Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  But that had amused her only for a while.

  She turned back to Falunis. “But I’m bored, and I want to leave!”

  Falunis briefly flashed with annoyance, but it quickly and smoothly returned to patient forbearance. “I will consult with my superiors. Perhaps we can take you out for an excursion.”

  “I don’t wanna go and see someone who’s trapped and then have you kill them.”

  “We will arrange something appropriate, child. In fact, an envoy from the High Shaman will be arriving soon. There’s much they want to talk to you about.”

  Morgan just stared at Falunis for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Falunis left, leaving Morgan alone in her palatial prison. She returned to the windows, watching for a while as shuttle-cars and individual Nyctus moved about the city, some slowly and sedately, some zipping along with purposeful speed. Morgan’s thoughts drifted, though.

  An envoy, Falunis had said. She didn’t know what an envoy was, but it sounded very official. So did the High Shaman. More to point, the words seemed somehow sinister, maybe even dangerous. Most telling, though, had been Falunis’s bioluminescence when she said it. Morgan had become very good at matching a Nyctus’s bio-lights to their thoughts. Falunis’s display had, just for an instant, been one of smug eagerness. She was looking forward to the arrival of the envoy, but not in a nice way.

  And then there’d been her words back at the site of the wrecked spaceship, the one where the poor, trapped alien had been kept alone in the freezing dark and then almost casually killed.

  So, now, we’ll have to try the final way.

  And what if that doesn’t work?

  It doesn’t matter, child, because you won’t be here to see it.

  Falunis said that the Nyctus wanted to be her friends, but they were lying. Only the Radiant Nyctus were her friends. These ones weren’t just pretending to be, they actually meant to do her harm. She knew it.

  Morgan bit her lip. She could just try to make them all into her friends. Make them into Radiant Nyctus, like the ones on Tāmtu.

  “Nah,” she said to the view out the window. She didn’t like Falunis. She didn’t want Falunis to be her friend.

  Morgan turned to the door. There were Nyctus outside, she knew. Falunis said they were there in case she needed anything, but they carried guns and weren’t nice at all. She could change that, of course. But that would just lead to more unfriendly Nyctus, and more after that, and then the whole city after that. And that just brought her back to making them all into Radiant Nyctus again.

  So, instead, she should just leave. Just get away.

  Of course, there were two problems with that. One, there were Nyctus shamans, a lot of them, maintaining a circle of protection around her. They weren’t really, of course. They were just making sure she stayed inside her fancy room.

  And two, even if she could get away, she couldn’t travel as fast through the water as the Nyctus could. She could move herself along quickly, but they were made for water, and she wasn’t. Also, they had things like shuttle-cars that were even faster.

  She resolved to tackle the second problem first. Morgan drifted to the center of her room, then bit her lip in thought again. The Nyctus could move fast through the water. But what about the air?

  Morgan raised her arms out to her sides, closed her eyes, and created a big bubble of air around herself. The water drew back until it shimmered like a spherical mirror completely enclosing her.

  That just made it worse, though. Now, in addition to moving herself through the water, she also had to move this big bubble, too.

  It did feel kind of funny to not be surrounded by water. It felt even stranger to breathe air again. But she shrugged it away and just let the bubble deflate until it was gone, and the water closed back in.

  Morgan spent a while experimenting. She felt the shamans occasionally poke and prod at her mind, but it was easy to pretend to be doing nothing. And even if they saw her somehow, they’d probably think she was just playing around. Eventually, she found that if she surrounded herself with a whole bunch of little bubbles, almost like foam, she could move through the water a lot faster. She tried making herself move, just pushing herself along with magic, and she could move really fast. It was fun, jetting along through bubbly, foamy water. She zipped from one side of the room to the other a few times, and decided this was the best way to move around under water by far.

  That left her with the problem of getting out of this room. The walls were thick and tough, and they were also shored up by the magical power of the shamans watching over her.

  She pondered that for a while. At one point, she looked down at her feet. There must be a way.

  Her feet. On the floor.

  The floor!

