by J. N. Chaney
“Then why?” Scoville asked, curious.
“You’re career Navy, sir?”
“I am.”
“Think back to the days of the blue-water Navy on earth. If you handed a rail gun to one of those captains, what would they think?”
Scoville paused again. “Not much. They wouldn’t have any context or understanding for—”
“Sir?” Thorn asked, his lips curling slightly.
“Oh, shit.” Scoville waved a hand. “Point taken. You’re saying that this—book, and you are the rail gun, and we’re the old salty bastards trying to play catch-up?”
“I am, sir.”
Silence grew between them, fat and awkward.
“I still have a question that goes beyond simply making things explode, or whatever else you can do—and full disclosure, I still don’t like any of this. But I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t use a knife put in my hand, so—” Scoville gathered himself, then spoke again. “The Nyctus throw rocks around, I get it. Like I said, we already knew that. What we don’t know is how they screwed with the task force’s sensors. We can’t find any technical reasons in the data we’ve got, and we can’t really head back into Nyctus space to retrieve any wreckage.” Scoville gave Thorn a questioning look. “You’re supposed to be one of the Starcaster Corps’ best, so if you’ve got any ideas, let’s hear them. I admit to being outside my area of expertise, and we don’t have time for me to reinvent the wheel. Our planets are dying.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.” Thorn bit his lip and studied the frozen image of the shattered Centurion. Indeed, the Nyctus had, as Scoville put it, simply thrown rocks around. Big rocks, the size of shuttles, some even larger. But as he walked around the tactical snapshot, peering closely at it, he saw they’d employed smaller rocks as well. They’d literally just heaved them out of their ships, then used their potent earth magic to accelerate them far harder and faster than their structural integrity should allow.
Scoville was right: the simple inertia of the big rocks should have caused such extreme accelerations so as to smash them into debris. The magic bypassed mundane physics, though, keeping them intact and turning them into cheap, kinetic missiles that were both difficult to destroy and incredibly deadly. It was a cumbersome tactic, only effective at relatively short ranges. The Nyctus had mastered it and used it a lot. As yet, they hadn’t built an entire battle strategy around setting up a situation like one. This time had been different. Why? Just to be unpredictable.
No. There was more to it than that. Just getting close enough to make it viable pretty much demanded taking the targets’ sensors offline. Once, they would have used their formidable telepathic powers to manipulate their enemy’s perceptions, but the addition of ’casters to the ON arsenal made that much more problematic for them. That meant the aliens had come up with something else, something that made them damned certain they could confuse and blind their enemy.
Thorn narrowed his eyes and thought of the night his life changed. The sound, the impact—the fire. He touched his talisman, rubbing idly at a smooth part of the cover. A hint of grit, still, after all these years.
Thorn smiled as the memory hove into sight, a grim gesture of finality, not joy.
“Stellers, I’ve got three other places I need to be,” Scoville said. “If you think of anything, call my aide.”
“Dust.”
Scoville blinked at Thorn’s single word. “Dust. What about it?”
Thorn pointed at the frozen imagery. “This battle. It took place in a nebula—inside a big cloud of dust, blown off that star when it died.” Thorn struggled to recall what he’d learned about stellar evolution—which wasn’t much. “Sir, what would that dust be made out of?”
“For a star of the mass this one was?” The Commodore frowned, recalling his own stellar-physics training. “Carbon, mostly. Probably some oxygen, magnesium, some silicon—why?”
Thorn gave a slow nod. “All elements found in most rock,” he said, then nodded. “That’s how the Nyctus did it. They used their Earth magic to build up dust on our ships, especially on their sensor arrays. They blinded them with dust, then attacked them while they were helpless. And that’s why they chose to make their stand here, inside this nebula and close to the white dwarf, in the thickest part of it.”
Scoville didn’t look away from Thorn. “Fleet Engineer, Ops O here.”
A voice replied from the air. “Here, sir.”
