Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  19

  “This is the biggest damned hangar I’ve ever seen,” Mol said, stepping out of the Gyrfalcon. Thorn clambered out after her and stopped at her side, then gaped around and whistled.

  “It’s right up there with the biggest spaces I’ve ever seen. Well, except for space itself, of course,” Thorn said, his voice tinged with wonder.

  He’d thought the Memphis was a big ship, and would probably be the biggest the ON ever built. Turned out he was wrong. This new super super-carrier, the Tobruk, not only had almost half-again as much mass and bulk as the Memphis, but also a hangar deck seemingly big enough to handle the Hecate. The Gyrfalcon seemed to just vanish into its cavernous expanse, along with the Jolly, which had settled onto the deck about forty meters away. Beyond that, rows of Kestrel fighters lined one side of the hangar, with ranks of ships similar to the Gyrfalcon hunkered down along the other. Techs purposefully moved around the ships, poking about in open maintenance panels, or pushing dollies loaded with ship components and ordnance among them. Brightly lit, humming with machinery sounds punctuated by the occasional shout or clatter of metal on metal, and smelling of warm electronics and the oily tang of lubricants, the place seemed almost alive.

  “Stellers!”

  Thorn turned to the shout and saw Admiral Urbanek striding toward him. Tanner followed, along with a pair of the ever-present staff officers that made up an Admiral’s entourage. Thorn and Mol both snapped to attention, saluting Urbanek as he stopped a couple of meters away.

  Urbanek gestured around. “So what do you think?”

  “It’s—uh, big.”

  Urbanek grinned. “It’s funny the number of people who call it that the first time they see it. Big. Kind of like seeing some famous work of art for the first time and calling it nice.” He laughed. “But it is indeed big, isn’t it?”

  “Sir, there must be, what, seventy or eighty Kestrels here? And another thirty or forty Gyrfalcon-class fighters?” Mol said.

  “You’re close. Eighty-four Kestrels. Twelve in a command and reconnaissance squadron, and seventy-two more in six combat squadrons of twelve each. And there are actually fifty ships similar to your Gyrfalcon, but under the skin, they’re complete rebuilds around the new engine and anti-grav system. The changes are enough that we’ve renamed the class to Raptor.”

  “So your Gyrfalcon is now officially a second-line ship,” Tanner put in.

  “Which means, if you want to trade it in for a Raptor, I’m sure we can give you a good deal,” Urbanek said, grinning. “Heated seats, cup holders, hell, I’ll even throw in a set of floor mats.”

  In answer, Mol looked at Tanner. “You taking your flag off the Hecate, sir?”

  “Don’t plan to.”

  She patted the flank of the Gyrfalcon and turned back to Urbanek “There you go, sir. I know how this pretty girl’s doing just from what I feel in my butt through the seat. I don’t really feel like breaking in a new ship in the middle of a war.”

  Tanner looked up from a data pad and nodded firmly. “Understood, Wyant. The Hecate and your Gyrfalcon are like an old married couple. They’re meant to be together.”

  Thorn had to remind himself they were talking about machines, not people they considered dear friends. And yet, they actually kind of were.

  But Thorn was curious about something else. “Sir, I notice we came in through an airlock that was damned big but could still only handle the Jolly on her own. So you could get, what, maybe two of these new Raptors, and maybe three Kestrels in there? How many of those airlocks are there?”

  Urbanek smiled in a way that hinted at him knowing this question was coming. “Three. Two starboard, one port.”

  “So to launch and retrieve all of these fighters is going to take forever, isn’t it?”

  “Hours, I’d think,” Urbanek said. “Fortunately, we don’t have to do it that way. We can roll open all these big doors you see and launch the whole wing in ten to fifteen minutes.”

  Thorn looked around and whistled again. “It must be a big job, depressurizing this much space, then repressurizing it again.”

  “Too big,” Urbanek said, waving them to follow him. “This is the Tobruk’s nifty little secret.”

  He stopped at one of the big hangar doors and spoke into a comm. A warning buzzer sounded, strobe lights lit up, and the massive door slid up and open.

