Starcaster
Author: J.N. Chaney
Date: 2020-09-06 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Military Fiction; Magic; Space Opera; Fiction
Description: Magic. Steel. Blood. Victory. The Earth’s navy is left drifting among the stars as Nyctus ships swarm, their purpose unknown as they continue their advance, burning one system after another. Humanity's extinction seems inevitable. But on one of the forgotten worlds, a boy is left behind, and he holds a talent unlike anything the galaxy has ever known. Thorn Stellers is a mage, made to lead and fight. With a renegade division of warriors at his side, and with weapons far different from those of old Earth, Thorn stands a chance at standing up to humanity's enemies. For these mage-soldiers, armed

Copyrighted Material

Starcaster Copyright © 2020 by Variant Publications

Book design and layout copyright © 2020 by JN Chaney

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

1st Edition

Contents

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Starcaster

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Hex Division

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Crimson Sun

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

A Short Bonus Chapter

Bonus Chapter: Spark to Flame

Witch Nebula

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Savage Tide

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Cry Victory

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

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Prologue

The Hecate’s orbit sat low enough to study the alternating cloud flow in the yellow and red banded gas giant below, but the real show wasn’t the curve of a planet filling the port viewers, it was the fleet ranged in battle formation to the front and starboard. Hecate’s captain, Laird Valmont, straightened his tunic before he could stop himself. His hand strayed to the Orbital Navy crest pinned to his lapel, and he rubbed it with a bit of jacket cuff pinched between his finger and thumb. It was a ritual movement, born from years of stay-bright medals that refused to stay bright. There was a lot of ON brass out there, commodores of cruisers and destroyers a hell of a lot snazzier than his aging frigate, and Valmont hadn’t had a chance to get his dress uniform to the cleaners. There hadn’t been time.

No telling how long he would have kept it up, fixing himself for an audience that had no reason to flip their viewers to ship-to-ship mode. The enemy was out of visual range. Long-view scans seemed to be on the fritz, tracking more movement in the rubble of the planet’s ring system than among the enemy ships. There was nothing to do but hurry up and wait.

Most of Valmont’s crew were new faces. They’d been recalled from leave, like he had. Some had been stop-lossed and returned to active duty. Bag of dicks, that’s what it was, but the ON hadn’t had a choice.

A soft cough and a whispered, “Sir?” brought Valmont back to reality.

“Lieutenant Jaune, requesting permission to speak.”

Jaune wasn’t one of the new ones. Valmont had known him since he was a baby-faced ensign. He’d moved up in rank, but the baby-faced part hadn’t changed. Some people were blessed with not having to shave, but Valmont was pretty sure Jaune’s voice hadn’t dropped either.

“What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” Valmont asked. “You look a little green.”

Jaune’s jaw worked, chawing at nothing. “I don’t like being sidled up to this planet, sir. These bloaty gas ones are tricky.”

Valmont could hear the young lieutenant grinding his teeth. He was pretty sure everyone on deck could. “Let me give you a bit of advice. Might save you some dental work.”

“Advice, sir?” Jaune had stopped the teeth grinding, but a muscle in his cheek was playing hopscotch.

“Your place isn’t to question. That’s above your paygrade. Just keep your head down and do what you’re told.”

“Sir.” Jaune jabbed a finger at his personal view screen. “That’s a damn vortex. The planet’s got a pull and this position is a death trap. Once we’re in the atmosphere, it’s a toss-up. Either the wind gets us, or the pressure will.”

The deck was quiet enough that Valmont could hear Jaune gulping air—rhythmic labored pants, like a farm hound in August.

“How long have you been on duty today, Jaune?” Valmont caught the eye of one of the alternates.

The alt didn’t waste any time sliding into position next to the lieutenant. “I’ll take your viewer. Why don’t you take a break? Get your head right.”

Jaune didn’t reply, but he did slide out of his chair and let the alternate log in. Once he was logged out, Jaune slouched, hands on his thighs and head low, taking more of those noisy dog-breaths.

“If you’re going to be sick, don’t do it on my bridge,” said Valmont. “That’s an order, by the way.”

Jaune straightened and managed an, “Aye, sir.” It wasn’t crisp, but it was audible.

Drops of sweat speckled the lieutenant’s upper lip.

The alt who’d taken over leaned in to study something on the viewer and smiled. “If you’re worried about the storm and the pressure, Jaune, you’re freaking about nothing. Ammonia, methane, and hydrogen are the friendliest gasses in that thing. We’d melt before we got crushed.”

The lieutenant sprinted off the bridge so fast Valmont wondered how he did on his fitness assessment. Damn, that kid could move when he needed to.

From his perch on Jaune’s seat, the alternate stared at Valmont with a look one part admiration and three parts calculating.

“What’s your name, troop?” Valmont asked.

“Barca, sir.” He swiveled to face the viewer again and began to adjust Jaune’s settings.

“You new?”

“Aye, sir. First tour here on the Hecate, second deployment.” He was smiling again, eyes locked on the viewer, fingers sprinting on the keys.

He looked a little too comfortable in his new seat.

Valmont shook his head. “Barca, try not to run anyone else off my bridge just because you want to move up.”

“Aye, sir.” The alternate didn’t even have the grace to look sheepish.

Valmont was a firm believer that everyone should try a stint in the military. He’d seen plenty of dropouts and hard-sells make something productive of themselves, both the enlisted side and in the officer corps. The ON was a good fit for a lot of unlikely people. Even when it wasn’t, what’s a few years of service in the scheme of things? Given recent circumstances though, Valmont had to remind himself that “try it, you might like it” was peacetime thinking.

They weren’t at peace.

“In case there’s doubt floating around, the planet is there for cover if needed,” Valmont said, pitching his voice to carry. “We don’t know what we’re fighting. No one’s gotten a good look. Every skirmish, communications have been knocked out early.” There was restless movement from the crew at his words, but Valmont knew he wasn’t telling them anything they hadn’t already heard from the news vids. “If things get bad, we can dip into the atmosphere. It may throw off their tracking. But Barca here is right. Outstay our welcome and we’ll melt. If we go in, we don’t get comfy.”

Barca’s hands were flying over the keyboard as he accessed finer details about the red and orange globe filling their portside view. His grin hadn’t slipped, although Valmont was damned if there was anything to smile about.

“Sir, if the fleet runs into trouble we can’t tackle, escape pods can hide in the ring debris.”

Valmont nodded. “Good to see someone around here thinking—“

Barca cut him off. “There’s something coming from our three.”

“Let the ships on our three handle it. Scan what’s in front of you. That’s the last order given.”

“But our three—“

“Barca, my high opinion of you is deteriorating.” Valmont really didn’t want to cycle him out of Jaune’s chair. If this pattern kept up, he’d run out of crew. He glanced out the starboard wall viewer, but the angle range was hampered on the bigger viewers. “Stay in your lane.”

“But, sir…”

“Something wrong with your ears? Should I call a medic and have you scanned? I said let them handle it.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, sir. We’ve lost the cruisers on our three. All of them.”

“What do you mean all of them?”

A proximity alert rang out seconds before a chunk of debris hit. The shield repelled it and off it tumbled, too little to do any damage. Valmont watched the mass sail past on its new trajectory. The proximity alert didn’t stop its clamor, though, and an instant later a rain of debris pelted the hull.

There was a moment of silence when the alarm cut off.

The planet’s vestigial ring system harbored a whole lot of dust, a few notable bits of rock, and a dozen lumpy moons. It had caught Valmont’s eye when they first got into position, because like Barca pointed out, it could provide concealment if things went south.

Other than that, it wasn’t much to look at. Not nearly as spectacular a view as the turbulent red and orange globe of the planet itself or the stretch of the ON fleet.

But something was happening to the ring. First dust and small chunks, and then larger rocks wobbled out of their bands. It happened slowly at first.

Valmont started to ask Barca for a scan but never got the chance. A lump jerked out of the planet’s skimpy belt and flew at them, like some invisible giant had decided to have a bit of fun with a game of catch.

The proximity alert began to wail again.

Barca turned to Valmont and shouted, “I think somebody just threw a rock at us.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

There was a thump and a shudder. The deck rolled.

Valmont had been in an earthquake once—a big seven pointer. It hadn’t been a teeth-shaker like in books and movies; instead, it felt like this, like riding a long, slow wave. At the time, Valmont had been a cadet and one of the requirements was meditative yoga. It was meant to teach inner calm and grace under pressure, but when Valmont realized the female he shared matspace with had head lice, all the class did was raise his blood pressure. The way the earthquake had rolled underfoot made him wonder if that was what the lice felt during yoga class—this smooth, undulating, massive movement. His immediate response to the quake wasn’t fear, but wonder.

Here it was, so many years later, a great deal of water under the bridge, beast of a frigate under his feet, and Laird Valmont was once again reduced to a louse in yoga class. It felt like a circle drawing to a close. He didn’t trust it.

In between bouts of static, the large viewers showed ship flotsam tumbling by.

“Sir?” Barca called. “That was the destroyer on our three. Wait—“ A shower of spacecrap smacked the Hecate bow and starboard. “This stuff isn’t just ships. A lot of it looks like ring debris.”

Valmont squinted through the static on the viewers. “Those rings are a good distance off. How did all of it get out here?”

More debris shook the ship.

“I think it’s them, sir. The enemy. I think they’re pulling it out of orbit and aiming it at us.”

“Is there an energy signature? A tractor beam?” Valmont asked.

“I scanned. Sensors aren’t picking up anything.”

The viewers held. The whole fleet was being pelted with debris.

“The enemy is throwing rocks at us? Rocks took out ON ships?” Valmont shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense. We have shields. Even if the enemy can throw rocks, so what? If there really has been losses and it’s not a trick, what’s causing the losses?”

On screen, a moon jerked out of its orbit and slammed into one of the destroyers. The collision caused the ship to tumble one direction and the moon to sail off in the other. Fragments from both took out a swath of smaller ships.

Valmont staggered to Barca’s viewer. It wasn’t a dream or a hallucination; the personal-sized reader showed the same images the wall screen had. “Do every scan you can think of. Don’t just search for the usual.”

The deck crew were glued to their screens, frozen.

“Weapons,” Valmont yelled. “Online. Pulverize everything bigger than a football—that isn’t one of ours.”

A weapon tech swiveled in his chair to face Valmont. “System can’t get a lock, sir. It’s like the weapons systems are just sliding off.”

Valmont couldn’t remember the tech’s name. “Keep trying. Tell me the second you find something we can use. “

Barca broke in. “More debris incoming.” The proximity alarm was joined by two more sirens. The combo was deafening.

“Someone override those damn alarms,” Valmont snapped. “We know. Spacecrap. It’s everywhere. Shut off that racket so we can think straight.”

One of the techs—a thin, nervous woman named Purnell—raced to comply. Valmont knew she was on her first assignment and sixth month in the navy. He hoped she’d see a year.

On screen the ON fleet was in tatters. All of the bigger ships, the destroyers and cruisers, were scraps. Maybe they’d gotten escape pods off before being hit, but Valmont hadn’t seen it.

The alarms cut off with a suddenness that was even more jarring than the clamor. In the quiet, Barca’s words sounded strangely amplified. “Debris everywhere, sir. I’m not getting any life signs. None of our outgoing coms are working.” A shadow crossed the large frontal view screens—something big enough to darken them all at once. “It’s a moon, sir. It’s a ways out, but it’s closing on us.”

“Weapons?” Valmont shouted. The ship shuddered. Its movement had transitioned from a rolling earthquake to a teeth-jarring one. “This would be a good time.”

“Sir, we can’t get a lock. We can’t stop it.”

Valmont took one last look outside. So few ships were left. With all the debris, it was hard to tell what was whole and what wasn’t. “Barca, how many ships have life signs?”

“There’s something wrong with the data, sir.”

“How many did you see before the sensors went down?”

“I was only scanning wreckage, sir. I didn’t hit the functional ships.” Barca darted a glance at him before focusing back on the viewer. “The moon is closing. If we’re going to do something, we have to do it now.”

Valmont closed his eyes and then thought better of it. He forced himself to look, to take in the debris field and crippled ships that had been the ON fleet. “This isn’t working. Spin up the drive and get us out of here.”

“Sir, what about recovery? We could dip into the planet, pop out to scan and rescue, and use it for cover if the enemy starts throwing stuff at us. Just like you said.”

“No.”

“Why, sir?”

“Because someone has to live to tell what happened.”

1

Thorn Stellers had heard the term “mud-ball planet,” but he’d never been on one that tried so hard to fit the bill. Being taller than most of the planet-born workers just meant there was more of him to get smeared with muck. Even after a hard scrub, which happened less often that it should, he still had crap under his nails. After a few weeks planetside, Thorn was pretty sure his hands would be dirty for the rest of his life.

There were tar clots on everything he owned, even his off-day clothes. The slop was everywhere—in the prefab barracks-style sleeping quarters, spattered on the chow trays, and smudged on latrine walls. The air felt soupy with it. Mudflat reclamation work was a hell of a way to earn a few credits.

The pipeline they were working on had been hit years ago, during the first days of the Shino-Shield War, back when the enemy had first targeted the resource planets and left everyone scrambling. Almost two decades later, there were still countless inoperable hellholes like this—more planets than workers to dig them out. On the plus side, jobs could be had for someone desperate enough to do cold, filthy, miserable work.

“Stellers.” A voice pulled Thorn out of the fog he usually drifted in, making him uncomfortably aware of the damp clay that had found its way inside his boots, feet throbbing along to his heartbeat, and the wet-wool and armpit reek of the foreman standing next to him. “Stellers,” the voice—Thorn’s foreman—repeated. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“A what?” Thorn had half-noticed the transport pop out from under the cloud cover right about the time he’d started to trek back for shift change. He thought it was the usual Blue Alliance or Collective supplier, some freighter bringing fresh blood to supplement the planet’s local labor force, the same way he’d come here.

“Visitor.” The foreman wasn’t a fan of repeating himself. The look he leveled at Thorn for having to do so twice could have boiled mud off a pipe. “It’s an ON ship.”

“Why would the Orbital Navy do a drop on this hole?”

The foreman shrugged and pointed over his shoulder at the conjoined huts that served as both housing and chow hall. “Couldn’t say, but the military don’t send pretty girls out for a common plug.” He directed a glare at Thorn. He always had a look like he’d eaten something rancid and was trying to ignore the taste, but today the foreman looked especially bad-tempered. “Once they fly out, you’d do best to find your way off planet, too.”

Thorn’s aching feet, the foreman’s stink, and the muddy sludge around him—it all fell away. Reclamation work was last resort stuff. If he couldn’t make it here, there wasn’t much to fall back on. “But mud’s all I’ve dreamed about since I was a boy. What will I do with myself if I can’t do this?” Thorn said it like a joke, pulling out a grin to back it up. The grin fit just fine. “If this is about the card game, boss—”

“Ain’t about the cards.” The foreman nodded at the huts again. “Ain’t even about the ON lady over there waiting. Something just rubs me wrong about you. I’ve never seen someone so fresh-washed mucking pipes.”

“Wait.” Thorn held up a hand. “This is about the cards, isn’t it? There’s no rule against winning.”

“Find yourself a way off-planet, Stellers,” the foreman said, expression of mild disgust unchanged. He could have been talking about the weather, the mud, or a rock in his shoe. “The sooner we’re rid of you, the better.”

Thorn watched the man slog off through the muck and started to call out, maybe offer him a rematch on the cards, double or nothing, but decided against it. Instead, he picked his way through the mud and the damp toward whatever fresh trouble might be waiting at the hut.

* * *

The foreman was right. The ON soldier was pretty. She was also smart. She’d grabbed coffee for both of them and brought it outside the chow hall doorway so the other workers wouldn’t stare, but it wasn’t until Thorn was close enough to grab the steaming tin mug that he realized he knew her. The realization hit him hard—a forced remembrance of a time that he’d tried to forget.

“Kira? Kira Wixcombe?”

He hadn’t seen her since they were both kids at the Children’s Refugee Collective, the de facto dumping ground for orphans in the early years of the war. Unwanted kids, bad food, and despair. A perfect recipe to produce people like Thorn, who fit nowhere but lived everywhere. The flotsam of war.

She flashed Thorn a smile. She still had her dimples. “How’d you know it was me?”

“We don’t get many redheads,” Thorn replied.

Kira glanced around the mud-smeared stoop of the chow hut, the utilitarian bulk of the sleeping quarters, and the soup of the flats beyond. “Doubt the hair’s what sparked your memory. Anyone could dye it this shade.”

The coffee she’d handed him had the texture of runny grits, but it was hot. Thorn took a long swallow and stared at Kira over the mug’s rim. She was the cleanest person he’d seen since he got here, and even more surprising, she was armed—a railer at her hip, the compact, powerful weapon gleaming darkly in its synthetic holster. Though small, the personal railgun would send rounds through walls, not at them. It was a menacing touch on Kira, but it didn’t detract from the pleasant sensation filling Thorn’s body. He wasn’t working in the slop, and for the moment, that was a vast improvement over his daily life.

When he lowered the mug, he shifted his grip from the handle so he could cup it in his hands and warm his fingers. “People in these camps are happy to get two squares a day. No one wastes credits on hair dye.”

“Redheads aren’t exactly rare, Thorn. Plenty of people come by it naturally.”

Kira’s eyes were still roaming the camp and mudflats. Thorn followed her gaze. From his perspective, there wasn’t a damn thing worth looking at with that level of intensity, except for maybe him, and he was the one thing Kira’s gaze wasn’t burning a hole in.

“Redheads are rare on this planet. Prevalent shade is brown,” he said. “Protective camouflage. Blends with the scenery.”

Those blue eyes stopped roaming and locked on his. Kira arched an eyebrow and waited.

“Alright.” Thorn tried out the grin that hadn’t worked on the foreman. “I read the name tag on your uniform and put two and two together. You always said you wanted to enlist.”

Kira flashed him those dimples again and then pointed at the silver bars on her collar. “I didn’t enlist. The enlisted have to work for a living. I’m an officer.”

“Look at that,” he said and then took another long pull of coffee. “Good for you. Glad someone made it out of there, I guess.”

The wind picked up. It pelted rain against the construct material of the awning that sheltered their stoop.

The pause in the conversation felt awkward. The silence needed something, so he added, “Do you like it?”

“Hmm,” she replied, staring out at the mud again.

As an answer, it wasn’t the most positive one Thorne had ever heard, but it beat the hell out of what some of the crustier ON vets on the reclamation team had said about their years in service. “I’m guessing we owe the pleasure of your visit to some policy shift between Collective and the Alliance? They’re trying to make nice and now the ON’s responsible for surveying reclamation work. That sound about right?” Thorne asked.

Kira tapped a finger against her chin, her head tilted a bit as if in thought. “Nice place you got here, Thorn.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “You get to pick between two seasons: slush or monsoon. Lucky you to visit during slush.”

Kira took a long pull of her coffee, grimacing at the taste, and then stared down into her cup. Thorn studied her while he could. That red hair and those ice-blue eyes hadn’t changed a bit. Thorn would have known her without the name tag. Kira was impossible to forget.

But when those eyes looked back up, he saw they were chilly. Her face was a lot more closed off than when they were kids. Now, it was dark with secrets.

“I need to ask you something,” she said.

He put his grin back on and turned up the wattage. “Here we go, the woman with a plan—ask away.” Thorn reached out to clink his mug against hers.

She didn’t grin back. “Do you remember when we were kids?”

“Obviously.”

She snorted in annoyance and shook her head. “No, I don’t mean in general. I mean do you remember how you liked to read after lights-out?”

Thorn gave her a slow nod but didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember when they took your flashlight away?” Her eyes bored into his.

The mudflats and the pipeline work seemed much warmer than this short redhead in uniform next to him. Thorn looked away so he wouldn’t have to meet her stare.

“Do you remember how you made that light? It was a ball about the size of a silver dollar. You pulled it from nowhere. It floated right over your palm.”

Thorn kept his eyes fixed on his cup. Ancient history and hocus pocus weren’t where he’d expected—or wanted—their conversation to go.

“How long did it take you to recover from what the kids in the Home did to you?” Kira asked. “Have you ever tried to do it since—tried to make a light?”

Thorn dumped the dregs of his coffee into the mud that started just past the chow hall’s stoop. “As much as I’d love to reminisce, chow’s about to clear. Almost time for second shift, and I’m on doubles this week.” He stood, towering over her a bit, before meeting Kira’s upturned gaze squarely with his own. “I’ve got congealed oil to muck unless you’re here to offer me a way out.”

The coffee churned in his stomach. It had done nothing to wake him up. Thorn’s eyes felt grainy with exhaustion.

“That’s exactly what I’m here to offer,” Kira said. Those dimples flashed, then faded. Her eyes weren’t tired. They were hungry.

“Yeah?” Thorn’s snort rang harshly in the chill air. “Where?”

“Thorn Stellers,” Kira said, standing and holding out her hand. “How would you like to join the Navy?”

2

The jump plane banked so it could start its descent. Thorn leaned into his seat as they broke through a puff of cloud into clear sky and bright sun. There was a river below and a gray scramble of buildings with a stubby landing strip a little too short for comfort. Luckily, crates like this didn’t need much of a runway to take off or land.

They hit a patch of turbulence, and Thorn’s fingers tightened on the armrests. This jumper was a shorty. It could handle standard near-Earth weather conditions as long as passengers didn’t mind bouncing. When conditions were red, it was another matter—then it was better to stay in near-orbit and wait things out.

Things were far from red, but turbulence jostle was Thorn’s least favorite part of travel, especially after the relative smoothness of space. Jump planes weren’t cut out for interstellar distances, but they were standard for planet-to-planet. In the search for work, Thorn had been on more than his fair share.

Kira snored in the seat next to him. Earlier she’d slumped loosely against his shoulder, not a sensation he minded, but when she started to drool, he repositioned her so her head was against the seat instead of him. Not that drool could damage his clothes any worse than the mud and tar of reclamation work already had.

The plane hit another rough patch. Thorne tried to force his fingers to unclench. Watching the landscape unfold below helped. Not a lot of mud down there. If he got nothing else out of volunteering for the ON, at least he’d get a shower and a chance to dry out.

Kira had dragged him from ship to ship, a bewildering glut of civilian shorties and one aging interstellar transport burg reeking of fermented cabbage and satsumas. When Thorn asked her why they were crawling along on that glorified farmers market, and why they kept changing crafts, and why the hell they didn’t just use the ON jump she’d come in to hop them back to the longer-distance ship that must have brought her, she shushed him and glanced around, as if worried someone might have overheard.

For years, distance versus maneuverability had been one of the ON’s biggest headaches. Ships bulky enough to handle an interstellar drive engine had no maneuverability when they had to fight gravity and atmospheric conditions. Some of the bigger ones were too large to land planet-side at all. Until engineers could find a better drive, ships were either marathoners or sprinters, but never both.

Kira twitched awake just before they landed, wiped the side of her face with the palm of her hand, and blinked muzzily at the sun flooding the jump’s cabin.

“You going to tell me where we’re at, or is it still a big secret?” Thorn asked her.

She yawned. “Since we made it without getting killed, I guess I can.” Kira pointed outside as the plane touched down, her gesture directed to the gray mess of buildings he’d seen from the air. “Thorn Stellers,” she said. “Welcome to Code Nebula. Home of the Magecorps MEPS and training grounds.”

“What’s an MEPS?”

Kira yawned again. “Military entrance processing station. It’s what you go through to join the ON. All of us have to do it at some point.”

“This place isn’t very big. All of the ON passes through here?”

Kira snorted. “This place? Not hardly. The ON has independent MEPS stations on a bunch of worlds. But…” She started to add something, hesitated, then finally said, “Nebula is different.”

Thorn glanced out the window again. The buildings didn’t look plotted and planned like a military installation. Nothing was crisp. This looked more like a research facility on some backwater outpost planet. “It’s different how?”

“You remember that do-it-yourself night-light you got beat up over?” Kira asked. “Only a mage can make light—spells, really. You’re going to be part of the Magecorps.” She gave him a long, measuring look, then settled on staring at his face. “If you don’t flunk out.”

* * *

They clomped down a set of silicone and aluminum airstairs—Kira with empty hands, and Thorn with the only luggage he owned. It wasn’t much: a change of clothes, a handful of hygiene items, and a kid’s book.

The book was the same one that Thorne had been reading at the Children’s Home the night he was beaten up—actually, every time he was beaten, the book was nearby, if not hidden in a pocket. When Kira had seen him stuff it into his carryall, she recognized it.

She had grabbed his wrist, a strange look on her face. “That book.”

“Brought it from home,” he’d said. “I’m not leaving it here.” And he didn’t. Bringing the book made sense. It didn’t take up much room. It would have been wasted. It’s not like the other reclamation specialists would have read it. It would have gone into the trash pit the second he lifted off planet. That book was the one constant he had, hard proof of the life he’d had before war erupted and he became an orphan. He’d heard the ON required soldiers to cut ties, but he wasn’t cutting this one.

“No, I don’t think you should leave it,” Kira had said, hand still on his wrist, although her grip had softened. “There’s something about it. Something special. Keep it with you, Thorn.”

He’d tossed her a grin—that Thorn Seller’s patented special, designed to let him just get by without revealing anything real—trying to wipe the odd look off her face, but it had lingered.

Now, standing on the tarmac of an unfamiliar world, Thorn tightened his grip on the carryall handle. It was like he could see through the bag’s canvas sides, straight through to the worn cover and yellowing pages wrapped up in his spare clothes. The book’s presence was calming. It always had been.

When he snapped back to reality, he saw Kira had already stepped off. Thorn followed, lengthening his stride a few steps to catch up. When he did, she glanced at him and said, “That building straight ahead is where you’re going. Once I hand you off, the rest is up to you.” She fought a smile, the corner of her mouth quirking and her dimples dancing between visibility and non-existence, before giving in to the grin. “Try not to worry too much about fucking up. Failure is part of training.”

“You’re coming too, right?”

Kira stopped midstride. “What?”

“Aren’t you training with me?” Thorn asked. “We’ve come this far. Might as well keep the team together.”

Kira shook her head and said almost gently, “I’m an officer, Thorn. I’ve already been through training. My job was to deliver you. Your job is to—well, you’ll see.”

When she started walking again, Thorn lagged a step behind. He told himself it was because he wanted a chance to enjoy the view.

* * *

Kira placed Thorn in the hands of a bony woman with “Narvez” on her nametape and long frown lines bracketing her mouth. She wore silver double bars on her collar like Kira did. Thorn turned an experimental grin toward her, but the woman didn’t even look at him.

“What fresh idiot you bringing me now, Wixcombe?” Narvez asked Kira.

“Well…” Kira flashed her dimples. “You always yell when I bring them to someone else.”

Thorn cleared his throat. “Them? How many people have you brought here?”

Narvez looked at him for the first time.

“Ma’am,” Thorn added.

He waited for more, but the woman stood there with her lips pressed tightly and her arms crossed, saying nothing. She had a narrow face, somewhere just short of gaunt. With her mouth thinned to a line, she was a study in slashes, like someone had taken a sharp knife to a plug of clay.

He shrugged, his grin fading. “I’m not sure I—”

She cut him off by thrusting her knife of a nose in his face. “You,” she said, her voice a hiss, so he had to stay where he was, nose to nose, to catch every word, “will address her as ma’am. Lieutenant Wixcombe is not your drinking buddy. You will address me as ma’am. You will address all female officers as ma’am, and if you happen to see a male of the species, and he’s wearing officer rank, you will address him as sir. Does that sound simple enough, or do I need to write it down for you?” She pulled back, an arm’s length away, and redirected her gaze to Kira. “What did you say his name was?”

“She didn’t, actually,” Thorn said, a flare of anger piercing his usual calm. “It’s Thorn. But if you want to be drinking buddies, you can call me whatever you want.” He paused just a moment before adding, “Ma’am.”

“His name is Stellers,” Kira told Narvez.

“Stellers.” Narvez said it like she’d just gotten a mouthful of something rotten. “If you’d be so kind as to follow me for swearing in and processing.” She looked him up and down, then delivered a grin of her own. “Enjoy your attitude while you’ve got it. It’s about to be fixed.”

* * *

Twenty minutes after that, Thorn sat on a metal table in a pale blue room. He was naked. Everything about the room conveyed a flesh-creeping cold—the shade of the paint, the temperature, a handful of pastel sketches that showed the inner workings of the human reproductive system from different angles, and one unusually large poster of venereal diseases identifiable by sight. The thin paper lining on the table stuck to his butt whenever he shifted. About the time he realized the room was likely a test of some kind and he was probably being watched, someone knocked on the door.

Thorn called out, “Come in.” He stood just as the door handle turned.

A woman walked in, cute, blonde, surrounded by an air of bustle. She had a clipboard with a medical scanner fastened to it. She didn’t bat an eye when a naked Thorn stepped forward to shake her hand. She took it without changing expression, glanced at the clipboard, and asked, “Stellers, Thorn?”

“In the flesh,” he replied. “Obviously.”

She glanced at the clipboard again, unimpressed. “This is your entrance physical.”

He tapped her clipboard, and she looked up, expression still stoic.

“Kira made it sound like I already had the job.”

“It’s just a formality. The ON fixes what gets broken during training or service—if there’s anything left to fix. They’re not likely to deny for a preexisting, but they do want to know what you’re coming in with.”

“Coming in with?”

She shrugged. “Childhood trauma is fairly common in the Magecorps.”

She didn’t add much warmth to the room. For all that she was cute, and seemingly flesh and blood, she could have been a well-designed ’bot. Thorn had dropped Kira’s name, hoping for a connection of some kind—anything to tether him to this new world, and what might be a new life.

Instead, she waved him to the exam table and ran the scanner from his temple to his shoulder and then across his chest at nipple level. Every now and then, it beeped and she made a notation. She worked her way down, then back up, and front and back, without ever saying a word—except twice. Once when she asked him to turn his head and cough, and later when she instructed him to hop off the table and grab his ankles.

“I kind of prefer reclamation work,” he muttered.

“Don’t take it personally,” she said, moving around to his front again, her eyes flat with clinical regard. “We do reclamation work here, too.”

The pale blue walls seemed to muffle background noise. The stylus against the clipboard, the girl’s breath, the shush of the air circulators—he couldn’t hear any of it. It was like being stuck under an ice sheet in a frozen sea, sunlight filtering in from above.

She was scribbling notes after poking and prodding him when Thorn asked her how she liked being in the service. She blinked, puzzled for a moment, and then started to laugh. “The ON’s recruiting comedians now?”

“Apparently.”

She stepped to the door, then through as it opened. “Enjoy your sense of humor while you’ve still got it.” With that, she was gone.

3

Code Nebula was a much smaller planet than the mud-ball Thorn had spent the last few years on, so the darkness that met him as he left the medwing took him by surprise.

Narvez waited, tall and angular, with her hands clasped tightly behind her back. Her sharply angled elbows mocked a hawk’s wings. In contrast to her poise, Thorn sauntered toward her, shoulders slumped forward, hands jammed into the pockets of his oil-worn trousers. Having lived on a planet known for nothing more than mud-slush and monsoons, he’d learned to keep his head down and hands warm. He didn’t expect the sharp—and sudden—two-finger jab to the diaphragm that propelled his body upward in a desperate attempt to swallow the air he’d lost.

The woman’s lips curled in a frigid bow. “Stellers,” she hissed. “You will stand upright and at attention or I will make you stand upright and at attention.”

“I think I understand. Ma’am.” Thorn choked on his words as he recovered from the shock, keeping his anger at bay with a force of will.

Narvez stared, then turned on her heel and led him toward a small grouping of oil-shined steel buildings. She didn’t look back, assuming he would follow. He did, though he looked around, stunned at the sights.

Code Nebula was pristine. On Murgon 4, Thorn had stood out from the other workers, literally a head taller than the rest, but also because he couldn’t stop himself from attempting to clear the muck from every facet of his life. As he absorbed his surroundings now, he felt as though he was the muck they’d be wiping from their shiny black boots.

They arrived at the barracks, and Narvez directed him to the second on the right. Simple black markings above the door read “2A.” Thorn paused, a new life waiting just beyond the metal threshold, then pressed into the orderly, sterile space.

The recruit bunks somehow managed to exude the kind of cold that seeps into your bones while at the same time hinting at comfort he could only dream of. In all his years, he had never felt so luxuriously neglected. The soft white pillow beckoned to him, and he realized just how utterly exhausted he was. Kira may have slept en route, but he’d never had the pleasure. All of the plane jumping seemed to smack him in the face, and his eyes began to droop.

“STELLERS!” Thorn jolted to attention at the sound of Narvez’s voice. He didn’t remember drifting into a sleep haze.

“Ma’am?” he said, his brain lagging two steps behind his mouth.

“Your bunk is there.” She pointed with a long finger. “Near the window. Get the hell out of Rodie’s bunkspace.”

“Shit,” he grumbled. Then, as his brain finally caught up to him, he snapped to attention and flashed a brilliant smile at the serrated woman. “I mean shit, ma’am.”

Though she didn’t seem too pleased with the correction, Thorn snatched up his canvas bag and clutched it tightly as he transitioned to the correct bunk. The other six recruits in his barrack sniggered into the crooks of their elbows or behind their blankets, but Thorn didn’t pay them more than a glance. He didn’t have the energy. Until their collective laughter, he hadn’t even clocked their presence.

Narvez left him with an icy glare, and Thorn sighed away the tension as he collapsed on the edge of the mattress.

“I’m Rodie,” a nasally voice announced from much closer than Thorn had anticipated. “This is Drigo. Don’t worry about the bunk mishap. They all look the same anyway.”

Thorn grasped the man’s hand and shook it, marveling at the slight figure he saw before him.

When Kira had offered him the job, Thorn thought he was a lock. Obviously, the ON would be interested in a tall, heavily-built man such as himself. But standing before him now was a young man barely more than skin-and-bones with a head two sizes too big for his neck and glasses that made a job of sliding down the bridge of his nose.

“I…uh, yeah…” Thorn stuttered at the juxtaposition before him.

Drigo chuckled and lifted his arm to press it against the metal bed frame. “We get it, man. Don’t worry about it. The first day in Magecorps is a little freaky. Messes with your head and shit.” He had a subtle air of aggression, even when he was smiling. Thorn knew his type—as the tallest kid in every group, and on the slop crews, Thorn was made to be challenged, and usually by guys like Drigo, who thought their natural position was in the lead. They’d have to reach an understanding at some point.

Thorn dropped his head and ran his fingers through his chunky locks of blonde hair. “Magecorps.” He tested the word on his lips. It fell from his mouth naturally and somehow brought the collision of reality to the surrealism of his surroundings.

“Yeah, well, trust me, man—your head’s gonna be doin’ somersaults tomorrow.” Drigo’s bicep rippled as he gestured vaguely about the oncoming day. His physique fit the construct Thorn had created of his fellow recruits much better than Rodie’s—just about a foot and a half shorter than what he expected. What he lacked in height, he’d certainly gained in bulk, though.

Add Napoleon complex to his urge to lead, Thorn mused.

Rodie chimed in again, pushing his glasses up with a crooked finger. “That’s Val over there. She’s a beast. Then you’ve got Streya, Tuck, and Unger.” He leaned in close enough that Thorn could feel his breath against his cheek. “But if you need anything, you wanna talk to me.”

Drigo grabbed Rodie by the shoulder and nudged him gently toward the aisle between the bunks. “Yeah, yeah, let’s let the poor guy get some sleep before you start touting your goods, eh?”

The pillow on his bunk was just as inviting as Thorn imagined Rodie’s to be. Even the rough blanket couldn’t stop sleep from finding him, and soon he slipped away for the night, his body and mind finally at rest. For a while.

* * *

A resounding crack brought Thorn reeling out of sleep. His heart pounded against his chest, and he gulped to calm his staggered breath. He hardly recalled his dreams anymore, though he didn’t know why. He did know that the racing thump of his heart and beading sweat on his brow wasn’t unfamiliar. Without thinking, he reached for the book stashed beneath his pillow and ran his thumb across the cracked cover in the dark.

Just when he thought the calm had returned, another sharp, atmospheric crack sounded in the distance. This time, he saw the light that filled the room with an ethereal glow. Thorn pulled himself up by the window ledge and stared out in wonder. He had only seen that particular luminescence once before, and it had emanated from his own palm. Here, he saw the clouds alight with the spectacle.

Thorn glanced around the room. Everybody else seemed to still be sleeping. Smart. Catch your flies while you can, he knew, so he eased back down to a prone position. Despite his exhaustion, Thorn lay awake listening to the sky crackle as flashes of light splashed across the ceiling tiles.

It wasn’t much longer before the barrack door smashed open and a cyclone of cold air tore through the bunks, ripping blankets from the recruits and jolting them all awake. At the back of the room, Thorn was lucky enough to see the destruction, so he clung to his bunk, fingers in a death grip.

The slim figure in the doorway could be none other than Narvez, but right now she appeared to stand ten feet tall. Her cloak swirled about her knees as she stood silhouetted against the pre-dawn sky.

Narvez’s voice echoed above the tired groans of his bunkmates. “Breakfast in five, or none at all.” Then she was gone.

With each passing second, Thorn was missing the muck and oil of his former life.

* * *

The mess hall was far from messy. Thorn couldn’t help but marvel at the polished aluminum floors, the shiny metal chairs—hell, he could nearly see his reflection in the tray Drigo passed back to him. Bodies jostled about as they shook off the haze of fitful sleep. Men with silver bars on their jackets stood throughout the room, surveying the recruits with professional disinterest.

To say the breakfast was meager would be an overstatement. For a hard day’s labor on the pipes, Thorn could eat nearly a dozen eggs, toast, bacon, and then some. He had a feeling today would be a bit more strenuous than working pipes on Murgon 4, but what he got was two egg-like circles of protein on top of a slice of dusty bread so thin it only had one side. For his second slice of what the cook seemed to think of as bread, there was a jelly with the consistency of engine oil, smelling vaguely of burned sugar and peaches. He devoured it out of necessity but took solace from the coffee. It was hot, heavily caffeinated, and only mildly offensive.

After breakfast, Narvez led the recruits of 2A to the training grounds where they came to a stop on a running track. The sun was just starting to rise above the wooded hills in the distance, and the new officer pulled a cap on to shade his eyes.

“Recruits, at attention!” Narvez commanded.

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” Thorn was a syllable behind the rest in response as they saluted in unison.

“Instructor Burnitz, your recruits. Stellers, step forward.” Narvez tipped her head to the ginger-bearded man. “Instructor Burnitz, your newest recruit—Stellers. Good luck with this one.”

Thorn shuffled forward, uneasy with the limelight for the first time in his life. Instructor Burnitz scoffed, then sized him up like livestock. Thorn felt his anger rise, but only just.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you’re called, recruit. Get back in line.” Burnitz’s voice was all bite and no bark. Thorn could sense the danger this man held at his fingertips.

“Get ready to run, Proby,” Val whispered over her shoulder in his general direction.

Rodie’s right. Thorn raised a brow as he took in the hard lines that shaped her physique. She’s a beast.

“Recruits! Fall in!” Without another word, Burnitz started down the track with a quickness that took Thorn by surprise.

Thorn hadn’t been on a run in ages. His chest burned as they trekked through the hills and slogged through muddy banks, but he refused to fall out. He wouldn’t be that Proby. The other bunks had just caught up with them when Thorn’s legs began to falter, and his mind told him the run was over. But they continued. They must have done about six miles when Burnitz finally spoke above the gasps and moans.

“What’s the matter? We’re just over halfway there now.” Burnitz chuckled at the hopeless grunts. He stayed ten yards ahead of the rest, seemingly unfazed by the rugged terrain. “You know, I am feeling a bit shaded in these trees. Can any of you get my hat off my head?”

A few recruits started moving faster and pressed forward, but Burnitz only increased the distance between them. Now he turned and ran backward, a slight smile lifting the corner of his beard.

“Ease up, now. Run any harder and you’ll hit the ground before you hit me.” Burnitz continued to run backward, his feet finding purchase on the ground below as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

Despite himself, Thorn let out a groan. Luckily, it wasn’t heard over the retching behind him. He looked up and saw Rodie, by some act of the gods, appeared to be at the front of the pack. He had to admit, the nerd had great cardio. Thorn watched as Rodie raised his hands, running awkwardly with shoulders stiff to the front. A globe of light built in his palm and he threw it forward, but it was an awkward motion, like a fawn taking its first steps. The globe splattered against the ground and blew Rodie’s feet from beneath him. He hit the trail hard and whimpered before scampering back to his feet at the back of the pack, head down.

Burnitz chortled. “There we have it! The best of the best! Is that all you fresh bloods got? A miserable fizzing of energy that takes out the ’caster?”

All around him, Thorn saw balls of light begin to glow one by one, and each fizzled out before it could be thrown at Burnitz. He clenched his jaw and directed his eyes to the dirt, determined not to give in to his anger at Burnitz. The instructor was an asshole, but an asshole with a purpose. Thorn would avoid being one of the many. Instead, he let the anger simmer as everyone else around him failed, their magical efforts little more than an embarrassment.

“Kids, kids—we’re all going to be friends someday, but not with this terrible attitude,” Burnitz called, hoping to further break their egos. “Can’t run, can’t fight.” He sniggered. “And can’t even perform magic. Not a good way to assault your instructor and reveal your incompetence.” He lifted a brow, smiling at them, his feet still moving like pistons. “You have to understand enemy strength, along with your own ability. So far, I’m seeing neither.”

Val growled and threw her hands forward, a bright white ball of light flying from them. Burnitz sidestepped easily and the globe splintered the tree beside him.

“There we go! That’s some fire!” Burnitz lit up—literally; his eyes glowed with an electric blue. Val tried to harness the energy once more, but it only sparked.

Guess I’m not the only failure here. Thorn fought a chuckle and lost the battle. Burnitz stopped in his tracks. The recruits collided and tumbled over one another in the abrupt stop, like a train piling up in slow motion wreckage. Thorn’s legs twitched as if they itched to keep going, even as Burnitz’s eyes bore into him with that electric blue glare.

“Stellers, is it?” Burnitz demanded.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Thorn answered instantly. He was learning.

“I don’t recall seeing your pitiable attempt. Remove the hat from my head, recruit.”

Thorn bit back his first reply, then spoke. “I wanted to, ah…save up my energy for a legit try, sir.” A few of the recruits snorted uncontrollably at Thorn’s uncertainty and their own failures.

Burnitz grimaced back. “Not a fan of waiting. I like to get to the main event.” He tapped a finger on his rugged watch, indicating time was wasting.

Thorn was about to respond when a blast of seafoam light singed the hair at the top of his head.

“Remove the hat from my head, recruit.” Burnitz’s voice now filled the space between the trees.

Thorn’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. He chewed on his cheek and stood resilient, face placid.

“Oh, my mistake.” Burnitz began to turn forward again. “Thought you were a coward. You don’t have the fighter’s eye.” Burnitz gave him a look that slid away in disgust. “Or intellect, for that matter.”

The column of rage that boiled inside Thorn shot through every nerve in his body—a furnace of heat and energy that sizzled nerves into action before Thorn even knew what was happening. Without a thought, Thorn’s hands went up, wrapped in a malignant chorus of light, then he released it all in a single pulse of magical power that streaked forward faster than the eye could follow. The silent blast of dark, glittering energy had thrown Burnitz to the forest floor; his hat lay beside him in the dirt, curls of smoke rising from the seared fabric. Silence filled the empty space and the air burned with a sulfurous residue.

A harried breathing made the squad turn to see Narvez approaching from the rear. “Instructor Burnitz!”

“Lieutenant Narvez.” Burnitz bounced to his feet as if he hadn’t just been hit with the force of a truck.

“Which recruit?” Her inquisition was incomplete, but they all knew what she was asking.

Thorn stepped toward her before Burnitz could respond. “It was me, ma’am.”

Narvez turned to head back to the training field. “Follow me, Stellers.”

Still shocked at what he’d just produced, he fell in behind Narvez, his body gone cold with fear and uncertainty. He could hear Burnitz calling cadences as the rest of the recruits trotted on behind him.

* * *

Commander Schrader’s office was as cold as his skin was pale. Lieutenant Ashworth was already sitting in a high-back leather chair in the corner. Thorn sat in a state of rigid attention, more statue than recruit. His thoughts were simple—on the first day of training in the Magecorps, he was going to be discharged because his magic was too volatile for even the ON’s dark horse battalion. The Commander’s icy stare made Thorn hold his tongue for the moment while he sorted a response to the oncoming shitstorm.

“Commander Schrader, Thorn Stellers. Wixcombe arrived with this one yesterday.” Narvez’s hatchet-lined features went blank when speaking to the Commander.

“Bring Wixcombe to me as well, Lieutenant Narvez,” Schrader said.

“Aye, sir. Right away, sir.” Narvez hurried from the room.

Thorn stood in a cloud of uncertainty as Schrader and Ashworth sat, their eyes pinning him from two angles. After a few minutes, Narvez returned with Kira. Thorn turned his eyes toward her bright auburn hair as she brushed it neatly back away from her face and stood at attention.

“Commander Schrader,” Kira said.

“Wixcombe, what do you know of this recruit?” Schrader appeared genuinely curious, and Thorn’s nerves settled a bit at the Commander’s demeanor.

“Commander, sir, this is Thorn Stellers. I arrived at Code Nebula with him yesterday. I sought him out because I believe he will be a fine addition to the Magecorps, sir.” Kira never looked in Thorn’s direction as she addressed Schrader.

Schrader steepled his long, boney fingers. “And why do you believe that, Lieutenant?”

Kira dropped her eyes to the ground for a brief moment as she cleared her throat. Thorn could see that she was struggling with whether or not to reveal their connection.

“Stellers was…” She lifted her eyes and set her jaw with a new resolve. “Thorn was my brother at the Children’s Refugee Collective Home. He might be a little broken, but he’s a good man.”

“And you thought… what did you think, Lieutenant Wixcombe?” Commander Schrader stood and placed his fingertips against the desktop so that his knuckles bent like spider’s legs. “You thought you’d collect this boy you haven’t seen in more than a decade and bring him to Code Nebula without even holding him accountable to the trial first?”

Kira’s hair fell into her face, head dipping. “Aye, sir.”

Lieutenant Ashworth drew his breath in between his teeth. “Wixcombe, you know he must be held accountable to the trial. Why in hell would you expect to plant him directly into training without accountability protocols?”

Kira cast a glare toward the second in command. “Because I know this man. And I know what he is capable of. It may have been years ago, but he has passed the trial. A trial need only be given once.”

Schrader lifted a closed fist in the air, silencing the lieutenants immediately.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe is right, a trial need only be given once. If she says this trial has been passed, then we take her on her word.” Schrader left his cold stare on the olive-skinned man. “But all magic may become tainted through time without proper instruction. You”—his gaze moved to Kira—“have just run the risk of contaminating our entire fleet of new recruits with your carelessness.”

“Sir,” Kira began, but she was cut short when a single pointed finger was raised toward her.

“To your bunk, now, Lieutenant. Tomorrow you train with the recruits.” Schrader sat once more behind his mahogany desk.

“But Sir, I…” Kira started, but it was useless.

“Butts are for the stock of your rifle. They do not belong in my office.” The angular commander’s shadow grew against the wall and the strong bass of his voice resonated in their chests. “This man”—he pointed to Thorn—“needs to learn full control of his magic immediately. It may interest you to note that these people will be going to war with the Nyctus—and soon. You are taking that responsibility on yourself, Lieutenant. If the dog is not broken in a month’s time, you will join him on whichever slum-bucket you pulled him from.”

Kira’s eyes narrowed and Thorn could see the anger darkening her face, but she maintained her composure with some effort. “Sir, yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

With that, she turned and left.

“Now, Stellers. Is there any thought in your head of what it is you’ve produced?” Schrader turned his attention to Thorn.

“I don’t want to lie,” Thorn began but paused as he realized that even the truth was evasive. “I…felt it happening. Inside me, but I don’t know where the power came from. When we were kids, I did it so I could survive—my book from home was life to me. But as to a plan, no sir. I had none.”

“Yes.” Schrader sighed, his anger dissipating, if it had been real at all. “Magic is a reflection of our deepest thoughts and emotions. When you are so broken, your magic, though powerful, is broken as well. It will control you before you have control over it. That makes you a danger to every soldier stationed at this base. That makes you a danger in training, on the field, or anywhere else. Do not let your emotions drive your actions, for in battle that is a sure way to never return home. Use your emotions to fuel your intuitions, and then train your actions to harness that energy into a controlled force. The snake does not strike out of anger or hatred, he strikes out of necessity. And when he does, his venom is released in a carefully measured dose to neutralize the enemy and preserve himself. If the snake were to strike out of hatred, the dose would not be carefully measured, and so the snake would drain himself of his precious venom and commit himself to a deadly fate. Measure your venom, Stellers. Keep your satchel full.”

Thorn gave a cautious grin. “Got it. Be the snake. Channel the snake. Will do, sir.”

Schrader waved his hand in dismissal, and Thorn felt as though he could finally breathe as he hurried through the door to the fresh air beyond.

4

“Get those knees up.” Narvez’s heavy black boots created a trench of their own as she paced in the viscous semi-liquid that Thorn had become well acquainted with over the past few weeks. The suctioning sounds resonated as the recruits raised their knees chest high.

“Good,” Narvez murmured. “Tear them down. Then build them up.”

The only energy Thorn had left was spent tearing his feet from the mud that grasped onto his boots. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been running in place, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could continue to lift his legs. They felt full of lead, and a punishing heat suffused every inch of his body.

He faltered. Narvez saw. She saw everything.

Narvez came to an abrupt stop and turned on her heel to face them with a look of irritation. “Drop!”

The recruits obeyed, dropping to their stomachs in a ragged line, hands sinking into the putrid ground.

“Now push that ground away from you in half counts—Stellers, you’ll be particularly delighted at this exercise. It’s all of the pain your body can take, but you’re using whatever magical ability you can muster. Think of it as a little vacation from running, won’t you? Now! One-and-two-and-hoooollld it. Four counts.”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am!” the troops called back at her. “One, two, three, four.”

“Now down. Half counts. One-and-two-and-hoooollld it. Four counts.”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” The group response had already begun to lose its fervor.

“One, two, three, four.” Among the shouts were groans of pain and a muted sob. Magic was hard, even if you were gifted.

Narvez schooled her features into something that appeared neutral.

Thorn thought he’d left the murk behind on Murgon 4. He’d seen the pristine barracks of the research facility upon entry and assumed that was the forecast of how his new life would be. He hadn’t taken into account the minds of the Magecorps’ Sergeants and how effectively they would force him to relive his muck-strewn past. At least on Murgon 4 he got to play cards.

Thorn shook his head at the memory. “Coulda been rich by now,” he muttered to himself as he glared at the brown tar an inch beneath his nose.

The air went still as his words tumbled out, and it took him a few seconds to notice the thick black boots standing in front of him. He turned his head up slowly, looking through his raised brow as he dared not drop to the ground and give the lieutenant a reason to start the drills all over again.

“Did you speak, Stellers?” The sharp lines in Narvez’s face dug even deeper into her tanned skin.

Thorn could hear the other recruits gasping as they held their form. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He struggled to project the response but refused to let her see his pain.

“Recruits.” Narvez turned her attention to the flagging troops. “Did I give you permission to speak?”

“Ma’am, no, ma’am,” they called back. Thorn was pretty sure a few of them were on the verge of crying. Or puking. Or both.

“Lieutenant Narvez, ma’am, if I may?” Thorn’s look of apology was mild, even regretful.

Narvez raised her brow as the silence stretched between them.

“I was simply going to comment on the sad state of your boots, ma’am. Those are not ON officer compliant.”

Thorn had only a fraction of a second to revel in the troop’s laughter before Narvez’s boot came down between his shoulders and pressed him into the mud. Above them a cloud began to swirl—far from natural, and contained only by the power of Narvez’s magical will. It took shape in seconds, growing darker and more intense by leaps and bounds. She glanced up at the unnatural structure as a sense of doom began to fill Thorn’s chest. Her face was still. Inhumanly so. And in that blankness, he sensed power.

Above her, power continued to gather, just at the edge of his senses.

Narvez’s voice rang with metallic clarity as she raised her arms to the sky. “Lay your arm out to the side, Stellers,” she commanded.

The recruits were stunned to silence. Thorn was compelled to obey.

“Fingers spread.”

A ball of light began to form in Narvez’s palm and she held it as it grew, sparking in wild, spasmodic growth. Thorn stared in horror at his fingers, spread unwillingly in the mud, wishing his arm to pull back in toward his body. When he realized he no longer had the mental capacity to control the limb, he turned to his side, grabbed the rogue shoulder with his other hand, and pulled against it. Nothing. His heart hammered against his ribs as his feet scrabbled for purchase; thoughts of his stupid mouth bringing this on to him unwelcome, bitter—and true.

The glowing globe shot from Narvez’s hand into the clouds and generated a bolt of lightning. It separated into four thin, distinct branches as it hit the ground between each of his fingers.

Narvez turned her dimming eyes toward him and lifted her boot from his back. “You can spit shine my boots later, Stellers. Thank you for your concern.” She grinned—a hideous effect on her features—and floated back to her trench, her feet skimming over the ground in a show of magical ability designed to make the recruits feel small

It worked.

Thorn threw his hand to the sky, then turned it over and back, checking his fingers for singe marks. Momentary fear still coursed through him at the sight of what true magic could do.

“Now push that ground away, recruits.” Her voice had returned to its natural grit. The recruits resumed their positions with a newly discovered motivation and continued their half count pushups.

“No, no, no,” Narvez hollered. “I said push that ground away.” She held her palms out toward them, drawing on the white-blue light once again and letting it hover in the air in front of each hand. “Push!”

Thorn regained his composure and placed his shaking fingers just above the mud. He looked up at Narvez in mild shock, then he pushed. The black cloud of shimmering energy shot from his hands and propelled him upward.

Narvez looked up at him, and for a moment her stoic demeanor faltered. The recruits stared up at Thorn in disbelief.

“Umm, a little help up here?” Thorn wobbled against the current of energy, some twenty feet off the ground.

“Release it, Stellers.” Before Narvez had a chance to complete her sentence, Thorn smashed to the ground. “Slowly…dammit.”

Thorn coughed and spat mud into Val’s shoulder beside him. “You could have led with that, ma’am.”

Val smacked him hard on the arm and wiped the mud from her skin. “Keep your filth to yourself, Proby.”

Narvez commanded their attention once more. “When you’ve all finished getting to know your own magic a little better, you can return to the mess hall for chow—then report to Instructor Burnitz for weapons training.” She turned to the back of the mud pit. “Lieutenant Wixcombe, direct the recruits and ensure each and every one of them initiates a magical push before they are dismissed. Not a pushup. This isn’t some childhood gymnastics class. I want command of their body mass against gravity, not an archaic workout.”

“Lieutenant.” Kira accepted the shift of responsibility and made her way to Narvez’s trench, kicking the mud from her boots into Thorn’s face as she passed.

Thorn couldn’t blame Kira. Because of him, she was stuck in the ditches with the rest of the grunts until he got himself under control—at the very least, he had to control his mouth. The magic would come with practice, he hoped, but his damned attitude might stop him from surviving in the program long enough to find out. Kira’s rigid form told him she was accustomed to the officer’s quarters and recruitment life—but her movements proved she could also get her hands dirty. Thorn was caught admiring the woman who he had first known as a girl.

“Stellers.” Kira wasted no time singling him out. “You’ll continue to push—with control—until every one of your squad have followed suit.”

“You know you don’t have to ask me twice.” He ran his mud-covered hands through his hair before returning to the plank position. “Ma’am.” For the next hour, Thorn pushed and released, practicing his descent and harnessing the energy that remained as he lowered himself to the ground for the next push. He felt like a leaf, caught in currents of his own making.

The food provided in the mess hall consisted of a small handful of nuts and a few cubes of cheese. His stomach roared in defiance as he chewed the last cube of pasty cheese. He dropped his tray on the conveyor and turned to see Kira standing behind him with her jaw jutting out. The childlike attitude reminded him of the days at the Children’s Home when she’d been pissed at him for one thing or another.

Kira punched him without holding back. “You dumbass.”

Thorn rubbed his shoulder. “Ouch. Tad excessive, don’t you think?”

“Get your shit together or I’ll show you what excessive is.” Kira marched off, pulling her hair tight in its frayed ponytail as she did.

Stave training was no less exhausting than the emotional breaking Narvez had subjected them to that morning. Though the planet was smaller and the resulting days shorter, these first few weeks at Code Nebula felt as though they were one continuous blur of pain and failure. Burnitz had made it his personal job to make sure every inch of Thorn’s body was covered in welts or bruises. The burly bearded man could move with the grace of a gazelle and struck with the force of a rhino. Thorn had no idea how to deflect his blows, let alone best him with the wooden planks, and Burnitz had two full decades of experience in hand-to-hand combat. He’d forgotten more than Thorn knew, and Thorn had grown up using his fists on a daily basis.

Rifle training was only different from stave training in that the ON demanded live ammunition. Luckily for Magecorps, the ON had not yet banned the use of Lifer energy—healing magic—on training wounds. That didn’t stop it from feeling like a red-hot iron rod was being projected through your skin, nor could it revive an instant death from a badly placed shot.

Thorn made his next mistake by asking the instructor a question when the recruits were marched out onto the live-fire range.

“What happens if we’re hit, sir?”

“This.” The instructor’s rifle snapped up, fired, and went back to resting position before anyone else could move. The shot cut a hot furrow through Thorn’s shoulder, leaving him lurching to one side in shock and pain.

“Hurts, doesn’t it? You’ll learn to dodge. Or you won’t. Either way, you’ll answer the most important question on my range,” the instructor said in a casual tone. He was a grizzled veteran, with eyes like black gems and a scar that split his scalp in three parts.

“What question is that, sir?” Thorn gasped as a medic began holding hands over the wound, her lips moving without sound. The healing spell worked—but it still hurt like hell.

“How do I learn to dodge a bullet?”

The day proved to Thorn and his class that gunshot wounds are the greatest teaching method ever devised. All the instructors assured the trainees that they never aimed for vital body parts. Thorn suspected they found pleasure in the soft thud of lead against those non-vital squishy bits, but with every failure to deflect a shot, the medic was called immediately. Thorn began to understand that the instructors weren’t sadists—they were trying to save the recruits from death.

Day after day, the instructors pulled the recruits from their bunks, pushed them through a paltry breakfast, tore them down physically, and then broke them mentally. When they were sufficiently depleted and broken, they would demand that the trainees perform magic with clarity and conciseness. When they inevitably failed, they broke them down once again. They worked their posts like prison guards with a penchant for punishment.

While Thorn found himself succeeding in Weapons and Tactics, he was not so adept in Clearance and Material Sciences. No matter how many times he repeated Commander Schrader’s snake analogy, he couldn’t seem to let go of simmering frustration that Burnitz and the others didn’t care what they put the recruits through, and in his darkest moments, Thorn was convinced the instructors made it personal. It didn’t matter to them that the troops were running on eight hundred kcals a day or less than four hours of sleep a night. They expected them to perform without exception. They were shaping them into war machines but treated them as if they were just that—machines.

On the training grounds near the creekbank, Instructor Hiroshi was giving some presentation about the different elements that magic could be drawn from and their manifestations, and in that moment, Thorn didn’t feel like a machine at all. He felt—tired. Hollow. His mind began to fuzz, and—

“Stellers!” Hiroshi startled him out of his daydream.

“Sir?” Thorn had become proficient in the art of snapping out of it.

Hiroshi said, “Unless you want to be the subject of my presentation, I’m going to need you to fall in with the rest of your squad.” The compact, muscular man was a Lieutenant Commander out of Magecorps, and within it, he was the foremost authority on elemental magic. Hiroshi, the recruits learned through the grapevine, had come into his power at the age of twenty, when a ship’s airlock went haywire and killed two sailors in front of him. As with many people who found magic later in life, Hiroshi needed trauma to awaken his power, which made sense given how Thorn had come to know his own magical ability.

