by J. N. Chaney
—rough, gritty, sharp angles and edges still almost as jagged as they were when first formed by some titanic collision uncountable ages ago. Searing hot where the system’s sun glared on it, and searing cold in the stark shadows—
Thorn blinked, staggering slightly. The bustle of the CIC crashed back in around him. He found Scoville abruptly standing right at his side.
“Stellers?”
“I—” Thorn blinked again, then nodded. “I’m fine, sir. I was just trying to reach out to that rock, and . . . touch it is the best way to describe it.”
“Again, fine, I don’t need the details. Did it work? What did you learn?”
Thorn took a ragged breath, recovering from the effort it took to read the mountain’s frigid, airless surface. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do it. I can’t stop it. No one can.”
Scoville nodded, slowly. “Alright, then. We’ve just lost Code Gauntlet.”
Thorn gave a desolate shrug. “Yes, sir. It looks like we have.”
Kira dreamed of fire and smoke.
Maybe it was a result of her burgeoning facility with Joining; she’d always had vivid dreams, but lately they sometimes became almost lucid. Like now—she knew she was asleep, but that didn’t yank her out of the dream. Instead, it let her participate in it while recognizing it for what it was: an unreal place, filled with flames.
She let the image run, like an ancient, grainy video, as desolate and scorched as the places where Nyctus KEWs fell from the sky, turning lives to ash. Unlike those craters, this fire grew, climbing higher, savage heat blistering the air around her until—
Something caused the world to rattle and shake like a blast of thunder. She staggered and fought to keep her feet.
Kira.
And now someone was calling her name. Get to the point, she thought. It seemed she was impatient, even in her dreams.
Kira!
The dream world shook again, and the fire blazed higher, threatening to consume everything.
No, wait—
“Kira!”
She blinked, flung her eyes open, and looked around.
She was in her bunk. It was dark. But there was light, an inconstant, flickering, orange-yellow.
“Kira, wake up!”
She gasped and sat up, almost slamming her nose into Rainer’s forehead. “What? What’s going on?”
“Fire,” Rainer snapped. “Next barracks over—”
An explosion of klaxon cut her off as Code Gauntlet’s base-wide fire alarm started blaring.
Kira jumped out of bed. She’d made Rainer second-in-command of the squad, her 2ic. Rainer had been exemplary, a fact she underscored with her next words, which she had to shout over the alarm.
“I roused the squad, got them going around waking everyone up for a head count!”
Kira nodded as she pulled on trousers and boots. “Good work!”
Kira strode to the middle of the barracks and swept her gaze around, making sure everyone from her squad was either gone or in the process of forming up for the head count.
“Get your shit together and move,” Kira bellowed, a refrain picked up by Rainer seconds later. They pushed and dragged and threatened the stragglers, then Kira swept her eyes over the barracks one last time, making sure everyone was out.
Outside was chaos.
Cast in the glare of a fire now roaring from the windows of the barracks next door, Building 2C, recruits and trainees milled about, their ranks disorganized as they mixed and mingled in the flame-lit darkness. Shouts rose from trainee squad leaders, their tones ranging from calmly assertive to almost hysterical.
Kira strode into the mayhem, Rainer at her side. Her own squad had gathered on the edge of the nearby parade square; she did a quick head count—
And came up one short.
“Who’s missing?” she asked the whole squad, as much as Rainer. They all peered around at each other for a few seconds.
“It’s Smiley, ma’am,” one of her squad members finally concluded. “No sign of him.”
She began peering at faces in the slowly organizing crowd around them, looking for the lean, angular features of “Smiley” Riley, the Scorch she’d saved from extra duties by turning out last for PT. She didn’t see him.
On impulse, Kira extended her awareness through the crowd—now more or less sorting itself out into squads and platoons—then beyond, into the surrounding night, her mind’s eye crawling like serpents as she marked each mind and moved on. She’d gotten to know her squad well enough to recognize the shape of their psionic profile, a picture as unique as their fingerprint and much more layered. Her thoughts touched a multitude of others, some bright with fear, others still dull and mired in the dregs of sleep, and almost every possible emotion between.
But she didn’t let her attention linger because none of them were Riley.
She pushed a little harder, forcing her psychic attention through the mental noise of the assembled trainees. Finally, she brushed a familiar mind.
Yes. It was Riley. And he was—
“Shit!”
Rainer, who’d been getting the squad lined up, turned. “What’s wrong?”
“Riley. He’s gone into that burning barracks.”
“What? Why?”
“No idea.” Kira glanced around for any of the instructors but saw none. Wait—was this another exercise?
She shoved the thought away. Whether it was or wasn’t didn’t matter. “Rainer, you’re in command. Keep the squad here.”
“Kira!”
But she ignored Rainer and took off at a run, hurrying toward the conflagration.
Kira shielded her face from the wall of heat emanating from the burning barracks, the roar of flame tearing through holes seared in the roof. Around her, the fire came alive, leaping from windows and doors like a beast that could never be fed enough, a furnace glow suffusing everything from ground to sky. She reached the door at the end of the barracks not yet engulfed in fire; turning at an angle to deflect some of the painful heat, she peered inside. She saw fire, nothing else—
No. There. Movement.
