Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  This wasn’t just a glitch in Trixie’s voice processor. This was a major failure.

  “Trixie,” he said. “Can you confirm our destination?”

  “Sure. We’re going to DW 10875.9.3.”

  “No, Trixie, we’re not. You’ve got us headed to a different star.” He rattled off this one’s designation, another string of letters and numbers.

  “You sure you’re reading that right? Because I’m one hundred percent sure I’ve got us underway to DW 10875.9.3—”

  “Trixie, stand by,” Thorn said. He glanced back at Mol, who was sleeping. He hated like hell to disturb her, but this was a serious problem. If Trixie was malfunctioning, or she’d been damaged in the recent battle, then the mission may have just ended. He’d have to use magic to move them back to the Hecate—

  “This isn’t good,” Brid said, her voice glum. “Without Trixie, and with Mol down, we’re kinda out of options.”

  Thorn turned back to the nav screen, tapping his chin with a forefinger.

  “Trixie, those charts we gave to the Danzur—they’d had all but the most basic information stripped off of them, right? Including our designations for the stars?”

  “That’s right. Mol told me to leave the stars with only generic names—Star Alpha-One, Star Beta-Five, that sort of thing. She figured the Danzur didn’t need to know our designations for them, just their locations and essential spectral details. She said, they can go and explore the damned stars for themselves, call them whatever the hell they want.”

  Trixie synthesized Mol’s voice almost perfectly. Thorn couldn’t help a bit of a smile, but also feeling a little creeped out by it. “But they were accurate, right?”

  “Of course! Not much point giving them star charts that aren’t right, right?”

  “Okay, let me see the one showing this system, and the ones around it.”

  The nav screen changed—or, rather, the names of the stars did, while most of the detail disappeared.

  “Okay, Trixie,” Thorn said. “Assume that we’re currently in the system called Alpha-Four. Plot us a course for an Alcubierre hop to star—um, Alpha-Eleven. That’s our target destination.”

  While Trixie ran the immensely complex calculations required for Alcubierre flight, Thorn leaned back in the pilot’s g-couch. “If this doesn’t work, then I guess it’s back to friendly space,” he said to Brid and Dart.

  “Which means it’s a good thing we’ve got you with us,” Dart replied. “If we were relying on Alcubierre hops by themselves to get home, well, this star system might suddenly become home.”

  “I highly recommend we head back anyway, sir,” Brid said, her tone formal. “For the record, with an injured pilot, an apparently unreliable AI—”

  “Low ammunition and ordnance, too,” Dart put in.

  “—and you now being our only way of reliably traveling at plus-light, we’re reduced to a single point of failure.”

  Thorn looked from one, to the other, his gaze level and bland. “Duly noted.”

  He turned back to the nav screen. Trixie’s new trajectory now showed them going to where they actually wanted to go.

  “Okay, Trixie, compare that to the previous calculations you did,” Thorn said.

  “They’re different. Huh.”

  “Yeah. Huh. Any explanation?”

  “Well, I’m going to run self-diagnostics and see if something’s wrong. I can try rebooting myself completely, but if that takes me entirely offline, then there are a lot of Gyrfalcon systems that need me to run properly. Like that fusion reactor will scram and shut down, and you’ll be flying on thrusters only.”

  “Do it, and let me know what you find.”

  Thorn settled back to wait. He felt Brid and Dart moving around him, but ignored them.

  Mostly, anyway.

  “Found a glitch,” Trixie eventually said.

  Thorn opened his eyes and sat up. “How bad?”

  “Had a data mismatch coming from two different, redundant subroutines. I restarted both of them, and now they agree. That means I see the problem you guys had earlier—instead of DW 10875.9.3, I was actually sending us to TG 19384.4.9—”

  “Let’s just call it Alpha-Eleven,” Thorn put in. “Our destination will be Alpha-Four.”

  “Yeah, it’s a mouthful. Roger that.”