  Morgan glanced around, feeling almost guilty. Almost. Maybe if Falunis and the other Nyctus had been nicer to her, more like the Radiant Nyctus on Tāmtu, she’d be happier here. But she wasn’t, and there was an envoy coming, so it was time to leave—

  The door opened, and Falunis came in. There were other Nyctus with her. She didn’t have to see into their thoughts to know that they weren’t friendly at all.

  “Child,” Falunis began, but she was cut off as Morgan loosed a blast of raw power at the floor under her feet. It was as tough as the walls, but it wasn’t reinforced with the shamans’ magic. The floor shuddered, Falunis suddenly flashed with alarm, and then it all collapsed under her with a dull, booming roar as it fell.

  Debris swirled up into the room, cloaking both Morgan and the Nyctus in a churning, brownish cloud. Morgan wrapped magic around herself, hiding herself away, then whipped the water into foam. A gentle push of magic was all she needed to zip toward the door and over the heads of the flustered Nyctus pulling themselves back from the collapsed floor. She raced past some more Nyctus in the next chamber, then loosed another blast of magic at the wall on the far side. Like the floor, this wall wasn’t magically protected, so she was able to smash it open, revealing nothing but open water on the far side.

  Morgan raced through the opening. Behind her, the tower swayed, then the whole uppermost part of it toppled over. Morgan yelped and made herself go faster, much faster, causing the falling tower to miss so close she was sure she felt it brush the bottoms of her feet as she sped away.

  Morgan flew along through the little pocket of bubbles she’d created around her, leaving the city behind quickly. The outskirts blurred past beneath her, and then they were gone, too. Now it was just her, zooming across the abyssal plain at colossal speed.

  She drove herself faster still, a long trail of bubbles streaming behind her, the ocean floor now just a tan-grey smear below.

  The exertion took its toll. Shading herself, loosing two prodigious blasts of magic force to escape the tower, surrounding herself with a foam of air bubbles, and pushing herself the way she was, it all combined to make her head pound, her vision start blurring. She slowed, then let the bubbles fade. The water squeezed back in around her, draining off more of her tremendous speed. She fell in a long arc, plunging toward a rising range of rocky hills and ridges now looming ahead. She could shelter among the cliffs and ravines, she thought, but then she spied something even better.

  Chest heaving with exertion, Morgan angled herself toward the gaping cave mouth. It was, she knew, something called a lava tube. The elder shaman on Tāmtu had explained them to her. They had something to do with, well, lava, and volcanoes, but she didn’t remember what, exactly. It didn’t matter, though. This one yawned open ahead three times as big around as she was tall. It could easily wind a long way down into the bedrock, but she just needed it for immediate shelter.

  Morgan brought herself to a dead stop, then just slowly fell the last few meters to the soft, mucky sediment draped over the rocks just outside the cave-mouth. For a moment, she rested there, catching her breath.

  She couldn’t rest for long, though. The Dark Nyctus would be looking for her. Calling them Dark had just occurred
to her, but it seemed to fit. After all, her Nyctus friends on Tāmtu were the Radiants.

  She looked behind her. No signs of anyone chasing her just yet.

  Morgan kicked with her hands and feet, pushing herself up and out of the mud and toward the cave. She’d intended to just walk, but one look at the rock inside made her quickly change her mind. It had crumpled into jagged, ragged shards and spikes and angular boulders. Her bare feet would be cut to bits in just a few steps. So she kept swimming, deeper into the cave, until its mouth had shrunk to a dim oval behind her.

  The elder shaman had said that most lava tubes were ancient things, long since drained of their blazing hot magma. Most wasn’t all, though, so she proceeded carefully. She hadn’t seen any sign of active volcanoes around here. There were no hydrothermal vents or new lava flows. Still, it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  Something caught her eye, just a hint of a pale gleam in the tiny bit of light that made it this far into the tube. Curious, Morgan swam toward it, then set her feet down on a flat spot nearby. The hard rock jabbed at her feet and she glared at it, before dredging up a flicker of magic and smoothing it out. That would give her somewhere to stand, or even sit, while she examined whatever this was.

