Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “I did, sir. I heard her, and I knew she was—"

  “Stellers!”

  The single word cut through Thorn’s reverie like a knife.

  “Sir?” Thorn found it hard to meet Tanner’s eyes. Kira was out there, and he had the means to find her. To save her, and to kill Nyctus while doing it, if only he could be let off the leash.

  “Listen to me, Specialist. You will not lose it on me. Not again!” Tanner stepped forward, his presence a growing storm. “You are responsible for what has happened. As one of her crew and an officer, you are responsible for this ship, for the welfare of it and its crew, and for its ability to wage war against our enemies. That is your duty. Do you understand?”

  “I—” Thorn finally nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t think you do. You’ve become target-locked on your friend. You’ve lost situational awareness. Ask Wyant about that. She’s a fighter pilot, she lives and dies by knowing or not knowing what’s going on around her. And right now, you don’t.” Tanner drove on, implacable, not giving Thorn an instant to react. “That’s when soldiers die, Stellers. And that’s when they get other soldiers killed. Now, I don’t give a shit if it’s a friend fallen in battle, or captured, or a loved one dead, or someone who’s been dumped by their partner. It all comes down to the same thing once you step through that airlock, onto my ship. You have a job to do, and you do it, and you don’t get target-locked on anything that will get in the way of that.”

  Thorn nodded once, looking the captain in the eye.

  But Tanner wasn’t done.

  “Now, it’s bad enough when a Rating, or a systems engineer, or someone like that loses it. But you, Stellers—you’re a special case. You can bend and twist reality. You can steer asteroids with your mind. You lose it, and we end up catapulted who knows where. So, I need to know, Stellers, right now—can you guarantee me, one hundred percent, that you will focus on your job? And I mean one hundred percent, so you’d better be honest, not just with me, but with yourself. Because if you can’t, then we face a really serious decision—what to do with you.”

  Thorn lifted his gaze back to Tanner’s. The man said no more, but Thorn knew what he meant. It was an unspoken promise, not a threat.

  Thorn took a deep breath. “Sir, you’re right.”

  “No argument here.”

  “I am still affected by what’s happened to Kira. But I won’t let that get in the way of doing my job.”

  Thorn spoke as honestly as he could. Tanner and the ship deserved it, and he truly did not want to let this man down again.

  Tanner maintained his stare for a gravid moment, then nodded. “If you’d tried to tell me you were over what’s happened to your friend and you’d just get on with the job, I’d have relieved you of your duties and put you under guard right then.” The man’s face softened. “War is a horrible, miserable experience for us all, Stellers. It leaves us all dragging ghosts along behind us. But while we’re out here, in the shit, that’s where they have to stay—behind us. Not forgotten, always in our thoughts—but out of sight. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “This time, I believe you. Okay, so now that that’s done, we can move onto the next problem. We could be anything from days, to weeks, to months away from home. We won’t know for sure until we get a decent fix on our present location. I can live with days if I have to. Weeks or months are a no-go. Not only do I not want to keep the Hecate out of action that long, I don’t want to try and keep that squid under wraps the whole time.”

  Quinn, who’d been trying to look like she was busy and not overhearing their entire conversation, cut in, her dark eyes hooded with concern.

  “We don’t have anywhere near enough of that tranq we’re using on it to last more than a few days anyway, sir. And the thing seems stable, but keeping it drugged up like that much longer is probably going to have long-term health effects.”

  “Not that I especially care about its health,” Tanner spat. “But I’d rather not deliver a corpse to the ON spooks. That doesn’t really matter, anyway, because we’ve got about thirty days of food and potable water aboard, so that’s the clock we’re on. So, Stellers, since you got us into this, can you get us back out?”

  Thorn glanced once at the man named Gillis, thought about the severed fingers he’d been carrying, then knew he had no answer—at that moment. “I don’t know, sir. I’m going to have to take some time to work that out.”