  Thorn turned to Brid and Dart. “What do you guys think?”

  They exchanged a look. “Still not at all comfortable with making this flight, sir, to be honest,” Brid said.

  “Why not use magic to do it?” Dart asked. “I think that’s actually a lot more reliable right now.”

  Thorn sniffed. “If the Nyctus really are trying to hide something from us in that system, then us arriving there with me utterly exhausted probably isn’t a good idea.” He shook his head. “Nope, the mission comes first. Trixie, you’re cleared to take us to Alpha-Four.”

  Thorn turned back to face forward, but kept a sliver of his attention on the others. He resigned himself to sitting awake through the nearly eight hours of flight time. A lot of things were starting to converge in a worrisome way. Nothing was specifically wrong, but something just wasn’t right.

  Thorn tried to convince Trixie that there were far better types of music than some Old Earth genre that consisted mostly of noise and anger, but she stubbornly resisted. None of them, she said, had the energy of punk rock.

  “A broken turbopump tearing itself to shreds doesn’t have the energy of your punk rock,” Thorn grumbled, and decided to give up. Besides, the nav showed that they were just shy of arriving in the system he now called Alpha-Four. He’d already checked on Mol; she was conscious, but groggy, so he left her in the bunk, strapping her in just in case they started maneuvering hard.

  “Don’t want to break you any more than you already are,” he said, smiling at her.

  She offered a glimmer of a smile back. “That’d be nice, yeah.”

  “Okay, everyone,” he said, returning to the pilot’s g-couch. “Time to earn our pay. If there’s nothing here, we go home.”

  “And if there is something here? Something we have to fight?” Dart asked.

  Thorn watched Dart discreetly. “Well, then, we’re probably screwed.” He smiled. “But you didn’t think you were going to live forever, did you?”

  Thorn studied the tactical display intently as the Alcubierre drive cut off, and the Gyrfalcon returned to normal space. The display immediately began to fill with data—most notably, a complex stew of electromagnetic energy, centered in the radio spectrum. Something in this system was broadcasting modulated radio-frequency energy in vast quantities—

  A planet.

  “Well, what have we here?” Thorn said to the display.

  The planet in question was the fourth from the star. Inward from it were three small, rocky worlds, the innermost mostly just a glowing ball of molten sludge orbiting so close to the star that its year was about three standard weeks long. Spaceward from the fourth planet were three more small, terrestrial planets, then one of the largest gas giants he had ever seen. It was so large, in fact, it hovered on the edge of being a brown dwarf, a wannabe star.

  Which was all very astronomically interesting, but seemed to represent no obvious tactical threat, so Thorn fixed his attention back on that fourth planet.

  Trixie had already focused their passive sensors on it, so data describing it quickly poured onto the display. About one-point-one times the size of Earth, only a slight axial tilt, with about 90 percent of its surface being water. Not only was it the source of the RF emissions, its atmosphere immediately showed spikes in a range of chemical pollutants that could only mean one thing: it was inhabited.

  And being a hydro-world—

  “This is it,” Thorn said. “This is what the Nyctus were trying to protect. It’s one of their planets.”

  “I’m detecting traffic inbound to, outbound from, and in orbit around it,” Trixie said. “But the only ships with an apparent military configuration are some
of the latter. And not many of them, either. I mean, wow—this system isn’t very well defended at all.”

  “That’s because it’s way behind squid lines,” Thorn replied, his tone hardening. “They assumed it was safe—and it was. Not anymore, though.”

  “Well, we got what we came for,” Brid said, peering at the tactical display. “Those—how many are there, three? Four? Anyway, those squid warships are going to break orbit any second and come after us.”

  “Trixie,” Thorn said. “Can we get in close enough for a more detailed look at this place, but not so close those squid ships can realistically intercept us?”

  “Oh, yeah. Easily. If we do a fast, tangential course through the system, they’ll never be able to get enough delta-V to catch up with us.”