The breeze freshened and Thorn realized he may have actually fallen asleep when he saw the recruits had moved to the field above the rocky bank.

“Sir, yes, sir.” Thorn hustled to join them, a cloud of confusion fading as he pelted up the incline, feet churning damp soil.

Hiroshi twisted his hands in a deliberate series of motions, light beginning to flare between the palms. Each mote was blue, then silver, and then they combined into a serpentine flow that danced in an unnatural sight that had once been reason enough to burn people at the stake. The rushing water slowed its current and flowed obediently upward, joining the ball of glowing matter between Hiroshi’s hands. There, the water vanished, held in a magical reservoir beyond the normal senses of humanity. With a dismissive flick, Hiroshi split the globe of light, water crashing from his palms in a torrent that sent spray ten meters in the air.

Not one recruit spoke. They were unable to in the face of such power.

Hiroshi’s black hair billowed backward with the opposing gust of wind, coming to rest around his face like a hood. “The dynamism of magic is completely in the hands of the Mage. Rodie, perform. The target cairns are downrange, and you will each destroy one of the stacks. If any rocks are still touching, you have failed. Begin.”

Rodie made the earth tremble along a well-placed line and passed his bright white energy through the cracks to dismantle the targeted cairn, each rock flying away with enthusiasm. Drigo’s power manifested in a living red flame, directed precisely to a point of earth that was left charred glassy. Val could spin a ball of blue energy into whatever caliber was necessary and hit the target cairn three hundred yards out—when the spell hit, the first stone it touched exploded in a shower of rocky fragments, some glowing like lava.

Streya seemed to pull on the very air around her and act as a conduit for the natural power of the environment. Thorn had never seen her so ominously present as when she pulled the clouds down from above her and swirled them into a cyclone, obliterating the stack of rocks. When the cyclone disbanded, the rocks flew in all directions. More than a few left their marks on the recruits, and one knocked Rodie out cold.

Hiroshi threw water from the river on Rodie to bring him back to consciousness.

“Hey, Rodie. Now that melon head of yours has a lump of its own,” Drigo said.

Hiroshi struggled to keep the smile from his face but still commanded Drigo to do fifty physical push-ups for speaking out of turn.

“Stellers, let’s see what you can produce.” Hiroshi stood near the cairn, daring him to miscalculate his attack. The atmosphere was tense, but Thorn was not.

Thorn had no trouble performing the Mage tasks. The trouble came in controlling them. He moved to the riverbank and chewed his lip in trepidation. He enjoyed Hiroshi’s teaching style. If there were an instructor he would hope not to abolish in a cloud of dark energy, Hiroshi would be the one.

He breathed deeply and concentrated. On what, he wasn’t sure. At first his thoughts swirled through his head, colliding, threading through one another in a woven skein of uncertainty and—there was something else. Under the surface, like a riptide—

It was power. And it was Thorn’s, if he could take it.

Then the image of a schoolboy pulling seven-year old Kira’s long copper hair flashed before his eyes—Kira, enduring abuse for no other reason than she was unable to defend herself. Then, not now. Thorn gathered the molecules that surrounded him, letting the anger grow to a diamond point.

He directed them at the memory of the sallow face on the boy, and he let go. The stack of rocks flew backward in a scorching blur, embedding in the trunk of a tree twenty yards away.

Silence descended, along with sprays of bark, leaves, and the feathers of some unfortunate flying creature caught in Thorn’s cone of destruction.

“Ah, well then.” Hiroshi cleared his throat, unused to being at a loss for words. “Dismissed. And remember to hydrate,” he added, warming to his position once again.

Elemental magic had a way of sapping the fluids from the fibers of your muscles. Thorn sat at the bank of the river and splashed himself with the cool liquid.

Before returning to his bunk, he caught a glimpse of Instructor Hiroshi speaking in hushed tones with Lieutenant Narvez and Commander Schrader. Lieutenant Ashworth stood nearby looking particularly sullen.

“Hey, Stellers!” Rodie had a little too much enthusiasm as Thorn entered the barrack and stripped the mud-crusted clothes from his body.

“What are you selling today, Rodie?”

“You’re gonna love it, Stellers. I’ve reeeally got the goods this time.” The lump bulging just above his left eye made Rodie look like some street urchin who’d fought off dogs for a stolen loaf of bread.

“Just get to it, Rodie.” Thorn plopped down on the edge of his bunk.

Rodie pulled a small, rectangular bar wrapped in gold foil from his chest pocket. “I’ve got the king of kings, the lord of sweets, seventy-two percent gen-you-ine choco-late!”

“I don’t really have a sweet tooth, Rodie.” Thorn lay with his face to the wall.

“Suit yourself. I was offering it to you first, but I know Drigo’s gonna go crazy,” Rodie said as he sauntered off.

Val stopped him in his tracks. “Rodie, did you just say you have-- chocolate?” Thorn turned to watch this exchange.

“I sure did, darling.” Rodie said, grinning slyly. “And it can be yours for a small price…”

“Let’s negotiate, shall we?” Val said.

“Um.” Rodie rubbed one hand over his head, face wrinkling. “See, I was gonna ask for”—he cut his eyes at Thorn, who shook his head imperceptibly—“your good graces during, our, um…upcoming trials together.”

Val lifted a brow. “Eminently reasonable of you, and forward-thinking.” She plucked the chocolate from his hand, grinning. “I applaud this kind of initiative in a squadmate.”

“Yeah, initiative,” Rodie said. “Enjoy your bar, Val.”

“I haven’t had chocolate in months. I don’t know how he gets this stuff.” Val spoke through chunks of the bar in her cheek, already halfway through the contraband treasure.

Despite the exhaustion, Thorn rose from his bed and looped a companionable arm around Rodie. “You got hustled.”

“Did not,” Rodie protested.

Val laughed, chocolate smearing her teeth. “Sure did, Rodie. It was my feminine wiles. They’re irresistible.” She flexed a forearm corded with muscle.

“Yeah. Wiles,” Rodie said slowly, but Thorn’s good humor helped him past the irritation..

“Come on, Rodie, that’s enough commerce for one day. You might get to your rack without shoes if I don’t escort you there personally.” He gave Rodie a playful shove, then turned back to Val, whose eyes were half closed in bliss. He joined Val on the edge of her bunk and held his hand out for a piece of the chocolate. She obliged.

Thorn nibbled at the square. “What brought you to the ON anyway?”

Val nodded at Tuck. “Tuck and I have been best mates for ages. We used to play Navy versus Invaders as kids. Guess we both always wanted to join up. Never imagined this is what it would be for us.”

“I couldn’t have imagined it either, but most of my ability to dream was torched in an impact crater,” Thorn said, but not in a dark way. He was practical like that.

“Where’d you get hit?” Val asked.

“Cotswolds, the main island. Nothing left but ashes now. And me,” he added, then smiled at Val for the first time—a real smile, earned by a growing sense of shared purpose. “Thanks for sharing your spoils. I’m gonna get the most sleep I can tonight.”

Thorn shuffled to his bunk and fell face down into the welcoming crisp sheets. The night brought him thoughts of home again, a flickering story of fire and loss, but even that couldn’t stop him from sleeping—a state he achieved almost instantly, and without anything more than a long, thin sigh.

For the first time in a month, the recruits were woken after the sun had risen. When Narvez arrived to lead them to breakfast, she never said a word. As they approached the mess hall, Thorn was sure his senses were failing him. He smelled the unforgettable scent of bacon.

Commander Schrader stood near the trays, a pressed black uniform neatly folded about his crossed arms.

“Congratulations, recruits.” Schrader didn’t have to raise his voice—ever. When he was present, the troops were devoid of sound. You could hear a pin drop from across the room, save for the hum of overhead lightbars.

“You’ve hit a milestone in your training. Every one of you has efficiently controlled your elemental magic, and I’m proud to report you’re now Magisters, one and all. Next stop—Starcasters.” Schrader stepped aside and his arm swooped around to reveal their prize. The troops whooped at the sight, their voices lifted in relief and joy.

Thorn began to salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs. The buffet was stacked full of sunny yellow eggs, fresh fruits, links of spicy sausage, and the mother of all holies, piles of bacon. He filled his tray to the brim and nearly stumbled over Kira as he turned to find a seat.

Kira stood with one arm behind her back. “You did it.” She handed him a piping hot thermos that held a deep aroma of dark, floral sweetness. “You got your shit together. I’m off training duty and you’ve got yourself a cup of one of the smoothest Columbian joes you’ll ever taste.”

Thorn nearly dropped his tray. “Colombian? Like, Earth Columbian?”

“That’s right.” Kira’s eyes glimmered when she saw her surprise had, in fact, astounded him.

“How did you…I didn’t think any of this roast even existed anymore.” Thorn took a sip a bit too quickly and burned his tongue. “Ah, shit.”

“This batch is one of the last, so I hope you still get a chance to taste it once your tongue cools.” Kira left him to enjoy. It would be a long time before he was treated to such extravagance again.

Over the brim of his cup, Thorn watched her walk away, her steps light with a new optimism.

Now the real work begins, he thought.

He was right.

5

Thorn twisted beneath Burnitz’s arm as he swung a hammer fist; the destination, Thorn’s right temple.

For a split second he thought he may have gained the advantage on the powerful instructor, and he jabbed his knife-wielding hand in an upward trajectory. He didn’t realize how much he had underestimated Burnitz’s agility until he was in the air on a short list for a meeting with the ground. He hit the dirt with a hollow thud and dropped the knife at his side.

“Well, that didn’t work,” Thorn wheezed.

“You look natural down there, Stellers. Like you’re in your element.” Burnitz kicked the knife away as Thorn grimaced.

Burnitz addressed the plebes. “Self-defense—fighting, to you kids—does not rely on the ability to use greater speed alone. No, instead you should watch their eyes. They tell you everything you need to know, and you can predict their actions. Then, you can enhance your advantage.” He dropped a clear bottle half-full of a mottled brown liquid on Thorn’s chest.

“Dit da jow. Become acquainted. The ancients of the old world developed this cure for bruising and to strengthen bones against breaking. The herbs used to create the salve are worth more than your weight in gold, and we’ve…augmented it…with some of our own processes.” Burnitz tapped a foot against Thorn’s ribs with enough force to get his attention. “But if you use more than a drop, I’ll break those ribs before you get the chance to toughen them up. Clear?”

Thorn opened the bottle and gagged at the noxious aroma. “Are you sure these are herbs, sir? Smells like you took a dunk in the latrines.”

Burnitz stooped and grabbed Thorn by the shirt, then he pulled him up. When Thorn was standing, Burnitz smoothed out Thorn’s uniform front and leaned in close. “I don’t like you. You’re overconfident and undisciplined, and you don’t know shit about control. Impulse control makes an officer. Good judgment makes a mage. You’re neither right now.”

Thorn chewed on that. It was better than mindless bellowing, and the truth stung him—if only a little.

“Sir, yes, sir.” Thorn had gained a bit of sense in his time at Code Nebula as to when he should call it quits. He poured a drop of the foul tonic on his finger and rubbed it into a spot on his forearm that was now blooming into a lurid bruise. The skin immediately began to tingle, and he tossed the bottle back to Burnitz.

“Thank you, sir.” Thorn threw his legs into the air and landed on his feet, then he raised his fists to the ready position. “May I have another, sir?”

At this, Burnitz grinned. “Why Stellers, I thought you’d never ask.” This time they engaged one another hand-to-hand.

Thorn attacked with a sequence of quick jabs. Burnitz parried and landed a pointed knee in Thorn’s left quad. The muscle cramped on impact, but Thorn paid it no mind. Burnitz entered a series of varied attacks with blinding speed—jabs to the ribs, one to the temple, and a meaty hand clamped down on Thorn’s shoulder, pulling outward to cause a wild spin toward the ground. Thorn dropped his arm a second too slowly and failed to block the three-punch combination, but he twisted his body hard in the opposite direction as Burnitz attempted to ground him. As Thorn turned, he drove his elbow up and was rewarded with a dull crack as blood sprayed from Burnitz’s shattered nose.

The dark red blood stood out like a burn on the instructor’s pallid skin, followed quickly by a red flush of anger. Burnitz was losing his temper. He bull rushed Thorn, taking them both in a tumble that splayed arms and legs alike as they lost footing and crashed wildly down the riverbank.

Burnitz bounced to his feet at the terminus of their fall and stopped Thorn’s descent with a savage snap kick that sent both men falling apart from the inertia.

Violence had consequences, even among the highly trained.

Thorn burned to take deep breaths, but with iron will, he masked his exhaustion. Predict the actions…he mused, as Burnitz circled to the right, trying to gain the upper bank. I can predict what I cause to happen. He let down the mask of control only slightly, wincing at the pain, then dropped his right arm just enough to make it seem he was hiding a weakness.

There. Thorn watched carefully as Instructor Burnitz loosened his defenses so slightly, it was only a fugitive moment in his expression that gave it away. The corner of Burnitz’s mouth twitched upward in victory and he directed his attack to the right side of Thorn’s torso. Thorn caught the bull-necked man’s strike with his arm and pinched his wrist against his body, turned sharply to pull him close, and smashed the palm of his hand into Burnitz’s already bleeding nose.

Burnitz was done. His pose went soft as he pulled away, shaking his head and snorting. He hawked and spat, eyes streaming tears from the vicious strike.

Thorn raised his blood spattered hands with palms outward, signaling that he was now disarmed.

Burnitz mastered his anger, but not before turning a poisoned glance at Thorn. With unsteady steps, the big instructor lumbered to the river’s edge, then he leaned down and washed his bloody face with the delicacy of a man in pain. Waving his arm at the recruits, Burnitz bellowed “Dismissed!” in a nasal twang, then turned to approach the water at the bank and waved his arm back toward the hushed recruits. “I said dismissed!”

“Sir, are—”

“Not a word, Stellers,” Burnitz said, and his voice held a note of command. “It’s only personal if you make it that way. Otherwise, it’s just business.”

* * *

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. The days recycled, and Thorn had begun to lose himself in the routine. Narvez, Burnitz, Narvez, Hiroshi, bunk. Narvez, Hiroshi, Burnitz, Narvez, bunk.

The mess hall had become a distant memory as training now required the Mages to eat on the go. Breakfast was a carefully calculated macro-nutrient bar, devoid of taste, that Narvez tossed at them as they hauled ass from their bunks to the first station of the morning. Lunch would be waiting for them at the third station and was expected to be inhaled before the instructor completed directives. The days regularly surpassed dinner hours, and the remainders, whatever those may be, sat outside the locked steel doors for the recruits to collect on their way to the barracks.

Once a week they were sent to the medwing for a brief physical to ensure proper hydration and appropriate increase in muscle mass. If it was found that muscle had actually been lost, the individual recruit’s breakfast bar nutrients would be recalculated to compensate the following week. Thorn had seen cattle raised for slaughter. This was different. Cattle ate food that had flavor.

Drigo dropped to the bunk beside Thorn and exhaled. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” He turned to his side and propped his head up on his fist.

“If you’re speaking in generalities—yeah. It’s one hell of a bitch, Drigo.”

Drigo flopped backward, spreading his arms across the narrow bunk, but not without an exaggerated groan. “Well, yeah, I mean my body ain’t never been so sore in my life. It’s like as soon as you get used to it, they switch it up on you so you can’t ever heal.”

Tuck passed by and pounded his fist against Drigo’s. “That is exactly what they do. Keep us on our toes. That is how we become the strongest intergalactic force.” He pounded his fist against his chest in Spartan fervor. “My pain is pleasure.”

Thorn struggled to place Tuck’s accent but was too tired to care. His hard consonants made him believe he hailed from the Velorum system—Naunet maybe. A people bred for survival in the harshest of environments. Hardasses to the last person.

Drigo scoffed at their tall bunkmate. “Speak for yourself, Goldie. I ain’t into bein’ hurt to prove a point.”

Tuck ran a hand through his pin-straight blonde hair. “I pity you, small man. You don’t understand the nature of learning. It’s pain. Otherwise, it’s not learning.” He moved to his bunk and crashed into it.

“Great. A philosopher and a magician. Like we need both in one guy. Thorn, y’think we should—” Drigo began, but his only answer was the soft snore of everyone else in the barracks.

“I can take a hint.” In seconds, Drigo was snoring too, pain or no, but Thorn’s eyes flickered back open as he let the room grow still, air ripe with exhaustion and the placid noise of people driven to the edge. And beyond.

Thorn reached his callused hand beneath his pillow and felt for the cover of the tattered book he’d placed there. Satisfied, he closed his eyes, feeling the darkness as a weight that settled down like a welcome friend.

He didn’t rest long.

Barrack 2A jolted awake to the noise of heloplane engines, chaos erupting in each bunk while the recruits stumbled as they stepped into their combat boots, fatigues already on.

Instructor Hiroshi met them as they burst through the metal doorframe and tumbled outside in disarray. His face was a slab of stone, implacable but tinged with disappointment simply by seeing them fight their way to some semblance of order.

“Today is your Class practicum,” Hiroshi began. “Your mission details await you on your individual holoscreens in the heloplane. There will be no breakfast this morning. The enemy does not wait to make sure you’ve eaten. The alien scum will attack when you are least prepared. And they know exactly when you are least prepared.” At this, Hiroshi shook his head in resignation. “I can do no more than observe in this practicum. You will not see me, nor will you hear me. You will become reacquainted with the Hammer—Instructor Burnitz. Good luck, Private Starcasters. Board your planes.”

Hiroshi pulled his hood to shroud his face and spoke a few words under his breath that Thorn didn’t understand, the liquid syllables vanishing on the breeze. The tunic flickered, and he was gone.

“Okay, I need one of those,” Thorn muttered, remaining at attention. He studied the area where his instructor had been seconds earlier. Hiroshi was using an environmental cloak—invisibility, more or less—and it was just one tech item that made the corps seem like it was populated by wizards instead of soldiers who also happened to be actual wizards. “Which we are. Both.”

He broke off his amazement to board with the other soldiers. Each person strapped into their jump seat and typed a code on corresponding holoscreens. Every recruit was given their own individual task to accomplish in support of the main event; the mission overview was deceptively simple.

They would take the enemy base.

Barrack 4D was set to oppose them in this practicum. Thorn had heard they had one hell of a Hammer, but not much else in the way of magic. Still, raw force—a Hammer—was a dangerous enemy ability. Subtlety wasn’t always needed, especially if you were pounded into paste before you could cast your own spells.

The heloplane had begun to decrease in speed, the engines switching tone as they neared their target. The group had been silent for the flight, each handling the unexpected test in their own way. Some twitched. Some stared. No one slept.

Thorn made a silent decision.

He cleared his throat in that obvious way meaning a speech comes next. “I don’t have an expensive glass to tap with my fork, so listen up,” Thorn said in a bold voice. He was surprised to see that they did, in fact, listen up. All eyes were on him.

“We’ve got one chance to complete this mission and pass our Class practicum. We pass, that puts us at First Class Starcaster. We each have our individual assignments, but we’re going to have to overtake 4D’s stronghold as a team. We hit our marks, and we move forward.” Thorn tapped his fingers against his holoscreen in a rhythmic pattern and projected it between their seats. “The battlegrounds. Mark your assignments here.”

Streya was the first to ping her red dot to the screen. “Stellers, what’s our plan? We don’t have a lot of time to alter it.” She tugged nervously at her hair, looking around.

The remaining six dots had appeared on the screen, and Thorn circled pairs. “This. This is our tactic. The assignment is meant to divide us, but we will move in teams. Streya, you’ll be with Unger. Val, you’ve got Rodie. I’d apologize but we don’t have time for that. Drigo and Tuck, watch each other’s backs—you’ve got a high visibility zone.”

Streya’s hands fell to her lap, fingers braided with nervous energy. “You mean I’ve got the Joiner? He doesn’t even know his true strength yet, and I’m not sure that telepathy or even psionics of any kind will help.” She measured Unger’s impressive stature with a hint of disapproval. As a Joiner, he could meld with other minds, but it might not be useful during their test.

“Then you watch him and make sure he gets off that field unscathed, okay?” Thorn’s voice crackled with authority. As a Purecaster, he was born with magic, but many Joiners developed slowly—or even learned as their lives went on, initially unaware of their potential. The idea that a Joiner’s magic was somehow less or even weak was beyond his comprehension. In Thorn’s eyes, there was magic—or no magic. The source was irrelevant, as long as the spells were under control and things that were supposed to go boom went boom. “Unger is good. He’ll do his job.”

The heloplane hovered and began its descent. “No, no, no. This is not right.” Tuck released his straps and grabbed the cargo netting above his head. “You have no team. You’re all alone.” His eyes bored into Thorn’s, a mixture of worried envy creasing his features.

Thorn got to his feet, grinning. “It’s lonely at the top. I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. We can build the team later by blending, but for now we go take this stronghold, and we don’t keep anything in reserve. I want us tapped out and victorious or we don’t deserve to be here. Agreed? They exited the heloplane at the drop zone and headed into the dense forest in admirable formation, a bounce in their collective step. Thorn’s growing command presence was a bulwark against the long days and exhausted nights. They’d earned this through long days of sweat and exhaustion, and now they had a chance to prove their worth.

As self-appointed leader, Thorn made his way silently to the crest of the hill. His assignment was to draw the Hammer away from the stronghold and neutralize him. His eyes scanned the canopy of trees surrounding the crumbling cement stronghold. The structure had definitely seen better days, as mortar speckled the ground in an array of broken chunks. The walls themselves were pitted, hemmed in moss, and crawling with vines thicker than Thorn’s wrist.

He caught sight of a strong breeze tearing through the trees to the East, nodding to himself as the pieces fell into place. He’s there. Burnitz. He’s coming.

“Now, to draw attention without appearing to want the attention,” Thorn said. “Burnitz knows me. That means he’ll try to predict what we’re going to do.”

“Which is?” Drigo asked, his feral gaze never leaving the walls.

“We make our final move, not the one Burnitz is looking for. Old tactic I picked up from a man who played games with me.”

“Think it’ll work?” Streya asked.

“I’m counting on it.”

Thorn drew on the air surrounding him, feeling his energy grow as each particle struck his senses. Heat began to build, then pressure, and then he channeled all of it into his open palms, turned up to the sky like a supplicant before an ancient temple.

The energy pulsed, glowing in a dark, shimmering void. He waited until he saw the breeze shake the leaves once more, fighting to constrain the power that begged to be released. Like a beast at the ready, he let it run free, throwing two explosive bursts into the trees fifty yards ahead of the Hammer’s trajectory. The light sizzled away, searing the air around it as it passed to impact like a pair of orbital bombs. When the thunderous sound of his attacks faded, the breeze did too, and all the leaves before them came to a stillness that seemed unnatural given the violence of a moment earlier.

After a quiet beat, Thorn worried that the Burnitz had hidden depths to his strategy, but then he saw the funnel cloud descending from the sky.

“Here we go,” Thorn growled, his bluff working to perfection. He could hear the forest creaking as trees were torn from their root systems, rising into the air in a dangerous vacuum of tortured debris.

One click in his comms device notified him that Streya had disarmed the security systems by magic or—well, it had to be magic. Thorn felt his energy gathering, but as an afterthought, because he hadn’t noticed the black cloud growing above his head. He focused on the globe of light he held in each hand as he raced toward the Hammer, flickering, hard-edged shadows dancing around him from the magical brightness.

Two clicks signified that Drigo had neutralized the Western guards. The team was moving faster than Thorn had anticipated.

Good. We’re early, he thought.

In a disjointed swirl, the cyclone reversed, releasing a maelstrom of debris, then picking it back up to whine through the air like a collection of lethal missiles.

Something had tipped him off.

Thorn had to draw his team back before they joined the vortex. He could not fail. Failure meant a one-way trip back to the pipe fields and, even worse, shitty coffee. A rage filled his chest unlike any he had felt before. The black cloud above his head sparked with blue light and began to draw on the cyclone, pulling at its edges, absorbing its power and diffusing it into the lacuna sky.

Control. Not revenge. Thorn’s thoughts were short and cast of iron.

He turned his eyes slowly toward the chasm of energy above his head. Before he had the opportunity to process what he’d just created, the ground trembled beneath him and he lost his footing, the earth slipping sideways in a moving slab. Rodie. His feet continued to slip as Rodie’s magic ran wild and free—and unchecked.

Too much. The cloud disbanded and his energy dwindled. Thorn knew there were limits to how much force they could apply, and the limit was answered seconds later.

A phosphorous globe of light shot into the sky and fizzled into red streamers. The med flare. Thorn dropped his weapon to swing it on its strap behind his back and sprinted toward the cement building in the center of the valley.

Practice could wait.

* * *

By firing a defensive globe of magic toward the rubble, Val managed to save herself.

Or at least she tried. She took in a breath, but carefully. Every part of her body rang with pain, the bruising so complete she looked like her skin was changing colors.

The mass of concrete from Rodie’s idiotic loss of control had fallen on her, but in a sliding motion, its path turned by the raw power of her intervention. Luckily, she hadn’t been killed on impact. Rodie had given in to his ego and harvested too much energy before casting. He couldn’t tend what he’d produced—the quake had brought the building down when it was only supposed to crack the seal to the control room.

Again, Val groaned, then turned her head as she sensed a presence.

Commander Schrader stood over her bedside in the medwing. A cold aura emanated from his very being, and he turned to address the squad.

“Lieutenant Narvez, Instructor Hirsoshi.” His icy blue eyes pierced the officers. “It is your duty to determine proper timing of the Class practical. These dogs haven’t been housebroken yet, to sum up.”

Instructor Hiroshi came to attention. “Commander, sir, I accept full responsibility for this incident.”

“As well you should, Instructor. Your pets are gonna get us killed.” Schrader was unnaturally still, only his lips moving as he spoke. “Ernest Rodie, step forward.”

Rodie’s eyes bulged with worry behind his glasses. “Sir, yes, sir, Commander, sir.” The skinny man stuttered through his response; any bluster he’d possessed had been little more than a show and was now only a memory.

“For the crime of casting in excess of what you are capable of controlling, and nearly killing your fellow recruit, you will be given two full days of isolation in the Electromagnetic Variance chamber. She would likely have been crushed in that rubble if it weren’t for her immense capabilities as a Castle. While in EV, you will attempt to harness and control your magic while the energy variations work to pull that control away from you. You will not eat. You will remain under high frequency light waves, and you will not sleep. Is this punishment clear?” Schrader spoke with a calm that undermined the severity of the sentence.

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Private Rodie, another point to consider,” Schrader said, stepping closer. “Do you know why your magic should be in perfect control, every time?”

“Sir, I—” Rodie began, but Schrader waved him silent.

“We don’t know what the enemy does with our dead. No one has told you that, have they? To be sure, we find some…remains in hard vacuum, but never anyone alive. The bodies are gone. We don’t bury our dead. We can’t. So when you’re reaching the mental and physical limits in the EV chamber, think about it as the best possible outcome for you in this war. For all of us, unless we achieve total victory. We don’t get the bodies back, Private Rodie, and I’m not sure we would want to. Do you understand?” Schrader’s voice was level, but intense.

“Sir, I do, sir,” Rodie said after a moment.

The Commander’s gaze swept the room. “You’re all excused. But Stellers— you stay.”

In a moment, the room was clear of recruits, leaving only Thorn and his commanding officers, none of whom looked happy.

“Lieutenants, I have half a mind to double this sentence for you. This private’s arrogance on the field is a direct result of your inability to break this squadron. This recruit is suffering a punishment that need not be given if you had done your jobs. What’s more is the power this one”—he pointed to Thorn with a long finger— “was wielding before the quake. These are recruits. Not soldiers. Not yet. That means that your petty jealousies—yes, Burnitz, I know about your issues—have no place in this program. My order is therefore simple. Shape them, or I will have no choice but to break you in their stead in order to gain the officers I need. Dismissed.”

6

The atmosphere in barrack 2A had changed since the accident. Val remained in the medwing with severe damage to her left lung. It was unclear whether she would be able to continue training at all, even with the skilled doctors and healers on staff. Magic could stabilize or even save a life—but it was no substitute for time, and that was what Val needed most.

Rodie’s light had dimmed when he returned from the EV chamber. Thorn missed his laissez-faire goods and goofy presence, but after a while it became obvious that what they were preparing for—war—was going to do far worse to them than a simple change of attitude.

Streya sighed as she braided her hair in order to control the wild locks. “It’s not right, is it, Thorn?”

“What’s that?” He was sure he knew what she meant, but he wanted to hear it from her.

“This.” She waved her arm, gesturing to the bunks. “We have one mistake, and this—this is what happens. Val is in medical and who knows when she’ll be back. Rodie is distant—he isn’t himself. Tuck is somewhere else, mentally. I feel it like magma just below the surface of a volcano. I haven’t seen Drigo’s fire blue-hot in weeks.”

“I understand, but…it’s going to get worse unless we make it better. I know hard times. This is the most difficult shit I’ve been through. And I’ve retrofitted sewage pipe in the Murgon System.”

Streya’s lip twitched at the corner. “I—worse? What the hell is the cure?”

Thorn dropped on the bunk next to her. “Cure?”

“It’s just, if this is how we live after one accident, what happens on the battlefield? What happens when we face them?”

The door banged open and Drigo brought a cloud of brooding energy into the room with him. Tuck and Rodie followed a few moments behind, and Thorn wondered how it was possible to make silence feel so loud.

Streya bounded to her feet and moved to the wall mounted café. She spoke the command for an herbal decaf and tapped her foot in triple time as she waited.

What would happen when they faced them. There was a whole lifetime in that simple question, and Thorn searched for the answer within himself. Something had to change; this lack of morale would be the death of them. He flattened his big hands on the bunk, thinking. A smile played at his lips as he saw the element missing from the team. Hell. They weren’t a team at all.

But they could be.

“What’s gotten into you?” Unger asked as he barreled past him, glancing briefly Thorn’s broad smile.

Thorn leaned forward, then clapped his hands together. “Friends, I know what we need. I’m practically psychic.” He was capable of far more than one kind of magic, but he kept that to himself for the moment. Aces were good cards to hide.

Unger’s previously determined step faltered, and he swiveled to face Thorn. “You’re what now? Is that true? I mean, I know a lot of casters are telepaths, but—“

Thorn left the bunk and opened his footlocker with a modest flourish. “No, but I may as well be. I’m good with magic, but hell, we all are. We need something else, and I know just how to find it.” He brandished a deck of cards pulled from the locker.

“Don’t look that fatal to me. You know, to the aliens and all,” Rodie said darkly.

Streya just stared. Her narrowed eyes told him she was unconvinced. “A game?”

Thorn waved everyone to the table. “A game. But not just any game. We need something to overcome a threat so vast and deep that only one power in the universe can vanquish it.”

“I…um, I’m listening. I think you’re full of shit, but I’m listening,” Streya said.

“Rodie?” Thorn asked.

“Y-yes?” Rodie’s reply was nearly a squeak.

“What kind of booze can you get me?” Thorn asked, idly.

“What kind of booze do you want?” Rodie crossed his arms against his chest, showing Thorn that he was still defensive, but at his core, a hustler. Thorn respected that.

Thorn clapped his shoulder. “That’s the spirit. Look, at a certain point in every unit’s existence, you gotta do something more than run and puke and snore. We don’t have time to forge bonds over years. So we’re going to cheat, the old-fashioned way.”

“Go on,” Rodie said, head tilted in interest.

“We’re going to get shitfaced together,” Thorn announced. “All of us.”

“Ooo,” Streya said, catching on first. “Count me in.”

“Me too. Be right back,” Rodie said, and he scampered away with renewed purpose.

Moments later, he was back—out of breath, but triumphant.

Thorn wasn’t sure how he did it, but Rodie managed to procure a gallon of rice alcohol so potent the fumes made Thorn see his dead relatives. After a cautious sniff, Thorn packed a canvas bag with the liquor, playing cards, and chocolate bars, then they headed to the medwing. It took some creative skill to find their way into the intensive care unit without being seen by the orderlies. Somehow, they made it even with Drigo bumbling through the hallways. Thorn had a sneaking suspicion he and Rodie had already shared a nip, but it didn’t matter—their infiltration was successful, if spiked with the occasional soft curse or laugh.

Val nearly killed them all when they crashed into her room, until Rodie pulled a chocolate bar from the canvas bag. Her eyes lit up and she mumbled something about forgiving everyone around the first sweet, decadent bite. As she chewed, her eyes closed in the first truly happy look Thorn had seen in weeks. Years, maybe, given where he’d come from. When she leaned to take another bar from the bag, the tube between her ribs pulled hard, snapping medical tape away from skin still marred by deep bruises.

Wincing, she pulled back and swore at Rodie in a language Thorn couldn’t identify—but they all comprehended the meaning through her tone. Rodie retreated, tossed the bar into her lap, and stooped to hide behind Drigo. Val filled her cheeks like a kid with stolen candy and then her face went still.

“Rodie.” She held her hand out for him to come and hold it. “You know that I don’t blame you for any of this. It was an accident.” She pulled him in close and whispered, “Besides, I didn’t like you before you crushed me. Nothing’s changed.”

They laughed together and Thorn could see the weight lifting from Rodie’s shoulders. This was how it should have been all along, but he’d been too busy finding ways to avoid the inevitable—they had to be a team, and he could either help stitch it together, or be part of the problem.

And the war was out there, waiting.

The card game hadn’t lasted long before they were found out. Val’s rattling cough had alerted the overnight nurses, and the bunkmates were sent scrambling through the door with dark threats chasing them. They weren’t reported, and as a result they weren’t given a punishment for the list of articles they’d broken—but two days training without sleep had been punishment enough.

Even through the exhaustion and pounding headache, Rodie was holding his head a little higher than he had the day before. Streya appeared less neurotic. And Drigo strutted with his old swagger.

Under every action, they all regarded Thorn a bit differently. He was known to them now. They were bonded, and they had a purpose.

Thorn found his mind drifting even as his body moved through the motions. Despite his raw exhaustion, he was keeping up—challenging the limits of each exercise, even, fueled by depths he hadn’t suspected. He wondered if it was possible that he had finally adjusted to the physicality of training. That, or he was so dead on his feet that he’d lost all feeling in his extremities.

Okay, so not unseen depths. Just stubborn as hell. That was good enough.

After training their bodies, Thorn pressed himself against a smooth-barked tree and hoped for a few minutes of shuteye. His head nodded forward as exhaustion washed through him, arms and legs heavy, but a catnap wasn’t meant to be. Tuck’s primal growl snapped him to attention. He leapt to his feet just in time to see the blonde demigod of a man gathering a vibrant green glowing orb behind the ginger instructor’s back.

Frantically, Thorn dove through the recruits, eyes a furious grey as dark matter materialized from the sheer force of magical will. Just as Tuck threw his orb, Thorn’s own shield spell streaked forward to blunt the attack—but even so, Burnitz was thrown forward into the climbing bars at the edge of the training course. The instructor’s body came to a sickening halt against the unforgiving steel, limbs bent at angles that no one conscious human could achieve. To Thorn’s relief, Burnitz groaned, rose, and shook his head slowly, blood spooling down his chin in a crimson stream.

“Everyone freeze. Do not move,” Burnitz said. “At all.” A background hum of building magic began to fuzz the air around them, and the recruits obeyed. Even Tuck, who had the good sense to avoid eye contact with anyone at all.

Narvez strode up without a word. The tension grew, if such a thing was possible, and the only sound Thorn could hear was a brave insect trolling for daytime lovers. Its call ended under Narvez’s booted foot as she pivoted in front of Tuck, inches from his face. “Dismissed, with two exceptions. Tuck, on my left. Thorn, on my right. March.”

Narvez and her mechanical, long strides guided him to Commander Schrader’s office. Every step was intentional, the pace without any deviation at all. She didn’t speak. She didn’t move her eyes.

In moments, they were standing outside the Commander’s office, and she still hadn’t said a word.

Narvez rolled her wrist, knuckles out, and rapped against the solid oak door with the eagle claw.

“Enter.” A muffled voice came from within.

Narvez pushed the door open with that same robotic precision, then waved the recruits forward. Commander Schrader sat behind his desk. He pressed his thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose and said nothing.

Lieutenant Ashworth abandoned his leather throne in the corner, choosing instead to stand at-ease near the Commander’s desk. Ashworth was, in some ways, a shadow—a cipher who existed to enforce Schrader’s will, and do it in a manner that left no room for mistakes. Kira was there in an opposite corner, but she too rose, moving smoothly across the room to grasp Tuck’s elbow while maintaining a look of such neutrality that she looked artificial. It was a rare moment in which Thorn had no desire to break the punishing silence.

Beads of sweat prickled at Thorn’s forehead in anticipation. He could have been summoned to this meeting for any number of reasons, not the least of which being a suspicion of criminal collaboration. Attacking an officer ranked among one of the few unforgivable infractions. There were no deliberate codes set for collaboration of the offense, but Thorn was sure they would come up with a sentence equal to the crime.

Schrader rubbed at his temple, giving a clear indication of the headache this troop had caused. “Burnitz, recount the events of this afternoon.”

“Commander Schrader, sir.” Burnitz stood rock solid as always, but his voice was lower than normal. “Training commenced as usual. In consecutive sparring sessions, I disarmed Private Ander with ease, as he was not fully engaged or devoted to our matches. I placed the man on his back and instructed him to remain seated through the following match with Private Rodie. I told the private that we would reconvene once his rear end was no longer sore and gave him the reasonable option to join his girlfriend in the medwing. At that point I engaged in self-defense training with Private Rodie and was hit with a blast from behind.”

Commander Schrader looked up for the first time. “You did not see the attack?”

“No, I did not, sir,” Burnitz said with barely repressed anger.

Schrader directed his attention to Thorn. “Stellers, did you witness this exchange?”

Thank the proverbial gods, they aren’t assuming collaboration. Thorn felt a ping of guilt at his relief while Tuck still awaited his fate. “Not entirely, sir.”

The Commander steepled his fingers. “I implore you to be truthful, Private Stellers. The charge for omittance is just as heavy as it would be for deceit.”

Maybe he wasn’t completely out of the ringer. “Commander, sir. I was…inattentive…at the beginning of this exchange. I did witness Private Ander cast toward Instructor Burnitz.”

“And you are certain that Private Ander was the caster?”

“Yes, I am certain.” There were no two ways around it, and Thorn hated himself for speaking against his bunkmate.

Schrader nodded in acknowledgment and turned to Tuck. “Do you deny these charges, Private Tuck Ander?”

Tuck set his jaw. “No, Commander, I do not deny the charges. I—Burnitz, he stepped outside of his rights and attacked me as a human. As a man.”

Schrader’s voice boomed as he rose from his seat and loomed above the tall man. “You have not earned your manhood, Private. You certainly, with this display of stunning idiocy, have not proven to me that you’re a human, let alone a mage.”

Thorn recognized danger when it was near, even if the Commander wasn’t yelling. He didn’t have to. A storm was gathering, right there in that room.

The Commander’s features softened. “Were you given the chance to review your new recruit handbook, Ander?”

“Sir?”

“Your new recruit handbook. Were you given a chance to review this material?”

“The pamphlet we were given upon arrival at Code Nebula?” Tuck’s Naunetian accent struggled through the soft vowels of ‘Code Nebula.’

“Yes, Ander, the pamphlet.” Schrader sighed in frustration. Tuck wasn’t the brightest recruit, but what he lacked in intelligence he made up in heart. He’d had no other dream from the day he took his first steps than to become a soldier in the Orbital Naval Forces.

“I was given a pamphlet, sir. I am not certain if I read it.”

“Lieutenant Narvez, recite the punishable offenses, page six, number four.” The Commander lowered himself into his seat once again. He pulled open a hidden drawer and removed a bottle of liquor with a glass. His fingers held it lightly, the bottle swaying with inertia as the liquor moved. The bottle was nearly full and sparkled with dust. A rare event that it left his desk drawer at all.

Narvez looked pleased to be faced with an answer she could provide without hesitation, given the legal and moral quandary before her. She projected her voice as though they weren’t all confined in the same office with the door shut. “Commander, the section reads: ‘a soldier shall not strike an officer outside of designated combat training.’”

“Oh, yes. I know the punishable offenses, sir. These are reviewed nightly.” Tuck pulled his arm against Kira’s hand. His nerves were making their presence known.

“And do these punishable offenses clarify that a soldier shall not strike an officer unless said officer has insulted his humanity, or, if we’re being truly archaic, his manhood?” Schrader waited longer than a Commander should for a response.

“No, sir, they do not.”

“Narvez, what is the sentence for committing the crime of striking an officer?” Schrader poured the liquid amber into the glass and held it up to his face in open admiration, and perhaps, under it all, a touch of resigned dread.

This time, Narvez was more subdued in her response. “The crime of striking an officer is punishable by hanging. Sir.”

Tuck tore his arm away from Kira and faced Narvez, his mouth hanging open as he struggled to find words in the common tongue. His shock was so complete, so instantaneous, that his next statement was a burble of harried Naunetian, the words slurred together in horror.

Burnitz’s head hung so low that his newly trimmed beard rested against his chest. Thorn saw a pain in his eyes he hadn’t thought existed in the hard-set instructor. It was—

No, not pain, Thorn knew. The man was angry at the waste of it all. Not at the attack. It was a senseless waste.

Tuck surged toward Burnitz, red-faced with fury. Kira and Narvez scrabbled to cling to his massive arms and held him mere inches away from the weapons instructor. Burnitz kept his chin tucked and eyes down, which only seemed to make Tuck nearly incandescent with rage.

“You! This is your fault! I will not go to the gallows for another man’s faults!” Tuck spat in the tongue that they could all understand.

Schrader sipped from his glass and waved consent to Lieutenant Ashworth. The sullen officer lifted his hand in the air, and Tuck was suddenly suspended within a cloak of energy, the curling wisps of magic lithely wrapping him in an instant.

The Commander stood. “Luckily for you, Ander, despite your inappropriate outburst in the presence of a Camp Commander, the ON is still learning to grow with the addition of the Starcasters. And there is some measure of truth to your words.”

“What does this mean, Commander?” Tuck regained the ability to speak, sensing something other than death was possible—if he could find some measure of control.

“It means that the glossary of naval terms defines ‘strike’ as the laying on of hands or attack with physical weaponry.” Schrader drained his glass, then leaned forward against the desk. “It does not currently define magic as a strike. It is only because of this that we have the option for a small amount of lenience. Naval law is unflinching in the eye of insubordination, and when such insubordination includes a direct attack on a naval officer, there is no option for a reduced sentence. This play on words allows us to sidestep the current law. When my hand in this is found out, the law will be rewritten, and you will be to blame. The next time someone is executed for stupidity of your flavor, it will be done under the aegis of Tuck’s Law. Congratulations. You don’t die today.” Schrader glanced at the clock overheard and added, “Yet. The day’s young.”

Tuck calmed, but that peace was replaced by the reality of his actions—and just how close he’d come to death. As his body began to slough away adrenaline, he gave a single nod of thanks to Schrader. In that instant, Ashworth released the spell, allowing Tuck to land easily on his feet.

Then Tuck staggered, his legs betraying him, if only for a second.

Schrader tilted his head down, shoulders lowering almost imperceptibly.

“Thank you, sir, I—” Tuck began.

“Don’t thank me just yet. We’re not done,” Schrader said.

Tuck noticed he hadn’t been addressed by anything other than his name. The realization flickered over his features, caught by everyone in the room.

Especially Schrader.

“You will submit yourself to depletion and are hereby discharged dishonorably from the Orbital Navy Starcasters.” Schrader’s sentencing resulted in a collective gasp. Even Ashworth betrayed emotion, if only for a fleeting moment. Schrader flicked his wrist for Tuck to be removed from his chamber. Kira and Narvez escorted the depleted man from the room.

Thorn had begun to follow them when Schrader addressed him. “Stellers, you will take accountability for Private Ander’s reporting to the medwing for his sentence. And Burnitz, the soldier was not incorrect. This young man’s life is worthless now, thanks to you.”

“Yes, Commander. This is my fault. I should have done more to—to shape these recruits before I built their strength. I saw the power they have, and a part of me felt an excitement I haven’t experienced since my days in the field.”

Thorn wondered when the right time would be to slip out the door as Schrader walked from behind his desk to stand directly in front of the instructor.

“Are you losing your edge, soldier?” Schrader asked.

Thorn stared at the wall ahead of him. He wished he could drown the sound out entirely.

“I may be, sir,” Burnitz admitted.

“You’re the finest weapons master I’ve had the pleasure of laying eyes on in the field of battle, Caleb. And your mental strength is unmatched. These are the skills our recruits need if they have any chance at survival against the Nyctus. You know exactly what will happen if they wield their power before they are broken. If they truecast before they are forced to rebuild themselves—they can’t. Do you understand? They’ll cook off from the power of unbridled magic, and we don’t really know what the hell will happen. We don’t have data, or history, or even a good guess as to what we’re crafting, here. So, I repeat—do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” Burnitz took a deep breath. “Which is why I would like to request a transfer to Camp Xeron, sir. I can teach weapons history to the intel troops and serve my purpose there.”

“Caleb, there is no other cadre I would trust to mold my battalion than you. You are what these soldiers need if they have any hope of survival. So if you care for these privates, you will shape them in the way they must be—or we’ll lose this war before it truly begins.” Schrader turned to face the wall that Thorn had been studying as if it held the secrets to universal peace. “Dismissed.”

Burnitz avoided locking eyes with Thorn as they both retreated from the office.

* * *

Thorn found Tuck sitting, lifeless, on the edge of his bunk. He pulled the golden-haired man up by his elbow and shook his limp hand before escorting him to the medwing to report for his depletion. Even the word sounded like a violation—which it was.

“Why am I here, sir?” Thorn asked an officer he didn’t know. The man was so blandly average, he may as well have been wearing a sign that declared him to be naval intelligence.

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 her 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 than 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.

Thorn took a long beat before responding, his face set in concentration. “It is…elsewhere. Ma’am.”

Narvez gave a single nod but said nothing. With a small wave, she cast a spell that sent blue current writhing from the earth.

A distraction, Thorn mused, but continued his unrelenting command of the storm.

The earth charge sent twitches through his muscles, but Thorn never faltered. If anything, he grew stronger, sensing the shape of his magic with a clarity that had been missing moments earlier. He was learning. He was becoming something outside the control of others.

Narvez saw this and interrupted the storm like a signal. Thorn’s canteen fell to the ground, a rivulet of water pouring out, but he flicked a hand at it, ending the spill.

Narvez stood before him, a searching look on her face. “You have power.”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” Thorn said as a mild tremor shook his body. The effort had taken something out of him, but he bent his knees and regarded Narvez evenly.

“Imagine doing that for an hour. Or a day. Or three days, while the enemy breaks half an Oort cloud over your magical shield. Thousands of lives—millions, really—depending on you. That’s the difference between a little cloud…and a ’caster,” she said.

Thorn said nothing, and Narvez expected nothing. She moved on, and the cloud bloomed again in petite rage.

As each recruit after Thorn failed, Narvez berated them, adjusted their form, or shook her head in disgust, but she was changed. They all were.

They’d seen the bad in Tuck. They’d seen what was necessary in Thorn. And with that dawning came a release of fear, like a collective sigh.

Leaving the training field, the recruits squelched through mud where it had been dry that morning.

“Stellers, clean that up,” Narvez said airily.

As they began to file in for chow, Thorn turned to the field, his face a febrile mask. With a word, the mud sublimated in a demonic hiss of steam and dissipated. The field was renewed.

So were the recruits.

* * *

Val was dismissed from the medwing that evening and returned to the bunk in time to share dinner with the others. What should have been a celebration was more like relief. Val had lost muscle mass and was looking thinner, but she was cheered by her relative freedom. Her short black hair had a smattering of gray—a new feature—but she managed a rare smile as the meal went on in companionable fashion.

Whatever had been their reality before was gone, and Thorn was somehow a fulcrum for the squad. Just as Val had been changed, so had Thorn, and his arrogance was being replaced by confidence in a process so natural it was virtually unnoticed.

Val began the meal with a hesitancy that faded as she sensed the change in dynamics, and by the time it was lights out, the ’casters were changed yet again. In the morning, they were to prepare for a new direction in their training, and that was the extent of their information.

Thorn’s sleep was restless that night, his mind filled with anticipation. He no longer thought of surviving training. Now, his concern was on a much broader scale.

He—and his squad—had to become lethal. They had to gain traction as ’casters and surpass the wildest expectations of their officers, because one thing had become abundantly clear in the light of Thorn’s new outlook.

Failing here meant that humanity would be that much weaker, and Thorn hated the idea of losing to the Nyctus even more than he’d detested the muddy slop of his former life.

It seemed serendipitous that Val’s first day back in training happened to be another field training day. While not a practicum, they were informed over a harried breakfast that this would be day one of pilot crafting and tactics. They were each assigned a heloplane and instructed to report to the clearing field, a buzz settling among the group at the thought of flying instead of slogging by foot. Soldiers of any era were experts in certain things; bitching being one skill that was raised to an art form in every military branch.

At the appearance of the heloplanes, no one complained.

The heloplanes flew in a formation that was no formation at all. In fact, Thorn watched with care as the helos landed in a haphazard tumble. Propwash lashed the air around the ’casters and then their orders were given according to color codes. Three teams, three colors, and Thorn was assigned yellow.

A prerecorded hologram of Instructor Hiroshi appeared in the center of the field, his spectral features remaining steady even in the tortured air. Thorn activated the audio recording and listened.

“Welcome to your first day in pilot crafting. Prepare yourselves for extreme energy depreciation. Your heloplanes are fully stocked with fluids for hydration and one thousand kcal macrobars,” Hiroshi’s avatar said, then the image disappeared and was replaced with an oversized notepad. Letters appeared as though they were being written in real time. The effect forced every recruit to pay close attention, even if they’d been inclined to let their minds wander. The tasks were blandly worded, but the overall meaning was clear.

“Your tasks are as follows,” intoned Hiroshi, as the holographic orders were drawn.

1. Maintain altitude.

2. Disable your enemy Starcasters.

3. Last person standing wins.

Hiroshi’s disembodied voice returned. “When all other teams have been eliminated, the two remaining pilots will face off in a sudden death round.”

Thorn grinned to himself. This was easier than he’d imagined.

“Sounds too easy to be true?” Hiroshi continued as though he had a front row seat to Thorn’s very thoughts. “That’s because it is. As I said…prepare yourselves. Your electrical systems will shut down in T minus ten seconds.”

Our—what? Thorn furrowed his brows.

“10…9…8…” The voice initiated the timer sequence.

Thorn’s pulse quickened as he considered and discarded various ideas, none of which would keep his helo in the air.

“4…3…2…”

Thorn panicked.

He cast a blast of shimmering black that pushed the heloplane away from the ground, driving it higher into the sky. His control faltered and the plane began to wobble to the side, flying diagonally toward the other yellow heloplane. He wasn’t sure who occupied the vehicle, but he knew he was about to take out his teammate and handicap himself.

He closed his eyes and harnessed the power within his chest, bringing the oblong vehicle to a sudden stop. When he opened his eyes, he saw an energy globe splatter against his nav screen, the attacking plane not much further behind it. The scuffed silver heloplane that approached was sparkling with the blue-white energy, its movements tightly controlled.

Val. Thorn made a snap decision. Val was back to duty, and he would not treat her as anything less than a lethal threat. He sensed she’d demand it from him, given the chance, so he closed his eyes once again, feeling his power like an object in three dimensions. His swift exploration complete, Thorn reduced his magical output. When battle instinct screamed for more, Thorn somehow knew that subtlety could be a better answer.

With that realization, he adjusted the output and dropped like a stone, just in time for Val to streak over the canopy of his plane. Without the ability to spin quickly enough to see the wreckage, Thorn heard a collision and hoped Val had been able to slow her advance before crashing. He held his hand over the dash controls and then drew on the substances around him to reenergize the command center. He was already feeling drained, but the display flickered to life with grudging slowness. When his screen was stable, he pulled hard on the yoke to hover near his teammate, who he still hadn’t identified.

Flames shot from his partner’s hull, searing the treetops at the edge of the clearance. Drigo.

“Guess that answers that,” Thorn said, rolling possibilities around in his mind. He had Drigo. He had some magic of his own left, though Hiroshi had undersold the speed of how draining this day would be. There was already a chill settling over Thorn, deep in his bones and spreading.

With the exception of Val, the heloplanes seemed to be gathering their bearings as they overcame the temporary loss of power. Val had already disabled one purple helo and was preparing for another attack. He couldn’t grasp the depths of her sudden magical reserves, unless it stemmed from lying inert in a hospital while she’d healed.

The battle rejoined when Drigo pushed forward in a stuttering motion, his helo cutting the air spasmodically.

“Drigo, save your juice,” Thorn muttered, then resigned himself to a role as wingman.

He saw Drigo dip toward the ground, and without thinking, he sent dark energy to lift the plunging helo away from an unpleasant impact. Guess I’m a Hammer, too, Thorn thought, but again, kept it to himself.

Thorn’s body began to throb with the weight of what he held on magical will alone. Pushing two heloplanes into the air was no light duty. Drawing on such an immense amount of energy, Thorn felt the first schism in—his source? His origin of magic? It was deep within him, and until that moment in the sky, it had been bottomless.

That was no longer true.

Not only was there an end to his magic, he could feel it approaching. His heloplane began to vibrate. The tremors intensified until the ship was cavitating in a wild undulation. He tried to get a grasp on it, but the crevice deep within his source only widened.

Thorn lost focus on the second plane for an instant—

—and watched in horror as a bolt of magical energy blasted into Drigo’s hull. His helo went into the tree line, where it slashed through the canopy in a shrieking of metal. Thorn let his magic wane, but not at a rate that would send him out of control. In agonizing seconds, he lowered his own helo with a hard thump and sprinted across the clearing. One by one, everyone else did the same with varying degrees of delicacy until the entire squad was down, every ’caster pounding across the turf to reach Drigo’s wreck.

Thorn reached the wrecked plane gasping for air; not because of the distance he’d just sprinted, but because of the fear he felt growing inside of him. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew that his lack of focus caused the crash. The hole in the bottom of the plane sparked with severed electric wiring, and Thorn dove on top of the tipped metal cabin.

“Drigo!” he called, tearing at the door. “Drigo! Answer me, dammit!” The dented aluminum had locked the door into place. Thorn smelled noxious fumes wafting from the broken hull.

“Drigo—whatever you do, don’t Scorch. Do. Not. Scorch!” Of all things to avoid right then, casting fire was at the top of the list. Thorn jumped down from the cabin and searched the ground for something to pry the door open with. Rodie was the next to arrive on the scene, and he slid to a halt in the leaves.

“Rodie, get me a branch—anything—to pry the door open.” Thorn jumped back on top of the downed plane. He heard a muffled groan from inside and pounded on the door.

“Drigo, hey, buddy! You awake in there?” Thorn pressed his ear to the metal.

In his dazed state, Drigo cut loose with magical fire, and the helo burst into flames.

Thorn, blasted with incendiary heat, threw his arm up to cover his face. Drigo screamed behind the expanded door, a high wail of pain that made Thorn jerk savagely at the handle, now searing to the touch. Thorn tore his shirt off and wrapped it around the handle, then he placed both boots against the hull and leaned back like he was trying to snap the helo in two, corded muscle standing out in desperation from every part of his body.

Streya arrived on the scene, waving her hands in short, economical motions as clouds gathered overhead at her command. Instantly, rain began to sluice down in a torrent, the fat drops spitting and sizzling as their sheer volume began to lower the metal’s temperature. With a hideous whine, the door opened and Thorn saw Drigo.

Or what was left of him.

Unger took one look and turned to run to his helo to summon more help. Among the rolling smoke, Drigo sat, swaying, one arm a black mass covered by mottled shreds of fabric. Ignoring the heat, Thorn lifted Drigo out with ease, freeing him to where they could both gasp in the cleaner air some meters away from the wreck.

Drigo whimpered in pain, but it was an infrequent, hideous sound, as he was in and out of consciousness.

The Nebula emergency medical team landed in the clearing. Without ceremony, they hauled Drigo away on a stiff board without even acknowledging the recruits, but Streya grabbed the nearest medic as they passed.

“Will he—” she began, but the medic shook his head.

“I don’t know,” the medic said, but it wasn’t unkind. It was honest. Even generous that he spoke at all.

Drigo was loaded into their helo without ever regaining consciousness, and the plane leapt into the sky at fierce acceleration.

Thorn watched and swayed. He coughed a crimson spume of bubbles and noticed a raw, acrid scent overwhelming his senses.

The helo had burned, and it was loaded with deadly chemical components. Thorn knew his lungs were a mess. With each labored breath, he could sense things breaking down inside his body.

“Oh—shit. Not—” Thorn said, but his voice collapsed into a crackling wetness that sounded like thunder in his head.

He coughed again, and this time stars flashed across his vision.

In agonizing slowness, Thorn began to fall. Every limb collapsed—his body limp with betrayal as the toxins spread through his lungs, then his blood, and finally, taking his will to stand. The ground didn’t rush up, because he couldn’t see a damned thing.

All he felt was the darkness made real, and then he felt nothing at all.

He awoke in the medwing and bolted upright, yanking at his mask and tubes with desperate hands. The machines alongside his bed began to beep in an irritating rhythm, the combined alarms summoning a nurse who walked into the room with a sympathetic look but no words.

She injected something into a line that went—somewhere, Thorn only knew it led into his body. As she pushed the syringe, his vision tunneled again, like at the crash site. This was different. He was filled with a lassitude in seconds, eyes growing heavy and closing before he could open his mouth to speak.

The last thing he remembered was the alarms falling silent, replaced with a low hum as the machines resumed their steady beat.

* * *

Over the next few days, Thorn drifted in and out of consciousness.

Flashes of faces surfaced in front of him, bits and pieces of conversations swirled through his head. Commander Schrader stood over his bed, speaking in hushed tones with Narvez. Rodie and Streya visited in silence. Kira sat by his side and slipped his book beneath his pillow. Though he couldn’t read it, he took comfort in the knowledge it was there. Each time he woke, his lungs burned, until one time he regained consciousness with the late day sun filling his room.

He took a breath. And then another.

“Huh. Clean air,” he rasped.

Kira answered him from a chair nearby. She looked worn, and more than a bit worried. “You’ve healed some. It was your lungs. They were…not good. Heavy damage from the chemical fire.”

“Drigo?” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying in vain to generate some moisture. “How is he?”

Kira dropped her head, auburn hair falling in front of her face. That made Thorn try to turn his head farther, which he did, though he was stiff.

“I saw…” He fought to sit up. “Get me out of this bed. I saw his arm.”

Kira put her hand on his shoulder and handed him a small cup of water with a straw. When he took a sip, Thorn frowned slightly.

“What is it?” Kira asked.

“No flavor. I figured getting scorched would at least earn me some flavor drops.”

Kira snorted. “You get flavored water after you kill Nyctus. It’s all rather top secret, but there are five berry flavors, all with caffeine.”

Thorn grinned, although it was a creaky expression. “What do you get if you don’t kill Nyctus?”

“Artificial banana,” Kira said, arching a brow.

“So, torture. Got it. The incentive to succeed just got stronger.”

“You understand all too well. Okay, serious shit, Thorn—you’ll be out of this bed soon enough. For now, lie down and get your rest. You’ve been higher than a kite for days.” Thorn lay back and closed his eyes, nodding in agreement.

“I’m not going to lie. It was the best part of healing, if that’s what this was,” Thorn said. “But his arm? I know what I saw.”

“The arm is—it’s gone. Incinerated at the shoulder.” Kira pushed her hair behind her ear. “They think…” She sighed. “They think it was some combination of Scorch energy and a Lifer blast.”

“But that’s impossible.” He searched her green eyes, wondering if he’d heard her right.

Scorch was fire sorcery, straightforward and simple. Lifer was magic that manipulated the ability to heal, to live, and even the ’casters were learning the very communications within the human nervous system. The two things did not go together. They could not go together.

