Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Kira gave him a surprised look. “You’ve managed to get Tanner to cover for you? I’m impressed.”

  He gestured at the thermal box holding the two meals he’d brought from the mess. “Let’s eat before they get cold.” He almost added, like last time, but didn’t. They’d spent enough time second-guessing, dodging, and bickering with one another. It was time to sort things out, and that started with the elephant in the witchport.

  “Kira,” Thorn started, as they both picked away at their meals—passable hot beef sandwiches, with a side salad that was actually pretty good. “We need to talk.”

  “Really? Huh. I had no idea. As to that phrase, well, it chills my bones—”

  Thorn raised a hand. “I’m proposing, right now, that we both acknowledge we’ve been really bad at this and start fresh, okay?”

  Kira leaned back a bit, studying Thorn, apparently to gauge how serious he was being. He let her.

  “Okay, then. Let’s do that.”

  “Alright. So—”

  Thorn launched into his speech. “Here’s what I know.” He began to tick points off on his fingers. “Densmore could be dirty, and I know you don’t think so, but it’s hard for me to excuse everything I see. There are too many hints, actions, hell—even feelings I get, as a ‘caster, like I’m being handled or scanned, or maybe a process that’s beyond me since the spy game isn’t my home field. As to Brid and Dart, it’s more of the same, although I admit that some of that could be pure instinct.” With each statement Kira looked alarmed, then angry, and then understanding.

  “Tell me more about Brid and Dart,” she said.

  “You’re not pissed about the first accusations?”

  “I mean—just humor me.”

  “They’re good at everything, including anticipating my needs. Your needs. Our positions. Look, we’re ’casters, we know the difference between luck and—”

  “—magic. Yeah. I get that,” Kira said.

  Thorn steeled himself. “And not to repeat myself too much, but this makes you look guilty as hell. Of something.”

  He expected Kira to at least be pissed, and quite possibly to storm off, outraged at what she could easily see as a betrayal. The worst part was that if she did, it would only add fuel to the fires of suspicion starting to flare up around her.

  Kira laughed.

  Thorn gave a bewildered snort. “Kira, this isn’t funny.”

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “Of course it’s not. In fact, it makes perfect sense. I’m laughing because I didn’t see it.”

  “You—wait. What?”

  “Thorn, the case you’ve laid out is a pretty damning one. I’ve been insisting Densmore is clean, because if she’s not, then I’m either incompetent, or I’m in on it. And it makes absolute sense to think that, since I was the squid’s captive.”

  Thorn shook his head. “Kira, I don’t believe for a second you’re a spy or a traitor.”

  “But you’re convinced Densmore is, right? So that puts me right into either incompetent or culpable territory.”

  “Or maybe the squids are able to do things we simply can’t detect.”

  “Sure. These things are all possibilities, aren’t they? But as long as one of those possibilities remains, I’m compromised, then I shouldn’t be involved in anything considered mission-critical.”

  Thorn shook his head again, this time in surprise, almost wonder. “You’re taking this—well, you’re not, ah—"

  “Ranting in outrage, lashing back at you, storming out of here?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Kira gave him a thin, humorless smile. “What would be the point? Not only would it not solve anything, it would just make me look even more suspect.” She sighed. “If you’re going to be professional about this, Thorn, you have to report all of this to Tanner, and—” She stopped, then nodded. “You already have. That’s why Tanner’s covering for you.”

  Thorn tilted his head in confession. “I can’t keep something like that from Tanner. Not aboard his ship.”

  “No, of course you can’t.”

  Thorn just stared, taken completely aback by Kira’s matter-of-fact acceptance of all of this. If he’d been asked to bet on her reaction, he would have figured the odds of this one to be very, very long ones. “So, where do we go from here?” he finally asked.

  “I need to be isolated from all critical parts of the ship, and all important systems. Then I have to try and figure out a way of convincing you and Tanner that I’m not compromised, and neither is Alys Densmore, and that I’m genuinely convinced of that.”

