Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  Together.

  The fold was almost complete, and then it was, as a dazzling flash washed away the Gyrfalcon in an assault on the senses that left Mol, Brid and Dart falling toward a distant point. They were too frozen to scream as their bodies were made unreal by a magical energy more powerful than anything they had ever known, and for a single instant, they were nowhere, and existed not at all.

  The Gyrfalcon moved, and the shift was complete.

  The residual power drained away from Thorn like water rushing back into the ocean in the wake of a tsunami. Thorn slumped back in the g-couch, gasping. “I gather that the fact that I’m . . . I’m talking, means we’re still . . . in one piece.”

  A cloud of stunned silence hung in the ship, fueled by short breaths and muttered sounds as Brid and Dart tried to collect themselves. Being disassembled by magic was bad for one’s nerves, although the condition appeared to be temporary.

  “Near as I can tell,” Mol said. “Trixie, get us a location fix.”

  “Working on it!”

  “That was—” Brid began, then stopped and shook her head. “Not sure what happened. I tried to follow what you were doing, but you left me. I’m lost. I mean, I was lost, but now, we’re here. Still lost about exactly what that was.”

  Thorn slid his book back into its pouch and glanced at Brid, offering her a tired smile. “Don’t be too amazed yet. Let’s wait and see where we are—oh, and when we are.”

  “When?” Dart asked.

  “We call it space-time for a reason. The time part is supposed to be a constant, but who knows if it is,” Thorn offered.

  They waited for Trixie to do her thing. She was locating particular pulsars, neutron stars whose frequency of pulsing was absolutely characteristic. No two rotated at exactly the same rate. They were really the only fixed reference points in space. She needed to find at least four to get a position fix. More would be even better.

  “And that’s six pulsars I’ve found,” Trixie finally said. “So that puts us—” A point appeared on the star chart. “Right here. And, based on certain reference transmissions from Earth, we’re right where we should be in time, too.”

  Thorn made mental notes as they all studied the chart, marking each point well. Knowing where he was could be as important as how he got there; moving ships with magic was imprecise at best, and as far as he knew, a talent shared by exactly one person—himself. That meant relying on his sense of place in addition to hardened naval tech. The pulsars were a constant, and Thorn worked the angles on using them in his own way, not just as a naval beacon. Ships that were too distant from ON time-base beacons were able to fix their temporal location by detecting ancient radio-frequency broadcasts from Earth, the schedule for which was known down to the hour.

  Once he absorbed the information, Thorn turned back to Brid. “Now, you can be amazed.”

  “I am, sir, believe me. I mean—holy shit, you just moved us umpteen light-years in an instant and brought us to just over a light-year from our target. That’s really—” Brid shook her head. “Terrifying, if I’m honest.”

  Thorn leaned back in the g-couch. “Which is why I get to take a break. Mol, over to you to take us the rest of the way.”

  “Will do,” she replied. “You rest, sir. Trixie, set up the flight parameters for an Alcubierre hop to our target point.”

  “Coming right up. First, though, how about a little celebratory music?”

  A wall of noise erupted from the speakers, all cat’s tail and angle-grinder again.

  “Trixie!” Thorn shouted.

  The music cut off.

  Trixie made a hmph noise. “Fine, dad. You guys are no fun at all.”

  A cubic volume of four light-years of space was, in galactic terms, minuscule. But for a single Gyrfalcon fighter to search the same volume of space exhaustively was a monumental job.

  “So what do we know?” Brid said once they’d jumped to their final destination point and found nothing.

  “Well, the Pool of Stars doesn’t seem to be broadcasting anything,” Dart replied. “If she was still transmitting that distress signal, it should be coming through about as loud as Trixie’s so-called music.”

  “It is not so-called music,” Trixie cut in. “It’s an artform that draws on the turmoil and dissatisfaction that wracks the human soul—”

  “Okay, I know that AI has finally made it to being a perfect replication of a human,” Dart said. “Trixie’s managing pretentious condescension really well.”

