by J. N. Chaney
“Sir. My mind is blown,” Mol said, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall. “Could you create a reality where I can get roaring drunk but never suffer a hangover?”
Thorn grinned, but Densmore didn’t.
“Actually, Wyant, he probably could. Or at least we have no reason to believe he couldn’t.”
Mol’s smile faded. “So, wait. Does that mean he could just create a reality where we’ve won the war and the Nyctus are, like, gone?”
“Maybe. Heluva jump, but maybe.”
Thorn looked from one to the other. “Okay, wait a second. If you’re going to ask me to start changing reality—”
“We’re not about to do any such thing,” Densmore said. “In fact, we don’t want you to make any more attempts to do that without express permission from Fleet Command. And that’s an order, from the Fleet Chief of Staff. I can get her on the comm and let her give it to you in person, if you’d like.”
Thorn shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Besides, I don’t know if I even could do it again. Safely, anyway.”
“That’s something we eventually need to find out. For the time being, though, the potential ramifications are an undiscovered country, as it were. The Hecate’s Chief Engineer said that while you were doing your thing, the ship’s Alcubierre drive was absolutely functioning normally. He couldn’t get over the fact that once you changed reality, the drive was quite happily doing something it was never designed to do. Hell, no one’s even done the math or engineering needed to build a drive that could do that. And yet, it was perfectly content, just humming along.”
“So what’s the problem?” Thorn asked.
“Well, first, the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive now doesn’t function at all. There seems to be a residual magic effect that’s confusing it, for lack of a better word. It simultaneously works one way, but also the other. And the two just aren’t compatible.”
“What about the rest of the ship’s systems?” Thorn asked, alarm in his tone. “And the crew?”
“All perfectly fine,” Densmore replied, raising a hand. “In your alternative reality, the only thing that was different was the drive. Everything else remained the same.”
“But if he had created a reality where, say, people didn’t get hung over—” Mol began, but Densmore cut her off.
“We don’t know. We’re not even sure if we can know. So this particular type of magic is now forbidden and has been assigned the highest possible security classification. And that means both of you are bound by that. Are we understood?”
Thorn and Mol both nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Anyway, the Hecate’s being refitted with a new Alcubierre drive. The old one is being pulled, so it can be studied. But that’s only part of what we want to do, and that brings me back to that deep reading of you we want to do.”
Thorn narrowed his eyes. “Does this mean you’re pulling me off the front?” Although the idea of being pulled back to more civilized surroundings had a definite appeal, the idea of being taken away from the action to be “studied,” did not.
Densmore shook her head. “We don’t have that luxury. Reality-bending aside, you’re just far too valuable an asset to tie up in being tested and scanned in some far-off research facility. We need you on the front lines, fighting the war. More so than ever, in fact.”
Thorn titled his head, curious. “What does that mean?”
“Just as I arrived here, I received intelligence that the Nyctus have started conducting raids into our territory. In some cases, pretty deep into our territory. They seem to be trying to return the favor of the forays you two made into their space. So, as soon as the Hecate is online, you’ll work aboard her on dealing with that little problem. Oh, and Wyant and her Gyrfalcon are being reassigned from the Apollo to the Hecate to help out, since you two seem to make such a damned fine team.”
Mol straightened. “Ma’am? Does Captain Samuels know about this?”
“He does, and so does the Hecate’s Captain, Tanner.” She looked back at Thorn. “We were actually going to deploy you immediately, aboard the Janus, but Tanner put up one hell of a fight to keep you aboard his ship. You seem to have impressed him, and that’s no easy feat. Tanner has a reputation for chewing through subordinates like I eat bacon. Something about high standards, and you apparently meeting them, I guess.”
Densmore stepped back from the bed. “Regardless, the Doctor wants to keep you for the rest of the day for observation and, if nothing changes, discharge you tonight. Your first stop when you get out of here will be aboard the Hecate. I’ll meet you in her witchport, and we’ll get to work on properly debriefing you.”
