Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “Petty Officer Ignatius, this is Damien Forester. He’s going to help me debrief you today,” Thorn said.

  The Marines guided Ignatius into a chair set about two meters back from the table where Thorn sat. Thorn had already turned the comm screen so that Ignatius and Damien could see one another. Clamped to the back of it, out of Ignatius’s sight, was a second screen, a data-pad set up to receive text-only messages from Damien without the Petty Officer being aware of it.

  “Good to meet you, Petty Officer Ignatius. I wish it was under better circumstances,” Damien said.

  “You mean like when I’m not chained up?” Ignatius raised his hands with a jingle of chain and looked woefully at Thorn. “Are these really necessary, sir?”

  “Afraid so. You were held prisoner by the Nyctus for a lengthy period. Until you’ve been fully debriefed, we have to treat you as a potential security issue.”

  Ignatius lowered his hands and sighed. “Don’t know what I can tell you, sir. The squids held me in isolation almost the whole time they had me. They only started getting interested in me recently—not long before you showed up and rescued me, in fact. Oh, and thank you for that, sir.”

  Thorn nodded, but Damien spoke up. “Before we get into any of that, tell me about yourself, Petty Officer. Or can I call you Anton?”

  “If I can call you Damien. It’d be a nice change from sir or ma’am.”

  Damien smiled brightly. “Absolutely! Oh, and if you see me plugging away at a keyboard here, I’m just taking notes. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  Damien, still smiling, spent a moment typing on a keyboard just out of sight. As he did, text appeared on the data-pad.

  Going to make small talk. Bear with me. Establishing a baseline of behavior by asking questions he has no reason to lie about.

  Thorn settled back as Damien started asking Ignatius a series of innocuous questions—where he’d grown up, if he had any siblings, how long he’d been in the ON, and other, not particularly interesting inquiries that Damien could have gleaned from the man’s personnel file. Thorn thought he got the point, though. By studying Ignatius’s tone and body language when he was clearly telling the truth, it would make it easier to sense when he started lying.

  But Thorn didn’t simply wait. He reached out with a tendril of magic-infused thought and tentatively probed at Ignatius’s mind. It was immediately clear that whatever it was the squids did to turn people into Skins had, indeed, only partly taken effect. There were still parts of the man’s mind that were shrouded, but they were distinct and isolated. Thorn had tried reaching into the minds of the other rescued prisoners and found that the worst cases had virtually no control of their own minds at all. They were blank pages, awaiting whatever imperatives the Nyctus intended to implant in them.

  Just thinking about it made Thorn clench his teeth. There were few more despicable ways of violating someone than to seize control of their mind and reshape who and what they were into something else entirely.

  But Ignatius was nowhere near that far gone. He still had control of his own mind.

  Or seemed to, anyway.

  Thorn backed out of the man’s thoughts, just as Damien apparently got whatever he was looking for. He typed, and more text appeared on the data-pad.

  Now we start asking him the questions he’s more likely to lie about. Go ahead.

  “Tell me, Petty Officer, what happened to the Uluru?” Thorn asked.

  “Damndest thing, sir. I was standing watch in Engineering when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “The reactor went off-line. It didn’t scram or anything like that, the fusion reaction just—well, it just stopped. The system switched to the backup fission plant, but it was dead, too. We ended up on power cells, which was just enough for life-support and minimal control. The comms were dead, too.”

  “What do you think happened?” Thorn asked.

  “I’ll tell you what happened. The squids had set up some kind of trap. The Chief Engineer briefed us about it. We were nosing around in an empty star system in the Zone, then we passed through a band of asteroids, and boom, everything died. Turned out the squids had magicked up three of those rocks, and when we flew between them, we were done.”

  Thorn leaned forward. “How do you know it was magic and not some kind of tech?”

  “Fusion reactions don’t just stop, sir. Neither does nuclear fission. If it wasn’t magic, then it’s some sort of tech I couldn’t even begin to explain.”

  More text crawled across the data-pad.

  Don’t see any deviations from the baseline. He’s telling the truth, at least as he understands it.

