Crimson Sun (Starcaster Book 3)

by J. N. Chaney

  17

  Thorn stared at Brid and Dart, looking for physical shifts and finding none. They appeared human. They certainly weren’t acting that way.

  “Oh, just in case you think this is simple mutiny, it’s not,” Brid went on. “Or, rather, it is, but not for the usual reasons.”

  “The ones in control here are the Nyctus,” Dart said, turning from his secretive task at the controls. “In fact, they have been all along.” He gestured around. “They see all of this. They know about all of this. They’ve known about it all along.”

  “They’re inside your head, Thorn,” Brid said. “They’re inside everyone’s head. Starcasters think they can protect themselves, but they can’t.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Nobody can.”

  “They’ve been with you, inside you, this whole time,” Dart said. “You’re one of us.”

  Thorn’s immediate thought was, I was right. These two can’t be trusted, they are Skins. Congratulations to me. I’m a genius who still got dropped.

  Thorn looked at the pistol. Its frangible rounds were designed to fragment on impact, so they’d be deadly, but without risking serious damage to critical ship systems or hull integrity.

  “You’re not really going to try something stupid, are you?” Brid asked.

  The fuzz in Thorn’s head began to thicken, but he smiled.

  “Oh, not at all. See, this is the part where the bad guy explains his whole evil plan. I’m going to let you do that, and then—”

  Mid-word, Thorn lashed out, knocking the pistol aside. It fired with an ear-piercing snap, the round slamming into the cabin roof and showering them with fragments. Brid yelped and tried to yank the weapon back into play, but Thorn gripped her wrist and held the barrel away from him. That mental cloud continued to build, a roiling fog that made magic—and even thought—harder than anything Thorn could ever remember. Thorn flung himself up and over the back of the pilot’s g-couch, then swept a finger over one breaker of the many mounted on the panel at the back of the cockpit. The inertial dampers, which also regulated internal gravity, went abruptly offline with a startled bzzt.

  Brid yanked again at the pistol, got it free, then spun around and bounced into the back of the co-pilot’s g-couch. She fumbled desperately, trying to reorient herself in what had suddenly become a no-g environment. Dart tried to cover for her, summoning magic to craft some sort of shielding effect while she recovered.

  Thorn couldn’t let that happen and kicked at Dart’s face. He scored a grazing hit on his cheek, snapping his head to one side and turning him halfway around. The kick made Thorn rotate, but he reached up and instantly arrested it by grabbing the edge of the overhead panel. He didn’t even have to look. Unlike these two, he’d spent so much time in this cockpit over the past three years that he could probably find every switch, every control, every surface or edge by feel—and do it blindfolded.

  In fact, if it weren’t for whatever they’d injected him with, this fight would already be over. They’d made the same mistake a succession of sparring partners had since Thorn had joined the ON—assuming a ‘caster couldn’t get dirty and fight.

  Except when you grow up as an orphan, then work shitholes like where Kira had found him, you learned to take care of yourself—and that included getting very good at beating the shit out of other people. In fact, Thorn wasn’t just good at fighting. He considered it a necessary skill, something to be studied and cherished and, on occasion, used. Just to keep in practice.

  Thorn kicked again at Dart and landed a solid hit. Brid gave up on the pistol and lashed out with force magic instead, pinning Thorn in place. With a concentrated will, Thorn pushed at the magical bonds, failing to move them an inch. He was bound, helpless, and filling with fury.

  Then Brid swung the pistol back into his face.

  He couldn’t stop her. Couldn’t do anything but writhe against the unseen force holding him still, and for the first time, Thorn considered the possibility that this was it. The end. Death, and in a place where no one would know except a pair of traitorous bastards who’d sworn allegiance to the undoing of humanity.

  If I go, I go on my terms, Thorn mused, vision filling with Kira, and his daughter, and then the skies above Nebo, shot through with lightning and madness.

