Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Kira glanced around. “It’s lovely.”

  “But kinda creepy at night,” Morgan replied, chuckling. “It’s better during the day. But I don’t mind it in the dark with you guys here.”

  Thorn’s first thought was, You might be the most powerful ’Caster in existence, Morgan. You really don’t need to be afraid of anything.

  But he brought that thinking to a stop. When he’d pulled her back from oblivion, he’d tried to change Morgan, to surgically remove her ability to use magic from her. The result had been a disaster forever written in the glowing sprawl of the Witch Nebula. Now, here she was telling them that she was at least a little bit afraid of the dark, perfectly normal for a kid her age. It just underscored how badly he’d screwed that up, his good intentions notwithstanding. Changing Morgan to save her from her own magic, and the feelings it provoked in others, hadn’t been the answer. Offering her love and support, both their own and that given to her by Calie and Asher, had been.

  Morgan, still crouching, looked into the water, which was black, dappled with hints of softly golden moonlight. “I still hear them,” she said.

  “Hear who?” Kira asked.

  “The Monsters. I still hear them in my head sometimes. They’re why I don’t like it out here when it’s dark. It’s too much like the places they live.”

  Kira and Thorn sat beside her on the creek bank, one to either side. Without even speaking, they’d both known to sit close to her, a protective bubble of warmth around her. Morgan went on to start divulging some of the details about what had happened to her while she’d been a captive of the Nyctus. They’d both simply listened, saying nothing and just letting her speak. Thorn found it tough, though, because the more he heard, the more he wanted to go and make the Nyctus answer for it.

  Monsters was exactly the right word for them.

  Morgan turned to Kira. “Mom, you got taken by them for a while, didn’t you?”

  Kira nodded. “I did.”

  “And, like you, she never gave into them, not even once,” Thorn said.

  “And, like you, I was rescued by your dad,” Kira replied, smiling at Thorn through the gloom.

  “I seem to recall you being there, too,” Thorn sat back. “Credit where it’s due, right?”

  Kira reached out and took Thorn’s hand. He squeezed it back. Morgan glanced from one to the other, smirking. “You guys need to get a room.”

  “We’ve got one back at the farmhouse,” Thorn said.

  “Umm. Eww. Kissing,” Morgan said, then she made a face like she’d bitten a lemon.

  They laughed together, but Morgan turned serious again. “Anyway, I still hear them sometimes. They’re scared. And angry. But mostly scared. I thought that would make me happy. You know, knowing that they’re frightened and upset, like I was when they had me.” She looked from her mother, to her father. “But I’m not. I just feel kind of sad. Sorry for them. That’s—is that dumb?”

  Thorn put his arm around her. “No, it’s not. What that is, is you being good. In your heart. Your core.” He thought about the number of times he’d gleefully watched squids die in battle, often because of some ’casting he’d done, thinking it served them right. Morgan’s compassion made him feel more than a little shame.

  Morgan suddenly leaned forward, touched the water with a fingertip, and traced out a circle. It remained inscribed in the water, glowing slightly, undisturbed by the slow current passing through it.

  “The shamans are scared because this is their circle,” she said.

  “Their circle?” Kira asked.

  “Yeah. Like, where they live. All their stars and planets.” She shrugged. “This is how I explained it to Major Fenton, anyway.”

  “That’s okay, Morgan. We get it. Go on,” Thorn said. They hadn’t intended to talk about the Nyctus, the Bilau, the war, or any of the rest of it until tomorrow, but this was clearly something Morgan needed to talk about now.

  She drew two more circles, each intersecting the other two, and all three overlapping in the middle. She explained as she drew. “This is where we live, where all the humans are. And this is the—um—Bilo—Bib—”

  “Bilau,” Thorn said.

  “Yeah. Them. Anyway, the Monsters are really really scared of the Bilau—more than they are of us, even.” She touched the Bilau circle and pushed its intersection deeper into Nyctus space. At the same time, the Nyctus territory became smaller and more and more like a crescent. Thorn couldn’t help noticing that more of human space got taken up by the Bilau, as well. Of course, this was an abstract way of portraying the three races and their territories, so that was just geometry.