“No rest for the wicked, ma’am?” Thorn said.
“Or the dead,” she replied, then turned and started to walk away.
“Ma’am? Dead?”
She stopped. “Oh, did I forget to mention that you were clinically dead after your reality fiddling?”
“I—what? Dead?”
“No heartbeat, no brain activity. Dead. Finished. So, if you needed any more incentive to not try doing that again, well, there you go.” She smiled sweetly, then turned and walked away.
Thorn looked at Mol. “Well, shit. So I was dead.”
Mol just shrugged. “You got better.”
10
When Thorn first swung his feet out of bed, he expected to need time afterward to recover. After all, he’d been dead, a condition which he assumed came with some kind of hangover. Mol had been on hand with the medical staff to help him, all of them holding out ready hands to catch him if he fell.
Except, he felt fine. Not a flicker of dizziness, a hint of watery weakness in his legs—nothing. He might as well have just gotten up after a normal night’s sleep.
“I don’t know if I find that worrying or not,” Dr. Al-Nouri said, her dark eyes focused again on Thorn’s pupils as she swung her little flashlight back and forth. Finally, she shrugged, then snapped the light off and put it away. “You seem healthier than I am, which is pretty amazing for someone who was, ah, dead.”
Mol smirked, again muttering, “But he got better.”
Dr. Al-Nouri smiled. “He did. Completely.”
“So I gather that’s unusual?” Thorn asked.
Her smile faded a bit. “I’ve had lots of patients die. That’s the reality of being a military doctor during a war. I’ve had a few that we managed to pull back from the very brink, and one I can remember that entered a state of being clinically dead, but who we were able to revive. Those last few required weeks of care and therapy, and none of them were the same afterward.” Al-Nouri stuck her hands in the pockets of her white smock. “And then there’s you, Specialist. You’re”—she paused, hunting for a word, finally finding on—“different. That’s all I can say. You’re different.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that pretty much all my life, Doc,” Thorn said, smiling back at her. “So, am I clear to go?”
Al-Nouri gestured to the door out of the ward. “Any time. Your uniform and personal effects are in that locker; it’s keyed to your thumbprint. I do want to see you back here at, let’s say, seventeen hundred for some follow-up. I want to make sure this isn’t all temporary and you’re really just going to keel over again.”
Thorn thanked her, retrieved his clothes, then drew the curtain and kicked Mol out from behind it as he got dressed.
“You never struck me as the bashful type, sir,” Mol said. Thorn could hear the grin in her voice.
“The planet isn’t ready for my treasures, Mol. I’m doing this for your own good.”
She laughed. “I was going to say whatever, I’ve showered with lots of guys. Doubt I’d see anything new. And if I did, I’d shoot it.”
Thorn grinned as he fastened his uniform shirt. “Easy, big shooter.” He tapped the curtain. “And thank you for your service in protecting me from her aim.”
When he’d gathered and stowed his effects and signed about 400 different discharge documents, he and
Mol headed for their first stop—the CIC. She’d been instructed to bring him straight there.
As they made their way through the FOB, Thorn was subjected to a barrage of smiles, offered handshakes, and general gratitude. On top of the routine salutes from the enlisted personnel, it all actually started to wear on him, but Mol leaned in and spoke to him in a low voice.
“The war’s become a grind. Heroes are few and far between. I say enjoy it while it lasts.”
She was right, of course. Thorn didn’t particularly crave personal glory, but he had elevated the profile of, and goodwill toward, Starcasters in general. So he kept his own smile in place and just returned the nods and handshakes, and acknowledged the well-wishes and gratitude. By the time they arrived at the CIC, his cheeks ached.
“I feel like a Greek general,” he muttered.
“No, you don’t. They’re all dead,” Mol said with a snort.
He braced himself as the door slid open. He’d expected something surprise party-like, some massive outpouring of gratitude and acclaim from the CIC staff. Thorn wasn’t looking forward to it, he realized, but as Mol said, he should ride it while it carried him. So, taking a breath, he stepped into the CIC.
