Crimson Sun (Starcaster Book 3)

by J. N. Chaney

  “Aye, sir,” Tifton replied.

  “Sir, there is one problem with all this,” Brid put in.

  Tanner turned to her. “Don’t mind hearing a problem, Specialist, but it had best come with a proposed solution.”

  Brid’s eyes widened slightly, but she nodded. “What all this will tell us, sir, is where the Pool of Stars was when she transmitted this message, not necessarily where she is now. As for a solution, I—” She stopped and looked at Dart, who seamlessly filled in.

  “Gives us a place to start looking, at least,” Dart said.

  Tanner returned to his chair, decision made. “Indeed it does. Okay, people, we’ve all got work to do, so let’s do it.”

  Thorn saluted his acknowledgement, then turned and strode off the bridge. He felt Tanner’s gaze following him but didn’t look back.

  Not all secrets had to be shared right away. Not even to someone like Tanner.

  Thorn buried himself in work, scrutinizing every record and scrap of data he could find about the Pool of Stars, poring over the transcript and data from her emergency transmission—anything to avoid facing Kira’s monumental revelation and everything it entailed.

  He just wasn’t ready to do that yet.

  To her credit, Kira got it. She backed completely away from him, giving him the space he needed. He crossed paths with her a few times, saw her looking abjectly miserable, then turned and went another way. He knew that his tense silence was a bludgeon, but grief was a process, not an event.

  “Lieutenant Stellers, Brid here. Can you come to the mess?”

  Thorn looked up from another technical article about the Pool of Stars and her—at the time—revolutionary Alcubierre drive. The mess made no sense for a meeting, and suspicion flared within him like a serpent.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve got the data from these three hops combined now, and think we have a starting point.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Thorn said.

  Thorn made his way there, still prepared to find himself facing some kind of well-meaning, but wholly unwelcome attempt to help him deal with the things he knew he eventually had to deal with. If it proved to be the case, he’d immediately turn and leave. In the meantime, as long as he did his job, no one had reason to complain, and especially no justification to start meddling. That even applied to Tanner. Work could be the best salve for loss, and Thorn was putting that theory to the test.

  As the door to the mess opened, Thorn found only Brid, Dart, and Mol inside, a portable viewscreen set up on one of the dining tables.

  Thorn relaxed a notch. “Okay, first question,” he said. “Why here, in the mess?”

  “Only place with the table space to spread stuff out,” Dart replied. “Dinner’s not for a couple of hours yet.”

  Thorn nodded and moved to the table. The viewscreen showed the same star chart as had the big screen on the bridge, except four lines now extended from the Zone and into Nyctus space, converging around a point well beyond it. They didn’t all meet at exactly the same point, instead outlining an area about four light-years across.

  “It’s probably not going to get much better than that, according to the Comm O,” Brid said. “We could do a bunch more intercepts, then plot the back-bearing on the signal, but we probably won’t get it down to much less than this.”

  “That’s fine,” Thorn said. “Searching four cubic light-years of space is a lot better than flying along a line ninety light years long, hoping to get lucky.”

  “The thing is,” Mol said, “Fleet doesn’t want Captain Tanner to take the Hecate that far out of ON space. They’ve told him to send a team aboard the Gyrfalcon.” She flashed a grin. “Enter yours truly. I’ve got Trixie chewing on the nav details now.” She looked at Thorn. “Unfortunately, even using the Alcubierre drive, it’s going to take us . . . oh, at least a couple of weeks just to get to the search area. That is, unless you can help us out with that.”

  Thorn looked back at the chart. “That’s a long way to try to move a ship using magic.”

  “In that case, sir,” Brid said, “you’d best stock up on reading material and clean socks, because we’re going to be making an equally long flight.”

  Thorn stared at the chart. Moving a ship that far, and doing it accurately, was going to take a prodigious expenditure of magical effort. He could do it, he was sure, but it would leave him drained and exhausted for some time at the other end. And if he plunked them into the middle of something bad, whether the Nyctus, or something else—

  But the alternative was a month of flying, just to get there and back. He did not relish the idea of spending a month cooped up in the Gyrfalcon with Brid and Dart.