  Brid spun again, her face a circle of fearful alarm. The pistol fired, striking the bulkhead behind Thorn, to his left, and Mol—the avenging angel, the wounded brawler, her own face a rictus of pain—jammed a hypo into Brid’s neck and forced the plunger down, shouting at Thorn to move.

  He was already back in motion, now free and sizzling with anger as he grabbed the heavy crash helmet and swung it like a club—right at Dart’s open mouth. The helmet was six kilos of whistling mass, swung with all the fury Thorn could manage. Dart tried again, but his timing was a beat too slow; the crash helmet slammed into his face, wobbling globules of blood erupting from the impact and drifting away in a crimson dance.

  Thorn swung and hit Dart again. He might have done it a third time, or even a fourth and fifth, except the gray curtain finally closed over him, his mind filled to the brim with whining static—

  Thorn blinked, his eyes open, immediately regretted it, and closed them with a soft groan.

  “Thorn?”

  He opened his eyes again. This time, he forced them to stay open, despite the light that seemed to cut into his vision like a knife made of agony.

  “Thorn, look at me, dammit.”

  He rolled his head toward the voice. “Mol?” Time to get up already? Hadn’t just finished a shift—?

  His memory, which had only reached about ten seconds into the past, suddenly flooded back. He gasped, trying to lever himself upright, in spite of the throbbing ring in his ears, the sudden bursts of fireworks behind his eyes.

  “Dart,” he rasped. “Brid—”

  “Are safely trussed up,” Mol said. “Not before landing us in a world of hurt, though.”

  Thorn took a moment to orient himself. He sprawled in one of the bunks, his body in that curious position of someone who had been wiped out from a narcotic overload. The other bunks were folded up, making space for a groggy Brid and an unconscious Dart, whose face was swollen and speckled with blood. He remembered doing that, beating Dart in the face—right, with a crash helmet.

  The memories slowly settled back into place, like snow piling on a windowsill overnight. Brid and Dart were Skins, and they’d tried to take control of the Gyrfalcon.

  Thorn looked at Mol. “What do you mean—ow, shit.” A wave of pain swept through his head, so intense that he almost threw up.

  “Take it easy,” Mol said. “Whatever they drugged you with has had you out for”—she glanced at the time—“almost twelve hours.”

  “You said a world of hurt. What do you mean?”

  Mol snorted in pure disgust. “Where do I start? They did something to life support, but I’ve managed to keep it going—barely. It honestly might conk out any minute, though, and then we’ve got about forty minutes of breathable air.” She gave Brid and Dart a venomous glance. “We can easily make it twice that, though.”

  “Shit. Okay, what else?”

  Mol’s eyes actually brimmed with tears. “Trixie. They’ve done something to her. A virus, I think. She’s completely offline, and I can’t get her to reboot.” She turned to Brid. “If she’s gone, then you are right behind her, you bitch.”

  Brid held bleary eye contact with Mol for a moment, then turned away.

  “Okay. Shit. Alright, what else?” Thorn asked, careful to pick each syllable out. His tongue felt like a small corpse that had been left in his mouth, an offering to slurred words and fractured memory.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Probably.” Thorn looked at Brid. “Has she said anything?”

  “She’s babbled some. It’s all the sort of bullshit you’d expect from a Skin. You know, you can’t win, they know everything, blah, blah. I’ve tried asking her some questions, but she doesn’t seem to want to coo
perate.” Mol’s face, already etched with anger and frustration, tightened even more. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s a waste of air now. They both are. We should just space them.”

  Thorn clambered to his feet. Static still hissed through his head, but it was starting to clear, but not nearly fast enough for his taste.

  “Whether we space them or not depends on the next words out of Brid’s mouth,” he said.

  Brid looked up at him, and snapped a curse.

  Thorn spread his hands. “If I thought we had the time or means to get these two back to friendly space and save them, we would.” He paused, taking a moment to let his head swim. “Let me try that again. I have to believe that you two were loyal to the ON at one point.”

  “But then we saw the light,” Brid slurred back, her voice thick and oily.

  “And what light would that be?”

