Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Which is how Thorn now found himself ensconced in the snug darkness of the Hecate’s repaired witchport, rapidly closing on the impactor. Captain Tanner and the crew, working frantically, had been able to get her underway in just over an hour; fortunately, her refit hadn’t involved her propulsion systems or powerplant. She had no working point-defense, and her tactical sensor and fire-control systems were mostly offline, but she could fly. Tanner had been expecting the flight capability to revolve around evacuating the FOB, but Scoville had ordered him to help enact Thorn’s wildly improbable plan.

  Wildly improbable was all they had, though.

  “Stellers,” Tanner said over the intercom, his voice its usual, cool tenor. “We’re two minutes from reversing course. Once we flip over, Engineering is ready to fire up the Alcubierre drive like you’ve proposed, but I’ll warn you now, the Chief Engineer is having a conniption about what you plan to do to his ship.”

  “It’s not something I’d want to try out just for the hell of it, believe me, sir.”

  Thorn watched as the impactor swelled in the witchport’s transparent bubble. Ships normally avoided windows; they were a structural weakness that wasn’t justified when remote viewers were just as good—and actually better, because they could show images across the spectrum, and could be panned and tilted and zoomed. But ’casting worked better if Starcasters had a true and direct line-of-sight to whatever they were trying to affect, so the witchport was accepted as a necessary flaw in an otherwise smooth, unbroken hull.

  The impactor kept growing, filling more and more of the port. A hot flutter started in Thorn’s gut. The damned thing was so big—and his idea was so wildly unknown. The Hecate could probably have carried another hundred personnel to safety; the possibility that Thorn had condemned them to death was quite real.

  Thorn cleared that thought, as doubt was the enemy of all ‘casting. He focused instead on the glossy smoothness of his talisman, letting the familiar touch of cardboard against his fingertips ground him. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.

  An alarm sounded. The Hecate had started her reversal, flipping end-over-end. Thorn opened his eyes in time to see a looming wall of jagged rock filling his field of vision. A rugged horizon appeared, erratic against the stars, then it fell out of sight. And now it was Code Gauntlet that glided smoothly into view, a small, bright crescent, centered in the witchport as the Hecate finished her reversal. A thrumming vibration shook the deck under Thorn’s seat as her drive fired up, accelerating her back toward the FOB.

  Thorn could feel the massive rock now filling space just astern of the Hecate. The Helm had cut it close, but with a skill bordering on aplomb. The ship was exactly where Thorn wanted it to be, and with a lot less maneuvering than he’d expected. He had to remember to buy the Helm Officer a drink when this was all over.

  “Okay, Stellers,” Tanner said. “We’re working off your marks, now.”

  “Understood, sir. Stand by.”

  Thorn took another breath and let it trickle from his nose, centering himself on the union of flesh and talisman, fingers and book. He was about to try something he’d never attempted. Something that, as far as he knew, no one had ever attempted. He was essentially going to make up a whole new field of magic, and do it on the fly.

  But it was worth the risk, he told himself as he opened the witchport and let the raw nothing of space wash over him. The alternative was hundreds of ON personnel dying, and the loss of Code Gauntlet—the former a catastrophic tragedy, the latter a massive strategic setback for the ON, one that might set the war effort back to where it was before they’d pushed the Nyctus back.

  “Sir,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  “Engineering,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Stellers now has command.”

  There was enough hesitation in the reply to let Thorn know the Chief Engineer was not at all happy with what was about to be done to his ship.

  “Aye, sir. Ready when he is.”

  “Okay, Chief,” Thorn said. “Bring the Alcubierre drive online. On my mark, we’ll activate it as we discussed.”

  “Understood.”