  She peered through the thick gloom. It was something white. That’s all she could tell.

  Her forehead wrinkled in a curious frown, she leaned closer, then waved her hand, puffing away a thin layer of sediment that settled over whatever this was.

  More of it appeared. It was something long, roughly cylindrical, and smoothly white. She waved both hands now, the little currents she created stripping away more silt, finally exposing enough of it that she could tell what it was.

  Morgan jerked back. “Oh—eww.”

  Bones. It was a skeleton. And not the skeleton of some strange sea-creature, like the ones she’d occasionally found while poking about on Tāmtu. This one was the skeleton of a person, of a human.

  Morgan collected herself and leaned back in again. The skeleton couldn’t hurt her, of course. It was just a pile of old bones. Still, though, there was something about seeing exposed ribs, a spine, and atop it, a skull, its eye sockets full of mud. It made her stomach knot up, her heart race a little faster. When you saw people, you weren’t supposed to see their bones. You were supposed to see their faces, their eyes, smiling, frowning, grimacing, glaring, whatever. Seeing the bones underneath was just wrong.

  Faded and tattered fabric hung over some parts of the skeleton. Clothing, she thought. Not ordinary clothes, though, like she wore, but more like a uniform.

  Seeing the skeleton still scraped at her, like when she’d sprained her wrist once, back on Nebo, trying to climb a sourfruit tree. Even after it had healed, it had stayed just slightly painful for a long time after. This felt the same way, the wrongness of it like that minor, persistent ache. But curiosity became stronger, and she wafted and swept away more sediment, exposing more of the bones. A leg, then two, knees, shins and ankles and feet still clad in tough boots.

  Oh. And more bones.

  Absorbed in her task now, Morgan kept waving away the silt. There were two skeletons here. But only one was human. The other one was just, well, weird.

  It wasn’t human, that was certain. But it wasn’t Nyctus, either. And it wasn’t just some sea creature, because the remains of a uniform clung to this second skeleton, too. But she couldn’t tell much more about it. Its shape, proportions, the peculiar arrangement of the bones, the weirdly misshapen skull, all of it was different. She tried to imagine what it must have looked like while it was alive, but couldn’t get much farther than two legs, two arms and a head stuck on a body. The similar shape to a human made her think of that, a twisted, distorted human, but it might look nothing like that.

  She finally revealed the last of the two skeletons. One was definitely human. The other definitely wasn’t. They’d come here, or been brought here, either together or separately, and died. Their bodies had rotted away, and here they were.

  Morgan sat back cross-legged on the flat spot she’d crafted, and contemplated the bones for a while. They told her nothing other than what she saw.

  She looked around her. Dark rock, beneath, around, and above. Silt and sand. Water. And bones. That was it.

  A hard lump suddenly hurt her throat. Her eyes stung. Morgan squeezed them tightly shut. No. She wouldn’t cry. She was too big to cry.

  Except she wasn’t. She choked out a sob, and that was it, she couldn’t stop the desolate weeping from pouring out of her mouth, the tears from her eyes.

  She was alone, with nothing but rock and dirt and bones for company. There was nothing else for her here. There was nothing else for her anywhere.

  Eventually, she’d cried herself out. Just as she did, she felt a soft touch against her thoughts, just the faintest flicker of magically-imbued awareness. It lasted only an instant, but Morgan knew just what it was.

  She sat up, wiping at her eyes even though her tears had just vanished into the water. She was too big to just sit here, crying. The Monsters, the Nyctus like Falunis, were looking for her. Eventually, they’d find her.

  Morgan turned and looked back along the lava tube, toward its opening on the sea-floor. She wiped her nose. Her strenuous use of magic to escape from the Monsters had drained her, but she was already feeling better, now. She just needed to rest for a while.

  The Monsters were coming to take her back.

  She pressed her mouth into a thin line of resolve.

  They were coming, and she’d be ready for them.

