Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  She turned a circle so Mister Starman could see the fleeing bugs; he took it all in with his usual cheerful smile but had nothing to say about it. He wasn’t chatty. Just happy, and a good companion.

  The girl shrugged and broke back into a run, aiming for the cool shade under the sour-fruit trees at the edge of the orchard, their limbs drooping with dark green globes.

  Partway there, she stopped again and squinted up against the yellowish dazzle of the sun that was framed so perfectly in the cyan-blue of the sky. Of course, this was why she’d come outside in the first place as soon as breakfast was done. She shifted Mister Starman to one arm and raised the other, pointing with a small finger. Her eyes narrowed in the light, cheeks already pinking with the heat of a summer’s day.

  “Awwww.”

  No horse.

  Yesterday, there’d been a horse in the clouds, trotting slowly across the sky. She loved horses, even though there were none here on Nebo. There were hulking, smelly things called broad-backs that sometimes pulled the plows and wagons, but they were nothing like the ethereal horses.

  Since discovering them on the vid during learning-time, all she’d wanted to do was watch the sleek, beautiful creatures, with their intelligent brown eyes and their flowing manes and tails. It didn’t matter if they trotted or galloped or just stood still; the elegant creatures had utterly captivated her. That’s why seeing one in the clouds yesterday had been so exciting.

  Mister Starman hadn’t been with the girl, though. Mommy had insisted on cleaning him up, then leaving him to dry for the day. And now the beautiful horse in the clouds was gone, leaving the girl’s lips in a moue that began to fade as fast as it formed.

  She dropped her arm and frowned. Her black robe seemed eager to slurp up the heat of the mid-morning sun—a steamy heat, because it had rained only a little while ago on top of the dew, and now the air felt the same way it did in the bathroom when the shower was running. Her frown fell away as she looked around for some sort of relief that didn’t mean going back inside. Learning time would start right after lunch, so she only had until then to—

  She wasn’t sure what. She’d come outside to see the sky horse, but it had trotted on to—somewhere else, beyond her limited horizons.

  “I’m hot, Mister Starman,” she said, careful with her s sounds. “Are you hot, too?”

  He didn’t reply and just kept smiling, but the girl thought she saw a glimmer of sweat forming on his fabric brow.

  “Yeah, you are. Let’s, uh . . .”

  She looked around but stopped when she faced the sour-pod orchard that sprawled off behind the house. The shade beneath the leafy trees looked so cool and inviting.

  “Let’s go there!”

  She bounced off, skirting the grav tractor with a broken strut, reaching the shady gloom and stopping again to take her bearings. The air under the trees still had a thick, sultry heat to it, but without the glare of the sun it seemed cooler. At least, cool enough to stand, take stock, and find a good place to sit. The girl was too young to have a schedule, so selecting a tree to lean against would be one of the most important events of her day.

  Settling back against the rough bark of a sour-pod tree on the edge of the orchard, the sky was still visible, spreading away in an endless dome of blue.

  “Hope the horse comes back,” she said, eyes wide and round.

  She kicked off her shoes, then wiggled her toes and settled herself in. She sat Mister Starman on her lap, his back against her chest, and peered closely at the doll when she saw one of the patches on his shirt had started to come free, loose threads dangling. The patches had symbols on them, and words she couldn’t actually read, but she knew what they said anyway. Daddy had told her.

  “That says Orbital,” he’d told her, one calloused finger pointing at the first word. “And this one says Navy.” He moved his finger back to the first word, then traced both as he spoke. “Orbital Navy.”

  “Ortib—”

  He smiled. “Orbital.”

  “Orbit—al.”

  She’d eventually gotten it, even if she didn’t know what the words themselves meant. It didn’t matter, though, because Mister Starman did. He knew all about Orbital Navy, and lots of other things, too.

  But not horses. She had to tell him all about horses.