“Precisely.” Kira patted him on the shoulder.

“Kira?” Thorn asked with some hesitation.

She stopped, turned, and faced him, sensing his question was going to carry weight. “Yes?”

“Can anyone—can any of us break the rules? Combine magic?”

She paused, her lips working for a moment before answering. “Possibly. But so far, only one ’caster in the entire Navy has shown the potential to control it, and even that’s a topic of heated debate.”

“Who’s that unlucky bastard?”

Kira’s face flashed sadness, then bitter resignation. “Look in the mirror when you shave, Thorn. And heal. You’re going to need every spell for what’s coming.”

8

Thorn continued to recover.

With each passing hour, his lungs cleared. His body rallied, and then, in a final defiance, he managed to leave the anesthetic haze behind as his mind grew sharp again. As soon as he was able to stand with ease, he moved from his med unit to Drigo’s. He watched from a sculpted plastic chair as Drigo whimpered in his sleep. The bulky man’s shoulder was wrapped in bandages that slowly transitioned from stark white to rust brown. The nurses would come in and change the bandages, blocking Thorn’s view of the full catastrophe. In the time he waited, the nurses changed his bandages three times. Each process revealed a horrific scorch mark that scrawled across Drigo’s neck, like fingers clasping at him, trying to drag him from life to death.

As day turned to night, Thorn remained. He let his head rest against the wall and crossed his arms in front of his chest to keep warm. It was almost sadistic how cold they kept the intensive care units, but when a nurse came through and offered him a blanket, he declined. He couldn’t decide if it was martyrdom or stubbornness, but he sat, unmoving and chilled, watching Drigo’s body fight a secret war, one wave of pain at a time.

The doctors had chosen to keep Drigo in a medically induced hypersleep until they were able to attach his custom bionic arm. Thorn was determined to be there when he woke up—to hell with training. Injuries of this magnitude were one thing on the battlefield. When the Nyctus were attacking, there was an excuse for it—it was war. It was space combat, and it was the most lethal clash of life forms humanity could imagine. The ON had gone too far in allowing live fire skirmishes. As much as he blamed himself, Thorn blamed every officer, too, but he kept that to himself. In spite of his anger, he now saw the framework holding the ’casters together. He didn’t have to like it, but the Navy was shaping warriors armed with weapons that had once been considered fantasy—or heresy—among humans. It was only the stunning cataclysm of orbital warfare that woke long-dormant abilities in select people. Some scientists considered it a genetic Hail Mary—a last, desperate throw of the dice on the part of man, the animal, when faced with certain extinction.

Thorn parsed all of this and then made his choice. When Drigo recovered, he would ask Schrader one question—and only one.

Was there a place here for Thorn? Or would his presence lead to loss instead of victory?

* * *

Kira swept the auburn hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. She opened the only drawer in her aluminum desk and pressed the hidden button above the compartment. After a brief whirring sound, a holocard dropped from the new opening into the palm of her hand.

She set the thumbnail sized square on her desktop and activated the holographic with the fingerprint of her right index finger. An image shrouded in blue electrodes came to life and danced above the table. Most of the file had been damaged, but a blip of fourteen-year old Thorn flashed into existence. In the image, he was smiling—the face of a boy crashing into manhood without anything good in his life except, maybe, for Kira herself. As the image unspooled, Thorn scooped Kira off her feet as she howled in laughter, their faces lit up in the sun of an August when the Nyctus were still a distant threat. Tumbling together, they fell into a pond, splashing wildly until Kira rose and dropped, arms akimbo and a scowl on her face. Kira’s copper hair hung in curls, which she flung to one side with all the dignity a soaked, mud-spattered ten year old could manage.

Thorn’s laughter rang out, then Kira threw a sopping strand of duckweed at Thorn, and they both dissolved into more laughter as the graphic froze, then sputtered. Kira touched a key and left the image before her, their younger selves preserved in time. Innocent, or as innocent as war orphans could be, but still relatively whole. Unspoiled. Hopeful, at times.

She sighed heavily, placed her elbows on the desk, and rested her chin in her hands.

“I hope I was right bringing you here,” she muttered, staring at the mosaic of sunlight on the forgotten pond. “And your magic. Whatever it might be.”

Ever since that night he read to her under the sheets at the Children’s Home, she’d known his talent was different. What Thorn didn’t know was that Kira had seen magic before that night. Her father was a mage and belonged to the first troop of Starcasters. There were only five, in total, during his time, and only one survived the battle at Pegasi 51. Reed Wixcombe was not among the soldiers on the returning fleet.

She should have known that Thorn was too damaged to control his energy. She should have foreseen this outcome. And yet—where there was uncertainty, there could be hope.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe?” A gentle rapping of knuckles against her door startled Kira and she got to her feet. She bumped the desk, and the holocard tumbled off. The image of Thorn went away in a fugitive gleam.

“Yes, come in.” Kira stood at attention.

Ashworth opened the door and stood just inside the metal frame. “Commander Schrader requests your presence at once.” The bland man chewed at the inside of his cheek. So, he did have human emotions.

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” Kira saluted.

Kira approached the Commander’s office with anxiety gnawing at the back of her mind. Before she had the chance to knock, the Commander called through the door as if he’d sensed her presence.

“Enter.” Schrader’s voice was particularly calm. Somehow, that made her even more anxious.

Schrader stood behind his desk with his back to Kira. A holographic map of what appeared to be the Targath System was projected against the wall, and the empty space between the stars made the room seem infinite.

And dangerous.

Kira stood to attention. “Commander, sir.” Nerves made her cough once. Discipline stopped it from happening again.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe, what do you see?” Schrader’s head tilted, but he continued to study the map of the star system.

Kira tried to channel his sense of understanding but failed. “Sir?”

“Here. Take a look.”

Kira approached, hesitant, then took up station at his side. “What do I see in the stars?”

Schrader weighed her with his eyes for the first time. “At ease.”

She dropped her hands to her side and relaxed, but only just. Her eyes were drawn to the map, each point of light lurid in the black background of eternity.

Again, Schrader gestured to the map. “What do you see in front of you?”

“I see—” Kira began, but she stopped as a sensation played at the edges of her consciousness, where she wasn’t watching. “I see a limited star system. Opportunity for expansion, sir.” The sense of being watched grew to an intensity that made her struggle to keep her eyes forward, and then—

—the situation clarified, as she realized the feeling had an identity. Commander Schrader. He was a telepath; a Joiner of some type, and a powerful one. She understood in that primal, invasive moment, and without turning his head, he knew she knew.

“There was opportunity here, once.” He raised his hand and waved long fingers in a series of motions, like sign language, but smaller and more compact. At each movement of his hand, the map changed and then finally glowed green in recognition of his command sequence. With a small rotation of his wrist, Schrader enlarged a region, and the POV sailed forward to a grouping of three planets. Tapping the air twice, he shifted the view again. Now, the map was squarely centered on the largest of the three planets. White clouds occluded parts of a blue world, streaked with green. Like Earth, but much larger.

“Hermacales.” The Commander stated the title as if Kira was supposed to know the weight that name held. “This planet was more vibrant than Earth. Full of life. Because of their potential as a threat, they were one of the first systems targeted by the Nyctus.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand…”

Schrader rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “The Nyctus identified Hermacales as a highly gifted populace and infiltrated the Planetary Government.”

“How were they able to infiltrate a government of ‘casters, sir?” Kira was becoming increasingly frustrated that she had never learned of this attack.

“A mild fever, common in the middle latitudes of Hermacales. They released a newly evolved strain—the original was known as Moonburn since it caused victims to spike fevers during the night. A number of the population fell fatally ill, but the Nyctus were not concerned with biological warfare. Their goals were far more insidious.”

Kira shuffled where she stood, wishing she could sit to calm her nerves. “How did it rake the planet then, sir? I thought the entire system was lost?”

“It was, and in a manner that was far more costly than a simple extinction event. The Nyctus used their agents to corrupt state officials—by forced insertion in their memories and subtle magical pressure. When the government panicked, the people followed. We sent endless aid to the planet, draining away critical resources to save people from something that was about as lethal as a broken toe. Weeks of flotillas, and food, and tech staff, and medical aid, all misdirected and lost by people who didn’t even know the enemy controlled their minds.” Schrader gave a short, bitter laugh. “The tactician in me admires the plan, because it set us back years, all while the people watched their planet, built over decades, fall into economic and social collapse. This happened in weeks, not years, and the cost in life and resources might never be known. When the government fell, the Nyctus attacked with a fleet so powerful that less than five percent of the planetary fleet rose to defend Hermacales. Do you understand? One in twenty ships, sailors, or marines were ready to fight. Even fewer actually did fight because of the massed orbital bombardment that hit them.”

“And what about the casters? Weren’t they…” Kira searched for a diplomatic term. “Immune, somehow?”

“Had the Nyctus not incited a panic, perhaps they would have been.” Schrader sat in his swivel chair and steepled his fingers in front of his lips. “But they played on the fear of the masses and weakened the minds of the ’casters, causing self-doubt.”

It was all coming together in her mind now. “And the self-doubt created chaos magic, uncontrollable and mutually destructive.”

“That is correct, Lieutenant.” The Commander nodded toward the map behind him. “And what you see now is a direct reflection of that.”

Kira observed the stillness before them and understood. The light of the stars shined dimly; each of the planets was surrounded with swirling clouds of darkness that choked the light from touching the surface. No jump planes zipped between atmospheres, no cities burned with defiant civilization, visible even from space. The worlds were shrouded, both in chaos magic and the quiet of a tomb.

“When a man doubts himself, it is even easier for that man to doubt others. Among ’casters, this kind of instability can make the most stable society into something quite dangerous—a mob.” Schrader’s blue eyes pinned her with the certainty of an experienced officer who knew things could get much worse than what he’d already seen. “No civilization survives a mob. And certainly not with rocks falling on them at terminal velocity.”

Kira snapped to attention once again. “Yes, sir. I might be a Joiner, but I am comfortable with my capabilities. I won’t crack, and I won’t allow my people to crack.”

“It’s not your confidence I’m concerned with, Lieutenant,” Schrader said.

Kira leaned back, moved by the bland nature of his statement. “Private Stellers.” It was a declaration, not a question.

“This latest accident is tragic—nobody is denying the scale of it.” The Commander moved from behind his desk and paced across the floor. “But it showed us something that we have never before seen in the Starcaster Battalion.” He stopped and faced her. “Did you know of his talent before you brought him to Code Nebula?”

“No, sir.” Kira then amended herself, shrugging slightly. “Well, I had a suspicion, sir. But nothing like this.”

“What suspicion was that?”

“When we were kids at the Refugee Home”—Kira paused, not wanting to divulge some of those most personal moments— “Thorn had a…a way about him. Like something untapped, under the fear when we were first taken in. We were scared, sir. Scared and alone, and we were convinced the world was ending. But even in the midst of all that, Thorn had layers. I could see it, and I was just a kid.”

Schrader stopped in his walk, facing her with a febrile stare. “You’re being evasive.”

She tried to pry open the memories, long held only between Thorn and her. “I do not mean to mislead, sir.”

“Then tell me what it is you are evading. In full.”

“I don’t have a clear recollection, sir.” As he drew up to question her again, she hurried to complete the explanation. “It started with a small ball of light in his hand, but then, in quiet moments…he could do things. I mean, to clarify, he could do anything, usually, if his stress was high, or if he was quiet. Or alone. Looking back, I never saw an end to his power, and it seemed utterly natural at the time. I didn’t realize the uniqueness until I was stationed at Code Nebula. Only then did I give any credence to my memories. I was only ten, and I know how fallible memory can be.”

Schrader grinned. “So it is true.”

She looked toward the ground and nodded. “I made the decision to track him down, sir. I had to know if my memory was correct. If he was the weapon I suspected. That we need.”

“You made the right choice, Lieutenant.” Schrader shook his head, lips pulled to one side as he considered what the confirmation meant. “But you should have come to me with your suspicions from the beginning. Thorn nearly died—you understand that, yes?”

“Yes, sir.” It was hard to look him in the eye, so she stared into the middle distance, seeing nothing but feeling the weight of her decisions.

“We cannot afford to lose a talent like that. In terms of a Starcaster Officer, he’s little more than a child. In terms of his power? He’s a bomb with limitless energy. He’s a supernova. Or more.” Schrader took his place behind his desk once more.

“I agree with you there, sir. But what does that have to do with me?”

“You are close with Private Stellers.”

“I was once, yes, sir. I think we still have some degree of connection, though we’re not kids anymore.”

“We would like for you to speak with him. He’s decided to leave the Starcasters, though he hasn’t come to me with this request yet. It’s a seed in his mind, because in his core Thorn is noble and loyal. He fears himself over all else, which is good…to a point. He’s going to ask me if he has value, but I can’t even let the question be posed. If he does come to submit his resignation because of some failure on my part to convince him otherwise, we will have no choice but to oblige by ON policy. A resignation request denied is a clear indicator of a future issue. A problem that can arise in combat, or even worse, at the moment of truth in this war. Believe me, Thorn will be at the nexus of combat every time he flies into the black.” The Commander pulled a file from a stack at the corner of his desk and thumbed through the documents. Eyes-Only dockets were the only paper files still used within the military, so Kira diverted her attention.

“What do you want me to say to him, sir?”

Schrader kept his attention on the files. “Don’t lie. I’ll never ask you to lie, but the unalloyed truth might be too much at this point. How are your diplomatic skills?”

“Rusty, but good when used, sir. We had to wheedle every meal at the home together as kids. It’s a natural response in me, now,” Kira said, with the first smile since she’d entered the room.

“How am I supposed to meet with him tonight, Commander? Fraternizing is…inadvisable, given our rules of conduct.”

“We will arrange for a meeting, off the books. Be at the East Bend of the river tonight. He’ll be there.”

“Yes, sir.” Kira stood awkwardly for a moment. “Am I dismissed, sir?”

Commander Schrader waved his hand at the door. “You are, Lieutenant.” When she was about to walk out, he added, “And Lieutenant, do not disappoint. This is the culmination of the most important and rare of things, us finding Stellers.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“A lucky break.”

* * *

Thorn was surprised to see Narvez enter Drigo’s med unit that evening, and even more stunned to see her grin easily as she sat on the bed. The lieutenant’s hard lines appeared softened even in the florescent lights of the medical room. She focused on Drigo, reaching out with a delicate touch and running her fingertips over the bandages of his shoulder. Without turning away, she spoke.

“Stellers, I need a few moments with Drigo. I’m going to help him, and the process is not for anyone else to see,” Narvez said.

“I’d rather not leave, ma’am,” Thorn said, his voice flat.

She turned, her eyes boring into his, mouth opening to lash him—and stopped. Officers had to plan ahead. Good officers planned three steps ahead, and that was what Schrader, Narvez, and Ashworth had done. The last element was Thorn himself, so Narvez did something out of character.

She smiled gently. “You will, because it’s an order. You will, because I’m speaking to you as a fellow human—I need you to trust me, Thorn. For just this moment, trust me, and see what I show you.”

“I—yes, ma’am.” Grudging, he stood, watching her. A touch in his mind, gentle but firm, and Narvez sent him a map built of memory. A riverbend, close by and with some purpose other than merely getting him to leave so she could work.

Thorn twitched as the image flooded his mind, then he twitched again at the realization that he was keeping her from helping Drigo.

This isn’t about you, he told himself . “Clear, ma’am, and thank you.”

She waved him away as her eyes went blank, power filling the space between her and Drigo. Her magic was suffused now with a sense of purpose—to heal and comfort, rather than to sow disorder and chaos. Thorn stood for a second, stunned at the complete reversal of her sorcery, then he stepped out of the room into a hallway where the air was antiseptic and there was no looming cloud of healing energy.

“To the river, then, for a quiet moment,” Thorn said, but the hallway did not answer, and his feet moved of their own accord.

He would speak to the night while Narvez waged war on Drigo’s pain. Maybe it would be enough.

* * *

The night air was brisk, the sky grazed by scudding clouds that broke the moonlight into a slow dance of shifting rays; some blue from the smaller moon, some buttery gold from the fat orb hanging higher in the west. He took his time, breathing deeply as the graveled path crackled underfoot. With a final turn, the path widened, and Thorn smelled water—a clean, sharp scent, followed by the sounds of a river at night. Water has two faces; one that is seen, and one that is heard. The moons lit a dark ribbon just ahead, occasional panes of silver breaking the busy surface.

Open space yawned ahead in the forest. A riot of flowers opened their faces to the moonlight, vines so black they seemed to steal the light around them. Only the petals glowed, unhindered by the shadows.

“I’m here,” Thorn said to the night.

“I am as well,” came Kira’s unexpected answer.

“Kira?”

“Come forward. Sorry about the ambush. I’m terrible at stealth. And diplomacy,” she admitted, stepping out into the moonglow.

“Nice place,” he said. It was. A long stone bench waited for them, close to the river’s edge. They sat as one, both turning to look at the water. “This isn’t accidental, which means Schrader thinks I’m going to leave. He’s pitching me to stay.”

Kira said nothing but let her eyes go up to the stars as she turned her head toward him.

“I’m right,” Thorn said.

“You are,” she admitted. “You always had insight. Even before you knew about your power.” She paused, crossed her legs, and leaned back on the bench. “You never asked why I’m here with the Starcasters.”

“You’re right. I never thought twice about it. Even though you were younger than me, you were never—”

“Actually younger than you? Yeah, I get that a lot. I was forty when I was twelve.” Her laughter was bell-bright and real.

“Glad we agree about that.”

Kira shrugged. “You. You’re the reason I’m here. And the war, sure, but mostly you, because of what you told me when we spent all those hours practicing something that had always been thought of as a lie. A myth. You knew magic was real and then…you showed me. And you taught me, at least something. I went away to the Navy thinking that nothing they could do to me was worse than our lives when we were young. I was right. And then they explained the real war—not what we saw back home, but the real fight. The scorched planets, the barren systems.”

He tilted his head in admission. “The thing behind the thing.”

“Exactly. It’s never what it seems. It’s what’s controlling events from the background. For us, it’s a war so vast that we can’t even imagine surviving it, let alone winning.”

“We can win,” he said simply.

“I know we can. Now, anyway,” Kira admitted.

Thorn dangled his legs above the still water. “I wasn’t wrong about you. You’ve always had that gift. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. Savvy, too, even when we were kids.”

Kira’s face lit up with a smile. “Gift. Or curse. My family,” she said, turning the word family into a slur. “You have the talent.” Her smile faded then. “My father had the talent. I might have it. Hell, I’m his true daughter. I even look like him.”

Thorn turned toward her slowly, brows rising. “He had—what? Magic? How did I not know that?”

“I never thought it mattered. We were too busy surviving that…home.” She kept her eyes on the water now. “I don’t have his level of talent. I wasn’t born to it, like he was, or at least it wasn’t a manifest part of me. I feel like it’s something I can coax out of…somewhere. Like a hidden reserve, maybe, and even then it might not be soon enough to help us in this war. That’s proof enough to me that the universe has a sick sense of humor. Sometimes, anyway.”

“There are only a few ’casters, but the need for good—great—officers is never going to go away. Not in this war. Your skills are elsewhere, maybe. Tactics, intelligence, command. Those go a long way.”

Kira looked him in the eye. “You taught me that my brain is valuable despite my lack of talent, Thorn. Even when we were kids.”

“You didn’t need me to know that.” He shook his head, teeth bright in the moonlight as he smiled. “Everyone could see that, even among all us leftovers. And now here you are, an officer, and something tells me your career will go on past this rank.”

Kira laughed. “Glad to hear that. The pay at LT sucks, so I guess we’ll have to concentrate on living long enough to get that sweet pension.”

“A noble goal. I like the whole part about living longer. It beats the hell out of a plasma cloud in some forgotten point in space.” He sobered, then added, “I hope I can control this.”

“Your power? Or the war? Big goals, if it’s the latter.”

Now he laughed, and it felt good. “I’ll start small and aim for harnessing whatever the hell is cutting loose inside me. I can feel it down—I don’t want to say in my bones, but it’s somewhere in a place that feels like it’s on the edge of my senses. Like if I turn my head slowly enough, I can glimpse my, ah…talent, but only for a second, then it’s gone. A memory. Or a taunt.” He lifted one shoulder, fingers spread on his thighs. “Do you think magic can truly be learned? Shaped, I mean?”

“I do. In fact, I convinced myself I could learn anything.” She smiled, and her next words bloomed in his head, clear and crisp. So I taught myself telepathy, reaching back to the echoes my father left for me to find. How’s it sound?

“Loud and clear—Kira, what the hell? How?” he asked, stunned. I thought telepathy was only for Purecasters. He’d responded to her without thinking.

She spoke aloud once more. “And yet here you are, a Scorch, a Lifer, probably a few other things we don’t really grasp, and now a telepath, with complete facility and ease. I watched your face. You did it like breathing. Second nature. Command has no idea what you’re capable of, and neither do you.”

Kira got to her feet and walked a few paces across the rocky surface before turning to face him. “The thing is, we need you. I need you, as a fixed point in my own past. You also happen to be the untapped fountain of—well, I don’t know. Magic, but of a kind that scares the shit out of people. Not me, though. And not Schrader, and certainly not the admiralty.”

Thorn stood slowly. “What are you talking about?”

“The Nyctus have been advancing. The recruits will be deployed soon, and we’re not ready.” Her body grew tense, and she let her eyes sweep the darkened sky as if the Nyctus would fall on them any second. “But you, Thorn, you are everything I remember you to be.”

“I’m not what you remember of me, Kira. I’m no better than any of the other ’casters here, and I’m sure as hell not ready for battle. I might—who knows? I might set myself on fire, torch a ship. I could do something you don’t have a term for, because even I don’t know what it is that I’m creating out of this power.”

She sputtered in frustration. “Who gives a damn? We don’t have options—not any longer. Whether or not you’re ready, or if you think you’ll turn a fleet to ash with wild magic isn’t the point. The point is this, and only this: it’s almost time to go to war, because there aren’t enough ’casters, and we’re losing. End of story. We lose one more big battle with our standard weps, and it’s over. The Nyctus will chew through planetary defenses with those big ass rocks, and we won’t be able to stop the volume of stone coming down on us. We have to fight, and soon. You most of all.”

He stepped toward her, pointing at the medwing. “Drigo has a missing arm. You sure it’s time to cut me loose?”

Kira reached out, took his face in her hands, and turned it up to the stars. “They’re out there, Thorn. Entire fleets of those murderous pricks, and every ship is aimed at the guts of our territory. If we win one battle—just one—we stop the bleeding, and we get room to breathe. Our shipyards are firing keels as fast as the Nyctus can turn them into scattered atoms, but we can’t replace the people. That’s where we come in. We’re the last line of offense. Not defense—to hell with defense. That’s a sucker’s bet. We can win, but we have to take the fight to them, not sit obediently and wait for the blows to land.” Her breath came short until she stilled herself with an effort.

Thorn took her hands, then let them go, uncomfortable at how easily he’d done it. “Okay. Let’s go tell Schrader to put me in a witchport and get the hell out of the way.”

“That’s the spirit. And one more thing,” Kira said.

“What’s that?”

“Burn every one of them you can see, because they’ll do the same to us if they can.”

9

Sleep came easily to Thorn that night, the scent of the river still filling his senses as he dropped away into silent rest. Despite Drigo’s condition, he felt needed. More importantly, he felt wanted, if not entirely trusted, and that was fine because he didn’t entirely trust himself.

Drigo’s arm was completed, and surgery was scheduled for the next morning to attach it to the scorched stump, now a pinking mass of keloidal scarring that would serve as a base for the elegant technology that would make him battle-ready. Thorn had worried about Drigo’s response but realized that being alive was a far cry better than the alternative, and frankly the arm wasn’t without some added benefits. It was powerful, nearly indestructible, and after glancing at the complex device, Thorn had to admit the new arm was an improvement over Drigo’s original, given his tendency to sunburn and blister.

The commanding officers had been understanding enough of Thorn’s absence from training, and he relied on that understanding for the remainder of the day. Tomorrow he would return to the field, but he needed to see his friend before he could dedicate his mind to the course materials once again. Peace, it seemed, came from a quiet moment at Drigo’s bedside.

“Does it—” Thorn began, but Drigo nearly growled at him.

“Itch? Yes. Like a friggin’ army of feverspot bugs have stung me in the forest. I might cut my own head off just so I can stop itching,” Drigo said, glaring at his bandages.

“Please don’t. I’d have to drink myself into forgiveness, and I can’t afford the hangover. Got a big war coming up.”

“I’ll hold off on the knife then, but they better get this arm on now.”

The nurses came in, all professional bustle, and Thorn was unceremoniously removed with assurance that his commander would be informed of any issues. Fighting the urge to resist their directions, Thorn heard a loud noise while standing in the hallway.

It was his stomach.

“Ah, right. Feeding time.” It had been days since he’d had a proper meal, and the mess was close enough that Thorn detected something close to coffee on the wind. “Right, then.” He went unerringly toward chow, noting the skies full of jump planes and general sense of purpose throughout the camp. Across the yard, new recruits were disgorged from a helo, their faces masks of shock as they took in the controlled chaos unfolding around them. There were less than two dozen in all.

Must be at the end of the Purecasters, Thorn thought sourly. That didn’t bode well. If what Kira had said was true—and he was almost certain it was—the ON would need battalions of ’casters to send the Nytcus back to their darkened worlds. No one really knew where the Nyctus originated, but they weren’t fans of bright stars or high grav.

The planes kept coming, and to Thorn’s relief, more recruits—infantry and ship-boarding—streamed into and out of the medwing. He wasn’t part of a mass recruitment, but this influx seemed a bit excessive, even for ON infantry standards.

His mind drifted to a life that felt so long ago. Working reclamation, he had no responsibilities but to himself. He could sleepwalk through his days, smeared in mud and low expectations. In some ways it was easier that way, but it was also a lonely, monotonous life that brought no fulfillment. Here, there was a promise of war, but also, maybe, life afterward.

Luckily, the mess hall was serving breakfast for all of the incomers. Thorn blended in well enough, but only until Kira spotted him.

She marched over to him. “What are you doing here?” Then she grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him out of the line.

“Hey now.” He lifted his tray so as not to spill what was already served. “Watch the grub. I fought a wave of wide-eyed newbies for this.”

She glowered at him. “I can pitch it in the shitcan if I want.” She looked at the tray with a gimlet eye. “Might even be saving your life. Is that…ham?”

“It used to be.” He lifted a chunk of the offending food with his thumb and forefinger. “Now, I think it’s just dangerous.”

Her shoulders relaxed at his joke. “Thorn, you can’t be here right now. You’re supposed to be in drills, anyway.”

Suddenly it dawned on him. “Last night.” He bent forward, his breath close to her ear. “Did you risk your commission for me?”

Kira looked up at him. Telling Thorn that she had been sent to convince him to stay wouldn’t be a betrayal, but it would take the shine of their conversation, and in some way, their shared history.

“No. I didn’t risk anything in speaking with you last night.” She looked around, surveying the room. “But today may be a different story.”

He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Why would you not worry about last night, but you do worry about today when we’re surrounded with witnesses?”

“The clock is ticking. That’s why. I don’t want our last conversation to be one that convinced you to go to war. We’ve got too much history for that.”

“You didn’t convince me.”

“I didn’t?”

“No, Kira. I was going to stay, and I’m going to fight. But you’re right about our history, and I’m going to need something more than simply winning the war as my goal,” Thorn said.

“Can’t offer you my hand in marriage. Not my style, and we’ve got a lot of fighting to do first.”

He snapped his fingers in mock anger. “Fair enough. I can wait for your devotion. But for now?”

“Yes, Recruit Stellers?”

He held up the ham. “Can you convince someone to cook actual meat?”

* * *

Thorn made it to the medwing just in time to see Drigo wheeled away to the surgical unit. He leaned against a wall, relieved that he’d be there when his friend woke with a new arm. He’d been a part of the accident, and he intended to be there before and after. As for during, he’d leave that to the medical team. Thorn was better at breaking than fixing, anyway.

Rodie, Val, and Streya arrived shortly after surgery had begun. The four of them waited silently in the hall. Being a military medical facility, there was no waiting room. Rodie thumbed through a deck of cards, shuffling and sorting, then shuffling again in a shushing metronome that was oddly comforting. Val bounced a thick rubber ball against the wall, testing her strength—or the wall’s—Thorn wasn’t really sure. Streya paced up and down the checkered floor. Thorn sat cross-legged, his wrists resting on his knees and his head leaning back against the white brick. He closed his eyes, using the wait to explore his magic, which was always just under his surface, like a waiting shark.

It took far less time than he expected before Drigo was wheeled out of the operating room on a silent gurney. The nurses studiously avoided any eye contact, which was frustrating.

“Ya’d think they could spare a nod or something,” Rodie groused, and everyone agreed. Other than the low hum of overhead lights, Drigo’s procession had been silent—unnervingly so. The four bunkmates scrambled to grab their jackets and coffee cups before they hurried down the hall behind the technicians. It would be a while longer before he woke up, but a surgeon relented, pulling her mask down to reveal a face as young as their own.

“I know. I’m a kid, but we all are at this point in the war,” the doctor said in a tired voice. “Everything went well. The arm is attached, working, and there were no unforeseen issues. Trust me when I say I’ve seen a lot worse.”

“From magical damage?” Freya asked, alarmed.

The surgeon—whose uniform read Booker—gave a graveyard smile. “Brought a recruit in here who’d been hit with a Lifer blast. They may as well have carried him through the doors in a bucket.” She shook her head, eyes gone blank with memory. “Drigo is fine. Will be fine, rather, once he learns some degree of synergy with the limb. It will serve him well in this war. If you’ll excuse me, I have another surgery.”

Booker turned and left, her shoes squeaking as she pivoted on the expanse of slick floor. Then Drigo groaned.

“…the hell? I f’l like shi…” Drigo’s voice was thick. “Did we win?” His lips drooped to one side. The meds were still kicking.

“Win? Oh, um, well…” Thorn said, then Drigo’s eyes cleared just a bit. He twitched in alarm. “What happened?” The question was razor sharp.

Thorn’s face fell. “I broke free, Drigo. I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Drigo blinked rapidly, trying to sift memories.

Thorn lifted Drigo’s hand and placed it on his new bionic arm. Drigo’s head turned in slow motion to see the titanium alloy that had yet to be covered with synthskin. He flexed his fingers, and the hydraulics hissed in response but then went silent as they adjusted. He turned back to Thorn, eyes wide.

Val tapped her foot. “Say something.”

“Bro…” Drigo’s mouth widened to a beaming smile. “I’m a robot!”

They all broke out in laughter, and Rodie flicked the new arm like a gong. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. A good attitude is the—”

“Dude. Rodie,” Drigo said.

“Yeah?”

“Give me a minute before you get all…” Drigo searched for the word.

“All Rodie?” Val said.

“Exactly,” Drigo agreed. “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?” Rodie asked, but everyone was on alert, searching Drigo’s face for pain.

“Automatic med dose. Felt it just now,” Drigo said, eyes drooping.

“Rest now,” Thorn said, but Drigo was already snoring softly.

“I have got to get me one of those,” Rodie said as they left.

“A cybernetic arm? Or those meds?” Freya asked.

Rodie’s smile was conspiracy itself. “Both.”

* * *

Everyone went back to their duties.

Except Thorn, who walked, eyes down as he processed what Kira told him about his abilities.

Lost in the abyss of conflicting emotions, Thorn had hardly looked two feet in front of him when he collided with Kira. He caught her just before she planted her rear end firmly in the mud, then stood to attention.

“Ma’am, my apologies.”

Kira dusted herself off. “Stellers.” She nodded to move past him, barely acknowledging his presence.

“Ma’am?” Her dismissal was cold to the point of rudeness, given their conversation and life before the ON.

She turned, but only halfway. “Sorry, Thorn. It’s time to think of yourself as an officer, because that’s the one thing we don’t have. Time.”

“I will. Ma’am.” His voice was steady, features neutral.

“I know. I wish there was some other way, but there isn’t. Get ready, Thorn. Sooner rather than later, we’re all going to battle.”

10

All he had left of home was the book.

The cover was tattered, and the bottom corner gone. Smeared with ash and grime, the title faded to a color so dull, it left no hint of the book’s former glory. Thorn knew every inch of it, and the cover, and even the torn page—259—and he touched that page like a talisman—which it was. The Hungry Trout and Other Stories could be felt, but not really seen, each letter more a memory than a shape on the seared paper cover.

Since the day the KEW took his home—his town, too, and his life along with it—the book was all he’d had. It was all he could salvage from the smoking hole of his former life, and now, under the alien light of twin moons, he opened to a random page and began to read. There was little comfort in his actions, but it was comfort, nonetheless.

I never should have stopped reading it.

Thorn tucked the book into his jacket pocket before reporting for training. He would read between instructions, or he’d never have time to read at all. Some touch of home was better than none, so he vowed to steal moments for reading while Drigo healed for another week. After that, Drigo could return to training, not as the same person, but as something more. Drigo would be a man with rare motivation.

And a perfect whetstone for Thorn’s magic. Again, he made a vow, but this time it was to be prepared for what Drigo might bring to the practice field. Anger, Thorn knew, could turn magic into a wild thing beyond the control of even a seasoned warrior, and the recruits were far from seasoned. They were, as Thorn and Drigo knew, dangerous.

But they could also be assets.

Even Burnitz seemed to take a softer approach with him. During stave training, Thorn sensed—not hesitation, but consideration on Burnitz’ part. Thorn was hit less often during stave training, though no one would consider Burnitz as being kind. If anything, the cynical part of Thorn’s mind said Burnitz was being prudent. An untrained—and lethal—element on the field was something to shape, not crush. The behavior made Thorn more receptive to quiet instruction. Where Burnitz had once bellowed, he now gave direct, practical advice on specific movements, each comment driving Thorn closer to an ideal combat form.

The new form of instruction took root.

Thorn was landing blows with regularity, and when the last session concluded, he was instructed to wait, as all soldiers did at one time or another, so he stood in the sun, reading his book and thinking of nothing at all.

“Stellers,” came Narvez’s voice, crackling with command.

“Ma’am?” He stowed the book, standing to attention. A second officer trailed Narvez, her bearing the polar opposite of anyone in command Thorn had seen thus far.

“This is Captain Leblanc. She’s here to begin your Clearance training, and if you want to succeed, you’d better pay close attention,” Narvez said.

“Ma’am,” Thorn said, accompanied with a crisp salute. Behind him, the other trainees rattled into formation, their uniforms making sounds of multiple salutes.

The captain had blonde hair pulled back so severely it gave her a look of mild surprise. Her cheekbones were high, her uniform black, and her pose one that verged into sleepiness.

Captain Leblanc did not stand at attention. She was the least militant officer that Thorn had ever laid eyes on, and for a moment, he felt a sense of disconnect. How did that person become a captain?

“Soldiers.” Leblanc stood with her legs hip width apart, knees slightly bent. For a moment, Thorn wondered if she was going to sit cross-legged on the ground. “I will lead you in your Clearance training today. Our individual sessions have given me the understanding necessary for this intensive training. Prepare for a deep psychological disruption.”

Thorn felt himself try to frown. He’d concluded, wrongly, that the individual sessions were Clearance training. The thought of his shared secrets being told to the entire squad left him with a pit in his guts. Fears, especially personal ones, were something Thorn kept to himself. To share them in the Home meant to be even more vulnerable to the other children. It was a lifelong habit born of hard lessons that Thorn kept his fears buried.

It was survival. It had always been about survival.

As if she sensed his unease, Leblanc continued with her instruction. “What you see before you will be your experience alone—an experience tailored to the weaknesses you carry. I am not your enemy. I am your ally. Your fears, however, are most certainly your enemy, because they can be used against you, or worse.”

Rodie raised a hesitant hand. “Ma’am?”

“Speak, please,” Leblanc said. Her tone was inviting, even if her facial expression remained one of shock.

“How? Our fears, that is, ma’am. How can they be used against us?” Rodie asked.

Leblanc began an easy walk along the front of their formation, her steps light. “A superb question. If fear has no tangible mass, then how does it manage to kill so many ON soldiers? The answer is quite simple. A weak mind, paralyzed by fear, becomes a weapon pointed not just at you, but the people around you. You can and will fail in the moment of truth because of fear.” She paused in front of Thorn. “Or childhood trauma.” She walked on, stopping in front of Rodie. “Or a sense of inadequacy. All of these are wedges, forced into the place where your power and discipline reside, and once they have a way in, you have no way out. Do you understand? This training is not about you. It’s about how your flaws will impact every single member of the battlespace, and how you plan on mastering that uncertainty. Starting right now.”

Narvez stepped forward and stood next to the captain. “This is the single most important training exercise we are able to give you to prepare for fighting the Nyctus.” The battle-hardened lieutenant dropped her mask and betrayed a plea for cooperation with her eyes. “If you are unfortunate enough to be within range of Nyctus mind control, this is the closest simulation to representing the horrors you will endure.” The willowy woman retreated, her face a scowl as she sifted memories of previous battles. Even the most tone-deaf recruit sensed her anger was born of experience, and Narvez scared the hell out of almost everyone.

That fact alone made every recruit stand a bit taller, and lean forward just that much more.

Thorn felt a pressure building inside his skull, and the world around him began a slow, dreamlike shift. In place of the blonde Captain and sharp Lieutenant, a little girl in a pink floral nightgown stood in front of him. Her sandy brown hair was braided into pigtails, and she held a floppy stuffed rabbit under one arm, a blue thread trailing from the hem of her dress.

“They’re coming, Thorn!” the girl cried, reaching back to him as she ran away, her feet a near blur. She pulled his hand toward a tall farmhouse, the roof glowing gold in the late day sun. “You have to save them,” the girl—no, not a girl, his sister, Bettani, piped at him in her child’s voice.

His heart clenched, his breath grew short, and he ran, his feet flying over rows of earth turned in the field that hemmed the south side of their farm. There was a low rise, then a ditch, filled with broken rock and the odd still pool, and then—

Home. He pelted forward, driven to see if they could be saved. If he could be saved.

In the sky above, an unholy noise grew from distant rumble to a roar, the massive rock splitting atmosphere in a boiling cloud of heat and light. The angle was sharp, the impact sharper, and Bettani vanished in a scalding blaze of white, only to reappear as he fell, faceup in the field. Thorn sensed the book in his pocket, and grass, and a small pebble digging into his shoulder. Bettani leaned over, her face twisting into hysteria.

“Why aren’t you doing anything, Thorn? They’re dying. Burning. All of them. Can you hear it?” Bettani asked, even as the roaring fire began to drown out all sounds except for the apocalypse brought down from the sky. Thorn’s chest bucked with a sob, but he ran his thumb over the book, now in his hand somehow, and the fire from above began to fade.

So did Bettani.

Reality flickered, then stabilized. Then the dream world was no more, and his mind, once more, was his own. He knew this was true because of the coppery tang in his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue, but if anything, that only helped flush the invasive visions from his mind.

“You’re not my sister,” he stated with conviction, and the last outline of Bettani shattered, leaving behind nothing except a deep-seated pain, pulsing just below Thorn’s brow.

“Thorn!” Kira rushed down the bank to his side and pulled him up to his feet.

“That was…intense.” He sat up, but slowly, trying to shake off the effects of a powerful telepathic assault.

“This is my least favorite portion of the curriculum.” She brushed off her pants and breathed deeply. “I was terrified you wouldn’t come out of it. Sometimes, people don’t.”

He shook his head, still feeling pressure inside his skull, but it was fading.

“Not fast enough,” he murmured, groggy.

“Oh, the hangover? It fades.” Kira shrugged, her eyes gleaming with relief. “Takes a bit, but it does. And I’m glad you’re coming back this fast. It’s a good sign for…for later.”

Kira smiled, stood, and pulled him to his feet among the groans and odd cough of every recruit coming out of their own private hell. “They’ll all have a story to tell. I once heard a ’caster say his dead uncle forced him back into high school. Can you imag—oh, shit.” Overhead, a silver line streaked across the darkening sky. “No, no, no. Captain?”

“This can’t be,” Leblanc hissed, pulling another recruit up from the ground.

Kira’s head whipped sideways to track the object. Another bright point flared into existence, then two more. “They found the base.”

Explosions hammered the ground, sending waves of debris skyward as the base was methodically reduced to ashes.

“KEW,” Leblanc shouted, leading the wobbly recruits across open ground. “On me,” she barked, as everyone followed in varying states of readiness. In seconds, the recruits were running at full tilt, their recovery complete as Leblanc led them to the armory.

They didn’t get far.

Thorn watched in horror as a hailstorm of bullets tore through the grass in front of them. Streya screamed as she hit the ground, blood spraying from her shoulder in a looping arc. She rolled twice, arm flopping.

Kira grabbed him by the arm as he changed trajectory from the armory toward Streya. “No! Thorn, you have to leave her! We have to get to the armory. We need weapons and suppressing fire!”

“Can’t,” he grunted, pulling away from Kira and ramping up to a run.

“Thorn, if you try to save her, you’ll just get both of us killed! Stay to the tree line and keep your damned head down.” On cue, rounds howled overhead, chopping trees apart with efficient brutality.

“Get my weapons, too,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Keep to the trees! I’ll meet you at the armory.”

Bullets continued to whine overhead, but Thorn wove with the desperation of the hunted. He slid to Streya’s side, causing his book to tumble out into the bloody earth. With one arm, he rolled Streya over; with the other, he grabbed his book. A heave and she was up on his shoulder, his adrenaline cooking off at a stunning rate.

“Gotcha,” he muttered, but Streya said nothing. Blood spooled away from her. “Shit, she’s ventilated.” Heart hammering against his ribs, he began to run and drew on the atmosphere around him, harnessing a cloud of dark shimmering matter. He held the attack ready, like a drawn arrow, wiping blood from his eyes—Streya’s—then wiping the sticky mass on his leg. His thumb brushed the book’s cover, peeking from his pocket—and the world stuttered.

“The hell?” he said, still running, but his steps slowed. Streya seemed light. “No-- lighter,” he corrected, then touched the book again. Overhead, his spell swirled, an unformed mass of endless violence, waiting for his command.

Streya coughed, crimson arterial blood leaving her mouth in a red mist, but there was a pause in the rounds flying by. Not silence, but…an interruption.

Thorn touched his book, brushing fingers over the pages as Streya grew lighter still. “Show me,” he commanded. When nothing happened, he released his spell, adding, “Show me the truth.”

Silence.

Without opening his eyes, Thorn felt sunlight and a breeze. No hint of char or blood or war in the air. He opened his eyes, already beginning to sense what was waiting.

Captain Leblanc smiled knowingly, though her eyes remained shrouded by a glowing orange light. Thorn released his remaining energy, the spell sublimating with a soft crackle.

“I knew that your induction would need to be multi-leveled when I saw the depths of your…pain, Stellers. From what happened.” Her voice resonated with power. This was not the same woman from moments earlier.

Thorn looked around to see the dazed faces of the other recruits. They stood, swaying, in her thrall. Some cried. Some raged in silence, and some were merely still, their bodies a mockery of what they’d been at the start of the test.

He was the first to be released from her telepathic hold.

“Keep that talisman close to your side, Stellers.” Leblanc’s face was eerily still. “No trainee has ever pulled themselves from dimensional training that fast.” She searched his face, then gave a small nod. “Or with such clarity.”

Thorn looked down at the book in his hands. Talisman. Yes. That was the word. The book was more than a memory made real. It was a steady point—an anchor for his power. For his sanity.

He sidestepped through the hypnotized troops and made his way to a fallen tree at the edge of the forest, it’s roots a cathedral of gnarled fingers. Narvez appeared at his side without a sound. He barely twitched.

“Your performance was impressive,” Narvez said.

“I—thank you, Lieutenant,” Thorn mustered. This sight of Narvez left him wary, and her neutral look did nothing to disabuse him of that.

“I know a fighter when I see one,” she said, walking away to join the captain without another word. He could see that Leblanc appeared drained, her face a wan circle of pale flesh. The enormity of her telepathic control came with a high cost, which told Thorn that she was built of far tougher stuff than her laconic bearing suggested. He found himself wondering what the recovery from such a task would entail, and was glad he didn’t need to find out. As to his own power, it was still there—brooding, vast, and unscathed, even after releasing a spell large enough to crack the false reality of Leblanc’s immersive magic.

Dismissed, Thorn began the slow walk to his bunk. By the time he made it, every cell in his body felt heavy—or light, as if hollowed out by the force of his own will. He staggered inside, only to hear Rodie’s light snoring.

“Damned good idea,” Thorn said, and in seconds he collapsed, but not before checking the sky once more for bright silver things, falling on his head for eternity.

11

The routine was becoming easier, and Thorn’s confidence was building with each wake up. Instead of fearing his magic, he was learning to live with it—to shape it in ways that made power seem like a natural extension of his own will. A part of him that belonged, not something to be hidden from the other kids at the home.

He kept The Hungry Trout on him at all times, and began to excel in areas that had been out of reach mere weeks before. Now, Clearance and Material Sciences came easier to him, as he finally concluded that making war would be the hardest thing he’d ever do. Not just using magic, because it was a given that his power was dangerous and costly.

But war against the Nyctus was going to be unlike anything else in his world. Humans weren’t built to kill. They could kill, given training, and there was even the odd enthusiast among his peers, but in truth, killing another sentient being wasn’t a default setting. Thorn considered this as his power grew, learning that inside himself he found a core shut off from the rest of the world. It was a secret place—a combat awareness—that he could invoke, given the time to tap into it.

But even the delay between thoughts and spells was fading, just as his need to physically touch his book. Now, he could merely sense the book, and his well of power would yawn open, a roiling mass of unformed energy waiting for his command.

Captain Leblanc had called him to her jump plane once more before moving on to whatever her next assignment was, and she was not the same person he’d met on the field that first day. Leblanc’s face was sallow, her eyes sunken over hollow cheeks and a look that fell between haunted and raw exhaustion. Thorn was sure now that recovery was far worse for her than it had been for the trainees.

“Stellers.” She spoke as if her throat was swollen, the words dusty.

“Captain, ma’am?” He stood at attention, eyes clocking her office. It was sparse, with odd things—like a brass plate, candles slumped in the middle, and the skull of a small animal, its jaw in an open leer.

She smiled, and even that gesture was an echo. “Have a seat, soldier.”

He dropped into a chair, noting the cushion. It smelled of dust and sunshine. “You lead a life of comfort, ma’am,” he said.

Her laugh was brighter than her smile. “Some things travel with me. I need the familiarity in order to…remain focused. And to recover, which I’m sure you’re seeing now. Think of me as a shepherd. I can only control so many in my flock before I need rest. Power—real power, like what you have—is at the utter edge of our control. It’s like a science so new that you’re as likely to die as you are to triumph in pursuit of its application. So, you get this,” she said, waving at her creased uniform. With a dismissive flick, she sent a crumb of energy bar falling to the floor.

“You didn’t call me here just to bask in this richness, did you, ma’am?” He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, leaning into the conversation.

Leblanc exhaled slowly. “No. I did not.” She fell silent, measuring him again.

“I’m unsure—” Thorn began, but she waved him silent. With an effort, he could see her push the exhaustion back. Thorn knew that look. He’d seen it on his own face, mucking oil day after day, trying to find a reason to get up. To go on.

“Your talent is rare. It might even be unique. Hell, I’m almost sure it is, but I haven’t seen every Starcaster yet, although one scenario will ensure that I do.”

“You mean if we lose, ma’am?” Thorn asked.

Her brows lifted in surprise. “How do you figure?”

Thorn gave a small shrug but spoke, heedless of what he had to say. She outranked him, but soon they’d be in the same war, together. “If we lose, we all die, and there won’t be any more Starcasters. So you’ll have seen us all.”

“Quite right. Ugly, but true.” Leblanc turned more toward him, her eyes brightening. “Show me something. Form a light in your palm. Your right hand, please.”

Thorn said nothing but turned his hand upward and willed a small globe of light into being. The light stayed still, only varying slightly from white to blue.

“Excellent. Now extend the light into a column, quickly, but when it becomes, oh, a meter long, turn it at a right angle, then stop.”

Thorn did as requested without any effort. The beam shot up and bent at a perfect ninety degrees, ending in a hard point between him and the captain. “Like this, ma’am?”

She nodded, smiling. “Congratulations. You’ve just figured out space combat with magic.”

He looked at the light, head tilted in an effort to fully understand. “We’re fighting around corners? Ah, ma’am?”

Leblanc shook her head, standing to point at the glowing end of Thorn’s magical projection of will. “In a sense, but more importantly, we’re fighting in four dimensions. The fourth being time.”

“I’m…not sure—”

“Missiles and lasers. Ships and magic. All at different speeds. All in the battle space, making raw chaos out of what begins as an orderly fleet. Do you see?” Leblanc asked.

“Oh.” One word from Thorn as the concept unfolded in his understanding. “Oh. But, Captain, why can I—not sure how to say it, but why can I feel the math, so to speak? I don’t have to think about it. I can just direct my spells and know where they’ll go, and what they’ll hit.”

Captain Leblanc pointed at him, smiling. “End your spell—ah, good. A silent, clean conclusion. And now you grasp why your ability is unique. Not everyone can do this, and not with any degree of speed. You have multiple forms of magic, and a near instantaneous implantation of them without fear of a wild shot—no, don’t interrupt me. You’re not the same ’caster you were, and when you leave, you’ll be even more different. You can have an enormous effect on this war if you do what I tell you.”

“I’m listening, I think. Ma’am.”

“You think?”

“I don’t know what my limitations are. At some point in my life, I was immortal, or at least I thought so, ma’am. I know I’m not, so if you tell me something I can’t do, well, I’m not going to bullshit you.”

“Good. Then listen, and hear every word. There are three things that you must do in the next few weeks before you graduate training if you have any hope of bringing us closer to victory. One, let go of the negativity and self-doubt that plagues you. Your past does not define you, but it can control you if you allow it. Leave it.” She held up two fingers. “Two, keep the use of your talisman pure. It is meant to clarify your power for control, not to enhance its force. And three, stop fighting the flow of energy. Controlling the craft is like coexisting with an avalanche. You have to swim with the flow if you expect to keep your head above the snow.”

“That’s not what I expected, ma’am.”

“Nor are you what I expected. But here we are, and in a short while you’ll be in a witchport staring down the barrel of a Nyctus fleet, wondering why that feel-good bullshit your Captain told you isn’t helping to kill the enemy. Let me assure you—it will,” Leblanc said.

“Then I believe you, ma’am, because I don’t want to die or get my people killed, and I sure as hell don’t want to lose,” Thorn said.

“Lose the war or lose at all?”

Thorn grinned. “At anything, ma’am. I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of being at the bottom of the pile.”

“Then you know what to do. Don’t be at the bottom. Be in front.” Leblanc stood, smoothing her uniform, and she looked more animated than earlier. “Dismissed. Stay pure, Thorn, but get ready for violence. It’s coming.”

“I’m counting on it, ma’am.”

* * *

Thorn left the captain’s quarters with questions—and more purpose.

Drigo returned to training that day with a positivity that was contagious. The synthskin of his bionic arm was indistinguishable from his other arm, save for an odd smoothness that looked at odds with his rugged exterior. The only visible scar from his accident was the scourge of black spider veins across his chest. Drigo claimed he liked the natural tattoo, but Thorn was still coming to terms with the daily reminder of his mistake.

Leave it, Thorn told himself. So he did, for the moment.

While Burnitz had tempered, Narvez’s methods seemed only to intensify in the weeks since the dimensional exercise. Thorn felt her eyes on him all the time. If he stepped sideways, she was there. If he relaxed, she was there. Narvez carried an air of natural suspicion toward Thorn that made them both uneasy, as if a magical catastrophe was always seconds away. It wasn’t, but there was no way in hell Thorn was going to tell Narvez the good news. If he was in misery, then a little uncertainty couldn’t hurt the tall martinet as she drove the recruits closer to graduation.

Thorn found himself taking greater risks in training exercises and trusting in his ability to perform—in part, because of his talisman. That’s how he thought of it now, as calling it a book was too simple; too bland. In the charred pages, he found a point of focus his magic could rotate around, creating a kind of inner power that separated him from the other recruits even more. With his continued success, he found that his comrades were also trusting in his abilities at a higher rate. The team was starting to become just that: a team. They began to lose the need for speaking, moving as a single unit, their spells going from a disjointed wall of magic into something more surgical.

They were more than just powerful. Now, they were lethal.

Instructor Hiroshi led the troop to the simulation chamber, their collective steps heavy. It had been a hard day already, and the antiquated hangar didn’t bode well for whatever came next. The building had been updated with blast shields and fire-retardant materials to provide some amount of safety, even in the presence of Scorches who were still learning the difference between spellcasting and wanton destruction.

A state-of-the-art digital immersion platform had been integrated into every cell of the wall. It was capable of projecting an infinite number of battle sequences. Thorn presumed that the reason they hadn’t been permitted to use the simulator previously was the ON’s concern for money, plain and simple. New ’casters broke things, and the screens looked expensive.

Naturally, they were, so unleashing fire around costly tech was a sure sign that the end of training was in sight.

“Think we can melt this place?” Drigo asked, voice low.

Hiroshi, who had been pointing out potential scenarios, heard him. Without breaking stride, the instructor said in a cheerful tone, “You can pay for the building with your ass. Given the size, feel free to melt this place to the foundation. We’ll have money left over. Are you ready to join us, or do you need more PT to properly ready your mind, Drigo?”

“No, sir. There will be no melting, sir,” Drigo snapped out.

Hiroshi clapped his calloused hands together, smiling. “Excellent. Then listen to your assignments and let’s go—and one small detail. If you detect a hum, or—”

“A hum, sir?” Rodie asked, his voice rising in concern.

Hiroshi gave him an oddly patient smile. “Yes, a hum. You’ll sense something between machine and mental invading your senses, but you’re not to fight it or concern yourselves. That’s the neural bath working to translate your magic into simulations that look and feel real. You can use telepathy, and the navy can use technology. Between the two, we get…this. It’s real in every way. Understood?”

“Aye,” came the ragged agreement. The recruits looked around, with Val’s sharp eyes picking out one, then two, and then several small projectors positioned around the space. The neural bath—or net, or whatever it was—covered every angle.

Hiroshi went on, comfortable in his role. “You’ve all been aboard a ship. You’ve all been schooled in how a ship works, and what to do. But this is different. This is about command and control. Not just the parts, and mechanics of a warship. This is—it’s a kind of magic unto itself. That’s what it means to use your familiarity aboard the ship. You know the space. So show us that you understand how to use it. I’m tagging you with your ranks and assignments. We begin now.”

Thorn was assigned Captain for their first simulated battle—held aboard a simulated battleship, no less. Val was his first Lieutenant, Rodie his second. Drigo was their designated weapons detail, and Streya sat to interpret the nav screen. A number of recruits from other bunks were given maintenance duties. While all functions of the battleship worked in theory, the ship wouldn’t actually move, but the immersion platform used realistic responses to any hits the ship may take. Each hit would add yet another level of authenticity to the overall experience, as well as a psychological impact on the crew.

The mission was simple enough: locate and defend the civilian planet. But most importantly, survive. Points would be given according to defensive efficiency, but a passing score would be granted to any surviving squadron.

Thorn felt surprisingly comfortable as he stood at the helm of the ship. He directed Val to initiate engines, then turned to Rodie.

“Lieutenant Rodie.” Thorn was in full character now, his commands and tone crisp. “Determine the proper course to Varroc 2 with Lieutenant Streya, and input the course parameters.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Rodie’s response was serious to the point of being clipped. Even though it was a simulation, the battle already felt real.

“Troop 2A.” Thorn said, tugging idly at a sleeve. “Prepare for liftoff.”

The engine flared to life as Rodie called to Streya, “Lieutenant Streya, any obstacles in our projected course?”

“Lieutenant Rodie, I’m clocking a meteor shower at the following location—sending coordinates now,” Streya said, sharing the data with a flick of her finger. Recommend avoiding light speed travel in this region, though I maintain it will be passable at coasting speeds.” Streya kept her eyes on the displays in front of her as she spoke into the comms. Her fingers dashed across the virtual screens, occasionally pausing to touch an actual point on the angled console before her.

Thorn turned, noting the location. “Lieutenant Streya, keep in mind that there are people on Varroc 2 who are relying on our protection. Find a faster way. They need us.”

“Aye, Captain.” Streya’s eyes narrowed as she studied the screens. She initiated a command sequence to compare multiple routes and dialed the calculations rapidly into the system.

Thorn leaned against the override controls. “We’re losing valuable time and fuel, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, sir. I maintain the given route as the most time-efficient course.” Streya spoke with confidence.

“You sold me. Lieutenant Rodie, input the course command.” Thorn straightened, relying on his navigation officer. Then he made his actual decision. “But keep us above light speed.” The team froze for a moment, then turned as one to regard him.

“Sir?” Streya asked, the question carrying far more meaning than one word.

“Keep us at speed, Lieutenant, and send the details of that meteor shower to my comms. Call me when we’re within two quadrants.”

Streya paused, torn between an order and her own knowledge of astrogation. “Yes, Captain.” Her answer was simple. The fallout might not be.

The battleship thrummed as it began to move, a deep basso suggesting immense power. Thorn performed the mandatory pre-takeoff announcement, and the squadron prepared for the preliminary jolt that came with light speed initiation.

Thorn’s stomach fell away as the drive effects began to take hold, every inch of his body rebelling at the unnatural sensation. Behind him, someone retched, swore softly, and then went silent.

“Steady yourself. The field is stronger than a transport or passenger ship,” Thorn said, not looking back to see who was sick. He spoke for everyone’s benefit, as military engines were far more powerful than any tub running from system to system. In truth, his own guts were turning to water, but he dug deep to hold himself in check.

Around them, the digital galaxy came to life, and stars of every color began to blaze away in an endless deep.

“If it feels real, then it should look real. Steady on your stations,” Thorn said.

“Captain,” Streya called out to him. “We have contact. Nyctus signals, closing hard.”

Thorn’s stomach had adjusted to the compression drive, so he walked to her station at a steady pace. If nothing else, he’d look like he had his shit together. “Show me.”

“Yes, sir—here and here.” Streya pointed at two small groupings of moving dots on the display. “They’re really moving.”

“Are we sure these are Nyctus ships?” Thorn felt a twinge of nerves, despite knowing it was a virtual battle. The trust he was trying to build was anything but virtual.

“Ninety-eight percent certainty, sir.” Streya nodded.

“What could the other two percent be?” Thorn asked.

“Radar malfunction, Captain. Which I don’t believe to be the case.” A red notification flared into existence on her screen. “We are within two quadrants of the meteor shower, sir. Your command?”

Thorn stepped to Rodie’s side and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Maintain speed, Lieutenant.”

“Captain?” Rodie asked, his fingers poised over the display.

“Maintain. And watch. Streya…display updated data on the meteor shower. Big screen, if you please,” Thorn said. His hand brushed the talisman without thinking, but no one noticed. Not even him.

Thorn fell completely still, and the crew followed suit, watching him turn inward, his eyes gone flat with an effort. In the place between places, Thorn’s power began to coalesce, turning empty space into something far more crowded.

His magic had a form. And that form had force behind it.

“Captain?” Rodie asked, but Streya hissed at him to be quiet. The seconds stretched, and something—not real, but not unreal, either—bridged the space between stars, shoving against the meteors.

“They’re just rocks,” Thorn muttered, his eyes flickering with strain.

In his mind’s eye, Thorn rearranged the meteors, turned his vision to will, and cleared a path. At speed. The tumbling mass of ancient debris pressed on his reserves of power, the effort dotting his brow with sweat. He shook, if only for a second, then broke through into a calm place beyond the turbulent moment of seizing control over the natural world.

With a force of will none of the other recruits could fathom, Thorn plowed the row as the big ship streaked forward, its path clear save for residual grit.

“Streya,” he said, his voice a distant echo in his head. “Nav update.”

“Captain. Ten seconds to contact with the meteors.” Streya’s fingers anxiously danced over her console.

