by J. N. Chaney
Watery brown eyes flicked over Thorn, and the seconds stretched into an uncomfortable lull.
“As a witness. To remember,” the man said and then turned to Tuck. “All you have to do is forget.”
He watched, in a fugue state, as the doctors strapped Tuck to the bed and connected sinister metallic nodes to his scalp. There was a legal reason for Thorn to be there as a witness, but by the second moment of watching, his skin crawled at the impending sense of violation.
Connecting the nodes took mere seconds, and they covered Tuck’s scalp in a pattern that followed some arcane pathways in his mind.
Or his soul.
When the switches were engaged, Tuck’s body convulsed in a rictus of pain so savage that foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. Streams of ethereal green light were torn—violently—from his friend, each pulsation making Tuck howl ever louder in a voice contorted beyond anything human.
Thorn turned away, stomach roiling at the sight.
The duty nurse turned him back, uttering one word. “Witness.”
Thorn witnessed.
When it was done, he signed an affidavit that Tuck had been depleted and survived—barely—and it was over. Pale and unsteady, Thorn signed the affidavit with a shaking hand. He could kill the enemy with impunity, given a chance. Another human was too valuable, and to even see such a violation was at odds with who he was. With what he was.
Tuck was escorted in chains to the flight harbor, his eyes flat, lifeless, and shadowed. As he shuffled along in abject defeat, only one thought echoed in his mind.
What next?
This life was all that Tuck had known; it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He breathed for the Starcaster Battalion, but it hadn’t been enough.
Thorn returned to barrack 2A, the light of the moons guiding his way. Everything felt surreal: the still night air, the sound of the babbling brook nearby, and the light from above reflecting against the corrugated aluminum path.
Burnitz appeared nearly unscathed, if clouded with uncertainty. Val was in the medwing with a lung that was possibly permanently damaged, and Rodie received a mere ass-chewing, which meant he’d come through the incident better than anyone else.
But Tuck? Thorn kicked at the mud in front of his bunk. The man with more zeal for the title of ON Starcaster than any other recruit at Code Nebula had just been stripped of his magic, his honor, and something else beyond words. It might have been the spark of life, but Thorn knew that Tuck wasn’t just drained. He was broken. He was—a husk.
Val was not going to handle this news very well, and Thorn wasn’t sure he could give it to her. He wasn’t sure how he felt about what had just transpired either. In less than a day, his concept of what it meant to be a Starcaster had been twisted into something unrecognizable. The change left him drifting.
Thorn had never really had a fixed point in his life; at least not since the rocks started falling when he was a boy. Before he had been placed at the Children’s Refugee Collective Home, he’d lived in one of the first systems that had been targeted for elimination by the Nyctus fleet—a small, green planet of cool mists and rocky coasts. On Cotswolds, his home, Children walked to a small central school while their parents worked the ocean or prepped forestry projects among the towering native trees. It was a bucolic setting, more like a nineteenth century coastline on Earth than a colony world out among the stars.
His mother had been a geneticist; his father, an engineer. Neither had the power to stop thousands of tons of nickel and iron from turning their town into a crater. Everything he’d known was gone in one cataclysm, the land beneath his feet ringing like a bell as a mushroom cloud rose above what had once been his home.
Thorn watched his world end from the bow of a small boat as he practiced sailing in a flat, still pond five klicks away from his cottage. When the hurricane wind of impact hit his boat, it tore the sail away, hurling Thorn into the cool water as the waves of destruction raced past, above the water that protected him for just long enough.
There was nothing left of his village. His family. Or his home. Nothing except a single charred book that became his talisman of a life cut short by a race bent on war.
He spent his formative years working the slums on Murgon 2 and passing what few coins he might have collected to the Proctor. For that time, his dreams were that one day he would have enough food that he would never have to feel hunger pangs again, even as he grew tall and strong on the rations he managed to scrounge.
As he neared emancipation, the Proctor had arranged for his shipment to Murgon 4 to work the pipe fields, a job which hovered somewhere between indentured servitude and prison. For the first time in his life, Thorn had been working for himself and only a percentage of his earnings were shipped to the Proctor for his finder’s fee. But he still had no fixed point. Of his life, all he could say with certainty was that he existed, and even that was in question given his exhaustion at the end of each day.
When Kira had shown up on the mud ball and offered him a way out, Thorn didn’t even know how to hope for something better. He understood he was taking a step forward, that he would be serving in the intergalactic military forces to protect the lives that didn’t have the opportunity to serve. What he didn’t understand was what that step would come to mean to him. As difficult as training had been, this place had become his home. These people had become his family—raucous, irritating, and crude, but family nonetheless, and more connection to a human than he’d had since his days as a boy.
And now he was face to face with the realization that, one way or another, it was going to come to an end. He had finally found something to attach himself to, and it was going to be pounded to rubble, just like his home, and his parents, and his dreams.
7
When Thorn watched Tuck leave the medwing for his jump plane to nowhere, a question arose in his own mind.
What next?
He was used to hardship. He understood pain. What he tried to see was where he fit in the Starcasters now, and the uncertainty was like a physical pain he couldn’t escape. Thorn had gone from mucking oil fields to being a magician in training, but now he didn’t know what he was.
