Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “Aye, sir.”

  Thorn gripped his talisman, focused his awareness into it, then merged it with magic and flung it across the ether. This time, he poured power into the Joining, burning through the shaman’s magical defense like a plasma torch through mild steel. The unfocused swirl of mental fragments coalesced into individual thoughts, forming specific, mental beacons unique to each of the Nyctus crew. Thorn latched onto those more concerned with the operation of the squid’s enhanced drive, burrowing into the creature’s consciousness.

  Who—no. No, you won’t do this. I won’t allow it!

  Wasn’t really planning on giving you a choice, Thorn replied across the void.

  He seized control of the Nyctus engineer and spiked a command into the creature’s mind.

  Shut down the drive, then lock it out.

  Thorn felt the Nyctus rebelling at this seizure of its motor functions. It pushed back, desperate to regain control of its own form. But Thorn’s compulsion, born on an irresistible wave of eldritch power, wouldn’t be denied. The creature’s tentacles danced across the engineering controls, scramming the drive. As soon as it had, Thorn let the floodgates of magical power swing open. He’d take control of the rest of the crew and try to hold them harmlessly in place to await the arrival of the Hecate. The presence of the shaman complicated that, but Thorn was confident he had the sheer power to prevent any squid shenanigans.

  “One minute, Stellers.”

  Thorn pressed his lips together, dedicating a sliver of thought to speak to Tanner.

  “Sir, the squid ship—I shut the drive down.”

  “No, Lieutenant, you did not. In fact, the ship has altered course and is now driving directly toward the nearer of the two planets.”

  Thorn jammed his full attention back into the minds of the Nyctus crew. The shaman desperately tried to deflect him, but Thorn maintained his focus, shoring it up with yet more arcane power. He could feel the shaman scraping and tearing at it, but he might as well have been trying to claw his way through ablative armor. Thorn swept his attention back and forth through the crew’s minds, determined to find whoever was holding out and bring them to heel.

  But it was none of them. Most of the squid crew had no idea what was going on, only that their ship had changed course. It wasn’t until Thorn managed to zoom in on the squid at the helm that he found his answer. It wasn’t who was holding out against his compulsion, it was what. The ship’s automation had been programmed to scuttle it should the drive be disabled or shut down. It was a fail-safe, and one that Thorn only had a moment to undo.

  He yanked his perception back from the crew and drove all of it into the complex machine that was the drive. He had to hope the crew’s sense of self-preservation would dissuade them from just blowing up their ship another way while he tried to stop the drive. Fortunately, despite the small sun blazing away inside the drive’s core as helium fused into heavier elements, the drive was a delicate construct. He could force it to scram in any number of ways, but the surest was to cut off its fuel. He let his awareness flicker and dance across the complex infrastructure, intricate systems of systems that kept the stellar power of the fusion reaction both going and in check.

  There. Right there. A magnetic conduit pushed a stream of helium-3 into the fusion core. Thorn shifted his focus, becoming a Scorch, using pyromancy to heat up the mechanism. He shouldn’t have to melt it entirely, only force its safeties to kick in. But if he did have to melt it, then so be it.

  Something slammed into his thoughts like a tackler during a game of grav-ball. Thorn winced, his Scorch effect abruptly dissipating as his focus broke. He now found himself in a desperate struggle with the shaman, who flung all the power he could into his frantic efforts to stymie Thorn’s efforts to sabotage his ship. Thorn knew he’d eventually prevail, but the fight was costing him precious time.

  He finally managed to batter the shaman into magical submission, leaving the Nyctus at least momentarily incapacitated. He swung his attention back to the drive, refocusing his power and resuming his attempt to scram the drive. The conduit heated and glowed red, then orange, then yellow-white. Thorn poured power into it, heating the component to nearly white-hot before the tough, heat-resistant alloy failed. Liquid helium-3 erupted from the half-melted conduit, vaporizing instantly and filling the squid frigate’s engineering section with searingly cold gas.

  But the drive still didn’t cut out.