  Thorn gasped and instinctively started to summon magic, to weave a denial around all of them to hold in the air. But there was no explosive decompression, just a blank starfield, growing larger as the door opened.

  “We can thank the Imbrogul for this. They’ve got force-field tech way better than ours. They’ve installed fields over each one of these big doors, so we can open them up to launch and retrieve fighters.” Grinning, he leaned against—nothing. His hand splayed out against something invisible, and apparently solid.

  “Your next question is going to be, sure, but how do the fighters get in and out if this is an effectively solid barrier? The answer to that is that anything equipped with the correct transponder key can pass through the field. That includes every one of these fighters. They can come and go with no trouble or resistance at all.”

  Thorn exchanged a look with Mol, who whistled softly. “Amazing, sir,” she said.

  Urbanek nodded and called for the door to close again. “The field isn’t perfect. There’s a small amount of air leakage through it, which is why we keep these doors closed when we’re not actually doing flight ops. And if we’re only launching or receiving individual ships, like yours, we just use the airlock.”

  Thorn shook his head. “I’m with Mol. This is amazing.”

  “More than that, I hope. I hope it’s the end of the war. Or the beginning of the end, anyway.” Urbanek gave Thorn a sly smile. “Speaking of ending the war, I gather you told Falunis you were willing to kill their planets with the plague they and the Bilau engineered. That’s despite the fact you don’t really have any samples of the agent they used to kill off the Meksun—that’s the avian species you found. Or, rather, what was left of them.”

  Mol raised her eyebrows theatrically. “You lied to the Nyctus? Sir! How could you?”

  Thorn favored her with a brief smile, but it quickly faded. “The Meksun. I’m glad to finally learn their name. Their city was—I mean, I wish I could have gotten to know them,” Thorn said, remembering the graceful spires and wide avenues.

  “You’re going to get a chance to do just that,” Urbanek said.

  “Sir?”

  “That cylinder you retrieved wasn’t just a message. It was a key. Show them, Galen.” He turned to Tanner, who stepped close and turned the data pad around.

  “Our cryptographers were able to extract this from the cylinder,” Tanner said.

  On the little screen was a simple green-and-black graphic, pulsing softly. A shape. An oblong line.

  “It’s, what? An orbit?” Thorn asked, staring. “Of what? And around what?”

  “We’re pretty sure we have the location nailed down. As to what it is, we have our suspicions, but in our place, it would be—a lifeboat. A last chance,” Tanner said.

  “A lifeboat? You mean there are Meksun here, orbiting in a ship or station?” Thorn asked.

  “Maybe, but it’s more likely genetic samples. Maybe even just their genetic codes. Either way, getting there requires one ship with a rate of speed like no other, and courage. You’ve shown the courage, and we think Bertilak’s ship is the answer. We believe that saving them is worth the risk, if their genes are even there, but—”

  “But you think it’s something else, too, sir?” Thorn asked.

  “It could also be the plague. Or the key to building it,” Urbanek said. He then just watched Thorn with narrowed eyes.

  But Thorn didn’t hesitate. “No.”

  Tanner laughed. “Told you, sir. He can shape time and space, but he’s no murderer. Not like the squids.”

  “For the record, I won’t have any part in genocide,” T
horn said. “What I told Falunis was very much a bluff. It doesn’t matter how much I hate the Nyctus. And the Bilau, now that I think about it, exterminating them would be wrong. Even my daughter knows that.”

  “You won’t have to be party to any genocide. None of us will. You have my word and Admiral Urbanek’s on that,” Tanner said.

  “Then why—oh.” Thorn nodded slowly as the implications hardened into certainty. “We save the Meksun, then show that we saved them, and then show them what happened to their race—”

  “And the tool used against them. Not only will this eventually give us new allies, but it also means we use the threat of their own bioweapon to convince the Nyctus to surrender, one world at a time,” Tanner concluded. “We might even be able to leverage it against the Bilau.”

  “Your ploy with Falunis inspired us, Stellers, even if it didn’t end up working,” Urbanek said.

  “So, it’s just another bluff,” Thorn said.

  “Again, our word,” Tanner replied.

  Thorn didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it.”

