Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Tanner rubbed his chin, giving the possibilities a moment to sink in. “Well, that’s well above my pay grade, especially right now. As of this moment, my concern is the ship. Although”—he looked at Kira, then back to Thorn—“you rescued a comrade from the grip of the enemy,” he said. “No matter what else that leads to, there is that, Stellers.”

  Thorn smiled at Kira. “Honestly, sir, I’d do it again, too.”

  Kira smiled back, but it quickly faded. “I only wish we could have rescued Rainer and Riley, too.”

  She didn’t say Gillis, because Thorn had already explained to her what had happened. It drew his attention to the bandage on her missing finger. Kira was being strong about all of this, but Thorn knew there’d be a reckoning coming when she had to confront and deal with everything she’d been through.

  For now, they all had immediate matters to face, the first of which was getting back to friendly space. And that led to the question that Thorn knew Tanner was going to ask next.

  “So, Stellers, you moved us out here, to the middle of galactic nowhere, and now you’ve moved Wixcombe across who knows how many light-years to join us. Can you do it a third time and move us back?”

  “For that matter,” Raynaud put in, “are you sure moving Wixcombe, or whatever the right word is for it, could cause these long-term effects you’re worried about, or was it only possible because you moved the Hecate in what seems like pretty much the same way first and already caused them?”

  Thorn hesitated. It was a good insight from Raynaud, but one to which he had no answer.

  “My only answer can be—maybe, but I’ll try like hell to make it a definitive yes.”

  Tanner gave a single nod. “Well, then your priority is now to find an answer to that question, Stellers. Wixcombe, you obviously need to be debriefed, but we have no one on this ship qualified to do it properly. The XO is going to take a statement from you. I need you to give as much detail as possible about your captivity with the Nyctus. That’s priority, after which you’re going to help Stellers out any way you can. You’re still restricted from critical areas of the Hecate, though.”

  Raynaud answered quickly. “Understood, sir.”

  “In the meantime, the life of this ship goes on. The Chief Engineer informs me that the Alcubierre drive is about a day away from being operational again. We’ve revised our ration schedule, which should give us enough to get back to ON space the old-fashioned way, but we’ll have to keep an eye out for fresh water sources along the way. Comets are handy like that. So, ladies and gentlemen, with that, to your duties.”

  Thorn walked with Kira as they left. They made inconsequential small talk, which fell absolutely flat; Thorn finally rolled his eyes and pulled Kira into a stores compartment.

  “I think we need to talk,” he said, “and I don’t mean about how good the food is aboard the Hecate compared to the shit the squids were giving you.”

  She returned a faint smile. “It was pretty bad. Almost as bad as that sandwich paste you tried to pass off as edible back on Code Gauntlet.” Her smile vanished. “But you’re right, I think we do.”

  “So let me start—”

  “Thorn, look,” she cut in, “when I started to, um, confess—”

  He shook his head, once. “That’s not what I meant. That’s . . . for another time.”

  “Seriously? It was a touch dramatic, even for wartime, Thorn.”

  “Uh, yeah, I was there, remember?” He smiled. “Let’s stow that for the moment. Right now, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

  She just stared. “About what, exactly?”

  “About doubting you. About doubting your abilities as a Joiner. I was wrong. Not only are you a skilled Joiner, Kira, you’re also powerful. I don’t know if you realize how powerful.”

  “I—well, know that I gained some power while the squids had me. I put it off to something like . . . like adrenaline, I guess. A surge, in the moment.”

  “Yeah, except that surge never went away. Kira, the only reason I was able to pull you back here was because you opened the conduit. You called me. In fact, you’ve been calling me for a while now, but in my dreams. I guess that’s when my mind was most receptive to it.”

  She looked askance, then shook her head. “I don’t remember trying to contact you—”

  “Maybe not, but you were. Your mind was. To me, it was—you were screaming. It was awful. Soul-killing. I put it down to stress. But you were broadcasting even then, even if you didn’t know it.” He shrugged. “As far as I know, the only others who can do that, over any distance, are me and Captain Densmore.”

  “Where are you going with this, Thorn?”

  “Right now, right back to where I started this. By apologizing to you. I underestimated you, because I was being cocky and arrogant.”

  “As far as I know, you’re the strongest Starcaster we know of, Thorn, at least so far. I let that start making me resentful.” She smiled, a little more genuinely this time. Thorn wondered how long it would be before her true, warm smile was back—or if it would ever be.

  “Anyway, that’s my way of saying I was part of the problem, back on Code Gauntlet,” she said. “So, I’m sorry, too.”

  “I think two sorrys cancel out, meaning we’re good,” he said.

  “I think that’s how it works, sure.”

  Thorn gathered Kira in his arms, an embrace that was apology and comfort and affirmation, all in one.

  They stayed that way until the door slid open and a surprised Rating with a data-pad stopped, one foot over the coaming.

  “Oh, uh . . . sir, ma’am. I, uh—”

  “Don’t mind us,” Thorn said. “We’re just in here fraternizing like hell.”

  The man chuckled. “Don’t blame you a bit, sir. I probably would if I could, too. Meantime, though, I need to scan ID codes on all these crates. I can work around you, if you’d like.”