Rodie reached for his own controls to kill their velocity and then drew back, flinching at Thorn’s command.

“No,” Thorn cracked. “Steady on, Rodie. Steady on. It’s okay. I have them.”

“Three seconds, Captain.” Streya’s voice wavered, but she kept on. “Two. One. Contact.”

Thorn gasped as he released the meteors, invisible tendrils of his power vanishing out in the black. The battleship streaked through the clearing, bolting out into clear space in less than a second.

They weren’t entirely clear.

As a ripple of excitement passed through the crew, the simulation revealed just how dangerous space could be. A lone rock clanged into the battleship’s hull, raking through two compartments and shearing an entire suite of navigation tech from the port side. Instantly, the ship began to roll, stars whirling by in a smear of confused light.

Thorn hissed in defiance at the instant disaster, pulling hard at his power to recapture control over the wildly spinning ship.

Nothing. He wasn’t tapped—he was on pause, if only for a few seconds, but it was long enough to lose the ship.

“Rodie!” he shouted over the chaos. “Disengage light speed!”

Alarms screeched through the cabin, and the ship spoke calmly over him. “Code Yellow. Damage to the secondary fuel core. Code Yellow. Damage to the secondary fuel core.”

“Can’t access the control panel, sir!” Rodie struggled against the force holding him to the wall. He was pinned, his face pale from the vicious effects of their spin.

“Cast, Lieutenant! Direct the energy precisely!” He saw Rodie’s eyes go wide at the realization that it would be magic, not engineering, that might save them.

Rodie closed his eyes, jaw working nervously. He pulled on his own energy stores and sent a tremor through the control panel, effectively disengaging light speed with the short circuit of the screen. The ship began to slow, then the emergency Vernier rockets kicked in, burning their chemical fuel in seconds as they bled off velocity through fiery muscle.

The stars, too, slowed. Then they stopped, and a tomblike stillness fell on the bridge—over all of them, except for Streya, who coughed twice, her eyes bright with sick relief.

“Streya, location.” Thorn was getting a handle on the situation, but a gnawing suspicion told him he’d just lost the team any bonus points for effective defense.

Streya dragged herself to the navigation controls and analyzed the data for a couple of seconds. “We’ve spun off course by about three quadrants. We’ve got Nyctus setting up formation at Varroc 2.”

“Silence those alarms and secure the ship,” Thorn said. He addressed Val, who held a hand over her stomach, still in the throes of motion sickness. She didn’t look happy—but then, Val wasn’t made to be happy. She was made to fight.

“Ideas, Lieutenant?” Thorn asked.

“Yeah.” She grimaced. “Kill the engines two minutes ago.”

Thorn leaned in, his voice low. “Sir. For the moment, you’ll use the proper term. Just because you’re about to spill your guts is no reason to act like an amateur.”

She looked down, jaw tight. He was right and she knew it, so all she did was shake her head. “No, sir. I’m effectively out of ideas.”

The clock was ticking, and Thorn stroked his chin, thinking. “Lieutenant, how are your reserves?”

“Of magic? Ah—sir?” Val asked.

“Exactly. Are you capable of casting?”

“Sir, I am,” Val answered, her expression neutral. She might even be curious, if she wasn’t trying not to puke.

“Then report to the engine bay. Cast what energy you may have into the secondary fuel core, and spare no amount of your power. All your energy, down to the last, Lieutenant.”

Val stood and sketched a salute. “Aye, Captain.” She hustled from the command bay, face thoughtful.

“Drigo.” Thorn spoke through his comm. “Stand by. Weapons ready. And that means us, too.”

“Aye. Weapons ready, and…so are we. Sir.” Drigo rolled his head and flexed both arms—real and synthetic. He was ready, and judging by his expression, he was buying what Thorn was selling.

“Streya.” Thorn stepped to the nav displays and pointed to a position behind Varroc’s moon. “Recalculate the course for a direct trajectory to this location. A quiet little place, out of the way, don’t you think?

“Sir, yes sir.” Streya dashed her fingers across the controls while murmuring a stream of data to Rodie, who typed even as he was listening.

Rodie spun his chair when Streya finished speaking. “Course loaded, sir.

“Fast. Good work,” Thorn said.

“You pay me to be fast, sir, not just witty,” Rodie said.

“I’ll issue a bonus for that one. Who’s next?” Thorn asked, smiling.

Val raced back into the command bay. “Secondary fuel core is reenergized, Captain.”

“You’re even faster. Make that two bonuses. Initiate sequence, Rodie. Let’s go. We’ve got a planet to save from the big guns. Or rocks.” Thorn held tightly to the override control this time. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. The battleship hurtled away, turning hard into an orbit that seemed to brush the moon. As they dug deeper into the gravity well, rear scans lit up in an array of colors.

The Nyctus weren’t closing on the planet. They were there.

“All stop,” Thorn said, touching Rodie on the arm. “I want to—”

The screens flared into light so brilliant it had a weight. Then the light faded, leaving—nothing.

No planet. No moon. No radar shadow to hide in. Nothing but debris, and even that was little more than glowing dust. A whole world—and moon—dust. Like in the beginning.

“The Nyctus can’t build,” Thorn spat. “Only destroy.”

The walls flickered. The stars vanished.

Hiroshi’s voice came over the comms devices in their ears. “Mission failure. Report to the training field.”

Drigo patted Thorn on the back, despite their abrupt failure.

“It was a good attempt, Cap.” He clung to their ranks from a moment ago without a thought. “I’m just sad I didn’t get to send any Nyctus to hard vac.”

“Same. Shit, we had them. This was designed to kill us. To kill the world,” Thorn growled, then he began trudging away toward the waiting officers, who resembled nothing more than a gathering of angry judges. Which they were. After stony silence, it was Ashworth who spoke into the gathering moment. “Follow me, Stellers.”

Thorn followed.

The door to Ashworth’s office closed without a bang, but a click—a sound so mild, but carrying a wealth of meaning.

“Recruit Stellers,” Ashworth said. “Reflect on your decisions this afternoon in the simulation practice. Carefully, I might add.”

Narvez, who was in the corner, merely stared at Thorn, saying nothing.

“Sir.” Thorn stood to attention, gathering his thoughts. “I…I used my power to clear a meteor field, in order to gain speed. To gain time. I failed. I was able to control all of the rocks except for one—I appreciate the sim reflecting that attempt on my part but don’t know how you did it. However, the one rogue asteroid struck us and sent us into a spin. I have no one to blame but myself.”

Ashworth smiled with a knowing air. “And how did that decision serve your purpose?”

“Not well, sir, if that’s what you’re asking,” Thorn said.

“It did not serve well, indeed. An understatement of rare quality. I saw the effects of your spin—brought on by your decision to ignore the one person on the bridge who could navigate a ship. Interesting command choice. Naturally, when I say interesting, I mean stupid, or perhaps even homicidal.” The First Lieutenant touched his desk, fingers splayed like a spider. “And what was the outcome of your…executive decision?”

Thorn kept his eyes level despite heat rising in his face. “The civilian planet of Varroc 2 was lost to the Nyctus.”

“And the enemy fleet?”

“The attacking fleet escaped, sir.”

“Without a single shot of engagement, I understand.” Ashworth clasped his hands behind his back and pressed his chest forward. “Is this correct?”

“Yes, sir, that is correct.”

“A team of Starcasters in the Orbital Navy is deliberately chosen with an array of expertise, Stellers.” Ashworth’s deliberation seemed genuine. “As an officer in training, it would be wise of you to place trust in the advice of your flight squad. Executive decisions should be reserved for reactive emergencies, not proactive battle plans.”

Thorn gave a quick nod. “Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Lieutenant Narvez.” Ashworth sat behind his desk, signaling that the meeting was over. “Explain the concept of cause and effect for Stellers, if you please. I find your creativity to be—um--”

“Fitting, sir?” Narvez offered.

Ashworth knocked his knuckle against the desk, smiling. “That’s the term. Fitting. You truly are accurate.”

Narvez smiled, lifting her nose as she savored the moment. “Stellers, you’re about to become an expert in Hygienic Engineering, and you’ve only got a week to master it—or you’ll repeat the education process. I say this without any undue joy, because if I’d listened to my crew, I wouldn’t be here coddling self-destructive idiots like you. In any field, let alone Hygienic Engineering.”

Thorn couldn’t hold back the question. “Hygienic Engineering, ma’am?”

Narvez smiled, and it was the look of a serpent. “You’re going to clean the shitters, and you’re going to make them shine like the stars themselves.”

12

The simulations of the following weeks went decisively better than their first run. Thorn relied on his team, and in turn they began to rely on him. Time was the one thing they didn’t have, because the Nyctus continued their advance, chewing at distant systems with weapons that left few survivors and even fewer answers.

He eyed himself in the mirror as he buttoned up his dress blues. The brass buttons shined in the florescent light of the communal bathroom, and Thorn realized he was no longer a kid. Who he’d been—under the covers of his bed, feeling adrift—was as distant as the war’s front. His body had changed, along with his mind. His will.

But most of all, his core ability had become something wholly different.

Thorn was a Starcaster. Ten years earlier—hell, five, if he was right—the term hadn’t existed. The war was now in its third decade, with the last five years being little more than a bloodbath as humanity watched the sphere of worlds shrink with each massive Nyctus push. He was a Starcaster, and an officer, and even more importantly, a human. And his training was nearing the end.

Wandering to the barracks for the last time, Thorn knew that of all the things in that building, only one mattered, and it was nestled in his pocket. The talisman didn’t leave him. Clothes were temporary, as were weapons, because he was the weapon, aided by the intense aura of magic imbued in the charred pages of a childhood book. It was hard to recall the feelings he had upon arrival at the base; all he was able to muster was a faint remembrance.

Everything was different. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be, even if it meant leaving the husk of his earlier life behind without a backward glance. That, he knew, was something he could do.

Val and Streya smashed through the door into the bunk, an air of breathless relief around them.

“We made it,” Thorn said simply.

Streya smiled. Val nodded, slowly, processing the reality of their moment.

“Now, the real work,” Val said, and there was an echo of something bitter in his words. They understand reality, and the math was not on their side. They would die. All of them might die inside a week if the Nyctus continued to target Starcasters with ruthless efficiency.

That silenced them as a group, so their walk to graduation was more like the march of the damned. There was no triumph, not at first, then Schrader gave a small nod as the former recruits began to line up in the main hall. There was room to spare around them.

“Thirty-nine,” Schrader said, his voice rattling off the walls. “We began with…far more than that.” He paused. “There’s no time for melancholy memory. There is only here and now. And the war. I say this with complete confidence—you’re ready.”

Schrader began pacing, marking their faces as he passed by. No one spoke. The air hummed with the unknown.

“I became a soldier before we knew magic existed, even though it was living inside me. There were no words for what I was, only the knowledge that I was real. My power was real, and so is yours. We know…we know much more now, but we also understand the Nyctus to some extent. Our magic and theirs are not alike. Let me repeat—your power is different from theirs. They are vicious, and aggressive, and even relentless, but I believe, as your commander, that our abilities are superior. This is where you take a stand. From this moment, you will be officers. I’m going to tell you an ugly secret—it doesn’t matter. What does matter is your will. It must coalesce into something harder than the heart of a star. And just as hot. You will be alone, at the bow of a massive ship being hurled into the teeth of an enemy that has known nothing but victory. You’ll be alone in your witchport, with the black stretching before you, and that’s when it will happen.”

“What, sir?” Thorn heard himself ask.

Schrader turned to regard him, his eyes serious but not angry. “Fear. You’ll fear the enemy. And failure. And for some of you, your own power.” Schrader held out his hand, and Ashworth placed the first Starcaster insignia in his palm. As he spoke, Schrader pinned the bronze symbol on one new officer after another—Val, looking serious, Streya and Rodie relieved. Then the rest, until only Drigo and Thorn remained.

“Don’t lose control of yourself. Ever. This war isn’t personal, despite how you might feel,” Schrader said to Drigo, who looked thoughtful but nodded in thanks. The salute he offered Schrader was crisp, and then it was Thorn’s turn.

He pinned the bronze rocket-and-stars on Thorn and then took a small step back, appraising him. “I tell you the opposite, Stellers.”

“Sir?” Thorn asked, confused.

“Hold nothing back. Burn them from the black, and don’t ever limit yourself. I know what you can do. We all know. Now, the Nyctus have to understand that our species has…certain advantages…that they don’t,” Schrader said.

“I—yes sir?” Thorn tried not to make it a question, but it was.

Ashworth chimed in. “You scare the shit out of the Nyctus, but they don’t know it yet. They’re single-school ’casters. Earthers, mostly, throwing rocks and being—”

“Inelegant,” Schrader cut in. “Your power is what they fear most, because it’s something they can never have. They hoped to wipe us out with the KEW barrages, and they came damned close. They failed. Now, they’re grinding us to dust, but that ends now. Which is why the next bit of news is, I’m sure, most welcome. Lieutenant, if you please?”

Ashworth addressed everyone with a genuine smile. “Most of you will have two days to raise hell in the casinos at Tuscolum, and it’s our unofficial position that you not wear anything identifying you as a Starcaster.”

“How’re we gonna get laid then, sir?” Rodie said, earning a round of laughter.

“For you, Rodie, I’d start with a bag over your head,” Ashworth said, and the room erupted. Ashworth patted the air for silence and went on. “I’m sure some of you want to get laid. But I bet all of you would like to screw the casino for a few thousand creds at the card tables. Am I correct?”

More cheers erupted, and even Rodie brayed with laughter.

“Remember, be subtle, be sly, but shake those bastards down with our blessings. Fight well, and dismissed,” Schrader said, thronged with new officers as he shook hands and clapped shoulders.

They were, for a moment, happy, and that was good enough. Thorn was swept away in the tide of relief, and then he was outside, looking up at the sky as it purpled to night. A ship blazed away to the north, its orbit heading out of system, and then the sky was calm again.

Kira was waiting.

“Hey. Dinner?” Thorn asked. There was a spread laid out before the jump planes began taking everyone into orbit.

“Got something better,” she said, holding out a silver flask. It looked impossibly old.

“Thirty-year-old whiskey in a two hundred-year-old flask. The last taste of home before we—” Kira said, then stopped. “Specialist Stellers. A salute to you.” She tipped the flask, drank, then handed it to him.

“Sounds weird. Why not lieutenant or, I don’t know, something a little less—”

“Special?” Kira asked, laughing. “Drink up. My plane leaves soon.”

He sipped and then smiled. “Peat. And meadows. I miss that,” Thorn said.

“Then make sure you come back to it,” Kira said.

“I’ll do my best. Why do I feel like there’s more?”

She took out an envelope and opened it to reveal orders. “Because there is. I’m going active.”

“Kira. You’re not a ’caster. Not yet. Where are—“

She smiled, eyes scanning the page. “Captain. Of the Pleiades. I’m getting a ship.” Her face had the bittersweet cast of someone who’d just gotten bad news of the kind you can’t avoid.

“Captain? I mean, you’re capable as hell, but…a ship? Isn’t the Pleiades a defensive frigate? You’ll be knee deep in the shit, Kira. You’re safe here, you can help win by—”

“Safe? You’re shitting me, right? Safe? Thorn, Code Nebula isn’t just a target. It’s the target, and no, I’m not safe within ten lights of this rock. At least on my own bridge I’ll be mobile, and I can fight back. Here, we’re just watching the skies, wondering when the rocks are going to fall.”

“Again,” Thorn said.

“Again.”

He nodded and then faced her, mere inches away. “You’re going to be a true leader, Kira. You led me out of that hellhole, and you’ll do it again. I’m sorry I didn’t just cheer.”

“It’s okay. I’m a bit stunned myself. We’re bleeding officers, so it’s not as if they have a lot of choice. I’ll—like you said, I’ll do my best.”

Thorn put his arms around her, and she stiffened, then went soft. “Thank you. For everything. I’ll see you out there.”

“Same. Meet me in the black, over the debris of a Nyctus fleet. We’ll be even then.”

“Deal.”

* * *

The jump plane from what had become more of a home to him than any other since Cotsworlds was a bumpy one. The upper-atmo chop was rough, leaving his teeth rattling after the first short hop. It took two additional jump planes before he docked for the last portion of his journey to Tuscolum, where he transferred to a grand, lumbering starship of enormous proportions. By then, Thorn hadn’t slept—not really—in thirty-six hours, and his eyes felt like sandpits. He staggered onto the massive ship, bag over his shoulder and looking for a bed.

“Specialist Stellers?”

Thorn turned to find the speaker. It was a small, fastidious woman near his age, her uniform sporting an offensively yellow badge that read ASK ME in bold letters. Underneath her apparent job description was the name L. Vigorito.

“Um. Yes?” Thorn said, slow to respond. He was nearly swaying. Compared to training, this was a new kind of challenge.

“I’m your liaison. I know you’re beat. Follow me to a private lift,” she said, and Thorn was convinced those were some of the sweetest words he’d ever heard. In seconds, they were in a small elevator, moving at an alarming speed. It stopped without a sound, and the doors opened to reveal a passage that was both carpeted and lit in tastefully dim globes.

“Huh. This is new,” Thorn said.

“If you mean comfortable, then good. It’s meant to be. You’re just here,” she said, opening a door to reveal a cabin that was five times the size of his bunk space on Code Nebula. “I’m Laris. Our comm system will find me if you need anything, but I’ve ordered a Quiet Room for the next six hours. After that, move about the ship as you’d like. Do you need anything?”

“I—no. Thank you, Laris. I hadn’t really—”

“Expected this?” Her smile dimmed. “We know where you’re going, sir.”

“Sir?” Thorn asked her, his eyes measuring the young woman again.

She paused at the door. “Not all of us are in uniform, Specialist. Sometimes, we travel quietly in case there are…problems delivering our assets to the front.” Her smile was bright but tinged with iron. “Rest well. Then eat. They’ll feed you if you stand still for more than a minute.”

Thorn grinned as he began slumping to his bed. “Copy that.” His eyes closed, and for once there were no dreams. There was nothing waiting for him but sleep.

* * *

The starship was full of civilians, and Thorn felt out of place. He hadn’t even seen a civilian in months. Strolling among them, he felt self-conscious at first but then understood that his uniform meant something to all of them. He was a symbol of hope. Among the people he swore to defend, his posture was wrong, his words were crisp, and his steps too fast, but they looked at him like he was doing everything right, and in an hour of exploration, he relaxed. He wandered. He ate—everything, at any time—and even managed to fall asleep in a chair alongside the incomprehensible luxury of an enormous swimming pool.

Then, he did the only logical thing a soldier considers when he’s not on duty. He slept more.

A soft chime woke him, and for a moment he felt the kind of dislocation that only drool-inducing sleep can bring.

“Yes?” He sat up, his head fuzzed from what felt like a week of sleep.

“Arrival, Specialist. Fifteen minutes to high orbit and you can go downworld,” Laris said over a hidden speaker.

“Thank you. Can I—”

“Open your door, please.”

Thorn fought the blanket and took halting steps to the door, only to see it open without his touch. Laris stood there with a rolling tray of every known food substance in the civilized galaxy. “Hungry?”

“Holy—yes. How’d you know?”

She rolled the tray in, holding up one hand and counting off points. “Subject is male. Subject is young…sort of, and subject just got done with weeks of hard training. Therefore, subject will be hollow, and only food can help.” She quirked a brow at him, then added, “Along with other things, of course.”

Thorn was already stuffing a sausage roll in his mouth, but he paused at that. “Laris, I believe you’re being lewd. Not that I mind. Training was…singular in its purpose.”

She laughed, revealing excellent white teeth. “When you get to the casinos, you’re doubtless going to skin their tables for about ten or twenty thousand creds in the first hour. Don’t.”

“Don’t?” he mumbled around a sweet roll.

“The pit bosses will pick you off like snipers. Go slow, don’t drink too much. I recommend one water to every drink, then two waters per drink after midnight. Trust me, you won’t sleep. Then, when you’re up big, they’ll send in the talent to cool you down.”

Thorn took a long pull of coffee and rubbed at his neck. “I take it this talent has long legs and red hair?”

“What is it with men and redheads?” She blew a breath at her own dark locks, then smiled. “Regardless, yes. Long legs. Smiling, laughing—you’ll be so funny, every joke will hit—and then you’ll be at a different table and losing. Don’t do it.”

“You care if I win?”

“No. I care if you draw the attention of the casino staff, which can lead to problems, which could possibly—”

“Make me late to the war. Got it. I’ll behave,” Thorn said.

Laris laughed. “I doubt it. But welcome to Tuscolum. Do watch your head as you disembark, won’t you?”

“Aye,” Thorn said, and after a shower and shave, he found himself descending to the planet on a transport crowded with babbling tourists and the occasional pocket of dour traders. Laris had seen him off with a delicate touch. He knew for certain that she was far more than regular Navy. She was an intel agent of some stripe, and she was damned good at her job.

Tuscolum’s surface was covered from sea to sea with towering skyscrapers and bustling flight paths; the calamitous dance of aircraft made Thorn nervous as his transport wove deftly through the chaos. Thorn had never seen anything like it. Cotsworlds was a rural planet, most of its inhabitants surviving as ranch owners and farm hands. The Children’s Refugee Collective Home had been situated on the outskirts of a major city, but Thorn was allowed into the city only for work, and even then he remained close to the Home. Murgon 4 was a mud-ball. Nobody wanted to live there, let alone develop it into a major trade post.

“Well, this is new,” he said as the cityscape rose into sight. Every single direction was a sprawl of lights and motion, smeared to a silvery gleam by their descent.

The lower he descended into the City, the more difficult it became to view the billboards of the upper levels. Of course the ON hadn’t splurged to set him up in a nicer hotel. He checked into his room and felt the need to inspect the area for unwanted bunkmates. The facility might not have been top shelf, but it appeared clean enough, and with a whispered command the single window went dim, casting him into a world of permanent midnight. He slid into the bed and wasted nine more hours of leave doing nothing more complicated than snoring.

Waking, he felt a frisson of uncertainty. Tuscolum was outside his door. He was no longer on Murgon-4, and his status as a mudhumping laborer was long gone. Dressing in the only good clothes he owned other than a uniform, he stepped out into the city, stomach simmering with nervous energy.

“Time to skin the house,” he said, then laughed. Thorn was the least criminally minded person he knew. If he made it through a full hand of cards without sweating, he’d call it a win and go for an actual steak.

He didn’t walk far. In fact, he didn’t walk at all. A moving sidewalk carried him up a small incline before ending at massive doors leading to a casino so gaudy, it fairly throbbed with neon light.

“This’ll do.” Thorn went inside, schooling his features into a mix of wide-eyed rube and hopeful idiot. A spot opened at a table playing sevens, so he sidled up, waved his card over the reader, and cashed in for almost all the money he had to his name.

The dealer was friendly. The table was packed—all nine chairs taken, and more money on each card than Thorn had ever seen in one place.

Thorn let the cards fall.

Then, he let his power roam, sensing each hope being broken as cards went high or low, cracking any chance of a win in one, then three, and then all of the players except him, the dealer, and a woman wearing nothing more than streamers and heels. She winked as he tapped for his last card, his smile impossible to contain.

Here comes the jack.

The dealer smiled broadly, confident—the woman frowned, as Thorn saw an image from her mind. Ah. There’s where the last king went.

Thorn turned his cards and watched the dealer’s face collapse. “Close.”

“Winner to the gentleman,” the dealer said, his smile tight. Thorn watched him sweep the digital chips, a small screen glowing with the winning haul. Nearly four thousand credits on one hand.

Shit. Too big. “Cashing, please. A hundred for you,” Thorn said, rising. A sweating man with three chins quickly took his chair, thick hands twitching with nervous energy. Or fear.

The dealer gave a polite nod, mollified, then watched as Thorn left at a sedate walk, parting the crowd to find another game. The woman who’d lost watched him go, smiled, then pulled out her card and ordered more wine. I’ll find him later, she thought.

Flattered, but no need, Thorn said, watching her twitch with shock over his shoulder.

She covered her mouth, laughing, then threw a conspiratorial wink his way. Sometimes, near misses were as good as successful hunts.

Thorn found another table offering Threedeck, a poker variant he’d seen on Murgon-4. This time, he paid attention to the bets, knowing that a huge win might bring attention. He threw two hands, won one, and then let the dealer think he was bust on the fourth. When the bets were down, he did the math and knew it was a heavy pot, but he vowed it would be his last hand.

“Winner, to the gentleman. I believe that’s three big wins tonight.” The dealer—a tall, slender woman named Bann—made a subtle motion to her left. Time to get him off my table. Hope they send Vee, Bann thought. An image of Vee flashed through her mind—long dark hair, tall, pale. A witchy vibe that would be impossible to resist among the glittering neon and pulsing noise.

Take that, Laris. Not a redhead, Thorn mused, then stood, repeated his tip to the dealer, and took his winnings in a transfer to his card. The small chirp of transfer made him grin, and he walked away from the table before Vee could descend on him to defend the casino profits.

Although, if he was honest, it wasn’t a bad way to lose a hot streak.

He went to a restaurant, sat by himself, and ordered an actual steak. Laris had been right—it was the reward he needed, and counting his illicit winnings was even better when accompanied with a piece of meat that cost a month’s pay. When he fell into bed some hours later, worn from the city and noise and lights, he saw a blinking icon on the flatscreen.

Kira.

He touched the screen, and her face came to life. She was smiling, like she could really see him.

“This is expensive, so I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “I bribed a comms officer to send this before we go pluslight, so I’ll just get to it.” She drew in a breath, and her face took on a purposeful glow. “Don’t die in this war, Thorn. Don’t. Die. I won’t either, because I…I don’t want that to be the end. Of everything, I guess, but of knowing you. Find me, or I’ll find you. Clear the skies of Nyctus, and I’ll be waiting.” She looked away as someone uttered something in urgent tones. “Drive is powering up. Gotta go. Stay alive and then find me, Thorn. You’re all I have of my past.”

13

Most ships had one Starcaster, if any. They were largely autonomous for long stretches of time—a sort of limbo until the fleets clashed and planetary defenses filled a system with lethal ordnance.

That meant when Thorn arrived on the battleship ON Apollo, he did so alone, and without any special recognition. If anything, he was roundly ignored until he was finally greeted by a harried Petty Officer with two different colored eyes and an abundance of nervous energy. He offered his name as Slaughterbach, then turned and nearly bolted down the passage.

“Follow me, sir, and welcome aboard. Captain wants you on the bridge after you stow your gear.”

They paced through the ship like they were being chased, Slaughterbach keeping a running commentary about the ship, the crew, the Nyctus, and anything else that happened to occur to him. After an exhausting trip, he stopped in front of a gray door that narrowed at the top.

“Where are we?” Thorn asked.

“Bow, sir. Close to your, uh—close to where you do your thing, that is. See the blue line on the wall? Follow it to the bridge. I gotta get back.” Slaughterbach was gone in a second, leaving Thorn to wonder just what the hell had happened.

The quarters were small but tidy, with a bunk, chair, desk, and—to Thorn’s surprise—private head. The shower was small enough to cause claustrophobia, but it was his, and that was an unexpected bonus. He dropped his bags, squared himself away in the small mirror, and stepped out to go meet his Captain.

To his surprise, Slaughterbach was waiting.

“Change of plans, sir. You gotta eat first. Cap’s kind of a stickler—you’ll understand, soon enough—are you hungry? It’s breakfast time. Not sure where you came from?”

“I could eat,” Thorn said, following Slaughterbach.

“Good, sir. Let Cap see you do it. He thinks hungry sailors can’t fight. He’s right, you know. Here we are.”

Thorn could smell chow before he saw the double doors, which were open to let a stream of people in and out in two orderly lines. Most of the crew had eaten, so a light crew sat at tables, eating and drinking coffee. Low, friendly conversations stopped when Thorn came in, but the sound buzzed back to life as he took a tray and began filling it. There were eggs and bacon and biscuits and even real milk, which made Thorn blink in case he was dreaming—along with every other kind of food he’d never had as a kid.

So far, so good.

When it was suitably covered with food, he picked a seat, Slaughterbach in tow, but the young Petty Officer made another apology and bolted away.

Thorn began to eat, looking around in curious appraisal. Then Captain Samuels walked in, speaking easily to the crew as he filled his own tray and sat down, coffee cup balanced in one meaty hand.

Thorn stood. It was time to meet his future.

“Captain?” Thorn approached and saluted uncertainly. “Stellers. I just arrived, sir.”

The captain’s eyes scanned him, but not in an unfriendly way. “You’re the Starcaster, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Samuels waved at the food, then motioned for Thorn to grab his tray and join him. When Thorn settled in, Samuels pointed to their trays. “An army, it was said, moved on its stomach. I believe that is only partially true.”

“Sir?”

“We travel in starships. We fight with our minds and bodies. If we don’t eat, we don’t fight. It’s that simple. The myth that tough soldiers come from hard conditions is just that—a myth. So, we eat. We train. And we do all of these things without fail, because we get exactly one opportunity to engage and defeat the Nyctus, on average.”

“Sir, you mean…most ships don’t survive engagement?” Thorn asked, lowering his fork.

Samuels shook his wide head, the scalp covered with short black stubble. His eyes were impenetrable black, but he had a presence that was more positive than punishing. “Some ships don’t even make it through first contact. The Nyctus aren’t just sledgehammers. They’re clever. We can discuss that more later. For now, eat, then come to the bridge and see me. Your witchport is open and ready to use, though I pray to the stars that we don’t need you just yet. We’re still getting used to the idea that something other than a missile can kill the enemy.” He beetled his brows, leaning forward. “You can kill the enemy, can’t you?”

Thorn considered his words carefully. “In the right situation, I can kill them all.”

Samuels sat quietly for a moment, chewing. “Houdini.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

Samuels put his own fork down and folded his hands. “The Houdini. It was a near-Earth frigate that got off the luckiest shot in naval history. One missile, three kills. That’s the last time an ON ship has punched above her weight, and it was only because a missile tech sent a fast-burner through the weakest point on a Nyctus dreadnought—and out the other side, clipping two more in the command modules and creating the biggest implosion you’ll ever see. That’s how rare it is for us to clear a battlespace, so when you say all of them, you have my attention.” He resumed eating, then finished quickly while Thorn chewed, waiting for something else to answer.

Nothing came up, because Samuels cleared his plate, stood, and told Thorn, “Come to the bridge. Let’s talk about luck.”

Then he was gone, and the clatter of a mess rang in Thorn’s ears as he wondered how long he would live on a ship that needed luck more than it needed magic. He was woolgathering when he became aware of more company.

A petite woman with dark skin and hair so black it may have been blue sat herself across from him at the otherwise empty table, settling easily as if she already knew him.

She leaned forward on her elbows, grinning. “You’re new.”

Thorn wiped his face and extended a hand. “Stellers, Specialist, Starcaster division.”

The woman tilted her head. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“I suppose not. Thorn Stellers, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Mol Wyant, same.” Her grin faded, but the tilt remained to her head. It gave her an avian aura.

“Well, Mol, what’s your MOS?” Thorn turned his coffee cup around, idly.

“Thirteen Ten ON. I’m a pilot.”

“How long have you been flying under Captain Samuel?” He sipped the coffee, wincing. It was body temp—an affront to all who love caffeine.

“I’ve had the privilege of calling Samuel my Captain for three years.” Mol gave a sharp nod, as if driving it home that the privilege was real.

“Sounds like he’s a good Captain with a good crew.” Thorn stood then went to return his tray to the waste conveyor, where it clanked away into a hidden disposal.

“Great.” She touched his shoulder for emphasis. “The word you’re looking for is great. Welcome to the team, Stellers.” Her eyes searched him, perhaps looking for rank, then she turned away with a polite nod.

“Thanks,” he told her, earning a wave as she vanished into the passage.

Thorn smoothed the wrinkles from his uniform and reported to the command deck. Captain Samuel stood at the helm, his broad shoulders hunching forward over the controls as if the weight of the world sat upon them.

“Captain Samuel?”

“Ah, Specialist.” The captain addressed him without turning. Around them, the bridge was a quiet buzz of orderly work, screens and consoles casting light of many colors across the dark walls. At various stations, staff looked down, or up, or into nothingness, their virtual gear held in place by small headbands.

“Yes, sir.” Thorn cleared his throat. “Reporting for duty, or just reporting. I’m unsure at this point.”

The captain looked up at him with a raised brow. “It’s duty, make no mistake. You’re a lot more gifted than our first ’caster, so I have some questions.”

“First, sir? You had another Starcaster?”

“We did. Briefly. Didn’t take. You’re different, though—all of you are, compared to the first few years. Then, we didn’t know what we needed out here, against the Nyctus. Thought we could turn rocks and throw them back.” He sighed, and it was a long sound of frustration. “The Nyctus are a heluva lot more devious than that, even if brute force is their preferred technique. Let me show you something.”

“Yes, sir.” Thorn stood quietly, watching the captain’s fingers dance over a virtual keyset. Samuels waved him forward to look at the images that were now hovering on a screen too small for anyone to see except them.

Thorn moved to the control panel and saw that the captain had been reviewing enemy fleet locations. Samuels swiped the flat panel forward to project a 3D hologram of the three separate maps, their borders twined together across distance and the galactic plane.

Samuel pointed to the map farthest to the left. “This was documented two months ago.” His finger moved to the right, indicating the static image in the middle. “Three weeks ago.” He zoomed in on the live radar furthest to the right. “And this is what we’re seeing now.”

Thorn’s heart sank. The alien battle fleet in the third live feed had increased from a couple of scout vehicles two months ago—to three immense carriers, battleships, more than twenty smaller craft, and at least five bulky shield ships, their distinct outline needed due to the cargo they carried. Each of the shield craft would be packed with defensive armor of varying types. As he watched, the vehicles remained chillingly inert. He could have taken the image to be a still had he not seen the jump planes zipping between the two planets.

The fleet still sat a good distance from the twin planets, so Thorn didn’t think that an attack was imminent. However, the sudden change in convoy structure told him that an attack wasn’t just forming up, it was close to launching. He’d seen enough sat recordings of battlefields where the ON had been scoured to dust, and this was no different. Someone was about to get hit. Hard.

“Where is this, sir?” Thorn asked. It was apparent these planets were well populated, given the amount of system traffic.

“Too far for response by the Apollo.” The captain shook his head. “But within our jurisdiction. We’ll have to deploy the closest units capable of withstanding a battle of this magnitude.”

Thorn resisted the urge to reach out and enlarge the screen. “And what units are those, sir?”

“That’s not the largest of my concerns, Stellers.” The captain nodded toward the enemy fleet as he spoke. “They’re not in battle formation. They’re just hanging there. Waiting.”

“What do you mean it’s not a concern? Can we—rather, can I have an effect on this fight, sir?”

The captain turned to face him, leaning back against his chair. “I didn’t say it’s not a concern, Stellers.” He gave Thorn a neutral look. “I said it’s not the largest of my concerns.”

“What is the largest of your concerns, sir?” Thorn was bewildered that the captain was so calm. The people on these planets were going to die if they didn’t play defense with the fleet—and soon.

The captain pressed a button on the panel behind him without turning to look at the changes it caused. He crossed his arms as the two stagnant images blipped into nonexistence, and twelve new live feeds populated in a semi-circle across the front of the helm. Each feed showed the same presence, alarmingly still, in twelve new locations. Each solar system was populated with active civilizations.

Thorn could say nothing. The enemy wasn’t attacking a system. They were attacking across a front.

“This, Stellers.” The captain’s jaw rippled in frustration. “This is the largest of my concerns.”

Thorn reacted at the cellular level, every old hurt in his life flaring into the here and now. “Are these all within our jurisdiction, sir?”

“Yes, they are.” Captain Samuel’s eyes narrowed, but he let the newcomer run with his thoughts, for the moment.

“Have there been reports of similar activity in other jurisdictions, sir?”

“Short answer—no.” The captain turned to survey the holographic monitors once more, saying nothing, cupping his chin in one hand.

“That’s what they’re waiting for, then,” Thorn said. “We can’t—I mean, I can’t pry open a Nyctus mind at this distance, and I’m not sure I’d want to, but I think we’re looking at something different.”

“Clarify, Stellers.”

“They’re expecting us to react to the immense presence in this jurisdiction by calling for aid from others. It’s the logical reaction.” Thorn tapped on each of the feeds, zooming in and inspecting the fleets before moving on to the next. “Are there any outliers, sir?”

“Outliers how?”

“Nyctus ships within the jurisdiction that are not positioned for imminent attack?” Thorn posed the statement as a question, though he had more than a suspicion. The captain sensed it as well. “The enemy doesn’t just park. At least, not that we saw in training materials. I yield to your experience here, it’s just that—

Samuels leaned over the control panel, holding up a hand. “Here.” He cleared the live feeds and enlarged an image of fifteen small attack ships with one carrier sitting in deep space, their formation preparing for lightspeed.

Thorn asked, “That trajectory. Can you plot it?” He looked around for the nav officer.

Slaughterbach sat at the nav chair, his fingers nearly a blur. He imported the static image of the outlying fleet and demarcated the sharp angles of the Nyctus ships, then added an overlay based on any anomalies between the two points.

The air in the command deck felt sticky with angst. The crew fought the urge to gather around Slaughterbach as the system calculated the outcome. If there was a clock in the room, Thorn would have heard it ticking, even though the data compiled in the span of two breaths.

The navigation screen flashed green around the edges, and a simulation displayed the calculated course in exponential speed. The end of the route was a small, mottled brown and green planet directly in the path of the fleet’s trajectory.

Thorn studied the planet and those surrounding it. “Enlarge that image, sir?”

“Sleuth,” Samuels said. The seated nav officer turned his bi-colored eyes up toward him with an expectant glance. “Throw it on the big wall.”

“Sleuth, sir?” Thorn asked softly.

“A lot shorter than Slaughterbach, and the kid has a nose for the Nyctus,” Samuels said, lips curled slightly.

For the second time that morning, Thorn’s gut clenched.

“Corporal, can you tell me what I’m looking at?”

Sleuth displayed the planetary details with a flick of his wrist.

No. Thorn read the words. It can’t be.

Code Nebula.

His blood roared, feet moving of their own accord to the comms, where he tapped an open channel to find Kira—somehow, some way, he had to tell her—

They’re going to attack Code Nebula.

“Stellers!” He heard Captain Samuel’s command on the third attempt. “What are you doing?”

“That’s my base camp, Captain.” Thorn let his hand drift away, then stared at it. “My—all of my people. The officers and crew I know, or knew. It’s where the Starcasters are made.”

“I know that, Stellers.” Samuel grabbed him by the shoulders and sat him down forcefully. “You’re not going to warn them. Do you know why?” The question was generous. Samuel didn’t owe Thorn a thing. Not yet.

Thorn felt his shoulders fall. “Because the Nyctus would know. Sir.”

Samuel gave a slow, deliberate nod. “In about a minute. They’ll punch through our codes, or just brush the edges, and they’re not stupid. They’ll know. And more importantly, they can go early, before we could even get in orbit to defend your base.”

“So what do we do, sir? I know what it takes to make a ’caster. I was there. The classes are small, and—well, I was told that you needed me to have a shot at winning. So if I’m a glorified weapon, that makes Code Nebula an armory that has to be protected.”

“I don’t know what the best answer is…yet.” He took a chair, spun toward Thorn, and leaned forward as the entire bridge watched their exchange in tense silence. “But they’re not going to make the move until they know we’ve mobilized against their façade of infantry units. You sold me on that. It’s a feint, and it’s designed to siphon off our fleet, to get us out of position.”

“Sir, I can reach them. At Code Nebula,” Thorn said into the silence. There were audible snorts of derision, but Samuel quelled them with a look.

“Tell me,” the captain ordered.

Thorn spread his hands out, fingers splayed on his legs. “My telepathic range is—well, we don’t know what it is. But it’s deep, and I don’t get tired. I have a, I guess you’d call it a reserve. I might be able to reach someone on Code Nebula, but only if I’m utterly focused.”

Samuel cut his eyes to the bow. “The witchport is waiting, then. You came here to use your power, and we know the Nyctus are fighting outside our usual methods. Go, and ready yourself. You’ll need a suit for the hard vac in case you lose control of the bubble. There’s one waiting in your quarters. Gear up, get in the ’port, and clear your mind. If you want to save the base, and maybe us—go. Direct order, Stellers. I can’t claim to understand what you do, but I sure as hell know how I’m going to use it.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be ready,” Thorn said, saluting and retreating even as his mind began to fill with the oncoming task. Telepathy was one thing. Telepathy beyond the stars was another.

The captain was true to his word. A battlesuit of dark fabric hung, waiting in his locker. He took his talisman, dressed, and began to leave, turning for the lead part of the ship where only a Starcaster could go. One of his skills wasn’t just magic, but the creation of a wall—invisible, unbreakable, and filling the open witchport so he could be present at the leading edge of his ship as it attacked.

Or defended.

As he opened the door to leave, an icon blinked on his wallscreen. A message.

“Play message,” he said. Instantly, an image fizzed into existence and he saw Val’s square head, a smile ear to ear, and Rodie pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. They sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning into the center of the screen.

“Hey, Stellers!” Val waved. “Would you believe I got stuck with this guy for the rest of…oh, I don’t know, eternity?”

Rodie shoved his shoulder into hers and snorted. “I got the goods. She ain’t leaving. She’s hooked on coffee, chocolate, and clean socks. I got her right where I want her.”

Val laughed and shoved Rodie out of the screen. “We just wanted to check in on you and see how you’re doin’?” She looked worried, which was new, but she was also more—real. There was less bluster, and more actual human. It was a good look.

Rodie appeared again, leaning in so his oversized head took up a majority of the screen. “Yeah, man, miss you! Let us know you’re okay.” Rodie leaned in even closer, covering the side of his face with his hand to block Val’s view of his moving lips and whispered, “And tell me about all the babes on Tuscolum. I gotta know if the hype is real!”

Val smacked the skinny man on the shoulder. “We got booted to Vega 7, hardly a hop away from Code Nebula. Rodie’s disappointed he still won’t be using his rank insignia to bring the girls to the bunk any time soon.”

Rodie nodded, his eyebrows arching upward with no disagreement. They both laughed before the recording cut out and Thorn was left to silence once again.

The pieces fell into place, and Thorn left his quarters in a near run. If Val and Rodie were in the Vega system, then they were close enough that Thorn could reach them before the Nyctus could pound Code Nebula into memory. That left the problem of telepathy over enormous distances—it was unlikely to work, and the stakes were too high. Before he could continue his thoughts, Thorn burst onto the deck, black witcharmor rippling under the soft lights.

The commotion in the room stopped. Everybody turned to him expectantly.

“Quite an entrance, Stellers,” Captain Samuel said. “I take it you have news?”

“Two Starcasters are stationed at Vega 7. I trained with them. I can get a warning to them.” He drew a diagram on the holopad in front of him. “But we need to sell the Nyctus on us mobilizing to defend their attacks, without giving away what we know. It’s a fine line, I know, but I can do it, and I don’t need telepathy. At least, not at this range. I’ve got something a little more traditional.”

“Coded message,” the captain said, tilting his head. “Correct?”

“Exactly, sir. I know the Nyctus don’t have a full command of our language, at least not the nuances. They sure as hell won’t get an open code between squaddies who are fresh out of training.”

Captain Samuel looked around the bridge, noting the open faces. Thorn had them listening. “Go on.”

“We mobilize, sir.” Thorn projected his diagram to the center holograph and spun it as he explained. “I’ll send code to my old squad with directives. Specialist Rodie is there. I have no doubts he’ll decode my intention.”

“That part of your plan is clear. Tell me about the mechanics of it.”

“What we’ll tell them is to take a civilian jump plane to Code Nebula.” Thorn zoomed in on the jump plane traffic between planets in the system. “The Nyctus will assume this is a routine recruit plane, dumping a load of newbie ’casters.”

The captain pulled at his chin. “Again, a plausible move. And then?”

“From there, Rodie and Val can discreetly inform Commander Schrader of the attack, and they can plan an evacuation.”

The captain scoffed. “As soon as they evacuate that camp, these thirteen planets will be obliterated.” He gestured to the feeds behind him.

“Not if the evacuation is handled with precision, sir.”

“How precise? Bear in mind, we’re arriving late to the party, or not at all if the Nyctus attack across a broad front. If they do, our presence won’t matter to Code Nebula or the target systems. We’ll be overmatched, and I won’t put my ship in that position.”

Thorn pulled a chair, then sat and began to sketch on the holopad in wide, dynamic strokes. “Captain Leblanc can shade the planet for just long enough that we can get the evacuating ships to a nearby planet—in system. Since we know the Nyctus will be, ahh—”

“Raking her mind for information. Call it what it is, Stellers. The Nyctus can crack any of us, given enough time and effort. That’s why we’re losing this war. One of the reasons, anyway. No info security.”

“They can and they will, sir. I’m counting on it. And Captain Leblanc is incredibly powerful. I’ll ask her to sell the Nyctus a lie—a battleship fleet squadron so powerful that not even the Nyctus planetbusters could take them out. That projection will fry regular scans, too, so the Nyctus will see two ghosts, not just one. They’ll buy it, sir, and we can evacuate while they call for help. Or bug out.”

“And how do you plan to notify Captain Leblanc of this?”

“Easy.” Thorn leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “She’s been inside my head. Now I just need to get into hers.”

“And what about the defensive action here, in this jurisdiction?” Captain Samuel remained unsatisfied about that small detail, though his face betrayed a plan. He was a seasoned officer who’d just been given a weapon he’d never fired before. It was time to take Thorn out for a spin.

“Well, we mobilize, sir.”

Captain Samuel stared at him. “How, and from where?”

Thorn saw the dilemma, but he was so used to thinking in situational terms, he’d limited his own vision. The answer hove into sight, a mirage that became real as he approached it.

“Everywhere, sir.” He set his jaw. “This is no longer a battle. This is the war.”

14

Thorn stood before the walls between him and open space. He paused, his exposed hand on the control panel. It was keyed only to his identity, with an override for the captain.

Beyond were the stars. And the Nyctus, somewhere out there, waiting. Moving. Burning and crushing worlds as they advanced, their reasons known only to themselves.

The door opened. Thorn stepped into the small airlock and heard it cycle, followed by a soft chime. The second control pulsed green, waiting for his touch. He re-gloved, took a hissing breath from his suit, and opened the witchport to the endless black.

It was a circle, with rounded walls so dark they drank light. The floor was textured—not soft, but not too firm. He sat down, eyes glued in open awe at the yawning chasm of stretching away. Few stars were visible, and even they were moving steaks of muted light, with the occasional brief flare of a white or blue giant, still young and hot.

Thorn had to know if he could reach Captain Leblanc telepathically before any of his plan could be initiated, so he let the nothingness wash over him, drawing inward like a blanket of dark. As the universe closed in, his mind pushed out, gaining traction with each distant heartbeat in the corner of his senses that still identified him as human.

For the moment, he was a pure being of magic, his power unfolding, exploring, and finding the possibilities to its liking. Thorn smiled. This was what it meant to be a Starcaster. Not the mud and the sweat, the fear and exhaustion. He was—home.

Close bubble, he commanded the witchport system, sensing but not seeing the protective shield lock in place. Thorn removed a glove, felt nothing except cool air, and then took off his second glove. With hands that shook, if slightly, he removed his helmet, exposing himself to the killing cold of open space.

The shield worked. It was the absolute bleeding edge of human tech, not suitable on large scales for a ship, but good enough to close Thorn off from the empty oblivion beyond.

He drew in a long breath—cold, dry, but fresh enough. It was time to work.

Thorn’s hand wrapped around his talisman, and the energy inside him drew down to a point so fine it could pierce the sky. As the book warmed in his hand, he reached out, picturing the shape of Captain Leblanc’s mind—its whorls, and power, and delicacy. She was a ’caster of rare ability, with a signature distinct as her own fingerprint.

Neural connections sparked and fizzed out in the distance, a spiderweb of chain reactions that led him inexorably toward a point in space. It was…bright. Familiar. He had begun to move toward it when a wall slammed shut, violent and cold.

Stellers. What gives you the right to invade my mind uninvited?

Captain! Thorn sent, a flush of apology coloring his thoughts. It’s working. I—apologies. I am—

If this is about your ego, you’ve just ended your career. Now, choose your words carefully. Why are you here? Her words were chilled, and not by the distance between them.

Not ego, ma’am. Danger.

Go on.

The Nyctus are moving in force, and I need to warn Code Nebula. They’re about to be crushed, Thorn sent.

After a pause that seemed far longer than it was, her voice returned, curiously flat. Since you wouldn’t defy your commander on the first day, I can only conclude that you need to warn Code Nebula outside our comms. Who do you have in mind?

Val and Rodie, they’re nearby, Vega system. But that’s only part of it. Your ship is critical. He sketched the plan, repeating certain parts as their connection pulsed in and out of clarity.

After another pause, she sent an answer. My ship will engage the enemy as you suggest. Tell your captain to use you as he sees fit. This message must be sent to all available ships, and immediately. Is this understood? Tell Captain Samuel to implement Bulwark. Just one word. Bulwark. He’ll understand.

Yes ma’am.

One last thing. You’re in the witchport?

I am, ma’am.

Drop the shield, she said without hesitation.

Ma’am?

Your shield. Drop it.

But won’t—wait. You planned this. I’m supposed to. . .to control my atmosphere? My body?

Yes. You can and you will. The shield draws far too much power, whereas you have power to spare. This was always the plan. Drop it, and let your power take full command. I’ll listen, but our connection will fade soon enough. Do it now.

I—yes ma’am. I will. I mean, I am.

Thorn pushed away fingers of dread that clawed at his spine, breathing deep as if he was readying to dive into deep water. The fear was present, but it was only that. Fear.

Shield down, he commanded.

There was no change, and he fought a gasp—then let his own energy fizz through him, its presence as old as the stars, coming to rest in his veins, his chest. His bones.

Thorn?

Ma’am. I’m in space, I guess.

You are. And now, your training is complete. You are a Starcaster. We are meant for something other than the land, Thorn. We are meant to fight among the void. Are you ready?

I am.

Signing off, then. Tell your captain, Bulwark. Send a coded comm to your friends. See you at the fight.

Her presence didn’t fade. It simply ended, and he was left in the witchport, alone, open to the black and ready to fight.

Moments later, he stood in his quarters, adjusting to the shift in reality. The witchport was—he felt more connected to himself, whereas in the spartan room he would call home, he saw only things. Each object, like his bunk, his desk, and even the smooth, dull gray walls, was real.

With three long breaths, he was able to enter himself, coming back across the miles to focus on the task at hand.

Subterfuge.

A lie worked best when it was protected by the truth, so, turning on his comms, that’s exactly what he did.

Let the Nyctus twist, he thought, forcing a grin on his face. The screen flared to life, and he commanded the ship’s AI to begin recording.

“Hey, guys. Sorry I didn’t comm sooner, but it’s taking some getting used to, this whole thing about being an actual officer. Tried to sleep earlier but kept having those damn dreams again—like in Dimensional training, where everything gets wiped out and you can’t do anything about it. You know how prophecy can be when you’re an amateur magician.” He laughed, but kept his eyes utterly flat; the two halves of his face may as well have been different people. “I’d invite the captain and everyone else along for a little hellraising—be nice to see the camp empty while we live it up, even the recruits. Who cares if Code Nebula is there when we get back? We’ll be too hungover to care. Might even win a few hands at the tables. I tried my luck. Funny, didn’t think it would be so easy to clear out a table. Thinking about going back in two days, before the crush really hits. Busy time in our jurisdiction.”

He flashed two fingers, then gave the ship’s signal for enemy imminent, but it was so subtle he surprised even himself.

“Gotta wrap this up. I’ve got unwanted guests here. You know how it is—someone always knocking on the door. Behave yourselves, and take a trip if you can. Sooner the better. I’ll see you offworld.”

He cut the comm and sat, staring into nothing. It had to be enough.

Captain Samuel sat at the helm, his pensive figure reminding Thorn of Commander Schrader. The captain sat with his head to the side, chin in palm and one finger pressed up against his lips. A cloud of consideration hung around the man.

Captain Samuel looked up, a wintry smile creasing his face. “And now, we do that thing we’re best suited to. We wait.”

They waited. While the ship hummed around them, Thorn and the captain sat, barely speaking, both aware of the enormous gamble they were taking. The situation was out of their hands, a condition that didn’t rest well with either man.

Three hours had passed when Thorn received the message indicator on his holopad and opened it, holding a momentary breath before touching the read icon. He’d returned to the bridge, waiting in tense silence for just this moment.

Val and Rodie appeared, close to the camera, both wearing expressions of forced joy.

They responded in flat tones. “We received your message, Cap.” Rodie removed his glasses and wiped the fog from the lenses. “Think we’ll take a quick trip to see our old home. Kinda missing it right now. Wish everyone was here with us, instead. Who knows? We’ll ask Schrader if he can give everyone a pass. Be nice to clear out and live a little.”

Val put her hand on Rodie’s shoulder. “I’m sure the Commander will be happy to know those dreams are coming true for you. You always did look ahead.”

They signed off, smiles fading as the screen went dark.

Instantly, Captain Samuel jumped into action. He called a meeting of battleship captains across the territory with an emergency code, the time set for five minutes from that moment. Thorn watched the man, more than a little in awe of his swift decisions. When Samuel moved, things happened, and even though Thorn’s hands were damp with sweat, he took some solace in watching the captain work.

This was sure to be the largest scaled attack in Thorn’s lifetime, and he would be on the absolute sharp end of it, exposed to space with only his power to hand. The thought chilled him, but then he brushed a thumb over his talisman, knowing that there was more to this fight than mere missiles and armor. This battle would be where humanity punched back—and with a weapon that, until now, the Nyctus had held all to themselves. There had been Starcasters aboard ships, but never enough to wield as an offensive force, and if Thorn was to believe Captain Leblanc, there had never been anyone like him.

There had been dozens of battles before this moment, nearly all of them ending with the Orbital Navy turned to glowing slag, the lost souls frozen and dead among stars that neither cared nor interfered in the petty warfare of living beings.

Thorn meant to change that.

The joint captains responded to Samuel’s announcement with mild doubt, then anger, then acceptance, all in the span of minutes. They were seasoned professionals, and even though many of them knew the attack was tantamount to suicide, they agreed because that’s what soldiers did.

They obeyed. They fought. They died.

The ship’s air was charged with nervous energy as the crew tried to sleep. The Nyctus would know—at some point—which ships were on the move, but the Apollo remained on station per the plan. Waiting was the most unnatural thing for a warship, but the crew managed their collective energy with the help of officers who kept them tethered to their task.

It was 03:40 ship’s time when Samuel called Thorn to the bridge, somehow knowing his ’caster would be awake.

Thorn arrived, saluted, and stood, looking at the bustle around him. “It doesn’t look like midwatch, sir.”

Samuel smiled, waving a battered coffee mug at his crew. “Little sleep tonight, I think. Nerves are tight, and you’re here. Some of us don’t understand what that means, and we won’t until we see you in action. This is all new to them—and even me, if I’m being honest.” Captain Samuel turned a bright eye to Thorn. “Do you think you can turn any of the Nyctus away?”

Thorn paused, forming an honest answer. “I know I can move things, sir, but that’s not my concern.”

“What is your concern, then?”

“I want them to implode. I want to kill the Nyctus in their cradles, or whatever it is they sleep in. I don’t even want them piercing our jurisdiction, and when my friends get onsite, I want us all to roll the Nyctus back and leave no survivors. If we can’t do that, then everything I went through in training doesn’t matter much.”

Samuel whistled softly, then chuckled. “Mild goals, Stellers. I like a soldier who keeps their dreams realistic.”

“I try, sir.”

“Then try this, if you would, Specialist. Hypothetically, how do we—using your ability, if need be—how can we keep the Nyctus from going early? Hold them in place for a few hours, or, optimally, an entire day?”

Thorn paused, letting the problem unfold. He knew his part, and ability, but he didn’t know what the fleet was capable of in possible solutions to their problem. “Sleuth, can you run a scenario for me?”

“Yes, sir. Parameters?” Sleuth asked, turning from his station. Pale light made him seem nearly translucent in front of the flickering screens.

Thorn sketched his concerns, and Sleuth began to load datapoints, shaping a simulation that unspooled at ten times normal speed.

“Fail, fail, and—success, sir. Third time’s a charm,” Sleuth said, watching the icons blink blue and green. “I make it seventy-one percent that your suggestion will hold the Nytcus in place. You were right, captain.”

“He was?” Thorn asked.

“You’ve just confirmed my own suspicions. Thought I’d get a second opinion, just to see where we stand. Alright, captain to crew—marking order three as our new plan. Shared in-ship, but hold for general fleet release.”

“Aye,” came the reply from across the bridge as heads lowered to send commands.

“I’m covering six systems with battleships and their escorts. If they buy us time, they’ll also thin the herd as we sit tight and give Code Nebula a head start on clearing out. If they don’t, then we all die today, unless you have something to say about it,” Captain Samuel said, matter-of-factly.

“They will, sir. And I know I will,” Thorn said. He turned a palm up, pulling a small globe of vivid dark energy into life. It crackled with malignant fury, then vanished at a silent command. “I belong on this ship, sir. This is your doing—I feel useful. I have a purpose beyond just surviving, I think.”

“Good. Because I intend for all of us to survive.” After a long pull of coffee, the captain looked at his wristwatch—an archaic affectation. The orange face was surrounded by buffed metal, scarred and worn. “You’ve been here for a little over nine minutes, and yet—”

“Sir?”

“I don’t detect any evidence that you’ve eaten breakfast.”

“I—yes, sir,” Thorn said, fighting a smile. “To chow, then?”

“I recommend it with the utmost urgency.” Samuel tapped his watch. “You can set my body by my desire to have eggs and coffee, as any good captain should. I’d recommend you get a watch, too. A nice nod to our ancient traditions, when gears and steel ruled our lives, instead of chips and drives.”

“I’ll take it under advisement, sir. Where, ah…would I acquire a watch like that?”

“Like this one? Unlikely. This was manufactured on Earth in 1966, and was intended for divers who, for some reason, went underwater with metallic bottles of air strapped to their backs. The definition of insanity, if you ask me. Give me a massive, nuclear powered warship filed with deadly weapons. Much homier.”

“I couldn’t agree more, sir. I’m thinking of putting an armchair in my witchport.”

“That’s the spirit.” Samuel gestured to the galley with his mug. “Off you go. Fuel up and then come back here. I think we’re in for a long day.”

Mol appeared, looking as if she had just struggled to break away from her bed. “Morning, Captain. Need anything? I’m all in for the French toast today.”

“See, Stellers? She understands how we fight. I’m good, but thank you. Take Stellers with you and make sure he eats,” Samuel said.

“Aye, sir. To the gills with food,” Mol said, turning and waving Thorn to follow.

“Does my heart good to see this kind of preparation,” the captain said.

“French toast?” Thorn asked.

Mol smiled, leading the way. “We’re not animals, Specialist. We just fight that way.”

* * *

Kira sat at her desk, tapping the comms, checking compulsively for a message indicator that she knew wouldn’t be there.

Where are you, Thorn? Something was wrong, and it went beyond simple intuition. It was a visceral sense—maybe her first true hint at becoming more than just a Joiner.

The door swung inward, and she jumped to her feet in a defensive reaction. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing barging in here like this?”

She saw the specialist ranks on their uniforms—Starcasters, but it took her a moment to identify the faces as two of Thorn’s classmates. “What is it? Is Thorn alright?”

Val stood at attention and addressed her. “Lieutenant Wixcombe. Thorn is alright. But we need to speak with you and the other officers, highest priority. Can you meet us in the Commander’s quarters?” Rodie’s face was a mask of tension, but he said nothing.

Kira stood without hesitation as the sense of foreboding within her spiked. “I can and will.” She lifted her voice to the room AI. “Officer’s channel alert. To Commander’s office, double time.”

