Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  But—no. There was no urgency to their languid passage among the buildings. Like her, they seemed to be merely drifting upon the whims of the shifting currents, content to be taken wherever they happened to go.

  She smiled. Were they trying to emulate her? She remembered that some of them had actually begun trying to breathe, of all things, flexing their torso muscles in an awkward effort to mimic her own respiration. She’d laughed at their contortions and told them stop, and they had. But now, this.

  Well, there was no harm in simply floating under the surface in a state of relative peace. It was undemanding, and relaxing, and it freed the imagination to launch itself into wonderful journeys. And wasn’t that what a rest day was supposed to be about?

  After a while, she drifted close enough to the nearest building to be able to peer inside the squat dome. Like the city itself, it glowed from within with that gentle, blue-green light—the same shade, she knew, as the amniotic fluids filling a womb sac. The Radiance spanned the entire planet-sea, lighting the darkness beneath the perpetual ice in a way that the Nyctus found pleasing. She’d learned that from them, just as she’d learned so many other things, and she tried to incorporate all of it into the universe she’d made. She just wanted these gentle beings to be happy, not like—

  Her face darkened and she sighed out a breath of water. Tranquility and contentment reined here, as she planned. The rest of the universe was full of pain and strife and anger, emotions as dark and hot as a hydrothermal plume. On impulse, she lifted herself and rose through the water with the city falling away beneath her. In a moment, it was just another diffuse, bluish glow, one of a multitude. She could see them now, rising up the sides of canyons and seamounts, spreading across the abyssal plains.

  Something jarring caught her eye. There, far off to the west, the tranquil glow of the radiance gave way to a zone of utter blackness. From that, to threads of angry, orange glare. Her eyes narrowed at the unwelcome invasion of light. She needed to find a way to fix it. But when she tried, the result was the rumbling shocks of earthquakes as the heat trapped beneath the planet’s crust sought to escape. She was forced to allow the fissure to reopen and resume spilling magma onto the seafloor. There was probably a way to correct it, but she didn’t know enough about how these things worked to safely do so.

  Yet.

  She continued her ascent, and the water became noticeably colder. Not surprising with the vast roof of ice now looming directly above. The ice cap was an endless expanse of blank white, except for the silvery bubbles of trapped gas, dancing with restless motion as the current moved them about. The pressure diminished as well, forcing her to tweak herself slightly, making that discomforting feeling of something trying to press its way out of her go away.

  She finally reached the ice and stopped, then she pressed a hand against it. It seared her skin with its chill, so she tweaked that away, too. Now it had no temperature at all. She slid her hand across it. It was the smoothest thing she’d ever felt, utterly without texture other than a faint, rippling waviness. It fascinated her that something could be so smooth—

  But she yanked her attention away from the ice and pushed it up through thousands of meters of solidified coldness, up and up and up, until it emerged onto the surface. Now, in her mind, she stood upon a vast, frozen plain shot through with enormous cracks and fissures. Pressure ridges rose like saw teeth against the blackness of the sky. It was night here, this side of the planet lit only by the cold gleam of starlight.

  She shivered. Why would anyone wish to be here or—she looked skyward—up there. The world below, lit by The Radiance, was enough.

  She made to withdraw, but she stopped and scanned the stars.

  He was out there, somewhere.

  She needed to find him. She needed to know—

  “Child?”

  She blinked and the starlit icescape vanished, replaced by the ice above her. The dim residue of The Radiance glowed beneath her feet. A bulbous shape drifted nearby, its tentacles gently waving in a slow, patient rhythm.

  She grinned and rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to be working.”

  “I was. But I finished with this phase and came to find you.”

  “You’re checking up on me,” she said, making her tone accusing, but in a playful way.

  “Of course. We must keep you safe, after all.”

  “I am safe. Here, anyway.” She looked up at the hulking ice. “Up there, though—”

  The Nyctus shaman, an elder, offered an indulgent flash of bioluminescence, more variations on green and blue. She recognized it as a sigh. “Why, if you believe it to be dangerous, does it fascinate you so?”

  “Because dangerous things are fascinating, don’t you think?”

  The elder shaman paused. “I suppose there is logic in that. As long as fascination doesn’t lead to obsession, anyway.”

  “Is obsession like fascination?”

  “Obsession means to become too fascinated by something—so fascinated you forget other things that may be important. It can even become dangerous.”

  “As dangerous as the star world?”

  The elder shaman flickered pulses of affirmative light. “As dangerous as the star world.”

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “Well, you don’t have to. You are safe here.”

  She nodded. “I know. I just—” She stopped and pressed her lips into a thin, pale line.

  “Go on, child.”

  “It’s him. He’s out there. I know it.”

  The elder shaman again flickered agreement. “He is. But you aren’t. You were right to come here.” His skin flickered in a pattern intended to soothe Nyctus children. For her, it was just lights.

  She sighed, then a stray bubble left her nostril and danced upward. “I know. But he’s still out there. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.” She looked into the gleaming orbs of the elder shaman’s eyes. “I never told you this. But I saw something, right before it all went dark. It was an answer. But I don’t remember what it was anymore. I don’t remember the question, either.”