  “Simulated pretentious condescension,” Mol said, smiling.

  “I don’t know, I’m as annoyed by it as I would be if another person tried it on,” Brid replied.

  “Kids,” Thorn said in mock disgust. “Back to the problem at hand. We know that the Pool of Stars isn’t broadcasting, or we’d detect it, like Dart says. What possibilities does that leave?”

  “She’s stopped broadcasting,” Trixie said, earning eye rolls from Brid and Dart. Thorn, though, held up a hand.

  “No, that’s right. If her transmitter failed or she lost power—or someone switched the transmission off—that would explain it,” he said.

  “Fair enough. Maybe she was destroyed,” Brid admitted.

  “Or she’s been moved,” Dart added. “Though I guess she’d also have to stop transmitting, too.”

  “Maybe the signal from her is being blocked somehow,” Mol suggested.

  Thorn drummed his fingers on the chair arm, listening. “All possibilities,” he said. “The trouble is, we have no reason to pick one over any of the others.”

  Dart pointed out to the stars. “If she’s been destroyed, then being out here is kind of pointless.”

  “I’m not calling this mission done yet,” Thorn snapped. “Trixie, how hard would be to locate the Pool of Stars with sensors alone?”

  “Well, let’s see. She’s two hundred and sixty-three meters long, and thirty-eight meters at her widest across the beam. Her Alcubierre drive was powered by a fusion reactor—though not a very efficient one—so it was only meant to be fired up to light the drive, then shut off again, so we have to assume it’s cold. So no emissions from it. Her other powerplant was a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, and the thorium isotopes used have a super long half-life. We could, in theory, detect whatever fission products manage to leak past any shielding. But we’d probably have to be pretty close to be able to separate that from background radiation.”

  “So we’re trying to find an object less than three hundred meters long, that isn’t emitting anything except a little bit of radioactive decay products, in roughly four cubic light-years of space,” Dart said. “Does that sum it up?”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” Trixie replied.

  Thorn sighed. “So, unless we get really, really lucky, our chances are basically—not zero.”

  “Not zero is about as good as it gets, yeah,” Trixie said.

  Thorn exchanged looks with the others. It was Mol who summed it up best.

  “Well, shit.”

  As it turned out, the problem wasn’t the lack of possible targets that might be the Pool of Stars; it was that there were far too many of them.

  As soon as she began scanning for them, Trixie found dozens of potential sources of the types of radioactive decay products that might hint at the Pool’s reactor. Thorium wasn’t an uncommon isotope, so planets, asteroids, and even some comets tended to contain some. All of them exhibited the same types of alpha radiation they wanted to find, meaning the Gyrfalcon was awash in a vast ocean of the only characteristic emission they could imagine emanating from the Pool of Stars.

  On an off chance, they had Trixie scan for other types of radiation, including neutron emissions from a running fusion reactor. Again, though, every star was a blazing beacon of neutron radiation, so it got them no further ahead.

  Mol finally turned to Thorn. “Looks like it’s back down to you and your magic.”

  Thorn made a clicking sound, then tilted his head. “It’s not that ea
sy. I’ve never actually seen the Pool of Stars, so I can’t rely on contagion to give me anything to fix on.”

  Mol stared back. “Contagion? Like, in a disease?”

  Brid and Dart both turned from their respective tasks to chuckle, but Thorn shut them both down with a look. “No. Contagion can be summed up as the part reflects the whole. So, if I had a piece, say, of the Gyrfalcon—anything that could be considered a part of her—I could use magic to affect her, even if I couldn’t—” He stopped.

  Mol and the others stared, then exchanged glances. Finally, Brid spoke up. “Sir? Thorn—?”

  He raised a hand.

  He’d never been near the Pool of Stars, of course, much less seen her—at least, outside of images and video. But there was a part of her, and a unique part at that, with which Thorn was intimately familiar. It was, in fact, a part that could only be seen.

