by J. N. Chaney
Mol hammered the controls. “Shit!”
Whirling chunks of debris came racing toward the Gyrfalcon. Mol jinked frantically, barely missing a torn chunk of hull plating as big as the fighter. Another shredded hunk of debris, glowing cherry red, flashed by close enough that Thorn was pretty sure he could have reached out and touched it. The fighter tore through the cooling cloud of plasma, temperature and radiation levels briefly spiking to alarming levels, before dropping back off.
Mol slumped back as the Gyrfalcon raced into the clear. “Well, that was a lesson learned. This baby closes on targets a lot faster than I’m used to.” She glanced at the flight management system. “Trixie, how are we looking?”
Thorn braced himself for bad news. He hadn’t felt any hits, but he’d been pretty damned preoccupied. Moreover, they’d just strained both the new drive and the new anti-grav system pretty hard. Trouble wouldn’t have surprised him.
“Hey, what do you call that color between yellow and blue again? Oh, I know—green! Everything’s still green, Mol!” Trixie replied. “Unlike the color black. It’s popular among emo kids because—”
“Trix?” Thorn asked.
“Yes?”
“Music later. Explosions—not us—now.”
Mol sighed, then gave Thorn a contented smile. “I love my job.”
“Oh, by the way, I have a hard fix for our current position,” Trixie went on. “I’ve also triangulated our destination off these two hops and added that to the data from the star chart. I know exactly where we are, and almost exactly where we’re going.”
“You did all that in the middle of fighting a battle, Trix?” Thorn asked.
“What can I say? I love my job!”
“Me too,” Mol said, tapping the panel with a contented smile.
Thorn gripped his talisman. “Yeah, well, time for me to do mine.”
“This is creepy,” Mol said, switching her gaze between the tactical display and the planet-scape scrolling by beneath them.
“Yeah, I think we can add a new type of planet to the list,” Thorn said, his voice somber.
“What’s that?”
“Tomb world.”
The two words hung in the Gyrfalcon’s cabin like a breath of cold air. They certainly fit. The planet beneath them had once hosted a thriving population of billions. Thorn couldn’t even really fathom how many. Billions was the best he could do. Now, though, it was devoid of life, a barren husk of a once-living world, now reduced to that bleak, two-word description: tomb world.
When Thorn extended his mental senses, he immediately felt that forlorn lament of anguish, loss, and ultimately death. But while it had been only a distant keening on Nebo, here it intoned from every dust particle, every hydrogen atom. This race, whoever they were, must have had some sort of psychic capacity, causing their extinction to become imprinted on space-time itself. The effect was both deeply unnerving and profoundly depressing. It was the funeral dirge of an entire people unable to reproduce and watching their numbers relentlessly dwindle.
What must it have been like for the very last of them to finally die?
Thorn cursed and shook the thought away.
Mol looked at him. “You okay, sir?”
Thorn rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, I’m fine. This place just . . . sucks.”
“Yeah, I hear that. Can’t help shivering every time I look down at it,” she said.
Thorn nodded. Mol wasn’t a ’Caster, of course, so she had no way of directly experiencing the psychic mourning of a dead race. Instead, it resonated with her on a subconscious level, a creeped out, on-edge discomfort. It was the sort of thing nearly everyone felt at one time or another, in a place tainted by tragedy. Starcasters, though, had the dubious advantage of being able to feel all the agony and suffering nearly firsthand.
Thorn didn’t often envy those who weren’t ’Casters, but this was one such occasion.
Trixie spoke up. “I’ve isolated five potential landing sites, based on your criteria of an obvious weapons impact. Three are badly contaminated by radiation or industrial toxins. The other two are pretty much a toss-up.”
Thorn looked at the two sites as Trixie put them up on the tactical display. He pointed to the second. “That one. It’s right on the outskirts of a big city.”
Mol’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? I thought you would have preferred the other one, more out of the way.”