“I’m sending a Lieutenant to you, named Stellers. He’s a Starcaster, and he has an idea about what the Nyctus did to our ships. Once he’s done describing it to you, you tell me if it makes sense. If it does, then we’ve got a hell of a vulnerability to patch up . . . somehow.”
“Aye, sir. Stellers—I’ll be expecting him.”
Thorn nodded. “I’ll head there right now, sir.”
“Do that.” He paused, then added grudgingly, “Good work, Stellers.” Scoville had briefly overcome his own reluctance to offer the complement. It left Thorn feeling like the ON might never truly be comfortable with ’casters.
“Thank you, sir.”
Thorn saluted, then turned for the exit from the simulator.
“Oh, Stellers?”
He turned back to the Commodore. “Sir?”
“I watched the log all the way through, too. Hard to do, but it’s only right. These people need to be remembered.”
Thorn gave the Commodore a curious stare, wondering if the man was telepathic on some level. Thorn had never been a natural card player, so his face, unguarded, might be easy to read. When it came to cheating at cards, that was a different situation altogether.
But Thorn just nodded, ceasing his trip into other, less dangerous times. “Yes, sir. It is.”
Thorn spent barely an hour with the Fleet Engineer and her team. They’d crafted a simulation based on his supposition, to test the idea that a sufficient dust buildup could really inhibit sensors so thoroughly. The results were beyond striking. The first iteration they ran showed that even a few millimeters of dust would seriously degrade the effectiveness of sensors, electronic and optical. Two subsequent runs confirmed it.
As for the Nyctus using magic to accomplish it, Thorn was able to confirm that, too. His talisman in hand—the battered storybook, all that remained of his long-gone childhood and family—he’d channeled his awareness into the flight recorder retrieved from the Centurion. Sure enough, like the faint tick of metal cooling after exposure to intense heat, he’d caught a flickering echo of magical effect. It told him nothing about what that effect was, only that it had imprinted itself on the Centurion, a ship that had no ’caster of her own aboard. And true to its name, the flight recorder still held a glimmer of it.
The sheer volume of dust was impressive, considering the tenuous nature of the nebular dust cloud. But the Nyctus, those creative, vicious bastards, had managed it somehow, and that was bad news for the ON. Every nebular dust cloud—and there were lots of them—had suddenly become a no-go zone for the fleet.
Thorn flopped back into his bunk aboard the Hecate. He hadn’t even bothered to pull off his boots. He’d done his usual, morning shit-shower-shave routine only a few hours before, but he already felt as wrung out as an old dishcloth, ready to just pull the covers over him again, boots and all. Turned out that watching the last minutes of peoples’ lives was an emotionally draining event.
Thorn sniffed. Go figure. After his youth and years as a reclamation grunt, he expected emotional tolls to be the least of his worries.
He closed his eyes, leaning into the idea that the morning would be better, and finding the cause of bad news had to be a victory, no matter how Scoville felt about magic.
But his work was only partially done.
Dust was simple. Manipulating it in the void of space was far from simple—if anything, it brought physical talents to bear that Thorn couldn’t even begin to fathom. Dust was small, susceptible to the vagaries of a big universe, and even more notably, it had little or no mass.
“I don’t know how,” Thorn said. The ceiling had no answers, and the Nyctus weren’t about to spill their secrets. As he sifted memory, chances, and plans, Thorn kept returning to the same unsavory option: go back into enemy space, raid, and capture a shaman. Then, tear the secret from their slimy heads and hope that they could deliver the discovery safely.
Not likely, he thought.
“Thorn, Kira here.”
Thorn opened his eyes. “Kira?”
“That’s what I said.”
He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “Holy shit, this is real-time? You’re here, at Code Gauntlet?”
“It is, and I am.”
Thorn stood. Kira’s ship must have only just arrived at Code Gauntlet, the Third Fleet’s FOB just inside the ON defensive line that demarked this side of the no-man’s-space now separating them and the Nyctus. “Where are you right now?”