  “Then get started, Lieutenant. Keeping an eye on that squid and getting us back home, that’s your job. Everything else takes a back seat—well, except for one thing, first. You say you talked to Captain Densmore. And you did it live, despite us being well outside the twenty-five light-year range of normal, real-time comms. Can you do that again, and let her know what’s happened?”

  “I’ll get right on that, sir.”

  Tanner nodded again. “Very well. Get to work, Specialist. Dismissed.”

  Thorn hesitated, then offered his Captain the sharpest salute he could manage.

  Five weeks.

  That was how long the Hecate, using her Alcubierre drive, would take to return to ON space. The Nav Officer had finally pinned down four reference pulsars, confirming their identity by their unique and very specific rotational periods, giving them their current location to within a light-year. Since the speed at which an Alcubierre wave propagated through space-time was a function of the power used to generate it, the Chief Engineer figured he might be able to get that closer to four, if Tanner was willing to shut down everything not considered absolutely essential to getting the crew home alive.

  Except there was a problem. Thorn’s uncontrolled release of magic had apparently dumped far more power into the Hecate’s drive than its components were ever meant to take. For a moment, the destroyer had become the fastest thing in the observable universe, and perhaps the fastest thing there had ever been. She had covered thousands of light-years in an instant. But the resulting damage to her drive left it dead, and it was going to take at least several days to repair and bring back online.

  It got worse. Thorn was just as off-line as the drive. Whatever he’d done in his wild instant of expansive power had drained him of his ability to ’cast. At best, with effort, he could maintain watch over the Nyctus shaman. But that was all, which meant he couldn’t contact Densmore.

  “Is it permanent?” Tanner asked, looking up from the tiny desk in his briefing room. “Because if it is, then there is no way we’re getting all of this ship’s crew home.”

  The phrase all of brought Thorn up short. It was appalling to think that Tanner was already considering contingencies, which could include somehow reducing the size of the Hecate’s crew. But if she didn’t have enough supplies for all of them, she would have sufficient for some of them.

  That would be one hell of a ghost for Thorn to drag around.

  But he’d resolved to be honest with Tanner, so all he could do was shrug. “I don’t think it’s permanent, sir, but honestly, I don’t know. It’s not like we have a manual about how Starcasting works.”

  Tanner looked at Thorn for a moment, then simply said, “Keep me posted.”

  Thorn now rattled around the Hecate with not much to do. Until he was able to resume ’casting, he was little more than an underemployed officer with few useful skills. He’d finally settled on just trying to stay out of the way—and that included out of the way of the crew, as much as he could, to avoid the scathing bitterness of the looks being shot his way.

  He finally returned to the infirmary, struck by the fact that he might be able to accomplish something useful there.

  “How long does he need to stay in quarantine?” Thorn asked Quinn, while looking at Gillis through the transparent wall of the booth.

  “Protocol demands another three days. Why, Lieutenant?” Quinn asked. She pulled at her bottom lip, not looking away from Gillis.

  “I’d like to try doing a Joining with him. I can’t do much else righ
t now, but I might at least be able to glean something useful from him. I mean, the squids went to a lot of trouble to send him back to us. The question is, why?”

  “Is that something you can do from out here? Those protocols I mentioned a minute ago say that no one but essential medical personnel are supposed to enter an active booth.”

  “Ordinarily, I could, yeah. Right now, though, I need direct contact with him if this is going to work.”

  Quinn gave Thorn a doubtful look and contacted Tanner, who, to the surprise of both of them, gave his go-ahead. Thorn got bundled into a hermetic suit, passed through the tiny airlock, and moved to Gillis’s side. He couldn’t help noticing the three severed fingers each sitting in a jar of preservative fluid nearby.

  The spoils of war, Thorn concluded, then turned his attention back to Gillis. Quinn had already warned Thorn that skin-to-skin contact was out of the question—unless he wanted to spend the next few days as Gillis’s roommate—so he had to settle on a less-than-perfect contact through the suit’s glove.

  Taking a deep breath, Thorn pushed his awareness through the join of his gloved fingers and Gillis’s wrist seeking a connection, no matter how tenuous. He wasn’t used to having to expend so much effort to do this; by the time he was able to finally Join with the unconscious man, Thorn’s heart raced and sweat beaded his skin under the suit.