  “Compute the course then, please, and let me know when it’s ready—”

  “Sir,” Brid said. “I have to object. We got more than we came here for. We’ve located a squid planet. What more do we need?’

  “You don’t seriously think you’re going to—what, find the Pool of Stars in orbit around it?” Dart asked.

  Thorn paused, filtering options as he stared ahead at the display. “I don’t know what we’re going to find.” He glanced back. “I wish Mol was back in this seat, though.”

  “She’s still quite groggy,” Brid said. “And that’s just another reason for us to not linger. She really needs medical attention.”

  Thorn turned back to the control panel. Trixie had painted the proposed course onto the flight management system. It was basically just a shallow arc that would take them straight through the system at a high velocity, bringing them to within two million klicks from the hydro planet. She’d also depicted the closest possible approach for the Nyctus warships, assuming they had the typical flight characteristics of squid ships. It didn’t even bring them remotely close to any sort of threat range.

  Thorn tapped at the flight controls. He was no true pilot, but he’d spent enough time aboard the Gyrfalcon with Mol to have learned the basics from her, in case he ever had to take over—like now. He could fly the fighter from point A to point B, but it wouldn’t be fancy, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be doing any dogfighting.

  “Six hours flight time at highest possible acceleration,” Thorn said, eyeing the screen. “I think we’ll make this pass, then I’ll take us back to the Hecate. Mol should be good for that long.”

  “Sir, I—” Dart started

  “Mission first,” Thorn said, confirming that the flight plan was ready to implement. He reached for the Commit toggle—

  What if Trixie was wrong, though?

  Well, then she was wrong, and he’d have to fix the fallout. But, like he’d just said to Dart, the mission came first—and theirs wasn’t quite done.

  Trixie didn’t seem to be wrong, though. Sure enough, the squid warships finally scrambled out of orbit when they detected the Gyrfalcon, but their long, slow climb out of the planet’s gravity well made it clear that they were never going to be able to catch the fighter. Not unless anything went wrong, that is.

  And Thorn was fully suspecting something would.

  He kept himself braced and ready, his awareness ranging ahead of them, sweeping out toward the hydro planet, born on a trickle of magical power. He couldn’t focus entirely on the task, though, because he wanted to maintain situational awareness of his immediate surroundings, too.

  Splitting his focus like this was far from ideal; it meant he wasn’t doing either thing well. But he felt he had no choice. If there was even anything that could be called evidence at all, it was strictly circumstantial—but he didn’t want to leave himself unaware of what Brid and Dart were doing.

  He didn’t trust them.

  He hadn’t trusted them when they’d first boarded the Hecate either, but aside from being somewhat annoying overachievers, they seemed enough like loyal and dedicated ON officers that the distrust had faded to dull embers. Events since—the broken g-harness, the sudden problems with Trixie after three years of flawless performance, and their vague reluctance to carry on with the mission—had stoked those embers back into flames of renewed suspicion.

  Not that he was especially worried, if he did have to deal with them. Both were Starcasters, but he knew that even together, they were simply no match for his eldritch might. He could probably render both of them unconscious with barely a flicker of thought. And maybe he should, just in case.

  The planet ahead suddenly cleared in his mystical sight, as though it had emerged from a thick, obscuring fog. It wasn’t, he realized, because shamans were trying to obfuscate his remote viewing of the world; it had just been a simple question of distance. If he’d been able to devote himself wholly to scrying the planet, he could have pierced that mist of ignorance long ago. Better late than never, though.

  No, there were no squids trying to cloud, deflect, or distort his vision of the planet. In fact, he didn’t sense the presence of any shamans at all. Lots of Nyctus—an enormous multitude of them, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. Thorn could hear their collective thoughts as a dull, continuous roar, like standing near an enormous crowd, everyone in it speaking at once. He couldn’t resolve any individual minds, not without a great deal more concentration, but it didn’t really matter.

