Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  He stopped. Someone was already here, sitting at the table.

  Thorn smiled. “Mol?”

  She glanced up but said nothing, just smiling and waving. Thorn saw she had earbuds in.

  He leaned toward her. “Mol, what are you doing here?”

  She pulled out the earbuds. “Tell me what you think of this,” she said, tapping a control on the terminal she was using. A torrential rain of sound suddenly flooded the library, a cacophony of noise, like someone had thrown a throttled-up thruster pack into a trash reclamator. Someone who could have been male or female screamed along with the racket. Thorn knew how they felt; he suddenly wanted to scream, too.

  He shook his head and made a cutting motion across his throat. Mol touched the control again. The silence that thundered down in place of the discordant mess of sound rang with the rush of blood in Thorn’s ears.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked.

  “You can blame Trixie,” Mol replied. “For, um . . . what you just heard.”

  “Trixie? What, she’s turned on us and plans to use that ear-splitting racket as a weapon?” He feigned horror. “I’d rather face the squids, thanks.”

  “No, that’s”—Mol made air-quotes with her fingers—“music.”

  “It really isn’t.”

  “Yeah, it is. She discovered it a couple of weeks ago in some archive or another when I made that run to that new FOB—you know, Code Broadsword. I think one of the AI’s there is a bad influence.”

  “Again, Mol—not music.”

  “Actually, it dates from the late Twentieth Century. It’s called”—air quotes again— “punk.”

  “Punk.”

  “Punk rock, actually. Apparently, it was really popular.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Mol shrugged. “Trixie’s programming is designed to allow her a degree of choice in how she develops her personality. According to the AI people, it actually improves her ability to do the rest of her job.”

  “And that was what she chose?” Thorn asked, pointing at the terminal. “That . . . punk rock?”

  “She says she’s going through a wild phase.”

  Thorn shook his head. “She’s a computer. Can’t she listen to all the punk rock, or anything else she wants, like . . . internally? Inside her computerized brain? It’s all just data, right?”

  “Oh, she does. But she wants to share her love for the music,” Mol said, curling her lip. “So, I’m trying to, if not actually get into it, at least be able to put up with it.” She grinned. “I’m up to almost five minutes, now.”

  “Well, you played about ten seconds for me, and that’s enough.” He glanced at one of the other two terminals. “I was going to do a little research, but if you want to use this place—”

  “No, I just popped in, found the place empty, thought I’d take advantage of it,” Mol said. “If I try it aboard the Gyrfalcon, then Trixie won’t leave me alone. And I’m in shared quarters, so there’s always some commotion going on there. Quiet like this gives me a chance to, you know, contemplate what I’m hearing.”

  “It sounds like an overloading reactor. What is there to contemplate?”

  “You’d be surprised. Punk seems to be all about anger at authority, raging against an impersonal uncaring system.”

  “You’re right. I’d be surprised.”

  Mol gathered her things and stood. “All I’m saying is, next flight aboard the Gyrfalcon, brace yourself—Trixie’s gonna want to share her new love of punk with you.”

  Thorn twitched. “Oh. Um. Well, I consider myself warned.” He smiled gratefully at Mol, who slapped his back and left, snickering at the inevitable discussion of musical styles and taste.

  Thorn was left in an uncomfortable limbo. He still had almost a full hour to kill before meeting Kira, so he sat at a terminal and had it search the ship’s archives for every reference to the Pool of Stars. He could have done this in his quarters, but he spent enough of his days jammed into them and appreciated having somewhere else he could be jammed into.

  The orders from Fleet had been accompanied by a background briefing on the Pool of Stars, but that had been more clinical, factual, all schematics and flight reports and log entries. Thorn wanted to learn something about the Pool of Stars not as a machine or a technical achievement, but as the place a group of people called home, at least for the durations of her various flights. He also wanted to know more about those people—who they were, where they came from, their backgrounds . . .

