Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  While Mol reoriented the fighter onto a closing trajectory with the Hecate, Tanner engaged the damaged corvettes, finishing both off with missile and rail gun fire. The Draco and her patrol arrived shortly after, her Captain bitching that they’d missed the fun.

  Thorn smiled, but it was a distant thing. While Mol brought them back aboard the Hecate, he could only think of Kira’s desolate scream.

  This time, it hadn’t been a dream.

  13

  Thorn sat in the Hecate’s witchport and watched the repeater showing the tactical display. The ship glided past a screen of scanner buoys and picket ships now standing well off from Code Gauntlet, forming an essentially impenetrable early warning network. There’d been no indication that the Nyctus would try to fling another enormous impactor at the FOB, or that they even could do it a second time, but the Commander and his senior staff were taking no chances. If the squids did try it again, they’d find the FOB’s QRF—quick reaction force—in their faces almost immediately.

  And with them would be the ’casters, their magical reserves full.

  After a few traffic control delays, the Hecate finally slid into her assigned berth in the orbital docking platform locked in geosynchronous orbit high above the ground-based FOB. She was capable of entering atmo, and there were facilities planet-side to handle a ship of her class, but the FOB Commander had decided to keep anything bigger than a corvette either docked at the orbital platform, or in a parking orbit. The skies above Code Gauntlet were crowded, with ships and traffic control engaged in a complex dance that never ended.

  But Thorn saw the wisdom in it; ships could get underway far more readily if they were already in space and didn’t have to claw their way out of a gravity well. In terms of reaction time, the rewards far outweighed any risks.

  As soon as he could depart the Hecate, Thorn headed for a common comm terminal, one not restricted to classified, military traffic. There was a bank of them in the main concourse of the orbital dockyard—and all of them were out of service. Thorn cursed. Possibly shitty maintenance but more likely there was an upcoming op and all non-essential comms had been shut down to prevent leaks, inadvertent or deliberate. There’d been much discussion about the latter; it seemed inconceivable that any human could ever help the squids, but who knew? Soldiers were people, and people were more than capable of doing stupid things, for even stupider reasons.

  Thorn activated his personal comm. “Captain Tanner, Lieutenant Stellers here.”

  “Go ahead, Stellers.”

  “Permission to go planetside, sir? I have to send an urgent personal message, and all the comms up here are shut down. I should be able to go to the comm center in the FOB and at least get something into the queue for transmission.”

  “Sorry, Stellers. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d say yes, you’ve certainly earned that kind of latitude. But I was just going to recall you to the Hecate. Captain Densmore is here, and she wants to meet with us—and last time I checked, us would include you.”

  Thorn deflated, angered by the dead comms before him. “Aye, sir. I’ll be back shortly.”

  “Make it quick, Lieutenant. Densmore seems to have something urgent to discuss.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Kira, I’m still listening.

  Thorn settled into the crash couch at the Hecate’s helm. He had only the vaguest idea of how to pilot the destroyer, and absolutely no experience doing so, aside from a single, half-hour simulator run Tanner required of all of his officers. It was the most emergency of emergency training; if Thorn had to fly the Hecate, then things had already gone terribly wrong.

  Today, though, he just wanted a comfortable seat. Tanner had dismissed everyone from the bridge except for himself, Thorn, and Mol. Densmore stood at the main tactical viewer, which depicted a star chart encompassing the FOB on its far right edge, Nyctus space off to the left, and the Zone sprawled between.

  Without preamble, Densmore spoke. “We’ve lucked into what can only be described as a fantastic opportunity.” She tapped an icon about halfway into the Zone, and the view zoomed in to a single star, surrounded by five planets—a massive gas-giant, two smaller ice giants, and two rocky planets, one of which orbited in the star’s habitable zone.

  She pointed at the last. “We’ve learned that a Nyctus ship has crashed on this planet. It apparently had enough control on the way through atmo, though, to come down more or less intact.”

  “And how do we know that?” Tanner asked.