Seconds later, Kira, Val, and Rodie were silently waved forward as Schrader placed a small, silver disc on the floor of his office. He motioned for silence, tapped the disc with one foot, and waited. A small light pulsed green on the device.

“We’re clear. Speak freely and with urgency, Specialists. What is it?” Schrader said without preamble.

“Sir, can the Nyctus—” Val began, but Kira pointed to the disc.

“Scrambler. Makes a hash of anything, and even if the Nyctus could penetrate this deep into our collective presence, they’d be damned fools to do it. Taking on this many senior ’casters is a short trip toward cooking off your nervous system, even for those ruthless bastards.”

Kira felt a flood of relief, even as she stood, listening to Rodie and Val speak. Her flare of anger faded as it became clear that sending two newbie officers was, in fact, the right move.

“Sir, the Apollo is on standby, and Captain Samuel has already begun moving assets into position. To be blunt, the Nyctus are massed for an attack like we’ve not seen in some time,” Val said.

“He’s sending them to buy time,” Schrader said, and Ashworth gave a grim nod of agreement. The base commander stood up quickly, pointing to the door. “Time we don’t have. We go through the base, with the scrambler. Word of mouth only. Go-bag and weapons, nothing more. Doubletime, starting now.”

Rodie carried the scrambler with them as they moved through the camp, informing soldiers and enacting evacuation protocols. The hum of shock turned to furious activity as Val, Schrader, and Rodie made their way through the troops—Ashworth and the other officers were dispatched to begin similar preparations, as well as round up any additional arms that could be had. Despite arriving early, the general chaos of an evacuation took up the extra time, and when the hangar was filled with shuffling, nervous troops, the time for Captain Leblanc’s shading distraction was getting close to hand.

“There are stores onboard the carrier, but not much,” Kira said. “Let’s hope she breaks orbit clean. The nearest resupply is three days out.”

“We won’t need three days. We’re not going far, and we’re not waiting around. Move out,” Schrader said, lifting his voice. He turned to address Val and Rodie once everyone began loading onto their designated ships. The hangar was a seething mass of people and gear, despite being executed on short notice. “You’ll take the third fighter—Wixcombe and Narvez are in unit two, and Hiroshi is paired with Burnitz in the other. I want comm silence until we’re clear of the system. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Val answered.

“Good. These fighters punch way above their weight, and we can’t lose them if we have to form a convoy to jump systems. If you get in trouble, let us handle it. For a carrier, the Hippogryph has damned fine railguns and enough mounts to cause some trouble, but her fighter wing is undergoing refit. We’ve got ’casters of some strength on hand, and we’ll use our power to clear a path, so when I tell you to keep the fighters close, I mean it. Saddle up. Let’s go,” Schrader said, turning away to bark orders at a pair of recruits carrying a sled loaded with fuel canisters.

Val and Rodie jumped into one of the three fighter ships on base. They didn’t have need for many at Code Nebula, since it was highly classified and the risk factor for engagement was low. Hiroshi piloted another with the ginger-bearded Burnitz in the gunner seat. Kira controlled the third with Narvez to her side. The three ships flanked the carrier above and to each side as they blasted through the atmosphere, shredding clouds with a bowshock until they reached the blackness of space.

“Lieutenant Narvez,” Kira said in their fighter, keeping her eyes on the skies. “I appreciate you being in the chair.”

“Constance.” Narvez’s profile created a black shadow against the light of the system’s sun. “My name is Constance.”

Kira peeled her eyes from the route and looked at Narvez, grinning. “Constance. I never took you for a Constance.”

The deep frown that usually scored her face lessened. “I wanted to hear somebody call me by my given name before—whatever is going to happen, happens. So, I’m Constance, although Connie works too.”

Narvez only had time for a glance—a matte black shape hurtling toward them at killing speed—before the fighter rocked sideways with the impact. A searing light erupted, but she pulled hard on the stick, away from the carrier’s looming bulk.

“No—hell no. My stick,” Kira barked, holding on as the cabin bucked. “Control wing is torched. Missile strike or a KEW.” She pulled hard at the stick again, leaving the massive carrier behind them. “Connie, target that ship. Now.”

“Got them,” Narvez said, taking the weapons control into her hands. She spoke directives to the targeting software, augmenting the AI that was already tracking the Nyctus craft, which burned hard to affect an escape. Without atmosphere, her casting powers were useless except for any harnessed energy she may have, and that might not be enough.

A missile would have to do. Sometimes, you had to kill Nyctus the old-fashioned way.

“Bird’s away,” Narvez said, as the fighter shuddered. A silver line of plasma led her eyes as the missile accelerated almost too fast for the eye to follow. In seconds, the missile punched clean through the Nyctus drive, causing a catastrophic implosion. Seven more Nyctus ships broke out of pluslight, their drives lighting up the scanner.

“Escorts, are you seeing this? Eight hot, minus one—shit, they’re targeting the Hippogryph. To the carrier at maximum drive. If you’ve got a spell loaded, this is the time to cook it off. They’re under the—”

The second Nyctus ship blossomed into a ball of expanding gas, and now Hiroshi’s voice came over the comms. “They are vulnerable to our magic. Target what you can. The carrier is opening up gun mounts,” Hiroshi said in calm tones.

“Copy that.” Narvez touched off a second missile, the bird missing, but detonating due to a proximity fuse that sent another Nyctus ship into a wild curve, wobbling and leaking gases. “Can you reach them?”

“I can now,” Kira said, vocalizing the autocannon for a thirty-round burst. The shells turned the spinning enemy into hot debris, but not before the remaining Nyctus began to rake the Hippogryph with something that looked like a railgun, but far wider at the barrel end.

Sparks and fires erupted along the big carrier’s port side, and then her mounts began blazing away with so many small point-defense guns that space seemed to ripple. One, then two of the Nyctus exploded, one going on to tear a ten meter gash in the port landing bay, sending looping arcs of coolant into space as a snowstorm of red flakes.

“They’re…trying to break me,” Narvez said, clutching her head as an unseen Nyctus shaman invaded her mind.

Kira didn’t hesitate. She pulled a kill switch on Narvez’s controls and steered directly at the nearest enemy, a silent howl of pain in her skull at the Nyctus hammered at her psyche with wave after wave of probing telepathic hatred. She flickered in and out of reality, looking deep into the minds of any Nyctus that wasn’t buttoned up against a counterattack.

She found one.

Like a cracking dam, Kira flooded the space, sending the Nyctus into just enough of a panic to buy her time for another pass. The engine howled as their fighter turned, every screen a wild cacophony of dire warnings. The Nyctus were spiraling closer to the carrier, soundless weapons lancing out to chew at the big ship’s armor.

“They’re using KEW shit up close. Smaller versions,” Kira said.

“Gotta pick off the—” Narvez began, but choked on her words as Hiroshi and Burnitz turned directly into a fusillade of KEW strikes flying at impossible velocities. Their fighter was torn into shrapnel and then faded behind them as they completed their turn.

One Nyctus remained—the one that killed Hiroshi and Burnitz.

“Connie,” Kira said, eyes bleak and hot with anger, “turn them into vapor.”

A pair of missiles flickered out, slamming into the fleeing Nyctus ship. The enemy died, even as another alarm began shrieking in their fighter, and then Kira hit the override and all was silent once more.

“Rodie, you clear?” Kira asked.

No answer.

“They’re flying right there—hey— no, no no—” Kira said, voice rising in desperation.

“Are they compromised?” Narvez asked. “Sure looks like it.”

“Val! Rodie! Answer me, or we will fire!” Kira barked, but the other fighter only banked harder, right toward the belly of the carrier.

“I can’t kill a student,” Narvez said. “And there’s no way of knowing—”

A single missile lanced out from Val and Rodie’s ship. In less than a second, it drove deep into the carrier’s steel heart, exploded, and tore the massive ship in two.

“No—” Kira muttered into the dark. The Hippogryph began to implode, section by section, lighting up Val and Rodie’s ship in bright relief. “I have no choice. I have to take them out.”

“No you don’t,” Narvez said. “Look.”

A Nyctus battleship bathed them in scanners, but it was the spike of pain from their shaman’s that made Kira pull the stick hard as she kicked them to full power. With a barrage of KEW, the Nyctus turned Val and Rodie into a flare and then nothing at all.

“Time to go,” Kira said, flashing away like a frightened animal who’s seen the hunter’s weapon.

“Are they all gone?” Narvez asked, her voice weak. She sat, numb, watching the display. The Nyctus weren’t following them.

“Too small to matter,” Kira said, answering the unspoken question.

“Where are we heading?” Narvez asked.

Kira said nothing but set a course and took her hands off the controls, studiously looking away from the screens. “Wherever we can, Connie. We’re on our own.”

15

“Stellers, you’ll want to see this.”

The captain stood, hands clasped behind him as scenes of battle played out on three walls of the bridge.

“Sir? Where is this?’ Thorn asked.

“Everywhere,” Samuel said. He sounded tired, but his eyes were hardened to a focus that had weight. “Every system we’ve deployed to is under attack. Parker, send live footage to all screens as of now; Estgaard, if you please.”

The view shifted immediately, revealing a fleet of Nyctus ships, their dark hulls slipping through the inner rings of a massive green world surrounded by rings.

“Estgaard? That’s—it’s a lot closer than I expected, sir. For this point in the battle,” Thorn added.

“The Nyctus changed doctrine. Watch,” Samuel said.

Two enemy battleships bracketed a heavy cruiser, her point defense systems blazing away in a standoff action. On an unseen signal, the Nyctus ships belched KEW’s in a wave, nearly fifty shots hurtling toward the human ship—the Queen Nzinga, Thorn recalled—without any fear of friendly fire. The Nzinga began to blossom fiery outgassing as her shields went down, then a second wave of enemy fire blasted her center apart in a nova-like explosion.

“Captain, look,” Thorn said, pointing behind the expanding cloud that had been four hundred souls only seconds earlier.

The second Nyctus battlewagon had taken heavy damage from her sister ship. A huge venting of gas and fuel ignited, collapsed, and blew four sections of the ship into space, the shimmering cloud of debris glittering like freshly fallen snow in a stiff wind.

“They’re on suicide runs, sir?” Sleuth asked, his face a mask of horror.

“I don’t think so. It looks like they’re willing to take some damage to open up a system. We don’t know of a drone craft that large, so it’s got to be crewed,” Samuel said. “Enlarge the aft view, please. There—see it?”

Thorn did. There were bodies jettisoned from the ship, some whole, some in pieces, their segmented hardsuits gleaming from the detonations and internal fires onboard the wounded Nyctus vessel. “That’s the first I’ve seen of them.”

“Who, the enemy?” Captain Samuel asked, brows lifting.

“Yes, sir. I mean, we were shown hard data at Code Nebula, and as a kid I saw the vids. But still, not like this.” As Thorn spoke, a Nyctus suit was torn apart by a flying piece of jetsam, the stolid alien cut nearly in two. Its guts trailed away like a ribbon, then it was incinerated by an errant laser. The large, long head was left behind, spinning lazily, cut off from the ashes of its body.

“An engineer, and likely a female, given her size. Good riddance. Their engineers pull double duty as spellcasters when they’re in large scale assaults,” Sleuth piped. “Um, sir. Sorry.”

“No apology needed. We’re here to do the same thing they’re trying to do to us. If we see it happen on a small scale, it doesn’t change the outcome,” Captain Samuel said. “Enlarge scene three, please.”

The images, sent by a drone sitting at a safe distance from the battle, were crisp enough that Thorn could see a squadron of ON fighters wheeling away from a crippled Nyctus frigate. As the human pilots turned in unison, the fourth fighter broke hard right and began unleashing every weapon it had.

The shots—missiles and railgun—struck two ON craft, shredding both before they imploded into violent clouds of gas.

“Sir, one of our fighters has gone rogue. It’s—” Sleuth sounded stricken, his fingers flying as he worked to draw the images even closer without losing resolution. The rogue vanished in a ball of plasma as a Nyctus corvette sent three KEW’s in a killing salvo, each rock nearly a hundred kilos in weight. “He’s gone, sir. And the Nyctus corvette is damaged. Two fighters closing in, sir.”

“Good hunting,” Samuel said, then he gave a terse nod as two missiles thundered into the corvette, cracking her open along the keel. “Damned fine shooting. Still doesn’t explain why that fighter went—“

“Captain, I have incoming comms from multiple assault groups.” The speaker was a Petty Officer named Benton, her dark hair tucked up under a headset keyed to multiple comm channels.

“Give it to me quick and dirty. Any of them pushing back?” Samuels asked.

“Plenty, sir. I make…eight of thirteen on the advance, or holding positions. Three are not responding to any contact at all, and two groups—both around that binary system at Epsilon 2470—are now engaged in point-blank action due to massive magical interference from the Nyctus. Our ’casters are holding them—one moment, sir.” Benton nodded, listening, then her lips pressed into a thin line. “Sending to your private comms. Captains Herlich and Kumatso are presumed lost, along with all hands. There are three surviving craft from the entire system. Epsilon is in Nyctus hands, sir.”

“That’s how fast it happens,” Samuels said softly.

“Unger,” Thorn said.

“Someone from your class?” Samuel asked. He touched Thorn’s shoulder.

“Yes, sir. He was with Captain Herlich, I think.”

“They all died on the ground. The fight went planetside, according to what I’m seeing. Nasty business. Thorn, this is going to happen a lot more. Are you ready? For what comes next?”

“I am, sir,” Thorn answered. He might never be ready to die, but he was damned sure ready to fight.

“Go clear your head. We’ll be engaged soon enough, if this thing gets out of hand. That’s an order,” Samuel said, nudging Thorn away from the buzz of voices as reports continued to stream in.

“I will, sir.” Thorn stepped away, eyes down. There was nothing else to do.

Except for one small detail.

Kira.

The witchport seemed less ominous as he sat, legs crossed and staring into the inky expanse of space. He considered Kira’s feel, and the shape of her mind, and then—

Thorn. I’m here.

It worked! Thorn’s words rang with triumph in his own head. Too loud?

Hell, no. I’m stunned we can connect at this range, but it must be—well, it’s us, I think.

Good. Kira, are you alright?

He felt her sigh more than heard it. Physically, I’m fine. Her thoughts cracked and then steadied. I couldn’t stop them, Thorn. I couldn’t save them.

Who?

Val. Rodie. Barnett. So many. All gone. Commander Schrader didn’t get to issue orders, but he had a deadman’s switch set up for a databurst. They knew where we were, Thorn, and I don’t know how. One of the Nyctus turned Val, and it was her fighter that took out the carrier—not the Nyctus, not really, Kira sent. Her words were colored with naked fear. If the Nyctus could hijack ’casters, then—

We can’t be on the ships, Kira. Not until we find out how to slam the door on the Nyctus incursions. If our minds aren’t safe, then no one is safe.

I know. But what becomes of us?

The Starcasters? Thorn asked.

Witches. People with talent. The gift. What becomes of us? We’ve got a target on us if it turns out that we’re the weak link?

Thorn paused, thinking, letting his power reach across the miles and sending thoughts of reassurance to Kira like an undercurrent.

Command will want answers, and we have none. We held at most of the planets, but I think Captain Leblanc’s effort fell short. Everyone was exposed, but it still doesn’t answer what you asked. I don’t know what will happen, Kira, but we’re too valuable to sit on the sidelines.

We might be too dangerous to live, Thorn. What if the admirals panic? They’re not exactly flexible about us, even though the Nyctus are using power like ours. And winning.

The hum of stars filled Thorn’s senses, and he fought the urge to reach for Kira, all those miles away. We need a win, Kira, and we need it now.

How? Kira asked.

Let me handle that. You stay safe. We bought some time with all this blood.

The dead paid that price, Kira said.

Then it’s up to us to get it all back, Thorn said, and his thoughts simmered with unkempt rage.

I hope I’m ready.

Thorn sent an image—him, smiling, his face bright with agreement. We will. I can feel it.

16

Kira was quickly assigned to a new ship, the venerable Andraste, a battleship that had survived three major engagements since going active four years earlier. As a Joiner, the Admirals assumed it would be less likely that the Nyctus could trace her location.

Purecasters were another issue.

The admiralty feared Nyctus tracking enough that rumors were spreading through the fleetnet at a speed no ship could have achieved.

Along with her new ship, Kira was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, which led her to the act of standing in a cabin all her own, with a private head and sheets that looked like they were made of something other than sandpaper.

“Nice place,” she said, but the walls said nothing.

She sat at the desk and slid a digital encryption drive open with her personal voice command, then used her thumbprint.

“Onscreen,” she said. The AI obliged, and her orders—the first as a commander—flashed up, accompanied by a map. “Huh. I’m a spy.”

The mission was simple, and it had nothing to do with Starcasters. It was a flyby of Nyctus territory, at low speed as the squadron of ships spat disposable, stealthy drones into Nyctus space, all for the purpose of ’jacking whatever comm data they could find. It was a good way to get killed, but an even better way to find out where the Nyctus were going next.

The plan did little to calm her fears for Thorn, or—and this was the looming issue—silence a sense that the ON was in the process of falling back into a defensive war. Humanity had been in retreat since the Hecate got kicked back, and her first mission felt like laying groundwork for more of the same.

But before she could change the entire fleet doctrine, she had to meet her crew.

“Lieutenant Commander?” The baritone voice sounded from behind Kira, and she realized her door was still open.

“Yes?”

“The ship has been primed, and crew is at their stations. Main engines are ready at one hundred percent.”

“Excellent. Call the crew to the deck. Time to get to know each other.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The officer turned to leave.

“Lieutenant?” Kira called. “What’s your name?”

“Ellerby, ma’am.” He was short, powerfully built, and baby-faced, despite broad hands and a head that sat directly on his shoulders. There was no spacer’s tan, but he wasn’t exactly pale, either. He looked fresh up the well, and Kira wondered how many of her crew were green.

After he left, Kira rolled her head and rubbed at her aching neck. The ache had come on shortly after the Nyctus had tried to get into her head, and it hadn’t gone away since. Like a permanent hangover, there were echoes of their invasive touch, leaving her violated in a sense she couldn’t quite reconcile with—well, with anything. The Nyctus anatomy wasn’t unknown, but their lingering power from the use of shamanistic magic was an utter mystery. The throbbing left her mouth inexplicably dry, so she filled and drank two cups of water, back to back, pushing the metallic taste away.

I’m ready, Kira thought.

In the mirror, a young officer stared back. A mild case of nerves faded as she squared her uniform and gave her reflection a single nod. “If we can’t win with magic, we have to find a way to win with steel.” Onscreen, she saw the crew filling their stations. “Screens off. Commander to the bridge.”

The room went dark. Kira stepped out and pulled the door behind her with a final click.

The bridge was a short distance, and Kira arrived to find every face turned toward her steps. She greeted them with a friendly look, then took up her station at the elevated back where she had optimal views of all the data.

“As you all know by now, I am your new Lieutenant Commander, Kira Wixcombe. I fought in this past week’s battle against the Nyctus, and my fighter was the sole surviving vehicle among my squadron. That means I’m either lucky or good. I can live with lucky, because as we all know, luck is the only force in the universe that can be shared.” A smattering of grins greeted her statement, and she began walking around, nodding politely to each crew member.

Their faces were an array of emotions, although—and this pleased Kira—no one was afraid. Tense, yes, but no fear on the outside. She could live with that, because she didn’t want stupid crew. She wanted capable crew who understood that fear was a natural extension of the shitshow brought on by war with the Nyctus. “I belong in the chair, and you belong in yours. We’re professionals, and I expect some nerves at first while we shake off our…let’s call it uncertainties. If you’re nervous, good. Brave and dumb is no way to die out in space.”

There were more grins and a few laughs, some colored with the sound of relief. She had them now.

“To sum up, I’m on a short winning streak against the enemy. I intend to keep it going. But first and foremost, I want you all to understand a ship is nothing without its crew, and every task on a battleship is equally as important as the next. So I want you all to feel comfortable coming to me if you need anything. This is the part where I tell you my door is always open, but it’s not. On the rare occasions where I grab shuteye, I’m instructing Lt. Ellerby to have anyone who wakes me up flogged at the nearest opportunity. Lt. Ellerby, do we still flog people in this Navy?”

“I can arrange something, ma’am,” he said, grinning. The crew smiled at her now, following Kira as she completed her circuit of the bridge.

“Excellent. Only in egregious cases, of course, but we will have discipline. And coffee, and sleep when we can get it. Who’s in charge of the beans?” Kira asked.

“Ma’am, that would be me,” said a small wiry man, his hair tightly curled and nearly orange. “Petty Officer McMahon. I handle the roasting of coffee and other occasional tasks pertaining to the mess.”

“Outstanding. Are you the baker as well?” Kira asked.

“Ma’am?” McMahon looked confused.

“Do we have a baker on board?” Kira asked, surveying the room.

A hand went up, but with hesitation. “Ma’am, I, ah, baked a little?”

“Your name, please?” Kira asked. The woman was tall and painfully thin, but elegant. She had bronze skin and enormous dark eyes.

“Petty Officer Souza, ma’am.”

“Pleasure to meet you. As of now, you have a second job. Bread. We will eat well on this ship. I’ve arranged for certain supplies to be brought in—you’ll find them labeled and ready. We will have excellent coffee, even better bread, and we will never eat the same thing twice unless it’s spaghetti, because the sauce gets better over time. I will not fight those murderous squid on an empty stomach. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Souza said, with a broad, brilliant smile.

“If you add the orders stay alive and kill Nyctus, you now have my entire approach to command and battle. Are we clear?” Kira asked.

The entire bridge answered as one. “Aye, ma’am!”

Kira sat down, and the chair fit. “Helm. Per our course, kick it.”

* * *

Things went quiet after the Nyctus attack.

There was no evidence of enemy resurgence, so Thorn spent more time in training with Mol, learning what it meant to be Orbital Navy without magic.

“It sucks,” Thorn summed up.

Mol shrugged. “Not everyone gets to do things the easy way.”

“You think magic is easy?” Thorn asked, incredulous.

Mol gave a small shrug. She was pulling gloves on, waving Thorn into a combat mat. “Easier than this.”

Thorn stood, hands on his hips, head tilted in disbelief. “I think you’ve misunderstood…well, all of me.” He gave an expansive wave, then began pulling his own gloves on. He wore nothing on his feet, like Mol, although their practice gear was different. She opted for a single-piece robe in an ancient design. Thorn wore loose shorts, no shirt, and an expression of mild amusement.

“I’d adjust my attitude if I were you. I’m not just a stone-cold killer in the pilot’s chair. I’m a ground combat instructor,” Mol said, eyes flashing. She smiled, but it was chilly.

Thorn gave a small bow. The other crew were slowing down or falling silent. In the gym there were fifteen people training hard, but they all stopped to see what Thorn could do.

Or not do.

As a ’caster, he was of limited use after the battle. That meant he needed to be a supernova of skill in some other field, and the way Mol regarded him with a raised brow and half smile, it didn’t look like she found him threatening.

“Begin,” Mol said.

A second later, she was rolling to a stop, sucking wind and looking up at Thorn’s extended fist.

“Um,” she gasped.

“Um, indeed.” He pulled her to her feet and she waved him off. “The hell?”

“Try again?” Thorn asked. Now everyone was watching.

“Need a minute,” Mol said, pressing one hand to her ribs.

“I can go,” came a light, mellow voice. The speaker was a guy nearly Thorn’s height but heavier in build. He had a sleepy expression, but his movement radiated menace. He wore combat shorts, a faded blue shirt with Cyrillic lettering, and gloves. A trained fighter, at minimum. Also, a possible problem to most people in the gym, given their expressions of respect.

“Good,” Thorn said. “Stellers, Starcaster.”

“Voinich, Ground Forces. This is my gym.”

“I thought it belonged to the ON,” Thorn offered mildly.

“Not when I’m in it,” Voinich said in a tone so flat it seemed robotic.

“No broken bones, now,” Mol said.

“No promises,” Thorn answered.

Voinich narrowed his eyes but stayed calm. A seasoned pro. “Begin,” he said.

His left hand lashed out in a blur—

—to strike air. Thorn moved to the right and delivered a whistling punch to Voinich on the nape of his neck. As Thorn turned, he saw Voinich collapse, his eyes drifting around aimlessly.

Thorn knelt, checked the man’s pulse, then pushed everyone back. “Mol, did you think that being raised in a shithole collective home made me soft?”

Voinich groaned. “Friggin’ orphans. Always dirty as hell.”

“Not dirty. Creatively violent by necessity, is my preferred descriptor. Ready to stand?” Thorn asked Voinich, who shook his head.

“Guess I sort of forgot that part. Thought your, ah, magic was all you had,” Mol said by way of apology.

“It’s still with me. I didn’t use it, but it’ll never go away. It’s who I am, I think, no matter what command wants me to be,” Thorn said.

Voinich sat up, waving away the helping hands of other crew, who regarded Thorn with a mixture of respect and suspicion. “You gonna come fight it out with us as a boarding crew? Ground based? What now?”

“I don’t know. I’m a risk, maybe, and I won’t put anyone else in the line of fire because I leak psychic energy. This”—Thorn made fists— “is what I have for now.”

Mol smiled and then winced. “It’s good enough for now.” She glanced up at the chrono. “Time to go. Where you headed, Thorn?”

“Bridge, but not until I smell less like…” Thorn seemed to hunt for a word.

“A farm animal?” Mol offered, grinning.

Thorn inhaled and raised a finger. “No. It’s…victory.” He bowed and left, and even Voinich laughed.

* * *

Thorn reported to the command deck as usual and was greeted by the captain at the helm, his position dead center of a buzzing sea, filled with quiet, competent actions. The air was active but not desperate. The captain leaned over a comm, rubbing at his chin.

“Sir,” Thorn said, moving to the captain’s side.

Samuel stood, eyes flashing across the comm screen one last time, as if reluctant to leave—or believe—what he was seeing. “Interesting development here, Stellers.”

“I’ve learned that interesting is rarely good, sir.”

“Then you’re already a seasoned veteran,” Samuel said, pointing to the screens. “A battleship has been deployed to investigate a possible Nyctus command center.” The captain rubbed at his chin again, but this time it was even more absently, like a card tell, but revealing something more important than a mere hand of poker. There was danger, or at the minimum, a complication. Both were bad, especially given the ON record.

“Investigate with weapons or scans, sir? I find both can honor the intention of that order, if not the letter of it.”

Captain Samuel gave him a wintry smile. “Now I know you’re getting salty. They’re instructed to locate the target area, observe, and report. Nothing more drastic than data, although that’s a dicey proposition when the Nyctus are peeling open our, ah—well, we’re exposed in ways we hadn’t considered. This is riskier than I’d care to see.” Samuel swiped away the comm, then sent coordinates—very specific coordinates—to the helm.

“Observe and report doesn’t sound—oh. At what range, sir, if I may?” Thorn watched as the helm worked.

“They want the Lieutenant Commander of the ship to bypass the Nyctus defenses, deep scan the facility, and return with a detailed 3-D of the alien command post.” Samuel threw the Nyctus post image onto the panel for Thorn to review.

“Sir, forgive me for being obtuse, but…how?” Thorn shook his head. “Is this within our jurisdiction, sir?”

“I’m told the Lieutenant Commander is capable of telepathic shade—a female caster…Wiccum, Wixco…”

“Wixcombe.” Thorn’s breath caught, but he schooled his face into something close to neutral.

“That’s the one.” The captain dragged the image to display a direct route between the Apollo and the designated coordinates. “Yes, it’s within our jurisdiction, and yes, we’ll assist.”

“I thought the Admirals didn’t want any Starcasters wielding the craft?” Thorn’s confusion—and worry—were mounting with each passing second. This wasn’t just dangerous; it was a contradiction of the muddled policy anyone could see coming. The Admiralty was in a state of confusion about ’casters, their risk, and the reward that might come from using them in battle.

“This Wixcombe, you know her?” The captain gave Thorn a searching look. “She’s a Joiner. They’re assuming the Nyctus can’t track Joiners.”

“Assuming.” Thorn kept his hands loose, letting the rising tension drain away—or at least trying to. Even as a junior officer, he knew a bad call when he saw it. Punching through Nyctus defenses for something that amounted to a fishing expedition wasn’t just low reward. It was damned near suicidal, given the ON weakness to brainjacking by Nyctus shamans. “What if they’re assuming wrong?”

“My thoughts exactly, Stellers.” Samuel took his seat, lifting a battered coffee mug and taking a wincing sip.

“This could be provocation and a guaranteed loss, sir. And Lieutenant Commander Wixcombe’s ship could be taken prisoner without the Nyctus firing a rock.”

Samuel regarded him with a blank expression. “Both correct.” He fell silent as a means of inviting Thorn to continue.

“Have the Nyctus ever taken prisoners before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Thorn did his best not to betray any concern. “Who knows what they’ll do to them?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Let’s hope this Wixcombe is as good as they think she is.”

Thorn knew Kira and believed in her ability to make good decisions. But the Nyctus were another issue. “If I may, sir?” He looked toward the bow, and his quarters, as an ensign refilled Samuel’s mug. The captain was almost languid when he tilted his head toward the door, and Thorn was walking toward his bunk—and Kira—before realizing the captain had given him silent permission to contact her.

“Huh,” Thorn said to himself. Captain Samuel got a lot done without saying anything at all, sometimes. “Another lesson.” Everything was a lesson out here in the black.

He lay in his bed and pulled the book from beneath his pillow, then he set it on top of his chest. Best not to use the ’port unless it was strictly ordered. This would become the new ritual. If the Nyctus couldn’t trace Kira, they certainly couldn’t trace him either.

Or so he thought. It was a risk, but his power as a Starcaster was outside the aegis of anything humanity had ever used to fight a war. That meant his instincts were more honed to the reality of magic, tracking magic, and winning a war with power beyond natural science.

At least, that’s how he was going to play it. He drew his power to a point, seeking the shape of Kira’s mind. He didn’t look for long.

Lieutenant Commander, huh? Thorn’s smile colored his mental casting. You’ve earned it.

Thorn! You shouldn’t—this might not be safe. Not with your power. Her answer was almost instantaneous, the words clear.

How else do you expect me to reach you?

Oh, I don’t know, by comms so I can see your face like a normal human being. He could hear the comic frustration in her voice.

Not nearly as fun. This is better. And, I think, safer.

It’s not supposed to be fun. Laden with emotion, he caught her image. She was alone in her cabin, at the desk, meal tray before her.

Is that actual bread?

You can see me? She twitched, briefly disrupting the image. Like ripples in a pond, then, her face stabilized, though the cabin remained—unfocused. Does command know you can do this? She recovered quickly.

Can’t everyone? All the Starcasters, I mean?

Thorn, are you joking? This is—it’s next level. It’s unprecedented. This isn’t simply using magic. You’re spanning a distance with imagery. And it’s immediate, Kira said. You have to tell your captain, and then—

I will. Then what? he asked.

I’m wondering how we can use this. You heard about my next objective?

Yeah. It’s a shitstorm. Why can’t they use hardened drones and send the data to a relay? Even at the massive distance, and in a means not known to humans—or at least not widely known—Kira could hear his anger.

The Nyctus. The squiddies are capable of frying drones if they can see them, and we can’t risk getting nothing. So, we’re going in, and we need to scrape as much data as we can. Draw your own conclusions about what comes next, she said.

You’re on the way then, and without the help of any ’casters. What the hell is command thinking?

That we’re losing, Thorn. And we need a lucky card.

Bullshit to that. We have a lucky hand. We’ve got Starcasters, and command got spooked from one sneak attack on our minds. Billions have died, and we’re abandoning an entire division because the old guard can’t adapt? Thorn seethed.

I’m confident in my strength. You know that. But we don’t know what the Nyctus can and cannot trace, so we’re not going in without some magical cover. Shit, I can’t get used to saying that.

Magic?

Yeah. It’s real, and it lives in me—not like you, but it’s growing. It can be learned, Kira said.

True. How much cover can you provide? Can you shade the ship and keep the Nyctus at arm’s length, at least?

Yes.

Then what does your gut tell you about being tracked? Thorn asked.

My gut tells me that it has nothing to do with whether or not I’m a Joiner. I think they have a hard time identifying telepaths, and yes, command overreacted. She moved in his mind’s eye, then settled again, her eyes unfocused. He felt like a voyeur, but it didn’t trouble him. She knew they were connected, and the shape of her mind was a cool blue—colored with agreement, nervous energy, and even—

—she missed him. At least a little.

Does command grasp the concept of shade? Do they really get it? Thorn asked.

Maybe. A sigh echoed across the miles. Maybe not. They don’t seem to understand that you—and even me, and the Joiners—aren’t just battering rams. We can be subtle, too. That’s our advantage over the squid. We don’t need rocks.

Doesn’t mean I don’t want to drop a few on their heads. If they even have heads, Thorn said.

They do. Just soft. Might bounce off them, the bastards.

Thorn sent her the equivalent of a telepathic snort, earning a smile in his mind’s eye. Right. Forgot they’ve got—heads, if you want to call it that, they’re just so damned ugly I tried to block that particular memory. Regardless, travel safe, and Kira?

Yes?

The thing about shade is that you don’t have to be powerful. You just have to be constant. You understand? Thorn asked.

I do. Pace myself.

Good. I’m here if you need a boost. I think—wait. No. I know that things are going to change, in here, Thorn said.

Where?

In my—whatever this reservoir of power is. It’s not the same as it was a month ago, or even a week. I’m unfolding, Kira. I can feel it, and that means that I can try to reach you if your shade falters. Know that I’m here, though all the miles lie between us. Know that, and stay constant, Thorn said.

I do, and I will. We’re not done with magic yet, Thorn. Not now, and not ever. Until the war is done.

Thorn let the signal start to fade, like a long goodbye. Aye, commander. Thorn out.

17

“Stellers,” came a voice.

He awoke instantly; a longtime habit developed in the children’s home. Heavy sleepers didn’t fare well among the casual cruelty of displaced, angry youths.

“I’m here,” he said, then it clicked—the voice was Mol, and it was coming through the comm speaker in his cabin. “Go ahead.” He sat up, dislodging the sheet.

“Be at the launch deck in ten. I’ve got food for you. Complete silence on the way. Captain is waiting down here. Out.” Mol cut the comm, leaving Thorn with questions and an elevated heart rate. He glanced at the chrono floating on his comms screen. 02:59.

Nothing good happens at this hour.

He made it into the launch bay moments later, having spoken to no one. Wearing his coverall, he’d grabbed a go-bag, sidearm, and his talisman. Nothing more, nothing less. Even without trying, he sensed the roiling presence of danger in Mol’s thoughts, and beyond hers, a general fizz of worry percolating from—

—Captain Samuel.

Not good, Thorn mused, then stepped through the hatch into the yawning launch bay. Mol’s delta-winged Gyrfalcon streamed frigid gas from the fuel coupling as a crew disconnected the hoses, gave salutes and thumbs up, and began to recede, taking their tools and fueling tractor with them. The small, bright orange vehicle ran soundlessly away to its cubby, the driver backing in without averting his eyes from Thorn.

Guess they know it’s me. Now, let’s find out what the hell is going on, Thorn thought, but he said nothing, pulling up short of Captain Samuel, who didn’t look up from his comm tablet. With a grunt of disgust, Samuel swiped at the screen, then looked up, piercing Thorn with a stare.

“Wixcombe’s ship has been…brainjacked, we think. You’re going to go get it,” Samuel said without preamble.

To his credit, Thorn merely nodded. Scenarios—none of them good—flickered through his mind like a decaying video.

“Can we approach in stealth, sir?” Thorn asked.

“To some extent. Wyant’s a genius at subtlety, when she isn’t attacking headfirst. I’ve instructed her to mask the approach and survive, regardless of whether or not you get a…a psychic hit. Your orders are simple, Stellers. Find the Andraste and mark her course. We’ve got several ships missing. I tell you this because not all of command is in agreement about what to do with the Starcasters,” Samuel said.

“Sir, if I may ask about—” Thorn started to say.

“I’ve read your jacket in detail, Stellers. I know how you lost your family in the first bombardment, and I know what you’ve gone through. You deserve an answer, so here it is. You make me nervous because I can’t see what you do. You make me hopeful because nothing else is working in this godforsaken war, and every system we lose is millions of lives, or worse, because we can’t fall back forever. Earth awaits, and then after that, annihilation. This is my fourth decade in space, son, but it doesn’t mean I’m not willing to—” Samuel paused, thinking, then brightened. He nearly grinned. “I can learn. And I will. You’re simply new, but you’re one of us, and even if I don’t understand you, not fully, I trust you. Go find her ship, mark the course, and report immediately. We will go after the Andraste. You have my word.”

“Thank you, sir.” Thorn saluted, feeling the captain’s emotional chaos lessen, just enough to give him hope that the Starcasters had allies who wanted them to exist. To fight. And to win.

“We flying, or what?” Mol asked from the Gyrfalcon.

“We’re flying,” Thorn said, climbing up the handholds. In seconds, he was beside Mol, attaching his suit cable to the ship’s AI. He’d fly copilot, but mostly he knew what was needed.

His mind was to roam as they flew where Kira’s ship vanished, and if he could, let her know that help was on the way.

Mol saluted the captain, who stepped back as the towline pulled the Gyrfalcon into position. Without a pause, Mol said, “Launching Bloodhound One.”

The open bay beckoned, and with a silent pulse, massive magnets hurled the fighter into the black. Stars flared to life as Mol pulled the stick, banking hard away from the launch bay.

“Bloodhound One, you’re clear for main engine.”

“Thanks, Nest. Hound out,” Mol said, as the AI completed course data with a soft chime. “Here we go.”

The main engine spun up, and the stars went dark.

“Faster than the helos we used to train in,” Thorn said. The controls were nearly identical, but the capabilities were worlds apart. The Gyrfalcon had a railgun that could break ships, a forward laser array, and four missiles designed to punch through atmosphere for ground work, if needed. All in all, the sleek fighter was a heavy hitter, even at less than forty meters in length.

“We’re the limitation,” Mol said. “Even with our suits, there’s no way we can wind out the engine. We’d be pasted. That’s one area we can outrun the squid, anyway. They’re softbodies, and even with a hardened suit, they need to get us early if they’re going to get us at all. That’s why the bastards are so insistent on hammering planets with rocks. No chasing.”

“Never thought of that.” Thorn considered the implications. If the Nyctus couldn’t pull twelve G’s, then—

“Command already tried every trick to get the enemy to chase us. They won’t, unless they’ve got a trap set. But I like the way you’re thinking. Trixie, set the stick for auto and give me a weapons check. Then kill any extra electronics. We have a guest aboard, and he’ll be using a…ah, sensitive instrument to track the Andraste.”

“Done,” came the mellow female voice.

“Your ship’s named Trixie?” Thorn asked, grinning.

“She knows all the tricks, so....” Mol shrugged. “Saved my ass often enough. And for an AI, she doesn’t rob my combat systems of power. This design is only a year old.”

Thorn looked around. The cockpit was sleek, minimalist, and dark, lit only by the paired screens before them. There were two physical sticks, and little more to get in the way. “I like Trixie.”

“I like you too, Specialist Stellers,” Trixie said.

“Flirt. That’s enough. Oh, dispense two bulbs; coffee, sugar, stims in mine, no stim in Thorn’s,” Mol said.

“Done,” Trixie said. A side panel slid open, revealing two opaque bulbs of coffee. “Left side is for our guest.”

“Thanks,” Thorn said, pulling at the bulb. The coffee was hot, sweet, and strong.

“Mmm. Okay, time to make our first jump. On my command. Go,” Mol said.

Once again, the stars went dark, but this time there was a subtle purpling at the edge of his senses. The stars returned, and his vision cleared.

“We’ve covered.” Mol looked, then gave a small shrug. “All of the distance to their last known position, and then some. About three lights past it, actually.”

Thorn didn’t have to reach out—he sensed her. Kira.

“She’s here. What’s the closest system?” Thorn asked.

Trixie flashed an image on screen. “Red Nine,” she said. “Enemy held.”

“Not just enemy, but a major stronghold. That’s why the Andraste came out to take a sniff. There’s a Nyctus Spindle out here, filled with the sneaky bastards,” Mol spat.

“Spindle?” Thorn asked.

“Long station, lots of rings. We think they fill some with water, spin it up at different speeds to give the squid a place for—well, whatever the hell it is they do. We know it ain’t engineering, because they’re sitting on one big idea: throwing rocks. Other than that, the Spindles seem to be a locus for ship traffic and comms. Maybe even troop transfer points.” Mol squinted over at Thorn. “Hey, can you, uh, sense her? Wixcombe?”

“She’s here.”

“Need me to shut up?” Mol asked.

“Give me a moment, but yeah. That helps.” Thorn closed his eyes, reaching out to the bright point where Kira’s presence trailed away like a diminishing scent. Bloodhound is right, he thought.

Thorn? It was Kira—distant, troubled, a note of fear.

I’m here. Where are you?

Running like hell. We’re cooking off the engines and about to lose reactor containment. The Nyctus sent some kind of fast attack team. There are three of them, small, mean as hell, lots of rocks to throw. They’ve even got a front laser array, Kira said.

How soon before they close?

Twelve minutes, and they’ll have us bracketed. I’m running for the gravity well of a supermassive gas giant, but...

I can see you. Sit tight. And Kira, have your crew get away from the controls. Set everything on auto.

You sure?

Trust me. They do not want to get in the way of what I’m doing, Thorn said.

“Stellers, what the hell?” Mol asked. “You here?”

“I’m here. Permission to address Trixie?”

“Sure. Trixie, code ingress; Stellers, Thorn. Active now,” Mol said.

“Acknowledged. I’m listening, Specialist.”

“Mark that massive gas giant, and target a point just beyond it for our nav path. Max speed now, and then kill all external radiation,” Thorn said. He turned to Mol. “I’m going to punch through the Nyctus using their own weapons, and I don’t know if I can do it with background clutter.”

“Be my guest. Trixie, run silent,” Mol said.

“Quiet as a whore in church, ma’am,” Trixie said.

Thorn snorted, then drew his focus to a fine point, seeing the Nyctus ships. They were somewhere south of a corvette, but sleek, fast, and unscathed. Their reactors hummed with good health, and Thorn decided that was where he would start.

A Nyctus engineer stood in front of the control panels for a cooling tower that lay sideways, liquid helium coursing through the system. Thorn caressed the alien mind—felt its fear—and then nudged a…well, it wasn’t a hand. More like an appendage with nodules on the end, but it could punch a command prompt. Since Thorn couldn’t read Nyctus, he settled on a more inelegant solution. He brainjacked the Nyctus, made it smash its head against the screen, and then repeated the process until a viscous fluid leaked from torn, rubbery skin—

—And the screen was a pastiche of wildly dancing characters, all colored in beautiful crimson red.

Guess the Nyctus use red for danger, too, Thorn said.

And blue for normalized systems. What did you do? Kira asked.

You’ll see. Nyctus ship two seems to have developed a leak.

Looking in on the Nyctus engineer, Thorn watched in fascinated horror as the cooling tower began dumping liquid helium, which splashed, shattered, and destroyed everything it touched, including all three of the hapless engineers. The reactor began to whine—a high, mournful sound of dying animals, but captured by the vibrating ceramics of an engine that finally detonated in a spectacular flash of scalding light.

Splash one, Kira said. Did you—what did you do?

The same thing they did to your ship. Did you regain control?

We did. They ’jacked three crew, killed our comms, and sent us on a near fatal path into an asteroid field. We lost two people. The third might never—I don’t know if she’ll live. Or speak, even if she does, Kira said.

They can wipe us like hard drives, I think, Thorn said. Back to work. I’m finding ways in. They’re so used to being dominant, they’re sloppy. Okay, I’m in. The third ship is crewed by a…not sure what to call them, but I get an image of a higher skill level, like a master. I’m turning the second one if I can.

Thorn found his target in the main central passage of the second Nyctus ship—a younger mind, elastic, but still utterly alien. He got echoes of resentment at another crew member, this one taller, bulkier, prone to stern lectures in their curious, burbling language. The young Nyctus hated being spoken to like a...ah, that was the word. Swimmer. Thorn collected sonic memories of the taller Nyctus flashing its colors in anger, the cells changing from red to gray as fast as an eyeblink, all punctuated with the occasional liquid sounds.

You can always count on teenagers to be pissed at their parents, Thorn told Kira, then he reached deep into the young Nyctus and tried a simple, brute-force attack. He seized control of the arms and made the young alien reach out, open an airlock, and blow the entire atmosphere out in a blast of icy flakes. The inner bulkheads failed, and the water interior shattered outward, gutting the second ship, which began a reckless tumble as its crew died, exposed to hard vacuum and flying debris. Two down. The third is beyond me. We need a more traditional fight.

My weapons officer has twenty-six birds left, and we’ve got all sixty rounds in the railgun, Kira said. Our lasers are ready, too.

Flip your ship and begin braking hard against the gravity well of that gas giant. And send all your intel to us in a databurst, then send it to me as an image. I won’t let you die, Kira, but we can’t fail.

I…I know. Sending now. Do we open up on the Nyctus? This gas giant is going to crush us in less than four minutes if we don’t skip off the atmosphere.

“Trixie, quick and dirty, what’s the point of no return for Kira’s ship?” Thorn asked.

“Four minutes, twenty seconds, give or take,” the AI answered.

“Can she flip back in time to accelerate out?” Mol asked.

“No need. I can’t crack the third ship’s crew, and they’re too small for a sure kill as Kira’s heading down that well. Only one thing to do,” Thorn said, his lips pressed in a thin line. An incipient headache began, spreading across his temples. “Not the time—oh, shit.”

“What is it?” Mol asked. “Thorn—your nose—it’s bleeding.”

“Probe. The Nyctus aren’t waiting around for me to—” Thorn vomited explosively, head banging against the bulkhead as a spike of pain ripped his mind apart.

Thorn? Are you—Kira sent.

Thorn gripped the arms of his seat, knuckles white, hands twisted like claws. His back arched in a rictus of pain, and he kicked the floor in a spasmodic beat with one foot.

The bastard has me, he thought.

Thorn’s stomach clenched again, but there was nothing in his body to eject. He rolled forward, trying to relieve the pressure on his skull—

—and found a point. A location. A small patch of calm in the storm. You can’t reach me everywhere. I’m not like you, he told the Nyctus officer, but there was no answer-- only a new wave of hideous contortion in his mind, so Thorn leaned, shook, and found the place where the wind and waves couldn’t batter him—and he pushed back.

It was known in the ’casters that you were never more vulnerable than in the depths of a hard spell. Since telepathy and psychokinesis are the purest forms of magic, they were a crack in the armor that could not be avoided.

Sometimes clever is too clever. Let’s try cheating.

Thorn went on the offensive, seizing control of four Nyctus limbs, and forced the officer to methodically strangle himself. When the Nyctus realized what was happening, he stood, spitting water and saliva in a furious torrent—but Thorn merely pulled two tentacles away—one held a comms pad—and jammed them into the soft crown of its bulbous head, feeling the screen shatter into sharp debris. The pieces slashed deep, laying the alien open, but the tentacle did not stop, grinding down into the brain without mercy until the Nyctus spasmed once, then twice, and died.

Kira, railgun. Thirty rounds in staggered timing, Thorn said.

The Andraste’s main gun spoke, sending a furious volley up range at the Nyctus pursuit vessel. The first four rounds missed.

The fifth did not.

A bloom of light was all that remained of the Nyctus seconds later, and Thorn sensed Kira’s cathartic relief.

Turn and burn, Kira. You have twenty seconds to—

Already firing engines at max rate. It’s going to be tight. Lot of planet under us, Kira said.

A ping sounded in Trixie’s speakers. “We have the data package,” the AI intoned.

“Not good enough. I want the sender, too,” Thorn said.

He stood from his chair and reached toward the screen, where Kira’s ship struggled against the inexorable reality of physics. Sometimes, the universe wouldn’t lose, and nature was meant to be.

“Thorn, they’re going into a dive. I’m showing a reactor about to cook off,” Mol said, somber as a judge.

Can’t fight nature. But I’m not natural. I’m beyond that, Thorn raged, hands pressed against the black screen where a small, silver bar began slipping toward the globe of swirling orange, white, and blue. Kira.

We’re losing her, Thorn.

Kira, close your mind down.

What?

Do it. Now. Please.

I—okay. Kira’s tone was braided with panic and trust.

Thorn touched his talisman, reaching deep inside the well of power that flowed through his body, crashing and tumbling like a wild river. He didn’t need to move a ship. Not really. He needed to give it a nudge. A small one.

He pushed. Not up, but sideways. He envisioned the massive ship sliding along high clouds, the howling winds hungry, but denied their prize as the Andraste rolled, came about— engines thrumming as they neared their limits—

We’re gaining altitude. Reactor holding at 103%, falling now. 101.9. 101. Escape velocity now, at angled orbit. Thorn felt Kira’s nerves shatter with sickened relief. How?

I’ll explain in front of command. We’ve been doing it all wrong, Kira. You don’t have to push a ship. You convince it to move, just a little.

And if you do?

Well, in space, a nudge on a nudge on a nudge is—

Holy shit. Delta V without an engine, Kira said.

That’s what they did to us, Kira. Why we couldn’t find them. The Nyctus coasted to our worlds and dropped those damned rocks. All shamans, no engineers. No wonder we—I mean, no wonder we lost so many people. We never knew.

A pause, then Mol touched Thorn’s arm. “Sit down. I’ll help you clean up. We’re going home, and the Andraste is coming with us.”

Thorn fell back in his chair, spent. “Sounds—”

He was asleep, hands hanging limp, his body soaked with sweat.

“Follow us, if you please,” Trixie told Kira’s ship.

Below them, the gas giant whirled, then small sparks of light flared as the Nyctus ship debris hit atmosphere, and in a moment they were gone.

18

“Unpack data,” Captain Samuel told the ship’s AI. He stood in his cabin with Thorn, Kira, and a thin, dark man named Levitt, who wore the rank of commander with a natural ease. Levitt leaned against the desk, eyes focused in febrile intensity on the scrolling images from Kira’s flyby in Nyctus territory.

“A Spindle?” Levitt asked, his voice mellow, calm.

“That’s what it’s called, sir. Holds a high value for the Nyctus, judging by how hot things got when we broke for the clear,” Kira said.

Levitt merely grunted at that, watching as ship traffic poured in and around the Nyctus base. “Stop right there. Back up five seconds, freeze, isolate,” he told the AI. “Captain? Are you seeing what I am?”

Captain Samuel peered at the screen and nodded, slowly. “I’m no expert in Nyctus command structure—”

Levitt snorted at that. Nobody understood the Nyctus forces beyond a bare minimum. Their secrecy was a strength.

“—but a ship accompanied by six fighters and what looks to be a troop carrier? I’d say that’s a jump command post, up close and personal. There’s an admiral on board that Spindle, or whatever passes for one in the Nyctus Navy.”

“Concur,” Levitt said, and his voice took on an oddly formal tone. “Do you agree?” He fixed Kira with his dark eyes, waiting.

“I—well, I do, sir. At a bare minimum, it’s something high-value, and it confirms my suspicions about this Spindle. It’s not a simple relay, or a hot cot. I’d say we have a regional command,” Kira concluded.

“Agreed. Kick it upstairs, then. Take Stellers with you to Fleet Command,” Samuel said.

“Sir, um—” Kira began. Her hesitance was born of training. You didn’t walk into Fleet every day, and certainly not with intel that could change local history.

“You’ll be fine. They’re smart people who want to win. Tell them the truth, and answer everything they ask. And let Stellers run free with his thoughts—I know, it’s against every instinct you have, but do it. They need to know ’casters are useful, and that any victory is going to come by using magic as a hammer against the Nyctus.” He looked at the display again, where a Nyctus ship was imploding, courtesy of Thorn’s stunning power. “Leave within the hour. Dismissed.”

“Sir,” Kira said, saluting.

“One more item, Wixcombe.” Commander Levitt held up a hand, stopping her. “Did you feel like the Nyctus knew you were coming?”

She considered it, then shook her head. “No, sir. Not at all.”

Levitt smiled at Captain Samuel, who dipped his head in agreement. “Told you. That’s our second break, and believe me, we’re going to drive a fleet through that crack if they’ll let us.”

“Should I report on this, ah, break, sir? Or breaks, though I don’t know what the first one is,” Kira admitted.

“No need. I’ll send this along immediately via fleetnet. And as to the first break, that happened the moment Thorn Stellers was able to…to do what he does,” Commander Levitt said cryptically.

Kira knew not to go fishing for information, so she followed her instincts, saluted again, and spun on her heel. She needed her go-bag, Thorn, and time to think. The war wasn’t just around them. It was waiting in the future, and she knew her role would be right in the thick of it all.

* * *

Their transfer pilot was a dour ginger rockhopper named Argyle; his spacer’s tan ended just above his pale, red eyebrows, making him appear to be in a constant state of squinting. Raised on the big asteroids around Tau Ceti, he had long fingers and hands, and when he spoke, it was in the clipped accent of his home system.

Thorn said little, watching Argyle work the panel with near robotic efficiency, but then they launched, and the silence stretched, grew fat, and then grew odd.

Argyle began to hum, and it was so tuneless, it was an affront to their ears.

“You okay?” Thorn asked.

Argyle gave them a sly grin, then flicked his eyes at the screen. “Two minutes, nine seconds. A near record.”

“A record? For being out of tune?” Kira asked.

Argyle snorted. “Close. For tolerating me being incapable of being, um...melodious. At all. It’s a bet I make with myself, sort of as a way to make passengers feel comfortable.”

“You mean your singing is worse than the chair?” Thorn asked, looking pointedly at the hard seat he was in. “I slept in an oil reclamation field. This is worse.”

Argyle laughed, and Kira joined. “Older model shuttle, but don’t let her interior fool you. The seats might be utter shit, but the engines are flawless.”

Thorn’s face twitched as they finished their jump, and the stars shifted. “Good, because we’ve got company.”

“How did you—shit, two contacts—no, I make one, just a weird signal,” Argyle said, fingers flying over keys as he sent FleetNet a sitrep. The shuttle was ninety thousand klicks out from a hab wheel that dwarfed anything Thorn had ever seen; around it, silver points of light indicated a fighter defense that looked serious.

But they were too far away to help.

“One is better than two,” Thorn said, feeling a calm sweep through him, welcome and—it gave him courage. No, confidence. That was the term. “Confidence,” he said.

“What?” Kira asked. “Bad time for affirmations, Thorn. Gotta fight.”

“I am,” Thorn said.

Argyle looked askance at them both, wrestling the stick to no avail. “I need time to launch missiles on a longer arc. Can’t get at that ship from directly behind us; it’ll sidestep and we’re screwed.”

The shuttle was fast, but it maneuvered like a brick. The Nyctus ship was closing at a stunning velocity. Whoever the pilot was, they’d picked the right vector. They would have a firing solution on the shuttle in less than ten seconds, far too distant to use the ON ships as active partners in the small shootout.

“Thorn?” Kira asked him, but her voice was miles away. He was falling inward, letting the howl of stars fill his mind as he looked, touched, and sensed everything about the Nyctus pilot—

—and there she was.

Scared. Angry. Seasoned.

She was a veteran, and her quiet rage at being sent on the hunt alone percolated through her thoughts, poisonous and ripe to use. Thorn felt—then saw—a long series of shells—no, combat medals. She was decorated.

He reached in and bent her will to him. So many kills. So long an ink trail, dark with your success. How bright your lights flash in the waves, striking fear in the hearts of the landwalkers. This is beneath you.

Yes! It i—the Nyctus pilot began to agree, then clipped her thoughts with a blast of willpower so hard it felt like Thorn had struck steel, face first.

All that space. Open. Like the waves, where you belong, Thorn said.

Psychic laughter, then a wave of hate. Clever. Not clever enough. My—a word, not translated, but an image of a flaming rock—seeks you even now. The beauty of my math is beyond your understanding.

Try me, waverider. You may be surprised at what I know.

There is no place for your kind among the stars, human. You are as children, without purpose of path. Beaching yourselves on the reality of galactic power. I will—what is this?

Thorn turned an eye to Argyle, who grinned. “Birds away. Glad you kept it talking.”

Those are called missiles. Harlequins, to be exact. Heluva pop. Goodbye. You will never taste the waves again, Thorn said, as the missiles stuck home, and the Nyctus ship was reduced to cooling gases in a cloud.

And then the cloud was gone, too.

“Shuttle, nice shooting. Didn’t see the squiddies in this close. They follow you?” came a voice on the comm.

“One did. Not for long. I’ve got the ’casters aboard. Permission to approach?” Argyle asked.

“Granted, and we’ll fly you in. Welcome to Fleet, Starcasters.”

“Glad to be here,” Kira said. “Even more glad Stellers is here.”

“I’ll bet. Follow along, kids. We land in two minutes,” the pilot said. “I’m Torval, by the way. That’s Kuprinov over there, flying like she’s on vacation.”

Kuprinov told Torval where he could stick her foot, but nicely.

“Thanks for the company. Shuttle out,” Argyle said, smiling. “Fun group.”

“Let’s see how fun they are after we dump our reports,” Kira muttered, but then Fleet got closer, Argyle got busy, and Thorn looked like he wanted to sleep, the lucky bastard.

Sometimes, Kira hated being senior to him. Like now.

* * *

“Stellers, I can’t help but notice that you’re a bit confused as to what’s happening,” Admiral Maynard said in a slow, matronly drawl. She fit her voice. Whatever Thorn had been expecting, she wasn’t it. Short, slightly plump, and with the air of a grandmother, her bright green eyes and silver hair were offset with freckles, a warm smile, and a calm demeanor. She wore little insignia on her uniform, and carried nothing but a battered green notebook with an actual ink pen clipped to the cover.

“Yes, ma’am,” Thorn answered.

They were walking along the second ring, alone, and Thorn got the feeling that was by design. Every other area at Fleet had been a hive of activity. Here, there was nothing except the stunning view—the entire wall was clear and looked out over the streams of naval traffic. Every few meters, a small fruit tree or flowering bush grew, mounted to the wall in a bulbous pot. The air smelled more alive than anything Thorn had experienced onboard a ship, and after a moment of walking, Thorn felt himself relax.

“Yes, it’s designed to make you comfortable. I’m an admiral, not an interrogator, though some of my colleagues are both. I prefer more archaic methods of planning,” Maynard said. If she was faking the whole grandma persona, it was damned good. An air of calm surrounded her, even when she lifted the green notebook and showed it to Thorn. “I’m told you have one of these.”

Thorn was confused, but only for an instant. “Ah, yes, ma’am.” He pulled his talisman and handed it to her. “I didn’t realize you were—”

“An officer cursed with some magical ability? Yes, I am—have been since well before such things were accepted as real. I’m more than twice your age, and I remember a time when magicians were regarded as hustlers. Or worse.”

She took the talisman, feeling its heft. “A lot of power here. And in you,” she said. “Where did it come from?” She held the book out to him.

Thorn took it and tucked it away, then he followed as the admiral began walking again. Outside, a small warship flashed three coded lights and burned away at maximum acceleration, only to be replaced by two more identical craft. Fleet was busy.

“Cotswolds. My home. Or, it was, ma’am.”

“And the book came from?”

“The crater of my home, ma’am. It was the…the only thing I could save. Ma’am,” Thorn said.

A long pause ensued, then the admiral stopped and waved at a larger ship out in the black, its running lights blinking blue. “Fueling. But what they don’t know is, there’s not enough fuel in the universe to do what we need.”

“I respectfully disagree, ma’am,” Thorn offered.

She lifted a brow, but her face remained—amused. “Please, explain.”

Thorn said nothing but turned and faced the ship, now a klick away, stationary. It was a missile frigate of newer design, some two hundred meters in length. Thorn stared hard at the trio of fueling lights, their constant blue glare pointed slightly away, toward the star.

The lights turned green, then red. Then one turned blue, and two remained green. Then they all went dark for a short interval, before returning to their calm, steady blue.

Admiral Maynard stood utterly still, watching Thorn.

“Ma’am, if you’ll watch the ship?” he said, sounding distracted.

“I will.”

