by J. N. Chaney
Kira’s eyes widened. “Wait—sir, are you asking me to spy on Thorn?”
“I’m asking you to do your job as a ON officer, who puts the welfare of the Fleet and the state ahead of all personal considerations. You know Stellers better than anyone, I’d venture, and you’re also a Starcaster yourself. That makes you the best candidate to do this. In some sense, you’re the only candidate for the job. You knew him when he was Thorn, and that matters to someone who’s endured that kind of trauma. You were there.” He cleared his throat once and looked away. “We’ve all been scarred by this war, Wixcombe, but the pain came earlier for some of us. As much as anyone can know Stellers, I think—no, that’s not true. I know you understand him, even if things are frosty right now.”
“Frosty? Sir, I—”
He held up a calming hand. “It’s my job to read people. You use minds. I use information and what I can see.” Tanner leveled that keen gaze on her again, then his eyes softened, but only slightly. “I’d point out, Wixcombe, that you came to me, asking for temporary assignment to the Hecate so you can spend time with Stellers. I’m granting your request, but under my terms. If you can’t do that, Lieutenant, then the airlock is that way,” he finished, pointing down to his right.
“Sir, aren’t you concerned about my objectivity in all this?”
“Should I be? Are you telling me that you, an ON officer, would be unable to put the mission first?”
Kira took a slow breath, suddenly remembering a conversation she’d had with one of the instructors at Code Nebula when she returned there for upgrade training.
. . . we can’t compromise what truly matters—the mission, the instructor, a Lieutenant-Commander named Fielder, had said. Whatever mission we’ve been given, it takes absolute priority over everything else. The mission is the only thing that matters. The outcome of a battle, a campaign—hell, of the entire war might hinge on the mission you’re given. Do you understand that, Wixcombe?
She’d respected Fielder, just as she respected Tanner. And both had the same message—the mission has to come first.
“No, sir. If I have any concerns about Lieutenant Stellers, I’ll share them with you,” Kira finally said.
“Good. Find out what’s going on in his head, Wixcombe. He’s holding something back.” He pinned her with a commanding stare, and Kira, for all her talent, felt young in that moment. “Just like you are. So if those things are related somehow, Lieutenant, I’m trusting you to reconcile them.”
The gleam of knowing in Tanner’s eyes stuck with Kira long after she’d saluted him and left the Hecate to retrieve her kit. She’d have thought he might have some latent ability for Joining, but not everything came back to magic. No, Tanner was really just that sharp, and he’d admitted as much to her, but she was so wrapped up in her own issues, she’d let it slide by.
Won’t do that again, she thought.
After all, he’d just taken a poorly conceived, almost desperate plea from Kira to come aboard the Hecate, turned it into a crucial assignment, and now expected her to do the right thing in carrying it out. Tanner was a genius among officers, and she was learning to trust him through sheer force of his being insightful—and correct.
Duty came before all else. Even pain.
Which reminded her, as she passed through the airlock, past the hard scowl of the Marine she’d managed to bypass, of something her father had once told her, while she was still a teenager. You could tell what the right thing to do is, her father had said, because it’s almost always whatever sucks the most.
5
Once more, Thorn squeezed into Tanner’s planning room aboard the Hecate. The ship was a day out from Code Gauntlet, in company with her sister ship, the Circe, escorting a pair of fuel tenders to a replenishment point a few light-years into the no-man’s land separating human and Nyctus space, popularly known as the Zone.
It wasn’t particularly sexy work for a warship, but it was essential; all ships required helium-3 to fuel their fusion reactors, so the forward replenishment points, or FRPs, were an important factor in maintaining an ON presence in the Zone. It saved having to withdraw forces all the way back to the various bases for immediate resupply of critical combat supplies. There would likely have been one or two arsenal ships in company as well—specialized freighters loaded with expendable munitions, such as missiles and mines-- except no one was doing any shooting, so there were no munitions that needed topping up.
Assignment to one mission didn’t preclude being involved in others, though, as Thorn knew they were about to find out. Tanner had called him in response to some urgent transmission from Fleet. He arrived in Tanner’s planning room to find the XO and the Tactical Officer already there.
“Sir, reporting as ordered,” he said, saluting Tanner. “I—”
He stopped as the door opened again and Kira entered.
“Sir,” she said, saluting. Thorn caught a quick, sidelong glance directed his way. He carefully ignored it.
That Kira had been able to wrangle an assignment aboard the Hecate—even a temporary one—gave Thorn pause and made him confront some of his simmering confusion about the gulf between them. It could easily make him suspect Tanner and Densmore of collaborating on it, but they were consummate professionals, and he didn’t think his connection to Kira took precedence over the fighting readiness of an entire ship.
“She’s on a special assignment,” Tanner said, seeing the suspicion on Thorn’s face. “Is there a problem, Stellers?”
“There’s—” Thorn started, then shook his head. “No, sir, no problem. It was just . . . a surprise.”
“You’re the ones who convinced the powers that be to assign her to Captain Densmore’s command. And you don’t work around Alys Densmore for long before you’re involved in some scheme or other. It’s in her nature,” Tanner said, then leaned back in his chair, face inscrutable. “I’d suggest you make peace with Wixcombe.”