  Sighing, she looked back up at the sky, still unhappily free of dancing horses. There was a cloud that looked like a bunny, and another like some kind of spiny thing, maybe a jawfish, like the ones that made it so you couldn’t swim, except where mummy and daddy said it was safe? Uncertainty pulled at her tiny brow as she watched the clouds bloom, their edges swirling and dancing as a hidden wind began to pull hard, high above.

  Then something did appear, and it was no horse.

  It was a hard, fierce point of light, so bright it hurt to look at. It was like a little piece of the sun had broken away and now streaked across the sky. The sun shard left a glowing trail behind it, but it was utterly silent.

  “What’s that, Mister Starman?”

  He didn’t seem to know.

  A huge bang walloped her, like a blast of thunder. The girl jumped and looked around, heart pounding, suddenly breathless with confusion.

  “What’s that?” she asked, but Mister Starman had no answers.

  The dazzling mote of light fell across the sky, toward the horizon. A steady, rumbling thunder seemed to follow it. The light touched the distant hills and vanished—

  Then the entire sky in that direction lit up, as though from a tremendous flash of lightning in the late summer storms. The girl winced at the glare, instincts humming in her little body.

  No, she thought. No, no. This isn’t right. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Pieces of the sun didn’t break off. Thunder and lightning didn’t come from a sunny, empty sky.

  Mister Starman agreed. He showed it by starting to glow a soft, shimmering blue. He did that sometimes, when she wanted to change things. To make them just so.

  Another piece broke off the sun. Then another. The girl shook her head. No. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it worked. Pieces didn’t break off from the sun.

  The bluish glow swelled, filling the air around her like a pool, outward, slipping, spilling, pouring over grass and broken grav-tractor alike. In seconds, the coruscating light swept through the sour-pod trees in a flood of brilliance, rendering every part of the house and barns in sharp, cobalt relief.

  The light did not stop there. It went on, a silent flood turning her world the most perfect blue. A cool color, not like the broken piece of sun that spat anger as it fell.

  The doll seemed to smile as he glowed, bright enough now to push the sunlight away. On the small, fabric face, a look of relentless good cheer beamed, and the sunlight began to fade, replaced by a pure blue that curved up and out in a dome of dancing energy. The temperature dropped. The girl smiled, knowing Mister Starman would make things all right. That was what he did.

  A boiling wall swept over the distant hills and raced toward the farm. Everything vanished behind it, leaving only hazy visions of scorched ground and tattered trees, their bark and leaves flashing into ashes as the lethal procession vaulted forward, inevitable as the wind. In just a few seconds, it washed over the blue glow—and was deflected, around and up, until the farm and the grass and the orchard were just a bubble of unchanged calm encased in roiling fire.

  It only lasted a brief moment, then raced, trailing tongues of flame that slid across the bubble, seeking a way inside. The sky returned, but it was different—pale, shimmering, shot through with more pieces of the sun, all of them streaking with blasts of thunder toward a colossal, black cloud now rising and spreading from beyond the hills.

  “No, no, Mister Starman,” the girl shrieked. “Make it stop, make it stop!”

  Mister Starman happily obliged. Streams of blue radiance shot up from the bubble, reaching for the sun shards like grasping hands. Each time they touched one, it simply vanished, poof, gone. But there w
ere more, there were always more. To the girl, the sun was falling apart, and she wondered if anything would be left behind. She was a brave girl, but the thought of endless dark touched her fears, and she clutched the smiling doll even tighter.

  Something warm and wet slid across the girl’s lip. It tasted of salt, and the way the old scrap metal daddy kept in a bin behind the barn smelled. Trembling, she touched her mouth, then pulled her finger away. It was crimson. It was blood. Her nose was bleeding.

  No.

  Mommy. She needed mommy.

  The girl drove herself to her feet, meaning to run back to the house, find mommy, and get her to make all of these horrible things stop. As she did, the shimmering blue light faltered.

  It was replaced with a searing white glow. The girl spun around to see that one of the sun shards hadn’t been sent away by the blue light, and now the errant piece of fiery debris fell toward her in a long looping arc. It was the biggest by far, swallowing most of the sky.