Thorn leaned toward the clear wall until his forehead touched, hands limp at his sides. His face was devoid of any expression, save a small furrowing of his brow, but that faded as something began to tickle at Admiral Maynard’s awareness.

The ship moved. One meter toward them.

Then it moved back.

Thorn broke his concentration with an apologetic grin. “We don’t need fuel, ma’am. We need people like me. And we need a lot of things to throw at the Nyctus.”

Maynard let a breath hiss from her nose, eyes bright with a pastiche of fugitive emotions. “Sweet merciful—I wish he could be here to see this.”

“Who, ma’am?”

“Einstein. Albert. An old scientist. He would have loved this, I think,” she said, grinning broadly. “He knew the universe was wild and unknown, and this would—well, it confirms that no one knows everything. Or even anything, really. When did you learn that you could manipulate large objects?”

“When I was getting Kira—excuse me, Lieutenant Commander Kira Wixcombe—her ship was being chased and brainjacked, and I sort of, ah, ended that operation by the Nyctus,” Thorn said.

Admiral Maynard regarded her right hand, where a thick white scar crossed the entire back and thumb. “My own present from the Nyctus. Shrapnel from a magtrain engine. We were hit bringing in ore from the Lookout Mountains on Antioch. I was one of three survivors.”

“On the train, ma’am?”

She gave a small, sad shake of her head. “Antioch. My children died there, frozen in an icy crater. We never went back to mine there again. Too many ghosts. And bones.” She sighed, then squared on Thorn, her jaw set. “Until now, we’ve been thinking in big terms. Huge fleets. Massive set battles over systems with dozens of worlds. An entire press, front to front, and we’ve been losing. We’ve given up nearly two hundred light years’ worth of breathing room, and all it’s gotten us is more empty hulls and a lot of death notices to sailors who aren’t coming back.”

“How do I fit in, ma’am? I’ll do anything you ask. I’m not scared of dying. I was more or less dead for a long time.”

“We’ve all felt like that. I’ll tell you a secret, Thorn, although admirals aren’t supposed to have feelings. I ache for my children. For my husband. My home. I have since the day it happened, and I know you understand. That’s why we’re here, discussing this. Because you’re going to fight a kind of war—for now—that goes against everything we’ve tried to this point. Where we went big, and failed, we will now go small in hopes of two things,” she said.

“I’ll do my best, ma’am.”

“I know you will, because I asked you, and because you want the same thing we do. The two things that I want to see are a victory and fear.” The Admiral angled her head to look up at Thorn. “Do you understand?”

“I do, ma’am, because I felt it. Victory makes sense because, well, we want to win. But fear—that, I get. You want the Nyctus to lay awake, looking at the skies and wondering if this is the night the fire comes down.”

“Exactly. Let them die inside every time something streaks across the sky. Let them stew in their fear until it gnaws them to a husk and their officers start making mistakes. Weaken the root, and the tree falls. That’s what we’re going to do, and you’re the axe. You leave with Wyant and Wixcombe in four hours, and you’re not going to attack the Nyctus command post.”

“I’m not? Uh, ma’am?” Thorn said. He was in new territory, but a thrill began seeping through his bones at the prospect of a real fight. And real victory.

“No.” Maynard pointed lazily toward a red star that was pulsing with fiery light. “There. No planets, no main bases, but something a lot more…personal.”

Thorn stared, trying to recall the star’s name, but failing. He grunted, a wicked grin creeping onto his face. In that moment, he was far gone from the uncertain officer who’d stepped into the long corridor with a friendly admiral. “Family.”

“Yes. In a manner of speaking. The Nyctus are highly structured in their family groups, and fiercely dependent on their own history. There’s a…repository, of memories, tended by young Nyctus officers who are being trained to remember.”

“Indoctrinated, ma’am. That’s the word I would use,” Thorn said, with respect.

“A far better word. We think some three dozen elite Nyctus families have their best and brightest there, sort of a finishing school for a race who are convinced that killing thirty billion humans is their birthright. I want you to crack the station open, spill them into hard vacuum, and film it. Can you do that for me, Lieutenant Stellers? Can you do it as a first step?”

Thorn turned and saluted. “I can, and I will, ma’am.”

Admiral Maynard stared up at him and smiled. “What are your thoughts right now, in one word, Lieutenant?”

Thorn didn’t hesitate. “Finally.”

19

“Three jumps, three attacks, and hopefully, making the squiddies ink in their pants,” Mol said.

“If they wear pants,” Kira added.

“Just get me in front of them,” Thorn said.

He was a different man than he’d been days earlier. After seeing the hope—real, open hope—in Admiral Maynard’s eyes, Thorn understood that he wasn’t just an expensive tool to be thrown into the Nyctus war plans.

In reality, Thorn was the best, last chance humanity had to push back, and the weight of it sat easily on his shoulders. If they could succeed, then the war moved on. If he failed, Thorn likely wouldn’t be around to see it all come apart.

“We’re an hour out from the…I think it translates as End Lesson, but that might be a bit shaky,” Mol said, reading a datastream Trixie was scrolling up for them as final prep.

“The translation is solid to nine of ten, Mol,” Trixie said.

“Why not just say ninety percent? Or ninetieth percentile?” Thorn asked.

“She’s going through this dialect thing. Caught her playing old earth videos from something called the Victorian Era, and she’s been insufferable ever since,” Mol said, rolling her eyes.

“M’lady,” Trixie intoned, “my reactor is optimal. Ready for turndown in three—two—one—we’re silent and cold. Per your instructions, I’m cutting all radiation.”

Kira snorted, then tipped an imaginary cap. She’d seen the vids as well.

“Thanks, luv,” Mol said. “You’re up, Thorn. We’re coasting in at thirty percent of light, but I’ll use the snowflake drive to slow us and cut toward the target.”

The snowflake drive was a gas jet used as an attitude rocket; it left sparkling debris behind in the form of frozen gases that dissipated almost immediately. It was the quietest method for sneaking up on something in space, unless you could be both stealthed and free of acceleration.

“Mind if I add something to our arrival?” Thorn asked Mol. Kira gave him a sharp look, then it turned curious. As a Joiner, she understood something of his power, but Thorn was growing beyond the man who’d arrived at boot camp covered in muck and anger. He pushed a blond lock away, focusing his eyes in the middle distance. Without asking for further permission, Thorn closed his eyes and waved his left hand in a dreamlike pass through the air before him.

Outside, the stars vanished.

“Holy shit,” Mol whispered.

“Yeah, that,” Kira added.

Thorn opened his gray eyes, face nearly devoid of emotion. “Knock, knock.”

The stars fuzzed back into existence, and a bright point began to grow between the local star and their viewscreen.

“Thorn, what did you do?” Kira asked.

“I wove a shadow around us, and then made it—I made it one-way. Now they’ll see nothing, at least nothing until it’s too late. Just like it was for us, back home,” Thorn said, his tone savage.

“For all of us,” Mol added.

The Nyctus base drew closer, and as it did, the design began to grow more complex with each passing second. It was no mere space station. It was a globe, with something in the middle—something reflective.

“An ocean. Or a pond. They brought something from home with them,” Thorn said.

The silvery globule moved about in a perfect sphere of clear material; it was divided by long, opaque corridors that ended in habitats. At the northern pole of the station, a wide-mouthed launch bay was filled by ships, none of them in motion.

“Caught them sleeping,” Kira said.

Thorn shook his head gently. “Not sleeping. Singing.”

“You can…you can hear them? At this range?” Mol asked. Her eyes widened with a hint of fear at Thorn’s ability, revealed in his casual statement. The Nyctus base was nearly sixty thousand klicks away, but somehow he was listening to them. It was voyeuristic and powerful all at once, and Mol wasn’t sure how that made her feel.

But then, the squid hadn’t cared about how humans felt as the fire came down. They just kept dropping rocks.

“What will you do?” Kira asked.

Thorn made a gesture asking for quiet, then pointed closer to the station. “Can we bend in, fifteen degrees? I need us to pass by up close and personal.”

“Why?” Mol asked.

“Is it safe?” Kira asked, peering at the display.

“It is,” Trixie said.

“Okay, change course, Trixie,” Mol said. “Follow Thorn’s call.”

“Done,” Trixie reported. “We’ll pass by close enough to see their faces. Or whatever they’re called.”

“Good,” Thorn said, then closed his eyes again, but this time he stood, leaning forward on his toes. His eyes flickered under the lids, busy at something only he could know. Sweat began to bead on his forehead, lips twitching as if he held back a song too terrible to speak aloud.

Trixie’s hull began to sing.

It was a deep, bass note, slowly building until Mol and Kira felt it rattling in their teeth, but they said nothing, nor did Trixie. Thorn leaned further into his pose, lifting a hand, then both, and then drawing his fingers together into fists so savage his knuckles cracked like gunshots.

To their right, the Nyctus globe began to wobble. Warning lights flared to life along the exterior supports, and the ships—once dark and still—began to pulse with navigation beacons, red and white, then a constant flashing red.

The Nyctus sprang to life at the unseen and unmeasurable attack.

Too late.

Kira dropped to one knee, hands flying to her head from a pain so brutal she thought the Nyctus were ’jacking her. But she was wrong. It was a side effect of Thorn’s blunt force assault on every Nyctus mind, along with something else. He was attacking the globe itself, twisting two small ports apart to reveal a gap. It was a small hole, as holes went—a half meter across, but in space that was more than enough to let hard vacuum pull the water out and beyond its glassine corral.

Einstein isn’t here to see it, but then he might not want to, Thorn mused.

The globe shattered, and Nyctus began to howl into the void, their psychic screams filling Thorn’s mind with savage delights.

“Thorn—what the hell…they’re—” Kira said, voice trailing away in shocked horror.

“Exploding. They’re, um, freezing and exploding?” Mol said, asking no one and everyone.

“Explosive decompression is unusual in certain situations, but it would appear that the Starcaster has chosen a decisive means to finish this objective,” Trixie said. It was the most officious tone she’s ever used, and Mol turned to regard the console with suspicion. “Trixie, what’s going on?” She cut her eyes at Thorn, who began to relax as the concentration drained away from his body.

“This is the first true victory I have seen. I find that unusual,” Trixie said.

“So do I,” Mol said, watching as the Nyctus shattered, one after another, their bodies mixed into the maelstrom of outgassing and hard debris. The globe was no more. The entire station was—pieces. A swirling cloud of components, glittering in the light of a star that had been—until moments earlier—a safe place for the next generation of Nyctus conquerors.

Thorn’s eyes opened, slowly. He surveyed his work, face neutral. “It worked.”

“What kind of magic?” Kira asked.

“All of them, I think. I’m not sure I know the term, but I could feel the water, and their presence. I could have ’jacked one of them, or maybe more. They were too…complacent. They felt safe,” Thorn said.

“Trixie, any outgoing comms? We need to know if they got off a message,” Mol said.

“None detected. Should I jump to the next objective?” Trixie asked.

“Yes. The squids will find out about this soon enough, and it’ll go through their fleet like wildfire. That’s what we wanted, but I’d rather not be here when the cavalry arrives,” Mol said. “Ready, Thorn? Kira?”

Kira merely nodded. Thorn sat down, fingers drumming on the arm of his seat, then gave a slow nod of his own.

“Trixie, let’s go. Next stop, The Keels,” Mol said.

The stars turned to a smear of light, then went out, and the dead Nyctus were only a memory, left far behind.

* * *

Trixie held them in a stable point some seven hundred million klicks out from a blue-white star that bathed the system in hot light. The ship was pointed inward toward a small, barren world with no atmosphere, deep dust, and scores of canyons filled with hard black shadows.

As Mol fired the engine, their scanners were able to detect what waited at the location known simply as The Keels. On the opposite side of the planet, a dozen or more ships floated in various states of completion, some little more than hard shells. The largest ship under construction was a carrier, its massive keel nearly a thousand meters long. Three tugs nudged the engine system into place, and when it was positioned, Trixie’s long-range scope showed dozens of robotic fabrication units working furiously to attach everything before microgravity could push them apart. Bright lights flared, white hot, and then the scope moved on to a smaller ship nearing completion.

“Is that a frigate? Looks too big, but I don’t know,” Kira said.

“Gotta be three hundred meters or more. Cruiser?” Mol asked.

Two lines of ejection ports ran along the ship’s entire length—the Nyctus could launch dozens of KEW’s at once with the design, both in space or high orbit. That kind of massed fire could take out any ship in the ON, as well as flatten a city of medium size.

“They’re not changing tactics. Just more of the same,” Thorn said with disgust. “Consistent that way.”

“How do they carry so many…I guess, rocks? Is that it? Just rocks?” Mol asked.

“I see a laser array, and maybe missile ports at the bow, but there’s no reason for the Nyctus to change. Think about it. As far as they’re concerned, the war is almost over. It’s a matter of time for them,” Kira said.

“Not anymore,” Thorn said. “Same plan as before, but I’m going to use the ships themselves as weapons. They’ve got a delicate balance going on with so much mass attached to that pier.”

“Think you can do this and make it look like an accident?” Kira asked.

“That would be a hell of an advantage,” Mol added.

Thorn rubbed his jaw, head tilted as he considered the ships. Tiny dots flitted about—workers, robots, maybe both—and there was a general busy feel in the image. “Maybe we will try that. I mean, I will. What if—never mind, I think I know what I want to do. Or at least try.”

“Tell me,” Kira said, putting a hand on Thorn’s arm. His eyes were unfocused again as he worked through scenarios that used magic to create chaos among the Nyctus.

“Hard propellant in the thrusters, I think. This calls for Scorch as a discipline,” Thorn said.

“Ah,” Kira said.

“Ah?” Mol asked. “Ah what?”

“Fire is bad. Fire inside a rocket is even worse. Those transfer units look like they’ve got a lot of mass—maybe a ton or more. Instead of being subtle, I’m going to be, ah…” Thorn said, then waved vaguely.

“Make something go boom at high speeds?” Trixie offered helpfully.

“Yes. Just like that. Thanks, Trixie. I knew you would understand,” Thorn said.

“What do you need?” Kira asked Thorn. She continued to survey the screen, making estimates of the Nyctus firepower. The number of ships meant that if Thorn could, taking this system out would leave a hole in the enemy offensive capability.

And less offense meant less defense.

“Yes, it is,” Thorn said.

“Did you read my mind? Without permission?” Kira asked him, but she was only mildly irritated.

“Didn’t have to. If this works, then, yeah—whatever is behind this place becomes a target. We have a way into Nyctus space, once I—well, let me work. And if anything goes wrong, Mol needs to save Trixie,” Thorn said.

“Told you he was sweet on me,” Trixie chirped.

“Easy, tramp. He’s thinking about all of the data and intel you’re collecting,” Mol said.

“Whatever.” Trixie sniffed. “But, yes. I’ll send it ahead in a databurst just in case.”

“Good,” Kira added. “Thorn, do you need quiet?”

He nodded, then held up a finger. “Actually, can I try something different?”

“Sure. I’m just your ride for this, but we’d better do it fast. We won’t be unseen for long,” Mol said.

“I’m going outside,” Thorn said.

“What? Why?” Kira asked, alarmed.

“Just a hunch. Let me suit up and hover about…say, no more than fifty meters away. Then have Trixie go quiet. Okay?” Thorn said.

Mol shrugged. “It’s all new to me, but sure. Suits are behind you. Yours is number three.”

“Thanks,” Thorn said, standing and stepping away to the locker where suits were held. He stripped to the waist, revealing his hard, angular frame, dotted with small scars from years of living as a refugee in his own world. In a moment, he was clad in the black suit and helmet, his faceplate a perfect silver mirror. Thorn was gone, replaced with a shape, a suggestion—the only unique part of him was the bulge where his talisman rested in a chest pocket.

He stepped through the lock, only his breathing making a sound on the comms, and when Trixie cycled the opening closed, Mol and Kira held their collective breath until he appeared, hovering in front of the ship like a wraith.

“Quiet now, please,” Thorn said.

Trixie followed Mol’s keyed command, and the ship went dark. Beyond, the Keels were fizzing with activity as the Nyctus went on about the business of war, unaware of Thorn’s presence as he swept his gaze over them—

—and found his target.

The Nyctus engineer flew slowly along the carrier’s length, about ten meters away from the outer hull, using a simple harness and suit. There was a canister of solid fuel, long with an unexpected bonus—two large batteries for a welding unit. The torch hung at the Nyctus’ belt, unused, as the alien went slowly along, examining the long connection of two massive hull plates.

There.

Two columns. Two tanks. Sixty kilos of compressed propellant in search of a spark.

I can be a spark.

Thorn reached out, his consciousness wandering, righting itself, and becoming something more than a formless presence. He drew focus on the tanks and connected to them through a line so clear and bright it was more real than the local star, pulsing hot white in the distance. He let the magic break free—out of control, away from his guiding hand, and the small, diamond-bright point of Scorch magic ignited the fuel in one tank, and then the second.

Both of the Nyctus’ hearts spiked with panic as it began to accelerate away from the Keels at high speed. A covered tentacle reached for the control pad, but Thorn was there, guiding the alien digits away with a surprisingly gentle intrusion.

Out, away, and then back, Thorn said to the Nyctus, drawing a mental image of a long arc that would result in terrific velocity at the end. Despite Thorn planning a burn of nearly sixty seconds, there would be over half of the fuel left in both tanks—turning the Nyctus into a flying bomb going more than two hundred meters per second. Between the gear, and the tanks, and the delta-V, wherever the Nytcus hit would be vaporized.

That meant Thorn had to select the target carefully. So he did, nudging the Nytcus’ control digit to fly directly at the massive engines just installed on the carrier. With thousands of tons of fuel and other incendiaries, the result would be spectacular.

The Nyctus fought Thorn, to no avail. Images of a watery home with curling ramps that ended above the surface filled Thorn’s mind, followed by a series of flickering, panicked thoughts—the stars above the same home. A collection of carved shells, their surfaces pearlescent and dancing with natural luminescence—then a human spacesuit, the legs torn off. The suit was spread out like a trophy and whatever reservations Thorn had about cold-blooded murder vanished in a puff of exhaust as the second tank ignited fully. In the brainjacked Nyctus vision, the Keels shifted from an orderly series of ships. At the growing velocity, each hull became part of a silvery forest, drawing closer with each second as the relentless chemical burn went on.

Gonna be going even faster than I thought, Thorn mused.

The Nyctus began a silent howl of agonized frustration, knowing it—he—had been ’jacked, and by a human, no less. Thorn switched views for a moment, experiencing the last seconds of flight before jumping away, back to the safety of his own sight.

The engineer struck dead center of the engine assembly, and it was followed by an incandescent white light as the carrier vanished into molten debris. The explosion raced along the Keels like wildfire, smashing each ship into splinters or slag. The last keel shattered into three main parts, each section tumbling away as they crushed Nyctus engineers with their runaway mass. The central anchor point separated as well, and the entire storm of metal and Nyctus corpses continued to deteriorate in a series of small flashes.

“Thorn?” Mol asked in a small voice.

“Yes?” he answered, not looking away.

“Are you…okay?” Mol reached out as if she could reach him, then drew back.

He focused on her, his gray eyes inscrutable. Then his lips curled, and whatever demon had been inside him took leave. Thorn came back, but Kira and Mol were forever changed.

“I’ll be alright,” he said. Cracking his back, he then turned his head to and fro, loosening the muscle gone rigid with concentration. “I knew revenge would come with a price. It always does.”

“Where did you learn that?” Kira asked him, one eye on the cloud of Nyctus debris.

Thorn’s answer was soft. “Nowhere. I taught myself. Just now.”

20

Stellers?

Um…yes? Ma’am, I mean?

The voice was unknown to him, but it was human, female, and powerful. A Starcaster at minimum, and not a Joiner.

I’m relaying your change in orders, per Admiral Maynard. She asks that you consider them carefully, because the target has changed. Instead of destroying something, we want you to seize it.

Ma’am? Brainjacking? And, no disrespect, but how do I know Admiral Maynard is even involved in this?

He heard ghostly laughter, then a pause. She told me to be ready for that question, and her answer is this: if you don’t finish this mission, but you somehow survive, she’ll slap you silly with her green notebook. Twice, if necessary.

Thorn laughed richly, imagining Admiral Maynard reaching up to bop him with the notebook. Copy that, ma’am. What’s my mission?

Read these coordinates in Lyra, and commit them to memory. There’s a ship underway at low speeds for now. You will intercept, take control, and bring the ship with you by way of a jump. You’ll likely be followed, the woman said.

Ma’am? Won’t that defeat the purpose of ’jacking the ship?

Ordinarily, yes. But we’ll be waiting. More specifically, the entire fifth fleet will be waiting to turn the Nyctus chasers into scrap. They won’t have a chance, and for once, we’ll be the hunters. Your job is to keep that ship in one piece, along with the crew.

The…the crew? Ma’am? I’ve never ’jacked more than one squid at a time. Not sure I can—

It’s a tug run, with less than two dozen crew. You don’t have to control them all. You only have to control the bridge. If you must, eliminate any Nyctus who try to scuttle the ship, or redirect outside our cone of control. Understood?

Yes, ma’am. But, one thing—Thorn twitched as an image came to his mind, free of static or distortion.

It was a ship unlike anything he’d ever seen. Five rows of thirty gunports, what could only be masers of a power an order beyond human technological ability.

You understand, then. Those guns—and that maser—will remove all doubt in any battle. We grab this boat, we save years of research. We miss, and we’re back to nipping at their heels. Can you do it, Stellers?

Thorn paused, but not because he was uncertain. It was quite the opposite. He knew he could.

Yes, ma’am. I can.

Good. See you at the debriefing.

You won’t be there? At the handover? Thorn didn’t even know who she was, but it still seemed worth asking.

I will, but you won’t notice me. I’m always just under the radar. Godspeed, Stellers. Fleet out.

* * *

“And we’re supposed to steal a whole ship?” Kira asked, voice oozing disbelief.

“Well, not the whole thing. Just the—well, yes. The whole thing, but it’s a small crew, and they’re on a maintenance run, I think.” Thorn spread his hands in surrender.

Mol looked at him as if he’d been struck in the head. “You want Trixie to take us to a point in the galaxy where we’re going to lurk, like some ancient train robbers?”

“I like their style, and yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Thorn said.

“Jump is plotted,” Trixie said. “Ready?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Mol protested, but the stars vanished in a lurch, replaced by a new view. Lyra, and dead in the middle of it, too.

“You treacherous little—”

“Admiral Maynard’s orders, Mol. Sorry,” Trixie interrupted. “Oh, and here comes your ship, by the way. Might want to get ready. There are several escort ships alongside our target, and they don’t look friendly.”

Kira looked stricken. “What the hell is that?”

Thorn glanced at the data, then Trixie made the image sharper. “It’s the last ship they’ll ever need, if we don’t grab it.”

“Are those masers? The size of a corvette?” Kira asked. The maser assembly was eight meters across, at minimum.

“Yes. And that’s why I need to—shit, Trixie, kill the noise. They’re probing me,” Thorn snapped.

“Quiet ship now. All yours,” Trixie said. Kira and Mol fell into a tense silence as Thorn shook out his hands and reached across the distance, unsure of what to expect.

Before the command screen stood a pair of Nyctus, speaking about the engines, the ship, and their general boredom with the entire process. The female was slightly younger, and it was her mind probing around out of a general curiosity. Thorn resisted her intrusion, seized one tentacle, and drew her weapon—a wicked looking curved blade, clearly with some traditional design in mind.

Under Thorn’s control, she slashed the other Nyctus pilot across his bulbous head, laying the soft tissue open in hideous spray of clear fluid that quickly turned inky black. The Nyctus officer fell with a wet gurgle, then the bridge erupted in chaos.

Thorn directed the brainjacked pilot to do one thing only: jump her ship to a point just inside the local star’s gravity well. She obeyed and punched the coordinates on her alien screen just before another Nyctus fired its sidearm at her, shearing her hearts into tattered debris.

“And…jump,” Thorn told Trixie.

The stars didn’t move so much as they twitched. Trixie only shifted some eight hundred thousand klicks, and when they burst into position, they weren’t alone. The Nyctus ship was alongside, mere kilometers away. In front of them, the might of the fifth fleet spread out, guns at the ready as three Nyctus cruisers gave chase, emerging with their KEW ports open and laser arrays in firing position.

“We can’t duck, can we?” Kira asked.

“Be nice if we could,” Mol said. Behind them, the fleet opened up, and she took a second to marvel at how exquisite a space battle could be when you weren’t the one getting shot at. Flickering beams and streaking missiles raced away from the fleet, pouring hatred onto the three Nyctus cruisers, which tried desperately to break formation in order to fight on.

For the Nyctus, they had everything but time.

The lead ship vanished when six missiles hammered into its bow, tearing deep into the ship even as it accelerated into the salvo.

“Splash one,” Thorn said, keeping a mental tab on the chaos aboard his target ship. Every time a Nyctus approached the controls, he ’jacked another and attacked. Under his tutelage, the Nyctus bridge was an ongoing civil war with no winners.

“And two,” Kira said, as the second chase ship warped, split, and detonated in a searing light. “Damn fine shooting.”

“They’ve got a ’caster onboard. She gave the missiles a nudge,” Thorn said.

“Glad to hear it. Have they—whoa, what the hell—” Kira spat.

The third ship broke at an impossible speed, making for the Nyctus ship Thorn was fighting to control.

“Think he’s going to scuttle—”

Thorn waved Mol off. “Not if I can—I have him.”

Kira and Mol watched in open-mouthed amazement while Thorn narrowed his eyes, leaned to one side, and waved a hand, as if he was a conductor of a ghostly orchestra. The third Nyctus ship vanished with the telltale flash of a jumpdrive.

“Where did he go?” Mol asked.

Thorn cut his eyes toward the star. “Somewhere in the middle of that.”

“Heluva way to go. Not that they don’t deserve it,” Mol said.

“They sure do,” Trixie added.

Thorn gave a terse grin, then refocused on the target ship. “If I can—shit. There’s a—” Thorn’s voice trailed away as he leaned against the console, sweat springing to life on his face.

“Thorn?” Kira asked.

“Telepath. Powerful,” he said. His voice was low, skin ashen.

“Can I help?” Kira asked, unsure if she could even survive contact with a Nyctus like that.

He reached for her hand. His fingers were slick with sweat, and he swayed with an invisible effort as he and the Nyctus fought a secret war. Thorn’s fingers crushed her hand and then—

—I have you, Thorn told his enemy.

You have only death. I will sing my victory to the tides, your blood and mind a prize of—

Don’t you ever shut up? Or does your arrogance never sleep? Thorn asked, even as he found what he was looking for.

A memory.

He pushed forward into the alien mind, seeing a crack where the Nyctus shaman held the one thing he could not admit to anyone else.

You’re ashamed, Thorn said.

I feel no shame at killing your kind. You are animals, incapable of swimming even as well as children. You are—

Not humans, you fool. You killed a…sister. Yes. I can see it. And no one knows. Well, until now. I know.

Silence, then—I will skin your body and leave the—

The Nyctus never saw the young ensign approach from behind. She was weak, and easy to control. Thorn made her use two tentacles to drive the—it was called a wingshell, the knife—into the telepath’s hearts, slashing back and forth until the deck was slick with black, inky blood, and then the ship was Thorn’s.

“Fleet command, sending a ship your way,” Thorn said over Trixie’s open comm.

“Appreciate it, Starcaster. Leave the engine running. We’ve got plans for this one.”

Thorn gave a weak grin and collapsed. “Tell the admiral we’re coming home.”

Epilogue

All of the officers were there, waiting. Thorn stepped into the room, any sense of awkwardness long gone. He inhabited the Starcaster role now, and it was a part of him. Stitched together from years of fear and a lust for revenge, now that he had power, he found it wasn’t exactly to his liking. It was—a necessity. A tool, albeit something within him. He took no joy in the death of each Nyctus, because tasting their cold, ruthless minds left him ever grateful that he was a human and capable of mercy.

That didn’t mean he would be merciful.

“You leave us with an unusual problem, Specialist.” The speaker was Admiral Wynne, a man with watery eyes and a hangdog expression. He sat, unmoving, among other officers who were part of a process that would ultimately answer the great question before them.

What to do with Thorn?

And, more specifically, the Starcasters.

“Sir?” Thorn asked, though he knew what the admiral meant.

Commander Schrader, still nursing wounds from the attack on Code Nebula, leaned forward on the gleaming table, his face conflicted. “Imagine finding a sword—a sword so sharp that nothing can stand before it. Now imagine fighting your way through the enemy, only to find that no matter how many times you swing this weapon, you’ll never be able to cut them all down. That’s where we stand right now, Stellers. You are—lethal. Beyond belief, and for now, you seem to have no delusions of grandeur. Your motivations are as pure as we could hope—”

Thorn bristled at that, but Schrader patted the air in a conciliatory gesture.

“My apologies to the memory of your family. And your world. I speak only to your…to the purity of your motivation, and the problems it causes,” Schrader said.

“Your trauma might have made you, Thorn, but we won’t cause other people to endure what you had just to win this putrid war,” Admiral Maynard said with unusual ferocity. “You have my personal guarantee.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I believe you,” Thorn said.

Kira cleared her throat, bending every eye to her. “If I may?”

“Please,” Admiral Wynne said, waving her to speak.

“Thorn has more ability than anyone can imagine, because we’ve never seen his talent before. That means he’s not only a—well, his power spans all of the styles, or schools, or whatever we choose to declare these destructive abilities. But I think he has something else to give. It’s not exactly hidden, but we haven’t considered it yet because we’re too busy pointing him at the enemy like a missile and then counting the dead,” Kira said.

“If you’re suggesting he teach, I must stop you right there, Wixcombe. He’s far too valuable on the front. Sorry, Stellers,” Commander Schrader said with a hint of actual apology.

“No sir—I mean, yes, he can teach, but not in the way of our instructors, and not in any style you would recognize. I think that…well—” Kira hesitated, looking to Thorn, who gave a small nod. “I’ve known Thorn since we were kids, so I have an advantage of sorts.”

“You mean you understand him?” Admiral Wynne asked.

“No, sir. I mean, I know him, as a…as a presence. As a mind. And he knows me. He can communicate with me over incredible distances, like any telepath, but it’s more than that. He can see me while we’re speaking, and I think it goes well beyond that. I’m only a Joiner, but I think he can train me by—what term do we want to use, Thorn?”

“Gift. I think it’s a gift, or gifting. It’s like permission to come aboard, but when I leave, I’ve drawn you a map to a place in your ship you’ve never been, and you never knew it existed. I think I can make our Navy stronger, but only if you keep the Starcasters together and let us fight as we will. I understand why we do things a certain way, but why should we keep doing that if so many people are dead?” Thorn asked everyone.

The silence stretched, gravid with unspoken admissions that Thorn just might be right.

“And you think these…gifts…can be inserted into other minds? Like a memory?” Maynard asked. Her eyes were bright with hope.

“I do, ma’am,” Thorn answered.

Silent until that moment, a pale woman with dark eyes, high cheekbones, and an air of near religious intensity floated away from the wall, where she’d been leaning in an unobtrusive pose of feigned indifference. She wore overalls and no rank, but something about her set Thorn’s teeth on edge. He caught an image from her thoughts.

Spy.

“Specialist Stellers, we’ve not met in person. For the purposes of this meeting, you may call me Captain Densmore.” Her smile was perfunctory, but her eyes were alive, drinking in his details. Thorn gave her a level look, then sensed the probe at a distant edge of his mind. He slammed the opening shut, seeing Densmore twitch—then cover it up almost instantly.

“If you visit my mind without invitation again, I’ll turn you into a walking corpse,” Thorn said in a conversational tone. Then realization dawned on him. He knew her.

Schrader and Maynard laughed, but Kira gasped in alarm.

“Told you he was strong,” Schrader said. “You’d do well to tread lightly, Alys.”

Alys—Densmore—looked satisfied with her fishing expedition. “I had to know for certain. I don’t take anything on faith since we’ve been on the losing end of this war.”

Thorn felt his anger rise, then put it away with an effort. “I meant what I said. Ma’am. And it’s good to see you in person, despite the tone. My apologies. You’re a strong telepath, and it’s my pleasure not to disappoint Admiral Maynard and her green notebook.”

“You told him that? Shame, Alys,” Admiral Maynard chided.

She shrugged but did so while smiling. “And I do apologize. I’ve suspected that the Starcasters have hidden depths, because we don’t know much about any of this. Ten years in and we still have infantry commanders who think the Nyctus use satellites to pound us into rubble.” She sighed in disgust. “You killed more Nyctus than the entire fleet, and you’ve done it in three attacks. If you think you can share your abilities, I’ll be the first to open my mind to you, but I suspect you have other plans.” Densmore glanced at Kira, who flushed red at the suggestion.

“My plans are simple, ma’am. I’ll do what fleet tells me, and Mol Wyant will put me close enough to Nytcus operations so that I can torch them. Then, one day in the future, some squid will get lucky and kill me.” Thorn shrugged. “I don’t want to die, but I plan on taking a lot more of them with me before I do. If Kira—excuse me, but that’s how I think of her—can be there fighting, it will be because at some point, I was able to share this ability with her. And I know I can. I don’t know when, or how, but it will happen.”

Admiral Maynard stood, smoothing her uniform as she picked up a thin file and placed it carefully before Thorn. “Go ahead, open it.”

Thorn did.

He whistled softly and glanced up for confirmation. When the admiral nodded, he went back to reading, then turned the pages so Kira and Mol could see.

A hundred targets, spread all over Nyctus space.

“Lotta work to do,” Thorn said, smiling. “Any gas in the tank?”

Mol grinned. “Tank’s full.”

Thorn beamed at Kira, then they rose, along with Mol.

“With apologies, may we be on our way? Busy days ahead,” Thorn said, saluting.

You have no idea, came the thought, as Alys quirked her lip.

Neither do the Nyctus, Thorn sent.

* * *

Keep reading to continue the story in HEX DIVISION.

1

Thorn Stellers knew that sometime in the next few minutes, this ship was going to die.

Beside him, the Captain—a preternaturally tall, gangly, and long-limbed woman from some low-grav world—leaned forward in her command chair. “Helm, as soon as this jump is finished, I want you to”—she paused, consulting a screen built into the chair’s arm—“maneuver five degrees port, ten degrees up, and apply half thrust for a ten-second burn.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Weapons, status?”

“All green, sir. Reactive armor is powered up; point defense systems switched to autonomous mode.”

“Good. You’ll be looking for targets to starboard-low. Get that data link up to the flagship as soon as we’ve got comms back. I want our targeting solutions uploaded into the squadron fire plan before they need to ask us for them—you know, unlike the last time we did this.”

The Weapons Officer answered the Captain’s admonishment with a tight nod. “Will do, sir.”

“Alright, Engineering,” the Captain continued. “Order a ship-wide suit check.”

The Engineering Officer tapped at the console, and an alarm buzzed through the ship. Every crew member ran through a quick checklist for their crash suits. Stripped down vac-suits, they offered about two hours of life support, enough to get to a life capsule or, in theory, to be rescued from a crippled ship.

Another chime sounded, and the Engineering Officer called out, “Alcubierre Drive cutoff in thirty seconds, sir.”

The Captain leaned back again. “Thirty whole seconds with nothing to do. Enjoy the time off, people.”

Chuckles rose around the bridge but quickly cut off, replaced by the soft chatter of voices across the intercom as each Bridge Officer coordinated the work of their respective departments. Tension crackled in the air, intensifying by the second like an electrical field building toward sudden discharge. Thorn knew the stress of these last moments before battle only too well. To their credit, these people—the crew of the Orbital Navy battlecruiser Centurion—soldiered on through it, every movement and clipped syllable a study in the word professionalism.

Another soft chime came from the Engineering station. “Drive cutoff in five seconds.”

The Captain nodded and leaned forward again. “Stand by, everyone. Show’s about to start.”

The 3-D viewscreen, filling the forward bulkhead of the bridge, abruptly flickered with a hint of dull crimson. The ship’s superluminal bow wave and intense Doppler shift released particles when the drive cut, the resulting scarlet ghost tinging the screen like diluted blood.

“Hold simulation,” a gruff voice said. Everything around Thorn froze.

Commodore Scoville, dour Operations Chief for the ON’s Third Fleet, stepped forward from his place near the rear of the bridge. “The next forty minutes or so of the log is the approach to the Nyctus fleet and the opening engagement. The part I want you to see starts at time index forty-two—”

“Sir, with all due respect,” Thorn said. “I’d like to watch the entire log, if I could.”

Scoville scowled and crossed his arms. “I’m looking for your expertise in Starcasting, Lieutenant, not tactical ops.”

“Understood, sir. However, there could be any number of clues about how the Nyctus pulled off what they did in the meantime. I’d hate to miss them.”

Scoville narrowed his eyes, then nodded. “Alright. Resume—”

“Sir?”

The Commodore paused.

Thorn looked around. “Did the Centurion have a Starcaster aboard?”

“No. There were only a half-dozen with the whole task force. Not enough of you people to go around.”

The Commodore’s tone hovered somewhere between awe, fear, and contempt. Another old-school officer who viewed magic the same way he might a reactor with delicate safeties: potentially powerful, but also potentially dangerous to everyone around.

Thorn was used to it, though. He just ignored it with a mental eye-roll, nodding as Scoville resumed the simulation.

The Captain and her crew abruptly came back to life. Thorn watched them carefully as they worked to prepare the Centurion for the impending clash with the Nyctus. Now that they could see the enemy fleet, a sprawl of ships backlit by the dim glow of the white dwarf beyond them, their tense anticipation ratcheted up another couple of notches. But they did their jobs with confident competence, and for good reason. The ON had enjoyed a string of victories now, each won battle pushing the Nyctus further back, away from ON space.

But the aliens had established a new defensive line, its center anchored on the white dwarf and a dusty nebula sprawling nearly a light-year around it. The ON had deployed the Third Fleet, the Centurion’s parent formation, to attack here; their specific objective was a large, fortified platform orbiting a white dwarf. Intel thought it might be a forward operating base, or FOB. While an important target on its own, more critically the Nyctus presence threatened the flank of the ON’s main effort, a major offensive by the combined First and Second fleets in the adjacent sector.

The intel hadn’t had much more to say about the battlespace than that. It did acknowledge the potential for some “sensor degradation” thanks to the dust, the remains of what had been a red supergiant before it had puffed away its outer layers, leaving only the shriveled corpse of its exposed core, the white dwarf. There had been nothing else of much note in the intel briefing, aside from a somewhat petulant comment about a lack of reconnaissance prior to the deployment of the fleet.

Thorn watched as the time and range to target both ticked down. Firing solutions were developed and refined until, at the twenty-five minute mark, the flagship transmitted the first command to shoot. Across the Third Fleet, salvoes of torpedoes rippled out of launchers and accelerated away. It was a coordinated barrage, intended to tie up the Nyctus while the ON task force closed to the effective range of their main batteries. A smaller fusillade of missiles erupted from the Nyctus, racing back toward the ON fleet. The Squids avoided reliance on long-ranged missile fire, but leaned heavily on purely kinetic weapons—basically, rocks hurled by the eldritch power of their shamans—a capability gap they either couldn’t close or simply chose not to. For the squid, a KEW rock was cheap, fast, and effective.

As the weapons tracked, Thorn took a moment to watch the Centurion’s crew. He wanted to see if any of them showed signs of being remotely influenced by the telepathic shamans of the Nyctus. None of them did, though, nor had there been any suggestions of it in the after-action reports. Thorn had expected as much, but he watched them anyway, studying each of their faces in turn. As he wandered around the virtual bridge, he felt Scoville watching him, but ignored it and focused on these digital ghosts. Since he was spending their last moments alive with them, he paid close attention to every nuance, every gesture, in the hope that some helpful detail would emerge from the swan song of a dying ship and her crew.

After all, someday he might be nothing more than a simulation derived from some combat log. In that case, he hoped someone took the same care watching him as he hurtled toward his end, because the idea of death without purpose angered him as much as the squids themselves.

“Enemy torps forty seconds out,” the Weapons Officer said, his voice taut but still measured and clear. “It looks like the escorts will take down . . . 90 percent-plus. Fleet tactical predicts 5 percent minimum breaking through the screen.”

The Captain nodded. “Leave them to point defense. Status on the rail guns?”

“Rail gun range in fifteen seconds,” the Weapons Officer replied.

“Good. Priority for firing solutions is the capital ships in that nearest—”

“Hold simulation,” Scoville said. “So, Stellers, have you seen anything useful so far?”

Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

“Well, this is where things start to go wrong. Resume simulation.”

“—enemy detachment. They look like they’re trying to flank us . . .”

The Captain broke off, frowning at the summary tactical situation showing on the console built into her chair. “Engineering, what’s with these uncertainty values? They’re all going up.”

Thorn leaned over the Captain, looking at her display. Sure enough, the icons representing the Nyctus ships were now each the apex of an expanding cone reflecting their possible range of maneuvers. That was normal at long ranges, where light-speed delays meant that the target ship had moved since the latest sensor return, so its current actions could only be estimated. But with the range down to just thousands of kilometers, there should be no such fuzz in the locations or trajectories of the Nyctus ships.

“Not sure, sir,” the Engineering Officer replied. “Some sort of scanner degradation. It seems to be affecting . . . shit. It’s affecting all sensors, even visual.”

Thorn looked at the viewscreen. It too depicted increasing uncertainty in the actual locations of the Nyctus ships; more fundamentally, the imagery was fading, as though some sort of diffuse fog coalesced between the Nyctus and ON fleets.

“It’s affecting our firing solutions,” the Weapons Officer called out. “Confidence levels are dropping fast.”

The Captain turned. “Engineering, this is not a good time for our sensors to crap out—”

“Working on it, sir.” The Lieutenant’s fingers danced across the console. “Everything self-tests green.” His voice rose a notch in frustration, fear, maybe both. “It’s all working the way it should!”

“I’ve got news for you, Lieutenant,” the Captain snapped. “No, it’s not.” She waved a hand at the big viewscreen.

Thorn followed her gaze. The imagery had almost completely faded away.

“Hold simulation,” Scoville said, then crossed his arms. “Okay, Stellers, time to earn your pay. Any ideas?”

Thorn frowned. The Nyctus could have developed some sort of jamming effect that targeted the ON sensors—but he was no tech and didn’t doubt that the ON had already thrown their best engineering minds at that possibility. In fact, him being here probably meant that they had come up empty. So he bit his lip and stared at the blankness of the viewscreen.

Something tickled his thoughts, but it was elusive, like a bug flying around the room—heard, but as yet unseen.

“Stellers—?”

“I’d like to see some more, sir, if I could,” he said.

Scoville nodded. “Resume simulation.”

The Captain turned back to the engineering station. “You and your people have one minute to get this sorted out, Lieutenant. If you can’t, I’m going to have to recommend to the flagship that we fall out of line, and I will not be happy about that.”

The Engineering Lieutenant gave a quick nod. “I know, ma’am. We’re working on it.”

“Work faster.”

The Weapons Officer blew out an exasperated sigh. “Firing solutions have dropped below 50 percent.”

“For which weapons?” the Captain asked.

“All of them, ma’am.”

A distant thud sounded, and the deck shuddered. Another followed, then two more, in rapid succession.

“Incoming missiles!” the Weapons Officer said. “Point defense can’t track them!”

“The reactive armor’s doing its job,” the Captain cut in. “For the moment, anyway. But we’re taking hits here, and we can’t even see them coming.” She turned again. “Engineering, last chance.”

The Lieutenant offered the Captain a bleak look. “Sorry, ma’am, we’ve got nothing—no idea what’s happening.”

“We’re getting calls from across the task force,” the Comms Officer put in. “It’s not just us. Sounds like—”

Another ripple of thuds sounded, and then a heavy bang came from somewhere aft. Damage alerts flared across bridge consoles; warnings chimed and buzzed.

The Captain turned to the now-blank viewscreen, and her eyes went wide. “Damn. It’s the Nyctus. Somehow, they’ve blinded us.”

The simulation abruptly froze—this time, without an order from Scoville.

“That’s where the log ends,” the Commodore said. “Based on what we’ve been able to piece together from all the logs we’ve recovered and accounts from the surviving ships, the Centurion took a catastrophic hit at this point. Run simulation Scoville-two.”

The digital ghosts of the Centurion’s crew and bridge vanished, replaced by a tactical map giving an overview of the battle. A cadre of Nyctus ships near the rear of their battle line suddenly vanished, then reappeared in pulses of blue-shifted energy within a few tens of kilometers of the ON battle line.

“I’m no expert,” Thorn said, “but isn’t using Alcubierre drives, or whatever the Nyctus version is, in such crowded space—”

“Asking for disaster? Damned right it is,” Scoville replied. “But the Nyctus had it all pre-plotted, and we assume that includes nav. They were ready for us, the bastards, and we played right into whatever disgusting appendages pass for their hands.”

The Centurion was, Thorn saw, the first of the ON capital ships to be hit and destroyed—and by nothing more than a massive chunk of rock unceremoniously dumped out of the hold of one of the Nyctus ships. There was no plasma flare from an engine, but the rock accelerated at a horrific rate until it slammed into the battlecruiser, virtually breaking her in two. She wasn’t the last, though. More ships staggered under titanic impacts, reeling out of line or just bursting into clouds of shattered debris.

“The Centurion and all the rest of these ships were taken out by boulders, Stellers. Friggin’ boulders, that they couldn’t see coming.” Scoville’s scowl was ripe with disgust. “The Nyctus and their damned shamans. There’s no way those rocks could have been accelerated that hard conventionally, not without being pulverized into gravel.” Jaw muscles clenched, Scoville stared at the miniature scene of carnage.

Thorn just stayed quiet. He didn’t need Joining to tell him that Scoville’s fury wasn’t just focused on the Nyctus, but on magic generally, a vast and unwelcome intrusion into their once-tidy vision of space combat.

“In any case,” the Commodore finally said, “we’ve seen that capability before, so it’s not new to us.”

Thorn nodded. “The Nyctus focus on Earth magic. At least the ones we’ve encountered do, although some of the squid target human beings. What we call Lifer magic.”

Scoville’s gaze went flat, his body utterly still. There was a cloud of potential violence around the man that went against everything an officer was supposed to be: calm, controlled, reasoned. “Earth mages, Lifers, whatever. I don’t speak ’caster, and don’t especially want to. I deal in math. I want a war I can fight, not some childhood myth come alive out here in hard vacuum.”

“Sorry, sir. Elemental magic is given by elements, so earth, air, fire, and water. It’s actually more complicated than that—electrical energy falls under fire. Think of them as cousins, not siblings. Anyway, Lifers are able to interact with living things directly, and Joiners are telepathic.” Thorn shrugged. “They’re not really official names, just terms born of necessity and habit. It’s all new to me as well, and . . . it’s a part of me. It’s a natural function of the universe, and for some reason it set up shop in my body when I was a kid. I’ve been carrying it with me ever since. Now I’m going to use it to kill Nyctus, and though I may be speaking out of turn—"

“Careful, Stellers. It may surprise you to find that I’m no fan of this bullshit,” Scoville growled.

Thorn gave a shrug that was neither apologetic nor indifferent. “Loud and clear. Since we’re being honest with each other, I’ll show you this.” He pulled out his talisman and handed it to Scoville, who took it with only a minor hesitation.

“Yes? And?” Scoville said, dismissing the book as he handed it back to Thorn.

“The ashes of my parents, my home, and my planet are on each page,” Thorn said.

Scoville paused, then spoke in a softer voice. “I’m sorry for your loss—”

“That’s not why I showed you, sir.”

“Then why?” Scoville asked, curious.

“You’re career Navy, sir?”

“I am.”

“Think back to the days of the blue-water Navy on earth. If you handed a rail gun to one of those captains, what would they think?”

Scoville paused again. “Not much. They wouldn’t have any context or understanding for—”

“Sir?” Thorn asked, his lips curling slightly.

“Oh, shit.” Scoville waved a hand. “Point taken. You’re saying that this—book, and you are the rail gun, and we’re the old salty bastards trying to play catch-up?”

“I am, sir.”

Silence grew between them, fat and awkward.

“I still have a question that goes beyond simply making things explode, or whatever else you can do—and full disclosure, I still don’t like any of this. But I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t use a knife put in my hand, so—” Scoville gathered himself, then spoke again. “The Nyctus throw rocks around, I get it. Like I said, we already knew that. What we don’t know is how they screwed with the task force’s sensors. We can’t find any technical reasons in the data we’ve got, and we can’t really head back into Nyctus space to retrieve any wreckage.” Scoville gave Thorn a questioning look. “You’re supposed to be one of the Starcaster Corps’ best, so if you’ve got any ideas, let’s hear them. I admit to being outside my area of expertise, and we don’t have time for me to reinvent the wheel. Our planets are dying.”

“Yes, sir, I understand.” Thorn bit his lip and studied the frozen image of the shattered Centurion. Indeed, the Nyctus had, as Scoville put it, simply thrown rocks around. Big rocks, the size of shuttles, some even larger. But as he walked around the tactical snapshot, peering closely at it, he saw they’d employed smaller rocks as well. They’d literally just heaved them out of their ships, then used their potent earth magic to accelerate them far harder and faster than their structural integrity should allow.

Scoville was right: the simple inertia of the big rocks should have caused such extreme accelerations so as to smash them into debris. The magic bypassed mundane physics, though, keeping them intact and turning them into cheap, kinetic missiles that were both difficult to destroy and incredibly deadly. It was a cumbersome tactic, only effective at relatively short ranges. The Nyctus had mastered it and used it a lot. As yet, they hadn’t built an entire battle strategy around setting up a situation like one. This time had been different. Why? Just to be unpredictable.

No. There was more to it than that. Just getting close enough to make it viable pretty much demanded taking the targets’ sensors offline. Once, they would have used their formidable telepathic powers to manipulate their enemy’s perceptions, but the addition of ’casters to the ON arsenal made that much more problematic for them. That meant the aliens had come up with something else, something that made them damned certain they could confuse and blind their enemy.

Thorn narrowed his eyes and thought of the night his life changed. The sound, the impact—the fire. He touched his talisman, rubbing idly at a smooth part of the cover. A hint of grit, still, after all these years.

Thorn smiled as the memory hove into sight, a grim gesture of finality, not joy.

“Stellers, I’ve got three other places I need to be,” Scoville said. “If you think of anything, call my aide.”

“Dust.”

Scoville blinked at Thorn’s single word. “Dust. What about it?”

Thorn pointed at the frozen imagery. “This battle. It took place in a nebula—inside a big cloud of dust, blown off that star when it died.” Thorn struggled to recall what he’d learned about stellar evolution—which wasn’t much. “Sir, what would that dust be made out of?”

“For a star of the mass this one was?” The Commodore frowned, recalling his own stellar-physics training. “Carbon, mostly. Probably some oxygen, magnesium, some silicon—why?”

Thorn gave a slow nod. “All elements found in most rock,” he said, then nodded. “That’s how the Nyctus did it. They used their Earth magic to build up dust on our ships, especially on their sensor arrays. They blinded them with dust, then attacked them while they were helpless. And that’s why they chose to make their stand here, inside this nebula and close to the white dwarf, in the thickest part of it.”

Scoville didn’t look away from Thorn. “Fleet Engineer, Ops O here.”

A voice replied from the air. “Here, sir.”

“I’m sending a Lieutenant to you, named Stellers. He’s a Starcaster, and he has an idea about what the Nyctus did to our ships. Once he’s done describing it to you, you tell me if it makes sense. If it does, then we’ve got a hell of a vulnerability to patch up . . . somehow.”

“Aye, sir. Stellers—I’ll be expecting him.”

Thorn nodded. “I’ll head there right now, sir.”

“Do that.” He paused, then added grudgingly, “Good work, Stellers.” Scoville had briefly overcome his own reluctance to offer the complement. It left Thorn feeling like the ON might never truly be comfortable with ’casters.

“Thank you, sir.”

Thorn saluted, then turned for the exit from the simulator.

“Oh, Stellers?”

He turned back to the Commodore. “Sir?”

“I watched the log all the way through, too. Hard to do, but it’s only right. These people need to be remembered.”

Thorn gave the Commodore a curious stare, wondering if the man was telepathic on some level. Thorn had never been a natural card player, so his face, unguarded, might be easy to read. When it came to cheating at cards, that was a different situation altogether.

But Thorn just nodded, ceasing his trip into other, less dangerous times. “Yes, sir. It is.”

* * *

Thorn spent barely an hour with the Fleet Engineer and her team. They’d crafted a simulation based on his supposition, to test the idea that a sufficient dust buildup could really inhibit sensors so thoroughly. The results were beyond striking. The first iteration they ran showed that even a few millimeters of dust would seriously degrade the effectiveness of sensors, electronic and optical. Two subsequent runs confirmed it.

As for the Nyctus using magic to accomplish it, Thorn was able to confirm that, too. His talisman in hand—the battered storybook, all that remained of his long-gone childhood and family—he’d channeled his awareness into the flight recorder retrieved from the Centurion. Sure enough, like the faint tick of metal cooling after exposure to intense heat, he’d caught a flickering echo of magical effect. It told him nothing about what that effect was, only that it had imprinted itself on the Centurion, a ship that had no ’caster of her own aboard. And true to its name, the flight recorder still held a glimmer of it.

The sheer volume of dust was impressive, considering the tenuous nature of the nebular dust cloud. But the Nyctus, those creative, vicious bastards, had managed it somehow, and that was bad news for the ON. Every nebular dust cloud—and there were lots of them—had suddenly become a no-go zone for the fleet.

Thorn flopped back into his bunk aboard the Hecate. He hadn’t even bothered to pull off his boots. He’d done his usual, morning shit-shower-shave routine only a few hours before, but he already felt as wrung out as an old dishcloth, ready to just pull the covers over him again, boots and all. Turned out that watching the last minutes of peoples’ lives was an emotionally draining event.

Thorn sniffed. Go figure. After his youth and years as a reclamation grunt, he expected emotional tolls to be the least of his worries.

He closed his eyes, leaning into the idea that the morning would be better, and finding the cause of bad news had to be a victory, no matter how Scoville felt about magic.

But his work was only partially done.

Dust was simple. Manipulating it in the void of space was far from simple—if anything, it brought physical talents to bear that Thorn couldn’t even begin to fathom. Dust was small, susceptible to the vagaries of a big universe, and even more notably, it had little or no mass.

“I don’t know how,” Thorn said. The ceiling had no answers, and the Nyctus weren’t about to spill their secrets. As he sifted memory, chances, and plans, Thorn kept returning to the same unsavory option: go back into enemy space, raid, and capture a shaman. Then, tear the secret from their slimy heads and hope that they could deliver the discovery safely.

Not likely, he thought.

“Thorn, Kira here.”

Thorn opened his eyes. “Kira?”

“That’s what I said.”

He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “Holy shit, this is real-time? You’re here, at Code Gauntlet?”

“It is, and I am.”

Thorn stood. Kira’s ship must have only just arrived at Code Gauntlet, the Third Fleet’s FOB just inside the ON defensive line that demarked this side of the no-man’s-space now separating them and the Nyctus. “Where are you right now?”

“Just passing through in-clearance.”

He glanced at the time. “Can you get away? You’re just in time for lunch.”

“I need about an hour to tidy up a few things,” she replied. “How about I meet you in the mess in, say, an hour and a half?”

Thorn smiled. “I’ve got a better idea.”

* * *

Kira grinned as she ran her bare feet through the grass. “I haven’t felt anything but deck-plating under my feet for—” She shrugged. “Seriously, I don’t remember the last time.”

Thorn grinned and gestured around. “I know, right? Whoever decided that the FOB needed an arboretum was a genius—and the ON doesn’t have many of those.”

“You could have said none, and I’d have bought it.” She closed her eyes and pushed her toes into the turf. “Oh, wow, that feels good.”

The arboretum, a single domed compartment flooded with light from broad-spectrum lamps high above them, was the brightest and airiest part of the FOB by far. In a rare concession to morale, the Fleet Admiral had authorized its construction, the official reason being that the sprawl of greenery helped maintain a clean atmosphere inside the FOB. And it did, because the host planet just had too much carbon dioxide for comfortable human breathing. Thorn knew it was about much more than that, though. It was, in fact, more about moments like this—a brief respite from the dreary grind of the ongoing war to enjoy a picnic lunch with a friend.

They weren’t the only ones here, either. ON fleet personnel, from low-ranking Rates to at least one Captain, were lounging amid the greenery, taking a break from alloy bulkheads and deck plates and a war that had settled into a bleak grind of attrition.

“So what brings you here to FOB Gauntlet, anyway,” Thorn asked.

Kira opened her eyes. “No idea. The ship came here, and I came with it.”

Thorn grinned again. “It’s something classified, isn’t it?”

“I could tell you, but then we’d have to turn you into compost.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

A hint of a frown touched Kira’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What? Oh, nothing. Just that I’ve had a few face-to-face encounters with the Grim Reaper, and he hasn’t gotten me yet.”

Kira closed her eyes and resumed luxuriating in the grass. “Sounds like famous last words. Pass me another sandwich.”

“You want one with the pink stuff, or one with the brown stuff?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The Mess made one pink, the other brown. Otherwise, I can’t tell them apart.”

She accepted the sandwich from him—one with pink filling. “You know, I’d have thought the food would be better at an FOB than it is shipboard.” She bit into it, gave an experimental chew, then made a yuck face. “I was wrong.”

“Now you know the gastronomic disappointment I’ve been living with.”

“Why do they have you stationed here anyway?” Kira asked. “Seems like a waste of one of our best Starcasters, hanging around an FOB.”

Thorn shrugged. “It’s not likely we’re going to see ops spooling up again any time soon.”

Kira swallowed. “Really? What have you heard?”

Thorn hesitated. The whole dust-blocking-sensors thing was very definitely classified. And even though this was Kira, there were some things that even friends didn’t need to know.

“Let’s just say we won’t likely be starting up any offensive ops for the foreseeable future, and leave it at that.”

Kira sat up. “Thorn, what do you know?”

“I . . . really can’t say, Kira. I’m sorry.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Fine. Need to know and all that, right?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

She cocked her head. “It’s something about the Third Fleet getting its ass kicked. You know something about that. Something the Nyctus did.” Her eyes nearly vanished, leaving only bright, suspicious crescents. “Something big—”

Out of sheer instinct, Thorn closed his mind off like an airlock in a breach drill. It happened without thinking, leaving him bathing Kira in a hard stare. There were some things a ’caster did not do. “You shitting me, Kira? Trying to read me?”

“Wasn’t just trying. You probably need to be a little more careful, Thorn. Another Joiner might not be quite so benign about it.”

Thorn felt his features soften, then lowered his mental barrier. “Kira, we’ve been friends for a long time. You know better. Second point, and this is critical, so please remember: Joiners are the least of my worries.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because Joining’s less a science and more an art, I guess. It doesn’t have the hard edges of a castle, or a hammer. A castle defends a specific thing, a hammer uses a specific force, but Joining is—” He struggled, searching for a word that didn’t exist.

“Soft?” Kira asked, a brow lifted. “Be careful, friend. I can peel away your secrets, if I’m given a chance.”

“If?” Thorn said, then laughed. “You don’t need to peel them away. They’re freely given.” He bunched his shoulders, uncomfortable with the gap in his logic. “I think I can perform some degree of Joining. Doesn’t mean I grasp it. Not entirely.”

“That’s fair. How about this—come to the gym,” Kira said.

“Gym? Why?”

Kira stood, then grinned down at Thorn, and there was conspiracy in her eyes. “Call it a hard lesson with soft edges. Tomorrow. Eleven-hundred. See you there.” She walked away, and Thorn fought the urge to peel her secrets away.

Some things were better found out in the fullness of time.

2

Thorn strode into the gym he’d booked, ready for a fight. Or a lesson.

Or both.

He stopped as the door slid closed behind him. He’d been preparing what he intended to say for a couple of hours now . . .

Kira, I respect you, he sent into the room, hoping she was listening. I hope you don’t intend to drop a beam on my head.