  13

  Tanner crossed his arms and stared pointedly at the Hecate’s main viewscreen, now depicting a star-chart. Three red icons gleamed their significance from it.

  Tanner pointed to a fourth, blue icon. “According to Fleet, the last transponder ping from the Uluru was here. Sometime after that, she proceeded into this region. Based on what Ignatius has told us, along with stellar and other data, these three red points are the most likely locations for the ship to have been seized by the Nyctus. All seem equally probable.”

  “How much do we trust that vile little worm?” the XO asked.

  “As far as I could throw him, which would just happen to coincide with the nearest airlock,” Tanner replied.

  “Okay, so, why do we trust him about this?”

  “Because his ship did disappear, he was taken by the Nyctus and, frankly, this isn’t something he’d be likely to lie about. It’s not important enough to him to make it worth it,” Tanner said.

  Thorn sat forward. “Even liars try to keep some semblance of truth intact, to make their stories believable. More to point, though, it’s not one of the parts of his mind that the squids have blocked off, so I can tell he’s telling the truth. About this, anyway.”

  “So at least one of these locations has, or had, a squid trap set up. Three asteroidal bodies, set up with some sort of system for snaring a ship that passes between them,” Tanner said.

  The XO closed her eyes and touched her fingers to her forehead. “I think some of Lieutenant Steller’s powers are rubbing off on me. I sense that we’re going to be investigating them, sometime soon.”

  Tanner gave a grimace, then a rare smile. “Yes, very prescient of you, XO. Try this—what am I thinking now?”

  “That you don’t appreciate flippant interruptions in one of your briefings, sir?” she offered, smiling sweetly.

  Tanner let his eyes go round. “Well, look at that, you really can read minds.”

  Thorn looked down at the deck and smiled, as brief chuckles floated around the bridge. At some point, he thought, the Hecate’s crew had become a team. They were more than just colleagues or peers. They were people who’d faced danger and death together, had learned mutual respect in the process, and shared that elusive bond of camaraderie called—what had Narvez, back in his Code Nebula days called it? Some old term. Oh, right. Esprit de corps.

  “Care to share whatever’s so funny, Lieutenant Stellers,” Tanner asked.<
br />
  Shit, the man didn’t miss a thing, did he? Thorn intended to offer the usual, Nothing, sorry, sir, response, and even opened his mouth to do just that. But then he thought, what the hell.

  “You and the XO, sir. You make a good comedy duo.”

  Tanner’s eyes went from narrowed, to widened in surprise. “Very candid, Lieutenant. So, the next time we have a Talent Show and the XO and I do our thing, I expect you to laugh the loudest, no matter how much we suck.”

  Thorn gave a thumbs-up. “You bet, sir.”

  They carried on discussing how to approach the Nyctus trap. It quickly became clear there was just no way to tell by remote means which of the three possible locations was the right one.

  “Unless, Stellers, you can climb into that witchport of yours and magic up the answer for us, that is,” Tanner said.

  “I could try, sir, but at this distance, it would take a lot of effort. And since it’s a trap, I’d expect the squids to be Shading it pretty thoroughly, so I’d have to burn through that, as well.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Sorry, sir. It’s a maybe.”

  “In other words, you couldn’t be sure.”

  “No, sir. Without getting a lot closer, I couldn’t be sure. And even if we do get closer, there’s a good chance the squids will sense my Scrying them.”

  “Which means they could just pack up their trap and move it somewhere else,” Osborne, the Tac O, put in.

  Tanner crossed his arms again. “So we’re back to checking out each location, then. Which, I might add, is not something we want to do alone, especially since the Uluru was a light cruiser and they got taken. I’ll contact Admiral Scoville and see if we can get a task force put together to do this.”

  “Excuse me, but why are the Nyctus making this so complicated for themselves?”

  Thorn turned to the speaker. It was Bertilak, who’d been sitting cross-legged on the deck at the back of the bridge. He’d been silent throughout the discussion so far, so Thorn had forgotten he was even there. The same went for Hackett, the Science O, who sat at an unoccupied workstation alongside Bertilak.