  The girl began to cry harder, a hiccupping sob that shook her shoulders as the sky kept falling, and the world flared into ruin everywhere except in the bubble of deepening blue light.

  Mister Starman smiled and tried to help, tried to gather some of the blue light, or so the girl thought—she could tell he was trying to make everything right again. But he didn’t have enough time, and the fragment hurtled to the ground spitting red and orange sparks, the air around it scalded to furnace heat.

  The white light filled her eyes, and the doll said nothing. Neither did she, and the world rang like a bell, mortally wounded from the falling pieces of sun.

  Thorn!

  Stellers! Stellers, what’s wrong?

  The voices drifted out of the light that had become everything, everywhere. A white so bright it filled his head, displacing coherent thought. He recognized the words, Thorn, Stellers, what’s wrong, but couldn’t attach any meaning to them. They were just sounds—noises that meant something, but he couldn’t discern what. There was only the light. The world was made of light.

  Stellers! Shit, infirmary, crash team to the mess hall!

  Okay. Okay. Those words—they did mean something. He was Stellers. Infirmary was—a place. Crash team—

  The meaning of crash team flickered tantalizingly close, then vanished behind a wall of pain.

  “Stellers, look at me! Look at my eyes!”

  Thorn groaned. The light had become pain. It filled his head completely. There was nothing else, just pain.

  His pain. But also the pain of others. A multitude of minds shared this agony with him. Some were familiar. One, though, was unmistakable.

  Kira.

  She was screaming. It was like the dreams and visions he’d once had of her, when she was taken by the Nyctus and nearly killed. Except this time he was screaming right along with her, his vocal chords straining to the point of shear.

  “Stellers, dammit, look at me!”

  The voice rang through the pain like a whip crack, cutting it apart, revealing a face looming over his. Through the pounding agony, he recognized it.

  Tanner. Captain Tanner. Commander of the Hecate.

  “Stellers! Can you hear me?”

  Thorn nodded, or thought he did. Tanner’s face resolved as that infinite white pain gradually receded, like a tsunami slowly draining back out to sea. More details swam into view. Pipes and conduits lined the ceiling, beyond Tanner’s face. People moved around. Voices—

  “Stellers, nod if you can hear me.”

  Thorn did. This time, he felt muscles contract, and his field of vision moved.

  The white agony had faded into the edges and margins now, a painful nimbus that haloed everything Thorn could see. Even that was subsiding now, and Thorn nodded again.

  “Sir—”

  “Stellers,” Tanner said. “Don’t try to move.” He turned to—someone, but Thorn couldn’t see who. “Where the hell’s that crash team?”

  “Right here, sir,” someone called. There was a clatter as more people appeared—off duty crew in various states of dress, a security team, grim with purpose, and now medics with crash bags slung over their shoulders, a stretcher floating along on grav repulsors.

  “Okay, Stellers, these people are going to take care of you. Don’t—”

  “Sir—”

  “—try to move. Just stay still, they’ll—”

  Thorn shook his head this time. “No. Sir. We—” He had to stop and swallow, his voice scraping against his throat like shards of glass. “Nebo.”

  “Nebo. What about it?”

  “Nebo—” Thorn levered himself to his elbows. He lay on the deck in the mess, the dinner of passable stew he’d been eating spattered across the bench where he’d been sitting, dripped onto the deck plates beneath in slow, gooey dollops. “Nebo,” he tried again. “Attacked. It was—”

  “Attacked? Nebo was attacked?”

  Thorn nodded.

  “How do you know?” Tanner shook his head. “Never mind. Look who I’m talking to.” The Captain gestured the medics forward and stepped back, activating his personal comm. “Nav Officer, calculate the flight parameters to Nebo and get them verified by Engineering. I’ll be on the bridge in ten. Be ready to fly then.”

  “Aye, sir,” the Navigation Officer replied.

  One of the medics clamped a diagnostic tap around Thorn’s wrist. The other handed him a disposable wipe. “Your nose is bleeding, sir,” she said.