  The screen filled with references to the Pool of Stars. There were a lot of them, everything from mentions in esoteric scientific and engineering papers, to off-handed references in pop culture entertainment. Thorn skimmed through them, his focus rapidly zooming in on one, particular attribute of the Pool of Stars: her nose art.

  He found a single reference to it—a mention in a news article of the artist, a man named Carew, a power plant engineer who was apparently also an on-again, off-again member of her crew. It wasn’t clear if he’d been aboard for her last, seemingly final flight. In fact, a definitive crew list at the time of her loss was surprisingly hard to find. He ended up finding three, none of which were quite in agreement. As for the nose art itself, though, there wasn’t much recorded, aside from a single, high-res image.

  It offered no new insights into the artwork, just more detail. It was, Thorn thought, quite well done, albeit not perfect. But then the man named Carew had donned a vac suit and painted his artwork in zero-g, so imperfections were hardly surprising. In fact, considering the circumstances of its creation, it was damned good.

  Thorn stared at the art. There was something about this image that . . . that resonated with him. He wasn’t sure why. He’d never been a fan of pop art particularly, mostly because he’d been too busy surviving to develop a sense of whimsy. It was amusing, and a little racy, but there was something more to it than that.

  He finally gave up and cleared the terminal, with about ten minutes to go to his meeting with Kira. Sometimes, he thought, not thinking about something was the best way to get it to make sense. And with Kira only a few minutes away, she was the foremost thing in his mind.

  It was time to finish the bridge and reconnect with her. It was time to get rid of doubt, and what started with his decision would end with the truth.

  Kira had booked the gym for nineteen-thirty, giving herself a half-hour to get in some workout time. She pounded away on the speed bag, ran a few sets on the resistance machine, and generally worked up a hard sweat. The tense dread she’d been feeling about finally confronting Thorn with the things she had to tell him had dissipated some by the time she was done, washed away by sweaty exertion and endorphins.

  Then Thorn strode into the gym, and it all came flooding back.

  Thorn gave her a thin smile. “I didn’t think we were actually coming here to, you know, workout. If I had, I would’ve worn my PT gear.”

  Kira shrugged. “That’s okay. I think I’ve done all I want to for now.”

  Thorn’s smile widened briefly, then faded. “Well, you wanted to see me. Here I am.”

  “Yes. Here you are.” She put her hands on her hips. “Which is amazing, actually. I’m surprised how hard it can be to track down someone on a ship the size of the Hecate.”

  “I’d say I was buried in work, but we know that’s not true.”

  “I—what?” Kira asked. His admission brought her up short. “You’ve been avoiding me. You were avoiding me before I got here. Why the . . . why the change in tone? It’s not unwelcome, just—"

  Kira saw Thorn tense up, but then it broke and his eyes softened. “I’m not sure why we let this happen, but I know my part has ended.”

  “Oh. Um. What was your part?”

  “The gap. The gulf. The distance. All of it.” Thorn let his shoulders fall in either admission or defeat—or maybe, it was hope. He took her hand, lightly, uncertainty vibrating in the grip. “We came from the same place, and I don’t know if
we can ever truly escape it.”

  “Thorn, we’ve barely seen each other for three years. Three. Years.” Kira held his hand, but her instincts hummed with a desire to pull away. She was pissed. “I know we’re ’casters and at war and all—the usual things people go through.”

  His snort echoed off the walls. “After a life in the home, and surviving falling rocks.” He shook his head slowly. “We’ve both had shitty hands of cards. But not now, despite the war. We were never going to be close on a daily basis, the Navy will see to that.”

  “A happy officer is an officer in need of something more to do. Preferably at an inconvenient time.”

  “And ten light years away. With no coffee,” Thorn added, and they both laughed, soft but with relief.

  “Now that we understand the condition, what’s the cause? Other than me? This happened before the Vision, Thorn.”

  “And me?” Thorn sighed again, but his fingers tightened around hers. “We’re strangers, and it didn’t happen overnight.”