  “No conditions?” Urbanek asked.

  “Would you entertain them from a junior officer with a spotty record of following orders?” Thorn asked, grinning.

  “Likely not, but for the Starcaster who’s done what you’ve done to help win this war, the sacrifices you made, yes. I will. More to the point, so will the ON,” Urbanek said.

  Thorn stared at the deck for a moment. He suddenly found himself faced with something he’d never expected—what would come after the war. As soon as he thought it, he realized what he’d wanted more than anything. He looked back at Urbanek. “If I was going to put any condition on my duty, sir, it would be about what comes after that duty’s done. I want a farm. A quiet place for me and family. And most of all, I want time to watch Morgan grow.” He exhaled slowly, eyes losing focus. “Once, I saw some human war propaganda that said after total war can come total living. I hope that’s true, but I’d settle for the farm, quiet, and family.”

  Tanner put a hand on his shoulder, a shockingly fatherly gesture from the man Thorn had come to equate with brusque purpose and devotion to duty. “You can have all three, Thorn. You’ve definitely earned it.”

  “Twice over,” Urbanek added.

  “Then my only question is, how soon can we leave?” Thorn asked.

  The answer came from Bertilak, who raised his voice from the Jolly, some forty meters away.

  “How about right now?”

  Thorn leaned forward in the Jolly’s co-pilot’s seat, waiting for the verdict from Bertilak. He’d used magic to fling them from the galactic downward border of ON space, past Nyctus and Bilau territory, beyond the ecliptic and just short of where what used to be Meksun space started. Or, at least, that had been his intent. However, it was the second-longest distance he’d ever deliberately jumped a ship. Only when he’d brought the Hecate back from the remote part of the galaxy had he purposefully moved a ship farther than this. It still left them several days short of their objective, but Thorn’s main concern had been getting past the Nyctus and Bilau. Completely bypassing them by using magic to move the Jolly had fit the bill nicely.

  Of course, that assumed that Thorn hadn’t launched them in a wrong direction or otherwise gotten them hopelessly lost.

  He waited, his head still muzzy, a dull pain throbbing behind his eyes. The magical exertion had taxed him to the limit, leaving him feeling drained and limp, verging into an exhausted sickness. He hoped there’d be no need for magical effects any time soon because he’d be lucky to muster enough mojo, as Mol insisted on calling it, to even Scorch someone with a hotfoot right now.

  Bertilak finally turned to Thorn, his enormous green face grave.

  “It’s not good, I’m afraid.”

  Thorn sighed. “Shit. How far out was I?”

  Bertilak’s mouth suddenly broadened into a grin. “Almost half a light-year. And it’s a half-light year closer to where we’re going, so we even save a bit of time!”

  Thorn gave Bertilak an exaggerated glare, but it quickly turned into a tired smile. “You’re a real pain in the ass sometimes, Bertilak.”

  “Blame your daughter. She’s the one who designed me to be an occasional pain in the ass.”

  As soon as the Alcubierre drive cut out, Thorn forced his perception into the void surrounding the Jolly, looking for trouble. The most disconcerting thing was the overall lack of stars. He wasn’t sure if the Milky Way galaxy really had an edge, as much as it just kind of petered out into empty, intergalactic space. Either way, they were much closer to that yawning abyss of nothing than he’d ever been before. Another few days of Alcubierre travel, and they’d be on their way to Andromeda, two million light-years of utter emptiness away.

  Thorn shuddered at the thought, even as he somehow felt that unfathomable emptiness pulling at him. What would it be like, he wondered, to send his awareness out there with nothing to encounter, sense, or feel other than just more nothing?

  Yeah, enough of that bullshit, he thought and yanked his perception back into the star system they’d just entered. Centered on an ancient red giant that didn’t even have a star-catalog designation, this forlorn place only consisted of two planets. Both were cinders, scoured to bare rock when the star had swollen into its current, colossal form. If there were any planets further in-system, they were long gone, puffed to vapor by the expanding star.

  And that was it.

  It was a lonely, desolate place, so far from what Thorn knew as inhabited space that it couldn’t even be seen through successive veils of dust and gas. Humankind could easily have risen from the primordial swamps, reached the pinnacle of civilization, then died back out without ever having laid eyes on this place.

