Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “Alright, people, crank up a hasty operations order for my approval,” Tanner said to the CIC at large. “I want to review it in ten minutes, at 0320 shipboard.”

  Thorn leaned toward Tanner. “Sir, can I have Morgan taken off the Hecate and sent planet-side, down to Code Gauntlet? I’d rather not take her into battle.”

  Tanner didn’t say anything for a moment and just stared at the tactical display, which was slowly changing as the two fleets maneuvered. “Sorry, no time, Stellers,” he finally said. Before Thorn could protest, Tanner turned and looked at him squarely.

  “Besides, Stellers, I don’t think there’s a safer place in the cosmos for Morgan than right here, aboard the Hecate, with her mother and father.”

  Thorn started to formulate an objection, but it died on his lips. Not only was Tanner probably right, but he also obviously thought the same thing Scoville did. There was something strange about this whole squid attack. It was a death ride, charging into the teeth of what might be the most formidable mass of firepower ever assembled, the Orbital Navy’s Third Fleet. It might just be one final gesture of defiance from the Nyctus that Morgan called the Monsters. But, like Scoville and Tanner, Thorn didn’t think so. There was something else going on here.

  “Roger that, sir. If you need me, I’ll be in the witchport,” was what Thorn finally said, offering a snappy salute, then heading out of the CIC.

  Thorn knelt in the witchport, watching the battle unfold. It was a strange, even off-putting feeling, seeing the ON locked in a huge fleet engagement, but only as a spectator.

  “Dad, can I please come into that witchport with you?”

  Thorn glared at the comm. This was something else that made this strange battle even stranger. He had his daughter aboard, pestering him to let her experience the action with him. Kira had already insisted Morgan would stay with her because the cramped witchport was Thorn’s duty station, but that didn’t faze a twelve year-old at all.

  It was like the most aggravating version possible of take your kid to work day.

  Kira’s voice cut in over the comm. “Sorry, Thorn. We never should have shown her how to work the comm.”

  “Mom—!”

  “Kidding.”

  Thorn finally gave up. “The hell with it. Kira, you can bring her down here. We’re at least half an hour from any possible engagement anyway. Be nice to have some company.”

  “You sure?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “On the way.”

  The witchport simply wasn’t built to hold two people. The only reason Morgan fit at all was because she was a kid, and even then, Thorn took an elbow to the face, and a small, round heel that fit just right against one of his ribs. Finally, though, Morgan was settled in, essentially sitting on his lap.

  Morgan gaped around at the expansive view, the best on the ship. “So we’re surrounded by total vacuum right now? Cool!”

  “Actually, very, very cold. And we’re always surrounded by vacuum, kid, no matter where we are.”

  “Oh, duh, you know what I mean, Dad. ”

  Thorn laughed, but it died as the situation, as depicted on the tactical repeater from the bridge, suddenly began to change.

  He tapped the comm. “Stellers to Tanner. Sir, that second squid line was accelerating, like they were going to join battle. But now they’re falling back.”

  “We see it. Any insights?”

  “They’re leaving,” Morgan said.

  There was a pause before Tanner answered. “Excuse me?”

  “They’re leaving. Those Monsters in the back. They’re getting ready to go somewhere else,” she replied.

  Tanner’s reply was simple. “Uh…”

  Thorn had to bite back a laugh. It was the first time he’d ever heard Tanner speechless. Of course, the man probably wasn’t used to twelve-year-old girls offering him operational intelligence.

  “I have no reason to doubt Morgan in this, sir. She has some sort of low-level, passive connection with the squid shamans. Some of them, anyway,” Thorn said.

  “Unorthodox, but then, everything involving you seems to be unorthodox, Stellers. Morgan, do you know where they’re going?”

  “No. They’re keeping that super-secret. I just know they’re leaving.”

  Sure enough, the second line of squid ships executed a ragged about-turn and then, ship by ship, vanished into Alcubierre oblivion.

  “So the squids make us think that their second line is about to engage, and then it instead redeploys. This attack was a diversion,” Tanner said.

  “Looks like it, sir,” Thorn said.