  “What about Brid and Dart?”

  She lifted her hands, palms out. “No idea. I can’t find anything that makes them suspect, but if I’m a squid agent here to support them, I wouldn’t, would I?”

  “I have to admit, this isn’t the way I saw this going. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, but—it’s just that I was girded for battle, so to speak. I didn’t expect you to be this open.”

  “Which is exactly what I’d probably do if I were a spy, right? Put you off your guard by being cooperative and understanding about your suspicions.”

  “Are you trying to incriminate yourself now?”

  She gave him a genuine smile this time. “No. Just trying to be realistic. Besides, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “What the hell do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

  “Thorn, ever since our last dinner, I’ve been thinking about us—about you, especially, but not like you might imagine.” She sighed, playing with her food, then pushed on as they passed a young blue star to their port side, its point almost painfully bright. “You said we needed to start fresh, and you were right. That means I need to have a talk with you I should have had three years ago. When I first started working with Densmore. Since we’re rebooting things, I’m going to start by doing that now, and I’m going to tell you. You need to hear me out. To the end.”

  Before she could do that, Thorn leaned close to her. “Let me go first. I’m sorry, and I won’t let the war steal away everything I’ve become since leaving the home. The me that you helped build. The Vision made it worse, and—"

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Like you said once, I know you better than anyone else alive,” Kira said. “I knew that the Vision affected you—and badly.” She took a deep breath. “There’s a reason for that.”

  Thorn drew back, curious. “A reason?” The question hung, unanswered.

  Kira didn’t answer right away. Instead she closed her mouth and looked away, breathing long and slow.

  Thorn felt alarms begin to ring, watching her sit there, doing nothing except brace for impact. There was no other term for what she was doing, her body motionless except for the soft rise and fall of her chest.

  Something plucked at Thorn, like catching a warning light on a console out of the corner of his eye. He tried to bring it into focus, and succeeded; a flicker of an unthinkable idea had barely appeared in his mind before it swelled into realization.

  Three years ago—pushing four, now—Kira had left the Hecate and gone to work for Alys Densmore. He’d only seen her once, briefly, shortly after, and then not again for the better part of a year.

  The girl in the Vision had been, what, about three?

  “Shit. Kira, you have to tell me.”

  Kira said nothing, her face pale. Stricken.

  He steeled himself. “That little girl in the vision—"

  Kira’s face drained of any remaining color at all, eyes fever-bright with a hurt so deep it wounded Thorn to see it. In her eyes, he saw her begging him not to ask, but there was no way to stop. Not then.

  “Kira, was she—ours? Did we have a daughter?

  Kira nodded once.

  “Yes.”

  10

  As soon as Thorn strode onto the bridge, Tanner swung his command chair around to face him.

  “Lieutenant Stellers—” he started, then stopped, staring at Thorn.

&nb
sp; “Lieutenant, is something wrong?”

  Thorn shook his head. “Nothing that I can discuss right now, sir.” His voice came out tight, carefully controlled. Every syllable was clipped, robotic.

  Tanner nodded. “My door is always open, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tanner held Thorn’s gaze a moment longer, then swung back to face the main viewscreen. It held an entirely unremarkable image of stars.

  Thorn saw that Brid and Dart were already here, leaning over the comm station. He moved to join them.

  “We’ve been back in normal space for almost an hour now,” Tanner said. “Do we have an ETA on that signal from the Pool of Stars?”

  Brid turned to the Captain. “Should be sometime in the next five minutes, Captain, given the usual uncertainty in our position following an Alcubierre hop.”

  Thorn focused on the task at hand, though he felt like a husk, dried and brittle. Brid’s point to Tanner was perfectly valid: there was always a certain amount of slack in the destination parameters of an Alcubierre hop, that only got worse as the distance increased.

