by J. N. Chaney
“Your request is approved, Wixcombe. We’ll be making a stop at Code Gauntlet in two days’ time. You can depart there. I can give you three weeks, then I want you back aboard the Stiletto. Work out the details with the XO. In the meantime, I want you to carry on as I’ve instructed. Debrief the civilian about to disembark from”—she paused as something suddenly blocked the view out of the docking port with a heavy, metallic clunk—“that shuttle. I’ll find someone else to run the case. You can hand off to them once I do.”
“Understood. Thank you, ma’am.” Relief colored her tone, a genuine sensation she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Densmore didn’t leave immediately; instead, she waited for the pressure light to turn green on the airlock, the doors to slide open, and an unremarkable man in unremarkable clothes to step out of the shuttle. As soon as he did, Densmore spoke, a single word.
“Well?”
The civilian shook his head, and Densmore withdrew, leaving Kira with the bland man who gave her a wan smile.
“Smith, or is it something else?” Kira asked him.
“Smith will do fine.” He grinned, the expression not reaching his eyes.
Kira looked skyward, exhaled, then fixed him with a look of tired resignation. “But of course.”
Mister Smith, it turned out, was a civilian contractor who’d been verifying the installation and proper operation of certain new security features in ON information processing systems, under a project codenamed Hermes. Debriefing him took all of ten minutes, since there was very little he was willing to share with Kira beyond the project’s name and the fact that he’d visited four bases in swift succession. He mentioned the food at Code Gauntlet, the beds everywhere else, and a general poor quality of coffee at all four locations. Beyond that, he was an enigma, a hole into which her focus could get lost the moment he started speaking in his sonorous tone.
It didn’t matter to Kira. She simply took down everything he said verbatim and asked a few standard follow-up questions, then she thanked him and let him be on his way. She’d been doing this long enough now to know that his statements no doubt contained hidden messages, included as particular phrases or combinations of words. By dutifully recording his statements exactly as he spoke them, she was capturing both the frankly boring overview of his recent work, as well as the coded messages, which would presumably mean something, to someone, somewhere.
The messages were, no doubt, tied to Densmore’s single word question—well?—and the negative head shake. Beyond that connection, Kira knew her involvement ended when she closed the report and sent it on, to be lost in the mire of endless information fetishized by the navy.
She would, of course, never hear any feedback, and that was fine with her. Flirting with the idea of a mind probe ended when she carried such an action to its logical conclusion. Of all the outcomes, none were good. There was even a small chance this was a test, but if that was true, it only served to reinforce something Kira had come to know over the past three years.
Kira hated the spy business.
She finally returned to her quarters, hoping that Mister Smith didn’t need any further handling for the next couple of days. Subjects, as those like him were called, rarely did. Not for the first time, Kira wondered why they bothered with human debriefers like her at all. Why couldn’t Mister Smith have just recorded his statements? What point was there having her sit there and write them down? Again, there was probably a reason—but no one had yet shared it with her.
Need to know sucks.
Kira stretched her legs out as far as the cramped cubbyhole of her quarters would allow and let out a long, slow sigh. She assumed the spooks knew what they were doing, but to a frontliner like her, it just seemed like a lot of convoluted bullshit, all intended to keep as many people as ignorant as possible of the facts. Being siloed was a necessary thing, but it made her job into a series of half-secrets and lies that built up inside her like the sludge in a fuel tank.
No doubt about the spy business. It was hateful. Leave would do her good.
Kira lay down on her bunk, clearing her mind of spooks and lies and the web they wove. At the center of her thoughts was a fixed point.
Thorn.
One of the benefits of being an accomplished Joiner, it turned out, was potent mental discipline; it was what made Joining work. Kira could organize and compartmentalize her thoughts pretty much as she wished—right up to the moment she couldn’t, and it all came crashing down around her. Joiners would bend until they broke. For now, Kira was bending.