  Her nose art.

  Putting aside the enormous implications of what Kira had told him, that he’d still be studiously trying to just put and keep aside, there might even be a personal connection between him and it. The little girl—

  —he grimly pushed aside the word that his mind wanted to use, his—his daughter—

  —had apparently been trying to use that nose art as a way of sending some sort of message, or warning, to him.

  It would still be a much less than perfect connection, but it was the strongest, and really, the only one he had with the Pool of Stars.

  “I’m going to try something,” he finally said. “It might not work, and if it doesn’t, I’m stumped. If we can’t think of anything else to try, we might just have to give up and go back home.”

  “What do you plan to do?” Dart asked.

  “I’m going to find Una’s Ass.”

  Mol blinked. “That is not . . . what I expected you to say.” Then she grinned. “But hey, whatever you do on your own time—”

  Thorn gave her a sidelong look. “Just shut up and fly, Mol.”

  Thorn once more shrank his awareness down to a point and focused on his talisman, his old story book. This time, he kept his eyes open, fixed on the cover art. It was typical of a kid’s book, brightly colored cartoon imagery, now scuffed and faded, but still similar in style to the Pool’s nose art. He then lifted his gaze to the flight management screen, which Trixie had temporarily repurposed to display the highest-res image of the nose art available. He let himself absorb that image for a while, then turned back to his book.

  Back to the nose art.

  Back to the book.

  He was waiting for a resonance, a flicker of connection that would tell him he’d found even a sliver of contagion, a thread of connection across which he could pour magical effect. There was simply too much space for him to realistically search it bit by bit; it would take weeks, probably months. But if he could find a link, no matter how tenuous, it gave him something to grab, like a protrusion from a smooth wall.

  Nothing.

  Thorn didn’t give up, though, because he knew he hadn’t tried everything. To do that, he had to go to the very place he’d been trying hard to avoid.

  The screen door banged behind her as the little girl came tumbling out—

  Why didn’t you tell me, Kira?

  —a doll, a smiling boy with wild, dark curls of hair and crude insignia patches sewn to each arm of its tattered shirt. “Lookit, Mister Starman! Lookit the bugs—”

  Kira, I had a right to know.

  Mister Starman smiled as he glowed, bright enough now to push the sunlight away. He was as cheerful as always, even when everything stopped working the way it was supposed to.

  He’d make it all right.

  He’d make it all right.

  He’d make it—

  A flickering, undulating thread of silver-blue radiance leapt away from Thorn’s talisman. Unconstrained by any physical laws, it moved at the speed of thought; it was suddenly just there. It connected him to a star system—a sun, around which revolved six planets. Somehow, there was a connection between Thorn and this distant star.

  That connection could be only one thing.

  He was tempted to use the thread as a pathway and push the Gyrfalcon along it. But the expenditure of power would, again, leave him drained, and he didn’t want to take them into such a massive question mark while unable to help deal with whatever they might encounter. So he let the effect end, the thread dissolving into motes of connection that faded away.

  He slumped back in the g-couch. “Trixie, give me a local star chart.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He pointed at the chart when it appeared, at a particular star system. “There,” Thorn said. “We want to go there.”

  The other three stared at him for a moment, then Mol nodded. “Trixie, you heard the man. Do your mathematical magic, get the nav set up.”

  “You bet!”

  Thorn rubbed his face, body thrumming with exhaustion.

  Mol glanced at him, back at Brid and Dart, then back at him. “Thorn, you okay?”

  Thorn took a moment to answer. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just took a lot of out of me, that’s all.”

  Some pain, he would not share. Not yet.

  “So, six planets,” Dart said, studying the instrumentation that had been set up behind the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit. “One gas giant, five rocky planets. Three of those are terrestrial. Two of those are in the star’s habitable zone—let’s see, one-point-two Earth masses, and—oh, this one’s a beast, three-point-six Earth masses.”