A few faces turned away from consoles to look at him, and he got a few smiles and a thumbs-up. And that was it.
“Get your ass over here,” a voice he recognized snapped. It was Commodore Scoville, standing in exactly the same place Thorn had last seen him before he’d departed on his desperate mission to save Code Gauntlet.
He probably hasn’t even moved from there, Thorn thought. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d installed him in the CIC when it was being built.
“Yes, sir,” he said, wending his way through the consoles in the “snake pit,” which was the name given to the CIC’s lower level. Scoville stood in “the pulpit,” the higher command-level.
He stopped and saluted Scoville. Mol hung a few paces back. Thorn noticed that Scoville wasn’t alone; Captain Tanner, CO of the Hecate, stood nearby.
Scoville returned the salute, then shoved out his hand like it was a drill movement. Thorn took it, and the gruff Commodore shook it three times, then released it.
“Well done.”
And that was that.
“The FOB Commander passes on his own sincere thanks. He’d be here himself, except he’s off-world—meetings back at Fleet Command.”
“Understood, sir.”
Tanner stepped forward. His attitude, likewise professional, was a little more relaxed than Scoville’s. “Echoing the Commodore, here.” He shook Thorn’s hand. “That was damned good work, Lieutenant.” He gave a thin smile. “Have to admit, had some misgivings about it all when we pulled up to that rock.”
“You and me both, sir.”
“You might want to go and speak to the Chief Engineer. I think he’s both pissed and grateful about what you did.”
“Sir?” Thorn raised his brows, curious.
“He’s pissed because you broke his Alcubierre drive. Grateful because he gets a new one, and a later model at that, that he can tinker with.”
“A mixed message, I guess. I’ll proceed with care when I see the good engineer.”
“Which brings us to the business at hand,” Scoville said, gesturing to the main tactical display. It was zoomed a long way out, depicting most of human space, the Zone, and the nearest edge of Nyctus-controlled space. The usual array of friendly blue icons and red enemy ones were spattered across it, but what caught Thorn’s eye were the smattering of red icons inside human space. Some of them had penetrated quite deep.
“I heard that the squids were raiding us,” Thorn said. “I didn’t realize it was that volume of incursions, or that far inside our territory.” As he was speaking, a flicker of dread ignited in his gut and he sought out Code Nebula, where Kira was still undergoing her upgrade training. He found it free of red icons, causing the embers of anxiety to die again.
Scoville crossed his arms. “Indeed. It appears that the Nyctus are trying to accomplish several things with these raids. They seem to be testing the integrity of our line to intrusion—a troubling ploy—so we’re taking some measures to deal with that. They’re also testing our response times, methods, and from where we send help. And, they seem to be trying to gather intel. A few of the raids have made off with equipment—a few worrisome items, but nothing really critical.” He narrowed his eyes. “Some people, too. We don’t have the full picture yet, and we’re still trying to confirm who they managed to grab, but we’ve got preliminary reports from these sites that people have gone missing.”
He nodded to a Rating at a nearby console. The image changed, highlighting a half-dozen of the intruding enemy icons.
“These are all locations with personnel missing after a raid. We haven’t yet confirmed if they were snatched or are just dead, and we simply haven’t recovered their remains—although, in some cases, we had KEW impacts, so there might not be any remains,” Scoville said.
Thorn studied the map, and his dream returned: violent, intense, unwelcome.
Kira, screaming for eternity—
“Lieutenant?”
Thorn jumped and turned to find Scoville, Tanner, and Mol all staring at him, brows furrowed in concern.
He blinked. “Sir?”
“You went stock still for about five seconds,” Scoville said. “Didn’t respond to me at all, like you were frozen or something. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Maybe you should be back in the infirmary—” Tanner started, but Thorn held up a hand.
“Sorry, sir. I’m fine. I was just remembering a . . . a memory, or a dream, sort of, while I was out. Was having it when I came to, in fact.” Thorn winced at the term. Even to him, dream sounded like the exact opposite of what they needed—strategy and tactics.