  Morgan looked smug. “See? Good thing I was here, huh?”

  Thorn smiled. “Don’t get used to it, kid. At least not until you’re old enough to join the ON yourself.”

  “And live on board one of these ships all the time? Blah. It always smells like hot oil and stinky feet,” she groused back.

  Thorn’s smile became a chuckle. “Can’t argue with that, kid.”

  Kid.

  Morgan.

  She was here, on the Hecate, not where she’d normally be, on—

  “Nebo,” Thorn said. “Commodore Tanner, that’s where the rest of the squid fleet is going. They’re going to Nebo, because they think Morgan’s there.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure? No, sir. Except—yeah, I am.”

  “Understood. I’ll inform Admiral Scoville. Meantime, stand by for this squadron to bust ass for Nebo.”

  Tanner’s squadron was now Task Force Tanner, an ad hoc detachment from Third Fleet tagged to intercept the second Nyctus fleet and protect Nebo.

  Thorn swept his gaze across the Hecate’s tactical repeater. It still just showed a static message, STAND BY. The Hecate remained ensconced in her own little Alcubierre universe, her scanners unable to detect anything more than a few klicks away. But Thorn didn’t have to limit himself to what the tech could do. Taking a cue from the Jolly Green Giant, he’d worked out how he could project his awareness across the boundaries of Alcubierre bubbles and get at least a rough picture of what was happening with both fleets. The key to how Bertilak’s ship was able to track things while traveling at superluminal speed had turned out to be just what it was detecting. It wasn’t able to track the substance of other ships, but rather the minds of their crews and, from that, build a picture from their impressions of their own ships.

  Task Force Tanner comprised the Hecate, the escort carrier Corregidor, two light cruisers, and twenty-four smaller ships, from corvettes to destroyers. It also included the Jolly and Mol’s Gyrfalcon. They were technically outnumbered by the Nyctus fleet, but Thorn didn’t think that would be a significant issue. Not only were their ships now generally much superior, thanks to the new drive and Imbrogul gravity tech now installed on most of them, but a major part of the squid fleet was mercenaries. Thorn suspected that they wouldn’t end up presenting much of a fight. Even the best payday didn’t make up for choking out your last breaths in hard vacuum or being vaporized in a plasma explosion.

  Or being at the mercy of Thorn.

  A warning sounded, and Reynaud’s voice came over the ship-wide intercom. “All hands, Alcubierre cutoff in thirty seconds. Gun captains, we’re still weapons-tight, but stay on the very tips of your toes. We’re probably dropping back into normal space right on the squids’ asses.”

  Thorn braced himself. Morgan had left the witchport and joined Kira in the CIC, meaning he actually had room to breathe.

  After a sudden wrench and a moment of disorientation, the starfield popped back into view. One after another, the ships of Task Force Tanner reappeared around the Hecate. Thorn watched the tactical repeater STAND BY vanished and was replaced by data.

  Reynaud had been right. The squids were not far ahead of them. Moreover, the Task Force’s acceleration curve greatly exceeded that of the Nyctus. The five ships not yet equipped with the new drive, three frigates and two corvettes, quickly fell behind. That had been expected, but it s
till further reduced the combat power of the Task Force.

  “All ships, Tanner here. Weapons-free.”

  Thorn watched as the range quickly diminished. Bertilak, who’d pulled ahead, opened fire first, destroying a mine the squids had dropped in their wake. He veered the Jolly hard to one side, then tracked and destroyed another. Mol’s Gyrfalcon swept into his wing slot and joined him in clearing out the Nyctus mines. Unfortunately, they missed one. It detonated with a dazzling flash, blowing the bow off a frigate.

  “Damn,” Bertilak said over the comm, his voice subdued.

  “Commodore Tanner, recommend we reduce speed, give us more reaction time to deal with those mines,” Reynaud said.

  “Negative. I want to give these bastards a bloody nose before they get to Nebo. All ships, priority targets are the mercenary ships. Even just damaging them is going to make this a more expensive proposition for their crews. If we can dissuade them—”

  He broke off. Four of the mercenary ships had abruptly swung out of line, then vanished into Alcubierre space.