  “We aren’t.”

  He tensed again, turning away, but whirled to face her, his features heavy with the effort a man sifting memories—and finding stones. “That goes two ways, doesn’t it? Before the Vision, I remember trying to get hold of you over, oh, what was it, two years?” He sighed, long and slow—the sound of tired understanding. “Seems to me that you were always busy—with work, wasn’t it? Too busy trying to deal with Densmore to ever have more than a minute or two of conversation. Or you were buried in work assigned by Fleet. Or you were at, on your way to, or coming back from some temporary teaching assignment at Code Nebula. And when we did talk, it was all the most insubstantial bullshit. You’re a stranger to me, in some ways, even though I know it’s not our”—he searched for a word, found it—“it’s not our natural state because of how much we’ve gone through. Together.”

  “Thorn. We’ve both been terrible at doing this.” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down, easing out her own sigh. “How about we both accept that and start communicating properly now? Before things get too shitty and we start to forget? I don’t want to forget. Not now. Not in the middle of this war, and not ever.”

  Thorn said nothing, and the silence grew, fat and aggressive.

  Then he spoke, and it was a step. Small, but a step. “Alright. We’re not kids. This ends, or—go ahead. I’ll listen.”

  As soon as he said it, Kira’s thoughts swirled with things to say, and where to start. In a flash, it became clear. Not easy, but clear.

  “Thorn, you’ve got to be really careful about this ship, the Pool of Stars,” she said.

  Thorn just stared at her. “Okay, that is entirely not where I expected you to go with this. What do you mean? Why do I have to be careful? And why did you mention something about my pride when we talked in the corridor?”

  Kira tossed the sweaty towel in the used laundry bin. “It all goes back to the Vision,” she said, forcing herself to turn and face him, her eyes bright with care, and fear, and maybe, if she looked inside, a loss that couldn’t be washed away. A stain made of hurt. Now that the time had finally come for this conversation, she wanted to be just about anywhere else. She wasn’t even sure she could do it, but she tacked hard to buy time.

  “Tell me what you saw. We’ll get to . . . to ancient history in a minute,” Kira said.

  Thorn stared, but only for a second. “Alright. I know the difference between a dream and a vision. What I saw was neither. It was a visitation. A trip. I was on Nebo, with this little kid—a girl, and then the skies opened up.”

  “KEWs?”

  “Like you can’t believe. Like when we were kids. Just hammered the world and kept coming. Massive strikes, and the kid, she was able to check the storm.”

  “What? Storm?” Kira asked.

  “The pressure wave, and the debris, the fire—all of it. She was able to shift physical matter around us or at least her, since I’m not really sure I was present. What I know is that kid is a ’caster of such raw power she makes me look like a trainee. You understand? She could alter the atmosphere itself into a bubble. More radical than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “More radical than, say, pulling a ship through space-time?” Kira asked slyly.

  Thorn grinned. “Fair enough. But more than anything I’ve seen planetside.”

  “What happened? After the KEWs? The fire?”

  “I ended up in the infirmary to be checked out. Turned out to be clean, but I kept on with being not right. This time, it was the Nyctus.”

  “You Joined? With squids?” She was aghast at the possibility, especially so soon after the Vision, which rang every ’caster like a bell.

  He shook his head. “Not like that. This was more like a dream, or a psychic echo. I saw the Nyctus emerge from inside our people. Like they were wearing costumes. Onboard a ship.”

  “Thorn, have you talked to any other Starcasters since then?” Kira asked.

  “No. Aside from our short stopover at Code Gauntlet, where you managed to get yourself assigned to the Hecate, we’ve been in the black ever since.”

  “Well, I’ve talked to a few. Every one of them describes the Vision exactly the same way. No one seems to misremember it, even down to the tiniest details.”

  “I read the summary report put out by the Fleet’s Master Starcaster,” he replied. “It was pretty clear about that. So?”

  “So, I remember things differently,” Kira replied.