  Kira stepped back from Thorn. “Nah, that’s okay. I think we’re done fraternizing. For now.” Her smile was filled with possibility.

  The squids were coming, she could feel them, they were coming to kill her, they didn’t need her anymore—

  Kira bolted upright in bed, gasping as the images faded from her mind, her heart pounding like she’d been miles deep in a punishing run. Acrid sweat drenched her and dampened the sheets. She swung her gaze around in the darkness, panicking—Thorn, Captain Tanner, the Hecate, all of that was just a dream, and she was still really mired in the nightmare of her captivity—

  But a dull rumble filtered through her racing thoughts. It was the pervasive sound of ventilation, air exchangers, a power plant, a running Alcubierre drive.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered, and swung her feet out of bed. Of course, she was aboard the Hecate. Death had been close, but she was safe. Or as safe as she could be thousands of lightyears from home on a warship.

  “Lights.”

  She crossed to the tiny sink in the closet-sized quarters she’d been assigned and hit the valve, but nothing happened. Oh. Right. Water rationing. She had to settle for scrubbing her face with a dry towel. As she did, she forced away the last dregs of that panic. That had been the dream. The squids weren’t coming for her. It didn’t matter that they didn’t need her anymore, because she was safe—

  She lowered the towel.

  Wait.

  Something wasn’t right.

  For a moment, that dreadful panic started to bubble up again, but she once more shoved it back down. Whatever was wrong wasn’t about what was happening now. It was about something that had happened before. Kira had always been a methodical thinker—it was how she survived in the orphanage, always thinking ahead, moving quickly, and seizing on details.

  Raynaud’s face hove into view, a memory. A clear memory, of questions during the debriefing, all of it recorded as she methodically catalogued her ordeal, each horrific memory saved to be examined. Considered.

  Shared.

  She thought again about the nightmare
that had just awakened her—

  And there it was. She was being chased, but not by the squid.

  Kira tumbled out of her quarters and hurried to find Thorn.

  Thorn just blinked, fighting through the woolen fugue of his first deep sleep in days. Kira stood before him, thrumming with frantic energy. That look cleared his mind in a flash, and he waved her in.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She stood, moving silently as she finished working out the details in her mind. When she was done, her gaze landed on Thorn, bright with triumph.

  “It was all a lie. Complex and devious, but a lie nonetheless.,” Kira said.

  “What was?”

  “Everything. Everything I learned from the squids.” She cursed. “They were a step ahead of me the whole time. Shit, I should have seen it—”

  Thorn took her hands. “Walk me through it. I see the value in sending you with bad intel, but . . . how do you know?”

  “I already said it. Everything. All the ship movements, all the supply and logistical activity, command and control measures—all of it was a lie. They were feeding me that information, Thorn.” She looked into his eyes. “They were setting a trap for the Fleet and using me as a trigger for it.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “Sell me on it. What’s the proof? Remember, we’ve got to sell this to Fleet. And Tanner.”

  “It’s because of something I remembered while giving the XO my statement. I hadn’t even realized I’d remembered it until just a few minutes ago.” She took a shuddering breath. “They were done with me, Thorn. They didn’t need me anymore. I could tell. I saw it in their minds while they were coming for me. They didn’t need me anymore.”

  Thorn stared, lips pressed in a line. He didn’t see—

  And then he did.

  “They were using you for something. And that something was done, so they were going to kill you.” His voice trailed off as he panned through the implications.

  “Yeah. Exactly. They were using me to set a trap for the Fleet. If the ON moves to pre-empt that supposed offensive, they’re going to be ambushed.” She sifted details, hints—every nuance of her ordeal, coming back to the same conclusion. “They’re not human. They’re utterly, wholly alien, so this bullshit? Using me? It’s exactly what we should have suspected.”

  Thorn looked dubious. “How could they possibly have known that you’d read their minds then talk to me and give me that info?”

  Kira wiped her face with one hand, fighting a sudden wave of exhausted despair. “I was wondering that, too. But then it hit me. How did they know to attack that rehearsal exercise I was doing with Gillis and the others? How did they know where we were so they could take out everything else, then send a bunch of damned robots—which are immune to Joining—down to the surface to capture us?”

  “Shit.” The pieces clicked for him all at once. “A spy.”

  She nodded. “Somewhere in the ON, yes. Somewhere pretty high up, too. High enough that they knew about the op I was assigned with my team. High enough that they know that you can contact others telepathically, over long distances, in real-time. And someone who knows that we’re close, so you’d try to contact me when you thought I was missing.”

  As Kira talked, Thorn looked over her shoulder at a spot on the wall.

  Only one person fit all those criteria. Only one person he could think of, anyway.

  “Densmore,” he said.

  Kira stared, then nodded. “It would fit.”

  He looked at Kira. “If that’s true, then she used both of us.”

  “She did, yeah.”

  Thorn hit the intercom to call Tanner.

  The voice that came back was slurred from sleep. “Is this really urgent, Stellers?”

  “The Fleet’s heading into a trap, sir.”

  This time, Tanner’s voice cracked like a whip. “My briefing room, now.”