  She felt small and foolish, the sensation breaking free within her, unwelcome. She began to cry as the enormity of her situation became clear once again. It happened now and then, moments of anguish where the alien world she drifted in felt more harsh than ever.

  The elder shaman immediately flickered and flashed reassurance, then reached out with the clusters of fine, fringed tentacles that spilled over its maw. They spread in starbursts, then lifted, as those raised in benediction. The girl, her tears mingling with the cold seawater, fell against the creature with a sob. The tentacles descended and embraced her in a gentle hug.

  She wanted to hug the elder shaman back, but the thing she’d been carrying in her other hand, the one she hadn’t pressed against the ice, made it awkward. She knew it was time to make a decision, so she did.

  Morgan opened her hand and let the thing she’d been holding begin its long, slow fall back to the seafloor. It took a long time, fluttering against the dense, cold water in an endless spiral. Finally, after being buffeted to and fro by the eddying currents, it touched down in soft mud with a puff of debris far older than any human, or Nyctus, or war. The chill depths were dark and eternal, and there was room on the seafloor for one more bit of jettisoned memory.

  And there it sat, the disturbed sediment slowly descending to cover it with a fine patina of grit. It wasn’t enough to obscure it completely, though. Although the doll’s face partly vanished behind the settling mud, the rest of it remained visible, and would until the restless currents eventually buried it.

  For now, the patches crudely sewn onto its tunic threw back The Radiance as a soft gleam, highlighting the words stitched into them.

  ORBITAL NAVY

  She had decided to finally let Mister Starman go so she could forget about him.

  The Nyctus, though, never would.

  1

  “I hate doing shit like this.”r />
  Mol smirked. “Oh, you do not. You love the sound of your own voice.”

  Thorn stopped and regarded her from under half-closed eyelids. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Oh, please, spare me the outrage. You have an ego the size of a red supergiant.” She raised her hand as Thorn opened his mouth to protest. “Which is fine. I’m used to it. Besides, I think it’s probably why you’re so damned good at what you do.”

  “Might I remind you, Specialist Wyant, that you’re talking to a superior officer?”

  Mol grinned in a most unintimidated away. “Charge me with insubordination, and you’re finding your own ride back up to the Hecate.”

  Thorn held his glare for a moment, but it collapsed into a smile. He and Mol had been through too much together to stand on ceremony—and Thorn hated ceremony anyway. That brought him back to the moment, standing in the wing of the main stage in Code Nebula’s auditorium. He could see one shoreline of the sea of faces filling the seats, all freshly minted Starcasters who’d finished their recruit training and were about to be deployed for the first time.

  An audience. His audience.

  “Are you ready, Lieutenant Stellers?”

  He turned to the voice and saw a face like a hatchet, eyes like glass glittering from either side of a straight, long nose. Thorn saluted.

  “Commander Narvez,” he replied. “I am. As ready as I’ll ever be, anyway.”

  Narvez had been one of his instructors when he trained here, what, five years ago now?

  “So tell me, Lieutenant, what do you intend to say?”

  He gave a sly smile. “Well, ma’am, you’ll have to wait for the show. Wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

  Her gaze sharpened. She held it locked on Thorn for a moment, like she had a targeting solution and her finger on the trigger—but she suddenly relented and let a faint smile soften her face.

  “I guess I can’t just browbeat you into doing what I want anymore, can I?”

  “Could you ever, ma’am?”

  Her smile widened. Thorn couldn’t remember the last time—or, for that matter, even if—he’d seen Narvez actually smile. It made her face look almost human. It inspired Thorn to go on.

  “Actually, ma’am, I’ve got you to thank for this. You tried to keep me on the straight and narrow, at least. No one in my life has done that before.”

  “Just doing what I’m paid to do, Lieutenant,” she said, starting to turn away. But she stopped herself and glanced back, her smile turning mischievous. “But I suppose I do consider you one of my success stories.”

  Thorn saluted again. Narvez returned it and walked away, heading into the audience.

  “Hey, sir, think you’re on,” Mol said, nodding toward the podium. The speaker, another long-time Code Nebula instructor named Fielder, was just finishing up.

  “. . . our keynote speaker, who will deliver the commencement address for Recruit Course 27-A8—”

  Someone in the audience shouted, “Hoorah!”

  Fielder quirked his lip. “Take note, Recruit Grady, that you haven’t actually graduated from Code Nebula until after the final parade. A lot can happen to a recruit’s course report between now and then.”

  Laughter rippled through the crowd.

  “As I was saying, please welcome our keynote speaker, Lieutenant Thorn Stellers,” Fielder went on.

  “Give ’em hell, sir,” Mol said.

  Thorn grinned. “No worries. I’m nothing but charm and erudite wit, after all.”

  He stepped into a sudden swell of thunderous applause.

  “. . . a team,” Thorn said. “If you just take away one thing from what I’ve said here today, make it that. You are members of a team. No one in the Orbital Navy stands alone. Thank you.”