  “So what happened after the squids disabled the Uluru?” Thorn asked.

  Ignatius shrugged. “They swarmed us and boarded us. We tried to fight back, and a lot of people died. Some squids, too. The rest of us had to surrender.”

  Thorn saw some text suddenly pop up on the data-pad.

  Had to? Ask him why.

  Thorn resisted a puzzled frown. What was Damien getting at? He wished they could have made the communication two-way, somehow.

  Of course, they kind of did.

  “Just to confirm, the squids knocked your ship off-line, boarded you, there was a fight, and the survivors, including you, were taken prisoner. Damien, any questions so far?” Thorn asked.

  I see what you did there.

  “Anton, tell us about surrendering,” Damien said.

  Ignatius looked from Thorn, to Damien on the screen, then back again. “They had us outnumbered. We had a bunch of wounded, and we thought that fighting on would just get the rest of us killed.”

  Interesting. We ask him to tell us about surrendering, and he tells us why he did.

  Thorn leaned forward. “Petty Officer Ignatius, did the squids offer you terms? Of surrender?”

  “Did they—?” He glanced from Thorn to Damien, and back again. “Yeah. They’d let us live if we gave up. Bastards never said it was so we could get turned into Skins.”

  Thorn nodded and picked up another data-pad, pretending to make a note. “So they offered you terms of surrender, and you decided to accept them. Anything else you remember about it?”

  Ignatius stared at the table for a moment, then shook his head. “Not really.”

  He’s lying.

  Thorn nodded. “Okay, what happened next?”

  Ignatius went on to describe the horror of being taken by the squids and then loaded into one of their ships, and spending the next days—he wasn’t sure how many—in a cell, being taken somewhere. He was examined and interrogated before eventually being offloaded into the Glorious Horizon Processing Home, where they’d found him.

  “It was . . . bad. Really bad, sir,” Ignatius said, putting his elbows on his knees and resting his head in his hands.

  It’s a mix of truth and lies. There are things he’s not telling us.

  “I know,” Thorn said, as much to Damien as to Ignatius. While he gave the Petty Officer a moment to recover, he flicked out a burst of Joining and skimmed the man’s mind. Normally, a person’s thoughts flowed naturally and organically through their consciousness, a mental river swirling and eddying around and over the contours of their subconscious, the riverbed. But Ignatius’s weren’t like that at all. His thoughts were fixed and rigid, as though deliberately assembled in a particular order. What shaped them was less his subconscious, and more the empty voids of denial the squids had placed in his mind. Ignatius was arranging his thoughts around those, and he was doing it with conscious purpose.

  Damien was spot on. And, he’d done it through a view screen, across a comm channel, using only visual cues, things he could actually observe. No magic was involved at all.

  Damn, he was good.

  “Okay, Petty Officer Ignatius, I know this is tough. But I need you to tell me what happened in the squid station, right up to the moment we rescued you.”

  Ignatius’s head snapped up, a g
lare hardening his face. It only lasted an instant, but Damien caught it.

  Woah. He’s suddenly not happy about something.

  His voice thick with misery, Ignatius described being isolated, starved, and tortured—directly, via pain inflicted myriad ways, and indirectly, by being denied sleep, or even just a momentary respite from glaring lights and pounding, discordant noise.

  “And then . . . they were inside my mind. That was the worst part. They were in there, and they were, you know, rummaging around, like they were looking for something. I could feel it. It was—” He stopped and choked off a sob.

  That’s true. He really did go through that.

  Thorn nodded again, making it look sympathetic, for Ignatius’s benefit. He thought just as Damien did. But a flicker of suspicion had sparked in a corner of Thorn’s mind and was rapidly starting to spread.

  “But they stopped torturing you at some point, Petty Officer,” Thorn said.

  Ignatius looked at him, his eyes suddenly hard with suspicion of his own. “What do you mean, sir? They never stopped. They never let up.”