  Scoville had been right. This was not how an Alcubierre drive was meant to work. The drive was supposed to warp space in a region around itself, turning it from a flat plain of space-time into a wave that would propagate in a direction determined by the ship’s nav inputs. The wave could then ripple along with no theoretical maximum speed; the fact that it carried a ship along with it was incidental. In its own frame of reference, the ship was entirely motionless and obeying the laws of relativistic physics. From an external frame of reference, though, the ship was whisked along at a speed only maxed out by the design, size, and power of the drive. Thorn didn’t get all the math and physics involved, but the fact that the ship was simultaneously both moving and not moving faster than light essentially somehow balanced, and the universe remained quite content, or at the minimum, permissive of their passing.

  Because of this, an Alcubierre drive was intended to essentially be either on or off, a fact made abundantly clear to him by the Hecate’s horrified Chief Engineer when he pitched the idea to Scoville and Tanner. In the end, though, the Chief had grudgingly admitted that the drive probably could be used to induce a much smaller distortion in space-time, albeit with unknown effects on the drive itself. Moreover, the conventional nav inputs wouldn’t work, meaning there would be no directional control.

  And that was where technology met magic.

  Thorn closed his eyes and let his awareness sink into his fingertips, where they pressed against his talisman.

  Awareness. That was the key. The Alcubierre drive was the means, but Thorn’s awareness was the intelligence that would guide it.

  His eyes still closed, Thorn simply said, “Okay, Chief.”

  He felt a slight, dislocating shudder and a brief flicker of nausea, the characteristic signature of the Alcubierre drive lighting up. But it abruptly vanished as the Chief locked the drive into its current state, distorting space to a far smaller degree that its design ever contemplated. It would—in theory, at least—cause the volume of space around the Hecate, and the massive impactor racing along just astern of her, to curve. Thorn could see the curvature. And he could see it clearly.

  The point of contact between his fingertips and his talisman swelled in his mind, becoming a firm anchor upon which he envisioned a particular version of reality where Alcubierre drives worked—

  Like this.

  Power began to emanate from that press of fingers on cardboard. The Alcubierre drive, powered up but given no nav inputs, began to twist and distort space randomly. But Thorn exerted his will, enforcing it through the power now pouring from his union with his talisman. The wild, random distortions suddenly converged into a smooth curve, a bend in space-time enabled by the drive and shaped by Thorn’s thoughts.

  But something was immediately wrong. Stress began building up in the impactor, force accumulating, straining its structure. The spatial distortion wasn’t big enough and didn’t entirely enclose the titanic rock, which meant part of it wanted to deflect, but other parts, protruding into normal, flat space, didn’t.

  “Chief,” he said. “You have to increase power to the drive.”

  “The drive’s unstable as it is,” the Chief Engineer shot back. “Applying more power’s going to—”

  “Chief . . . you have to.”

  “I’m not going to risk this ship,” the Chief said flatly. No emotion, no fear. Just a simple denial.

  “Do it,” Captain Tanner cut in. “Thorn has command. Follow his orders.”

  A reluctant “aye, sir” was the only response.

  The distortion expanded, fully encompassing the impactor. The accumulated stress dissipated. Thorn decided to let the sliver of awareness he’d kept on the impactor go, trusting that he’d done everything he could to get them here, and now just had to maintain it. He had to stay focused on the fact that Alcubierre drives distorted space only slightly
, just enough to induce a curved path that the Hecate and the impactor would now follow.

  And they did.

  Ship and rock both sailed smoothly on, traveling—from their perspective—in a perfectly straight line. The inertia of the impactor was now undisturbed; it quite happily raced through space as it had been all along, in perfect accordance with the simple laws of Newtonian motion. The fact that space itself was curved didn’t matter to it any more than the bends and turns in that child’s slide mattered to the kid plunging down it.

  “Well, holy shit,” Tanner said, his voice quiet. “This is actually working. Keep it up, Stellers.”

  Thorn dug even deeper. A fierce pounding started in his head, ringing rhythmically in his ears in time with his racing heartbeat. He was depleting his psychic resources far faster than he ever had; the flesh-talisman contact was an imperfect focus for his power, and the strain began to bear down on him, like rapidly mounting mental g-forces.

  But he couldn’t let up yet. Code Gauntlet wasn’t yet out of the line of fire.