  Densmore zoomed in again, this time on the planet. The northern hemisphere was mostly water, with a few sprawling archipelagoes. The southern hemisphere was an entirely different setting, covered by an enormous continent that was bisected by a massive mountain range. The rugged peaks soared to dizzying heights, and several mountains were volcanically active. The continental interior stretched away, brown and parched, hidden from the rain shadow of the mountains, while the coastal regions were lush with belts of verdant forests. Here and there, a fan of delta announced the end of a wide, lazy river, and in one circular bay, a soaring volcano huddled, quiescent and slowly being eroded by the ocean currents.

  She pointed at another icon that had appeared near the landward edge of one of the rainforests—a green one, meaning something neutral. “There’s a commercial mining facility here. Evacuated not long after the war began, but the miners left the scanners and other automated systems running. Now, this isn’t military grade hardware by any means, but remote telemetry shows that it still detected the Nyctus ship as it came down.”

  She popped open a window, split between a blurred and grainy image of a delta-shaped ship framed between two mountain peaks; it trailed smoke and a few specks of debris. Beside it was the scanner track of the ship, from the moment it entered the mining facility’s view, to its disappearance in surface-clutter about thirty klicks to the north and west.

  “It seems to have crashed in this area, here,” Densmore said, gesturing to a circular area about two klicks across at the end of the track. “Now, the miners might not have had the greatest airspace scanners, but when it comes to ground sensors, seismic systems, that sort of thing, well, we’ve got nothing like it. They recorded very little energy from the touchdown—almost none at all, in fact. That suggests more of a controlled crash landing than an actual impact.”

  Tanner rested his elbows on the arms of his command seat and steepled his fingers. “Okay, so a more or less intact squid ship on the ground. Where did it come from? Do we know?”

  “There was a clash between a patrol led by the Fornax and a group of squid ships in that system a few weeks back. For once, we had the enemy entirely outgunned and a ’caster onboard to stop any psychic warfare. The Fornax reported that they managed to destroy all of the Nyctus vessels. It looks like one survived damaged, though, and managed to set down on this planet—which, incidentally, is called Ballard’s World, apparently after the prospector who first discovered the ore deposits there.”

  “Ted Rand took over the Fornax a few months ago, as Captain. Bastard keeps kicking my ass at racquetball. Looks like I can remind him—in a professional manner, of course, during a critical game point—that he let a squid ship get away,” Tanner said, smiling broadly.

  “By all means, Garret, taunt away. In the meantime, we seem to have a situation where the squids have lost track of one of their own ships. A golden opportunity, maybe,” Densmore said.

  Mol shrugged. “Damaged, comms out, drive out, the ships with it all destroyed, it makes sense they lost it. Probably assume it was destroyed, too.”

  “Which, as I said, gives us an opportunity. If we can seize that ship, we could get a treasure trove of intel—squid tech, propulsion, power, weapons—hell, maybe even some insight into their magic.”

  Thorn, who’d been simply listening with interest, spoke up. “Why do I sense there’s a but hanging on the end of all this, ma’am?”

  Densmore smiled, but it was entirely humorless. “Because there is. The original
plan was to send a small recon team to check it out and report back as to whether there was anything worth recovering. For reasons even I don’t understand, that mission was scrubbed and the whole op fell off the must-do list and onto the should-do-if-we-can list. But then this happened.”

  She touched the screen, and another window opened. This one was a video feed from what seemed to be a security camera. It showed a compound of rough, industrial-looking buildings, with a high wall around it that was topped with wicked-looking razor wire.

  “That looks awfully secure for a mining setup,” Tanner said. “Something you’re not telling us here, Alys? Like, this wasn’t just a mining op? There might have been some of your spooky stuff going on there?”

  “Even if there was, Garret, do you really think I’d say?”

  “Need to know,” Mol muttered, and Densmore nodded.

  “Damned right. But, to be honest, no—it really is just a mining op. The wall is up because there are apparently things living in the surrounding forest that would happily chow down on miners.”

  “Or recon teams,” Thorn said.