  Thorn sniffed and caught that unmistakable tang of blood in the back of his throat. As he wiped at his nose, Tanner returned to his side. “Okay, Stellers, while these good folks do their job, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

  “Stellers, one last check before we hit Alcubierre cutoff,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?”

  Thorn ran a hand across the midnight velvet of the witchport’s thick cushioning. He’d been asking himself the same question. He did feel fine, but he’d also felt fine right up to the moment the powerful vision—or hallucination—body-checked his conscious awareness into a half-dead heap in the mess. Never before had he experienced something that intense, that—

  Overwhelming. That’s what it had been. It had been utterly overwhelming. Whatever the cause, and despite his formidable talents as a Starcaster, he’d been wholly unable to sense it coming, or do a thing about it when it did.

  He drew a slow breath, assessing. “Aye, sir,” he said. “I feel fine. A little dragged out, bit punchy, but otherwise fine.”

  “Kind of wish the medics had found some reason to shove you into the infirmary and keep you there, to be honest. Thought we were past the whole Starcasters-are-unpredictable-and-therefore-dangerous thing by now.”

  “Sorry, sir, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  A moment passed. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know what Tanner was thinking. Despite almost three years having passed with him as the Hecate’s Starcaster and him having proven over and over again how valuable his magical talents were, the old thinking hadn’t really gone away. Tanner was better than most mundanes by far, but even he still had a simmering reservoir of superstitious distrust not far beneath the surface. It might be buried deeper in Tanner, but it was still there.

  The logic was simple. Starcasters use magic. Magic defies scientific analysis and can’t be quantified, so it remains an unknown thing. And unknown things are frightening.

  “Don’t need to tell me anything else, Stellers. One of my officers tells me they’re good to go, I believe them.”

  Thorn offered the intercom a tired, but appreciative smile. Tanner really was better than most.

  Thorn braced himself as the drive’s cutoff alarm chimed, then snapped his helmet in place, but left the faceplate open. A few seconds later, the Hecate’s private little Alcubierre universe winked out of existence, depositing the ship back into real space, in the Nebo system. With a small lurch that sent Thorn’s breather swinging under his chin, reality changed, and with it,
a sense of calm descended on the ship.

  Thorn focused on his talisman, his battered children’s book, now strapped in a purpose-made pouch on his crash suit, then he decompressed the witchport and opened it to the hard vacuum of space.

  The planet called Nebo lay directly ahead, a tiny, sunlit half-disk. Tanner had brought the Hecate in as close to the planet as he dared, while still leaving the destroyer space to maneuver—and fight, if necessary.

  A glance at the repeater tactical display mounted in the witchport showed no other ships in the system, though. Tanner had requested that the nearest ON assets, a potent fighting patrol centered on the battlecruiser Hammerfall, stand ready to help, but he hadn’t yet received a reply because of the distance involved. That left the Hecate on her own—but she was a capable ship, able to outgun anything smaller than her, and outrun anything bigger.

  “No comm emissions from the planet,” the Comms Officer said over the ship's channel. “They’ve gone completely dark.”

  Thorn inhaled, nerves dancing. A planet with almost a billion people living on it? It should be a hub of comms traffic. His gut tightened, like someone had started turning a vise.

  Data kept sluicing in through the Hecate’s scanners. The picture steadily developing was ominous. No comms emissions, no local or orbital ship traffic, spectrographic data from the atmosphere that was all wrong.

  “Stellers, you have anything?” Tanner asked.

  “One moment, sir.”

  Thorn touched gloved fingers against his talisman. He’d learned that direct physical contact, while slightly better, wasn’t necessary; it seemed that his intent to touch the old book was enough to let him focus his powers through it. Using it as a springboard, he cast his awareness ahead of the ship and pushed it through the dead space of hard vacuum until it brushed against the planet called Nebo.

  Fire. Riven earth and shattered rock. Destruction, on an apocalyptic scale.

  Death.