  “Automatic drive cutoff in ten seconds,” the Chief Engineer said. “The safeties are going to engage—”

  “No . . . Chief . . . keep it online,” Thorn hissed.

  “Sorry, can’t—”

  “Chief,” Tanner said. “Bypass the safeties. Do not let that drive scram.”

  “But, sir—”

  “That’s an order, Chief.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the answer, laden with an unspoken fear. The Chief’s primary task was keeping the drive alive, and he was being ordered to run the most complex feat of human engineering with a different power source—that could scram the reactor and kill everyone in a flash of brilliant light. They wouldn’t even have time to mark the failure if Thorn lost control, and based on the Chief’s raw tone, he knew it.

  Thorn felt the end of his power.

  It approached, from a distance, and then he was in it, a searing burst of pain blooming through his head, caroming from eye to eye with an unearthly brilliance that made afterimages of red and black flicker behind the lids of his drooping eyes. His mouth flooded with saliva, and a wave of grey nausea swept over him. Desperately, he fought to keep the reality he’d shaped intact, to maintain the truth that this—not whatever came before, but now, in the moment, was how an Alcubierre drive worked.

  Thorn’s body buckled in a final spasm, and like that, he was done. There was no more left to give.

  “Stellers, you’ve done it. You can shut it all down,” Tanner said.

  Thorn opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He heard Tanner’s voice as though through a distant tunnel, the sounds distorted by distance and his own relentless pain.

  “Engineering, scram the drive. Helm, get us away from this rock. Medical, get to Stellers—”

  Thorn’s spine seized, arms out and hands drawn into claws. Every tendon howled, every muscle screamed, and he rose onto his toes as a long, unearthly roar of pain tore from his throat, spittle flying even as he collapsed.

  Limp, he slumped to the deck and knew nothing except the fading light of a place that existed only in his mind—and then the light faded, too, and behind it was only the dark.

  8

  Kira winced as she made her way along the infirmary ward. Her burns were mostly superficial and had been well-treated by the infirmary staff with sterile spray bandages. Still, they hurt like hell whenever she did anything to stretch or flex her seared skin.

  She shuffled around a partition curtain and reflected that, as bad as she’d been injured by the fire, she wasn’t as bad off as Riley. The poor guy had to suffer through recovering from much more severe burns, as well as lungs that had been inflamed by breathing hot smoke and gases. Still, he looked better by the day, his recovery remarkably fast, thanks to immediate medical attention that night and the diligent work of the infirmary staff since.

  He looked up Kira with bloodshot eyes. “Hey, squad leader,” he rasped. “How goes the healing?”

  Gillis sat with Riley, his young face knitted with concern for his best friend. Gillis was a Joiner, like Kira, and had buddied up with Riley on the first day, creating an inseparable friendship that the doctors thought would help in a long, painful recovery.

  Gillis nodded to Kira and smiled, the lines in his face softening, but only just.

  “You look better, Kira. Not as, um—well, sunburned,” Gillis said.

  She touched her hair, where a cowlick had formed when some of the strands burned away. “I’m just happy to breathe clean air. And I can live with the curl, for the time being.” She peered up at the offending hair, then smiled at Riley. “Base surgeon told me you’re good to head back for light duty in a few days. I never thought—I mean, he’s tough. Sorry to see him go back to duty so soon—"

  “There are light duties?” Riley asked, offering a watery grin.

  “There are. That’s what they’ve got me doing. Let’s see, I’ve shuffled a whole bunch of old papers around, folded about a thousand maps . . . oh, and straightened and re-bent about a million paper clips. It's an art form, but if you do it right, you can waste an entire day without leaving your chair.”

  “Really?” Riley asked.

  “I’m lying about the last one, but yeah, really. Light duties are boring. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I miss training with Fielder and Narvez and the others.”

  Kira had been consigned to the netherworld of so-called light duties while she recovered from her own injuries. It had left Rainer in command of the squad until Kira was cleared to resume regular duties. Kira desperately hoped that would be soon, because hanging around the orderly room doing odd jobs was driving her crazy.