Someone was walking out of the flames with ponderous, halting steps. Part of it was the weight of the body they carried, but there was more than that. Kira could see the flames dying around the trudging figure, then flaring up again in their wake.
It was Riley. He was carrying someone out of the burning building, using his abilities as a Scorch to suppress the flames as he went. But Kira could tell he was struggling, faltering against the sheer wash of heat. She reached out with her mind, touching his, finding a grim, fatalistic determination.
But it wasn’t going to be enough.
Between wielding his talents as a Scorch, the effects of the fire, and the weight of the unconscious figure he lugged toward safety, Riley was going to fall short of making it back to the door. His stamina, both mental and physical, was going to fail, and he’d lose control of the magical effect he’d crafted around himself. When that happened, he too would be incinerated, just another victim of the pitiless flames.
Kira sucked in a breath of cooler night air, then stepped into the barracks, her face a grim slate of determination. In silent resolve, she crouched, moved as far inside as she could without wilting, and began to Join with Riley, lending her power to him like a psychic buttress.
Riley’s head, which had been starting to loll, snapped up. He made eye contact with Kira, gave her a grim nod, then plodded forward.
Five meters. Stumble. Four. Stumble, cough, slouch—then two meters, Kira reached to him out of instinct—
Without warning, the floor beneath Riley gave way in a spectacular holocaust of shattering lumber and roaring flame. His ability to suppress the fire, as impressive as it was, would not repair damaged structure or charred wood. Beneath the barracks was a crawlspace some three feet high; Riley plunged into it, somehow managing to keep his grip on the person he was carrying, and even kept up his containment of the fire. If Kira hadn’t been here ment
ally reinforcing him, that would have been it. And it might still be, because while Riley was able to heave the unconscious body up onto the still-intact floor, he remained stuck in the hole that had opened beneath him, unable to climb out.
She could read his frantic thoughts, like hands beating at a locked door. Riley was on the edge of collapse himself, his power frayed to a thread.
Kira, take her, get her out of here, go!
Kira forced herself forward. It was like pushing against a gale of heat that was reddening her skin, searing her hair, and making her uniform smolder. She would be able to save the unconscious woman or Riley, but not both, because if she tried, then all three of them would likely die.
And now it was her memory of Fielder’s voice that thundered through her mind.
. . . we can’t compromise what truly matters: the mission. Whatever objective we’ve been given, it takes absolute priority over everything else. The mission is the only thing that matters . . .
Kira suddenly understood that bleak place inside Fielder. It was a place where he’d had to face this very truth—that sometimes to accomplish something, people had to die, and there was nothing you could do about it.
Kira grabbed the unconscious woman and dragged her back from the hole. As she did, all she could think was, I’m sorry, Riley, I’m so sorry.
Between one heartbeat and the next, the fire vanished. Kira heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Narvez, wreathed in power, striding into the barracks. Narvez stopped a few paces away from Kira, and now more figures rushed around her. It was her own squad, led by Rainer. Strong hands grabbed her, grabbed the unconscious woman, grabbed Riley and dragged him out of the hole. There were shouts and more hands and a hopeful they’re alive, but then the heat faded, soon replaced by the soft cool of night as Kira was carried out of the fire ravaged barracks and into the care of waiting medics. She heard Riley whimper next to her but couldn’t turn to see him. There was a universe of pain in his simple noise. Animalistic. Raw. And yet, he fought to breathe, his single ragged inhalation marked with another bark of agony.
As Kira began to cough, she felt tears streaking her face and told herself it was relief. Not fear. Not weakness. The fire had awakened a kind of primal fear that she never wanted to feel again, and as she turned her head and coughed in a violent spasm, Kira Wixcombe gave thanks to whoever was listening.
It was not her time. And she was glad of it.
7
Thorn shuffled down the ramp, toward the forward airlock of the Janus. The angled corridor was jammed with people, the whole throng moving slowly forward in a thick silence he could only describe as defeated.
He wondered if any of the other evacuees boarding the Janus felt as defeated as he did.
Probably not. He’d been asked to save Code Gauntlet and had to admit he couldn’t. The taste of that admission stuck to his tongue like ashes, a constant reminder that for all his power, Thorn was a vessel that had limited resources. He could fail. Admitting as much felt like a betrayal of the boy who’d fought his way out of the orphanage, and the sensation was nothing Thorn wanted to know again.
Glumly, Thorn took stock of the people around him. At least they were going to survive. The grim truth was that the available lift capacity fell far short of what was needed to evacuate the FOB. Even with the Janus and the other available ships jammed as full as their life-support systems would allow, some 500 personnel were going to die when that rock hit. They couldn’t even just try to find shelter on the planet’s surface; that large a mass, traveling that fast, would deliver enough energy to utterly devastate most of the near-side hemisphere.