She needed a clear mind, though, so she ruthlessly pushed away anything that wasn’t just blank, empty thoughts. Her breathing slowed as she found the mental place she called her center, the point around which the lever of her Joining rotated. She envisioned it as the point in her mind where all of her conflicting thoughts and feelings effectively cancelled out, equidistant and neutral. In that place, Kira centered her thoughts, and feelings, and the braiding of the two in that place where Joining moved from possible to real. Kira slowed her breathing, and felt her heart rate slow in tandem.
Clear the slate, Kira. And she did.
She was ready. Kira made her awareness expand outward from her fulcrum, radiating through time and space like a pulse of radio energy. But her awareness had no mass, no physical existence at all, so it wasn’t bound by the laws of physics or the constraints of lightspeed. In what amounted to no time whatsoever, she’d found her mental destination, a particular, familiar glimmer in the mental ether, at once both light-years away and right before her, right there.
Thorn.
She knew the curves and textures of his thoughts as well as she knew those of her own skin. There was no mistaking his presence in the space their minds now shared.
Thorn, it’s me.
The glimmer didn’t change, though. It was as though she’d found where Thorn lived, but he wasn’t home.
Thorn, it’s Kira.
Except he couldn’t not be home. He was there, behind and inside that glimmer, but he was refusing to acknowledge it. He was home, yes, but he wasn’t answering the door.
Thorn, please, talk to me. Why won’t you talk to me?
Nothing.
Kira would have been worried, fretting that he’d been injured, unconscious, rendered catatonic, but she knew he was none of those things. She’d been doing this long enough to know the feel of a wounded mind. No, Thorn was doing this out of choice, walling off his thoughts behind barriers so tough and thick that even Kira, prodigious Joiner that she was, couldn’t breach them. He was, in fact, one of only a very few who could stand up to her like this at all.
The question was, why?
Thorn, please—I have to speak to you. Please answer me!
She’d heard from him only once since the Vision—a brief, panicked connection between them in the immediate aftermath of that horrific event, one that might very well have only been involuntary, a reflexive thing. Since then, nothing, no matter how hard she tried. But she needed to talk to him, needed to know he was okay, because there were reasons he might not be.
Thorn, please! Dammit, talk to me!
She tried again and again but might as well have been trying to Join with a forest slug. The mental glimmer that was Thorn Stellers stubbornly refused to open to her, to change in any way, to do anything but just exist and glimmer, tantalizingly present but so far away.
Kira finally gave up, sitting forward with a muttered curse. She glanced at the terminal on her tiny desk; she’d send a conventional message to him, but she had no idea how far apart the Hecate and the Stiletto were. It was certainly more than the twenty-five light-year limit of real-time comms, which meant her message would have to be delivered through the ON courier system. As a low-priority personnel message, that could take days, even weeks.
“Lieutenant Wixcombe, Densmore here. Report to my planning room.”
Kira glared at the intercom, but her anger faded as she stood, straightened her uniform, and squared up
, firing off one last thought to Thorn, wherever he was.
When you’re ready, I’m here.
3
Thorn felt Kira finally give up and withdraw, abandoning her attempts to contact him.
Again.
Fortunately, this time she’d caught him on a down shift, when he had no duties. The last time she tried, he’d been ensconced in the Hecate’s witchport, just minutes away from a possible contact with a Nyctus incursion into ON space. It had turned out to be a false alarm, but he’d been forced to split his attention—a feat he now understood how to do, so the experience hadn’t been a loss. His inability to speak to her was born of a natural drift, and unfounded suspicions, and all of the myriad things that turn people into strangers. Kira and Thorn were no ordinary people, but they were still subject to emotions and strain. In some sense, the things that kept them together could be a wedge between them as their minds were both able to roam wide and free, hearing thoughts that were not their own. Feelings that were not their own.
Pain that was not their own.
Thorn shook his head. Stay in the moment. Stay here.
“Stellers, Tanner. Report to my planning room.”
Thorn tapped the intercom. “Aye, sir. On my way.”