  “Commodore Tanner, Wixcombe here. That was Morgan’s doing.”

  Thorn gave the comm a surprised look. “Kira, what did she do?”

  “I showed them what it would look like if they fought us,” Morgan said. “I made it really gross.”

  “Seems the mind of a twelve-year-old can be a pretty scary place,” Kira said.

  Thorn chuckled. Even Tanner sounded briefly amused.

  “Whatever works, Wixcombe. My thanks to your daughter,” he said.

  They entered weapons range, and the ON ships opened fire. A massed salvo of missiles raced away, followed by long-range railgun shots. The two cruisers, which had been mounted with another generation of experimental particle-beam cannons, also took a shot. The beams dispersed long before they hit their targets, but it was something else for the squids to worry about.

  The range closed, fast. Now the ON missiles started to detonate, and more railgun rounds started to hit home. The Nyctus ships began to trail wakes of debris and vented gases. They replied with a desultory return fire, which only diminished when another half-dozen mercenary ships decided to bow out of the battle, one doing so too late—a railgun shot pierced the mercenary bow head on, splitting the warship in half. The reactor cooked off in a flare of brilliance, and all that was left of the ship was a psychic howl from the crew. The collective shriek died away in seconds as space inevitably took its toll.

  Hard vacuum was like death itself. It was undefeated.

  Thorn gripped his talisman but didn’t otherwise involve himself. He kept his attention on the big Nyctus battlewagon leading the squid fleet. It had been cocooned in powerful psychic shields, a ring of denial he’d actually have to work at burning through. He’d decided to hold back and see just what that ship intended to do as it approached Nebo, now a gleaming crescent dead ahead.

  “Kira, are you getting the Shading around that big squid ship?” he asked.

  “I am. I’ve taken a couple of stabs at breaking through it but haven’t managed yet,” she replied.

  “Okay. You keep up the pressure. I’m going to hold back until we figure out what their endgame is here.”

  “Will do.”

  Nyctus ships started falling out of line, succumbing to damage. Only two mercenary ships remained in play. Tanner ordered the Corregidor to scramble its Kestrels to take care of the stragglers, while the Hecate, flanked by the Jolly and the Gyrfalcon, raced on. Second by second, the range ticked down.

  Nebo now loomed large, a dazzling blue and white crescent filling the starscape. The massive squid super dreadnought had aligned itself to enter orbit, but even Thorn knew it was traveling too fast to be captured by the planet’s gravity. Unless it slowed dramatically, it would slingshot around Nebo and race off in some new direction.

  It wasn’t a comforting thought. If he, far from an expert in orbital mechanics knew this, then so did the squids. That suggested that, whatever they were planning, they didn’t even need a complete orbit to do it.

  Thorn hit the intercom and shared his sudden concern with Tanner.

  “Concur. We think they’re going to deliver something nasty into Nebo’s atmosphere. Needless to say, we don’t want that to happen.”

  A moment passed in silence, then Tanner came back on.

  “And, to that end, it seems the squids want to talk to us,” he said. A moment later, a window popped open on the repeater, showing a Nyctus on the super-dreadnought’s bridge. It was Falunis.

  “This is directed at Stellers, but it applies to the whole miserable lot of you humans. You either return Morgan to us, or she dies on the planet, along with a large number of its innocent citizens. You have thirty seconds.”

  Thorn smiled.

  “Commodore, may I respond?”

  “Please do.”

  “Falunis, Stellers here. I have something to show you. Kira?”

  Another window popped open. Morgan stood beside Kira against the backdrop of the CIC, a wide grin on her face.

  “Hi, Falunis!” she said, waving. “Guess where I am?”

  Thorn had never seen a Nyctus flash quite as angrily crimson as Falunis did. “Then we will kill her aboard your ship, along with you, Wixcombe, and the rest of you vile air-breathers.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Thorn replied. “You’ll never even get close to this ship. Face it, Falunis, you’ve lost. It’s time to give up, give in, and just accept the inevitable. Join with Winuk and try to do something positive for your people.”

  “I will never admit defeat to your despicable kind,” she snapped back.

