Crimson Sun (Starcaster Book 3)

by J. N. Chaney

  “And did you, ma’am?” Thorn asked.

  Densmore smiled faintly, then shook her head. “No, because the Intel Chief at the time yanked me off field duty and stuck me behind a desk. I was furious. I made that more than clear to him. He asked me why I was furious, so I told him—I wanted to kill squids, and he wasn’t letting me.” She looked straight at Thorn. “All he said was, ‘And now you know why you’re behind a desk.’ It took me a while to figure out what, exactly, he meant. It also took me a while to realize he was right.”

  She sat back again, looking tired. “Revenge is a powerful motivation, Thorn. It’s also a terrible one. It doesn’t leave room for things like prudence, and discretion—and mercy. And those are important things, Thorn, even in war.”

  “Especially in war,” Tanner added.

  “So, Lieutenant Stellers,” Densmore said, “I will join Captain Tanner in taking this proposal to Fleet, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

  Thorn turned and looked at the screen, at the simple, sterile icon depicting a planet he was proposing to wipe clean of life.

  The way Cotswold had been.

  The way Nebo had been—

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  Tanner remained impassive. Densmore, though, just looked sad.

  “Then we’ll convince Fleet to do this,” she said. “I just hope that once we have, we can all live with the outcome.”

  Thorn said nothing, mired in the hope that he could live with it too.

  20

  “Okay, Stellers,” Scoville said. “Tell me straight—are you blowing starlight up my ass, or do you really believe you can pull this off?”

  Thorn looked around at the people assembled in the briefing room on Code Gauntlet. This one was bigger by far than any likely to be found aboard a ship, and it had the advantage of natural daylight streaming through several skylights. There was room for something like this here at Code Gauntlet, and it lent the room an expanse that made Thorn feel his humanity with each sunbeam.

  “Yes,” Thorn finally said. “Sir.” His eyes were neutral, but his spine was straight. Thorn understood the weight of the moment.

  Scoville—Rear Admiral Scoville, now, him having been promoted to command of the Third Fleet—crossed his arms. “You’re going to move an entire fleet of ships, using magic, to a point hundreds of light-years away.”

  Again, Thorn chose brevity. “Yes, sir.”

  Thorn saw glances being exchanged among the others gathered. Besides Scoville, there were a half-dozen of his staff officers, along with Tanner and Densmore. Mol and Kira sat near the back of the room, ready to speak up on their particular areas of expertise—navigation and flight, and Joining, respectively—but Thorn knew Tanner had really brought them along as moral support for him.

  Scoville turned to Densmore. “Alys, I understand that you don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Tactically, I think it’s a brilliant idea, sir,” she replied. “I also think it’s incredibly risky, and the result is going to border on a war crime. At the very least, it’s a huge escalation. If we do this, we don’t know how the squids are going to respond, and frankly, every option has to be on the table to deal with whatever comes next.”

  “It’s not like you to be so . . . so wary, Alys,” Scoville said.

  “I guess I’m having trouble getting past wiping out a planet with no obvious strategic value,” Densmore said.

  Scoville sat back and stretched out his legs. “Agreed that it’s a hard decision to make, but let’s face it—this planet does have strategic value. It’s producing resources for the squid war effort, including baby squids. I’m no fan of getting down in the mud with these bastards, but if they keep hitting our planets with no obvious strategic value, they’re going to choke off our logistics capacity and win this war. And we really don’t want that to happen.”

  Scoville stood and walked to the front of the room. “The Allied Stars Ruling Council has given their blessing to this, if Fleet wants to pursue it. The Commander has authorized me to make the final decision.” He looked at Thorn. “We are putting a stellar-mass’s worth of trust in you and your abilities here, Lieutenant. That makes you a single point of failure. We do our best to try and avoid those.”

  “I understand, sir. I won’t fail,” Thorn said evenly.

