sweat, her brow aching from being furrowed with effort. She leaned back, thinking to sleep—

  —the world became a blur of hissing, oppressive weight, an acrid, bestial stink, jagged claws striking again and again—

  Kira gasped herself from the twilight of near-sleep she’d entered. No surprise she’d drifted off—utter exhaustion tended to do that. And given the circumstances, she could probably forgive herself for having nightmares. But this had been so clear, more like a memory recalled in vivid detail, right down to the alien odor of a predator beyond her memory or understanding.

  Her brow creased again, anger suffusing her cheeks. It had felt real—but also detached, as though it hadn’t been happening to her, but to someone else. Violence once removed.

  She exhaled, hard, and simply lapsed back into half-consciousness. The arrival of more nutrient paste and water roused her; the paste tasted like wet cardboard, but she made herself eat every molecule of it to keep her strength at something more than collapsed in a heap.

  Then she resumed her psychic experimentation. She had miles to go in her mind before she could make the Nyctus pay. With her eyes half-closed, Kira drew her intentions to a point and began to wander again, ghost steps through a land littered with the bright, hateful minds of her captors.

  A breakthrough.

  It had turned out to be deceptively easy. Kira was finding it laborious to the point of exhaustion to cajole her newly empowered Joining to accomplish what she wanted. It was, she thought, like chiseling marble, trying to craft a statue—slow, demanding, and frustrating. Exasperated and ready to give up, at least for now, Kira essentially just wished to realize what she was trying to do and enter the mind of a squid that wasn’t a shaman.

  So she did.

  It was a moment of stunning revelation. She’d been focusing on the process when she should have been focusing on the result. Just as her mind knew how to protect itself in a reflexive way, like jerking that burnt hand back from that hot surface, it knew what it needed to do to give her the result she wanted. She just had to concentrate on what that result was.

  Results first, and her mind would follow.

  “Huh,” she murmured. An officer who dealt with naval matters for most of her career, the idea that magic could craft reality was still nearly as alien to her as the Nyctus. And yet, the realization moved her much further ahead than all her previous work. In a moment of unalloyed joy, she found herself in a Nyctus mind, riding along like a passenger peering out through the alien’s senses.

  The squid knew nothing.

  Kira withdrew, then waited and stared at the door. She needed to know if the Nyctus had somehow detected this inaugural use of her new powers.

  Nothing.

  She let herself mentally roam again, jumping from one alien to another. As she did, she started to build up a picture of where she was—an orbital platform over a world that seemed to be mostly water, frozen into colossal ice fields at the poles. More importantly, though, she was able to start assembling bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned from the blissfully unaware squids into a growing intelligence picture.

  One squid had arrived on a cruiser that was redeploying to another sector.

  Another was awaiting a ship that would bring it to that same location.

  A third squid was engaged in the Nyctus equivalent of logistics planning, seeing to the movement of helium-3 fuel to—again, that same place.

  Something significant was happening in that sector that seemed to be preoccupying a lot of the squids’ attention.

  Busy squid. Think I’ll keep looking.

  Kira was pondering this when the door to her cell slid open and a procession of Nyctus entered. She started to stand, but two of the creatures shoved her back to the floor, one of them striking her with a truncheon that also delivered a powerful electric shock in a dazzling blue flash. Her legs and right arm went instantly numb, and a thin, shrill whine filled her head. Her right arm was pinned, her hand splayed out. Then some sort of blade, glowing like the exhaust cone of a fusion drive, fell. Kira screamed, or tried to—

  But all that came out was a strangle cry as the blade neatly severed her middle finger and cauterized the wound with a whiff of burned flesh. A blast of exquisite pain flashed up her arm, despite the numbness, and turned her mind dark and blank.

  20

  Thorn blinked and found himself looking up into sterile, white light. He wondered if he was dead? But wasn’t death supposed to be all about white lights?

  “Specialist Stellers?”

  Apparently, death also sounded like the Hecate’s ship surgeon, Quinn.

  He turned his head and found the doc looking down at him. “Specialist Stellers? Tell me your first name.” Her cherubic face was lined with worry.

  “Uh, Thorn, last time I checked.”

  The doc nodded, then raised his voice. “Captain Tanner? Stellers is awake.”

  The reply was curt. “On my way.”

  Thorn sat up and stared around blankly. “What happened? How did I get here?”

  “Some damned magical thing I don’t pretend to understand,” Quinn replied. “What do you remember?”

  Thorn’s eyes lost focus as he tried to reclaim memories that were faded, or outright fragments. “I was in the witchport. The Hecate was just about to get underway—”

  Tumblers clicked in his mind. And remembering became surging panic.

  “Kira!”

  Quinn grabbed Thorn’s shoulders and locked gazes with him. “Stellers. Focus. I have orders from Captain Tanner that if you start to show any signs of instability, I’m to pump a shot of sedative into that IV in your arm.”

  Thorn stared for a moment, breath caught in his chest. “Kira. Wixcombe. The squids have her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that Orderly Verdin there has her finger on the sedative button and is a heartbeat away from pressing it.”

  Thorn turned to where Quinn had gestured. Sure enough, a medical Rating stood with her finger literally resting on the IV’s controller, her face a mask of cool professionalism.

  Thorn paused, licked his lips. “Okay. Y
eah. I get it.” He looked up, eyes regaining some semblance of focus. “Look, I’m not going to lose control—”

  “A little late for that,” a new voice snapped. Tanner strode into the infirmary, his face tinged red with anger.

  Thorn blinked at him. “Sir, I—”

  “Don’t talk, Stellers,” Tanner said. “Listen. I don’t know what you did, but somehow you moved us.”

  Thorn blinked again. “Moved?”

  “Moved. We activated the Alcubierre drive at about the same instant you had some kind of magical meltdown. So, instead of a relatively sedate, trans-light flight back to friendly space, we’re somewhere else entirely.”

  “I don’t understand. Where are we?”

  “That’s a damned good question. Nav is trying to find reference pulsars so we can fix our location. So far, we’ve located two, which is enough to tell us we’re somewhere spinward and closer to the galactic core than we were. That narrows it down to an area the size of we’re screwed.” Tanner leaned closer, his glare intensifying. “So you tell me, Stellers. You answer your own question. Where are we?”

  Thorn just stared back. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know.”

  “Okay, how about this? What the hell happened?”

  Thorn thought back to those last moments in the witchport. “I was in the ’port, reaching out—”

  “Where?” Tanner asked. “I need details, not this vague bullshit. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I . . . I was reaching out, using my awareness, and I detected Kira Wixcombe. I know it was her, and I know she was in grave danger. If you ask me for evidence, I can’t produce it, no more than I can show you magic as a material. I can only show you results,” Thorn said.

  “You’re shitting me,” Tanner said flatly.

  “No, sir. I heard her, and—”

  Tanner rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in furious frustration. “And you reached out and dragged us through space-time with this friggin’ magic you use like an unshielded bomb.”