  “Okay. We’ll do it. Brid, you and Dart work out how much time you need to get ready. Mol, same with you and Trixie and the Gyrfalcon. Get your time estimates to me by”—he checked the time—“let’s see, I want to get a preliminary mission plan to Tanner by twenty-two hundred, so I need your time estimates, and any special requirements you’ve got, by eighteen hundred. The Captain wants us to launch no later than two days from now, and preferably a lot sooner, so the Hecate doesn’t have to hang around too long in any one part of the Zone.”

  “Got it, boss,” Mol said. Brid and Dart looked relieved, but said nothing.

  Thorn nodded back, then turned and strode out of the mess. He had no desire to make small talk—not now, and not until he could tell Kira what it meant to have a child, but for only a moment. Their losses were not the same, but then, neither were they as people.

  Thorn stood, hands clenched so hard his knuckles popped, and the seed of something dark bloomed within him. He’d come up hard, and through things that only children of war could truly grasp. So when the first dark possibilities of revenge took hold, deep in that place that was so unlike the rest of him, Thorn felt nothing. A blip, a minor squelch in his signal, but nothing that he feared. Nothing that could reshape him into a weapon without remorse.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Thorn didn’t want to put it off. He’d been doing his best to keep the whole matter of him having been an unwitting father firmly off to one side, but ignoring it was simply impossible. Thinking of the little girl opened wormholes to places he’d never imagined, and a sense of loss he could never truly grasp. Of that, he was sure.

  With a force of will that surprised even himself, Thorn began to draw his focus to the task at hand; moving the Gyrfalcon dozens of light years to a target area that was, in the galactic scheme of things, a virtually dimensionless point. Nor could he have it looming over him while trying to do whatever he’d end up having to do afterward, because after they moved, Thorn expected them to fight. That was the nature of war. Long periods of travel and boredom punctuated by gut-churning fear. It was an old business, and the names and places changed, but the spiking fear and chaos never did.

  So he took a deep, cleansing breath and asked Kira to meet him—this time, in his quarters. The witchport would be more private, but the intimacy of the little compartment just didn’t resonate with him—not for something like this.

  Now, he sat staring at the door, a draft version of his mission plan glowing on the terminal on his desk. He’d been picking away at it in a half-hearted sort of way, tweaking the wording here, altering a number there. All of the changes were clever distractions, and nothing more.

  The door chimed.

  “Come in.”

  It was Kira, not anyone else, because the universe has a sense of humor that only goes so far. She stepped into his quarters, closed the door behind her, but took a few seconds before turning back to Thorn.

  He didn’t wait for her to turn around. He spoke to her back, then her profile, and then her, each word landing with an unintentional blow.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Kira?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “You wanted to tell me. But you didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t think you—either of us—were even remotely ready to d
eal with something like that.”

  Thorn’s face was stone. “You thought that? And you thought that for me? For us?”

  “Do you know, you never once mentioned having a family? I was convinced you thought that being a parent meant a kind of death, like what we knew, growing up. You know. Pain. Loss. All of it inevitable, all of it tied to when the rocks will eventually fall, and your world turns to ash because no one can stop it.” She paused, eyes hot with anger and loss. “Your eyes go dead talking about the shit we went through as kids, and I know you can’t see past the day your home burned. The day my home burned. But we had lives before the squid, and I planned on having one after, too.” She paused, cheeks flushed in anger. “You never even gave me the chance to talk about more. About kids. A life.”

  “Doesn’t mean I didn’t. Someday, I imagined—”

  “Someday. Sure. Does someday mean when you’re a Lieutenant in the Orbital Navy, stationed aboard a warship, fighting the Nyctus?”

  “No, probably not. But—”

  “But what, Thorn? What was the solution, in a galaxy full of stars that could be swept away by the bastards who took our lives?”