  “Alright.” Scoville turned to everyone assembled in the briefing room. “This little jaunt into squid space is now known as Operation Trebuchet. Detailed planning is to commence immediately. A warning order will be issued to the Third Fleet within the hour.” He glanced at the Third Fleet’s Operations Officer, who nodded.

  He turned back to Thorn. “When I was a Lieutenant, I worked for a Captain who always started every op with the same phrase. At the time, before there was any such thing as Starcasters, I just took it as a colorful figure of speech. It takes on a whole new meaning now, though.”

  He turned back to the audience.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s see what magic can really do.”

  Thorn watched as another of the Cyclone missiles was eased into the loading bay of a battlecruiser. The FOB’s orbital dock had been turned into a hub for distributing the weapons, minimizing the amount of handling needed to deploy them across the Third Fleet.

  “I’m not sure which I find more disturbing—that we’re actually preparing to use these things, or that we had so many of them already built.”

  Thorn glanced toward the voice. It was Kira.

  He nodded at her words, then turned back to the viewport. For a while, they both just stood in the concourse, watching the stately progress of the efforts to load the planet-killing weapons.

  The Cyclone missiles carried a half-dozen warheads, each of them a variable-yield thermonuclear bomb that could be dialed from ten to one hundred megatons. They didn’t have much utility in space combat, being slow, cumbersome weapons whose space effects were quite limited. They were a blunt instrument, which really only had one purpose—bombarding the surface of a planet. Hard.

  Every one of the Third Fleet ships carried at least one of them. The bigger capital ships carried multiple. When fully loaded, the Third Fleet task force about to be launched at the squid hydro world would be packing as much as fifteen gigatons of explosive effect. That would be more than enough to obliterate the planet’s biosphere and render it essentially uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. In fact, it was overkill, but intelligence regarding Nyctus defenses around and on the planet was almost nonexistent, so the Fleet had to be prepared to offset losses of both ships and missiles.

  “Someone, somewhere, knew we’d eventually have to do this,” Thorn said. “That we’d have to attack an inhabited planet.” He looked at Kira and shrugged. “They probably started building them right after the raid that destroyed Cotswold. Once the squids did that, it was inevitable. They knew what they were getting themselves into, but they went ahead and did it anyway.” He looked back at the battlecruiser. The first Cyclone had been stowed, and now another was being maneuvered aboard her. “So to hell with them.”

  Silence hung for a while. Kira finally broke it.

  “Densmore came to me. She asked me to talk to you.”

  Thorn gestured out the viewport. “Even if she could convince me to reconsider, it’s a little late, I think.”

  “That’s not what she wanted me to talk to you about.”

  “Oh? What, then?”

  “She’s worried about you, Thorn.”

  He glanced at Kira. “Really? Why?”

  “For the same reason I am.”

  “Okay, and what reason is that?”

  Kira crossed her arms. “Thorn, why did you propose this attack on that Nyctus planet?”

  “I’ve said it—what, a couple of dozen times, now? Because it’ll be a strategic blow that might make the squids think twice about continuing this friggin’ war? Or at least maybe dissuade them from flattening any more of our planets?”

  Kira gave a thin, hu
morless smile. “All of which is true, yeah. But—be honest, Thorn. With me, and with yourself. How much of this is about the war, and how much of it is about you?”

  Thorn sighed. “Again, for the umpteenth time, it’s not about me—”

  “Bullshit.”

  Thorn looked at her, but she pressed on.

  “Remember who you’re talking to here, Thorn. I know you better than anyone. Maybe even yourself, at least when it comes to something like this.”

  “Kira—”

  “Mol told me about Trixie,” she pressed on. “I know that you considered that damned AI a friend. And now you’ve lost her. You’ve lost your family, our daughter, now Trixie—”

  “Kira,” Thorn snapped. “I know that Densmore thinks I’m locked into some cycle of vengeance here. And—yeah, sure, I admit it, I’m not going to cry over the squids we kill. But that’s not the reason for this.”

  “Thorn, if Cotswold and Nebo had never happened, and if Trixie was still the way she was, would you have proposed this plan?”