“We’re not at war, sir.”
Tanner smiled, and it was the face of a man who knew combat and relationships were neighbors at times. “Of course not.”
“Yes, sir,” Thorn said, weighing Tanner’s words. He fought the urge to slip from the cabin and take refuge in his witchport, while around him, the business of war went on, regardless of the disconnect he felt with Kira. It wasn’t easy dodging someone aboard a warship to begin with, and the Hecate wasn’t exactly a battleship. It made his life more difficult, at a time that difficulty was inconvenient.
And that meant that avoiding Kira wasn’t going to happen, and Thorn knew that just then, the gears of fate were nudging him in the right direction. There had been a gap, like two ships in a dock, their own inertia either pulling them apart, or pushing them together for an inevitable collision.
He was connected to Kira in ways the ON could never understand. He was also, in his own way, fearful of her. She alone understood what made him. Where he’d been.
How he had been forged in the ashes of a disaster, his ability awakened by a blood price so horrific that for years, Thorn suspected he would never be able to relate to another human, at least not in any normal sense. From orphan to sullen field worker—
—to Starcaster. And now, a shaper of the rules that made ships fly on thought, and war possible with pure will. He was a dangerous, uncertain thing in a galaxy made of known quantities, and for that and many other reasons, Thorn had pushed Kira away.
I fear myself. Thorn felt his mouth twist in disgust. He shook his head, looked to Kira, and reached his decision. Problems are only hard up until the point of decision. After that, they’re easy. He did the one thing he could to begin building a bridge back to her. He smiled, and it was sad, honest, and hopeful, and Kira understood. Whatever had gone on before the Vision, Thorn would erase it. And it started right in that moment, with a simple look.
“Alright,” Tanner said, breaking Thorn’s epiphany. “I’ve got Commander Ephraim from Fleet Intel on the line. He has something he wants to discuss with
us—and, more specifically, with you, Lieutenant Stellers.”
Thorn stared. “Fleet intel, sir?”
Tanner tapped a control. The viewscreen mounted on the bulkhead behind his desk lit up with the image of a lean, surprisingly weather-beaten man with a patchy beard, sitting against a neutral background. “I’ll let Commander Ephraim explain.”
Thorn noticed that an icon hovered in the bottom-right corner of the screen, indicating that the transmission was encrypted. And it wasn’t just standard encryption, used for all routine military traffic; this was high-level, weapons-grade encryption, the kind only used for things most secret or sensitive.
“Alright, people,” Ephraim said, “We’ve come into possession of some intel that we need to follow up. Are any of you familiar with the name Pool of Stars?”
Thorn shook his head, as did Kira and the Tac O, a serious man named Osborne who kept his red hair shaved almost to his skull. Raynaud, however, nodded with the sage air of a naval historian.
“She was the first Alcubierre-capable ship humanity ever developed,” she said. “As I recall, she successfully managed some short trans-light journeys during her trials, but the first time she was deployed on a long flight, she disappeared.”
“Correct,” Ephraim replied. “She was launched almost two hundred and five years ago, now. She’d been equipped with the very first operational Alcubierre drive, and as your XO says, was involved in flight trials when she vanished. Engineers at the time knew there were potential problems with the Alcubierre drive in its first iteration and were investigating solutions when they lost the ship.”
“Wave cascade,” Tanner said.
“That’s right,” Ephraim replied. “So, when—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Thorn cut in. “But—not an engineer here. What’s wave cascade?”
“Early Alcubierre drives had a tendency to run away, potentially sending ships further—and much faster—than was ever intended,” Tanner said. “We’ve got governor systems on modern drives that prevent that—in extreme cases, an automatic cutoff will collapse the Alcubierre wave and return the ship to normal space. The loss of the Pool of Stars was a major impetus to solve the problem.”
“So she was destroyed?” Kira asked.
“That’s been the assumption all along,” Ephraim replied. “We didn’t know for sure, because an uncontrolled wave cascade could very well have sent her so far out that any distress messages from her still wouldn’t have made it back to human space.”
“They had a trans-light drive, but no way of communicating faster than light speed?” Osborne said. “Ballsy.”
“I’ll say,” Raynaud said. “Imagine being about to activate that drive, to travel even a single light-year, and knowing that if something goes wrong, it’s going to be a minimum of one year before anyone else even knows about it.”
“The sort of people who willingly do that are a special breed for sure,” Tanner said. “But I doubt that you’ve called us up just to discuss the history of spaceflight, Commander.”
“Indeed. Like I said, it had been assumed that the Pool of Stars had been lost, and likely destroyed. Well, the lost part is certain, but the destroyed part, not so much.”
“She’s been found?” Thorn asked. If so, that would be an amazing discovery, he knew, even if he wasn’t a subject matter expert in spaceflight. The very first Alcubierre-capable human ship—
Ephraim shook his head. “No, we haven’t found her. But, about two weeks ago, the frigate Spectre was doing a forward patrol in the Zone. She’d traversed all the way across and actually poked her toes into Nyctus space. While she was doing that, she detected a weak radio transmission, one that clearly didn’t have a natural origin. She was able to clean it up enough to tell it was a human source—but one either deep inside, or even beyond Nyctus space.”