  “The one that shows us the truth. We—you—can’t win. The squids—they’re everywhere. They know everything. They see everything.” She licked her lips. “Even if you make it back—” she started, then fell silent.

  Thorn knelt. “Even if we make it back—what?”

  Brid just gave him a languid smile.

  “Fine. We’ll do it the hard way. My magic’s coming back, stronger by the minute,” he lied. “If that stuff you shot into me was supposed to shut it down permanently, you might wanna get your money back.” He leaned in and offered Brid a smile cold enough to drop the temperature a degree or two. “Once it’s back—in, oh, another hour or so, say—I’m going to Join with you, and I’m going to take apart your mind, thought by thought. I’m going to learn everything about you in a surgical violation that will leave you sobbing. Or laughing. Probably both. I’ll rip every memory out of your brain right down to your core. Hell, I’m even going to dig out the repressed ones—hey, those should be fun, right?” He leaned back and stood. “I wonder if you have any family.” He held up a hand. “No, wait. Spoilers. Don’t bother answering. I’m going to find out soon enough.”

  “The only family you should be worried about, Stellers, is your own.”

  Thorn’s smile went wide with cold delight. “I told you before, I don’t have any family, Brid. The squids killed them. All of them.” He knelt back down. “And that’s why I’ve got no mercy left. None. I’ve said the war will end when all squids are dead. All of them. Just like my family. That planet back there? Scoured right down to bedrock. The whole race, wiped out. Only then do I think we’ll be square.”

  Brid’s eyes widened slightly, her resolve cracking under the cryogenic tone of Thorn’s voice. They widened even more when he leaned in close, and whispered something to her.

  Brid looked at him, shaking her head. “You . . . can’t.”

  “Can’t? Oh, I most certainly can. Won’t? Well, that’s up to you.” He stood again. “Anyway, I’ll let you think about that for a while. Mol, let’s see what we can figure out about Trixie, and our life support, and getting home.”

  He stepped into the cockpit. Mol stared as he pushed past her, then she followed him.

  “What did you whisper to her?”

  Thorn shrugged. “Starcaster threats. We can do things that are way beyond anything physical, and we can start inside their head, then move to the pain centers if things get. . .dicey. You really don’t want to know the details.”

  Mol stared just a moment longer, then shook her head before looking at the stricken expression on Brid’s face.

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  Thorn sat back with a sigh. “So, not much in the way of good news,” he said.

  Mol wiped her eyes and shook her head.

  They sat in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, Mol having just run through a dreary checklist of everything gone wrong. The only good news, in fact, was Brid and Dart apparently hadn’t disrupted the nav or flight controls, so when it came to flying in normal space, the Gyrfalcon was fine. They’d long since flashed past the hydro world, and were now racing out of the system again, soaring above its ecliptic plane at a velocity the squids chasing them had no hope of matching.

  At least until they ran out of fuel. Then, their acceleration would die, and so would any chance of escape. That was the good news. The bad news was grim indeed.

  “Without Trixie,” Mol said, “we lose some ship’s functions. We’ll just get raw data from the scanners. Fire control is going to be manual. The fusion reactor might scram any minute, even if the life support doesn’t, and then we’re on backup power cells.” Mol looked at the control panel, as though it really was Trixie’s face. “I lose my friend.”

  Thorn touched her arm. “Hey. We’re not done yet.”

  Mol looked back. “No, but we’re close. If you don’t get your mojo back, then even using the Alcubierre drive means doing all the calculations manually. We have to hop over and over to get back to ON space, and even one error in all those equations and shit—”

  “I know, Mol. I know.” He decided to change the subject. “By the way, how is it that you happened to wake up just in the nick of time to take down Brid? That kind of last-second thing only happens with heroes.”

  “I wasn’t out,” she said, a ghost of a smile flitting across her face. “Hadn’t been for, oh, at least an hour. I could sense something was up, so I decided to play dead. Good thing I’m that clever, huh?”

  “It’s the only reason we’re here, having this conversation.”