  Thorn gave her a sharp look. “Differently how?”

  “The Vision I had was identical to yours, right up to the end. Something happened that was different from what every other Starcaster experienced, at least as far as I know. The . . . the little girl, she spoke to me.”

  Thorn’s eyes widened. “What? What did she say?”

  “The final explosion just—it just stopped. Everything just stopped. The girl turned right to me, and—”

  Kira had to stop for a moment. Her throat had clamped painfully tight, and tears brimmed in her eyes. She pressed on.

  “—and she turned to me, and she said, ‘They will try to find the Star Pool. It will be very dangerous. But the real danger is pride. Pride makes terrible things happen.’” She took a long, slow breath. “The last I saw of her, she’d mounted a horse and rode off, straight into the blast of that last KEW, the big one, the planet-killer.”

  Thorn kept staring. Kira could see his mind racing back and forth through her words, as though struggling to understand them. When he finally spoke, though, it was to focus on something Kira hadn’t even considered especially important.

  “A horse?”

  Kira frowned, then nodded. “Yes. A horse. I don’t think that’s—”

  “Are you sure it was a horse?”

  Kira shrugged and shook her head. “Yes, I’m sure. I remember it as clearly as the rest of the Vision, the same way every other Starcaster does.” She bit back a curse. “Her brain was so . . . so fried at the end. It was just her synapses firing . . . firing blanks.”

  Thorn yanked a data slate out of a belt pouch and started poking at it.

  “Thorn,” Kira said, then stopped again.

  It was time for the hard part. The hardest part, really. Ever.

  She summoned her breath and her courage. “Thorn—”

  He raised the data slate and turned it to her. Its screen held an image of a virginal girl, astride a donkey, the calligraphed words Una’s Ass—

  It took her a moment to place it. Right, it was the so-called nose art that had been emblazoned on the Pool of Stars.

  She looked at Thorn. “You think—what, these things are related?”

  “Well, star pool—Pool of Stars,” he replied.

  “You were assigned to find the Pool of Stars long after the Vision, though.”

  “You’re trying to make logical, real-world sense of a prophetic vision simultaneously sent by a little girl on a dying planet to Starcasters all over the League? Some of them a few dozen ligh
t-years away?”

  “Alright, so what do you think it means?”

  “Maybe nothing. But I think we really need to find this ship, the Pool of Stars, now.” He stared at the speed bag. “I’m going to need more info before I can do that, though. That nose art—I think it’s somehow the key. Shit, we’re magicians fighting a war against star-faring squid who happen to be psychic.” He waved his hands in disgust. “At this point, nothing tracks with who we used to be as a species. The old humanity is gone. What we are now can take something like symbols and visions seriously, because we operate outside the physical world.”

  “If that’s true, then why ignore something that sounds a heluva lot like a warning?” Kira asked. “What if the kid is telling you not to go looking for the ship? What if she knows something?”

  “The bigger question is, why did she send this message to you, instead of me?” Thorn cut his eyes at her, watching.

  “Because she didn’t know you were going to be tasked to find that ship.”

  “Neither did you. We need to figure out what makes you so special to this girl, compared to all the other Starcasters.”

  Kira took a deep breath. “Thorn—”

  “We’ll talk later, Kira,” Thorn said, his face closing off from her.

  “Thorn, wait. This isn’t everything.”

  “Later,” he called back over his shoulder. “I have to talk to Tanner, and then to Ephraim at Fleet Intel.” He stopped and gave her a grin—more like the man she’d known. “We will. It’s okay. Or, at least, it’s going to be.”

  She watched him pass through the door and vanish into the corridor. She could have gone after him; hell, she could have stopped him at any time, demanding his attention. But her voice caught in her throat and she just stood and did nothing.

  And she felt relief.

  She’d managed to avoid the second part of their conversation, and all she felt was relief. That made her either a coward, or unprepared, and Kira was neither. Not since the day she put on the uniform.