Thorn made it a half-dozen paces into the cavernous gym, then stopped short. There was no sign of Kira, and he had no sense that his words had been received. They echoed flatly around him, a psychic remnant of his lukewarm apology.

He checked his chrono. He was on time. In fact, he was a couple of minutes late, which was sloppy. It was a standard throughout the ON that if you were attending a meeting, you always showed up at least five minutes early to study any maps or other documents that had been prepared for it. Early was on time, and on time was late.

Something flickered against the edge of Thorn’s vision. Acting on instinct, he turned, at the same time conjuring a fierce point of blue-white light over his outstretched palm; with a thought, he flung it out into an implacable shield against whatever he’d glimpsed—

Kira slammed headlong into his barrier and rebounded with a bluish flash and a cry of pain—and landed firmly on her ass. In a blur, she sprang up, thanks to her superb conditioning.

Thorn let the residual energy drain away and stepped toward her, again putting out a hand, but this time it was free of any sorcerous energy.

“Kira?” He spoke out loud, and there was far more in the word than a simple question. “What’s the lesson?”

After catching her breath and straightening her fatigues, she put her hands on her hips and waved vaguely at the space. “You didn’t even know I was here, did you?”

“Well, not until you tried to throw yourself at me like some sort of mugger, no—”

“We’re in a war for our survival, as a species, and sometimes the most talented people have blind spots. Like yours.”

“If I’m blind, then—you mean after I felt you? Or before?” Thorn asked.

She sighed, a gentle sound of acceptance, not anger. “You—we—grew up hard. You understand threats, whether or not they’re in front of you, right?”

“I’m an expert in them. You are too,” Thorn said. The home had been brutal at times, cold at others, and never, ever truly safe. “Where are you going with this?”

“It’s the Nyctus. They’re alien.”

“I’m aware.”

“Are you though? They’re not in front of you, but they also aren’t like some kid at the children’s home, laying in wait to kick your ass for no reason. Different kind of threat,” Kira said.

Thorn rubbed his chin, then tilted his head in agreement. The memories she was dredging were sour, dead things—things he’d worked hard to bury. “If you’re comparing yourself to a lurking bully with designs on my food ration—”

“I’m not. I’m nothing like the Nyctus, and never will be. You can see me, and feel my presence. I don’t know if that’s true with the squid, at least, I don’t think we can say for certain. This,” and she waved at their setting, dismissing it, “is just an attempt to get you to open your horizons to the Nyctus and what they really are.”

“What do you—”

Kira’s hand flickered forward in a blur, the small knife flashing lethal in the wan light. Thorn turned, barely, and slapped the blade away, raising his other hand to Kira in vibrating menace. The knife clattered against a console and fell still. In the seconds of her attack, he never made a sound, and neither did she.

“Would you have really stabbed me?” Thorn asked, his voice flat.

“Damn right I would have. Three inch blade, wouldn’t be fatal but it would sure as hell get your attention. I couldn’t make an attempt on your life in public. Too open.”

“Why?” Thorn asked, his eyes slits.

Kira sighed again, and this time, she lifted her eyes upward, forming each word with care as she spoke, studiously avoiding eye contact with Thorn. “The Nyctus can turn that which we know against us, including our—our friends, and our own minds. Everything. Every person, object, even emotions, all turned against us by the squid because at their cold, double-heart, they’re the finest liars the universe has ever seen. We’re pretty good at bullshitting each other, us humans, but the squid are built to get inside and make the lies real. And when that happens, you have to be ready.” She paused, then let her eyes rest on his. He was smiling, slightly. “I take it you understand?”

“Some of it. I—some of it,” he admitted. “What am I missing?”

“That despite all your gifts, and the way you wield them, you can still be attacked. You’re not bulletproof, Thorn, and your natural ease is going to be pierced to the core one day if you don’t realize that inside that reservoir of magic is a body that can be killed, either by the Nyctus or by space itself. Likely, you’ll be in some distant shithole, so far out in the darkness that no one will ever know you’re dead. Unless one of us Joiners sends word, and your corpse is cooling in hard vacuum. Do you understand? There are threats you can feel—”

“And those I can’t. Like just then,” Thorn said as the tumblers clicked into place. “This is a function of being a Joiner?”

“It is. We sense and feel that which is beneath your psychic radar. Maybe it’s because we had to work so hard to get it—no, don’t give me that look, because I’m not judging you. I’m a little pissed that you’re so friggin’ gifted, but not angry at you. But I needed you to see this. To see me as Kira, and then see me as an enemy. The lie made real, and close enough to reach out and touch you.”

“You mean smash your face against my Castling effort?”

She made a face. “Well, now that you put it that way, yes. But my second attack--

Thorn winced. “Yeah. That was better. And a better—illustration.”

“Good. We get one shot with you, and then we’re back to fighting with a lot of gifted people who have one trick in their bag. You have all the tricks, Thorn, and beyond that, you’re all I have left from everything that used to be good. Before this war. Can you remember that far back, even?”

“Sometimes, no. But I can now.”

“Good. Because losing the feel for what we used to be is the easiest way for us to all get killed. You don’t have the option of walking into a safe, secure gym and being attacked. When the squiddies do it, they’ll be arrayed across a half-light year, hurling rocks and trying to crack your mind like a nut. And someday, they might do it,” Kira said.

“It’s less likely now,” Thorn said quietly.

Kira gave a sharp nod. “I’m glad to hear that. Remember—the quiet places between attacks can be dangerous too.” She looked to the door, then back at him. “Let’s see how good you are at defensive magic.”

With that, she vanished.

Thorn sighed and started for the door. Before he reached it, it slid open and a squat Petty Officer bearing an ON Security badge stormed in, a pair of armed and armored guards at his back.

“Just what the hell is going on in here?” the man blurted, his expression as hard as deck-plating. “There’s a maintenance crew two compartments over reporting all kinds of weirdness. They practically shit themselves with fear for no good reason, and then I learn a Starcaster has booked this gym—”

Thorn held up a hand. “Yes, Petty Officer, I know. I had a magical effect go a little wonky, I’m sorry.” In truth, his Castling had worked to perfection. It was the magnitude that was the problem.

The Petty Officer’s unibrow wrinkled up like a frightened caterpillar. “I’m going to have to report this, sir.”

“Yes, of course you will. Just please also put in your report that I now know practicing ’casting anywhere inside the FOB isn’t going to work, and I’ll have to find somewhere more remote to do it.”

For a long moment, the PO kept his glare trained on Thorn. Finally, he spun around, muttering something about Starcaster freaks, and stormed away, his security backup in tow.

Thorn sighed. Yes, he’d undoubtedly get chewed out for letting magical effects spill over into other parts of the FOB. At least he could keep that off Kira, though. Her lesson—and that’s what it had been—was good enough that he could handle a little heat.

* * *

Thorn walked into the arboretum, eager, but also wary. He hadn’t expected Kira to call him, waking him up, and ask him to join her here. He really didn’t think she’d make another stab at some sort of telepathic ambush—not in such a well-used, public part of the FOB. Even at this early hour, there had to be a least a dozen people here.

But he couldn’t dismiss the idea entirely, either. What if, as he’d imagined during the night while lying in bed and staring into the darkness, she’d somehow been influenced by the Nyctus? Could she actually be a danger?

Thorn walked around a stand of trees rising from a low group of bright pink bushes, their color almost alarming. Kira sat just ahead, staring at a flower that looked more like a small furred mammal than a plant.

“What’s that?” he asked, easing to the ground.

“Shh. It’s hunting,” Kira said.

“It’s what?”

“Watch.”

The flower extended a thin brown tendril, which accelerated in a blur and pinched the bud from a nearby neighbor.

“Shit. Vicious little thing,” Thorn said, impressed.

“Mother Nature takes no prisoners.” Kira turned to him with an easy smile.

“Okay, so is this smiling Kira just another Joiner projection, and you’re really about to pop out of the azaleas and shank me?”

Her smile changed to something close to an apology. “No shank, and I prefer the term shiv. Much more dignified.”

“Spoken like a true vagrant. Then let me adjust my inquiry. No shiv today?”

“No, not today.” She shook her head, and the smile drained away. “I hope you took my demonstration to heart.”

“I did.”

She looked at him sharply. “That’s it?”

“Sure. You had a point to make, and you needed it to happen in person, and in real time. You did so. End of story.”

“Well then. I sort of thought there’d be more of a fight, or at least some quest for a second opinion,” Kira said.

“No reason to, unless you have one.”

Kira leaned back on her outstretched arms and sighed. “I’ve been reading reports about the Starcaster Corps. About the things Starcasters have accomplished—victory, for one thing, even in the face of us falling back across multiple fronts.” She glanced at him sidelong. “And not to be too specific, but what you’ve accomplished. Hell, I’ve been with you for a bunch of it.” She sighed again. “You’re not the kid I knew, or even the same as you were when we left Murgon with muck caking your boots. The war is changing all of us, but it’s shifting you most of all. I hope you’ll remember that when the time comes.”

“When the time comes? For what? Our collective suicide charge into the bosom of the squiddies? Hell no.” He regarded her for a long moment, but she said nothing. “We’re not going away, Kira. Not even if the Nyctus get close enough to split my skull with a meteor. We’ll fight, and we’ll win. We’re Starcasters, not the scared recruits we used to be.”

She held up a hand. “I know. And you’re right. But despite the glowing reports, ’casters are still looked at as freaks by most of the rest of the ON.”

Thorn thought about the Security PO’s muttered words the night before, damned Starcaster freaks, and just nodded. “I know. They treat it like witchcraft.”

“It is witchcraft, Thorn. For . . . hell, hundreds, maybe thousands of years, it’s been seen as something—” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Dangerous. Sinister. Evil, even.”

Thorn stretched out his legs. “Yeah. Eye of newt and all that.”

“What of what now?”

He waved her off. “An old reference, and a bit niche. But you’re right. They used to hang and even burn people for what we now know is ’casting.”

She nodded. “I know. And even though it’s helping us—well, if not actually win, then at least not lose this war, everyone’s trying to come to grips with it.” She sighed. “Anyway, if you think it’s bad for ’casters, it’s worse for Joiners. Seeing someone throw a fireball or whatever is scary, but it’s obvious, and it’s easy to see how that’s something we can use against the squids, like right here, right now. But knowing that someone can slip into your mind and screw with how you perceive reality itself is insidious and terrifying.”

Thorn had to nod at that. “Fair point. I’d never really looked at it that way before.”

“Neither had I, until it became known through the fleet I’m a Joiner. I had people I used to sit beside in the mess suddenly start moving away if I even made eye contact with them. Like I’m going to Join and screw around with people I consider—considered—friends.” Kira’s voice had gone hard, and she glared at a spot in the grass just beyond her feet. But she stopped and took a breath. “But I really didn’t ask to meet you just to vent, or even to confirm that you’ve seen the wisdom in my lesson.”

He smiled. “Hope not, because I’ve got about ten minutes and then I’ve got duties starting up. I’m kind of hoping that we can—”

“I asked you here to tell you two things, Thorn. One, to guard yourself at all times, even from the ON itself.” She drew up her feet and hugged her knees. “You’re one of the few friends I’ve got left—mainly because you know I can’t hex you, or whatever.” She gave a rueful smile. “You kind of made that clear last night.”

Thorn held up two fingers. “I’m not hex-proof, because I for one welcome the form of a frog. Always wanted to jump like that.”

Her bark of laughter scared the attacking mouse-flower. “Good, serves you right, you little menace,” Thorn said. “The second thing? What is it?”

“Yeah. I did a lot of thinking last night after I left the gym. Didn’t really sleep. Just wandered, came here, spent a lot of time thinking things over.” She looked squarely into Thorn’s eyes. “I really do believe Joining is powerful, that it has huge potential. And I can feel mine growing, getting stronger. But I’ve only ever had the most basic training when it comes to controlling it.” She plucked a blade of plant matter, gave it a cursory glance, then dropped it and turned to him. “So I’ve submitted a request to be transferred off active duty and reassigned for advanced Joiner training at Code Nebula.”

Thorn gave a slow nod again, liking the direction she was going. “Sounds like a good plan. More important, though, it sounds like it might help make you happy—or happier, anyway—with how things are when it comes to Joining, and ’casting, and just generally serving the ON.” He made a point of meeting her eyes squarely. “I hope it works out for you, Kira, and that you do find what you’re looking for.”

She nodded. “I hope so, too.”

Thorn checked the time. “I really do have to go. How about I catch you later for dinner. The mess here might make shitty sandwiches, but the meals are actually decent. As long as it’s not pink food.”

“I don’t trust pink food. Or blue, for that matter,” Kira said.

“As usual, your instincts are above reproach. Come see me for dinner. I don’t want the war to steal everything from my past,” Thorn said.

She favored Thorn with a smile that somehow seemed a little sad. “Same. See you there. I’ll call ahead and order.”

“You can do that?” Thorn asked.

“Sure. You do it by color. Anything but pink.” With that, she was gone, leaving him to stand in the fragrance of flowers that knew nothing of the war, or loss, or his wishes.

* * *

As soon as Thorn had finished the end-of-day briefing—which wasn’t much more than a succession of variations on, Situation stable, no change, from all the FOB departments—he left the HQ and headed off to find Kira.

“I need a channel to Lieutenant Kira Wixcombe,” he said into the comm. He kept walking as he waited for the comm AI to establish a link to her, heading generally in the direction of the main Mess.

“Wixcombe, Kira, Lieutenant is no longer at FOB Gauntlet,” the computer-synthesized voice came back. “She left a message for Stellers, Thorne, Lieutenant.”

Thorn stopped just clear of a junction between busy corridors. Kira was no longer at FOB Gauntlet? What?

“Go ahead, play her message.”

“Hey, Thorn, if you’re hearing this instead of seeing me, I’m gone—not for good, just for now. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me, and a lot of time to think, but what I know right now is that you matter to me, and I’ll be damned if I don’t say it out loud at least once. I’m sorry we both know loss, and I’m sorry so many stars and miles are between us, because you’re a fixed point between me and the past. I need that past, and I hope you do too, even though it hurts like hell sometimes . . .” She trailed off into a moment of silence. “I can’t hear you right now, but I need to . . . to say it, to say that you’ll fight like a demon against them. Against the enemy and everyone who thinks your power is a bad thing. You’re not a bad thing, Thorn. You’re the best thing in a sea of hurt and loss and shit, I’m rambling.” She paused and took a long breath, and when she spoke again there was a richness to her voice that was far different from the girl Thorn knew all those years ago. “Thorn, come back to me when you can. Through all this emptiness is between us, fight. Survive. Win. Promise me, and . . . I hope this matters, but I’ll promise the same to you.”

Thorn spat a curse. Kira was gone?

She was gone, and yet, she wasn’t. She’d left a thread for him to follow, or for her to follow back to him, and maybe there was something in that. A thing worth nurturing beyond the simple act of surviving. An act of hope that spanned something longer than a single fight, or a running battle that left wreckage among the stars.

“She’s out there,” he said, but no one heard.

He knew, though, and for now, that was good enough.

Thorn resolved to at least record a message to her, and even started to turn back to his quarters to do just that. But a voice over the comm system stopped him dead.

“Specialist Stellers, report to the Hecate, docking bay sixteen-alpha,” the computer said. “Crash departure in thirty minutes. This is not a drill.”

Again, shit.

Thorn did hurry back to his quarters, but only to grab his go-bag, then get to the Hecate. Something urgent was happening, and that meant messages across the miles would have to wait.

For now.

3

The Hecate’s Tactical Officer glanced back over her shoulder. “Captain, the Nyctus ships seem to be making a run for that nebula off to our starboard, low.”

The Hecate’s Captain, a sturdy rock of a man named Galen Tanner, leaned forward as far as his crash suit and seat harness would allow. “Fascinating. They’re trying to lead us into a dust cloud. I wonder why.” He glanced at Thorn. “Stellers, is there anything you can do with your Starcasting to block or undo the Nyctus and their damned dust attacks?”

Thorn shifted in his jump seat. The witchport, set on the ship’s prow, had been damaged in a previous skirmish with the Nyctus and hadn’t yet been repaired. For the time being, that left him consigned to a temporary station on the Hecate’s bridge, so casting meant finding a quiet space and letting his power go.

It was an unusual sensation to hurl magic from a meeting room, or a glorified closet—neither of which had the sense of wonder that the ’port gave him when he stared out into the black. It left him and Captain Tanner as the only ones that weren’t sitting at workstations—the whole ship was Tanner’s workstation, while Thorn just didn’t need one. But while Tanner had a big, sophisticated g-seat, Thorn only had the piddly little jump seat—not even a permanent fixture, being folded up into a bulkhead while not in use.

Thorn felt a lot like a kid when he wasn’t being treated as a questionable member of the ON. Like the jumpseat, Thorn could be put away when he wasn’t in use. The sensation left him bitter, but he said nothing, lost in his moment of reverie.

“Stellers? The dust?” Tanner asked again, sharply.

Thorn shook his head. “Sorry, sir, no. The Starcaster Corps is working on the problem, but no one’s come up with any solutions that actually work.”

Tanner grunted and turned away. “Alright, then. Helm, bring us back to our original patrol course. We’ll just have to let these bastards go.”

Someone on the bridge muttered, “Again,” and Tanner’s head snapped around.

“Whoever said that,” he said, his eyes set firmly on the Tac O, “should feel free to add their own solution to the Nyctus dust attacks—or else shut their damned mouths, because I won’t have editorial comments about my orders on my bridge. Do we all understand this?”

A chorus of “aye, sir” rattled around the bridge. The Tac O glanced at the Captain once, then focused on her console, cheeks coloring in embarrassment. If she was innocent of the comment, she wasn’t doing a good job of defending herself.

Thorn bottled up a sigh, staring ahead at the screens. Ever since the disastrous battle in the nebula that mauled the Centurion, this event had been a script for the war. Just a series of brief, inconclusive clashes between patrols, and pursuits broken off as one side or the other managed to get under the cover of the big guns. Fixed fortifications—bristling with those same big guns—were springing up along the fringes of no-man’s land, also known as the Zone.

In the case of the Nyctus, they faded like water into sand, running hard for the protection of one of many, many voluminous clouds of dust and gas sprawling through and around the Zone.

It was a frustrating, tedious kind of war, bleeding away personnel and resources in fits and starts but never yielding a decisive battle—or even a notable loss. Ships had to be constantly rotated out for overhauls and upgrades, as frequent patrols took a toll on their systems, especially the finicky Alcubierre drives. Thorn knew a growing sense of unease was permeating the ranks of the ON, right up to the most senior levels. If something wasn’t shaken free soon, and the ON was able to resume the strategic initiative, it would become ever more difficult to do so, and might eventually become impossible.

“Stellers!”

Thorn jumped when Tanner snapped out his name. “Sir?”

“Are you asleep on my bridge?” the Captain asked, his tone the very definition of menace.

“Oh . . . no, of course not, sir. I was just contemplating possible ways to get around the dust problem, like you asked.”

Tanner narrowed his eyes at Thorn but eventually just nodded. “Fine. Just don’t let it switch off your situational awareness. I asked you if you could detect any of their damned—what the hell are they called, shamans? Anyway, any of the squiddie’s ’casters aboard their ships. You can do that, right?”

Thorn strained against his harness, struggling to take in the tactical display. At this range, no conventional magical effect would likely be effective, not without enormous effort. He’d just be another long-range weapon, no better than a single torpedo launcher.

And unlike a device made of metal, he would get spent. Exhausted, worn down, and prone to make mistakes. But Joining could work, since it seemed that physical distance between subjects was irrelevant. As long as Thorn could conceptualize his target, he could interact with it, and had several times already, remotely compelling Nyctus to attack one another or scuttle their own ships.

But he’d been wary about it since. If he could do it to them, they could do it to him; in fact, he’d likely be of more value just trying to shield the crew of the Hecate from psychic influences by the squiddies—

And yes, the irony of considering how useful Joining might be right now, when he’d pretty much blown Kira’s talents in the very same thing off just a couple of weeks prior, wasn’t lost on him. It just underscored how bad he felt about not being able to apologize to her. He’d been bugged out of Code Gauntlet too fast to get a message out before he left, and the Hecate had been deployed since then, which meant comms were secured and usable for official traffic only. He’d even considered trying to use telepathy, but given their proximity to the Nyctus, hadn’t wanted to chance it. Again, if the aliens managed to influence or, worse, take control of a Starcaster aboard an ON ship, the results might be disastrous.

Which brought him full circle back to Tanner’s question.

“I could try, sir,” Thorn replied. “But there’s a risk. If the Nyctus shamans are on the ball, they might be able to back-link through my own telepathy, and potentially gain some control over me. I mean, it’s not likely, but it is possible.”

“All I need to hear, Stellers. If there’s any chance they could turn you against us, it’d be like giving them the security access codes to our reactor’s governor system.” He scowled at the Nyctus ships, now passing out of effective sensor range. “We’ll just accept these bastards as gone and move on. Tac O, file an entry in the log about this, our latest non-fight against the bad guys, for my review and approval. And let’s stand the ship down from action stations.” He glanced at his own armor, then raised both brows in mild irritation. “I don’t wanna sit marinating in this damned crash suit any longer than absolutely necessary, and the crew needs some grub.”

Acknowledgements floated around the bridge, as the various stations went to work reducing the alert state and returning the Hecate to her standard flight configuration.

For Thorn, that mainly meant staying out of the way, which was a skill he learned years ago at the orphanage.

Some things never change.

* * *

Kira cracked open an eye but didn’t dare stir. The Trainees—and that was their official title at Code Nebula, regardless of rank—were expected to remain in their racks until reveille, whereupon their feet were expected to hit the floor. Even a few seconds before or after was grounds for a chewing-out, and probably extra duties on top of it.

She heard the sudden clump of booted feet on the barracks floor, then saw Lieutenant Commander Narvez stride into view. The severe woman stopped, looked around in the wan, grey light of predawn, and did—nothing. She just stood there. Kira knew the woman was watching the time like the hawk she resembled, while waiting to see if anyone stirred before her wakeup order.

A week into training, they all knew better than that. Besides, none of them were actual recruits; all had spent time not just in the ON, but on operational duty, so they generally knew the score. It sucked that they had to go through all of the ridiculous, basic-training style crap contemptuously known as chickenshit again, but that was just the way Code Nebula worked.

A dazzling blue flash was followed by a piercing crack like thunder, and then the overhead lights snapped on, garishly bright. Narvez varied how she did reveille every morning, another little head game. Kira shoved her feet out of the covers and planted them on the cold tile floor, then she lifted herself up. All the other trainees did exactly the same, almost in unison. As Kira stood, Narvez’s voice grated through the barracks.

“Wakey wakey, people! It’s the start of another superb day at Code Nebula!”

A ragged, sleepy chorus rose in response. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!”

Narvez stopped and looked around, hands clasped behind her back. “You people sound like you’re tired.” She spun on a Trainee—a lean, hairy young man named Riley. “Are you tired, Trainee Riley? Is the pace of Code Nebula proving too much for you?”

Riley, a Scorch, blinked at her. It did look to Kira like he was genuinely having trouble waking up, but he blurted out the automatic response anyway.

“Ma’am, no, ma’am!”

Narvez kept her gaze on Riley for a few uncomfortable seconds—long enough to make him begin wondering if he should say something else. But she abruptly spun away and raised her voice again, shouting along the entire barracks. “Let’s hit it! Up and outta that rack!”

Narvez rubbed her hands together, warming to her role as she did every morning. “This day is a gift. Code Nebula is a treasure chest of opportunity, and I’m here to assist you, in my own kind and personal way, to reach levels of expertise you’ve never imagined. A gift, each time you reach inside that cauldron of power you’ve been given. You’re all talented. But I assure you, I will make you better. Superior, even, if you only do one thing.” She paused her pacing, and rounded on Kira. “Do you know what that one thing is, Trainee?”

“Ma’am, it is to do exactly as you order, ma’am,” Kira answered smoothly.

Narvez allowed herself a small grin. “Perfect. Trainees, take note. This is how to become better in a hurry. With that in mind, listen up. I want everyone turned out and formed up in PT strip in three minutes from my mark. Your beds had better be made.” She started for the door, then stopped. “Oh, and before I forget, the last one of you formed up gets extra duties tonight. Don’t bother thanking me; my heart’s already full.” She clumped her way to the doorway, stopped again, and shot a single word back over her shoulder.

“Mark!”

The Trainees exploded into action, yanking at bedding and pulling it back into order. Most of them had pinned it to the bottoms of their mattresses, meaning they only had to pull and straighten out the top of the bedding, flatten it, and get the pillow properly aligned, instead of having to remake the whole thing from scratch. It was one of a multitude of tricks that got passed down from generation to successive generation of Recruits and Trainees, intended to make life during training a little easier—a legacy of handy shortcuts through and around the chickenshit.

As the platoon began pulling on their PT gear, Kira stepped out of the little embayment enclosing her bed space, basically a cubby hole containing her bed and a row of lockers. “Hey, everyone,” she shouted over the clamor of Trainees rushing to make this next timing. “I’ll be the last one out, so don’t kill yourselves.”

Riley paused in the middle of pulling on a sock. He was more often than not the last one ready. “That’s solid, Kira, thanks.”

Kira just shrugged, even when a chorus of thanks floated her way.

“Eh, I have a feeling I’m in for a shitty day anyway,” she said, returning to her locker and extracting her neatly folded and stacked PT strip.

As she yanked on her gear, Kira wondered how Narvez would be for the remainder of training, then she turned her thoughts to Joining. The desire to be a powerful Joiner wasn’t just lip service; Kira was all in and ready to work. How she could get better was a less certain concept, because magic—and Joining—were somewhere between art and intention.

Kira squared her shoulders, eyes ahead, and strode out into the day, knowing exactly what awaited her on the other side.

“Wixcombe,” Narvez snapped as Kira finally rushed into the cold light of dawn and took her place in the platoon. “You’re the last.”

“Ma’am, I’ll clear my calendar for the evening, ma’am.”

Narvez gave a single nod. “I’ve got just the activity to fill your free time. Now let’s get to work.”

4

“Tac O,” Captain Tanner said. “Talk to me. Talk to me especially about those two Nyctus ships that seem to be trying to flank us, starboard high.”

“Two ships trying to flank us, starboard high, sir,” the Tactical Officer said, offering a sheepish smile. “It looks like they’re trying to hammer-and-anvil us.”

Thorn shifted uncomfortably in the jump seat. He was starting to feel more at home in this cramped, folding seat than he did in the cabin he shared with two other junior officers. That is, if at home included sitting in a sweaty crash suit, jammed into a chair about a centimeter too narrow, just enough to prevent him from ever quite finding a comfortable position.

“Concur,” Tanner said. “Hammer-and-anvil it is.” He tapped at the console set into the arm of his expansive—and no doubt plush, at least by comparison—command seat. “Helm, I’ve sent you a new heading. Tactical, coordinate our new trajectory with the Steadfast and the Gladius, and inform them to adopt Formation Tango during the approach to battle.”

Thorn watched Tanner as he worked. The man exuded a quiet but formidable competence. He was, Thorn thought, a true leader: direct, assertive, and unforgiving of sloppy performance, but just as ready to make the correct way clear, then give the miscreant a chance to fix their mistake. He could be gruff or warm by turns, and the Hecate’s crew loved him for it.

Which was no doubt why he’d been given command of this little task force—the Hecate and Steadfast, both destroyers, and the smaller, more nimble Gladius, a corvette. The Gladius’s primary job was courier duties, running dispatches between Tanner and the fleet HQ back at Code Gauntlet. Absent easy transluminal comms beyond twenty-five lights, Alcubierre drive-equipped ships were the only way to get messages moved around that would take years, centuries even, as they crawled along at light speed.

But she could fight, too, and it was looking as though that was about to happen—that Task Force Tanner would finally come to grips with an enemy that seemed to suddenly want to engage in battle, rather than running off toward the nearest dust cloud.

And that made Thorn suspicious. Why the sudden desire to fight, when the past few weeks had seen nothing but hit-and-run attacks, emphasis on the run part?

Apparently, Captain Tanner had the same suspicions.

“Stellers, we’ve got five enemy ships, frigates and corvettes, that are apparently looking for a scrap. They outgun us by a small margin, but not enough to be immediately decisive. This could go either way, and they know that. I want to know what they’re up to. Comments?”

Thorn shifted in his uncomfortable seat again. He could see the subtext of Tanner’s words in his expression.

Do something to earn your keep, Starcaster Stellers. Give me a reason to keep you on my bridge.

“No idea, sir, but I’d like to find out myself. To do that, though, I’m going to have to ’cast.”

Tanner nodded. “Do it. Find out what you can.” He glanced at his console. “And you’ve got three minutes, then we have to make a go/no-go decision about fighting today.”

“Understood, sir.” Thorn began unhooking from the jump seat so he could move to the briefing room adjoining the bridge for some privacy.

“Oh, and Stellers?”

“Sir?”

Tanner tapped his console. “I’m going to have a Rating watch over you, with a sidearm and orders to do whatever needs to be done if the squiddies get their mental tentacles around you.”

Thorn looked at Tanner for a moment, then nodded. “Again, understood, sir. Just one favor?”

Tanner’s eyebrow lifted. No one asked the Captain for favors on his own bridge, but he was obviously intrigued. “And what would that be, Stellers?”

“Tell whoever’s going to watch over me that I owe you ten grand. That should ensure they’ll only pull the trigger if they absolutely have to.”

Tanner just returned his no-nonsense stare for a moment.

And then he laughed. The moment of humor flickered away from him, around the bridge, and Tanner gave him an appreciative look.

“Carry on, Starcaster Stellers.”

“Aye, sir.”

Once he was settled in the briefing room, little more than a cubbyhole, and a dour Rating with a pistol had joined him, Thorn pulled his crash suit open. He extracted his talisman, the battered copy of The Hungry Trout, a book from his childhood on the now-devastated planet once called Cotswold. Before he began ’casting, he glanced up at the Rating.

“You’d better draw that pistol and aim it at me.”

The man frowned. “Why, sir?”

“Because if you’re more than a trigger pull away from killing me, and if the Nyctus manage to grab control of me, you won’t get the chance.”

The Rating swallowed. “Sir? Uh, really?”

“Yes, really.” But Thorn smiled. “But don’t worry. The chances are slim. More likely I’m going to be the one making their day miserable.”

The man took a breath and released it as he drew his sidearm and cocked it. “Hope so, sir. I mean, if I end up having to blow your head off, I’ll probably be the one stuck cleaning it up after.”

Now it was Thorn’s turn to laugh. Riding the surge of good feeling from the humor, Thorn let his awareness shrink down to the point of contact between his fingers and the smooth, glossy cardboard of the book’s cover. Once he was entirely focused on the familiar touch, he let his awareness expand again, like a balloon filling with air, until he could feel every nerve ending in his body hum like a wire keening in the wind.

Then his senses kept going, encompassing the briefing room, the Rating and his intense nervousness, the purpose and confidence of Tanner and the bridge crew beyond, the yawning gulf of emptiness beyond that—

—all the way out into the darkness yawning just beyond his fingertips.

Now Thorn had to start pushing, crafting a wave of psychic force that would carry his awareness far beyond the Hecate’s hull, and into—

Nothing. Literally nothing. Just vacuum and a few glimmers of matter, lone dust motes, and gas molecules too dispersed for even the Nyctus to craft into a viable weapon. He rode the wave through it, his focus diminishing even as the area of his awareness grew like a blooming thunderhead. Thorn gritted his teeth, squeezed his talisman, and continued to push.

Still nothing. And—

Alloy, tough and lifeless. Electro-mechanical systems, but he didn’t recognize them. They had no clear signatures, so there wasn’t anything he could know about them other than their utter unfamiliarity. But this told him nothing about the intentions of the Nyctus. He needed to touch a squid’s mind for that, so he let his awareness roam through the enemy ship, searching.

And finding nothing of the sort.

Thorn pushed a little harder and drained himself a little faster, bringing the enemy ships into even tighter, more complete focus. But it made no difference. There were no signs of life, no flickers of thought, aboard two of the Nyctus ships. Just electrical and mechanical signals, the fierce energy of reactors, and nothing else.

Thorn made to release the ’casting, to return his awareness to the bridge of the Hecate. Before he could, though, he heard—or felt, or thought—a voice that rang in his mind like the booming of a gong, the scrape of heavy feet in gravel, the squeal of fingernails across slate.

We

See

You

We

Know

You

Thorn yanked himself out of the ’casting, flicking his eyes open, gasping as he reoriented himself. He was still sitting in the Hecate’s briefing room.

“Stellers!”

He turned to the voice, but it wasn’t a gravelly screech. It was Captain Tanner over the comm.

“Sir?”

“We’ve got to make a call to either commit to battle or not in the next fifteen seconds, or we’re committed whether we want it or not—”

“Two—” Thorn began, then licked dry lips with a dryer tongue. “Two of those ships . . . the two flanking us . . . they’re crewless.” He was already hurrying back to the bridge as he spoke, passing the Rating who gave him a relieved smile.

“Glad I didn’t have to blow your head off, sir.”

“Me too.”

He stepped onto the bridge to find Tanner staring at him. “Drones?”

“Aye, sir. There are no life-signs aboard those ships that I can detect.”

Tanner kept staring.

Then his eyes widened and he turned, stabbing a finger at the console attached to his command seat. “All ships, crash action Beta-Epsilon! Rendezvous at Point Tiger!”

Tanner didn’t need to say anything else. The Hecate’s Helm Officer immediately fired the drive to full power, while Engineering started the countdown to activating the Alcubierre drive. Thirty seconds later, the Hecate and her consorts vanished from normal space, hurling themselves into warped bubbles of space-time within which they were, technically, motionless. It was the Alcubierre bubble that propagated through space at a transluminal rate, carrying the ship along with it. The logic of it twisted Thorn’s mind, the way magic probably did with people like Tanner and Scoville. It seemed like cheating around the limits of relativistic physics via a loophole—which it was, really.

Tanner turned to Thorn. “Good work, Stellers. You probably just saved our collective asses.” A hint of a grateful smile played across Tanner’s face, a fact that seemed to annoy the man.

Thorn shook his head, clearing away the last cobwebs of his ’casting. “I don’t understand, sir. What do you mean?”

“Fire ships, Mister Stellers.”

Thorn just kept staring. “Fire ships?”

“An ancient weapon. Take some old ships, fill them with flammables and explosives, then suicide-run them into your enemy. Why else would the Nyctus have ghost ships so determined to close on us? Hammer-and-anvil means that they were trying to catch us in a ninety degree crossfire, so no matter which way we turned, we’d be flanked.” Tanner turned back to the main viewscreen, now rendered utterly blank, thanks to the Alcubierre bubble separating them from normal space. “A solid tactic—and a ruse. They would have run those fire ships of theirs in as fast as they could and then collided with us, detonated them, whatever. It would not have been a desirable outcome.”

Thorn settled back in his seat, letting the residual effects of his magic trickle away. It was immensely gratifying to have been able to do something with ’casting that seemed, on the surface of it, anyway, to have been so valuable, even if it did end up with them running away. But his thoughts didn’t linger long on that and instead went back to that horrifying voice in his head. It had been unlike anything he’d previously experienced from the Nyctus minds he’d touched.

We see you.

We know you.

I know you too, Thorn sent. And that’s going to be a bigger problem than you can ever know.

We will know. You will understand.

Thorn let his mental laugh ring harsh across the miles. Not in time to do anything.

* * *

It was a flat truism that not all ’casters were created equal. The battery of tests intended to determine a potential Caster’s aptitude wasn’t just pass or fail; it gauged the Caster’s capabilities and strength as well. Of course, it also became pretty evident in situations like this.

Kira watched as a group of neophyte ’casters ran the obstacle track. They were members of a recruit course being run at Code Nebula at the same time as Kira’s upgrade course. This was the first day they were allowed to use ’casting to help them climb the walls, cross the ropes and beams, crawl over or under the razor-wire entanglements, and avoid the laser trip beams that would fire a barrage of painful darts if broken. The Recruits were given no guidance or constraints on how they used their ’casting—which is why a small cadre of experienced ’casters watched them warily, to reign in some magical effect gone awry.

Kira couldn’t watch for long. She had a task of her own—running a tortuous cross-country route, without being briefed on the route. They had to use Joining to lift the specific turns and distances from the minds of their instructors, while trying to make the mental intrusions as unobtrusive as possible. It was, quite literally, a psychic navigation exercise. Kira had stopped at the top of a sandy slope overlooking the obstacle course to re-strap a loosening gym shoe, which gave her a moment to watch these brand new ’casters in action.

She saw a girl of eighteen or nineteen years stop at the base of a four meter wall, concentrate, and then lift herself on a swirling column of air, up to the top, and then over the obstacle. Kira grunted in approval, but the mood was short-lived when the girl lost control of her Casting and plunged unceremoniously into the dirt, chin first.

“Ouch,” Kira muttered. The girl had fallen three meters, but in true youthful spirit, bounced up, spat, and began moving again.

The next member of the course behind her, a somewhat chunky young man drenched in sweat, stopped and tried to mimic what he’d just seen her do. He raised a strong wind, whipped up a bunch of dust and debris—and that was it.

And that, Kira thought, was the difference between a natural talent and a latent one that had to be coaxed out of its bearer by training and practice.

Trainee Wixcombe, are you enjoying your little vacation?

The voice cracked in her mind like a whip. It wasn’t Narvez, though, as she’d expected it would be. This was Lieutenant Commander Fielder, a snappy, short-tempered man who oversaw most of their Joiner-specific training. He was a seasoned vet, but a replacement due to the depleted corps left behind from the Nyctus attacks.

She finished strapping up her shoe, then stood and resumed running, leaving the little tableau of ’caster recruits behind. As she pounded along, she saw Rainer up ahead, jogging and glancing back. She was a young woman from a high-g world called Carpathia. Shorter than Kira by almost a head, her loss of height was offset by a corresponding increase in girth; Rainer was built like a barrel: round, squat, and sturdy. Kira knew the taciturn Hammer could probably arm wrestle any two other members of the course simultaneously and beat both. She paid for it, though, with legs like tree stumps that inevitably consigned her to last place in any sort of run or competition that involved speed. That explained how Rainer could have started this run in the first group to depart, and Kira could have time to lollygag around with her shoes and still catch up to her.

Rainer glanced back as Kira pulled up behind her, then edged aside to let her by. Instead, Kira fell in beside her.

“Don’t let me hold you up, Wixcombe,” Rainer said, her voice a bass rumble.

Kira had to smile. Not a hint of breathlessness from Rainer. It wasn’t a case of her not being in shape; she could probably run like this all day. Her lagging was more a matter of her having to pound out two steps for every one of Kira’s.

“You’re not holding me up,” Kira said, her own voice taut with exertion. “I just thought I’d drop by and say hi.”

Rainer gave her a sharp look. “If you’re planning on being all noble and sacrificing and shit like you were last week at reveille, and deliberately come in last so I don’t have to, don’t bother. If I’m last, I’m last, and I’ll take my lumps.”

Kira shot a glance back at Rainer, then shrugged. “Fair enough. Good running to you, ‘caster,” she said, then sped on, leaving Rainer behind with a jaunty wave.

“Hey!”

Kira looked back. Rainer was giving her a sheepish look.

“Sorry, Wixcombe. Don’t mind me, I can sometimes be an asshole for no particular reason.”

Kira slowed, letting Rainer catch up. “Yeah, I see that. And—” Kira paused to take a couple of breaths. The trail had started an incline, rising into a stand of looming frond trees. “And I wasn’t going to come in last place just to save your ass anyway. I’ve only got one noble sacrifice in me per course.”

Kira watched Rainer sidelong as they ran. Instinct had told her that blunt and direct was the best way to talk to this woman. But she wasn’t sure; she’d never met another Carpathian before, so maybe they were all about convoluted, subtle, and nuanced conversation.

“Good running to you too, Wix,” Rainer shot back, suddenly grinning.

Blunt and direct it was, then.

They labored up to the crest of the high ground, into a clearing among the frond trees. The afternoon sun crashed down on them as they emerged from the shade along the trail; bright, merciless, hot. Both of them jogged to a stop. Two trails left the clearing ahead of them, one continuing more or less straight ahead, the other taking off to the left, rising over some rock outcrop, and heading toward even higher ground.

Kira shaded her eyes, then took a series of breaths, hands on her hips. She needed a pause to catch her breath before trying to read Fielder, or one of the other instructors, for the right way to proceed.

“That way,” Rainer said, pointing straight ahead.

Kira looked up from her doubled-over stance. “You’ve already . . . Joined an instructor and found that . . . out? Holy crap, that was . . . fast.” Kira’s breath hadn’t yet caught up with her.

Rainer shrugged. “Nah. There was a map hanging on the wall of the company orderly room. I got sent there to drop off some papers by Narvez, and saw it.”

Kira straightened, shaking her head. “Shameful. That’s cheating.”

“Well, aren’t you honorable.”

Kira smiled. “Nope. I’m actually impressed. That’s the kind of skullduggery I can admire.”

“Skullduggery? Are we channeling those old Earth vids where the, you know—” Rainer mimed waving a sword around.

“Pirates and shit like that? Yeah, sounds about the right era. Regardless, well done,” Kira said, then trailed off as a mental flicker, like a distant voice you could hear but not quite understand, tickled the edges of her awareness. It was an instructor, maybe Fielder, giving the training area a psychic scan to stay updated on his students’ progress. Kira’s own mental defenses had bristled at the touch, snapping into place to protect her from an intrusion—the mental equivalent of a gag reflex. She was going to let it go at that—

But, instead, decided to try a little experiment.

“You coming?” Rainer asked, taking a pace toward the trail ahead. “Or are you still catching your breath?”

Kira raised a finger. “Just gimme a sec.”

Using the emanation of Fielder’s thoughts like a beacon, Kira let her own awareness be drawn to it. The instructors had gone to great pains to point out that they’d deliberately not defend themselves against attempts by the students to lift the correct course layout from their minds. The point of the exercise was to test their ability to read remote thoughts while exerting themselves physically. No doubt a future incarnation would have them trying to slip by the instructor’s mental defenses, probably at night and in the rain, too.

There. Sure enough, there it was, a conceptual understanding of the course, punctuated by memories of trails and junctions through the frond forest, like frozen images or brief, staccato bursts of video.

The trail ahead that Rainer had seen marked on the map wasn’t the right way. She pointed up, to the left-hand path. “That’s the right direction.”

Rainer put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Not what the map said.”

“I know.”

“Why would they have a map in the orderly room showing the wrong course?”

“Maybe it was something else—” Kira began, then stopped, narrowing her eyes. “Wait. Have you ever seen a map hanging in the OR before?”

“No, but I don’t make a habit of hanging out with the company brass.”

Kira nodded. “Same, but . . . it’s just too convenient.”

“What, you think it was a setup?”

“Forcing us to choose between trusting a strange map or our own Joining?”

Rainer nodded. “Damn good point, Wixcombe.”

“It’s Kira.”

“Okay, Kira. I’m still Rainer.”

Kira chuckled. “Okay, so I guess we’re going that way,” she said, turning toward the left-hand trail. But it was Rainer who didn’t move this time.

“You know, I’m not the only one who would have gone into that orderly room. In fact, now that I think about it, there were more than a few little errands to drop stuff off there. Remember, just yesterday Max got sent there to go pick up some papers that turned out not to be ready? So Narvez got pissed over it, then sent Wylie back—”

“Yeah.” Kira nodded. “Yeah. I can think of at least two or three times the day before, too.”

“Sneaky bastards, aren’t they?”

Kira nodded again. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“That we’re going to stay here and make sure that anyone coming behind us doesn’t go the wrong way because they saw the map?”

For a third time, Kira nodded. “Yeah.”

“Means we’re definitely gonna be last,” Rainer said. “Or at least I am, because you can just take the lead right near the end.” She shrugged. “Whatever.”

This time, Kira shook her head. “Nope. We’re crossing that finish line at exactly the same time.”

“Up to you. I won’t say no to some company on the extra shit duties, though.”

5

Thorn clattered into the quarters he’d been assigned at Code Gauntlet, one of a bunch of rooms—although airless cubbyhole was probably more correct—reserved for transient personnel. The Hecate had finally been pulled back from patrol duties and was now stood down, starting a series of upgrades to her point-defense systems and sensor suite that would take her offline for at least a week. All non-essential personnel had been disembarked to keep them out of the way.

And a Starcaster was, apparently, near the top of that non-essential list.

Not that Thorn really minded. He might have had more expansive quarters aboard the Hecate, but he also shared them with two other junior officers. This might be a glorified closet, but as an officer he was entitled to better accommodations than the sprawling, dorm-style barracks that were home to all but the most senior enlisted personnel.

So he had walls. And a door. And that meant privacy.

He also had access to comms—the first such access that wasn’t locked down for operational security reasons, in fact, since about three weeks ago. Since Kira abruptly left Code Gauntlet, and then he’d been yanked onto active duty aboard the Hecate and couldn’t even contemplate sending a personal message.

Until now.

Thorn tossed his duffle bag on the bed, which was squeezed beside the terminal and the tiny, stool-like chair attached to it.

“Small, but at least it’s charmless,” he said, then rolled his shoulders, feeling some tension begin to release. Having any sense of permanency at all was an improvement over the shiftless life of someone who’d lost everything at a young age.

Clearing his mind, he drew in a breath and spoke to his terminal. “Open a comm message,” he said, and the terminal lit up.

“Real-time or remote comms?” the terminal asked.

The AI voice was curt and crisp; nothing like Trixie, the AI that oversaw Mol’s Gyrfalcon fighter aboard the Apollo. He let himself spend a moment wondering how Mol and Trixie were doing, then shook himself back into the moment. Thorn’s mind was drifting, and a glance at how his bed suddenly looked told him why.

“Remote only.”

“State recipient name, location ID, and security classification.”

“Lieutenant Kira Wixcombe, Code Nebula, station ID . . .” He couldn’t remember the specific comms ID, which was just a string of digits. He shrugged. “You’re supposed to be artificially intelligent. It’s Code Nebula.”

“Location ID accepted.”

“Good. Security classification is . . . unclassified but personal.”

“Low priority assigned to message. Ready to record.”

Unclassified, personal messages might be assigned low priority ratings automatically, but it struck Thorn that, for most people, personal messages to friends and family were probably the highest priority. Still, arguing with an AI was a losing game, so he let it go.

“Kira, it’s Thorn. I’m here, in a jumped-up version of a shipping container, but I’ve got a bed and a place to think.” He exhaled, choosing his words carefully. “When you get this, things will have changed, and changed again. I think—I think that’s how our lives are going to be until we kick the last Nyctus back across their systems and remove their ability to ever harm us again. I don’t know when that will be, or even if that will be, but we’re not kids anymore. I’m not even sure I’m entirely human, sometimes, given how other ON personnel look at me. You know what I mean, given that you’re a Joiner and people can sense your ability, sometimes. Sense it and resent it. When you come back out into the stars to fight, I’ll be here, and I will need your Joining. So perfect it. Be as strong as you can, and bring that will—the will I saw you use when we were young? That kind of iron. Bring it with you, out here, to us, and to me and everyone else fighting our way across this bloody path.” He let a long breath out, rubbing his face with a hand. “I’ll be here. Be safe, and come help us win this fight. Even when you think you’re alone, you’re not. I’m here.” Again, he paused. “End message.”

When he was done, Thorn reviewed it. It was hardly poetry, but it was from the heart and would have to do. He confirmed transmit, downloaded the transmission confirmation, and leaned back, eyes closing, if only for a moment.

Transmit implied the message was now on its way at light speed to Kira. But a message from here to Code Nebula would take eight years to arrive, and Thorn didn’t have that kind of time. It would be downloaded into a data module with a multitude of other messages, then carried by courier ship beyond the twenty-five light-year soft barrier. He had no idea when Kira would actually receive it—days certainly, and possibly longer.

“Time for the rack,” he said, sleep coming to him like a wave he couldn’t escape. His last thought was about learning to hover. It seemed like a skill that would come in handy.

Sometimes, magic had uses other than making things go boom.

* * *

Kira was pretty damned sure the floor of the platoon office really didn’t need to be scrubbed with a toothbrush, but here she was, on her knees and doing just that long, long after the rest of the class had gone to bed.

As she dug the bristles under the edge of the baseboard, Kira wondered how Rainer was getting along. Rainer’s particular critical task consisted of using a coffee mug to transfer all of the water from one 170 liter drum, to another. This task, which took punishment to new levels of tedium, absolutely had to be performed before either of them could even contemplate falling exhausted into their racks.

“Trainee Wixcombe.”

Kira jumped, turned quickly, and smacked her face on a table leg. Muttering a curse, she looked up, saw it was Lieutenant Commander Fielder, then immediately got up and snapped to attention.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Fielder studied Kira for a moment, black eyes gleaming in the middle of his deep brown face, his cheekbones high and angled. The man came from some high-rad world—maybe Fremont, where Kira heard the population had to literally take shelter from the midday sun or risk serious UV burns.

He kept studying her. Kira found herself wanting to shift and fidget under that uncompromising gaze, but Fielder finally relented and broke the tension.

“At ease, Trainee.”

Kira snapped herself to the at-ease stance, which, she’d long ago learned, was only slightly less taxing than standing at attention and had very little to do with ease at all.

“Wixcombe,” Fielder said. “Tell me what happened today.”

Kira squashed a frown. Fielder was probably referring to her little sojourn during the psychic navigation exercise with Rainer—unless he wasn’t, and it was an entirely different kind of mistake she’d made. She decided to stay noncommittal. “Sir?”

“Playing dumb really pisses me off. You know damned well what I mean.”

Okay, he must mean the incident with Rainer. “When Trainee Rainer and I determined that the correct path wasn’t the one she’d seen marked on a map in the company orderly room, we wanted to ensure no one else made the same error.”

“Seven people did, though, and ended up in the Fire Swamp.”

Kira winced. The Fire Swamp, a dismal stretch of sodden low ground along the river bordering Code Nebula, had nothing to do with heat or flames. The name came from the fact that everything that lived there, from plants to bugs, literally seemed to ooze powerful—and exceedingly painful—neurotoxins.

“They were ahead of us, sir,” she said. “We weren’t in time to stop them.”

Fielder nodded. “So some of what happened to these people was out of your control.”

“It—yes, sir, it was.”

Where was Fielder going with this? For that matter, what brought him to the platoon office at oh-dark-thirty in the first place?

Fielder looked at a document on the clerk’s desk. He turned it slightly, examined it, then turned back to Kira.

“Trainee Wixcombe, it is at this point in the course that we assign Trainee Squad Leaders. Platoons will be divided into three squads, with a Trainee leader responsible for each.” He moved slightly so he could look Kira in the eye. “You will be assuming command of Number One squad in our platoon, effective at reveille.” He picked up the document. “This shows the breakdown of personnel in each squad. You’ll need to review it so you know who’s in your squad and can get them turned out for morning PT in”—he glanced at the time—“four hours and eleven minutes.”

Kira blinked in surprise. She could think of at least a half-dozen members of the platoon that had performed better than she had, almost across the board.

But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t her place to question.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll try not to let you down.”

But Fielder’s face showed not even a hint of pleasure. “Do not thank me, Trainee Wixcombe. I have done you no favors here. If anything, you should be cursing me—and believe me, you will.”

Kira stared for a moment. “Sir, I—” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Leadership is a burden, Wixcombe, not a reward. A privileged burden, but a burden nonetheless. I have just placed the lives of nine other individuals in your hands. You now have custody over the well-being of someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s son, or brother, or best friend—you get the idea.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it gets worse, Wixcombe. Your instinct will be to protect these people. And that’s good. It’s a damned fine instinct.” His eyes lost focus for a second, then snapped back with a small turn of his head. There were memories nipping at his heels. “There are times when it’s going to be the wrong instinct.”

His confession wasn’t kind, but it felt generous. “I’m sorry, sir, again—I don’t understand.”

Fielder regarded her with a look of professional curiosity, and for a moment, his mental shield—a formidable construct, towering over and blocking access to his thoughts—faltered, as though a gate had been briefly cracked open. Kira sensed pain, and loss, and regret, and then the gate slammed shut again. Even Fielder was human, at his core.

“We didn’t give you a timing for that nav course today. You finished when you finished. But what if we had? What if you had had just enough time to get from that clearing where you figured out our little ruse, to the completion line? What would you have done about the people coming along behind you then?”

Kira hesitated. She wasn’t sure what the right answer was here, or if there even was one. She decided to go with the one that sounded the best, coming from a new squad leader.

“I would have stayed anyway, sir, to make sure our people didn’t go the wrong way.”

Fielder nodded. “I’m sure you would have. And that would have been the wrong instinct, the wrong thing to do.”

That drew Kira into a direct gaze with Fielder, which trainees studiously tried to avoid out of sheer self-preservation. His stare had a weight to it. “Sir, but in the ON we don’t leave anyone behind."

“Oh, that’s bullshit. Yeah, sure it sounds good, inspiring, comforting for our people.” He held up a hand. “And don’t get me wrong. We will do everything we possibly can to bring our people home, alive or—” He hesitated, and Kira thought she now sensed some of that pain she’d seen darken his face. Kira did the only thing she could in front of an open mental door where she was unwelcome, or undeserving. She withdrew and averted her eyes.

Fielder squared himself again and repeated his admonition. “Alive, or dead,” he went on. “But we can’t compromise what truly matters: the objective. Whatever task we’ve been given, it takes absolute priority over everything else. The mission is the only thing that matters. The outcome of a battle, a campaign—hell, of the entire war might hinge on the mission you’re given. Do you understand that, Wixcombe?”

Fielder’s sudden, febrile intensity surprised Kira, and in his words she sensed that he needed her to accept it. So she nodded quickly, even though she wasn’t entirely convinced he was right. Some missions might need to be aborted, because they simply weren’t worth the cost in lives.

“Sir, yes, sir,” she said.

Fielder kept his gaze locked on hers for a moment, then turned away.

“You now have four hours and seven minutes to prepare your squad for morning PT, Wixcombe.” He glanced down. “This floor will do as is, so you are dismissed. I suggest you rest and prepare so you can use the time remaining to you wisely.”

Kira acknowledged, then quickly withdrew. As he hurried back to the barracks through the predawn chill, though, she kept coming back to Fielder’s final words.

. . . so you can use the time remaining to you wisely.

He’d obviously meant the four hours and change until reveille and PT. But then she saw that strange intensity in his dedication to the mission, that almost pleading note in his voice, and found herself wondering how much time she had left in the war. In her life.

Maybe even with Thorn. But first, to victory, and that started with her squad. She glanced at her chrono. Four hours and three minutes to go.

Up next: rack time, Kira mused, and for the first time in a day, she smiled.

6

The alarm rattled Thorn partly awake; he blinked, or thought he did, anyway, being caught halfway between a dream, in which an alarm had jangled, and—

And what? He blinked again. He was dreaming, just dreaming about an alarm—

His eyes flew open, leaving him staring into darkness. But the alarm didn’t stop.

Reality intruded, unwelcome and harsh. Thorn flung the covers aside and exploded out of bed. Light immediately flooded the room, making him wince, and he blinked fast against the glare. He threw the door open and looked into the corridor; other junior officers, barefoot and rumpled, looked around at one another.

But the stunned instant of surprise slammed to a halt as everyone began grabbing clothes and boots, and jamming the minimal amount of clothing on before rushing off to duty stations if they had them, or blast shelters if they didn’t.

Thorn had joined them, pulling on socks, t-shirt, and pants, then grabbing his boots and the rest of his crash kit to get to his own assigned blast shelter. As he did, he nearly slammed headlong into another Lieutenant, a sallow-faced young man wearing only the lower half of his fatigues.

“What’s going on?” the other man asked, his eyes wide as portholes as he bounced on one foot while pulling a boot onto the other. “This a drill, or the real thing?”

Thorn shrugged. “No idea. This is a Forward Operating Base, though—”

“Specialist Stellers, report to CIC,” an automated voice cut in. “Specialist Stellers, report to CIC.”

Thorn glanced up at the ceiling, dawning realization on his face. “This is it.”

The other officer stomped his foot firmly into his boot. “Well, good luck with whatever the hell’s going on,” he snapped, then hurried off, feet pounding with the desperation of oncoming battle.

Thorn turned and rushed the other way, heading for the Combat Information Center. He had no idea why he was being summoned there; he had no assigned duty post at Code Gauntlet, which meant he was supposed to take station in a particular blast shelter and wait out the alert. His station was aboard the Hecate, but she was still in dry-dock, powered down, partly disassembled, and still at least three days from being ready to fly.

He rushed along, just carrying his boots for now in the interest of speed. He dodged around and pushed past other personnel racing for their own duty stations or blast shelters, clad in everything from little more than underwear to full battle-rattle body armor. A tense purpose hummed in the air, telling Thorn this probably wasn’t a drill. Something very real—and maybe lethal—was happening, and he’d been summoned right into the very middle of it.

* * *

The electric tension thrumming through Code Gauntlet was only magnified in the CIC. Thorn entered, then paused to finally pull on his boots since it only seemed right to be properly dressed in the operational heart of the FOB.

“Stellers, forget making yourself handsome and get your ass over here,” a voice snapped. Thorn followed the whip-crack voice through the bustle and hum of the CIC to find Commodore Scoville, the Ops O, waving him over. The man was, of course, impeccably dressed.

Thorn did as instructed and padded across the CIC in his socks. He noted more than a few personnel in various states of undress rushing past him with data slates or sitting at workstations, chattering away into comm circuits. It made him feel a little less conspicuous, but also made him wonder at the number of personnel that had been caught asleep. Code Gauntlet, as he’d said to the Lieutenant he’d nearly run down in the corridor, was supposed to be a forward operating base, emphasis on the forward part.

Based on the mild chaos around him, forward was exactly where he was.

“Stellers,” Scoville said. “Turns out you’re one of only two Starcasters currently here at the FOB, and the other is shipboard, on the Aquila, getting underway. That puts you on the spot.”

Thorn dropped his boots to the deck beneath a workstation. “On the spot for what, sir?”

Scoville gestured at the primary situation display. “For that.”

Thorn studied the display, a smear of tactical and operational information. He was still new enough that he had to take time to decipher it. He recognized Code Gauntlet at the center as well various icons scattered about, showing the locations and trajectories of ships and patrols, and—

“Oh. Shit.” He pointed at an angry red icon representing enemy activity. There were a bunch of those scattered along the far left of the display, reflecting the Nyctus side of the Zone, the no-man’s-land between two combatants. This one, though, was far closer to Code Gauntlet and was closing fast. “That’s an enemy—something, I’m sorry sir, I’m still getting used to these tac symbols.”

“Tell me about it,” Scoville said. “We’ve gone symbol crazy and need to winnow these down. But not right now.” The Commodore turned to Thorn. “Right now, that symbol is our problem. It’s a rock. A big one.”

Thorn took two steps, avoiding a workstation, then studied the data portrayed alongside the icon. “That’s—wait. Is that its mass?”

“It is. One-point-seven times ten to the tenth metric tons. That makes it the size of a small mountain.”

Thorn just stared. A mass that big was unprecedented in terms of weaponized rock used as KEWs by the Nyctus. That led to a slew of questions, beginning with the rock’s origin point and just how the Nyctus had hidden something that big, and that fast.

“Can we stop it?” Thorn asked, suddenly aware of why he’d likely been summoned to the CIC. “I mean, with our weapons, point-defense—?”

“We just ran a simulation,” Scoville cut in. “Best case scenario is that, using every last bit of ordnance we can, we can chip away at it, spall off a bunch of debris, and reduce it to one big chunk surrounded by a bunch of smaller chunks. That’ll spread the destruction over a much larger area instead of making it a single, direct hit on the FOB.”

Thorn considered the display. “Will that really make any difference?”

“Instead of being entirely vaporized by the impact, we’ll be mostly vaporized.”

Thorn had to marvel at the man’s aplomb in the face of impending obliteration. If anything, he sounded more annoyed than terrified.

