by J. N. Chaney
“Stellers, one last check before we hit Alcubierre cutoff,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?”
Thorn ran a hand across the midnight velvet of the witchport’s thick cushioning. He’d been asking himself the same question. He did feel fine, but he’d also felt fine right up to the moment the powerful vision—or hallucination—body-checked his conscious awareness into a half-dead heap in the mess. Never before had he experienced something that intense, that—
Overwhelming. That’s what it had been. It had been utterly overwhelming. Whatever the cause, and despite his formidable talents as a Starcaster, he’d been wholly unable to sense it coming, or do a thing about it when it did.
He drew a slow breath, assessing. “Aye, sir,” he said. “I feel fine. A little dragged out, bit punchy, but otherwise fine.”
“Kind of wish the medics had found some reason to shove you into the infirmary and keep you there, to be honest. Thought we were past the whole Starcasters-are-unpredictable-and-therefore-dangerous thing by now.”
“Sorry, sir, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”
A moment passed. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know what Tanner was thinking. Despite almost three years having passed with him as the Hecate’s Starcaster and him having proven over and over again how valuable his magical talents were, the old thinking hadn’t really gone away. Tanner was better than most mundanes by far, but even he still had a simmering reservoir of superstitious distrust not far beneath the surface. It might be buried deeper in Tanner, but it was still there.
The logic was simple. Starcasters use magic. Magic defies scientific analysis and can’t be quantified, so it remains an unknown thing. And unknown things are frightening.
“Don’t need to tell me anything else, Stellers. One of my officers tells me they’re good to go, I believe them.”
Thorn offered the intercom a tired, but appreciative smile. Tanner really was better than most.
Thorn braced himself as the drive’s cutoff alarm chimed, then snapped his helmet in place, but left the faceplate open. A few seconds later, the Hecate’s private little Alcubierre universe winked out of existence, depositing the ship back into real space, in the Nebo system. With a small lurch that sent Thorn’s breather swinging under his chin, reality changed, and with it, a sense of calm descended on the ship.
Thorn focused on his talisman, his battered children’s book, now strapped in a purpose-made pouch on his crash suit, then he decompressed the witchport and opened it to the hard vacuum of space.
The planet called Nebo lay directly ahead, a tiny, sunlit half-disk. Tanner had brought the Hecate in as close to the planet as he dared, while still leaving the destroyer space to maneuver—and fight, if necessary.
A glance at the repeater tactical display mounted in the witchport showed no other ships in the system, though. Tanner had requested that the nearest ON assets, a potent fighting patrol centered on the battlecruiser Hammerfall, stand ready to help, but he hadn’t yet received a reply because of the distance involved. That left the Hecate on her own—but she was a capable ship, able to outgun anything smaller than her, and outrun anything bigger.
“No comm emissions from the planet,” the Comms Officer said over the ship's channel. “They’ve gone completely dark.”
Thorn inhaled, nerves dancing. A planet with almost a billion people living on it? It should be a hub of comms traffic. His gut tightened, like someone had started turning a vise.
Data kept sluicing in through the Hecate’s scanners. The picture steadily developing was ominous. No comms emissions, no local or orbital ship traffic, spectrographic data from the atmosphere that was all wrong.
“Stellers, you have anything?” Tanner asked.
“One moment, sir.”
Thorn touched gloved fingers against his talisman. He’d learned that direct physical contact, while slightly better, wasn’t necessary; it seemed that his intent to touch the old book was enough to let him focus his powers through it. Using it as a springboard, he cast his awareness ahead of the ship and pushed it through the dead space of hard vacuum until it brushed against the planet called Nebo.
Fire. Riven earth and shattered rock. Destruction, on an apocalyptic scale.
Death.
Thorn let his awareness snap back into place, like a stretched rubber band. It left him gasping for a moment, catching both his physical and mental breath as the echoes of Nebo began to fade from his awareness.
“Sir,” he finally said. “Stellers here. Nebo is dead. Utterly dead.”