  Darkness. Pounding fear. Running. Something monstrous, something with tentacles right behind. And now ahead as well, and all around—

  Thorn relaxed and let the Joining end. The man seemed to be trapped in a nightmare, probably at the moment of his capture. Everything afterward collapsed into an incoherent smear, just fragments of images, a slurry of disjointed thoughts and feelings and emotions.

  “You okay?” Quinn, monitoring from outside the booth, called over the intercom.

  “I—yeah. I’m fine.” Thorn noticed that the doc wasn’t alone; a Rating named Onoda had joined him. Thorn immediately noticed he was armed, serious, and alert.

  “I get why you’re here,” Thorn said, offering a grim smile. “But are you really going to shoot me right through the booth?”

  “Yes, sir. Loaded armor-piercing for that very reason.”

  Thorn titled his head respectfully. “Fair enough. If you’ll excuse me, then.” He Joined Gillis and was swept away in the terror and turmoil.

  Darkness. Pounding fear. Running—

  Thorn started to relax again to let the Joining end. This man required far more care and intervention than he could offer him. As he did, though, something snagged at him, like catching a chipped fingernail on fabric.

  Someone else was here. Someone was standing in that darkness filling Gillis’s mind, and watching.

  We

  See

  You

  Thorn tore himself out of the Joining. As he did, the full realization of what was going on hit him like a particle-cannon blast.

  The Nyctus were using Gillis as a conduit. They were hiding themselves in the shadow of his identity and using his mind as a place from which to observe—to spy.

  And now that Thorn had discovered that, he was of no further use to them.

  Gritting his teeth, Thorn Joined Gillis again, drawing in every last fiber of magical strength he had to drop a barrier around the man’s mind. Then he let go of Gillis’s wrist, slapped at the airlock control, and stumbled into the tiny booth. As he did, on pure instinct, he grabbed one of the jars containing a severed finger.

  Onoda drew and raised his sidearm.

  “No!” Thorn snapped. “No. Evacuate. All around. There’s a bomb!”

  Quinn gaped. Onoda hesitated, then aimed.

  “A bomb! I can keep it from detonating, but not for long!” Thorn pounded at the airlock door, then plunged through when it opened. He stayed on his feet, only to find himself staring into the muzzle of Onoda’s pistol.

  “Kill me, you die. Run!”

  Onoda locked eyes with Thorn for an instant, then dropped his pistol, grabbed him, and heaved him away from the quarantine booth. Quinn hit the intercom panel, triggering an alarm that would send the crew to general quarters.

  “All hands!” he shouted. “Evacuate zone five-alpha now!”

  Thorn was able to maintain his Joining until they reached the corridor, then it faltered in a shimmering curtain of mental energy, diaphanous and torn.

  The world turned white.

  “Nothing is ever boring with you on board, is it, Stellers?”

  Thorn blinked up at the voice. Tanner loomed over him, his face a mix of deep concern and even deeper anger.

  “Sir, what?” Thorn licked his lips. “What happened?”

  “Well, we lost most of zone five-alpha, which means three decks amidships are now open to hard vacuum.”

  Thorn struggled to raise himself on his elbows. He felt like he’d been punched all over, and repeatedly. Spray bandages dotted his flesh, covering minor wounds, while a large dressing was wound around his right arm. That was all on top of the wounds he’d taken on Ballard’s World.

  Do I feel like shit.

  Finished inspecting himself, he blinked and looked around. He lay on a litter in the mess, which had been repurposed into a makeshift infirmary. There were other litters, other casualties sprawled to his left and right. “How many?”

  “Four dead. Six wounded, including you. It would have been more like fourteen dead if you hadn’t managed to keep a lid on things until Quinn hit the alarm and got the evac order out,” Tanner said, his voice rich with disgust.

  Thorn slumped. “Sir, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You did exactly what I wanted from you: your job.”