  Thorn picked up the second data-pad, the one he’d been pretending to use to take notes. This time, he actually did consult it. “I’ve got a medical report here from the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon. He says that your newest injuries were almost two weeks old. He also says you showed no signs of malnutrition or dehydration. So the squids must have stopped torturing you and denying you food and water and such at least two weeks ago?”

  Ignatius licked his lips. “I don’t recall, sir. It all just blurs together. Anyway, they kept using their damned magic on me. Maybe they decided that torture just wasn’t working.”

  He hasn’t mentioned any of his crewmates. Not even once.

  “So how come they kept torturing other members of the Uluru’s crew? We rescued four others from your ship, and”—Thorn made a deliberate show of consulting the data-pad—“and they’d all be tortured recently, one of them apparently when we started our attack on the station,” Thorn said.

  “I don’t know, sir. I can’t speak for those bastards.”

  Damien spoke up. “You’ve clearly had a hard time here, Anton. But you’re safe now. After you’ve been debriefed and thoroughly checked out, you’ll be able to resume your duties aboard a new ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As a—Junior Propulsion Engineer, wasn’t it?”

  Ignatius looked down at his feet for a moment. Again, Thorn swept a pass of awareness across his thoughts.

  Simmering resentment, shot through with flashes of anger. But the foremost thoughts in his mind weren’t about the Nyctus. They were about Thorn.

  He felt the man collect himself. Thorn withdrew.

  Ignatius looked up. “Is there anything else, sir?”

  Just follow my lead.

  Again, Damien spoke. “Yes, there is. You know, Lieutenant Stellers, it strikes me that Anton here probably has some valuable insights into the Nyctus. Once he’s been fully debriefed and had his security clearance reinstated, maybe you should speak to Captain Densmore. I think the ON can always come up with Junior Propulsion Engineers. Someone who’s an expert on the squids, though, would be way more valuable than that.”

  Thorn gave a thoughtful look. “Huh. I agree. In fact, I think there’s an opening in Fleet Intelligence that Densmore’s been trying to fill. It’s a fast-track position, though. Really demanding. But for a top performer, it’s a straight shot at promotion. Hell, it’s a straight shot at a Captaincy.”

  “Hey, you should apply for it, Thorn,” Damien said, smirking.

  “I would, but the Starcaster Corps would never let me go. Sharp guy like Petty Officer Ignatius here, though—” Thorn smiled. “You’d pretty much have to give up spaceflight, though. You’d be somewhere in the rear with the gear.”

  Sure enough, Ignatius’s demeanor changed. Thorn didn’t have to Join to see anger abruptly give way to an almost smug enthusiasm. “I’d definitely be down for that, sir. However I can best help the war effort, I will.”

  Bingo. He’s a narcissist and an opportunist. The squids offered him something.

  Thorn stood and walked around the table. “Okay, Petty Officer, that leaves only one thing.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  Thorn leaned in, his smile flicking off. “I want to know what the squids offered you.”

  “Sir?”

  “The squids offered you something. Something that you wanted. In exchange, they stopped torturing you, started feeding you, letting you rest. What was it?”

  “Sir, there was nothing—”

  “Bullshit!” Thorn locked his gaze on Ignatius’s and didn’t let it go. “You’re a collaborator, Anton. You traded your loyalty to your crewmates, to the ON, to your entire freakin’ species for something. What was it?”

  Ignatius’s face instantly flicked from victim to angry defiance. “You’re accusing me of treason? Go to hell!”

  Thorn saw the Marines starting to close in. He raised a hand, stopping them, then let a slow, humorless smile spread across his face.

  “Petty Officer Ignatius, you are going to tell me what I want to know, or I’m going to dig into your mind, bludgeon aside whatever the squids have done to block off parts of your thoughts, and root around until I find it. And you will not be able to stop me.”

  Damien hissed through his teeth. “Ouch. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. I mean, I’ve seen this man move a whole fleet just with the power of his mind.”

  Ignatius’s hostile insolence lasted a few seconds longer, then collapsed into a heap of surrender. “They told me—they told me they needed humans to oversee things once they won the war. They—” He took a shuddering breath. “They said they’d make me a Governor. Over any planet I wanted. They were torturing me, and I just wanted it to stop!”

