by J. N. Chaney
“Which leaves the Bilau,” Thorn said.
“Indeed it does. That’s going to be our next job, I think. If we don’t need them as allies against the squids anymore, then we’re going to have to decide what sort of relationship we do want with them.”
“It’s probably going to be war, sir. Based on what we’ve learned about them, I can’t see any alternative. They’re not going to be happy as the number two power in this part of the galaxy,” Thorn replied. “Or any galaxy, for that matter. It’s their nature.”
Tanner nodded. “Like I said, I’ll take this to Admiral Scoville. Meantime, this task force is returning to friendly space. Assume you’re coming with us, so consider yourselves no longer detached.”
Thorn made to sign off, but Tanner raised a hand. “Stellers, I have a question for you. Is what I’m hearing about how you dealt with that squid captain true? You simply tossed him into space, right through the hull of his own ship?”
“Yes, sir. I figured a suitably dramatic gesture might sway the rest of the crew. Is there a problem?”
“For me, no. For a lot of the other Captains in this task force, yeah, kind of. The idea that magic can do that is making everyone a little uncomfortable, I think.”
“Tell them not to worry, Commodore. I doubt that anyone but Stellers, and maybe his daughter, are capable of it in the first place,” Densmore said.
“Assumed as much, but still good to know. And I seem to say this at least once a month, but damned if I’m not glad he’s on our side,” Tanner muttered, shaking his head.
11
Thorn stepped out of the Gyrfalcon’s airlock under a gloomy overcast that clamped a lid of dull, grey cloud over Code Nebula. He wasn’t used to the place being so socked in. In fact, Code Nebula had a reputation for being mostly sunny and hot. But he reminded himself that this overcast wasn’t natural. It had been crafted, and was being maintained by a cadre of Starcasters. The point was to create a visual block from orbit so that any surreptitious eyes trying to spy on the base would see nothing but cloud. It was crude, sure, but also very effective.
“Okay, Mol, I’m not sure how long I’m going to be. You might as well go scare something up to eat,” he called back into the fighter.
Mol’s dark face popped out of the hatch. “Code Nebula mess food? Oh, yes, please!” she said, then stuck out her tongue and made a retching sound.
“I ate here for months. The food isn’t that bad.”
“I have a refined palate.”
“She really does,” Trixie put in. “If you ever want to hear Mol really complain, just hang around her at mealtime. One time, she tried something called a burrito and I thought there was going to be a fistfight between her and the chow worker.”
“There was hot lettuce in it, you glorified speakerbox. I was well within my rights to pick a fight,” Mol said, aggrieved.
“Can’t really argue. Sorry, Trix. I’m with Mol. Lettuce should be cold. Or in the trash,” Thorn admitted. “And with that, I’m out.” He waved and began walking toward the clustered buildings of Code Nebula proper.
Approaching them revealed something else Thorn wasn’t used to. Code Nebula was swarming with ON personnel.
When Thorn first arrived here, the base had been a relatively out-of-the-way place, devoted to the very niche business of training Starcasters. Now, it was a central hub for ON ops, hosting the Starcaster Corps headquarters, and a variety of other installations, from signals intelligence to psychological warfare. Anything that wasn’t directly involved in operating, fighting, and maintaining ON warships had seemingly been relocated to Code Nebula. Densmore hinted that her own HQ may be moving here. Thorn suspected it already had, especially given the ominous presence of some heavily fortified and guarded bunkers sitting off by themselves in the middle of a sprawling, open field of grass.
As he approached the buildings, he felt a sudden tingling surge of magic. The Starcasters maintaining the wall of denial around the base recognized him and immediately let him pass. That wasn’t just a part of the base’s new and expanded purpose. The prototype drive was here, and Fleet was determined that no one—Nyctus, Bilau, or otherwise—should be able to discover that. Accordingly, fifty Starcasters working in shifts of ten were maintaining the denial ’casting around Code Nebula around the clock.