  After a brief pause, the roar of applause washed through the auditorium again. Thorn nodded his thanks to the recruits.

  Fielder, who’d been sitting with Code Nebula’s senior staff at the side of the podium, stood and shook Thorn’s hand. “Thank you, Lieutenant. You held them spellbound. Well done.”

  Another Commander, one Thorn didn’t recognize and who must have been assigned to Code Nebula only recently, nodded enthusiastically. “Quite remarkable, really. You sure you don’t want to come on as an instructor here, Lieutenant Stellers? We could use someone who can actually keep these people quiet for a few minutes.”

  Thorn smiled, but it was a thin, forced expression. All of the adulation was starting to wear on him, and even his skill as a ’caster couldn’t mask the cumulative cost of being someone else. Thorn had spent most of his life to date either as a kid, or as a nobody picking up odd jobs cleaning up what amounted to shit. He wasn’t used to being the center of attention, except when he was getting into trouble while engaged in the ugly business of survival.

  He shook his head. “Sorry, sir. As tempting as it sounds to spend some time here, away from the frontlines of the war, I think I’m more needed out there.”

  “Spoken like a true warrior. I guess I’d actually have been a little disappointed if you’d said yes.”

  So why did you ask me, then? Thorn thought. Some sort of trap—

  “Come on, Stellers. We can’t dismiss these people until you’re off the stage,” Fielder said.

  Thorn nodded and followed the Commander back into the wings, another round of applause following him like an unwelcome shadow.

  As soon as he’d stepped out of the auditorium, Thorn quickly separated himself from everyone else—even Mol—saying he just needed a few minutes alone. He wandered off behind the building. He could hear the chatter of the almost-graduates spilling out of the other end of the building, punctuated by shouts from their instructors to “Form up!” and “Get it together, people!”

  For a moment, though, Thorn was alone.

  He basked in it. There was nothing but the sun, the eddies of breeze wafting around the corner of the building, and the grass under his feet. Nothing in sight but the Code Nebula rec hall across the field, the camp HQ building, and the parade square off to his left.

  He slumped back against the wall of the auditorium. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been alone in a place that wasn’t enclosed in alloy bulkheads, reactive armor, and the void of space.

  “Sir?”

  Thorn blinked and turned. One of the Recruits had just popped around the corner of the building, and he skidded to a stop when he saw Thorn. The name strip over the young man’s right tunic pocket read GRADY.

  “Sorry, sir, didn’t know you were here,” he said, saluting.

  Thorn started to shrug like it was no big deal but realized he was still leaning against the wall. That was something that would land a pile of shit onto a Recruit here, and probably extra duties, too. He straightened and returned the salute.

  “Not a problem, Recruit Grady—” Thorn stopped. “You’re mister hoorah, aren’t you?”

  Grady stared blankly for a moment, then gave a sheepish grin. “Oh, yes, sir. Sorry about that. Got carried away.”

  “Again, not a problem. Nothing wrong with some course spirit. Anyway, you should hustle your butt to formation, or you’re going to be spending the grad party tonight cutting the sports field with scissors.”

  “Oh, it’s okay, sir. Commander Narvez sent me off as a runner to the company HQ to fetch the photographer. I guess they decided to do the final course photos outside, since it’s such a nice day.”

  “Alright, well, be off with you then.”

  “Sir?”

  Thorn raised an eyebrow.

  “I just wanted to say—” Grady started, then paused. “I mean, I think that—”

  “Just spit it out, man.”

  Grady took a breath. “Sir, I just wanted you to know that you’re a hero around here. We actually got one full lecture period just about you. Commander Narvez, she described to us how you moved the Fleet to attack that squid planet. That was—” He just shook his head.

  Thorn grimaced. A hero. And Nar
vez was apparently pushing the idea. Narvez. He’d assumed she’d managed to get from hating him to just tolerating him.

  Of course you could dislike someone, he supposed, and still think they were a hero.

  “It was my job, Recruit Grady. It’s really no different than the job you’re going to be doing, assuming you actually graduate from here, of course. That might be up in the air if you don’t go get that photographer in a hurry.”

  Grady nodded. “Yes, sir. Understood, sir. I just—it’s just that you’re a legend. You don’t meet legends every day.”

  “A legend.” Thorn sighed. “Before you get too starry eyed, Grady, keep in mind that I stink when I sweat, just like everybody else. Have to keep yourself grounded in reality. That’s especially true for a ’caster. We can climb to heights that a regular soldier might not know, but we can fall a lot farther. I—what I’m saying is, don’t get swept up in your own hype, because the squids sure as hell won’t.”

  “Thank you, sir. Good advice. I’ll remember that.” He saluted. “Still, sir, I got to meet a demigod today. Sorry about that term, but you can’t shift reality without creating some kind of legend. You . . . you sort of scare the hell out of us, sir, but we also want to be like you and do the things you do. That’s worth some shit from Commander Narvez.”

  Thorn returned the salute but said nothing.

  Grady smiled, turned on his heel, and left Thorn in silence, brooding with memory of what it meant to be more than human. More than a ’caster.