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give the tiniest shit about someone’s dreams,” Scoville replied, “but given the circumstances, and who you are, is it something we should be aware of?”
“I—” Thorn started, then hesitated. He didn’t think it was important to the greater strategic picture, but the simple fact that he hesitated rang an alarm in the deepest part of his awareness.
He shook his head. “I doubt it, sir. It’s more a personal matter.”
Scoville scowled. “This is definitely a whole new ON, thanks to this magical—and don’t take this the wrong way, Lieutenant—bullshit. Can’t believe I was genuinely concerned about what someone was dreaming. We have to adapt or die off, I think.”
“Who does, sir?” Thorn asked.
Scoville pointed to himself. “People like me. There are two kinds of officers, or there will be—trained before magic was real, and after. The choice isn’t easy to accept, but it isn’t really a choice, either. I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t use what I’m given to win, and for now, that means you. That means magic, a word I considered to be mere fantasy a few years ago.”
“I understand, sir,” Thorn said, and he did. He turned to regard the map and found his attention pulled to Code Nebula. The nearest Nyctus raid was almost seven light-years away, on a planet Thorn didn’t even recognize; the map simply referred to it as a navigation waypoint. So there must have been a nav beacon there. But Code Nebula itself—
—a shrill, piercing scream of pain and terror—
—was entirely in the clear.
“Any observations, Lieutenant?” Scoville asked.
Thorn shook his head. “Sorry, sir, none. If there’s a pattern to these Nyctus raids, I don’t see it.”
“You, and the rest of our intel and ops people.”
—piercing scream—
A sudden flicker of—something. It was a thought, but an elusive one, like a dust mote drifting by and only caught out of the corner of his eye.
Then it was gone.
A surge of anger hit Thorn. The triumph he’d felt over saving Code Gauntlet drained away, leaving a hollow space inside him. Saving the FOB had been a tremendous achievement, but only in t
he sense that he’d stopped the Nyctus from gaining a huge, strategic advantage, at least in the nearby sectors. It hadn’t advanced the ON’s position, or helped the Fleet regain the operational initiative. It was just plugging a hole in a dam, without taking on the rising waters on the other side of it, which was the true problem.
The Nyctus, on the other hand, were still bringing the war to them, in the form of these damned raids.
“We need to strike back,” Thorn said. “Same method, same targets. No quarter given.”
“Say again, Lieutenant?” Scoville said.
Thorn spun around. “We need to raid the bastards in kind. Even if we can’t go for general fleet engagements—at least, not until we get that dust problem sorted out—we can still go back to doing what Mol and I were doing before I was reassigned to the Hecate.” He stabbed a finger back at the map. “They’ve taken some of the initiative back, sir. We can’t let them keep it.”
Scoville actually smiled. Thorn wondered if it might damage his face.
“You’re singing our song, Lieutenant. In fact, that’s why you’re here—well, aside from congratulating you for saving our collective asses. I’ve just informed Captain Tanner that the Hecate, once she’s back underway, is going to be detached from regular fleet duties and assigned to special ops. Wyant here is being transferred aboard her, with her Gyrfalcon, and then the whole lot of you are going to be dispatched into Nyctus space to, as you put it, raid them right back.”
Thorn stared for a moment. For some reason, he’d expected resistance, a list of reasons why the ON couldn’t conduct raids against the Nyctus right now. He finally settled on a terse nod, but internally, he cheered.
“Outstanding, sir. When do we leave?”
“When the Hecate can go FTL again,” Tanner said. “Unless you want our grandchildren to celebrate the one and only raid we might manage, while we do a crawl between the stars.”
“And that’s going to take a few days,” Scoville said. “In the meantime, you’re to report to the Infirmary twice a day for a check-up. And, when you’re done here, you’re to meet with Captain Densmore. She, incidentally, will be overseeing the Hecate’s mission, among others, as senior Spec Ops officer.”