  Since the drive effectively removed the ship from the universe for the duration of the hop, there was no way to check navigation while underway. Instead, all nav while the Alcubierre drive was active was based on a series of complex equations, developed by the Nav Officer and his underlings. The only alternative was to make repeated, shorter hops and check nav along the way against fixed stellar reference points, but Tanner didn’t want to spend any more time in normal space, this far into the zone, than absolutely essential.

  The Comm O, Tifton, tapped a screen, whistling. He was wiry, dark, and quick, a sense of intense purpose clinging to every move. Then he spoke without looking up. “We’re getting a signal,” Tifton said, tapping a control. A window popped open on the main viewscreen, a graphical depiction of signal frequency and amplitude. An extraordinarily tenuous wave of radio energy was brushing past the Hecate, carrying a message from two hundred years ago. The signal processors plucked some of it out of space, amplified the feeble trickle of energy and cleaned it up, then broadcast it over the comm.

  “Flight Com, this is x-ray-tango-one-one, Pool of Stars . . . emergency, location data uncertain . . . assistance possible . . . attempt repairs, but . . . systems telemetry follows . . . will repeat in sixty . . .”

  “That’s as good as it gets, huh?” Dart asked.

  Tifton nodded. “We’re lucky to get this much. This signal has about one one-thousandth as much energy as that light diode,” he said, pointing at a random indicator on his workstation.

  The signal collapsed into a staccato series of clicks and squeaks.

  “That’ll be the system telemetry they mentioned,” Dart said. “Probably data about power plant, drive performance, life-support status, that sort of thing.”

  “Sounds like noise and gibberish,” Tanner said.

  “It’s compressed, sir,” Tifton replied. “We can decompress it and give it to—” He turned and looked at Dart. “Well, to you, I guess.”

  Tanner nodded. “Do that, and let’s see it contains anything useful to us.”

  The comm went dead for ten seconds, then the message started again.

  “Flight Com, this is x-ray-tango-one-one, Pool of Stars . . .”

  Thorn crossed his arms. “Sounds identical. So, a looping recording, I guess?”

  Tifton placed the graphical output of the first message over that of the second. Aside from a few, small offsets that were probably just noise, the two were identical. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Someone recorded it, then left it on a repeating broadcast.”

  They listened as the message repeated three more times—five in all. And that was it.

  “Why did it stop?” Brid asked. “You’d think it would keep repeating more than five times.”

  “Any number of reasons,” Tanner replied. “Including the destruction of the ship.”

  “Can we tell where this was broadcast from?” Thorn asked, still deliberately keeping his mind focused on staying in the moment. “A location? At least a direction?”

  “Direction, yes,” Tifton said, swiping at his console. The waveform window on the main viewscreen was replaced by a star chart, showing the Hecate’s current position in the Zone. A straight line extended from there, across the Zone and into Nyctus space. It continued past the limits of ON charting and into space whose features were remotely mapped, but not known by a physical survey. “The origin point is somewhere along that line, between here, and a maximum distance of ninety light-years.”

  That furthest possible point, Thorn saw, lay well beyond what they understood to be Nyctus space.

  Tanner leaned forward. “We’ll hop to another point core-ward, intercept the signal there, and then another rim-ward, and do it again until we have enough to triangulate. Can you make that work with partial signals?”

  Tifton nodded. “The more intercepts we make, and the further apart they are, the more accurate the location will be.”

  “I’m not anxious to spend a lot of time hopping around this deep in the Zone,” Tanner said, then he turned to Thorn. “Stellers, can you add anything here? Do anything with your magic to help narrow the search down?”

  Thorn stared at the viewscreen for a moment, then shook his head. “I doubt it, sir. There’s no actual conscious mind behind that voice—it’s just a recording. So Joining won’t work. And I can’t interact with the signal directly, not when it’s a thousandth the strength of a light bulb.” He pursed his lips. “Still, I can give it a try.”

  “Do that,” Tanner said. “Meantime, Comm O, work with Nav to figure out the minimum number of hops, over the minimum distances possible, we’d need to get a location for that signal’s origin nailed down.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tifton replied.