  “Alys Densmore?” Tanner said, crossing his arms. “Hard to believe.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thorn replied. “But it fits.”

  “Can you contact anyone back at Fleet besides her?”

  “No. And if she’s compromised—”

  “Then even if you contact her with this, she won’t do a damned thing to stop it.”

  “It’s worse than that, sir,” Kira put in. “If Thorn contacts her, she might just double down and try to get even more of the Fleet committed.”

  “But she doesn’t know what we know,” Raynaud said. “Or at least what we suspect. She doesn’t even know that you managed to retrieve Wixcombe.”

  “Unless she’s in contact with the squids and they’ve let her know,” Kira replied.

  The XO nodded at that, but Tanner shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. She knows we’re out of the picture, and that the only one Stellers seems to be able to contact is her. So she’s gambling that we’ll stay out of the picture until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “Pretty good gamble,” Raynaud muttered.

  Tanner nodded. “It is.” He turned to Thorn. “Unless you can figure out a way to get us back into the picture, Stellers.”

  While the others had been talking, Thorn had been letting his thoughts roam. Several disconnected things were starting to come together. He looked at Tanner.

  “Sir, I’m assuming the order for me to not, ah, alter reality no longer applies?”

  “The one Densmore gave you? What do you think? Besides, I already told you, you work for me.”

  “In that case, sir, I’m going to ask you something you’re going to hate,” Thorn said.

  Tanner sniffed. “Stellers, you just described the life of an ON officer.” He leaned forward. “I’m assuming this is something to do with magic, a complex plan, and the utilization of tactics that make my skin crawl?”

  “Naturally, sir.”

  Tanner smiled, long suffering but resigned to whatever happened next. “But of course. So, Starcaster, what do we do?”

  22

  “We’re ready, Stellers,” Tanner said. “All stations, Lieutenant Stellers has command. From this point on, you work off his marks.”

  Thorn made himself as comfortable as he could, then grabbed his talisman in both hands, rested it on his crossed legs, and opened the witchport. A last waft of air lingering after depressurization puffed away as vapor against the stars.

  “Kira,” he said. “How about you? Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Okay.” Thorn filled his lungs, let it out. He repeated the process, but even slower, with a deliberation he’d come to know as the sharpening of his power. Let his full awareness sink into the press of his fingertips against his talisman, feeling the whorls of each finger like a familiar story.

  “Nav, Engineering, stand by.”

  “Alcubierre drive ready to engage,” Fulbright said. To his credit, there wasn’t even any reluctance in his voice. He was obviously as ready as anyone to return home.

  “Nav confirms,” another voice said. “Never entered data like this before, but it’s ready when you are, Lieutenant.”

  Thorn’s awareness now expanded from his fingertips, swelling to encompass the Hecate, and especially her Alcubierre drive. He could feel it as a locus of potential, a beacon of possibility, waiting to come to life. All it needed was a flow of certainty, and that’s what Thorn was about to give it.

  “Activate the drive.”

  There was a distant thrum as the Alcubierre drive lit up. The universe shrank until it was a space and time barely larger than the Hecate herself. True to its nature, the resulting ripple in reality tried to collapse as creation tried to restore its naturally flat character. The collapse went on and on, a wave continuously trying to break, but at superluminal speed. As it did, it carried the Hecate—which was, from the internal perspective of its miniature, isolated universe, entirely motionless—along with it.

  It was how an Alcubierre drive worked. But Thorn was about to change that.

  Now that he’d touc
hed the boundaries of the Hecate’s tiny universe, he pulled his awareness back, collapsing his sense of self until he was focused on the drive. Only the amount of power being fed into the drive limited the speed at which it could propagate the Alcubierre wave through space-time. That was as much a constraint of the drive’s engineering as it was the power that could be fed into it; a given drive could only handle so much input without being damaged. That’s what had happened when Thorn had, in a wild, uncontrolled burst, swept the drive and the ship up in his outpouring of raw emotion. He now did much the same thing, but in a methodical, controlled way.

  Thorn fed magical might into the drive, because that’s how it worked. The more he fed in, the faster the Hecate’s bubble of reality tore through the firmament of the greater universe. What would have been weeks of travel had become days.

  But that wasn’t enough. He felt his muscle seize and pushed harder. Space warped to an ever-greater degree, shoving the Hecate’s bubble along even faster. The distortion bent around, straining to break free until reality and unlimited travel met in one point—at a place where the Hecate streaked through space.

  In another moment, the two points would coalesce, and a wormhole through creation would open, yawning away into impossibility. It was probably something like this that had flung the Hecate so far in the first place. The Chief Engineer, when Tanner had asked him about the possibility of this and its implications, could only shrug. The math said it could be done but offered nothing about whether it should be.

  Thorn was tempted; it would reduce what was now hours of flight time to essentially no time at all. But he didn’t, and fought just to keep the drive running on the edge of tearing space apart. His head began to pound, his pulse throbbing behind his eyes like bursts of lightning, red crackles that surged to life and died, all in the curtain of his vision. He pressed down hard on his talisman, keeping his focus fixed on it, ignoring his racing heart, the way pressure was mounting in his head—just a bit longer—