  Wasn’t it?

  Thorn leaned in, suddenly curious. For some reason, the bottoms of both the Nyctus and Bilau circles were slightly flattened. Morgan must have drawn them that way deliberately. “Morgan, can you draw where the galaxy is compared to this? The best you can, anyway?”

  “You mean all the stars?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at the drawing for a moment, biting her lip, and then began to draw. Eventually, she’d outlined a rough boundary for the upper and lower edges of the galaxy, and she made them swell outward in what was clearly meant to be the galactic core.

  Thorn studied the shimmering diagram in the water. Human space lay entirely above the galactic ecliptic plane. But Nyctus and Bilau space butted against it and, for some reason, were both truncated by it.

  “Morgan, these flat spots here, and here. Did you mean to draw these circles like that?” he asked.

  Morgan stared. “Uh. Yeah. I guess so. I just draw them the way that feels right.”

  Thorn looked at Kira. “Do you see it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

  “What? What are you guys talking about?” Morgan asked.

  Thorn pointed below the flattened circles. “This line is called the galactic ecliptic plane. That’s a fancy name for the line that divides the galaxy into its upper and lower halves if you looked at it edge-on.” He narrowed his eyes. “For some reason, all of this space below that plane seems to be empty, as though the Nyctus and the Bilau have decided to stay out of it.”

  “Or were forced to stay out of it,” Kira said.

  But Morgan shook her head. “It’s not empty. I get echoes from there, too, sometimes. They’re way quieter than the shamans, but they’re there. They’re, I don’t know, sad. Like an old, old song almost no one remembers anymore.” She clasped her hands together. “I thought it was more of the Monsters, but I guess not.”

  Thorn extracted his battered old storybook and held it. “I’m going to try something. Why don’t you guys Join and try it along with me?”

  Kira moved to take Morgan’s hand, and then Thorn’s. He dove down into his reservoir of magic, drew a prodigious plume of it back up as he ascended, and then cast his awareness far off into the void.

  For a long time, there was nothing except the warm thrum of stars and the cooler, dimmer tones of dust and gas. As he launched his thoughts through Nyctus space, he caught hints of the frantic, furtive whispers of the distraught shamans Morgan described, but he ignored them and pressed on, pouring more and more eldritch power into sustaining his empathetic journey.

  Eventually, the harsh buzz of the Nyctus fell behind him. Now, ahead, loomed nothing but more of the void, more stars and dust and gas singing their mindless songs of dumb matter. There was nothing else.

  Maybe Morgan was wrong. Or maybe she was actually right and these echoes she’d heard had just been hints of the Nyctus. He was about to give up and end the ’casting when he caught a sudden flicker of something deep and sad, a mournful mental dirge unlike anything else his mind had ever touched.

  Thorn swallowed. It hurt. The sorrow that flowed through his mind, as slow and cold as the creek in which Morgan had drawn her circles, hummed among the stars with such a desolate melancholy that he found himself wanting to cry.

  Even so, he doggedly kept himself immersed in the slow funeral
procession of dreary tones, waiting to see if they changed, or somehow incorporated an actual message. But they seemed just to be a carrier wave of sadness, and he eventually just backed out.

  Kira sat, wiping her eyes. Morgan now stood, her head cocked, her small hands held out, palms up to the moonlight. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she sobbed. Kira put her arms around her, making the small, warm noises of comfort that mothers have made for their hurt children since the dawn of time.

  Morgan finally sobbed out a question. “What was that, dad?”

  Thorn opened his mouth to answer, but movement off to his right caught his eye. He turned and saw two Marines, Fenton and his company’s Gunnery Sergeant, had emerged from the darkness. They both looked at him with worried, questioning looks. He waved them off with a thumbs-up, and they both nodded and quietly withdrew again.

  Thorn put his arms around Kira and Morgan, then he looked at his daughter.

  “I don’t know what that was. So let’s go find out.”