To an outside observer, the base would seem entirely unremarkable. It would still obviously be a military installation, but it wouldn’t seem to be any busier than would be expected for a facility of its size. Once through the obfuscating veil, though, the true magnitude of what was going on here came rushing into place all around Thorn.
Code Nebula was a hive of activity.
He wended his way among cargo containers laid out in specific patterns around the base, some incoming and yet to be unloaded, others outgoing and awaiting pickup. Logistics personnel hurried and scurried among them, scanning ID tags on the containers with portable readers. A chunky, six-wheeled contraption had just driven into place over one of the containers, and now hoisted it up into its belly for transshipment somewhere else. Thorn did his best to stay out of the way and stick to the main road passing through the bustling logistics yard, making his way into the base itself.
More personnel thronged here, too. There were still courses running, confirmed when Thorn had to step aside and let a platoon of recruit Starcasters jog past, their instructor shouting out a cadence. The woman leading them saw Thorn, recognized him, and waved.
“Hey, sir! Good to see you!” She shouted at her platoon, “Everyone say hello to Lieutenant Commander Stellers!”
The response boomed back in a chorus made a little ragged by panting. “Hello, Lieutenant Commander Stellers!”
Thorn smiled and waved back, then carried on, aiming himself at the base HQ building.
“Lieutenant Commander Stellers, huh? It’s about time,” a voice said.
Thorn turned and saw Kira striding toward him, her face split in a broad grin. “When did that happen?” she asked, pointing at his rank insignia, still shiny and unblemished.
“At Code Gauntlet. Admiral Scoville did the honors,” he replied. He’d been sidetracked to Code Gauntlet for a debriefing with Scoville and his staff, while Kira had carried on here, escorting the Nyctus drive.
“Well, Captain—sorry, Commodore Tanner did threaten to promote you,” Kira said, giving Thorn a tight hug.
Thorn chuckled as they disengaged. “It’s only been four days. Not complaining, though.” As he spoke, he caught a Commander he didn’t recognize passing by and frowning, apparently at their overt display of affection. Thorn readied himself for an objection, but the woman seemed to recognize them both, then turned hastily away and hurried on.
“Reminds me of Narvez,” Thorn said.
“Yeah, except Narvez wouldn’t have hesitated to jack us up for fraternizing, or some such thing,” Kira replied.
They both took a moment to look into the distance, toward Sentinel Hill, where Narvez now rested with every other Starcaster who’d fallen in battle. A bigger memorial, listing the names of all who had been lost in the war and their remains never recovered, stood starkly against the grey sky.
“Anyway, when I heard that Mol had landed, I came looking for you. I’m supposed to bring you to the lab,” Kira said.
“The lab?”
“You’ll see.”
Thorn studied the Nyctus drive, now mounted in a frame and secured in a heavily protected vault in “the lab.” This had turned out to be a secret research installation buried several tens of meters underneath Code Nebula. Thorn had had absolutely no idea it was here.
“How long has this place been around?” he asked one of the researchers, a young woman in a lab smock hovering over an instrument array.
“Hmm? Oh, at least three years, which is when I was posted into it,” she replied.
At least three years. That meant it was longer, which meant it might have been here while he was sweating his way through recruit training all those
years back. Now that was a well-kept secret.
Tanner appeared from a side room, chatting with another researcher in coveralls. Thorn knew he was here because the Hecate was one of at least fifty ships in orbit. That meant a good chunk of the fleet was here, which struck Thorn as a little counterproductive. If you really wanted to deflect attention away from a place, why the hell would you park fifty ships in orbit above it?
He waved the thought aside. Decisions like that were way above his pay grade, and Tanner caught his eye.
“Stellers. Like you to meet the R&D boss running the show here.” He gestured at the woman beside him. She was striking, a classical beauty, the sort that artists use as the model for statues and paintings. Her coveralls took the edge off her sheer attractiveness, though, making her seem a little more human—which, ironically, just made her that much more attractive.