He didn’t wonder long, because Narvez approached him as he stood, watching the jump plane punch through a cloud layer thousands of meters above.
“Stellers, it’s not my policy to coddle recruits, but I do have some good news for you.” She stood next to him, eyes shielded by a hand as she too watched Tuck’s departure. Her face was utterly neutral. “Val wasn’t even the most serious injury we had this training cycle. Have you ever seen a human explode from within?”
“From—” Thorn started, but fell silent when he saw Narvez quirk her lips. For a moment, she was human.
“Yes. From within. Space and magic have two things in common—they’ll kill you without warning, and they are never truly safe. So for you to have such mild losses, in terms of human capital, is what we officers consider to be a success. We’re still learning about magic, do you understand? For the modern era of human history, magic—sorcery, call it what you will—was considered a bad thing. Now, we know it’s the only force that might save our asses from an enemy that uses their own flavor of magic to strike at us in ways the tech heads never considered,” Narvez said.
“Pardon me for asking, ma’am, but is that why we—”
“Got our fleets hammered into scrap? Watched our cities turned into craters, all without a single scanner hit from their massive ships? Yes. That’s exactly why. Instead of using metal, they use magic. They’re”—she searched for words, her jaw tight with a frustration born of combat experience—“not like us in many ways, but the only place it truly matters is in space. They’re shamans. Land magic. We’re mages—some might say sorcerers, or even conjurers. Different magic entirely. Do you see?”
Thorn was smart, and in a tumble of internal gears, pieces of an incomplete understanding fell into place. “Ma’am, I do.”
Narvez let h
er brows go up. “You do?”
Thorn drew in a breath to speak. “This isn’t a war like we know, but I think it’s a war we used to know.”
Narvez was quiet for so long, Thorn thought she wasn’t going to respond. Then she did, and all she said was, “Follow me.”
As they walked, she explained how many recruits were gone—most of them, in fact, and not all due to injury or incompetence. Some had simply lost the ability to cast magic, others had broken psyches, and one—although Narvez didn’t say who—had inexplicably converted their own left leg into stone.
“Not a good look for an ON officer,” Narvez remarked when Thorn made a noise of surprise.
They arrived back at the Commander’s office, but this time there was no air of dread. Something had changed in the time between Tuck’s departure and now, and it would play out on a schedule outside of Thorn’s control.
Schrader met them at his office door, and his bearing was entirely different. He still held a command authority, but when he looked at Thorn, it was with a curious appraisal that wasn’t entirely unfriendly.
“He worked it out?” Schrader said without preamble.
“He did, sir. That makes thirteen. Out of nearly ninety,” Narvez said, some of the old disgust creeping into her tone.
Thorn felt that like a physical blow.
“Exactly,” Schrader said. “With thirteen out of this class, and the failure rate only climbing, we’ll be lucky to station one ’caster with each unit. Do you know why I’m telling you this, Stellers?”
“Sir, no, sir.” Sometimes brevity was the soul of any soldier.
Schrader looked up into the iron gray sky, broken only by the odd beam of sunlight. “The Nyctus are assembling new fleets. We know this because our probes have sent back data before being vaporized. There are few things working in our favor, but among them is the fact that these new battlegroups are so distant, it would take weeks for them to arrive in our territory. That means you had limited time to realize your role. I’m pleased to say it happened faster than I anticipated, but don’t get excited. Your reward is simple. You’re going to war sooner than later.”
“Sir? Have the Nyctus attacked again?”
“They have. Three systems are gone, or at the least incapable of communication,” Schrader said with a hint of anger. “You’ll complete training, and you’ll go to war. You’ll likely die. I think you’re a powerful mage—it’s possible your magic is dangerous, even—but my hope is that you’ll take a lot of the enemy with you. How do you feel about that?” Schrader watched him, head cocked at a predatory angle.
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“By all means.”
Thorn paused a beat before answering, then swept a hand over the scene around them. “Space battle has to be better than this bullshit.”
Despite his control, Schrader snorted with laughter. “Stellers, come with me. I think it’s time we gave your enemy a face.”
“Sir?” Narvez asked. She didn’t like the shift of purpose, not without knowing where it was going ahead of time.
“Dismissed, Narvez. I’ll return him in one piece.”
“Excellent, sir. I’ll be ready,” Narvez said. Her face was schooled into something so bland as to be a warning, but Schrader led Thorn away—through a corridor he’d not seen. In twenty steps, they were clearly a meter below ground and in a temperature-controlled environment. A fan whirred, the air dry and getting colder as they approached a metal door, locked to a biometric code that the Commander provided with hand, voice, and eye.
“Sir?” Thorn asked as the door swung inward.
“After you,” Schrader said.
Two humorless guards greeted them, unmoving. The left guard uttered a single phrase.
“Code in, sir.”
“Schrader Black Priority Hex One.”
The guards subsided, slightly, and Thorn followed Schrader through a second door that amounted to a thick curtain of plexiglass, one side fogged with modest condensation.
“You have ten minutes,” Schrader said, then stepped back. “After that, I come get you, and you never speak of this unless the high command asks you a direct question. Understood?”