  “The last thing I want to experience is running on a planet that big,” Brid said. “Hell, even breathing would be hard. Please tell me that’s not our destination.”

  “It’s not. The other planet, the smaller one, has atmospheric pollutants suggesting an industrialized society. Looks fairly advanced from here.”

  “Yeah, they’ve got artificial satellites, a couple of things that might be orbital platforms,” Mol said, studying her own tactical display. “Can’t tell if any of it’s defensive systems or not.”

  Thorn stared at the fierce point of light that was the system’s star. They’d made the trip in a single Alcubierre hop, and returned to normal space on the inside edge of the system’s Oort Cloud. It offered enough distance to keep them out of range of probable detection, but close enough that they could snoop.

  “There are broadcasts from that planet, too,” Brid said, fiddling with her own console. “All across the radio frequency spectrum, and down into microwaves.”

  Thorn glanced back. “That’s good, right? Means they don’t communicate by smell, or bioluminescence, or anything like that?”

  “Well, they might,” Brid replied. “But these radio emissions are modulated, some in amplitude, some in frequency, and there are patterns to it. So they’re probably communications, which means we probably have some common linguistic foundations.” She made a face. “Probably?”

  “Can you decipher any of it?” Thorn asked.

  “Translation software’s working on it now,” Brid said. “If it can find something to suggest shared concepts, then it should be able to come up with some sort of translation key. Might be pretty crude, though, so I wouldn’t count on any long, involved conversations.”

  “Whatever you can do,” Thorn said. “Meantime, Mol, what’s our best possible time to that planet?”

  She nodded at the normal space nav display, set in the console between them. It already held the answer. “I knew you’d ask that,” she said. “Without burning insane amounts of fuel, four days.”

  Thorn thought about sitting in the Gyrfalcon for four days, with nothing to do but brood. “Can we cut that down at all? Use the Alcubierre drive?”

  “Knew you’d ask that, too. We can, and shave about two and a half days off the trip.”

  “But?”

  “But, pushing that deep into a gravity well is going to strain the drive. I’d hate to break it, especially this far from ON space.”

  Thorn sighed, frustrated by the limits of physi
cs and ‘casting alike. He could use magic, but again, it would deplete his supernatural resources just in time to arrive on the doorstep of an entirely unknown race. But he could also do it more or less instantly.

  He turned back to Brid and Dart. “You guys are both Starcasters. Think you can cover us, while I take some recovery time after moving us in-system?”

  “We’ll do what we’ve gotta do,” Brid replied.

  “Okay, then.” Thorn settled back in the g-couch and extracted his talisman. “Stand by, everyone, we’re going for another ride.”

  12

  They called themselves the Danzur, their civilization the Danzurite Sovereignty. It was a grandiose name, Thorn thought, for a civilization that consisted of a single planet. Fortunately, it turned out that Brid’s translation software, which was AI-based and much more sophisticated than the stock system built into the Gyrfalcon, was able to establish a workable translation key. By the time Thorn had shifted them to a point only a few million klicks from the planet, they had the means of talking to the Danzur.

  Unfortunately, they were assholes.

  “—the sovereign and inalienable territorial rights of the Danzurite Sovereignty shall not be infringed by any external party, without express permission of the Assembly of Hegemons, in accordance with charters adopted during the Second Conference, and with due regard—”

  Thorn lowered the volume on the droning voice. “Are they telling us we’re welcome here, or they want us to go away?”

  “I can’t tell,” Brid said, shaking her head. “That’s the problem with being a linguist. I might be able to figure out how to communicate with someone, but I have no control over whether it’s actually worth our time.”

  “—certain accommodations that recognize the unfamiliarity of external parties with certain provisions, and exceptions to those provisions—”

  Thorn scowled. “I don’t even think this is a recording. There’s some guy, Danzur, whatever the hell these people are, anyway, actually saying all of this stuff to us in real time.”