“Thorn Stellers, Kira Wixcombe, this is Doctor Eleanora Gaust. Doctor, these two are—”
“Responsible for recovering the drive from the Nyctus. Yes, I read the report of your chase and how you ran down that battlecruiser.” Her green eyes, somehow mysteriously dark and luminous at once, settled their gaze on Thorn. “You ejected the captain into space through the hull of his own ship. That’s remarkable, and by remarkable, I mean terrifying. You’re obviously a very dangerous man, Lieutenant Commander Stellers.”
Thorn smiled. “Thank you. I—” He stopped. “Um.”
She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? Kira said, her voice almost gleeful in his mind.
She’s okay.
Thorn, you’re literally speechless. But I get it. She is absolutely stunning. I’m not so inclined myself, but if I were, I’d be all over getting to know her better.
Really? The two of you? Huh—
You go any further down that road, and you’re going to find it goes over a cliff.
Thorn’s smile widened. “Sorry, Doctor. I haven’t been back to Code Nebula in a long time. I’m still getting used to it.” He gestured around. “I mean, how long has this facility been here?”
Good catch, Kira said, her tone dry.
Tanner wasn’t fooled, either. He briefly caught Thorn’s eye and lifted one corner of his mouth in a glimmer of a smile.
Gaust glanced around. “I’ve only been here a few months. As for this facility?” She turned her striking gaze back on Thorn. “That’s classified.”
“So, Doctor, have you figured out much about this drive, yet?” Kira asked, smoothly saving Thorn from himself.
“We have, actually. We’ve studied it thoroughly, right down to the details of its metallurgy. We then took it to an uninhabited moon, hooked it up to a fuel supply, and powered it up. We only idled it, but we could tell right away that it's an amazing piece of tech. Without going into the convoluted details, it uses some clever particle physics trickery to get about 20 percent more thrust out of a standard ON fusion drive unit, while using about one-third the fuel. And that’s from a device that’s about 60 percent smaller and not much more difficult to build.”
“This is—it’s a leap forward. And yet, they were transporting it?” Thorn asked, curious.
Tanner lifted a finger. “A word from an amateur historian? This kind of thing has happened before. A man named Private Theodore Grabowski took a picture, with a camera—a primitive form of video capture—hundreds of years ago. The picture is important to us now because of what it is, not who’s in it.”
“What was it, sir?” Thorn asked.
“Two boys. Children, probably ten or twelve years old. They had no shoes and were steering a pair of oxen—beasts of burden, pulling a two-wheeled wooden cart. The year was 1945, on Earth, and the cart carried a jet engine for an atmospheric fighter. It was the most advanced piece of tech on the planet, and it was under the control of two kids with cow shit on their feet, running for their lives from American bombers.” Tanners shook his head mournfully. “The war was over, even if their leaders wouldn’t admit it. I was reminded of this event when you captured the drive because I can only hope that the Nyctus aren’t like the Germans. I pray, for all of us, that they know when to quit. That they . . . that they understand what we’ll be forced to do, in order to assure that this never happens again.” He sighed, a long, dolorous sound, but then his smile returned, irrepressible and bright. “Could have been a game-changer if the squids had managed to get it into production even a year ago,” Tanner said.
Thorn looked at the drive. “Glad they didn’t.”
“So am I, Stellers,” Tanner murmured, but his eyes were somewhere else, the smile a faded memory.
Thorn watched the image on the viewscreen intently. The Hecate had parked herself two million klicks away from the moon, an uninhabited hunk of rock orbiting the Code Nebula system’s sole gas giant. The last of the research ships had just lifted off and would be at a safe distance shortly.
The drive sat snuggly secured into a cradle, which had been rock-bolted deep into the moon’s surface. Thorn was about to witness the first test of a human-built version of the prototype drive. Whether or not this proved a game-changer to the ON’s benefit hinged on the next few moments. Having the prototype squid drive was one thing, but being able to reproduce it was something else again.
“We are fully Shaded,” Densmore said over the comm. “We should be able to maintain it for at least an hour.”