  13

  Thorn had long ago become accustomed to the cramped confines of the Hecate. Being jammed into an alloy shell fragrant with the mingled reek of electronics, lubricants, old food, and stale sweat was just the nature of the beast. But the Hecate was now cramped beyond even the standard set by, well, the Hecate.

  Tanner was becoming known through the Fleet as the Commodore who refused to leave his ship. Commodores and Admirals normally chose a capital ship to hoist their flag. But Tanner had stubbornly decided to remain aboard the Hecate, appointing his former XO, Commander Reynaud, as her new Captain and elevating Osborne, former Tactical Officer, to XO. It had necessitated completely repurposing the Hecate’s biggest remaining cargo bay into a Combat Information Center, a CIC, where Tanner could command a fleet and run a battle. That left the bridge as Reynaud’s domain, from which she commanded the ship.

  The Hecate’s crew obviously had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, carrying a Commodore’s flag was a tremendous honor for any ship, and unheard of for a destroyer. On the other, Tanner’s presence not only cost them a cargo hold and diminished provisions, but also brought another dozen personnel aboard, his staff. More people meant most of those who’d enjoyed quarters of their own now had a roomie. Grumbling ensued. Fortunately, the crew revered Tanner enough that they were willing to live with it.

  Besides, it pissed off every capital ship that considered itself in line for a flag, and pissing off capital ships was one of the great joys of a destroyer’s crew.

  Mind you, it meant that Tanner’s new CIC had a lot more free space than that tiny briefing room jammed behind the Hecate’s bridge, so Thorn and Kira were able to spread out a little as they described what had happened to Tanner.

  “Sir, whatever it was, it seems to permeate this region of space below the ecliptic,” Thorn said, sweeping a hand across the star chart depicted on the CIC’s main tactical screen.

  “And you’re sure about this?” Tanner asked, leaning against a console with his arms crossed.

  “We are, sir,” Kira said. “Both Morgan and I heard it when we Joined with Thorn, er, Lieutenant Commander Stellers. It was very real, and painfully sad. Heartbreaking, even.”

  “But you don’t know what it was, other than heartbreaking.”

  Thorn looked at the chart. “No, sir. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some sort of psychic resonance that’s been imprinted on the region by some sort of massive tragedy. And by massive, I mean interstellar-scale massive.”

  “War? Could it have been something the Nyctus, or the Bilau, or both did?” Tanner asked.

  Thorn rubbed his chin and sighed. “Maybe. But there’s also some reason that the squids and the Bilau are staying out of that space.” He traced his finger across the chart. “These are their boundaries, as Morgan understands them. We did ask her to confirm that, and she’s pretty damned sure about it. So, if it was war, it wasn’t about conquering territory.”

  “If anything, the squids and the Bilau seem determined to stay out of that region,” Kira said.

  Tanner straightened and walked up to the chart. “Put up the most detailed survey the ON has of that region.”

  The CIC’s AI, for some reason named Ralph, complied. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice as flat and dispassionate as Trixie’s was bubbly and effusive.

  A handful of star systems in the region in question lit up with data. They weren’t very good data, though, obviously only having been collected by remote sensing. The vast majority of systems remained dark, meaning the ON knew only the most basic facts about them—brightness, mass, distance, the sorts of things that were probably observed and recorded by astronomers on Earth several hundred years ago. There’d been virtually no more detailed analysis done since.

  “Not very helpful, is it?” Tanner said.

  “No, sir,” Thorn replied.

  Tanner turned to him and Kira. “In an hour, the Hecate’s going to rendezvous with a corvette, the Zenith. She’ll be carrying someone I want you and Wixcombe to meet.”

  “Is it Alys Densmore? Whenever someone’s being all mysterious, it’s usually Alys Densmore,” Kira said.

  Tanner smiled. “Can’t say if she’ll be aboard or not. With her, who knows? But, no, there’s someone else I want you to meet and talk with. His name is Colton Urbanek. He’s—”

  “Admiral Urbanek,” Kira put in. “Sorry, sir. He’s pretty well known across the Fleet.”

  “He is, yes. Anyway, you’ll be meeting with him to talk about this,” Tanner said, gesturing at the star chart.