“No. I want to get a sense of who these people were. Landing out in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to accomplish that.” He turned to Mol. “Whoever these poor bastards were, they deserve to be remembered.”
“Roger that. Going down.”
Mol decelerated the Gyrfalcon, lowering its orbit until it touched atmo. For the next few minutes, the fighter was cocooned in the searing plasma of re-entry. When it had slowed enough to emerge from the dazzling light show, Thorn found them flying toward a sprawling city that stretched across a broad river delta, the alluvial fan stretching out into water that appeared utterly devoid of life.
“The impact crater is at eleven o’clock, twenty kilometers,” Trixie said. “I’ve highlighted it on the FMS.”
“Got it,” Mol said, banking the Gyrfalcon slightly. Thorn watched the ground scrolling by beneath. Builds of unknown purpose, many of them sprouting towers and spires, flashed by. A complex series of tubes wound their way among them in graceful, sweeping arcs. Some sort of mass-transit system, he assumed. Some parts of it, and some of the buildings, had fallen into early stages of decay, but most of it stood intact. The exception was a cluster of buildings that seemed to have been blown apart from within. As they passed near them, Thorn saw the rad count suddenly shoot up. Mol immediately veered the Gyrfalcon aside.
“Nuclear fission plant, it looks like. It failed and blew up, and now we’re seeing the exposed core, or what’s left of it,” she said.
Thorn nodded but said nothing. The ground around the plant, for at least two klicks in all directions, looked to have been burned over and scoured down to soil and bedrock. Based on the rad count, even a few minutes within a couple of hundred meters of the derelict plant would be lethal, without some major protection, anyway.
Mol banked the Gyrfalcon again, avoiding a group of particularly tall buildings, fluted spires, and soaring towers easily pushing 300 meters tall. The FMS highlighted the impact crater just beyond them in a built-up area of smaller structures. Further on, the city’s core soared above them, the tallest of the delicate towers easily 1,000 meters high. One of the spires had apparently fallen, victim to some catastrophic failure, and now existed only as a long stretch of pulverized debris.
He sighed, long and slow. It had been a supremely advanced society, this city once bustling with life, its citizens engaged in all sorts of esoteric pursuits. Some would have been pragmatic, the various things that needed to be done to keep a civilization functioning. But some of it would have been purely aesthetic, painting and sculpting, writing and singing, or whatever the alien equivalents of those things would have been.
And there would have been families, at least until the Bilau perpetrated their monstrous, slow-motion genocide. Just the thought of it made Thorn queasy. The sterility prion weapons had landed, and then every day after that, each death would have been a permanent loss. It must have been sheer, unadulterated hell. Whether born, hatched, or formed by budding or mitosis or whatever, societies were meant to have offspring. It not only literally kept the species going, it gave the species a reason to keep going. Without it, what was the point?
Mol landed the Gyrfalcon as close to the impact crater as she could. Thorn donned his vac-armor, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.
“Mol, you vac-armor up, too,” he said.
“I thought I was staying here, keeping the motor running.”
“You are. It’s just a precaution. The last thing we want to do is risk spreading what happened here back to any human worlds.”
She grimaced. “You think that’s possible? This shi
p is perfectly airtight.”
“Humor me.”
When she was suited up, Thorn cycled the airlock. Before he opened the outer door, though, he surrounded himself with a hermetic cocoon of magic, similar to the ’casting he used in the Hecate’s witchport when it was open to the void. He infused it with the intent to keep out anything that might be a pathogen, whether bacterium, virus, prion, or even nanoscale machine. Surrounded by a faint shimmer like heat-haze, he opened the outer door and stepped onto the surface.
“Okay, Mol, comm check,” he said.
“Reading you five-by-five. Be careful out there.”
“Always,” Thorn said, and started for the crater about five hundred meters away.
As he walked, enclosed in his protective ’casting, he kept his hand on his sidearm. It wasn’t his primary weapon, though. That would be his magic. This far from home, he wouldn’t hesitate to use it however he had to in order protect himself, Mol, and the ship.