“Just passing through in-clearance.”
He glanced at the time. “Can you get away? You’re just in time for lunch.”
“I need about an hour to tidy up a few things,” she replied. “How about I meet you in the mess in, say, an hour and a half?”
Thorn smiled. “I’ve got a better idea.”
Kira grinned as she ran her bare feet through the grass. “I haven’t felt anything but deck-plating under my feet for—” She shrugged. “Seriously, I don’t remember the last time.”
Thorn grinned and gestured around. “I know, right? Whoever decided that the FOB needed an arboretum was a genius—and the ON doesn’t have many of those.”
“You could have said none, and I’d have bought it.” She closed her eyes and pushed her toes into the turf. “Oh, wow, that feels good.”
The arboretum, a single domed compartment flooded with light from broad-spectrum lamps high above them, was the brightest and airiest part of the FOB by far. In a rare concession to morale, the Fleet Admiral had authorized its construction, the official reason being that the sprawl of greenery helped maintain a clean atmosphere inside the FOB. And it did, because the host planet just had too much carbon dioxide for comfortable human breathing. Thorn knew it was about much more than that, though. It was, in fact, more about moments like this—a brief respite from the dreary grind of the ongoing war to enjoy a picnic lunch with a friend.
They weren’t the only ones here, either. ON fleet personnel, from low-ranking Rates to at least one Captain, were lounging amid the greenery, taking a break from alloy bulkheads and deck plates and a war that had settled into a bleak grind of attrition.
“So what brings you here to FOB Gauntlet, anyway,” Thorn asked.
Kira opened her eyes. “No idea. The ship came here, and I came with it.”
Thorn grinned again. “It’s something classified, isn’t it?”
“I could tell you, but then we’d have to turn you into compost.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
A hint of a frown touched Kira’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What? Oh, nothing. Just that I’ve had a few face-to-face encounters with the Grim Reaper, and he hasn’t gotten me yet.”
Kira closed her eyes and resumed luxuriating in the grass. “Sounds like famous last words. Pass me another sandwich.”
“You want one with the pink stuff, or one with the brown stuff?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The Mess made one pink, the other brown. Otherwise, I can’t tell them apart.”
She accepted the sandwich from him—one with pink filling. “You know, I’d have thought the food would be better at an FOB than it is shipboard.” She bit into it, gave an experimental chew, then made a yuck face. “I was wrong.”
“Now you know the gastronomic disappointment I’ve been living with.”
“Why do they have you stationed here anyway?” Kira asked. “Seems like a waste of one of our best Starcasters, hanging around an FOB.”
Thorn shrugged. “It’s not likely we’re going to see ops spooling up again any time soon.”
Kira swallowed. “Really? What have you heard?”
Thorn hesitated. The whole dust-blocking-sensors thing was very definitely classified. And even though this was Kira, there were some things that even friends didn’t need to know.
“Let’s just say we won’t likely be starting up any offensive ops for the foreseeable future, and leave it at that.”
Kira sat up. “Thorn, what do you know?”
“I . . . really can’t say, Kira. I’m sorry.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Fine. Need to know and all that, right?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
She cocked her head. “It’s something about the Third Fleet getting its ass kicked. You know something about that. Something the Nyctus did.” Her eyes nearly vanished, leaving only bright, suspicious crescents. “Something big—”
Out of sheer instinct, Thorn closed his mind off like an airlock in a breach drill. It happened without thinking, leaving him bathing Kira in a hard stare. There were some things a ’caster did not do. “You shitting me, Kira? Trying to read me?”
“Wasn’t just trying. You probably need to be a little more careful, Thorn. Another Joiner might not be quite so benign about it.”
Thorn felt his features soften, then lowered his mental barrier. “Kira, we’ve been friends for a long time. You know better. Second point, and this is critical, so please remember: Joiners are the least of my worries.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Joining’s less a science and more an art, I guess. It doesn’t have the hard edges of a castle, or a hammer. A castle defends a specific thing, a hammer uses a specific force, but Joining is—” He struggled, searching for a word that didn’t exist.