  Densmore nodded again. “Anyway, just watch.”

  She advanced the footage. For a moment, there was nothing, and then movement. A figure appeared on the right side of the screen and moved slowly left. The strange, humped shape and sinuous, jerky movement made it immediately clear that it wasn’t human.

  Thorn sat forward, his gaze fixed on the image. “That’s a squid.”

  “Indeed it is, Lieutenant Stellers. There was apparently at least one survivor of the crash. But that’s not all.”

  Even as she said it, the Nyctus reached the wall surrounding the compound. It paused at the bottom for a moment, then lifted into the air, drifted over the razor wire, and vanished from sight.

  Thorn stood up.

  “It’s a shaman.”

  Densmore cleared the various windows on the tactical viewer and turned back to Thorn and the others. “Now you see why this matter has moved back from the should-do pile to the must-do. That security imagery is from only three days ago—which means that there’s a squid shaman trapped, possibly alone, on a planet with no way to get off and without the rest of the Nyctus even knowing about it.”

  “All due respect, ma’am,” Thorn said, “but how do we know the Nyctus can’t use long-distance telepathic contact the way we can?”

  “We don’t. But if they do, either this shaman can’t do it, or something else is going on. Regardless, the Nyctus obviously haven’t come to the rescue of this poor bastard, at least not yet.”

  “So this squid shaman traveled at least thirty klicks through hostile terrain—where scary carnivorous things are apparently lurking—to come to this mining facility,” Mol said. “Why?”

  “To try to use the mining station’s comms,” Thorn said. “To make a call for help the old-fashioned way, with tech.”

  Tanner lifted an eyebrow. “Tech is the old-fashioned way?”

  Thorn shrugged. “Sorry, sir. For a ’caster—and possibly a shaman—it kind of is the old-fashioned way. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

  “Glad that anything labeled with the entirely not-specific term tech has your seal of approval, Stellers,” Tanner said, but with glint in his eye that hinted at him doing a bit of chain-yanking right now.

  “Anyway,” Densmore cut in, “the answer to that is, yes, Stellers is right. The squid broke into the comm-station and apparently tried to access the system to send out what we presume would be a distress message. It couldn’t bypass the security features, though—at least, so far. The mining station is also on the shore of a sizable lake; there were a hundred and twenty-five people living there, and that was their source of fresh water. And since the Nyctus are naturally aquatic—”

  “He’s moved right into the neighborhood,” Mol said.

  “Which means he’s going to keep trying to bust in the comm system,” Tanner added.

  Densmore nodded. “And we have to assume it will eventually succeed, which means we have a window of opportunity here, one that’s potentially pretty limited.”

  “I assume, ma’am, that this isn’t just a courtesy briefing you’re giving us here,” Thorn said.

  “You figured that out all on your own, Stellers?” She smiled again, with a little actual humor this time. “Formal orders will be delivered to Captain Tanner shortly. In summary, though, the Hecate is going to travel to Ballard’s World and deliver you to the surface. Your primary mission will be taking this shaman alive. The secondary mission is recovering as much intel as possible from the crashed Nyctus ship.”

  Thorn let his eyes close, briefly, as he processed the mission. “I appreciate how much faith you have in me, ma’am. I’m unsure about it doing this alone. Even one on one, a shaman might clip me if we’re fighting in a hostile landscape.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that. That’s why you’ll be accompanied by a spec ops team. They’ll be arriving here at Code Gauntlet tomorrow.” Densmore turned to Tanner. “As soon as they’re aboard, you’re to launch. The details of the op are otherwise up to you. I assume you’ll probably want Wyant here to take Stellers and the spec ops team down the surface.” She turned to Mol. “Your Gyrfalcon can carry extra passengers if it has to, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, up to eight, for short periods of time, and as long as everyone doesn’t mind getting really friendly.”

  “The spec ops team is six, and you’d only be carrying them down from orbit, so that works out perfectly.”