He followed a broad avenue between soaring towers. They weren’t even close to the tallest in the city, but they still loomed over him. Amid the ruins, he could make out details, including numerous statues of flying beings, slender and elegant, like dinosaurs or birds with feathered crests. They were graceful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. He stopped to look at one that rose at least four meters over him atop a plinth in the middle of the avenue. He had no idea if this was a rendition of these people or just a motif they favored. And that made him even sadder. The Bilau had mostly erased this society from existence, leaving Thorn and Mol among the few sentient beings to even appreciate what was once here.
His foot knocked against something. He looked and saw it was a bone.
There were more bones scattered around him. Thorn tried to examine them more closely but soon gave up. He wasn’t a xeno-biologist, so they were just bones to him. He couldn’t fashion any coherent picture of the creature they’d come from. Whoever they’d been, they were just bones and dust, stirred by a thin, keening wind that whispered among the buildings. Occasionally creaks and groans of overstressed structures punctuated the dreary breeze, but other than that, his own footsteps were the only sounds.
Thorn pushed on, hurrying now. He’d had his fill of this forlorn and dreary place, this tomb world. He wanted nothing more than to climb back aboard the Gyrfalcon and get the hell out of here.
Thorn clambered back into the Gyrfalcon’s airlock with a grateful sigh. He placed his prize—a chunk of ceramic shrapnel from the Bilau weapon that had blown open the crater—on the deck. When the outer door had closed and sealed, he summoned more magic and flooded the airlock with a flare of ’casting that would render its interior, his vac-armor, and the roughly thirty centimeter long fragment completely sterile.
“Is it done?” Mol asked over the comm. Thorn made to answer, but music suddenly flowed over the comm, something Trixie had played before. It was from something she called a game show, the light, bouncy theme somehow still managing to ratchet up the tension.
Thorn puffed out an exasperated sigh.
“You mind, Trix?” he snapped.
“Sorry. Thought you would appreciate some theme music apropos of the moment. A man named Alex hosted that show, and he would approve of your steely nerve right now. The contestants had to—”
“Trixie?”
“Yes, Thorn?”
“Shh.”
“Copy that.”
He stowed the fragment in a compartment meant to hold samples, that was built into one of the airlock bulkheads. When it was sealed, he cycled open the inner door.
“Okay, Mol. We’re done here. Let’s get the hell back into space and go home.”
“No argument here, sir,” Mol replied, the drive immediately powering up and vibrating the Gyrfalcon with its reassuring thrum.
15
Thorn watched as the Nyctus ship approached. He had to work at keeping his face, and for that matter, his whole attitude, impassive. He wasn’t used to watching Nyctus ships doing anything but fighting, fleeing, or dying. To see one sidling up to an ON ship just seemed wrong.
He stood aboard the massive carrier Memphis, one of the newest additions to the ON fleet. She was the first in a new generation of capital ships, almost a thousand meters long, meant to carry a swarm of Super Kestrel fighters upgraded with the new drive and anti-grav tech. Thorn knew that Admiral Scoville had chosen this ship deliberately, despite her not yet having seen battle. She must have been an overwhelming sight for the Nyctus, a vast engine of destruction poised like a blade to drive deep into the faltering heart of what remained of their once-great empire. It was a choice deliberately intended to instill a sense of hopeless despair in the squids.
Good.
Thorn turned to scan those assembled to meet with the Nyctus delegation. Virtually everyone of consequence, at least to him, stood here, waiting for the airlock to roll open. He, Kira, and Bertilak stood together with Tanner. Damien and Densmore had put themselves near Admiral Scoville. And all of them stood behind Admiral Urbanek, who would be leading the negotiations about to get underway. He’d been impressed enough by Thorn’s and Mol’s retrieval of the Bilau weapons fragment that he’d asked Thorn to join his negotiating team. Thorn had insisted on Kira being part of it as well, her being a stronger Joiner than he was, and therefore more likely to be better at digging into the squids’ minds as the talks went on. Urbanek had made it clear that he had no compunction about using magic to support the Allied Stars and ON position, so why not have two of the most powerful Starcasters around present?