“It was from the Pool of Stars?” Thorn asked. “What did it say?”
Ephraim shrugged. “Not much. It was an automated distress beacon.” He curled his lip; as he did, Thorn realized that what he’d thought was leathery skin from long exposure to the elements was actually scarring. At some point, Ephraim had been seriously burned. It wasn’t unusual for personnel injured in the line of duty to be assigned to staff jobs in headquarters, if they could still produce but were no longer suited for frontline deployments. It was a stark reminder that the effects of the war propagated far beyond the simple duality of just life and death.
“What’s the point of a distress beacon on a trans-light ship that doesn’t have trans-light comms?” Osborne asked.
“It’s called being hopeful, Tac O,” Tanner said. “The alternative is to have no beacon and just give up hope altogether.”
Osborne nodded in the silence that followed, letting the enormity of such danger settle over them all.
“Anyway,” Ephraim went on. “This tells us that the Pool of Stars was still intact when she returned to normal space—or at least intact enough to transmit this message. It means she may very well have survived and might even still be out there.”
“All due respect, Commander,” Kira said, “but, so what? Even if she is still out there, in one piece, that makes her—what, a historical curiosity? Why is Fleet intel involved?”
“Because, Lieutenant,” Ephraim replied. “As I said, the Pool of Stars seems to have entered, and perhaps passed through, Nyctus space. We’re speculating that it was encountering her that alerted the Nyctus to the existence of humans in the first place. More importantly, we’ve been wondering how the Nyctus were able to so quickly co-opt humans and turn them into Skins. Either they’re really fast studies—which, yes, is a possibility—or—”
“Or they’ve had time to study us,” Thorn said. “And by us, I mean the crew of the Pool of Stars.”
“But they’d all have been dead for years!” Osborne said. “They’d be studying nothing but corpses, or what’s left of them.”
“That’s where all of this gets both interesting and a little tough to understand without an advanced degree in space-time mechanics,” Ephraim said, raising a data slate and reading from it. “Wave cascade can result in significant displacement in all four standard dimensions, from the perspective of an outside observer. From the perspective of an observer located inside the runaway Alcubierre bubble, there is no such displacement. The lack of displacement in the three spatial dimensions is both implicit in, and fundamental to, modern Alcubierre drive technology, but—”
Ephraim stopped, scowled, and tossed the data slate back onto his desk. “To hell with that. Bottom line is that from our perspective, the Pool of Stars vanished two centuries ago because of a wave cascade. But from the perspective of her crew, it’s quite possible the wave cascade means that no time passed for them at all. So, if they only emerged from the wave cascade, say, two years ago—”
“Then, as far as they’re concerned, only two years have passed since they left the year 2096,” Kira said, her voice soft with wonder.
“Indeed,” Ephraim replied. “Which means they may still be alive.”
“Which means they might be prisoners of the Nyctus,” Raynaud added. As soon as she said it, Thorn felt a sudden tension in Kira’s demeanor.
“And that brings us back to the serious matter of the so-called Skins,” Ephraim went on. “The Nyctus have somehow very quickly figured out how to co-opt humans so thoroughly that we’re not even sure if the Skins know that they’re Skins. Our scientific intel arm has been working with the Starcaster Corps to come up with possible explanations—and, so far, they haven’t. None of them believe that it would be possible for the Nyctus to do this if they haven’t had time to study and experiment on humans for longer than the war’s been going on.”
“But we don’t know that’s the case,” Tanner said. “You’re surmising that, but, like you said, you don’t know it.”
“We don’t, no,” Ephraim conceded. “It’s all really conjecture, based on what we know about the Nyctus—which admittedly isn’t all that much.”
“Sir,” Kira said. “There is another possibility. I—” She stopped and took a breath. “I was taken captive by the Nyctus, along with three other humans.”
“We’re well aware of that, Lieutenant,” Ephraim replied.
“Well, then doesn’t that offer a simpler answer? That it was . . . it was us that the Nyctus studied? That they figured out how to control humans through us?”
Thorn felt the sudden, desolate guilt and sadness radiating from Kira. It only lasted an instant before her innate mental shields slammed into place, but it was very much there.
“They did manage to control the fellow who carried the bomb aboard the Hecate,” Raynaud said. “I . . . I don’t remember his name—”
“Gillis,” Kira said. “His name was Gillis.”
Raynaud nodded and offered Kira an apologetic look. “Right. Gillis. Maybe that was an early attempt at a Skin.”
Kira offered a bleak nod back. “That’s what I mean.”
“Honestly, Lieutenant Wixcombe,” Ephraim said, “we’ve considered that. Considered it, and rejected it. You and your colleagues were all Starcasters. None of the Skins we’ve detected are. Moreover, the Starcaster Corps itself tells us that it’s unlikely the squids could establish lasting control over a Starcaster, because of—well, magic.” He waved a hand. “Look who I’m telling here.”