“Yes. Of course, sir.” Thorn took a final step forward, pushing through the remaining barrier.
He stopped dead.
Rather, he stopped as dead as the Nyctus that sprawled before him on a chilled ceramic table, its tentacles drooping in repulsive disarray.
“Sweet mother of—”
“I can hear you, Stellers. We can speak through the comm unit overhead, but it’s best if you just look. And…feel. Sense it. It’s a male, officer class, taken at the Battle of the Falling Eagle—a miserable failure on our part, except for this. Use all your ability, and speak as you’re looking to share any impressions. I’ll be just outside.”
A soft click signaled the comm channel going silent, then there was nothing save the hum of the chillers and an occasional pop as the walls contracted. Thorn could see his breath in the air, and the room was empty except for the table, the Nyctus, and him.
Thorn approached as curiosity took over.
The head was bulbous, skin pale and nearly translucent over a dark section that ran horizontally into the trunk. Tentacles—two of them burned to stumps by trauma—ranged in two lengths. Four were longer, two were short, tipped with finger analogs, though there appeared to be no skeleton in the being.
“It’s like a terrestrial squid, or something close. The head has—I think the brain is bifurcated, but I can’t be sure. There are two massive organs where our heart is, and…let me look—”
Thorn lifted a delta-shaped wing of flesh that hung alongside the head, revealing a recessed hole. “Looks like it was a water jet at one point. This one has something attached, like a wire and a…maybe a transponder? Looks like integrated technology, and the flesh has grown around the device. It’s been there a while.”
Thin lines of circular sensory points ran along what passed for a face, then down between the two largest tentacles. Every finger-like appendage had the same circles on each end, and the two thickest tentacles had odd calluses on them.
“I think they can walk on land, sort of. They’re comfortable in water, but they do live on land at times.” Thorn peered closely at the mouth, which was a wide slash across the lower head structure. Inside, rounded teeth vanished into the gut, and two sharp triangles of something like plastic extended from the pale gums. “Got a beak, or something along those lines. It might walk on land, but it sure as hell looks like the squid I saw in school vids.”
There were no genitalia, or any other openings at all, but Thorn wasn’t compelled to look. What interested him was the head. He could see thick blue lines that flickered with silver highlights in the overhead lights. As he moved, the lines nearly sparkled despite the Nyctus being thoroughly dead.
“I wonder if—” Thorn placed a hand flat on one of the shimmering lines—nervous tissues, he sensed—and let his hand touch from wrist to fingertips. The skin was damp, firm, and rubbery.
Something was there.
Thorn nearly staggered as the echo of—whatever this being had been—reached out and sparked at him, like an old battery with one moment of charge left.
“He died in a rage,” Thorn said. “He knew you—we—were going to take him.” Thorn shook his head, overwhelmed by the latent hatred coursing through the Nyctus corpse. “His anger is like a picture of the moment he died. It’s written in his flesh.”
Thorn removed his hand and wiped absently at his coverall.
“Commander? Why did you show me this?”
There was a pause, then he said, “Because you’re the strongest out of all of them, and someday you’re going to meet one of these…things, and I thought you should know.”
Thorn nodded, drawing back from the corpse. “Good. Thank you, sir.”
“Have you seen enough?” Schrader asked from outside the makeshift morgue.
“More tha
n enough. I’m wondering something,” Thorn said as he stepped back out, but not before giving the Nyctus one last stare.
“What’s that?” Schrader asked in the corridor outside. He stood, watching Thorn, but unmoving.
“Has anyone tried to read their minds?”
Schrader gave him a curious look, feigning innocence. “Now how would I know about that?”
The days grew longer as summer peaked, sunlight lingering well past the moment when Thorn was exhausted. Every morning, in the predawn gray, Narvez arrived to extract the recruits from what little sleep they may have acquired, but things were different now.
If Thorn had thought the lieutenants enjoyed the torture they delivered before, he saw that there was no pleasure in the torment they implemented now. They had a job to do, and they made it their goal to complete that task in the most inhumane way possible within the Naval Code. The most efficient of them all was Narvez, who knew that Thorn, of all the recruits, was on the edge of becoming something outside her control.
“Stellers, hold your canteen up,” Narvez barked.
Everything remained still—except for a cloud above them, which grew with stunning rapidity. In seconds, a gray mass of swirling air and rain hovered mere meters overhead, tiny bolts of lightning punctuating the monochromatic mass.
“Ma’am.” There was no anger in his answer, only acceptance.
“Ready,” Narvez said. “Elemental control. Catch the rain.”
Thorn’s canteen remained still, but his free hand waved once in a motion so fluid it looked like he was beginning a primal dance. The rain began to fall in a torrent, but by sheer force of will, Thorn held it up and shaped the water into a serpentine spiral that vanished back into the cloud it came from. In a silvery ribbon, the water came down. A faucet made from Thorn’s magical power, the storm was pushed obediently into his canteen, which never seemed to overfill.
“Stellers, what are you doing with the excess?” Narvez asked. There was an uncertainty to the question that was at odds with her previous orders. And personality.