As he traversed the Hecate’s corridors, Thorn reflected on the fact that he knew exactly what was wrong with him. Ever since the Vision, he’d been finding it harder and harder to maintain his focus. What should have been trivial magical tasks, things that should, by now, be as natural to him as blinking or breathing, had begun to require effort. He had to concentrate on things that should have been reflexive, and the effort was a kind of grinding, both in his mind and in the untapped well of magical energy that made him more weapon than man. Thorn was a balanced knife—a human who existed between two worlds, and at the moment, neither felt like it fit.
He braced himself as the door to Tanner’s planning room slid open, ready to find it once more a sweaty little box jammed with people. But Tanner was alone. He gestured Thorn in, acknowledged his salute, then muttered, “Stand easy, Stellers.”
“Sir, you wanted to see me?”
“I did. Tell me, Stellers, do you think you could detect a Skin?” Tanner didn’t waste words, his eyes pinning Thorn with bright intellect and will.
“I don’t know, sir. I’ve heard a few mentions of it via ’caster channels, but nothing definitive,” Thorn admitted.
“Starcaster channels?”
Thorn waved vaguely toward the captain’s comm unit. “The Starcaster Corps maintains its own sort of back channels, I guess. We talk to one another. I’m sure commanders do the same, just by different means.”
“Magically?”
“Sometimes.”
“Huh.” Tanner mulled that for a moment, then lifted his brows as he sifted the concept of a secret network. Tanner was an old hand, and the more he learned about the ‘casters, the more he understood them to be sailors with a different set of tools. “No different, I suppose, than, say, the Engineering folks, who bitch about supply and their commanders. And captains. They live to gripe about captains. For engineers, it’s an art form.”
“Starcasters would never do that, sir,” Thorn said with feigned dignity.
Tanner actually smiled. It was brief, and slight, but genuine. “Of course you don’t. You’re far too noble. But back to the matter at hand. Do you think it would be possible to detect a Skin, using your magic, but—and this is key—discretion is critical, and not for the simple reason that we don’t want them tipped off. We need our entire awareness of them, as a presence, to be utterly secret. Do you understand?”
Thorn chewed on that, knowing any magical scan could be detected by the Nyctus. If these Skins were, in fact, shamans of some kind, that meant his incursion would be like ringing a bell. “It’s possible, I suppose, sir. I assume there’d be some sort of evidence of the Nyctus tampering with someone’s mind, that a Joiner could detect. Like an echo, or a trail maybe?”
“Can you do it covertly from the ship? Or at a distance?”
“Spy on people’s minds without their knowing about it? If I was careful, yes. However, the Starcaster Code of Conduct expressly prohibits—”
“Yes, I know it does,” Tanner said, raising a hand. “And it’s a laudable prohibition, sure. Our minds are supposed to be our ultimate safe place, aren’t they?”
Thorn nodded but knew there was an implied but hanging off the end of Tanner’s words. So he said nothing and simply waited.
“Don’t worry,” Tanner went on. “I’m not going to ask you to read people’s minds without their knowing about it. But I am going to ask you to read people’s minds. I need to know the Hecate’s senior officers, bridge, engineering and weapons crews are free of this . . . influence. I don’t know what else to call it, at this time, but we know that they’re not on our team. We’ll hold off on the rest of the crew, at least for now. I’ll have to create a subtle means of denying certain crew access to more sensitive areas of data, weapons, and the holiest of holies: battle plans.”
“That’s going to raise suspicions all on its own, sir.”
“We’ll be announcing that there are new security protocols introduced by Fleet. The crew will bitch and complain about them, and then get on with their jobs, the way they always do, because they know the Fleet will eventually change its mind and come up with something else.”
Despite his brooding thoughts, Thorn had to lift his eyebrows. “You’re going to blame Fleet, sir?”