  “Come on, Kira,” Gillis said. “You’d rather be out humping your ass across the landscape doing environmental magic? Seriously?”

  Kira smirked. Environmental magic was the sterile, bureaucratic euphemism the syllabus used to describe crawling through mud at zero-dark-thirty, in the rain, with maybe an hour of fragmented sleep in the last twenty-four, all while trying to create or maintain some specified magical effect.

  In other words, it sucked.

  However, Kira missed it. Or, rather, she missed being with her squad—and especially with Rainer, who’d become her fast friend as well as her 2ic.

  “Hey, Kira?”

  She looked at Riley. His eyes shone back from a puffy, reddened face, and he too would be dealing with unruly hair for the next two months or so. His was growing back, but even his scalp showed signs of burns.

  “Thank you,” he said, face falling into a morose pose. “If you hadn’t been there and done what you did—”

  “Stop. I mean, I’m glad I was there, but I’m even happier you’re here. It’s okay. It’s a shitty war with bad things, and I hope you would do the same for anyone,” Kira said.

  Riley gave a single nod, then winced. “I would, and I will.” He tried to adjust himself in the bed, failed, and only succeeded in making Gillis look like a worried mother. “You hear about Jaska? She didn’t make it.”

  “She was the source? Of the fire?” Kira asked. She knew it but sensed that Riley needed to process what he’d endured.

  “Scorches can lose control, and she . . . she did. She didn’t just light the barracks, she set herself on fire. Doc said she was dead before I went back in to find her.”

  “You did the right thing, Riley. Your instincts are dumb, but heroic. Don’t ever change that in you,” Kira said. “We need it. To survive, and maybe win this friggin’ war.”

  “I won’t. Not even sure I can,” he admitted.

  “Good,” Kira said, and the pause stretched as the lights hummed overhead. It was universally accepted that military hospitals will never have functioning lights, and if they don’t flicker or buzz, then you aren’t in a military hospital.

  “Hey, they got you sleeping in tents, I hear,” Riley said, breaking the gravid pause.

  Kira nodded. “Yeah. They had to put everyone who’d been in the ba
rracks that burned down into tents, so they decided that everyone would have to go into tents until a prefab was put together.” She shrugged, then immediately regretted it, wincing again at the pain that flashed through her tender skin. “It’s not so bad. Well, as long as this decent weather holds, anyway.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Gillis shot back. “I’m stuck in a tent with Rainer.”

  “What, does she snore?”

  “No, but she runs the tent like a freakin’ dictator.” He changed his voice to a shrill falsetto. “Straighten out your sleeping bag. Keep your laundry out of sight. Kick the muck off your boots before you come in here. We’re not animals.”

  “So, sounds like she doesn’t want to live like a slob?”

  Gillis rolled his eyes. “It’s like living with my mother all over again. They’re both real bi—”

  “Think carefully before you finish that sentence, Gillis,” Rainer said, popping around the privacy curtain. “Your survival may depend on the next words out of your mouth.”

  “Busy people. Busy. Always working hard, never resting.”

  Rainer narrowed her eyes, but smirked. “Nice save.”

  He shrugged. “You get the knack when you live with someone like my really busy mother.”

  Even Riley snickered. Kira raised an eyebrow at Rainer. “Speaking of busy, how come you aren’t? For that matter, how come you’re here in the first place, Gillis? Don’t you guys have, you know, a ON career to be pursuing right now? Or has everyone just decided to go AWOL?” Kira pinned Rainer with a stare, then lifted one brow.

  “Squad’s been stood down until sixteen hundred,” Rainer replied. “I’d like to think it’s a well-deserved break, but I’m sure that by sixteen-oh-one, we’ll be neck deep in shit. Meantime, the powers that be want to see you,” she said to Kira. “Narvez, Fielder, and some spooky guy I’ve never seen before are waiting for you in the Orderly Room.”