  Thorn stared. So Tanner’s tone wasn’t directed at him, but at the squids who’d just attacked his ship.

  “I’m sick of being on the back foot here, Stellers. Please tell me that that explosion knocked some of your powers back into you.”

  Thorn stared. “Sorry, sir, but what?”

  Tanner waved a hand. “Some old comedy thing—guy gets hit on the head, loses his memory, gets hit again and gets it back.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works, sir.”

  “It—hell, it doesn’t matter! I’m reaching for stardust here, Stellers. We need a break, and you’re what I’ve got to get one.”

  Thorn considered Tanner’s question. That dry wellspring of magical potential did seem to have refilled a little. It wasn’t his full potential by any means, but it was much more than he’d had. Experimentally, Thorn raised a hand and conjured a bluish point of light.

  “I—yeah, I do seem to have gained some of it back. It was probably the—” He glanced at the ship-time on the mess chrono. “Holy shit, almost twelve hours I was passed out?”

  “Whatever works,” Tanner said mildly. “Now, what happened?”

  “He wasn’t Gillis, sir, and I knew it almost immediately. Wait, that’s not—he was Gillis, but his trauma was so close I could taste it. I felt his fear, his lingering pain, and underneath it all, I sensed them.”

  “The squids?” Tanner prompted.

  “Yes, sir. Their hand—tentacle, whatever—was all over his mental bruising, and then I peeled away the memory and could see. I mean, I could actually see his damage, what they’d done to him. It was as lurid as a bruise on his face, and in that instant I knew. They broke him, saddled him like a beast, and wired him to kill,” Thorn said. “They were hidden in his mind. Like parasites.”

  “And they had a failsafe,” Tanner finished, shaking his head in anger at their devious, repulsive invasion. “They’d implanted a bomb in him, some sort of organic explosive that didn’t immediately show up in the doc’s assessment of him. Apparently, all he could see with the equipment in that damned quarantine booth was an unidentified mass, which he thought was a tumor or something.” He spat a curse, making a fist so hard his knuckles cracked. The captain was pissed.

  “Sir, the squids were able to maintain a standing Joining with Gillis, something that should take
a lot of ongoing effort. When I Join with Captain Densmore, it’s something we can only maintain for short periods of time.”

  Tanner narrowed his eyes. “So? Maybe the squids are just much better at it then we are.”

  “I don’t think so. See, they screwed up. They couldn’t resist gloating. And when they did, I could see how they maintained the link. They’d taken a small piece of flesh off his body, somewhere where it wouldn’t be obvious. Now, there’s a Starcaster theory called contagion—and no, I don’t mean disease. Basically, a piece of something continues to act as though it’s part of that something, even if it's physically separated from it.”

  “So?”

  “So, the squids used that bit of Gillis to keep their Joining with him going. Now, as I was getting my ass out of that quarantine booth, I grabbed one of those severed fingers. It was just on a whim—on instinct. But I’d just been in Gillis’s mind. He was captured along with Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe. She’s . . . obviously very close to me. That finger just seemed to be the right one to grab.”

  “So what? You think you can link up with Wixcombe, using—can’t believe I’m saying this—her severed finger?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s worth a try.”

  “Well, that finger was put away somewhere secure—didn’t seem right to leave it sitting out in plain view.” Tanner waved a hand, questioning the squid tactic. “What would be the point? Besides reassuring yourself that Wixcombe’s alive, that is?”

  “Don’t deny that’s part of it, sir. But if she is alive and has learned anything about the squids—”

  Tanner’s eyes went flat, but he finally gave a single nod. “Alcubierre drive’s still out, we’re further from ON space than anyone’s ever been, I’ve got a hole in my ship and dead crew—right now, I’ll take anything I can get. Do whatever you have to do, Stellers.”

  Thorn worked himself to his feet, wincing as he did. Fortunately, the blast from the implanted bomb had been diminished by the tough, plasticized glass of the quarantine booth and the intervening bulkheads; most of what had hit Thorn, and those with him, had been a concussive effect. It left him feeling more than a little tenderized but still on his feet.