  “We could have—”

  “What? Tell me, Thorn. Tell me how what we do—and our duty—would have room for an infant. A child whose sole existence meant we would fight to the death to save her, but if she was with us, she would die out here in the hard vacuum? With us? How could we protect her?”

  “Family. That’s how.”

  “Neither of us have any family, Thorn, aside from distant cousins and such that might as well be random strangers. We weren’t even going to be on the same damned ship!”

  “Kira—”

  “This is why I finally decided not to tell you, Thorn—oh, and don’t think I didn’t agonize over that decision, and then second-guess the shit out of it ever since,” Kira said. Her voice was on that edge where pain and tears meet and fight for control, but neither wins nor loses.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself—partly because she was asking questions he couldn’t readily answer, putting him on the defensive. And that pissed him off. “You know, it seems that the one who should be outraged here is me, not you.”

  Kira stared for a moment, then nodded. “You can feel as alone as you want, Thorn, but you’re not.”

  She hovered close to tears. Thorn heard the desolation in her voice, the miserable regret, the second-guessing. He took another breath, and deliberately backed away a bit.

  “Kira, I had a right to know.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Yes. You did. And I’m sorry for not telling you, for whatever it’s worth. But, you know what? I’m also not sorry. You haven’t had to spend the past three years so worried about the child you basically gave up that sometimes you can’t sleep at night because of it. You were spared dealing with the day-by-day, hour-by-hour consequences of a few minutes of carelessness, of indiscretion. You were able to just carry on with life. I wasn’t. I chose to carry this for both of us, because I knew how shitty this war was going to be, and that even if we do everything right, all of our worlds might come to an end. I chose this, Thorn. So you—hell, so we could both fight. So we could do whatever we had to in order to win, because I knew that the more room you had in you for fighting, the better our chance of survival. All of us. Not just her.”

  “And that’s why you were so silent? Right up to the time of the Vision?”

  “You’re a Starcaster, Thorn. A powerful one, a Conduit. You can do everything other Starcasters have to treat as a specialization.” She shook her head. “You’re also closer to me than any other living person. You would have seen through me in an instant.”

  Thorn rubbed his face. “Okay. I get it. But—damn it, Kira, I was her father.” The word tasted like ashes, and he had to pause again, jaw muscles working furiously. “I get your reasons, and I get how tough it must have been for you. But you still should have told me. Instead, you cut me out of the whole thing and stuck her on some remote planet—"

  “It was a nice planet, Thorn. A nice family—you know, a family, the one thing neither of us have, and that we couldn’t give her. I thought she’d be happy there—safe there.”

  “Turns out she wasn’t. We haven’t killed enough squid.” Thorn looked away, the color rising in his cheeks. “We’ll never get to that point.”

  Kira watched Thorn for a moment, like seeing a caged animal break free. She knew grief. She also understood danger, and even in his moment of loss, Thorn was—shifting.

  The bloom inside Thorn that fed on revenge grew taller. His spirit, darker.

  “Thorn?”

  He looked to the door. “There are some things that I can keep inside.”

  “And the others?” Kira asked, fear in her voice.

  “Those, I will have to set free. But not here.” He leaned to her, kissing her cheek with lips that were dry and flat. “I will know when.”

  11

  He didn’t see Kira again before h-hour, the time the mission launched. Or he did see her, but only briefly, during planning meetings and the like. Each time they made brief eye contact, and that was it. For the time being, at least, it was all they had left.

  He wondered if she’d show up to see him before he joined Mol, Brid, and Dart aboard the Gyrfalcon, because the reality was that he might not come back. The state of war made no allowances for broken promises, grief, or loss. War went forward, inexorable and cruel.

  But there was no sign of her as Thorn clambered up the ladder into the fighter’s cabin, and the outer airlock door sealed behind him, its muffled thump sounding far too final for Thorn’s liking, but then he looked around, eyes resting on the familiar interior. This was more home to him than his own bunk, and at least Mol was there.