  Thorn cursed and drove his awareness deeper into the drive’s guts. It took him more precious time to find the cause. The drive incorporated a reservoir, a holding tank for helium fuel that would keep feeding the fusion reaction even in the event of a fuel stoppage. If he’d found this first and blew out a component downstream of it, he would have killed the drive. Now, he wasted yet more time tracing and attacking the fuel feed system between the reservoir and the reactor.

  But it was too late. Thorn felt the frigate shudder, then slew hard to starboard. Terror rippled through the crew as they raced to escape their doomed ship. Thorn cursed again and yanked his awareness back just in time to see another chunk of rocky debris slam into the frigate, gouging a massive chunk out of its flank.

  “Shit!”

  “I’d take that to mean this wasn’t going to have a good outcome, Lieutenant Stellers, but seeing the squid frigate breaking up like it is kind of gave it away,” Tanner said.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It just took me too long to get past their damned shaman.”

  “War’s hell, Lieutenant.”

  Thorn turned to the tactical repeater as the dregs of the magical power he’d summoned dissipated. The squid frigate was falling through the debris field surrounding the nearest planet, the thickening cloud of rocky fragments tearing it apart. Thorn had to acknowledge the irony of the Nyctus being devastated by high-velocity chunks of rock. But another thought quickly replaced it.

  What if he’d rewritten reality? Changed the nature of, say, the squid ship’s trajectory? Altered the universe such that the frigate would simply plunge through the debris field unharmed, or would never encounter it in the first place?

  But the question answered itself. He wouldn’t do that. The stakes were far too high.

  A bright green flash pulled him from his brooding reverie. “I think that was probably the last mine,” Bertilak said.

  “Thank you. You might as well come back on-station with the Hecate,” Tanner replied.

  “Will do—oh.”

  Bertilak paused, then continued. “The Nyctus have launched a shuttle . . . or a big escape pod. Something, anyway. Seems that some of them might have gotten away.”

  As Bertilak said it, Thorn saw the battered squid frigate slam head-on into the biggest chunk of rock yet and instantly disintegrate into a cloud of speeding debris. It would eventually fall into the planet’s atmosphere and turn into a brief, although probably spectacular, meteor shower.

  But Bertilak had been right. A smaller craft had just detached and now jinked and dodged among the whirling rocks. It reached the upper edge of the atmosphere and began trailing a glowing wake of friction-heated gas. On impulse, Thorn hurled a burst of magic, infused with his intent to mark and keep track of the little vessel, before it vanished into an almost unbroken expanse of cloud.

  He turned back to the intercom. “Captain Tanner, we might not have managed to snag that Nyctus ship, but some of those surviving crew might still be valuable to us. I’ve tagged their ship with magic so we can find it on the surface.”

  “Especially if any of them are engineers,” the Tac O put in.

  Tanner grunted assent. “I hate settling for second place, but like I said, war is hell. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get. Alright, Lieutenant Stellers, we’ll put together a landing party and see what we can salvage. Better put your walking boots on.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re going down with them. If that Nyctus shaman is one of the survivors, you’ll need to deal with him.”

  “Under
stood, sir.”

  Thorn closed the witchport and extracted himself from it. As he headed for his quarters to retrieve his battle-rattle, he thought about the last time he landed planetside to take on some squids. In the space of a couple of hours, he was nearly shot, blown up, squashed by water-magic, and eaten by some of the local fauna.

  He allowed himself a thin, dour smile. Maybe this time the landing would be uneventful, they’d find the squids, and everything would just fall into place.

  Yeah, right.

  Thorn sighed. War is hell, indeed.

  2

  “So what are we killing?” Bertilak asked.

  Thorn jumped, then gave him a bemused, sidelong look. “Ideally, nothing. We’d like to go down there and take the Nyctus who escaped that frigate alive. By the way, how long have you been aboard the Hecate?”

  Bertilak smiled. “I just arrived. But I told you I was coming.”

  The XO, who was Officer of the Watch and therefore currently in command, shot Bertilak a narrow-eyed look. “You did, yes, from your ship, over the comm. And then a few minutes later, you walked onto the bridge. Seems to me you might have skipped a few steps in there.”