  Thorn twitched at the enormity of it all—time, and space, and the stars—and then drew his focus to a fine point, searching the blackness around them.

  There. Ensconced at one of the outer planet’s L5 Lagrange Points was a small, artificial object. Nearly ambient temperature, and radiating virtually no other signatures, he doubted it could even be detected on conventional scanners more than a few tens of thousands of klicks away. Magically, it shone like a spark in the emptiness, emanating the unmistakably warm glimmer of life.

  “Head to the outer planet,” he said to Bertilak. “Whatever we’ve come to find, that’s where it is.”

  Bertilak went to work on his controls. “So this is the right place, it seems.” He glanced sidelong at Thorn. “Have to admit, I wasn’t entirely sure your ON colleagues had decoded the data on that cylinder correctly. I mean, this is really out of the way.”

  “I think really out of the way is the point,” Thorn replied, nodding. You couldn’t really get much more out of the way than this. Even after his vast, magical jump past the Nyctus and Bilau, it had taken another six days of Alcubierre travel at their best speed possible to get here. And that was only because it was the Jolly, whose top speed, like nearly everything else about her, didn’t really seem to be fully constrained by physics. It would have taken Mol’s Gyrfalcon weeks to make the same trip.

  Bertilak brought them in to within a thousand klicks of the object. Thorn studied it on the viewscreen, a small, spindle-shaped object only visible because it occluded the glorious background sprawl of the Milky Way. Viewed from any other angle, it would have been utterly invisible.

  “Not very big,” Bertilak said, eyeing his instruments. “Only about fifty meters long.”

  “And no sign of anything that looks like weapons,” Thorn mumbled, eyes searching the screen.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Well, we came all this way. We might as well pay a visit.”

  Bertilak eased the Jolly closer, to a hundred klicks, then ten, then one. As they closed, Thorn braced himself for some sort of reaction. Automated weapons, maybe. Or some sort of pre-programmed attempt to escape. But nothing happened at all.

  “Okay, then. Let’s snuggle right up to it and see if we can find
a way in,” Thorn said.

  Bertilak nudged the Jolly to within a hundred meters of the object, then closed to fifty. Still, nothing happened.

  Thorn had already donned his vac-armor and now snapped his helmet into place. Bertilak needed no suit, seeming as comfortable in hard vacuum as he was anywhere else. He led the way out of the airlock, kicking off with a foot and sailing straight across to what had to be the Meksun lifeboat, a tether trailing behind him. Thorn followed, pulling himself along. It took them a while to find a way in. Bertilak finally located a round indentation a little smaller than his oversized palm. Thorn readied himself, then he pushed on it. A meter away, a circular section of hull two meters across sank a few centimeters into the hull, then smoothly slid aside.

  Bertilak pulled himself over to it and peered inside. Then he gave Thorn a thumbs-up and entered.

  Thorn could use Joining to speak to the big alien but decided the distraction wasn’t a good idea at the moment. Instead, he followed Bertilak inside the Meksun lifeboat, every nerve humming with the importance of what they were about to do.

  “Are they alive?” Bertilak asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

  Thorn extended magical senses and brushed them across the three slim figures, each strapped down to a padded couch inside a transparent cylinder. Just over two meters tall, they appeared every bit as lithe and graceful as their statuary—tall and delicate, but with a hint of wiry strength. They lay on their sides, mighty wings folded, their sleek, avian heads cradled under a slender arm.

  “They are,” he said over his suit’s external speaker.

  As soon as they entered, environmental systems had come to life, pressurizing the lifeboat and warming it up. Thorn kept his vac-armor on anyway, just in case the pathogen that had obliterated the Meksun had managed to contaminate their lifeboat. Bertilak seemed not only immune to disease, but he couldn’t even seem to carry it. Even so, Thorn intended to subject him to some intense magical scrutiny before they reentered the Jolly. “I’m sensing a little bit of mental activity and some very weak life signs. Whatever cold sleep, or suspended animation it is, it seems to only greatly slow down their metabolism, not stop it completely.”