1
“So it looks like every Starcaster, every single one, experienced essentially the same thing you did,” Tanner said, lifting a data slate so Thorn could see it. “The Hammerfall has reports from across four sectors, and they were still coming in when she passed out of range of real-time comms.”
Thorn quickly scanned the data slate. Seventy-one incidents were recorded, and three of them had been fatal—two Scorches who’d simply lost control of their powers and immolated themselves, and a Tidal who’d succumbed to a truly freakish accident. She’d had the misfortune to be on an EVA when the vision struck and managed to drown herself in her own vacsuit before anyone could intervene. Tidals could not only control water, they could make it, and in losing control of her ability, the ’caster shifted from target to victim in one fatal moment.
Thorn nodded. “When I first came to after the vision ended, I thought I heard screaming. Many people, all screaming together.”
“You made quite the bloodcurdling howl yourself, Stellers,” Tanner said.
“I thought it might be the stew,” the XO, Raynaud added. “That first mouthful almost made me scream, too.” She smiled, dark eyes lively, but Thorn could tell it was empty of humor, just an attempt to lighten the gloom gripping the Hecate’s bridge.
“The vision of what happened here affected all Starcasters, everywhere, all at once,” Thorn said, working through the implications. Or trying to. It was all new to him
“So it appears,” Tanner replied. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea, sir.” He’d already recounted as much of the horrific vision as he could remember to Tanner and the Raynaud, holding nothing back. “It must have something to do with that little girl. She was clearly powerful—hell, powerful enough to shield herself from a KEW (Kinetic Energy Weapon) impact and knock more KEW’s right out of the sky.”
“That sounds like some you-level magic,” the XO said.
Thorn shook his head. “I doubt I’d be able to pull that off, ma’am—not without doing things to reality that we might really regret. What she did doesn’t seem to have had any lasting effects, though. And she was just a little kid—three or four years old, maybe. I’ve never heard of a child manifesting more than the occasional, random effect, like starting a fire, freezing the water in a pot, that sort of thing. It’s just enough to flag the fact they actually have magical talent, and that’s it.”
Tanner turned to the main viewscreen. “Well, it seems the Nyctus somehow recognized what she was capable of and decided to put an end to it,” he said, his voice soft and somber.
Thorn turned to the image of Nebo.
The archive entry for the planet showed it as a pleasant world, green continents amid blue water. The particular combination of Nebo’s orbit, its axial tilt, the nature of its star, and myriad other factors made it not only Earth-like, but better than humanity’s home planet in many ways. It had better, more stable climatic conditions over a larger proportion of its surface; aside from a few mountain ranges and the climate extremes at its poles, the whole planet was lush forest and arable land.
Abundant, predictable rainfall, along with temperatures that varied only slightly from nearly ideal, meant the growing season across most of the planet lasted almost eight months out of the thirteen defined by its orbit. There was a single, large moon, buttery gold and holding stubbornly to some atmosphere, with polar caps and great canyons
that cast deep shadows, shifting as the moon moved in its eternal dance.
It was as though someone had looked at Earth, identified all the faults and imperfections, and then designed a planet to fix them.
But no more.
Thorn stared hard at the blasted, scoured surface scrolling beneath the orbiting Hecate. They were over the nightside, so he could see the orange glow of magma leaking through cracks and fissures radiating out from the gaping wounds of KEW impact craters. The rest of the shattered surface was mostly dark, the firestorms that had devoured any available organic matter long since burned out. The atmosphere itself glowed slightly, though, a diffuse shimmer of superheated air. The lowest surface temperature the Hecate had recorded was just under three hundred degrees celsius, ranging up to nearly five times that close to the biggest impact scars.
“Stellers?”
Thorn turned. His hands hurt; he realized he’d been squeezing them hard enough to leave fingernail imprints on his own palms, but even then he had to exert some deliberate effort to unclench them. “Sir?”
“Since it appears there’s nothing more we can do here, I want you to report to the infirmary. The Doc’s going to do a complete workup on you.”