  “My apologies. I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect to your fine ship.”

  The XO raised her eyebrows, then nodded. The Hecate’s crew was getting used to the big, green alien and his bizarre ways.

  Thorn smiled and shook his head. “Anyway, we’re planning on dropping a landing party on the planet to find those squids. Do you want to come along?”

  Bertilak nodded. “By all means, of course.” Thorn noted he had to bow his head to avoid the conduits, structural components, and cableways that made up the Hecate’s bridge overheads. It was one of the disadvantages of being almost two-and-a-half meters tall. Ships meant to house humans weren’t built for such massive people.

  But Bertilak didn’t seem to mind, mainly because he managed to unerringly duck his head at exactly the right moments. Thorn had never seen him smack himself against an overhead, even if he was walking fast along the Hecate’s corridors. Nor did it really surprise Thorn. Bertilak was, after all, a construct, a being made of magic by his daughter, Morgan, as a way of testing Thorn’s honesty and integrity. Maybe because of this fundamentally arcane nature, Bertilak didn’t seem to slam face-first into his own limitations the way humans—actually, just about all creatures—often did. He always just seemed the equal to whatever situation confronted him.

  “Oh. Bertilak. I didn’t even know you’d come aboard,” Tanner said, striding onto the bridge. He gave the crew there an ominous look. “Imagine that, me being surprised by a visitor boarding my ship. What an unlikely thing to happen, or to ever happen again.”

  The XO stood, vacating the Captain’s chair and nodding her apology. “Sorry about that, sir. Bertilak kind of surprised us as well when he walked in here a minute or so ago.”

  Tanner turned to Bertilak. “You have this uncanny knack for waltzing through our routine security measures. Have to be honest. Makes me nervous.”

  Bertilak bowed a little more deeply. “I’m most sincerely sorry, Captain. From now on, I shall make sure to announce myself properly before arriving.”

  “Appreciate that.” Tanner looked at Thorn as he sat in the command chair. “Let’s have a SITREP, Lieutenant.”

  Thorn wanted to smile as he watched the exchange unfold between Tanner and Bertilak, but he kept his face deliberately neutral. Thorn hadn’t shared Bertilak’s nature as a magical construct with anyone in the Fleet. At least, not yet. As far as anyone was concerned, he was just an unusual alien who exhibited some odd interactions with magic. He knew that would probably be enough for the ON to want to keep him at arm’s length and under careful surveillance, but the big green guy with the infectious laugh had proven himself. Not only had he saved the Hecate from what appeared to be impending destruction, but he’d also been instrumental in moving the Reserve Fleet to head off a Danzur-Nyctus alliance against the Allied Stars. Thorn knew he was still being watched, but he did get a lot of leeway.

  Even Thorn wasn’t entirely sure what Bertilak was capable of. Again, he always seemed to be the equal of any situation he faced. Moreover, he seemed somehow detached from reality. Slightly out of sync with the rest of the universe. He hadn’t triggered the Hecate’s proximity alerts or counter-intrusion measures because, it seemed, he simply didn’t know he was supposed to. Now that he did, Thorn expected they would work just fine.

  “You know, Lieutenant, it’s customary, when giving your Captain a SITREP, to do it out loud,” Tanner said.

  Thorn blinked. “Sorry, sir. Right. So the Hecate’s sensors were able to track the squid escape shuttle until it vanished into the cloud tops. We’d have lost it at that point, but I tagged it with a magical signature.”

  “There’s a high concentration of organic pollutants in the atmosphere. Big molecules that seem to be degrading our sensors, sir,” Osborne, the Tac O, put in.

  Tanner steepled his fingers. “Source?”

  “Unknown, sir,” Osborne replied.

  “Toxic? Is the air down there breathable?”

  A sturdy woman with a brush cut and an air of stubborn toughness stepped forward from near the back of the bridge. “I just finished doing some spectral analysis, sir. The air might be kind of stinky, but it should be breathable.”