  “Uh, just one point,” Mol said. “The Gyrfalcon’s Alcubierre drive is still offline. We need to replace the power manifold, which we can’t properly do without a full workshop and probably two days of work. I haven’t even tried to book her into the FOB’s maintenance roster yet, since we just got here.”

  “Will she fly?”

  Mol nodded. “Well sure. She just can’t warp.”

  “Good enough,” Densmore said. “Like I said, formal orders will be transmitted shortly. So, if there aren’t any other immediate questions, I’ll let you all get to it.”

  She started to walk off the bridge, but on impulse, Thorn followed her. “Ma’am? A moment?”

  Densmore stopped, slowed, and waved him forward. “Walk and talk, Stellers. There’s somewhere I have to be.”

  “Thanks, ma’am.” He fell in beside Densmore as she made her way off the ship. “I’m hoping you can do me a favor.”

  She lifted an eyebrow at Thorn. “Favors imply a quid pro quo. Are you really sure you want to owe me something, Stellers?”

  Thorn surprised himself with an actual laugh. “Coming from anyone else, ma’am, that would sound strange. Coming from you, it’s a perfectly sensible question.”

  Densmore snorted, and it made her younger—for an instant. “I suspect there’s an insult buried in there somewhere, Stellers.” She ducked aside as a Rating struggled past, loaded with a stack of boxes. The Hecate would normally have taken at least two or three days to rearm, refuel, and resupply, but now they had less than a day, and Tanner seemed to already be getting his crew on top of the compressed timeline.

  Densmore moved back into place beside Thorn. “What would you like me to do, Specialist?”

  “Honestly, it’s a personal matter, ma’am. I’ve been trying to contact Kira, Lieutenant Wixcombe, at Code Nebula. She’s there—”

  “On upgrade training, I know. Doing pretty well from what I understand, too. Made leader of her squad.”

  “Oh.” Thorn, hesitated, digesting that. In a few words, he’d learned more about Kira than any inquiries of his own could ever manage. “Good. I—just, good. To my point, though, been trying to contact her, with no success. Regular comms are on lockdown.”

  “Security protocols are getting pretty tight, yes,” she said. “There are reasons for that”—she glanced at Thorn, a sly grin on her face—“that you don’t need to know.”

  Thorn bit back a curse of raw frustration. “Don’t you ever get tired of that,
ma’am?”

  “Absolutely not. If I don’t need to know something, then I don’t want to know it. That way, if there’s a leak or something gets compromised, it ain’t going to be me in the hotseat.”

  “Fair point,” Thorn replied. “Alright, I’ll get to it then. She’s not answering a telepathic contact. From me. There are two massive issues here, one being that Kira’s never frozen me out, and the second being that it isn’t just a lack of an answer. It’s dead air. Silence. As in, a black hole where her mental presence would be.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you. Understand you and she didn’t part on the happiest of terms when she left here.”

  They reached the airlock and stepped off the Hecate, into the FOB’s orbital station. The scenery changed, but the sense of bustle around them did not. Thorn stayed with Densmore as she walked along the main concourse. “Aside from the things you explicitly don’t need to know, ma’am, is there anything you don’t?”

  “As far as you’re concerned, Stellers, no, there isn’t.” But Densmore shrugged as she went on. “What’s the real issue here, Specialist? You and your friend were split up, and now she’s gone quiet, and, I might add, in the middle of intense training—"

  “It’s not just that, ma’am,” Thorn cut in, stopping mid-step. Densmore did the same, turning to face him, her face peering up with a febrile intensity that would make most people look away.

  Thorn did not.

  He lifted a hand and began making points, marking them on his fingers. “You might not place any value in dreams—hell, I’m not sure I do, or did, but I’m seeing Kira.”

  “Seeing?”

  “Yes. Vividly. In color. She’s screaming, and she’s in pain. Her voice echoes through my bones and it’s not because of some—look, I know I’m a ‘caster but I’m grounded in facts. I don’t think this is my psyche expressing some bullshit schoolboy crush because we were separated. It’s something else,” Thorn said.