Commodore Scoville had summoned Thorn specifically to the CIC in the hopes that he could do something, anything, with his magic to stop or deflect the titanic, incoming projectile. But there’d been nothing. The hunk of rock was simply too massive. He’d played it out over and over and in his head; even if he could somehow dig deep enough to actually affect the rock’s trajectory, the force he’d have to apply to overcome its inertia in any meaningful way would probably just shatter it, making matters worse. The Nyctus apparently had some way to overcome that, being able to quickly accelerate masses to high velocities without destroying them. They’d shown it during their attack on the Centurion and her cohorts, but he had absolutely no idea how.
“Hey, watch your feet—oh, um, sir.”
Thorn snapped his awareness back to the moment, focusing on the voice. A Senior Rating just ahead of him turned to bathe him with an expression caught somewhere between pissed off and deferential. Thorn apologized. The downward slope of the ramp tended to push everyone forward, causing Thorn to step on the man’s foot.
The Rating turned away and resumed his show shuffle downslope along with everyone else.
Downslope. A ramp. They were on a ramp—
Tumblers clicked, and Thorn felt the problems of mass and velocity and distance fall away, replaced by the elegance of possibility.
Married, of course to his power, which flickered to life in him like a battery given a fresh charge.
“Sir? You okay? The line’s moving.”
This time, the voice came from behind him. Thorn once more came back to the here-and-now and looked back. A Petty Officer glared at him. Indeed, he was blocking traffic, a rock in the stream of humanity.
Again, he muttered an apology. This time, he had to look up into the Petty Officer’s eyes, since she was standing upslope and, therefore, slightly above him—
And there it was. This last thought, such a small detail, but then small details could be combined for large solutions.
Thorn began pushing his way back uphill, into Code Gauntlet, apologizing to everyone he had to muscle by as he worked his way against the crowd. He reached a checkpoint manned by a pair of dour security personnel in imposing body armor.
“Sir,” one of them said, holding up a hand. “I’m going to have to ask you to go the other way.”
“I need to get back to the CIC,” Thorn said.
The man shook his head. “No can do, sir. Orders are to keep the evac going.”
Thorn stepped forward, flickers of power tickling the edges of his mind. He didn’t want to use magic to get past the checkpoint, but he would if he had to. “Listen,” he snapped, as other personnel shuffled past. “I might have a way of saving this place and everyone who’s going to die when that rock hits because we can’t evac them.”
The man, a Senior Rating, exchanged a glance with his colleague, took in the Starcaster insignia on Thorn’s fatigues, then stepped aside.
“Give ’em hell, sir.”
Thorn made fist, feeling the energy building within him. “Hell is exactly what we’re going to deliver.”
He pushed on, back toward the CIC.
Scoville leveled a fierce glare at Thorn as he strode back into the CIC. “Stellers, we don’t have time for this.” He turned to motion a pair of burly men over, their uniforms straining over muscles. “Turn around and get to the Janus—"
“Sir,” Thorn said, picking his words carefully. “I can do it.”
“Do what? Save the world?” Scoville asked, his voice a bass growl.
The dozen people left in the CIC turned to look at Thorn with a mix of relief and suspicion. He suddenly felt vulnerable, as though he’d walked in naked waving a plan to save their lives, which he had, albeit while fully clothed.
Scoville’s expression barely changed, but he nodded once. Being decisive was as natural to him as breathing. “Alright, you’ve got thirty seconds, and then I’m calling security to carry your ass back to that ship.”
Thorn gave a terse nod. “Fair enough, sir.” He turned to the primary display, now showing the impactor noticeably closer to the FOB. “We can’t generate enough force to deflect that thing—at least not enough to make a difference without shattering it to pieces.”
“We know that. Get on with it.”
“Well, we’ve only been thinking about affecting the rock directly. But we
can’t. So what if we affect the universe itself? Instead of trying to use brute force to push on the rock, what if we distort space-time in the path ahead? As far as the rock’s concerned, it would still be traveling in a straight line. But if we curve space, we’d be tricking it—the way an Alcubierre drive basically fools nature into letting ships bypass the speed-of-light limit.”
“So, as far as the rock and rest of the universe is concerned, the rock is still obeying the laws of physics, even though it’s actually deflecting relative to us.”
“And misses us. At least, that’s the hope.”
Scoville narrowed his eyes. “Is this possible? I haven’t heard of Starcasters altering space-time itself. You must admit, the prospect of it sounds . . . exotic, at best, and dangerous no matter what.”
“Well, sir, that’s really kind of what we do all the time. When we make, say, fire, we’re essentially creating it out of nothing, which means we’re adding energy to the universe, so we’re violating conservation laws.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve been through the briefings.” Scoville shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. What does is, how would you do this?”
“We put a ship with an Alcubierre drive out in front of the rock, activate the drive, and use that to curve space ahead of it. The rock follows the curve like a kid on a slide and misses the planet.”
“There are probably a hundred problems with this, but I only need to give you one of them. That’s not how Alcubierre drives work, Stellers.”
Thorn nodded. “I know, sir. And that’s where I come in.”
Thorn had honestly expected Scoville to reject the idea. It was against any kind of naval doctrine, or even Starcaster practices, as far as Scoville was concerned, but he’d heard Thorn out, turned and looked at the CIC display for a moment, then turned back and simply said, “Do it.”