The Nyctus ship powered itself to a relative halt with the Memphis, keeping station about five klicks away. It was as close as Scoville would allow them to approach one of his newest and biggest ships. Thorn could only guess how many weapons were trained on the squids, waiting for them to do something stupid. They’d been told to power down their weapons and take their tracking scanners offline for that very reason. Scoville didn’t want to give someone aboard an ON ship, who’d lost friends or family to the war, an excuse to get some justice with a railgun.
An ON shuttle brought the squid delegation to the Memphis. As it thumped into place at the airlock, Thorn touched his talisman. The faint whiff of fire and acrid smoke helped steady him. It had, in a strange way, become comforting. It embodied the destruction of his home, his family, and his childhood, at the hands of the very aliens who were about to step aboard the carrier. But it also reminded him of what he was fighting for, more than preserving the integrity of ON territory or resisting Nyctus aggression and tyranny. He had a family to protect, to make sure Morgan never faced a day where her only memories of her mother and father were captured in a tenuous psychic echo imprinted on some old book.
Are they here yet?
Thorn glanced at someone who’d appeared beside him. Literally appeared beside him, out of thin air. Morgan stood there in pajamas and bare feet, looking sleep-messy, rubbing her eyes.
Morgan, what are you doing here?
Mom said I could be here when they arrived.
I did not! Kira interjected. I said I’d tell you all about what happened when they arrived. What time is it for you right now?
Morgan seemed to glance at something Thorn couldn’t see. I can’t tell. It’s too dark to read the clock.
You get your butt back into bed, young lady! Kira snapped.
Thorn glanced quickly around, ready to apologize to Tanner, Urbanek, Scoville, and anyone else who might be unhappy with the sudden appearance of his daughter amid the proceedings. But no one else paid any attention to her whatsoever.
Still, Thorn didn’t want to chance anything disrupting what could be one of the most important moments in human history. Morgan, you need to leave before someone finds out you’re here, he said.
No one but you and mom can see me or talk to me. I mean, duh, I’m not dumb, you know.
Morgan—! Kira started, but the airlock’s pressure indicator turned green with a single sharp chime, cutting her off. The door slid o
pen, and the Nyctus delegation filed out.
Twelve shamans made up the bulk of the group, representing some aspect of Nyctus governance that Thorn still didn’t quite understand. The briefing documents hadn’t really been clear, probably because the people writing them had to cobble together whatever they could, and on damned short notice. The Nyctus had only requested this meeting a few days ago, after all. Moreover, he and Mol had only returned from their long trip to the tomb world the day before yesterday, so Thorn had been lucky to get any prep time for this at all.
The twelve shamans lined up, facing the humans. Six more Nyctus, apparently soldiers, lined up behind them. Their weapons, wicked blade guns, were slung on their backs, not easily deployed. The cadre of Marines surrounding all of the Nyctus weren’t handicapped like that, their weapons in their hands, fingers alongside the trigger guards.
Thorn studied the Nyctus as Admiral Scoville stepped forward. Ugly sons of bitches, he thought, all rubbery, greyish skin and dangling tentacles, bulging eyes, and a slick, gooey coating that seemed to glisten over top of it all. It was, apparently, a mucus-like secretion intended to protect their skin when they weren’t immersed in water. A series of compartments aboard the Memphis had been hastily reconfigured to fill with water to provide the Nyctus with rudimentary quarters while these initial talks went on. The actual negotiations themselves would be held in air, though, an environment the squids could apparently tolerate for much longer than Thorn realized.
He wondered if the squids would have been as accommodating were the roles reversed. As soon as he thought the question, though, it answered itself.
Dad?
Thorn glanced at his daughter. Or, rather, at the psychic projection of his daughter. What is it, Morgan?