  “Course I would have.”

  “Really?”

  Thorn stood, awash in disbelief. And maybe, in his core, a hint of shame.

  His family still alive. A daughter he could visit while on leave. Trixie, her usual bubbly, irreverent self.

  The squid hydro planet, populated by a multitude of families and—

  His admission came in a rush. “I want to make the squids pay for what they’ve done. It doesn’t change the fact that two things can be true at once—like revenge and a step toward winning the war. Is that what you want, Kira? Because it’s the ugly, unalloyed truth, and I can’t give it any simpler.”

  Kira’s smile faded, and she shook her head, sadly.

  “No, Thorn. Of course not,” she said, and walked away, leaving Thorn alone in the concourse, surrounded by throngs of officers and Ratings all hurrying to get Op Trebuchet—Thorn’s brainchild—ready to launch. Thorn swore, lost in the chaos of preparation.

  Thorn sat cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport, and waited.

  Task Force Trebuchet had finished its first Alcubierre hop, to a waypoint on the edge of a system containing a pulsar. There were planets, but they were just barren, airless lumps, long ago scoured down to their bedrock by the typhoon of hard radiation pouring off the fierce little star. Once every 0.7213 seconds, the pulsar swept the inner system with its ferocious emissions, making progressing any further than the inner edge of the Oort Cloud a hazardous undertaking indeed.

  An unfriendly little light, Thorn mused, eyes drifting over the yawning blackness.

  But the Fleet wasn’t here to do anything more than move on. This was a navigational stop only. According to the plan, the next hop would take the Fleet to a red giant, starting it on its way to its destination—a Nyctus-controlled planet on the edge of the Zone known to humans as Sherman Prime, the only habitable planet orbiting its namesake, Sherman’s Star. The squids had fortified it into a FOB. Its destruction would open a major gap in their defenses, ripe for exploitation by the Fleet.

  All of this was, of course, a lie. While Sherman Prime was a crucial strategic objective, attacking it would entail a major fleet engagement, followed by fighting through the planet’s defenses. Fleet kept a contingency plan handy for assaulting it, but Fleet contingency-planned lots of things. It had been a simple matter to modify the existing plan, turning it into the lie that everyone in Task Force Trebuchet, except for the ships’ Captains, assumed was the truth.

  Thorn sat quietly, breathing and shifting his fingertips around his talisman until they felt right. He currently had nothing else to do but wait, as the actual plan for the Task Force was propagated among the ships by Admiral Scoville, who had taken personal command of the attack.

  Scoville’s general broadcast was available on the intercom, but Thorn had muted it. He knew what the man was going to say, so he could better use the time for what was coming.

  Stellers?

  Densmore’s voice hummed in his mind. She was aboard the Stiletto, somewhere near the rear of the Task Force. Her ship, along with half dozen others, would actually split from the Task Force and make the hop to the next waypoint, the red giant. Once there, they’d use spoofing tech to portray the signatures of a much larger force, hoping to keep the squids’ attention focused on them for as long as possible.

  I’m here, ma’am.

  We just received intel that the squids are moving a large chunk of their reserve toward Sherman Prime.

  So we’ve definitely got a leak.

  Several, I’d imagine. She paused a moment. You know, you would think that someone who intended to betray this op would tell the squids to move their reserves the other way, further into their depth, where we’re actually going to attack, not forward.

  Thorn gave a chagrined smile. Point taken, ma’am. He hesitated, then went on. Look, ma’am, I’m sorry—

  Don’t be. You were right to suspect me. Hell, I’d have suspected me. But I hope this puts your suspicions to rest.

  It does, ma’am. His smile turned a little more genuine. For now, anyway.

  Densmore’s laughter rang in his mind like chimes, but it faded. Just do me one favor, she said. Try to not wreck the universe.

  “Stellers,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Admiral Scoville’s on for you.”

  Thorn opened his eyes. “I’m here, sir.”