“Sir, I’m—”
“Going to the infirmary, like you were just told,” Tanner said. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”
Thorn let out a slow breath, then nodded. “Aye, sir.”
“Carry on, then.”
Thorn saluted, turned, and strode off the bridge. He glanced back once at the ruined planet.
There’s nothing more we can do here.
There wasn’t. There would be no rescue, no recovery, no enemy to fight—just a world scoured by force and flame down to its bedrock, and nearly a billion souls cremated in the process.
And all of it—what, to kill one little girl?
He spun about and marched off to the infirmary, once more squeezing his hands tightly enough to hurt.
Thorn blinked. The sterile efficiency of the Hecate’s infirmary loomed whitely around him. He still wore his uniform, less tunic and boots, and still lay on a gurney, waiting as patiently as he could while the medical scanners assembled a picture of his condition. He really didn’t think the system would find anything actually wrong with him, aside from a surplus of frustrated anger.
Movement to his right caught his attention. He turned and saw several figures, garbed in sterile surgical suits, surrounding another bed. He could only catch glimpses of whoever was in it—the humps of feet under a draping sheet, part of a bare arm, tousled hair against a pillow.
Someone must have been injured—badly, too, from the number of personnel attending to them. An accident, Thorn assumed. They did happen, often enough that command staff incorporated a factor in their work for out-of-battle casualties. The navy was a dangerous place, with personnel taken out of action by mishaps like falling, having things fall on them, burns, electrocutions, or even just simple illness. Thorn opened his mouth to ask the nearest of the med staff what had happened—
But froze when the medic moved aside, letting Thorn see the face of whoever was the focus of so much care and effort.
It was Tuck Ander.
Thorn closed his mouth again. Tuck Ander. Here, aboard the Hecate. How had he not known? The Hecate wasn’t that big a ship. Thorn hadn’t seen Tuck since they were recruits training at Code Nebula. Even then, Tuck never graduated. He’d struck a superior officer, a capital offence in the ON. However, he’d done so using magic, which had let him avoid execution on the technicality that he hadn’t used fist or foot—a loophole now closed, thanks to Tuck. Instead, he’d been drained of his ability to interact with magic, a dire outcome that had ended his career as a Starcaster before it even began.
Which meant Tuck being here, on the Hecate, made no sense whatsoever. And neither did the procedure being performed on him—the same one that Thorn had been made to witness when Tuck was rendered magically null, a violation of hideous proportions. The same ominous electrodes were attached to Tuck’s shaven skull, leading to devices—sinister in appearance—that had forcefully siphoned away his magical power. One of the med staff activated the machinery, and the same awful process Thorn had been forced to observe—four years ago, now? Five? It didn’t matter. It was happening again.
Except it was worse. It wasn’t just Tuck’s magical potential that the machines were sucking away. His essence seemed to diminish, too—his eyes becoming dull, like frosted glass. His skin turned sallow and waxy, and his body seeming to shrink, collapsing in on itself like a deflating balloon. As Thorn watched in horrified fascination, Tuck was reduced in the same process as before, but this time, it didn’t stop when the man was a sobbing, broken husk. It went on, the skin on Tuck’s body growing pale, then withered, and then flaking like a mummy found in some forgotten kingdom, a hollow-eyed echo of the man he’d once been.
Thorn finally managed to croak out a word.
“Tuck?”
The leering skull that had been Tuck slowly turned toward him, jaws opening impossibly wide as the thing—it wasn’t Tuck, of that Thorn was sure—tried to speak. It could not, but managed something even worse. A whimper, so human and piteous as to make Thorn flinch as if he’d been struck.
Thorn needed to know why this was happening, and how. He began to ask, drawing on his well of courage to demand an answer for why Tuck was being broken all over again in a ghastly repeat, but the world fell away in a howl of wind, tearing the words from Thorn’s throat in a sickening change of pressure. His breath gone, Thorn stared in horror at a storm cloud, black and roiling that covered Tucks bed like a curse. The cloud was perfect in detail, raging about the bed in small fury, as if seen from a distance, though the ozone-scented air filled Thorn’s senses as a peal of thunder broke loud and rolling, signaling the wind to cut loose in a circular fury. Instruments, linens, trays, and anything not fastened down began to whirl as lights flashed and Thorn’s pulse spiked with adrenaline near killing levels.