  “Sir, there is one problem with all this,” Brid put in.

  Tanner turned to her. “Don’t mind hearing a problem, Specialist, but it had best come with a proposed solution.”

  Brid’s eyes widened slightly, but she nodded. “What all this will tell us, sir, is where the Pool of Stars was when she transmitted this message, not necessarily where she is now. As for a solution, I—” She stopped and looked at Dart, who seamlessly filled in.

  “Gives us a place to start looking, at least,” Dart said.

  Tanner returned to his chair, decision made. “Indeed it does. Okay, people, we’ve all got work to do, so let’s do it.”

  Thorn saluted his acknowledgement, then turned and strode off the bridge. He felt Tanner’s gaze following him but didn’t look back.

  Not all secrets had to be shared right away. Not even to someone like Tanner.

  Thorn buried himself in work, scrutinizing every record and scrap of data he could find about the Pool of Stars, poring over the transcript and data from her emergency transmission—anything to avoid facing Kira’s monumental revelation and everything it entailed.

  He just wasn’t ready to do that yet.

  To her credit, Kira got it. She backed completely away from him, giving him the space he needed. He crossed paths with her a few times, saw her looking abjectly miserable, then turned and went another way. He knew that his tense silence was a bludgeon, but grief was a process, not an event.

  “Lieutenant Stellers, Brid here. Can you come to the mess?”

  Thorn looked up from another technical article about the Pool of Stars and her—at the time—revolutionary Alcubierre drive. The mess made no sense for a meeting, and suspicion flared within him like a serpent.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve got the data from these three hops combined now, and think we have a starting point.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Thorn said.

  Thorn made his way there, still prepared to find himself facing some kind of well-meaning, but wholly unwelcome attempt to help him deal with the things he knew he eventually had to deal with. If it proved to be the case, he’d immediately turn and leave. In the mea
ntime, as long as he did his job, no one had reason to complain, and especially no justification to start meddling. That even applied to Tanner. Work could be the best salve for loss, and Thorn was putting that theory to the test.

  As the door to the mess opened, Thorn found only Brid, Dart, and Mol inside, a portable viewscreen set up on one of the dining tables.

  Thorn relaxed a notch. “Okay, first question,” he said. “Why here, in the mess?”

  “Only place with the table space to spread stuff out,” Dart replied. “Dinner’s not for a couple of hours yet.”

  Thorn nodded and moved to the table. The viewscreen showed the same star chart as had the big screen on the bridge, except four lines now extended from the Zone and into Nyctus space, converging around a point well beyond it. They didn’t all meet at exactly the same point, instead outlining an area about four light-years across.

  “It’s probably not going to get much better than that, according to the Comm O,” Brid said. “We could do a bunch more intercepts, then plot the back-bearing on the signal, but we probably won’t get it down to much less than this.”

  “That’s fine,” Thorn said. “Searching four cubic light-years of space is a lot better than flying along a line ninety light years long, hoping to get lucky.”

  “The thing is,” Mol said, “Fleet doesn’t want Captain Tanner to take the Hecate that far out of ON space. They’ve told him to send a team aboard the Gyrfalcon.” She flashed a grin. “Enter yours truly. I’ve got Trixie chewing on the nav details now.” She looked at Thorn. “Unfortunately, even using the Alcubierre drive, it’s going to take us . . . oh, at least a couple of weeks just to get to the search area. That is, unless you can help us out with that.”

  Thorn looked back at the chart. “That’s a long way to try to move a ship using magic.”

  “In that case, sir,” Brid said, “you’d best stock up on reading material and clean socks, because we’re going to be making an equally long flight.”

  Thorn stared at the chart. Moving a ship that far, and doing it accurately, was going to take a prodigious expenditure of magical effort. He could do it, he was sure, but it would leave him drained and exhausted for some time at the other end. And if he plunked them into the middle of something bad, whether the Nyctus, or something else—