“Roger that,” Tanner said. He turned to an inset window in the viewscreen, one showing Doctor Gaust and several of her colleagues, all of them staring intently at instruments of their own.
“Anytime you’re ready, Doctor,” Tanner said.
“We’ll start the countdown in thirty seconds.”
Thorn felt the persistent, but faint tingle of the massed Shade effect in the back of his mind. Densmore, who’d been put in charge of security for the drive program, had deployed two dozen Starcasters to maintain the obscuring effect while the test proceeded. Thorn had been gratified, when reading the various operational briefs, that more and more mention was being made of the Bilau as a possible security threat. And, since the Bilau seemed to have no facility for magic at all, it seemed the most effective way to keep them in the dark about this new drive. All of that had been Densmore’s explicit doing.
“I’ve come to trust your judgment, Stellers,” she’d said to him when he asked her about it. “Or I trust it most of the time, anyway. And you seem convinced that the Bilau are bad news, so I just can’t ignore that.”
It had been gratifying, but there was still a faction in Fleet command that felt some sort of deal with the Bilau was the best way to go. Thorn knew that if this drive test failed, then they’d gain a lot of traction in their arguments. One way or another, the Allied Stars Council was getting desperate to end this war, even if it meant reaching out to an alien race Thorn was convinced were as dangerous as the squids. Maybe even more so.
“Ten second countdown starting at my mark,” Gaust said.
“And, mark.”
Thorn watched the time tick down. At one, he took a deep breath. So, he noticed, did pretty much everyone else around him.
“Ignition,” Gaust announced. An instant later, the experimental drive lit.
A tongue of fusion plasma shot across the surface of the moon. Thorn immediately saw it was a much paler, more diffuse exhaust plume than he was used to. In fact, it was more evident by its effect on the moon itself, sending dust and fragments of rock flying so fast that some of them no doubt reached escape velocity.
It kept burning.
Thorn released the breath at almost the same instant as everyone else.
“Well, it starts,” Kira said.
Tanner flicked his attention from the viewscreen to the display set into his command chair. “Looks stable, too. Any issues at your end, Doc?”
Gaust shook her head. A smile slowly spread across her face, and those of her colleagues, who were now whispering excitedly among themselves.
“None. Everything’s green. So we know it idles just fine.” Sh
e tweaked something, then looked back up. “Commodore, I’d like to start throttling it up.”
“At your discretion, Doctor Gaust,” Tanner replied.
As they watched, the drive began to spool up. The rock washed by the plasma exhaust had started to glow dull red; now, it brightened, cherry red becoming a more intense orange, shot through with flickers of yellow.
“That’s ten percent power,” Gaust said. “Going for twenty.”
The drive amped up even more. The exhaust started to sear a trench into the moon, molten blobs being flung through a glowing cloud of vaporized rock.
Gaust kept applying power. At just over 40 percent, the drive suddenly just vanished. Thorn found himself staring at the twisted wreckage of the structure that had been holding it in place, and a glowing pit scoured into the moon, now cooling back through duller and darker shades of red.
“Well, shit,” Kira said, but Tanner raised a hand.
“Verdict, Doc? What failed?”
Thorn expected Gaust to be disappointed, but her expression was anything but. “The cradle,” she said, beaming triumphantly. “We weren’t expecting a real risk of catastrophic failure of the cradle system until at least 60 percent power. But it failed at 43 percent.”
“And that’s a good thing.”
“Yes, very much so. It means our first, home-built version of the prototype drive is even more efficient than we’d hoped. If we combine that thrust with the Imbrogul anti-gravity tech—”
“We’ll have ships that can fly like proverbial bats out of hell. Well done, Doc,” Tanner said, nodding his satisfaction.
Gaust’s smile brightened even more. “Thank you, Commodore.”
Thorn glanced at Kira. Brains, good looks, and now a beautiful smile. She’s something, isn’t she?
Kira turned and, in full of view the Hecate’s bridge, poked Thorn in the ribs.
“Mmmph,” Thorn muttered.