  He settled himself into the co-pilot’s acceleration couch, alongside Mol. The couch gripped him in a familiar and strangely welcoming embrace. He’d spent many hours of his life sitting here already, flying mission after mission with Mol. Brid and Dart settled into their own acceleration couches behind them.

  The Gyrfalcon’s cabin had been reconfigured for long-duration flight with four passengers; non-critical avionics had been removed, extra missile stowage emptied, and a whole suite of sensor gear had been moved to pods slung under the fighter’s wings. The extra space resulting had been repurposed for additional supplies and a tiny increase in the available living space. It was still going to be awfully cramped, and they’d had to plan for the contingency that Thorn wouldn’t be able to move the Gyrfalcon by magical means. That meant the engines and avionics had to function—perfectly. There was no going back if they got caught in Nyctus space with a broken vessel.

  “Trixie, run the pre-flight checklist,” Mol said. Trixie’s response was a blast of ear-splitting noise, something like a cat whose tail had been caught in an angle grinder.

  “Trixie!”

  The so-called music abruptly cut off. Dart uttered a soft curse. “What the hell was that?”

  “That was the Sex Pistols,” Trixie replied. “Aren’t they awesome? So raw, so much energy—”

  “I almost hate to ask, but what are Sex Pistols?” Dart asked.

  “And where can I get one?” Brid put in.

  Mol flashed a grin back at them. “It’s some ancient musical act, from the Twentieth Century. Trixie’s been exploring entertainment from the past, and has decided that punk rock is her thing.”

  “Totally,” Trixie said. “Just call me a riot grrrl.”

  Somehow, Thorn thought, the AI managed to say grrrl in a way that made it clear it was all r’s and no letter i’s. He glanced at Mol like a parent who blames the other parent for a kid gone wild. Or, at least as wild as you could be while existing in a lattice matrix aboard a spaceborne fighter.

  Still grinning, she flipped switches, provoking a rising whine from the Gyrfalcon’s energizers. “Trixie, care to explain that riot thing?”

  “It’s a late twentieth-century feminist-activist movement, spurred o
n by bands like Bikini Kill.”

  “Of course it is,” Thorn said, shaking his head in amazement. “Well, Trixie, I’ll make you a deal. Listen to all of this punk rock that you want—just don’t do it so we can hear it.”

  “Aw. I wanna share it with you. It’s so awesome.”

  “I believe you. I really do. But your mom and I need some alone time, and we—”

  “You’re not my real dad,” Trixie pouted, channeling a persona from the height of teen petulance.

  Thorn rolled his eyes. “Rather in character, isn’t she?”

  “You can’t imagine,” Mol said. “Easy on the racket, like Thorn said, okay?”

  “Fine,” Trixie said, turning the word into a howl against every indignity teens had experienced since the first parent told them they couldn’t borrow the car keys.

  Thorn smiled into his hand, and it felt good, even if his laughter was brought on by an AI going through the identity crisis of a fifteen-year old girl.

  “Pre-flight checklist complete,” Trixie reported, businesslike about the important things. “All systems nominal. Ready to launch.”

  Mol acknowledged as the Hecate’s main shuttle bay, repurposed into a permanent hangar for the Gyrfalcon, decompressed. When it was wholly empty of air, the big doors slid open. Mol asked for, and received, clearance from the destroyer’s flight controller to launch, and nudged the fighter into space with brief puffs from the thrusters.

  “How far do you want me to take us from the Hecate before you hocus-pocus us away?” Mol asked Thorn.

  He glanced at her. “Hocus pocus?”

  “Some old Earth thing, when people talked about magic.” She shrugged. “Trixie’s not the only one with a thing for ancient history.”

  Thorn offered a faint smile, doing a little math before speaking. In truth, it wasn’t math. It was what scientists called an educated guess. “Let’s make it at least a thousand klicks. I doubt that the area of effect of the jump will be anywhere near that, but just in case, I don’t want to accidentally drag the Hecate along with us.”