  Thorn sighed. “Okay, then let me show you something else.” He tapped at the repeater’s console, calling up an image from the Hecate’s database and sharing it on the comm. “Tell me, Falunis, do you recognize this?”

  She said nothing, but her sudden display of fury, and fear bordering on panic, was as clear as the bioluminescence on her face.

  “See, I retrieved this myself from a dead world under the galactic ecliptic plane. We know that the Bilau introduced a plague that rendered whoever those poor bastards were infertile, then sat back and just let it happen. Slow motion genocide. And I know you collaborated with them, or were at least aware of it.”

  “I do not know of this thing.”

  Even through the translator, the lie was obvious. Thorn shrugged. “Go ahead and lie about it. I don’t care. In any case, it’s not what this is that’s important, but what we took from it. We collected samples of the bioweapon you and the Bilau used against those people. I stood in their city and touched their bones. I wanted to cry for them. A whole race, wiped out in the most horrific way possible. A monstrous crime, against creation itself.”

  “Spare me the dramatics. And prepare to bid farewell to this beautiful world of yours,” Falunis snapped back.

  Thorn leaned toward the screen. “If you harm a single person on Nebo, then I’m going to seed every Nyctus ocean with that plague. Every. Last. One. We’ll spare the Nyctus that Morgan calls the Radiants, the ones like Winuk. But the rest of you, the Monsters, you’ll die childless, and your bodies will drift on the currents. The fish will certainly dine well. Eventually, your cities will collapse into the trenches, all of it will be buried under the mud, and no one will even remember your names.”

  Falunis stood rigid with hate. When the translator barked again, it came as no surprise. “Even if you dared, you would not—”

  The image shuddered, and Falunis staggered. Thorn looked back at the tactical data, expecting to see that the squid battlewagon had entered weapons-range of Nebo and started at bombardment. Instead, he saw the Jolly Green Giant racing along the length of the squid ship, colossal blasts of emerald energy gouging enormous chunks out of the great ship. The Nyctus opened with a withering return fire, but Bertilak dodged it all, spun the Jolly about, and made another pass.

  Bertilak’s shots tore through the Nyctus battleship, leaving a wake of destruction, gas, and slag
flaring wildly into the blackness of space. Falunis staggered again as her ship rocked, then lost attitude control. It began a slow tumble, its uncontrolled trajectory taking it ever closer to the high, wispy clouds above Nebo. But Bertilak was merciless. He launched a third pass and blasted more gaping holes in the battered ship.

  Thorn couldn’t help noticing that his weapons seemed to have greatly increased in power, and he realized that was a product of Bertilak himself. The alien radiated a cold rage that Thorn could sense even without resorting to his talisman.

  Falunis desperately raised her tentacles and began to keen, frantically trying to stabilize her ship with magic. Thorn or Morgan might have been able to do it, but as strong as she was, the task was simply far beyond Falunis. Her ship slammed into Nebo’s atmosphere, and she was hurled offscreen with a shriek. The image lit with a searing glow, then went dark.

  Thorn looked out the witchport. The battleship had become a streak of flame across Nebo’s placid face. A few seconds later, it broke apart, shredded into metallic confetti, each fragment searing the planet’s sky with a fiercely incandescent display of dazzling white streaks. One by one, they vanished.

  In seconds, it was over.

  “I don’t like hearing threats toward Morgan,” Bertilak said over the comm, his voice flatly devoid of emotion.

  “Neither do I. Nice shooting,” Thorn said.

  “I’d call that pretty much perfect,” Tanner added.

  Bertilak’s huge face suddenly filled the screen—and then he smiled, his overlarge teeth gleaming. “I aim to please. Now, what about what’s left of the rest of their fleet?” Bertilak asked.

  Tanner nodded to someone offscreen in the CIC. “Send the stand-down order to them. If they twitch, torch them. If they surrender, tell them to power down their weapons and make their way to the L5 Lagrange point to await further instructions. We’ll escort them back to the Code Gauntlet and the colony ships. Or not. Their choice.”

  Before he signed off, Bertilak muttered, “I really hope they decide to fight just a little more.”