  Thorn knew that was all Tanner was going to say about it. They’d have to wait to meet with Urbanek to find out anything more. But, as he and Kira made to leave the CIC, Thorn stopped and turned back.

  “Sir, I am really curious about something, if you don’t mind my asking. Why—?”

  “Have I kept my flag hoisted on the Hecate,” Tanner cut in.

  “Guess you’ve been asked that a lot.”

  “Pretty much every other Flag Officer has asked me, yes. Afraid I’m going to set some sort of precedent for Flag Officers generally. I tell them it’s because the operational tempo is just too high right now for me to take the time to transfer to a new ship and integrate into a new crew.”

  Thorn glanced at Kira. “But that’s not the reason, is it, sir?”

  Tanner leaned back against a console and crossed his arms again. “No, it is not. I’m only telling you this because I trust you two and figure you might even understand.” He paused and scratched an ear. “I had a dream, shortly before I got promoted. The upshot was that if I leave the Hecate, something terrible is going to happen. Don’t know what, just that it will. So, here I am.”

  Thorn again exchanged a look with Kira. “Didn’t take you for the superstitious type, sir,” she finally said.

  “This coming from two people who use magic to hear funeral music imprinted on the stars themselves.”

  Thorn grinned. “You got us there, sir.”

  Tanner straightened. “See, Stellers? Even an old sailor like me can learn new things. Just a few years ago, I would have gone pfft, it was just a damned silly dream. Having gotten to know you Starcasters and what you can do, well, let’s just say dreams don’t seem so damned silly anymore.”

  Admiral Urbanek reminded Thorn of Tanner. He projected an air of quiet authority, a thoughtful aura of command that radiated from his burnished skin and black eyes, and his close-cropped, iron gray hair. Unlike Tanner, though, a predatory sense of danger hung about the man. Where Tanner was aggressive when he needed to be, Urbanek seemed to be aggressive all the time and had to work at keeping it in check.

  He was also a war hero. In the early days of the war, especially in its first year, Urbanek had commanded an ON fleet to the only two victories of any significance they’d scored over the Nyctus. In the darkest days, when it seemed that the squids were unstoppable and humanity’s days numbered, Colton Urbanek had become a household name across the Allied Stars. He’d given p
eople hope, and that included the officers and sailors of the ON itself.

  He was still a Rear Admiral, though, having refused any further promotion. The scuttlebutt about it was that he simply didn’t want the inevitable staff or desk job that came with a Vice Admiralty. He was a warrior at heart and had long ago resolved to fight humanity’s wars in the field, not from some distant HQ.

  “Stellers, Wixcombe, I’ve heard a lot about you two,” he said, returning their salutes, then shaking their hands.

  “Likewise, sir,” Thorn said, looking around at the Hecate’s hangar bay, which was mostly filled by the Gyrfalcon. Mol’s upgraded fighter had just undergone the last of its field trials and had been certified for flight and combat ops. Thorn was honestly itching to see what it could do.

  Right now, though, his attention had been drawn to something covered by a security shroud, a wrap intended to defeat radar, or any remote attempts to peer beneath it. Urbanek saw him looking at it.

  “We’ll get to that shortly, Stellers. Meantime, tell me about the Nyctus, the Bilau, and everything you, Wixcombe, and your daughter—saw, heard, felt, experienced, whatever the right word is for it.”

  Thorn and Kira spent the next few minutes giving Urbanek a precis of what they knew. He had two staff officers in tow, and one of them, a Lieutenant Commander with striking blue eyes contrasted by skin as dark as night, dutifully recorded it all on a data pad. When they were done, Urbanek nodded, looking satisfied, almost smugly so.

  “I have to admit, I was kind of excited when you started sounding the alarm about the Bilau. I sensed that there was a third major player out there, based on little bits and pieces of intel, including a lot of unclassified, public domain stuff that our own intel people often overlook. I got a lot of hints from civilian traffic control records, in fact. No one wanted to listen, though.”

  “I find that hard to believe, sir, given your record,” Kira said. “You’d think the powers that be would have been all over it.”