  Thorn waited for Tanner to answer, watching the woman as he did. Her name was Moira Hackett, and while she was the newest member of the Hecate’s crew, she wasn’t ON. She was actually a civilian holding the acting rank of a Senior Rating and the title Mission Specialist. She represented the new addition to the ON’s roster—a Scientific Corps. Someone on high had apparently decided that ON ships needed some scientific know-how aboard, so corresponding scientific types were recruited, given an abbreviated form of training, then posted aboard ships throughout the Fleet. Most had been assigned to capital ships, but the Hecate, given her penchant for independent ops, had gotten Specialist Hackett.

  “Is the air breathable is not a question I like being answered with should be,” Tanner said.

  Hackett shrugged. “Let me put it this way, sir. None of the compounds we’re seeing in the spectral data are toxic. At least, not in the concentrations we’re observing. Still, whoever goes down there should probably do it suited up, just in case we’re missing something, and do a gas test before starting to suck the stuff in.”

  Tanner nodded and turned back to Thorn. “Can we get any read on the squid’s landing site? Terrain, vegetation, that sort of thing?”

  “Only very generally. It seems to be flat, and wet, and that’s about all we know, sir.”

  “Recommend we do some recon before putting people on the ground, sir,” Osborne said.

  “Agreed. Lieutenant Stellers, have you liaised with our esteemed Marine Detachment commander?”

  “I have, sir. He’s got a squad prepping to go right now,” Thorn replied.

  “Okay. Get down there, do what you have to do, then haul your asses back up here so we can be on our way. You’ve got two hours from the moment you hit atmo.”

  “Understood, sir.” Thorn looked at Bertilak. “Can your ship even do an atmospheric entry?”

  When Bertilak replied, he looked squarely at Tanner and smiled.

  “It should.”

  Tanner lifted his eyes to the heavens. “Combat ability and a sense of humor. Best crew ever.”

  Thorn watched as the Jolly Green Giant broke out of the cloud base, his talisman in hand, magic thrumming and ready. A flat, desolate expanse of dreary swampland sprawled out below, vanishing into grey mist a few klicks in all directions.

  “That looks like a bad case of wet feet just waiting to happen,” Bertilak said.

  Thorn grunted his agreement, then turned to the comm. “Mol, what’s your status?”

  “Five by five, about two klicks behind you,” came the reply.

  Thorn nodded. Mol’s Gyrfalcon carried a squad of Marines, commanded by a
grim-faced Sergeant named Twomey. The plan was for them to hang back and circle the landing site, while Bertilak and Thorn did a few flyovers to get the lay of the land. That wasn’t going to be hard since it would be flat and wet.

  Thorn let his awareness briefly fall out of real-time and sink into his talisman. He sent it riding a fine strand of magic, letting the tag he’d put on the Nyctus shuttle pull it along. He then immediately ended the effect, just in case the squid shaman was somewhere down there. Thorn wanted to give the creature as little time to react to their presence as possible.

  He pointed. “Ease left of our current course. A little more—there. Okay, this should take us right over the landing site in, oh, thirty seconds or so. Mol, you get that?”

  “Roger dodger. I’m starting a wide circle to the north. As soon as you guys want me to come in, just shout.”

  Thorn made himself relax but kept his perception hovering close to the magical boundary between reality and the symbolic essence of his talisman. If the squid shaman were down there, then this fast fly-past should provoke him into action, or at least let Thorn sense his presence.

  Bertilak pointed at the viewscreen. “Right there. Looks like—uh-oh. Looks like an impact crater.”

  Thorn watched as the site scrolled past beneath them. Sure enough, he saw an elongated trench had been scoured out of the swamps, ending in a crater already mostly full of water. Metallic debris had been thrown ahead of the crash site in a broad fan shape, while a chunk of hull protruded from the murky sludge, muck dripping from the bright edges of torn plating.

  Thorn flicked his thoughts across the wreckage as they passed over it. He sensed no life. Or, rather, he brushed against all sorts of life, which wasn’t surprising for a swamp. But it had the dull, diffuse feel of the most basic and unthinking of lifeforms, not the brighter spark of sentience.

  “Shit. Doesn’t look there were any survivors,” he said.