“Soft?” Kira asked, a brow lifted. “Be careful, friend. I can peel away your secrets, if I’m given a chance.”
“If?” Thorn said, then laughed. “You don’t need to peel them away. They’re freely given.” He bunched his shoulders, uncomfortable with the gap in his logic. “I think I can perform some degree of Joining. Doesn’t mean I grasp it. Not entirely.”
“That’s fair. How about this—come to the gym,” Kira said.
“Gym? Why?”
Kira stood, then grinned down at Thorn, and there was conspiracy in her eyes. “Call it a hard lesson with soft edges. Tomorrow. Eleven-hundred. See you there.” She walked away, and Thorn fought the urge to peel her secrets away.
Some things were better found out in the fullness of time.
2
Thorn strode into the gym he’d booked, ready for a fight. Or a lesson.
Or both.
He stopped as the door slid closed behind him. He’d been preparing what he intended to say for a couple of hours now . . .
Kira, I respect you, he sent into the room, hoping she was listening. I hope you don’t intend to drop a beam on my head.
Thorn made it a half-dozen paces into the cavernous gym, then stopped short. There was no sign of Kira, and he had no sense that his words had been received. They echoed flatly around him, a psychic remnant of his lukewarm apology.
He checked his chrono. He was on time. In fact, he was a couple of minutes late, which was sloppy. It was a standard throughout the ON that if you were attending a meeting, you always showed up at least five minutes early to study any maps or other documents that had been prepared for it. Early was on time, and on time was late.
Something flickered against the edge of Thorn’s vision. Acting on instinct, he turned, at the same time conjuring a fierce point of blue-white light over his outstretched palm; with a thought, he flung it out into an implacable shield against whatever he’d glimpsed—
Kira slammed headlong into his barrier and rebounded with a bluish flash and a cry of pain—and landed firmly on her ass. In a blur, she sprang up, thanks to her superb conditioning.
Thorn let the residual energy drain away and stepped toward her, again putting out a hand,
but this time it was free of any sorcerous energy.
“Kira?” He spoke out loud, and there was far more in the word than a simple question. “What’s the lesson?”
After catching her breath and straightening her fatigues, she put her hands on her hips and waved vaguely at the space. “You didn’t even know I was here, did you?”
“Well, not until you tried to throw yourself at me like some sort of mugger, no—”
“We’re in a war for our survival, as a species, and sometimes the most talented people have blind spots. Like yours.”
“If I’m blind, then—you mean after I felt you? Or before?” Thorn asked.
She sighed, a gentle sound of acceptance, not anger. “You—we—grew up hard. You understand threats, whether or not they’re in front of you, right?”
“I’m an expert in them. You are too,” Thorn said. The home had been brutal at times, cold at others, and never, ever truly safe. “Where are you going with this?”
“It’s the Nyctus. They’re alien.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you though? They’re not in front of you, but they also aren’t like some kid at the children’s home, laying in wait to kick your ass for no reason. Different kind of threat,” Kira said.
Thorn rubbed his chin, then tilted his head in agreement. The memories she was dredging were sour, dead things—things he’d worked hard to bury. “If you’re comparing yourself to a lurking bully with designs on my food ration—”
“I’m not. I’m nothing like the Nyctus, and never will be. You can see me, and feel my presence. I don’t know if that’s true with the squid, at least, I don’t think we can say for certain. This,” and she waved at their setting, dismissing it, “is just an attempt to get you to open your horizons to the Nyctus and what they really are.”
“What do you—”
Kira’s hand flickered forward in a blur, the small knife flashing lethal in the wan light. Thorn turned, barely, and slapped the blade away, raising his other hand to Kira in vibrating menace. The knife clattered against a console and fell still. In the seconds of her attack, he never made a sound, and neither did she.