  Thorn straightened. Strangely, he actually felt a pang of sympathy for him. But it almost instantly vanished into the realization that this man was prepared to betray humanity itself as long as he got something out of it. The squids had read him like a book, using his selfish ambition against him. Junior Propulsion Engineer aboard some ON ship, or Governor of a planet. In this man’s egocentric world, there was only one answer to that. The man had only budged when he and Damien had made what seemed like a better offer.

  The door to the cargo bay rolled open and Tanner walked in. He’d been watching the whole thing, of course.

  “I don’t know what pisses me off more—that you’re such a monster that you’d seriously consider the squid’s so-called offer, or that you’re such a moron that you believed they actually meant it,” Tanner said, stopping beside Thorn.

  “I know what pisses me off more,” Thorn said, his voice low with menace. Real menace, too. He wasn’t feigning it.

  Ignatius licked his lips, his eyes sliding between Tanner and Thorn. “Look. Look. I know stuff. I was there. I shouldn’t have believed them, no. And I didn’t, really. I was trying to get into their confidences, and—”

  Tanner cut him off with an exaggerated sniff. “The smell of bullshit’s getting too thick for me. Lieutenant Stellers, have Anton here taken to the brig and put in a cell. He can rot there until we get back to Code Gauntlet, where I can get his treasonous ass off my ship.”

  Tanner walked away. Ignatius turned, his voice turning desperate.

  “Sir, I can still help! I still know lots of shit about the squids!”

  Tanner stopped, speaking without looking back. “I believe Lieutenant Stellers alluded to a Captaincy. I’m going to make sure you get one. Once you’ve been debriefed and deprogrammed, you’ll get to be Captain of a shitty work party in some shitty place. And, if that doesn’t work to rehabilitate you—and I’m sure it won’t—then I’ll bet the Allied Stars war crime tribunal will be more than happy to give it a try.”

  Thorn turned to the comm screen. “Thanks for your help, Damien.”

  “Hey, a chance to unmask a piece of shit like
Anton here? No problem, any time.”

  Ignatius’s sudden defiance returned. “You can go to hell, all of you! You weren’t there. You didn’t have to go through what I did—”

  “No, but your crewmates did, and they were still holding out when we showed up,” Thorn said. He turned and nodded to the Marines. “Don’t feel obligated to be gentle.”

  The Marine Sergeant commanding the detail could have had a face carved from stone. Still, his eyes narrowed in contempt.

  “Oh, don’t worry, sir. I don’t.”

  12

  Morgan scowled and crossed her arms. “I want to leave. I don’t want to stay here.”

  Falunis flickered with barely restrained impatience. “We’re keeping you here for your own good, child. We want to protect you and make sure you’re safe. Besides, we’ve provided everything here that you could possibly want.”

  Morgan looked around. Yes, the chamber she’d been given in one of the spires was nice. Very nice, even. Spacious, luxurious, with a gorgeous view of the glowing city around them. Whatever food she wanted, whatever she might want to amuse herself with, it was hers for the asking.

  But she couldn’t leave.

  “When they put people into a room and don’t let them leave, it’s called jail,” Morgan snapped.

  “Not always. It can also be called protective custody.”

  “Custardy?” Morgan said, rolling the word through her mouth. It actually did feel kind of like the smooth texture of the sweet custard mommy had sometimes made on Nebo.

  “Custody. It means to watch over someone. Protective custody means we’re trying to protect you,” Falunis replied.

  “Protect me from what?”

  “From anything that would try to harm you. From Thorn Stellers, and all of the other humans who have taken his side against us.”

  Morgan sighed and turned to the enormous window. She could, just by touching any part of the exterior wall, make it turn transparent. Touch it again and it went dark. For a while, she’d amused herself with that and the gorgeous view beyond. The colors were much harsher than they’d been on Tāmtu, nothing like the Radiance at all. But they were still pretty in their own way.