The staff knew nothing. Moving quietly, they sensed, saw, and reacted to—nothing. They stood as islands, implacable and mute.
Now Tuck fought to lever himself up, his mouth working hard on words Thorn couldn’t make out in the wild tempest. Thorn swung his feet off the gurney and pushed into the storm, reeling from side-to-side as blasts of wind hit him like hammers made of ice. He ignored the med staff and focused on Tuck, who fought with desperate effort to say something to him.
As soon as he was in reach, a bony hand punched out and grabbed Thorn’s arm in an iron grip. Tucks empty eyes bore into his, and he finally managed to cough out a single word.
“Witness!”
As Tuck spat out the word, he jabbed his other hand at the med staff. Thorn turned in time to see the wind rip away their medical garb, exposing wet, grey skin, bulbous eyes, and tentacles.
Nyctus. They were all Nyctus. And they were here, on the Hecate.
“Thorn,” Tuck hissed. “What next?”
Thorn opened his mouth to scream for security, but a vicious blast of wind blew him backward. Now he could feel his own power being bled from him, like someone reaching deep inside and pulling.
Thorn drew himself back, desperate to get away from Tuck, from the storm, from the Nyctus. He crashed into something and fell—
Flat onto the gurney, where he just lay, blinking, the overhead lights harsh in his vision.
There was no storm, just the soft, white-noise rumble of the Hecate’s systems. Thorn rolled his head to the side and saw no Tuck—and no Nyctus. He saw only the ship’s surgeon, Quinn, and a nurse, both muttering over a medical display.
“Doc?”
Quinn looked up, her dark eyes snapping to focus on him. “Ah, Lieutenant Stellers. Sleep well?”
Thorn swallowed hard. His heart still pounded in his chest, a staccato, loping beat of two notes that translated to a fear response so ancient, it had no name, only a sound. “I was asleep?”
“You were.
Not a problem, though,” the surgeon replied. “And actually better, in a way, since we get better data.” He pointed at the display. “Looks like you were dreaming, too.”
“I . . . was, yeah,” Thorn said, letting his head sink back down on the pillow. He’d had the dream before, of being back at Code Nebula and once more witnessing the horrifying removal of Tuck’s capacity to perform magic. The procedure itself had been bad enough, but the recurring dream added the even more horrifying drain of Tuck’s life force, and his reduction to a cadaverous shell. It had been a horrific thing to see, so it wasn’t surprising the event haunted Thorn, a constant echo of the time he’d seen a ‘caster broken back to pure humanity, like a maestro who loses the ability to hear and speak.
Tuck had known magic, and then he’d known a void. The emptiness was cruel enough. Living beyond the procedure was a kind of walking death, known only to Tuck and the few other ‘casters who had been deemed too dangerous to continue practicing magic. It was a small group of souls who were bereft of the spark within them, and Thorn still felt pangs of guilt every time he thought about Tuck’s sad eyes and shaking body.
But there had never been Nyctus before. Never.
“Well, Lieutenant,” the surgeon said. “You’ve got a slight buildup of metabolic toxins, which suggests you need a good night’s sleep. Your electrolytes are a little off as well, so eat something before you rack out. Otherwise”—Quinn paused and looked at the nurse, who shrugged before turning back to Thorn—“you’re in pretty much perfect health.”
Thorn sat up. “Please tell the Captain that. I’d be grateful. Maybe throw in a few words like superb and remarkable.” He tried to sound offhanded about it, but his heart was still racing—something the ship’s surgeon could readily see on the display.
“Take it those dreams were unsettling,” the surgeon said, then looked up and gave Thorn a sly smile. “Or just exciting? No—don’t tell me. Your dreams belong to you alone.”