  Mol looked back into the cabin. “What the hell are we going to do with those two?”

  “What do you think we should do with them?”

  “Space them,” Mol shot back. “Right friggin’ now. Least, that’s what I want. But I know we need to try and take them back with us—if we can get back. They could be valuable to study, learn more about Skins and all that—”

  Thorn stopped her with an upraised finger. “Hold that thought.”

  He looked at Dart. Thorn hadn’t realized it at the time, but the crash helmet to the face hadn’t been the incapacitating blow. His wound came from an old-fashioned strike to the bulkhead, and whether he would ever wake up was a complete uncertainty.

  Brid, though, had just been sedated, and it had mostly worn off. Thorn stood and walked back. The static had cleared more, but enough remained that he still couldn’t ’cast properly. He had to hope that bluffing would be enough.

  He crouched beside Brid. “Well, I think you’ve had long enough to chew on your options. What’s it going to be?”

  Thorn waited, wondering if she would spit in his face or lash out.

  But she didn’t. She met his eyes, held his gaze for a moment—and then deflated slightly. “We really don’t know much. Only what we’re told.”

  Thorn asked the one question that every traitor would face. “Why? What are the squids offering you? Are they going to make you planetary governors or something when they win the war? Leaders of the docile humans, like some king in a prison of your own greed?”

  This time, Brid did laugh. “You think they’re, what, somehow paying us to do this?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way. They’ve just made it clear that if we do what they want, we don’t die. We get to live out our lives once the war is over, on a planet set aside for whatever humans survive. And they are going to win. You can talk all you want about wiping them out, Stellers, but we’ve only seen a fraction of their power. I know. They’ve shown it to me. Fleets and troops we haven’t even seen yet. Weapons like nothing we can imagine.”

  Her voice dropped to a fervent whisper as she spoke. Thorn managed a bit of clinical detachment. Clearly, she believed the things she was saying. That meant the squids weren’t controlling them, per se, like puppets on invisible strings. They’d simply reshaped their minds into something that saw the world the way the Nyctus wanted them to.

  They’d effectively installed some sort of buffer between what Brid and Dart actually experienced, and how they perceived it. It was an especially pernicious sort of psychic influence—subtle, but ove
rpowering. If reality really was perception, then these two couldn’t see anything but the squids eventually winning this war and obliterating humanity, except for the lucky, chosen few.

  Thorn finally accepted her zealotry as a fact. It was the only reasonable thing to do in the face of a true believer. “What’s the plan?”

  Brid smiled. “We’ve set you up. Left evidence that you’re the Skin back aboard the Hecate—you, and that woman you obviously love. She’s probably already in a prison somewhere. And you—” She glanced around the Gyrfalcon, her eyes narrowed in threat. “—won’t ever be able to get back to save her, or clear your names.” She let her head fall back against the bulkhead. “So you got us, Thorn. Good for you. Won’t make any difference. Meantime, we have a whole army of Skins among you, ready to bring the whole ON crashing down—”

  “Do we have to listen to this shit?” Mol snapped.

  Thorn stood and shook his head. “Nah. Let’s space them.”

  Mol’s face whipped toward him, eyes round. “Wait—really?”

  “Yes. Really. We’ve learned everything we’re going to from them—including how Skins work. By the way, thanks for that, Brid.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Yeah, yeah—again, whatever.” He looked back at Mol. “Besides, they’re putting a strain on the life support we don’t need. And they’re both Starcasters, so we’ll have to either keep a close watch on them, because I suspect that that sedative has almost entirely worn off of Brid and she’ll be able to start ’casting again soon, or keep them under. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

  “You’re serious.”

  Thorn nodded. “I am. They’re effectively squids, after all.”

  Mol stared, unmoving. Thorn knew what she was thinking—he’d spaced the crews of two Nyctus ships with minimal fuss. What were two more?

  She finally nodded, slow, deliberate. “Fine by me.”

  He turned to Brid. “I’d say I’m sorry. But I’m not.”