“Blaming high HQs for unpopular things is a time-honored tradition, Stellers, but with two, firm conditions—one, you do it sparingly, and two, you don’t use it as a way of shirking your own actual responsibilities. In this instance, it works because we don’t want to rouse suspicions, just in case any of our crew are compromised. Blaming it on some random, nebulous directive from Fleet diffuses any questions; a directive coming from me personally is likely to have exactly the opposite effect.”
“Because the crew will think you suspect something.”
“Exactly.”
Thorn smiled at the captain’s deft planning. “Okay, sir. What would you like me to do?”
“I’m going to interview each of the senior officers personally, ostensibly to get ready for annual performance reviews. You’ll be present and will use the opportunity to—to do whatever it is that you do, to determine if they’re clean or not.”
Thorn raised a finger in question. “Aren’t these people going to wonder why I’m sitting in on all of these interviews? We’ve never done that before.”
“Another Fleet directive. I’ll make a big deal about not liking it and roll my eyes when I explain it.”
“Ah.”
“Exactly. Never underestimate the power of an irritated eye roll. Once you confirm they’re clean, we’ll explain to them what’s going on, then work with them to screen their departments.”
Thorn waved out toward the corridor, where the crew moved about in their usual bustle. “Sir, wouldn’t it make more sense just to screen suspect personnel? Anyone the squids might have had a chance to actually compromise?”
“Stellers, we have new transfers from other ships and bases. People who have been away on special missions. Hell, people who were away on leave. Without some way of independently verifying where they were while they weren’t aboard the Hecate, any of them might have been compromised. For that matter, when we stop for resupply at Code Gauntlet in a few days, we’re going to rotate in some new crew, and they’ll have to be screened.” Tanner shook his head. “No, if we try to limit ourselves to just those who we think are likely to have been co-opted, we’ll end up testing only a handful of the crew.”
Thorn had to nod at that. “Good point, sir. When did you want to begin?”
“Immediately. We’ll start with the XO—she was on leave just over a month ago—and then move on to the bridge crew. I’m going to do this in my quarters.” He glanced around at his miniscule planning room. “More room in my close
t than in here. Report there in one hour.”
“Aye, sir.” Thorn started to turn to leave, but stopped. “Sir, I—” he began, then stopped, not sure how to proceed. Tanner, though, gave a thin smile.
“You wonder if I should be tested. Fair point.” Tanner’s smile widened a touch. “I haven’t been off this ship for more than a day or two for the past year. But, like I said, fair point. Feel free to read me any time. I’ll trust you to be discreet about it and not make yourself too much at home in my head. I like my personal space.”
Thorn offered the Captain an appreciative nod. Tanner had just told Thorn he trusted him implicitly, which buoyed him with a sense of pride.
“Discretion is my mission, sir, in the event I ever do scan you.”
“Excellent. I see you understand the concept of plausible deniability,” Tanner said.
“I do now, sir,” Thorn said, smiling. “But what about me? I’ve been on more than a few extended missions into Nyctus space, some of them with just me and Specialist Wyant aboard her Gyrfalcon.”
Tanner gave a wintry smile, and for a moment, he looked tired beyond his years. “If you’ve been compromised by the Nyctus, Stellers, then we’re all screwed.”
Thorn flopped into his rack without removing his shirt, or even his boots. Fatigue tugged at him around the edges, telling him to close his eyes, relax, just take a few minutes—
He blinked himself back to something closer to alertness. He hadn’t expected repeated Joinings to be so draining.
Thorn sighed. It wasn’t the Joinings he’d been doing on Tanner’s behalf—which had, thankfully, uncovered no Skins aboard the Hecate, unless they were Ratings in a non-critical department. He’d get through the rest of those tomorrow but doubted they’d find anyone who’d been compromised.
Fortunately, the Hecate’s crew was small compared to that of a big capital ship like a battlecruiser—which made him wonder how they could possibly ensure security against Skins aboard those massive beasts. By the time a Starcaster got through the entire crew, they’d have to start at the beginning again, given the number of transfers and leave rotations—