  “Okay, Stellers,” Scoville said. “We’re at H minus fifteen minutes. That’ll give the Stiletto and her detachment time to get clear of the Task Force. Once they are, this becomes your show.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Stellers?”

  “Sir?”

  “Early in my career, I decided I’d never wish anyone good luck. I didn’t believe luck really existed, and it all ultimately came down to brains and skill. That you made your own luck. That was before I found out that magic is real—real enough that I’m actually expecting to move an entire fleet hundreds of light-years by means of what I still have a hard time convincing myself isn’t just fevered bullshit.”

  “I can’t help thinking there’s a but coming, sir.”

  “Damned right there is. But, if magic is real, is luck really that far-fetched? Anyway, all this is a long and convoluted way for me to say good luck, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll be ready.”

  Thorn closed his eyes again and waited, breathing in and out slowly, deeply, settling himself into the intimate connection between flesh and cardboard, where his fingers rested on the old book.

  Fire. Smoke. Confusion. Terror—

  Thorn didn’t fight these ghosts speaking to him from deep inside his talisman. They were familiar, practically old friends. They anchored him, keeping him grounded in his own history against the wild unreality of magic.

  “Stellers,” Tanner said. “Admiral Scoville just sent the go signal. The Task Force is ready. What happens next is up to you.”

  “Understood.”

  Thorn had been considering, now, for days, the best way to approach this. Densmore’s concerns about him damaging the universe were justified; he could rewrite reality, so he had to make sure he didn’t rewrite it into something catastrophic.

  The first time he’d done it, changing how the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive worked to save Code Gauntlet, his magic had been contained in its own little pocket universe. The second time, when he’d desperately increased his own magical power to overcome the effects of the drug Brid had injected into him, he’d kept the focus on himself. And that seemed to be the key. The effect had to be constrained by something—even just intent.

  Intention was something that could be set. It was a law—and Thorn was the author.

  He began to draw magical power to him, using his talisman as a locus, a target upon which the eldritch energy would converge. He was a lightning rod, starting to attract the first stirrings and wisps of electrical charge from the air.

  If he continued this way, he would soon saturate himse
lf with magical power, drawing no more without allowing some to drain away. Thorn knew that, compared to most Starcasters, his capacity for magical force was immense—but it still fell far short of what he needed to move the Task Force.

  Now for the tricky part.

  Thorn had bootstrapped his power up when Brid’s vile drug concoction had tamped it down, bypassing the artificial limit brought on by modern chemistry in the form of a needle to the neck. He’d do exactly the same thing now. The difference was that, then, he only sought to move a single Gyrfalcon. This was going to be far more demanding, so he needed far more power. An ocean of chaos, if he made his mark, and that meant he was about to find out the answer to one question Starcasters hadn’t even dared to ask.

  Just how much magical power can a single human channel?

  He was about to find out. Thorn drew a slug of inhuman might out of the seething reservoir, focused his will through his talisman, and used it like a cutting tool, shaping the raw energy into something new, like a patch for reality. He snapped it into place, overwriting what had already been there—

  Thorn had the capacity for much more magic than he thought he had. That final constraint he’d always assumed had been a myth, because this had always been true.

  Eyes still closed, Thorn shook his head slightly. He now knew two entirely different realities—the one of a moment ago, that he rendered obsolete, and the new one he’d crafted to replace it. Both were incompatible, yet equally real. Like translucent panes of glass, they could be placed over each other, matching flawlessly so that the denizens of this place—his place—would never know. He was stitching reality between the two places, their flat expanses smooth and unblemished in the corridors of his mind.

  Unlimited. If I can survive it.

  He hadn’t been so deliberate about it when he’d brought the Gyrfalcon home. That had all been oxygen-deprived desperation. Thorn knew that Densmore was right; he could easily screw things up, possibly catastrophically, if he did this wrong. He may have screwed things up, in fact, and no one was aware of it yet. But he had a war to help win, and war meant taking risks.