  These massed thoughts, as much as they were just a smear of noise, nonetheless rippled and thrummed with trajectories and trends of belief and feeling. Again, if it had been a crowd, he could have been able to work out, from their collective tone, if they were mostly happy, excited, angry, or somber and subdued. Individuals might vary, but the broad strokes of thought and emotion would be there.

  And these squids, the millions upon millions of them, were—

  The best way to describe it was dispassionate. Cool. Aloof, and in some flashes, even clinically dull. There were no sweeping trends toward any particular, collective mindset. No massed focus, no deep purpose—no aggression. It felt like a multitude of squids just going about their daily lives, working squid jobs, eating squid meals, dreaming squid dreams. The planet was rich, and bountiful, and profoundly peaceful.

  And that was it.

  He found no hints of military installations, or armaments production, or any sort of significant militarization at all. The planet clearly produced large quantities of food, and presumably minerals and other commodities, but that was as far as it went. This planet wasn’t just far behind the war’s front lines physically, it was also deep in the squids’ ideological rear.

  Thorn let his awareness brush back and forth across the throngs of squids. They were civilians. They were parents. There were children.

  Cotswold and Nebo had been similar worlds, peaceful and agrarian. And the Nyctus had obliterated them. It brought a recent conversation he’d had with Dart back into focus, shortly after their most recent battle.

  These cycles of hatred, he’d said, they just go round and round, there’s lots of death and destruction—and the fire will never die.

  And Thorn had replied, The sooner we can end this war, the better. And if that means pulling every living squid into the void and leaving them there to die, well, there you go. Your cycle of violence problem is solved.

  Every living squid included these ones—the ones going peacefully about their lives, the war a distant rumble, nothing more. Except the food they produced fed the Nyctus soldiers. The metal ores they mined became Nyctus ships and weapons.

  Thorn faced a choice, and the options were simple. Now it was time to get back home, to hand all of these observations over to Fleet, then try to convince them to send a force here, and do to this planet what the squids had done to Cotswold, to Nebo—

  For a moment, Thorn lost himself in the image of Nebo and its apocalyptic fate—how it would look not blue and cloud-dappled, but the black and grey of barren rock and ash. A dead place. A place of memory, and char, and ghosts.

  That moment was enough. Something sharp jabbed him in the arm.

  He spun around to see Br
id standing next to him, a hypodermic needle in one hand, a boarding pistol loaded with frangible rounds in the other.

  “Sorry, Thorn,” she said. “But this is as far as this mission goes, at least under your command. We’ll take it from here.”

  Brid, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, started tapping at the redundant controls on that side of the cockpit, using the flight management system to access—

  Trixie. She was trying to access Trixie’s core programming.

  Thorn didn’t hesitate. He lashed out with magical power, meaning to snuff out the consciousness of these two traitors—because that’s what they were. They were traitors. They were Skins. And somehow they’d managed to fly under the sensors anyway.

  Fine. He’d render them unconscious. Or maybe dead. He didn’t care which.

  Except, when he tried to shape magic into the Lifer effects that would slam the thinking right out of their minds, he couldn’t. He couldn’t make his intent and thoughts and abilities sync up. Instead, he found himself facing nothing but a growing roar of static.

  Whatever Brid had injected into him, it had ripped away Thorn’s ability to do magic. In an instant, he’d ceased to be a Starcaster.

  Tuck, I’m sorry I let this happen to you, Thorn thought, as the magic faded away like water into sand.

  16

  Kira had returned to the Stiletto with both relief and dread. Relief, because she was spared, at least for now, from having to confront Thorn any further about her awful revelation to him. Dread, because she had no idea what was happening to him. She thought about reaching out, Joining him across the vast gulf of space that separated them, but didn’t dare. She might end up intruding at the worst possible time, during a battle, or while Thorn was otherwise occupied with what could very well literally be a life-and-death situation. And wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing? Throwing him off at the most critical moment and effectively causing him to be hurt—or worse.