The Commodore turned to face him squarely. “In other words, conventional military force isn’t going to work. We’ve got just over seven hours until that thing hits somewhere inside the red circle.” He gestured at a secondary display that depicted the planet’s surface with potential impact area. Code Gauntlet was close to the center. “That means we can get the planetside part of the FOB about two-thirds evacuated before we lose it, along with at least four ships currently stuck in drydock—including your Hecate. The geostationary orbital part will survive, but by itself it’s not much more than a refueling station. So, Starcaster Stellers, any ideas?”

Thorn stared at the display, trying to absorb the horrific information it was portraying in stark, dispassionate icons and data. A mountain-sized piece of rock, hitting in just over seven hours—

“How did we not see them accelerating this thing at us?” Thorn asked.

“We didn’t see it coming because it didn’t originate in this system,” Scoville replied. “As near as we can tell, the Nyctus accelerated it to that velocity, then somehow used something like an Alcubierre drive—a big one—to bring it here. They were able to conserve that original velocity, so when they returned it to sub-luminal flight, it was still moving like you now see it.” Scoville shook his head. “That’s something to worry about once we’ve dealt with the immediate problem, which is not having that thing come down on top of us. And that brings me back to my question. Stellers, do you have any idea what to do about this? Because if not, then you need to get to Transit Bay Delta, get your ass aboard the Janus, one of the evac ships, and haul it out of here.”

“Sir, I’m not going to run away—”

“You’ll do as you’re told,” Scoville said with iron authority. “Current orders are that we preserve Starcasters, if at all possible. And now I find myself asking the same question for a third time.” The Commodore’s face was set, jaw tight. “Don’t make it four.”

Thorn turned back to the display. “Is there any actual imagery of this thing?”

“There is,” Scoville said, nodding to a Petty Officer at a workstation. The woman, her expression tense, nodded curtly and tapped at her console. A window popped open on the primary display, framing a jagged chunk of rock, starkly lit by sunlight that cast knife-edged, midnight-black shadows across its rugged surface. Without anything to give scale, it could have been a fist-sized piece of rock held at arm’s-length or a mountain-sized slab of rock traveling at high sub-light speed.

“Does that help?” Scoville asked.

Thorn stared at the image and offered an absent nod. He walked a few paces closer to the primary display, concentrating on the onrushing projectile.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop it, sir, even with the help of another Starcaster,” he said. “It’s just too big, has too much kinetic energy.”

“Got to be honest, Stellers, I don’t care what you do to it, as long as it doesn’t hit this FOB.”

On instinct, Thorn reached for the talisman in his shirt pocket. He touched nothing but t-shirt, which gave him a small jolt, but without a word, he turned, walked back to the tunic he’d dropped by his boots, and retrieved his book. Holding his talisman absently, he returned his attention to the display, eyes bright with interest.

“Stellers, is that a children’s storybook you’re holding?” Scoville asked.

Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. It’s a talisman, pulled from the ashes of the orbital strike that killed my family. It has . . . meaning. And power, in a sense.”

“Fine. I don’t care if you have to strip naked to do what you do.” Scoville gave him a narrow-eyed look. “You don’t have to strip naked to do it, do you?”

“No, sir. Not my style. I’m not even comfortable in socks on your bridge.”

“Glad to hear it.”

A few taut chuckles floated from among the Ratings and Officers working around them. Thorn took note of it, another of those finer points of good leadership—make your people laugh, if you can.

He turned back to the image. Taking a deep breath, he cleared his mind as much as he could, trying to let the background chatter and hum of the CIC fade into a pervasive smear of white noise. He then split his attention between the massive chunk of hurtling rock and the cool hardness of the old book. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to be touching the surface of the colossal projectile. It wouldn’t be smooth, like the old, well-handled cardboard. It would be—

—rough, gritty, sharp angles and edges still almost as jagged as they were when first formed by some titanic collision uncountable ages ago. Searing hot where the system’s sun glared on it, and searing cold in the stark shadows—

Thorn blinked, staggering slightly. The bustle of the CIC crashed back in around him. He found Scoville abruptly standing right at his side.

“Stellers?”

“I—” Thorn blinked again, then nodded. “I’m fine, sir. I was just trying to reach out to that rock, and . . . touch it is the best way to describe it.”

“Again, fine, I don’t need the details. Did it work? What did you learn?”

Thorn took a ragged breath, recovering from the effort it took to read the mountain’s frigid, airless surface. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do it. I can’t stop it. No one can.”

Scoville nodded, slowly. “Alright, then. We’ve just lost Code Gauntlet.”

Thorn gave a desolate shrug. “Yes, sir. It looks like we have.”

* * *

Kira dreamed of fire and smoke.

Maybe it was a result of her burgeoning facility with Joining; she’d always had vivid dreams, but lately they sometimes became almost lucid. Like now—she knew she was asleep, but that didn’t yank her out of the dream. Instead, it let her participate in it while recognizing it for what it was: an unreal place, filled with flames.

She let the image run, like an ancient, grainy video, as desolate and scorched as the places where Nyctus KEWs fell from the sky, turning lives to ash. Unlike those craters, this fire grew, climbing higher, savage heat blistering the air around her until—

Something caused the world to rattle and shake like a blast of thunder. She staggered and fought to keep her feet.

Kira.

And now someone was calling her name. Get to the point, she thought. It seemed she was impatient, even in her dreams.

Kira!

The dream world shook again, and the fire blazed higher, threatening to consume everything.

No, wait—

“Kira!”

She blinked, flung her eyes open, and looked around.

She was in her bunk. It was dark. But there was light, an inconstant, flickering, orange-yellow.

“Kira, wake up!”

She gasped and sat up, almost slamming her nose into Rainer’s forehead. “What? What’s going on?”

“Fire,” Rainer snapped. “Next barracks over—”

An explosion of klaxon cut her off as Code Gauntlet’s base-wide fire alarm started blaring.

Kira jumped out of bed. She’d made Rainer second-in-command of the squad, her 2ic. Rainer had been exemplary, a fact she underscored with her next words, which she had to shout over the alarm.

“I roused the squad, got them going around waking everyone up for a head count!”

Kira nodded as she pulled on trousers and boots. “Good work!”

Kira strode to the middle of the barracks and swept her gaze around, making sure everyone from her squad was either gone or in the process of forming up for the head count.

“Get your shit together and move,” Kira bellowed, a refrain picked up by Rainer seconds later. They pushed and dragged and threatened the stragglers, then Kira swept her eyes over the barracks one last time, making sure everyone was out.

Outside was chaos.

Cast in the glare of a fire now roaring from the windows of the barracks next door, Building 2C, recruits and trainees milled about, their ranks disorganized as they mixed and mingled in the flame-lit darkness. Shouts rose from trainee squad leaders, their tones ranging from calmly assertive to almost hysterical.

Kira strode into the mayhem, Rainer at her side. Her own squad had gathered on the edge of the nearby parade square; she did a quick head count—

And came up one short.

“Who’s missing?” she asked the whole squad, as much as Rainer. They all peered around at each other for a few seconds.

“It’s Smiley, ma’am,” one of her squad members finally concluded. “No sign of him.”

She began peering at faces in the slowly organizing crowd around them, looking for the lean, angular features of “Smiley” Riley, the Scorch she’d saved from extra duties by turning out last for PT. She didn’t see him.

On impulse, Kira extended her awareness through the crowd—now more or less sorting itself out into squads and platoons—then beyond, into the surrounding night, her mind’s eye crawling like serpents as she marked each mind and moved on. She’d gotten to know her squad well enough to recognize the shape of their psionic profile, a picture as unique as their fingerprint and much more layered. Her thoughts touched a multitude of others, some bright with fear, others still dull and mired in the dregs of sleep, and almost every possible emotion between.

But she didn’t let her attention linger because none of them were Riley.

She pushed a little harder, forcing her psychic attention through the mental noise of the assembled trainees. Finally, she brushed a familiar mind.

Yes. It was Riley. And he was—

“Shit!”

Rainer, who’d been getting the squad lined up, turned. “What’s wrong?”

“Riley. He’s gone into that burning barracks.”

“What? Why?”

“No idea.” Kira glanced around for any of the instructors but saw none. Wait—was this another exercise?

She shoved the thought away. Whether it was or wasn’t didn’t matter. “Rainer, you’re in command. Keep the squad here.”

“Kira!”

But she ignored Rainer and took off at a run, hurrying toward the conflagration.

* * *

Kira shielded her face from the wall of heat emanating from the burning barracks, the roar of flame tearing through holes seared in the roof. Around her, the fire came alive, leaping from windows and doors like a beast that could never be fed enough, a furnace glow suffusing everything from ground to sky. She reached the door at the end of the barracks not yet engulfed in fire; turning at an angle to deflect some of the painful heat, she peered inside. She saw fire, nothing else—

No. There. Movement.

Someone was walking out of the flames with ponderous, halting steps. Part of it was the weight of the body they carried, but there was more than that. Kira could see the flames dying around the trudging figure, then flaring up again in their wake.

It was Riley. He was carrying someone out of the burning building, using his abilities as a Scorch to suppress the flames as he went. But Kira could tell he was struggling, faltering against the sheer wash of heat. She reached out with her mind, touching his, finding a grim, fatalistic determination.

But it wasn’t going to be enough.

Between wielding his talents as a Scorch, the effects of the fire, and the weight of the unconscious figure he lugged toward safety, Riley was going to fall short of making it back to the door. His stamina, both mental and physical, was going to fail, and he’d lose control of the magical effect he’d crafted around himself. When that happened, he too would be incinerated, just another victim of the pitiless flames.

Kira sucked in a breath of cooler night air, then stepped into the barracks, her face a grim slate of determination. In silent resolve, she crouched, moved as far inside as she could without wilting, and began to Join with Riley, lending her power to him like a psychic buttress.

Riley’s head, which had been starting to loll, snapped up. He made eye contact with Kira, gave her a grim nod, then plodded forward.

Five meters. Stumble. Four. Stumble, cough, slouch—then two meters, Kira reached to him out of instinct—

Without warning, the floor beneath Riley gave way in a spectacular holocaust of shattering lumber and roaring flame. His ability to suppress the fire, as impressive as it was, would not repair damaged structure or charred wood. Beneath the barracks was a crawlspace some three feet high; Riley plunged into it, somehow managing to keep his grip on the person he was carrying, and even kept up his containment of the fire. If Kira hadn’t been here mentally reinforcing him, that would have been it. And it might still be, because while Riley was able to heave the unconscious body up onto the still-intact floor, he remained stuck in the hole that had opened beneath him, unable to climb out.

She could read his frantic thoughts, like hands beating at a locked door. Riley was on the edge of collapse himself, his power frayed to a thread.

Kira, take her, get her out of here, go!

Kira forced herself forward. It was like pushing against a gale of heat that was reddening her skin, searing her hair, and making her uniform smolder. She would be able to save the unconscious woman or Riley, but not both, because if she tried, then all three of them would likely die.

And now it was her memory of Fielder’s voice that thundered through her mind.

. . . we can’t compromise what truly matters: the mission. Whatever objective we’ve been given, it takes absolute priority over everything else. The mission is the only thing that matters . . .

Kira suddenly understood that bleak place inside Fielder. It was a place where he’d had to face this very truth—that sometimes to accomplish something, people had to die, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Kira grabbed the unconscious woman and dragged her back from the hole. As she did, all she could think was, I’m sorry, Riley, I’m so sorry.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the fire vanished. Kira heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Narvez, wreathed in power, striding into the barracks. Narvez stopped a few paces away from Kira, and now more figures rushed around her. It was her own squad, led by Rainer. Strong hands grabbed her, grabbed the unconscious woman, grabbed Riley and dragged him out of the hole. There were shouts and more hands and a hopeful they’re alive, but then the heat faded, soon replaced by the soft cool of night as Kira was carried out of the fire ravaged barracks and into the care of waiting medics. She heard Riley whimper next to her but couldn’t turn to see him. There was a universe of pain in his simple noise. Animalistic. Raw. And yet, he fought to breathe, his single ragged inhalation marked with another bark of agony.

As Kira began to cough, she felt tears streaking her face and told herself it was relief. Not fear. Not weakness. The fire had awakened a kind of primal fear that she never wanted to feel again, and as she turned her head and coughed in a violent spasm, Kira Wixcombe gave thanks to whoever was listening.

It was not her time. And she was glad of it.

7

Thorn shuffled down the ramp, toward the forward airlock of the Janus. The angled corridor was jammed with people, the whole throng moving slowly forward in a thick silence he could only describe as defeated.

He wondered if any of the other evacuees boarding the Janus felt as defeated as he did.

Probably not. He’d been asked to save Code Gauntlet and had to admit he couldn’t. The taste of that admission stuck to his tongue like ashes, a constant reminder that for all his power, Thorn was a vessel that had limited resources. He could fail. Admitting as much felt like a betrayal of the boy who’d fought his way out of the orphanage, and the sensation was nothing Thorn wanted to know again.

Glumly, Thorn took stock of the people around him. At least they were going to survive. The grim truth was that the available lift capacity fell far short of what was needed to evacuate the FOB. Even with the Janus and the other available ships jammed as full as their life-support systems would allow, some 500 personnel were going to die when that rock hit. They couldn’t even just try to find shelter on the planet’s surface; that large a mass, traveling that fast, would deliver enough energy to utterly devastate most of the near-side hemisphere.

Commodore Scoville had summoned Thorn specifically to the CIC in the hopes that he could do something, anything, with his magic to stop or deflect the titanic, incoming projectile. But there’d been nothing. The hunk of rock was simply too massive. He’d played it out over and over and in his head; even if he could somehow dig deep enough to actually affect the rock’s trajectory, the force he’d have to apply to overcome its inertia in any meaningful way would probably just shatter it, making matters worse. The Nyctus apparently had some way to overcome that, being able to quickly accelerate masses to high velocities without destroying them. They’d shown it during their attack on the Centurion and her cohorts, but he had absolutely no idea how.

“Hey, watch your feet—oh, um, sir.”

Thorn snapped his awareness back to the moment, focusing on the voice. A Senior Rating just ahead of him turned to bathe him with an expression caught somewhere between pissed off and deferential. Thorn apologized. The downward slope of the ramp tended to push everyone forward, causing Thorn to step on the man’s foot.

The Rating turned away and resumed his show shuffle downslope along with everyone else.

Downslope. A ramp. They were on a ramp—

Tumblers clicked, and Thorn felt the problems of mass and velocity and distance fall away, replaced by the elegance of possibility.

Married, of course to his power, which flickered to life in him like a battery given a fresh charge.

“Sir? You okay? The line’s moving.”

This time, the voice came from behind him. Thorn once more came back to the here-and-now and looked back. A Petty Officer glared at him. Indeed, he was blocking traffic, a rock in the stream of humanity.

Again, he muttered an apology. This time, he had to look up into the Petty Officer’s eyes, since she was standing upslope and, therefore, slightly above him—

And there it was. This last thought, such a small detail, but then small details could be combined for large solutions.

Thorn began pushing his way back uphill, into Code Gauntlet, apologizing to everyone he had to muscle by as he worked his way against the crowd. He reached a checkpoint manned by a pair of dour security personnel in imposing body armor.

“Sir,” one of them said, holding up a hand. “I’m going to have to ask you to go the other way.”

“I need to get back to the CIC,” Thorn said.

The man shook his head. “No can do, sir. Orders are to keep the evac going.”

Thorn stepped forward, flickers of power tickling the edges of his mind. He didn’t want to use magic to get past the checkpoint, but he would if he had to. “Listen,” he snapped, as other personnel shuffled past. “I might have a way of saving this place and everyone who’s going to die when that rock hits because we can’t evac them.”

The man, a Senior Rating, exchanged a glance with his colleague, took in the Starcaster insignia on Thorn’s fatigues, then stepped aside.

“Give ’em hell, sir.”

Thorn made fist, feeling the energy building within him. “Hell is exactly what we’re going to deliver.”

He pushed on, back toward the CIC.

* * *

Scoville leveled a fierce glare at Thorn as he strode back into the CIC. “Stellers, we don’t have time for this.” He turned to motion a pair of burly men over, their uniforms straining over muscles. “Turn around and get to the Janus—"

“Sir,” Thorn said, picking his words carefully. “I can do it.”

“Do what? Save the world?” Scoville asked, his voice a bass growl.

The dozen people left in the CIC turned to look at Thorn with a mix of relief and suspicion. He suddenly felt vulnerable, as though he’d walked in naked waving a plan to save their lives, which he had, albeit while fully clothed.

Scoville’s expression barely changed, but he nodded once. Being decisive was as natural to him as breathing. “Alright, you’ve got thirty seconds, and then I’m calling security to carry your ass back to that ship.”

Thorn gave a terse nod. “Fair enough, sir.” He turned to the primary display, now showing the impactor noticeably closer to the FOB. “We can’t generate enough force to deflect that thing—at least not enough to make a difference without shattering it to pieces.”

“We know that. Get on with it.”

“Well, we’ve only been thinking about affecting the rock directly. But we can’t. So what if we affect the universe itself? Instead of trying to use brute force to push on the rock, what if we distort space-time in the path ahead? As far as the rock’s concerned, it would still be traveling in a straight line. But if we curve space, we’d be tricking it—the way an Alcubierre drive basically fools nature into letting ships bypass the speed-of-light limit.”

“So, as far as the rock and rest of the universe is concerned, the rock is still obeying the laws of physics, even though it’s actually deflecting relative to us.”

“And misses us. At least, that’s the hope.”

Scoville narrowed his eyes. “Is this possible? I haven’t heard of Starcasters altering space-time itself. You must admit, the prospect of it sounds . . . exotic, at best, and dangerous no matter what.”

“Well, sir, that’s really kind of what we do all the time. When we make, say, fire, we’re essentially creating it out of nothing, which means we’re adding energy to the universe, so we’re violating conservation laws.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve been through the briefings.” Scoville shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. What does is, how would you do this?”

“We put a ship with an Alcubierre drive out in front of the rock, activate the drive, and use that to curve space ahead of it. The rock follows the curve like a kid on a slide and misses the planet.”

“There are probably a hundred problems with this, but I only need to give you one of them. That’s not how Alcubierre drives work, Stellers.”

Thorn nodded. “I know, sir. And that’s where I come in.”

* * *

Thorn had honestly expected Scoville to reject the idea. It was against any kind of naval doctrine, or even Starcaster practices, as far as Scoville was concerned, but he’d heard Thorn out, turned and looked at the CIC display for a moment, then turned back and simply said, “Do it.”

Which is how Thorn now found himself ensconced in the snug darkness of the Hecate’s repaired witchport, rapidly closing on the impactor. Captain Tanner and the crew, working frantically, had been able to get her underway in just over an hour; fortunately, her refit hadn’t involved her propulsion systems or powerplant. She had no working point-defense, and her tactical sensor and fire-control systems were mostly offline, but she could fly. Tanner had been expecting the flight capability to revolve around evacuating the FOB, but Scoville had ordered him to help enact Thorn’s wildly improbable plan.

Wildly improbable was all they had, though.

“Stellers,” Tanner said over the intercom, his voice its usual, cool tenor. “We’re two minutes from reversing course. Once we flip over, Engineering is ready to fire up the Alcubierre drive like you’ve proposed, but I’ll warn you now, the Chief Engineer is having a conniption about what you plan to do to his ship.”

“It’s not something I’d want to try out just for the hell of it, believe me, sir.”

Thorn watched as the impactor swelled in the witchport’s transparent bubble. Ships normally avoided windows; they were a structural weakness that wasn’t justified when remote viewers were just as good—and actually better, because they could show images across the spectrum, and could be panned and tilted and zoomed. But ’casting worked better if Starcasters had a true and direct line-of-sight to whatever they were trying to affect, so the witchport was accepted as a necessary flaw in an otherwise smooth, unbroken hull.

The impactor kept growing, filling more and more of the port. A hot flutter started in Thorn’s gut. The damned thing was so big—and his idea was so wildly unknown. The Hecate could probably have carried another hundred personnel to safety; the possibility that Thorn had condemned them to death was quite real.

Thorn cleared that thought, as doubt was the enemy of all ‘casting. He focused instead on the glossy smoothness of his talisman, letting the familiar touch of cardboard against his fingertips ground him. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.

An alarm sounded. The Hecate had started her reversal, flipping end-over-end. Thorn opened his eyes in time to see a looming wall of jagged rock filling his field of vision. A rugged horizon appeared, erratic against the stars, then it fell out of sight. And now it was Code Gauntlet that glided smoothly into view, a small, bright crescent, centered in the witchport as the Hecate finished her reversal. A thrumming vibration shook the deck under Thorn’s seat as her drive fired up, accelerating her back toward the FOB.

Thorn could feel the massive rock now filling space just astern of the Hecate. The Helm had cut it close, but with a skill bordering on aplomb. The ship was exactly where Thorn wanted it to be, and with a lot less maneuvering than he’d expected. He had to remember to buy the Helm Officer a drink when this was all over.

“Okay, Stellers,” Tanner said. “We’re working off your marks, now.”

“Understood, sir. Stand by.”

Thorn took another breath and let it trickle from his nose, centering himself on the union of flesh and talisman, fingers and book. He was about to try something he’d never attempted. Something that, as far as he knew, no one had ever attempted. He was essentially going to make up a whole new field of magic, and do it on the fly.

But it was worth the risk, he told himself as he opened the witchport and let the raw nothing of space wash over him. The alternative was hundreds of ON personnel dying, and the loss of Code Gauntlet—the former a catastrophic tragedy, the latter a massive strategic setback for the ON, one that might set the war effort back to where it was before they’d pushed the Nyctus back.

“Sir,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“Engineering,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Stellers now has command.”

There was enough hesitation in the reply to let Thorn know the Chief Engineer was not at all happy with what was about to be done to his ship.

“Aye, sir. Ready when he is.”

“Okay, Chief,” Thorn said. “Bring the Alcubierre drive online. On my mark, we’ll activate it as we discussed.”

“Understood.”

Scoville had been right. This was not how an Alcubierre drive was meant to work. The drive was supposed to warp space in a region around itself, turning it from a flat plain of space-time into a wave that would propagate in a direction determined by the ship’s nav inputs. The wave could then ripple along with no theoretical maximum speed; the fact that it carried a ship along with it was incidental. In its own frame of reference, the ship was entirely motionless and obeying the laws of relativistic physics. From an external frame of reference, though, the ship was whisked along at a speed only maxed out by the design, size, and power of the drive. Thorn didn’t get all the math and physics involved, but the fact that the ship was simultaneously both moving and not moving faster than light essentially somehow balanced, and the universe remained quite content, or at the minimum, permissive of their passing.

Because of this, an Alcubierre drive was intended to essentially be either on or off, a fact made abundantly clear to him by the Hecate’s horrified Chief Engineer when he pitched the idea to Scoville and Tanner. In the end, though, the Chief had grudgingly admitted that the drive probably could be used to induce a much smaller distortion in space-time, albeit with unknown effects on the drive itself. Moreover, the conventional nav inputs wouldn’t work, meaning there would be no directional control.

And that was where technology met magic.

Thorn closed his eyes and let his awareness sink into his fingertips, where they pressed against his talisman.

Awareness. That was the key. The Alcubierre drive was the means, but Thorn’s awareness was the intelligence that would guide it.

His eyes still closed, Thorn simply said, “Okay, Chief.”

He felt a slight, dislocating shudder and a brief flicker of nausea, the characteristic signature of the Alcubierre drive lighting up. But it abruptly vanished as the Chief locked the drive into its current state, distorting space to a far smaller degree that its design ever contemplated. It would—in theory, at least—cause the volume of space around the Hecate, and the massive impactor racing along just astern of her, to curve. Thorn could see the curvature. And he could see it clearly.

The point of contact between his fingertips and his talisman swelled in his mind, becoming a firm anchor upon which he envisioned a particular version of reality where Alcubierre drives worked—

Like this.

Power began to emanate from that press of fingers on cardboard. The Alcubierre drive, powered up but given no nav inputs, began to twist and distort space randomly. But Thorn exerted his will, enforcing it through the power now pouring from his union with his talisman. The wild, random distortions suddenly converged into a smooth curve, a bend in space-time enabled by the drive and shaped by Thorn’s thoughts.

But something was immediately wrong. Stress began building up in the impactor, force accumulating, straining its structure. The spatial distortion wasn’t big enough and didn’t entirely enclose the titanic rock, which meant part of it wanted to deflect, but other parts, protruding into normal, flat space, didn’t.

“Chief,” he said. “You have to increase power to the drive.”

“The drive’s unstable as it is,” the Chief Engineer shot back. “Applying more power’s going to—”

“Chief . . . you have to.”

“I’m not going to risk this ship,” the Chief said flatly. No emotion, no fear. Just a simple denial.

“Do it,” Captain Tanner cut in. “Thorn has command. Follow his orders.”

A reluctant “aye, sir” was the only response.

The distortion expanded, fully encompassing the impactor. The accumulated stress dissipated. Thorn decided to let the sliver of awareness he’d kept on the impactor go, trusting that he’d done everything he could to get them here, and now just had to maintain it. He had to stay focused on the fact that Alcubierre drives distorted space only slightly, just enough to induce a curved path that the Hecate and the impactor would now follow.

And they did.

Ship and rock both sailed smoothly on, traveling—from their perspective—in a perfectly straight line. The inertia of the impactor was now undisturbed; it quite happily raced through space as it had been all along, in perfect accordance with the simple laws of Newtonian motion. The fact that space itself was curved didn’t matter to it any more than the bends and turns in that child’s slide mattered to the kid plunging down it.

“Well, holy shit,” Tanner said, his voice quiet. “This is actually working. Keep it up, Stellers.”

Thorn dug even deeper. A fierce pounding started in his head, ringing rhythmically in his ears in time with his racing heartbeat. He was depleting his psychic resources far faster than he ever had; the flesh-talisman contact was an imperfect focus for his power, and the strain began to bear down on him, like rapidly mounting mental g-forces.

But he couldn’t let up yet. Code Gauntlet wasn’t yet out of the line of fire.

“Automatic drive cutoff in ten seconds,” the Chief Engineer said. “The safeties are going to engage—”

“No . . . Chief . . . keep it online,” Thorn hissed.

“Sorry, can’t—”

“Chief,” Tanner said. “Bypass the safeties. Do not let that drive scram.”

“But, sir—”

“That’s an order, Chief.”

“Aye, sir,” came the answer, laden with an unspoken fear. The Chief’s primary task was keeping the drive alive, and he was being ordered to run the most complex feat of human engineering with a different power source—that could scram the reactor and kill everyone in a flash of brilliant light. They wouldn’t even have time to mark the failure if Thorn lost control, and based on the Chief’s raw tone, he knew it.

Thorn felt the end of his power.

It approached, from a distance, and then he was in it, a searing burst of pain blooming through his head, caroming from eye to eye with an unearthly brilliance that made afterimages of red and black flicker behind the lids of his drooping eyes. His mouth flooded with saliva, and a wave of grey nausea swept over him. Desperately, he fought to keep the reality he’d shaped intact, to maintain the truth that this—not whatever came before, but now, in the moment, was how an Alcubierre drive worked.

Thorn’s body buckled in a final spasm, and like that, he was done. There was no more left to give.

“Stellers, you’ve done it. You can shut it all down,” Tanner said.

Thorn opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He heard Tanner’s voice as though through a distant tunnel, the sounds distorted by distance and his own relentless pain.

“Engineering, scram the drive. Helm, get us away from this rock. Medical, get to Stellers—”

Thorn’s spine seized, arms out and hands drawn into claws. Every tendon howled, every muscle screamed, and he rose onto his toes as a long, unearthly roar of pain tore from his throat, spittle flying even as he collapsed.

Limp, he slumped to the deck and knew nothing except the fading light of a place that existed only in his mind—and then the light faded, too, and behind it was only the dark.

8

Kira winced as she made her way along the infirmary ward. Her burns were mostly superficial and had been well-treated by the infirmary staff with sterile spray bandages. Still, they hurt like hell whenever she did anything to stretch or flex her seared skin.

She shuffled around a partition curtain and reflected that, as bad as she’d been injured by the fire, she wasn’t as bad off as Riley. The poor guy had to suffer through recovering from much more severe burns, as well as lungs that had been inflamed by breathing hot smoke and gases. Still, he looked better by the day, his recovery remarkably fast, thanks to immediate medical attention that night and the diligent work of the infirmary staff since.

He looked up Kira with bloodshot eyes. “Hey, squad leader,” he rasped. “How goes the healing?”

Gillis sat with Riley, his young face knitted with concern for his best friend. Gillis was a Joiner, like Kira, and had buddied up with Riley on the first day, creating an inseparable friendship that the doctors thought would help in a long, painful recovery.

Gillis nodded to Kira and smiled, the lines in his face softening, but only just.

“You look better, Kira. Not as, um—well, sunburned,” Gillis said.

She touched her hair, where a cowlick had formed when some of the strands burned away. “I’m just happy to breathe clean air. And I can live with the curl, for the time being.” She peered up at the offending hair, then smiled at Riley. “Base surgeon told me you’re good to head back for light duty in a few days. I never thought—I mean, he’s tough. Sorry to see him go back to duty so soon—"

“There are light duties?” Riley asked, offering a watery grin.

“There are. That’s what they’ve got me doing. Let’s see, I’ve shuffled a whole bunch of old papers around, folded about a thousand maps . . . oh, and straightened and re-bent about a million paper clips. It's an art form, but if you do it right, you can waste an entire day without leaving your chair.”

“Really?” Riley asked.

“I’m lying about the last one, but yeah, really. Light duties are boring. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I miss training with Fielder and Narvez and the others.”

Kira had been consigned to the netherworld of so-called light duties while she recovered from her own injuries. It had left Rainer in command of the squad until Kira was cleared to resume regular duties. Kira desperately hoped that would be soon, because hanging around the orderly room doing odd jobs was driving her crazy.

“Come on, Kira,” Gillis said. “You’d rather be out humping your ass across the landscape doing environmental magic? Seriously?”

Kira smirked. Environmental magic was the sterile, bureaucratic euphemism the syllabus used to describe crawling through mud at zero-dark-thirty, in the rain, with maybe an hour of fragmented sleep in the last twenty-four, all while trying to create or maintain some specified magical effect.

In other words, it sucked.

However, Kira missed it. Or, rather, she missed being with her squad—and especially with Rainer, who’d become her fast friend as well as her 2ic.

“Hey, Kira?”

She looked at Riley. His eyes shone back from a puffy, reddened face, and he too would be dealing with unruly hair for the next two months or so. His was growing back, but even his scalp showed signs of burns.

“Thank you,” he said, face falling into a morose pose. “If you hadn’t been there and done what you did—”

“Stop. I mean, I’m glad I was there, but I’m even happier you’re here. It’s okay. It’s a shitty war with bad things, and I hope you would do the same for anyone,” Kira said.

Riley gave a single nod, then winced. “I would, and I will.” He tried to adjust himself in the bed, failed, and only succeeded in making Gillis look like a worried mother. “You hear about Jaska? She didn’t make it.”

“She was the source? Of the fire?” Kira asked. She knew it but sensed that Riley needed to process what he’d endured.

“Scorches can lose control, and she . . . she did. She didn’t just light the barracks, she set herself on fire. Doc said she was dead before I went back in to find her.”

“You did the right thing, Riley. Your instincts are dumb, but heroic. Don’t ever change that in you,” Kira said. “We need it. To survive, and maybe win this friggin’ war.”

“I won’t. Not even sure I can,” he admitted.

“Good,” Kira said, and the pause stretched as the lights hummed overhead. It was universally accepted that military hospitals will never have functioning lights, and if they don’t flicker or buzz, then you aren’t in a military hospital.

“Hey, they got you sleeping in tents, I hear,” Riley said, breaking the gravid pause.

Kira nodded. “Yeah. They had to put everyone who’d been in the barracks that burned down into tents, so they decided that everyone would have to go into tents until a prefab was put together.” She shrugged, then immediately regretted it, wincing again at the pain that flashed through her tender skin. “It’s not so bad. Well, as long as this decent weather holds, anyway.”

“Speak for yourself,” Gillis shot back. “I’m stuck in a tent with Rainer.”

“What, does she snore?”

“No, but she runs the tent like a freakin’ dictator.” He changed his voice to a shrill falsetto. “Straighten out your sleeping bag. Keep your laundry out of sight. Kick the muck off your boots before you come in here. We’re not animals.”

“So, sounds like she doesn’t want to live like a slob?”

Gillis rolled his eyes. “It’s like living with my mother all over again. They’re both real bi—”

“Think carefully before you finish that sentence, Gillis,” Rainer said, popping around the privacy curtain. “Your survival may depend on the next words out of your mouth.”

“Busy people. Busy. Always working hard, never resting.”

Rainer narrowed her eyes, but smirked. “Nice save.”

He shrugged. “You get the knack when you live with someone like my really busy mother.”

Even Riley snickered. Kira raised an eyebrow at Rainer. “Speaking of busy, how come you aren’t? For that matter, how come you’re here in the first place, Gillis? Don’t you guys have, you know, a ON career to be pursuing right now? Or has everyone just decided to go AWOL?” Kira pinned Rainer with a stare, then lifted one brow.

“Squad’s been stood down until sixteen hundred,” Rainer replied. “I’d like to think it’s a well-deserved break, but I’m sure that by sixteen-oh-one, we’ll be neck deep in shit. Meantime, the powers that be want to see you,” she said to Kira. “Narvez, Fielder, and some spooky guy I’ve never seen before are waiting for you in the Orderly Room.”

Gillis grinned. “Ooooh, Kira’s in trouble!” he said in a sing-song voice. “Getting called to the principal's office!”

Kira flipped him off and everyone laughed. But as she followed Rainer out of the infirmary, she wondered just why she was suddenly being called in front of the brass, because the reasons that happened were almost never good.

* * *

Kira swallowed hard, trying to quell the icy little fingers tickling her stomach. She stood at-ease just outside the company commander’s office, waiting to be called in by whoever’s voices she could hear murmuring behind the door. Narvez and Fielder, apparently, with someone else.

The door opened. Fielder nodded at Kira. “Wixcombe, come in.”

She came to attention, entered, and marched toward the big desk. At the last second, though, she saw everyone gathered around a conference table set off to one side and veered that way, then she halted and saluted.

“At ease, Wixcombe,” Fielder said, then closed the door and took a seat at the table.

She relaxed her body, but her mind raced, powered by suspicion and experience. Fielder and Narvez were there, with a man she’d never seen before. He was older, wearing the insignia of a Commander but no other identifying emblems. He watched Kira with a purposeful stare, one that carried a hint of knowing, of secrets that were important but couldn’t be shared.

“Wixcombe,” Fielder said. “Lieutenant Commander Narvez tells me that your performance during your upgrade training has generally been good and, in a few subject areas, very good.”

Kira resisted letting her mouth drop open in surprise. Narvez had been chilly at best and ruthless at her worst, always professional but never giving the slightest hint that Kira—a Joiner—was welcome under her command. For the formidable woman to be speaking well of her actually stunned Kira. She covered her surprise by simply nodding.

“Thank you, sir.”

“There’s also the matter of your rescue of Trainee Riley, despite the extreme risk to yourself.” Fielder paused, giving Kira a hard stare.

She swallowed again. Was this why she’d been called in here? Because not long after being lectured by Fielder on how saving everyone despite the risk could be the wrong thing to do, she’d gone ahead and done it anyway just a few days later?

“Well done, Wixcombe,” Fielder said, giving her a firm nod.

She blinked. Okay, so not that, either.

“In two days, Wixcombe,” Narvez said, “there is going to be an exercise. It is going to pit you and several members of your squad against an enemy force.” She picked up a paper from the table and handed it to Kira. “This is a Warning Order, giving you enough information to get your planning and preparations started.”

Kira looked at the page. Three names jumped out at her: Rainer, Riley, and Gillis. They were to be her team. There was more information—a thumbnail outline of the mission, which was apparently taking place on another planet, along with certain, key timings and specific things she needed to prepare. Receiving the Warning Order kick-started an entire process called battle procedure, which was a standardized way of getting ready for operations, whether by a single squad or an entire fleet. She’d digest the rest of Warning Order as soon as she was cut loose from here. In the meantime, though, she had one, looming question—

“You’re wondering why we picked you, and those three, in particular,” Fielder said.

Apparently he wasn’t the only one who let things leak out of her psyche, Kira thought, and nodded. “Yes, sir. Why not the rest of the squad as well?”

“Not that you’re entitled to an explanation, Lieutenant,” Narvez remarked mildy, “but our personnel screening and other assessments have told us that the four of you are naturally complementary, in terms of skills, character traits, and personalities.”

“But Riley is still in the infirmary—”

“He will be sufficiently recovered in time for this mission,” Narvez said flatly.

Kira just stared back. She didn’t see how that could possibly be true, even with the best healing tech available. But Narvez’s neutral gaze didn’t encourage further debate.

“Do you have any other immediate questions, Wixcombe?” Fielder asked.

Kira shook her head—which was a lie, because she actually had a mountain of questions, and more piling on by the second. But she wanted to extract herself from this really uncomfortable situation to read and ponder the Warning Order and digest what was going on.

Besides, she wanted to get away from the penetrating gaze of the third man, the unnamed Commander who hadn’t said a thing.

“No, no other questions, sir. At least, not at the moment.”

“In that case, Lieutenant, your timings are now dictated by the Warning Order and your own planning. You are dismissed.”

Kira came to attention, then turned and marched out of the office. She waited until she was well outside the Orderly Room before she voiced the two words she’d been holding in for a while now.

“Holy shit!”

* * *

Kira activated her suit’s heat sink and crept forward. The suit would now channel her body heat to reduce her infrared signature—as long as she kept the dispersal outlet pointed away from the enemy, that is. It gave her about five minutes of increased stealth, and then the sink would be saturated and she’d either have to pull back to dump the heat from it under cover, let her thermal signature poke through the suit again, or slowly cook in her own waste heat.

She peered through a patch of sawblade grass at their objective. Lowlight imaging showed the mock-up of a crashed ship—actually, an old hull that had apparently been stuck here as a remote training site for Code Nebula. She saw no one guarding it, though; thermal imaging showed a few flickers of heat, but nothing she could identify. If the signatures were decoys or enemy personnel, she didn’t have the resolution to say.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to rely solely on her suit’s tech. She took a breath, let it out slowly, and felt the calming effects of five seconds, then ten, and twenty—of absolute stillness.

Then she let her awareness expand the same way she had the night of the fire when she’d been looking for Riley. This time, she found him back in the patrol base they’d established, along with Rainer. Gillis hung back behind her, ready to give cover if she needed to extract. Other than that, though—

No, wait. There. Stray thoughts. More. Minds. That meant people.

Kira touched three—no, four sets of thoughts. She kept her own intrusion as superficial as possible, avoiding trying to glean any information. Yet. Right now, she just wanted to confirm enemy strength and locations. Intentions would have to wait, at least until she determined if there were Joiners among their opponents. If there were, then any deeper intrusion could be perilous.

The fact was, they were supposed to avoid detection entirely. This was a reconnaissance and recovery mission. The scenario was a crashed Nyctus ship, which contained valuable intelligence that needed to be seized, brought back to an extraction point, and then evacuated along with Kira’s patrol. They’d been warned there would be an active enemy force playing the survivors of the crash.

The plan Kira had developed saw her using her Joining powers to do a psychic reconnaissance of the wreck, while Gillis, also a Joiner, kept a mental lookout for other threats. Rainer, a Hammer, did double duty: patrol 2ic, as well as staying ready to use her formidable psychokinetic powers to deal with crash damage that might keep them from the intelligence they’d been tasked to retrieve. Of course, if Rainer started pushing and pulling debris away, that would certainly alert the enemy and turn this into a firefight. And that was plan B, in which Rainer and Riley would use their powers as weapons, while Kira and Gillis maintained psychic overwatch. All of them were ready to use conventional weapons, the handheld mass drivers called railers, and grenades, as necessary.

Of course, if it came to that, the mission would be considered a borderline success, at best. When it came to seizing and recovering intelligence assets, it was always optimal if the enemy didn’t know you had their secrets—at least not until it was too late.

Kira, satisfied that they faced four enemy, crept backward. Sweat beaded her brow and face behind her faceplate and began dampening her under-suit. When she was well back into the hole where Gillis waited, she shut off her suit’s heat-storage system and dumped her thermal waste into the cold ground. The soft, cool feeling gave her a new sense of purpose, and for the first time in what felt like hours, Kira exhaled freely.

She pointed her helmet’s infrared emitter at Gillis’s. The pulsed infrared light would carry her comms to him, and his back to hers, while minimizing their audible footprint.

“I make it four enemy. Two are amidships, one’s in the stern, and the other’s in or near the remains of the bow.”

“Got it,” Gillis replied.

“So we go with plan A. Bring Rainer and Riley forward, then you and Riley will go firm here, while Rainer and I move in on the objective. Once we’re in place—assuming the bad guys don’t intervene—we’ll take the next bound.”

“Got it, boss.”

Gillis turned and slipped back into the darkness. Kira again activated the heat sink and moved forward again. It was essential to keep eyes on the objective so they knew exactly what they were getting into when they started to push.

A brief flash lit the eastern horizon, followed a few seconds later by a rolling boom.

Kira frowned. Had there just been an accident? Had a copter or shuttle crashed? Or was this just a special effect for the benefit of the exercise? If it was the former, there’d be a general broadcast codeword standing down the exercise, with instructions to follow.

Nothing. Just dead air.

So it had to be part of the exercise. But what was the point—

There was another flash, followed by an even louder boom. Then a ripping sound overhead, followed by a tremendous crack that made Kira wince. An instant later, a dazzling flash lit up the sky; after a second or two, the ground heaved, and a second or two after that, a colossal whump rolled across the landscape, air pushing hard in a concussive wave that flattened trees and lashed the ground. Dust and debris were torn up in an orgy of violence that appeared before Kira could even shout a warning.

She immediately recognized it as the impact of a kinetic energy weapon, back in the direction of the exercise control station. They’d departed from there, a cluster of bunkers and huts that house the staff overseeing the training area.

If this was part of the exercise, then it was one hell of a set of effects.

“All stations!”

The voice, its tone almost frantic, had started over the comm but abruptly cut off at the second impact, the channel dissolving into a hiss of static.

Kira tensed. That didn’t sound like part of the exercise at all.

It sounded like someone dying.

Footsteps and the whisper of bodies moving through the foliage nearby pulled Kira’s alarmed attention, and the muzzle of her railer, that way. The hand cannon gave her a sense of security anywhere, anytime; one shot from it meant your opponent wasn’t just down, they were in pieces.

A sleek, stealth-suited figure emerged from the nearby foliage, cradling a railer of his own.

She relaxed. It was Gillis.

He crouched a few paces away and linked his infrared emitter to hers.

“Kira, what the hell’s going on?”

Then came another distant boom, followed by what sounded like a pair of secondary explosions. Kira could again feel it in her feet, as shockwaves propagated through the ground.

“No idea. But if I had to guess, I’d say we’re being attacked.”

“Attacked—you mean, for real? By the squids?”

She gave a grim nod. “Yeah. Turn around.”

Gillis hesitated, then did. Kira snapped open a single pouch mounted high on the back of his tactical harness and extracted a magazine. Their rifles were loaded with simulation rounds, since this had been intended only as an exercise, after all. But SOP had them cart around a mag of live rounds, sealed in its own specific pouch, one that was essentially impossible to get at without deliberately removing the harness or getting help from a buddy. It was the last thing issued before training, the first thing collected afterward, and tested, via an embedded chip, to determine if it had been accessed in the interim. Kira found this particular bit of intense safety protocol to be kind of dumb, considering what any one of them could do with a mere flicker of thought.

But Navy’s gotta Navy.

She handed him the mag and he snapped it into his railer, then turned and retrieved her mag for her. There were no more blasts in the meantime, and a ponderous, ominous silence had settled over the dark forest.

She seated her mag, stowing the one containing the practice rounds. Thirty railer shots. That was it. It was a powerful weapon, sure, but thirty shots didn’t seem like anywhere near enough if the Nyctus had chosen to drop by.

She turned around and relinked her line-of-sight comms to Gillis. “Okay, let’s go find the others.”

“Yeah, I didn’t make it back to them when this all started. Figured I’d come back to cover you.”

“And I appreciate it. But right now—”

Somewhere not far away, a man screamed.

They both spun toward the nerve-rattling sound that abruptly cut off. It had come from the direction of the mock-up crash site.

Kira turned back to Gillis, the anxious dread that had been starting to twist and turn her gut intensifying. “Shit. That must be the enemy force.”

“They’re—what, under attack, too?”

Kira hissed in frustration. Instinct told her to help the enemy force; they were enemy in name only, actually ON Ratings drafted into the role for the exercise. But she wanted to find Rainer and Riley, because—

Something burst through the undergrowth a few meters away. It was big, round, and glittering in the wan light, surrounded by writhing tentacles that never stopped moving

Which was all Kira and Gillis needed to see. They both aimed and fired on instinct, the hypersonic cracks of their railer shots snapping the stillness in half. Both rounds hit, blasting fragments from whatever the hell this was. It immediately fell back and vanished into the foliage.

Kira switched to thermal and could see a faint heat signature shimmering through the tangled leaves and branches. But there was no psychic signature, none of the incidental mental mumbles and mutters that leaked from every mind she’d ever encountered. Who or whatever this was, it either had mental shields so formidable she couldn’t even detect them, much less penetrate them—

Or it wasn’t alive.

“Kira!”

Gillis just shouted it through his faceplate. Kira rose, smacked his shoulder, and shouted back.

“Come on, let’s find the others!”

She raced off through the brush, Gillis taking her six and hanging three meters back. They both hurried, but with minimal noise and only the most economic movements. Fortunately, and per SOP, they’d dabbed otherwise invisible splotches of paint laced with small amounts of radioisotopes on trees as they’d come this way; the small amount of heat given off gave them a path to follow with their thermal imagers.

They reached a clearing. Kira knew they had to cross it, then carry on through the brush on the far side downslope to where Riley and Rainer should be hunkered down in the patrol base. She raised a hand to Gillis and paused and crouched, taking a moment to just watch and listen. That thick, ominous silence had draped itself over the night again, broken only by her own breathing, the rhythmic rush of blood in her ears, the odd, incidental noise from Gillis behind her.

And that was it.

Still, she tentatively extended her awareness in the surrounding night. Again, she touched no other minds. That should mean they were alone and safe, but—

“What was that thing?” Kira said, breath fogging her faceplate. Her heat sink was struggling to keep up after the raw chaos of close combat, and she took a series of long, calming breaths, returning both pulse and mindset to something closer to that of an ON officer.

She turned back to Gillis, made a hand gesture that said turn on your heat sink, then waited as both of their thermal signatures faded. Then, Kira waved for Gillis to follow and resumed her way forward, straight across the clearing. She moved as she’d been taught without thinking about it, putting her foot down outer edge first, then rolling her weight inward, compressing the grass and twigs under her foot slowly, rather than simply brushing through the forest mast.

Between them, she and Gillis made almost no noise, their suits reflected virtually no light, and with their body heat being dumped into the sink, they offered almost no infrared signature, either. Going around the clearing might have been more secure, but it would have taken them too long.

Something smashed out of the bush to her left. It was another of the enemy spheres, whose body formed the hub for a series of radiating tentacles. Kira caught a metallic gleam, which suggested something mechanical but could also just be armor.

And as she noticed this, her training had already kicked in, so she instinctively raised her railer and snapped out a shot. She didn’t bother aiming through the sight; she didn’t need to, because the thing was barely ten meters away. Her hyper-velocity round smacked into it dead-center, and it staggered. Gillis’s round hit a second later, and the thing dropped to the ground, levitation tech apparently failing. It landed with a gong-like boom, then lay there, tentacles flailing around it, thrashing through the brush and leaves in a serpentine dance of death.

Another appeared right behind it. Then two more, and a third coming up the path they’d followed from behind them.

“Gillis, let’s go!” Kira shouted, her racing mind telling her to break contact and get away to—wherever, it didn’t matter as long as it was somewhere they could defend. But the constructs—because she was now sure that’s what they were, just machines—raced in, closing on them from two directions.

Kira cursed. One ahead of them was about to cut them off from the trail forward. She snapped out two more shots and missed with one, but the other struck home and made the thing stagger sideways. Gillis’s railer snapped behind her. This was, she realized, a road to nowhere; if they tried to make a stand here, in the open, they’d be overrun. She smacked Gillis’s shoulder and shouted again.

“I said let’s go!” Kira bellowed, already lunging into motion.

They’d have to run the only direction they could, perpendicular to their intended path, which meant down into lowland they hadn’t traversed yet. Kira could only desperately hope they could find something, some configuration of rocks or fallen trees or anything that would give them enough cover to go firm and defend themselves.

They had less than one railer mag each.

She ran, Gillis pounding along behind her. But she’d only taken three paces before another of the monstrous things erupted from the bush ahead of her.

Kira spun around. “Back to back. We’re surrounded.” Her tone was calmer than she expected, years of training beginning to weigh despite their desperate straits.

He turned and covered a one-eighty arc, Kira covering the rest of the circle. She knew it verged on hopeless; the only thing they had going for them was that none of these things had deployed ranged weapons yet and seemed determined just to get in close.

Which was a whole different flavor of horrifying all on its own.

Kira and Gillis pumped out deliberate shots, counting their rounds as they did.

. . . eighteen . . . SNAP . . . seventeen . . . SNAP . . .

Two more of the things went down, crippled. Others closed in. Kira cursed their machine nature; all of her fearsome powers as a Joiner were useless with no minds to influence. Thorn had been right; Joining just wasn’t in the same league as ’casting when it came to applying force.

She drew her focus back to the battle at hand. There was still a chance, even without Joining. If they ran out of targets before they ran out of rounds, they might—

. . . thirteen . . . SNAP . . .

“Kira!”

Gillis had cried out as one of the slithering tentacles closed around his leg. Kira turned, all too aware that yet another of the damned things was closing in on her, and shot the one clutching at Gillis. Two shots, and it flopped to the ground, expelling a spray of gases and fluid from one of the bullet holes. As Gillis fought to pull his leg free, Kira spun back around to find one of the constructs almost within reach, writhing tentacles about to wrap around and smother her.

But the construct abruptly shot up into the air five meters, then plummeted down and slammed into the ground with a massive bang. At the same time, a fierce jet of flame, like a blowtorch, sliced into another of their attackers. A tentacle dropped off with a heavy clunk, the tip curling in spastic memory. Another came on, but Kira saw Rainer and Riley at the edge of the clearing. Rainer reached out a hand, made a fist, and, true to her powers as a Hammer, lifted and slammed the construct against the ground again with a ceaseless rhythm that rendered the alien weapon into so much scrap.

Kira took advantage of the momentary confusion to pump railer shots into more of the things. It bought them a respite and, more importantly, a path out of the clearing. Gillis, now free, lunged to his feet and ran, Kira at his side. They made it to Rainer and Riley; together, the four of them plunged back into the undergrowth. Ten meters in, they stopped to catch their breath.

“You guys okay?” Rainer asked.

“Aside from being scared shitless, yeah,” Kira gasped. She glanced at her railer. “I’m down to—shit. Six rounds.”

“Seven here,” Gillis put in.

“We’ve each fired about a dozen,” Riley put in. “We’ve been ’casting otherwise.” She heard him suck in a breath behind his faceplate. She couldn’t see his eyes but could well imagine them, wide as portholes, probably just like hers. “But I’m nearly tapped out,” he went on.

“Starting to feel it here, too,” Rainer said. “What the hell are these things? Where did they come from?”

“Could this be part of the exercise?” Gillis asked. “I mean, making it as realistic as possible and all that?”

“If it is, I’m going to personally kick asses—hell, Fielder, even Narvez, I don’t care.” But then she remembered that abbreviated comm message, the scream from the enemy force that was abruptly cut off, and shook her head. “But, no. This is the squids. There’s nothing like this in our tech, and sure as hell not in our training drones,” Rainer said.

“Why, though? What are they doing here—?” Gillis started, but he never got to finish. An untold number of the tentacled constructs suddenly appeared all around them, quickly closing.

The next few minutes, maybe seconds, were a blur of shouts, railer shots, and more of Riley’s flame and Rainer’s telekinesis. But it wasn’t enough. Kira saw the railer ripped out of Gillis’s hands; more tentacles swarmed and engulfed him. Riley went next, bursts of flame erupting in the bush around them as he was yanked off the ground. Rainer shouted something at her, about the same instant that the action on Kira’s railer locked in the open position, her mag empty. And then Rainer was gone.

Kira lashed out with the railer, trying to pistol whip the thing that suddenly loomed over her, blotting out the stars. She felt a solid hit, metal on metal, then a sinuous pressure as the tentacles wrapped around her arms, her legs, her torso, and she was being lifted—

Kira howled in rage as she was carried off into the night, head snapped back in a brutal movement as the construct holding her accelerated to wild speeds. She tried to scream and failed as a tentacle crushed her jaw together, and the landscape became nothing more than a smear of light.

9

Thorn strolled through the Arboretum, satisfaction humming through him that he’d been able to save it, and the rest of Code Gauntlet, from destruction. Touching leaves as he walked, each step sank into the long grass, cool under his bare feet. Unerring, he walked—ambled, really—to the place he’d last spoken to Kira, standing in the grass, admiring the park, and seeing her face in a fugitive memory that felt as real as if she’d been standing there.

Day. Or—night. Because it was dark. Strangely dark, in fact. The Arboretum was normally kept lit, its day cycle specifically tailored to maximize its benefit for the many plant species it contained. During quiet hours, the lights were dimmed, but never to less than twilight levels of cozy gloom. The plants didn’t seem to mind, and it meant that people with odd duty-shifts could come here any time to enjoy the tranquility of the place.

But this was dark. And darkness made him think of the witchport, and the war out there, so he stopped and looked around in mild confusion. A movement to his left drew his attention, and there was Kira, sitting in the grass, a picnic lunch laid out on a blue cloth. There was wine, and fruit, and the unimaginably expensive cheese made from actual milk, and even bread that didn’t look like it had been mixed with sawdust.

“Kira?” he asked softly. “When did you get back?”

She smiled at him but said nothing.

Thorn walked toward her. He saw that Kira was wearing a stealth suit. With a tactical harness. What? Why?

“Kira, what the hell’s going on? How long have you been here? And why are you dressed like that?”

Kira, still smiling, opened her mouth to speak—

And screamed, a shrill, piteous scream of endless pain, the sound vibrating in Thorn’s teeth and bones and even setting the hair on his neck at attention. It was an animal’s shriek of loss and fear, primal in every sense, and Thorn reeled back, feet slipping in the cool grass that was now slick with something—dew, he thought, then he smelled the tang of copper and knew it was blood, an ocean of it running wild through lawns. The blood stained Kira’s suit, her hand dripping as she continued to shriek, but she offered him an apple with her left hand, the fruit gripped so hard it began to weep in her pallid, tight fingers.

He was frozen in place, the blood like glue and holding him to watch her as she howled forever, a sound that would not—could not—end because of the pain and rage

Thorn thrashed around, trying to break free—

“Lieutenant!”

He turned toward the voice but kept flailing around.

“Lieutenant Sellers, stop! Shit—can I get a hand over here?”

His arms and legs were bound, immobile, and now something pressed him down, an oppressive weight, leaving him helpless.

You need to wake up, Stellers. You’re dreaming.

The voice, smooth and powerful, sliced through the panic chewing away at his reason. It made him hesitate.

I’m—what?

“I said you’re dreaming,” the same voice replied, but this time he heard it as it was speaking almost in his ear. “You were asleep. So you’re dreaming. But now it’s time to wake up. Open your eyes.”

He did.

Thorn lay in a bed, surrounded by white. Everything was a sterile white. Bedclothes, walls, ceiling, all white.

A hospital.

He turned to the nearest face, an uncertain oval of skin that began to gain details as he took shuddering breaths and fought, fought hard, to lean back in the sheets, now slick with his sweat. Other faces hovered around the bed. He recognized some. Maybe.

“Where—”

“Are you?” a different face said. “That’s always the first question, and good to hear. Means they’re probably on the mend.”

The first face gained details, and he knew her.

“Densmore?”

She smiled wryly. “That’s Captain Densmore to you, Specialist.”

One of the others—a doctor, and he recognized her, the Base Surgeon at Code Gauntlet—leaned closer, holding a small light. She flashed it into Thorn’s eyes, then away, apparently watching his pupils respond. As she did, she said, “What’s your name?”

“Uh . . . Thorn.”

“Rank?”

“Specialist. Maybe Lieutenant?”

“In?”

“The ON. Orbital Navy.”

“Service number?”

“Uh—N83179—uh. Shit. I think it ends 24, but it might be 42.”

“Who won the ON racquetball championship seven years ago?”

Thorn blinked. “What?”

The doctor grinned and straightened. “Just messing with you. For the record, it was me.” She stuck her hands in the pockets of her white smock. “The last big hurdle was him waking up with his cognitive facilities intact. He’s done that. All his other tests check out, so—” She shrugged. “We can discharge him by the end of the day.”

The enigmatic woman named Densmore, who was a Starcaster herself and obviously an agent of whatever the most secretive, spooky part of the ON was called, nodded. “Thank you, doctor.”

“Thank you for not letting him vaporize the infirmary.”

Thorn looked from one to the other. “Ma’am—er, Ma’ams, I’m right here, you know. You don’t need to talk about me like I’m not.” He looked at Densmore. “What’s this about me vaporizing things?”

“The good Doctor here asked me to help out, since your cortisol levels, or something like that, suggested you were starting the process of waking up. Everyone was afraid you might be disoriented when you did. And disoriented Starcasters can do a lot of damage.”

Thorn glanced past her. “Is that why they’re here?”

He looked at a pair of ON Security, standing with weapons drawn just a few meters away. One of them was the squat, unibrowed Petty Officer who’d confronted him in the gym after his magical altercation with Kira. Densmore gave a slight shrug.

“Call them plan B, in case I couldn’t contain any unintended ’casting you might have done while waking up.” She nodded at the Security detail, and they holstered their weapons.

“Would’ve been a shame to have to have blown your head off, sir,” the Petty Officer said, a twinkle in his eye.

“Yeah, you seem really broken up at the prospect.”

The man grinned and saluted, then they left. As they did, they dodged around someone Thorn recognized entering the infirmary.

“Mol? Holy crap, did everyone I know come here to see me wake up?”

Mol grinned. “Nope, I was her ride.” She jerked a thumb at Densmore.

“I happened to be aboard your old ship, the Apollo, when word came in. About you, and your achievements, let’s say,” Densmore said. “Captain Samuels assigned her to fly me here to Code Gauntlet.” She lifted a brow, a smile playing at her lips. “We may have broken some, ah, suggested velocity limits in order to get here on time. Or in less time.”

Thorn lay back on the pillow, flickers of puzzlement and holes in what he knew had begun coalescing into questions. Code Gauntlet obviously hadn’t been replaced by a glowing impact crater, so his deflection of the massive Nyctus rock had apparently worked. But he remembered nothing after that. What had happened? How long had he been out? Why had Densmore been aboard the Apollo, and close enough to the FOB that she could get word—

“I was coming to see you anyway,” Densmore said, answering his question before he could say it. “The Apollo was already slated for a duty rotation here, so I hitched a ride. Wyant’s Gyrfalcon was just that much faster.”

“Trixie wanted me to keep her updated on how you were doing,” Mol said. “She says hello, by the way.”

Thorn smiled at that. Trixie, the AI that ran Mol’s Gyrfalcon fighter, had more personality than a lot of people he’d known, and seemingly a little more all the time. But he turned back to Densmore.

“You once told me, ma’am, that if I intruded into your mind again, you’d kick my ass. All due respect, but that’s a two-way street.”

Densmore chuckled. “I wasn’t intruding anywhere. I knew what you were thinking because it’s just what I’d be thinking—what the hell’s she doing here?”

“Well, yeah. You were coming to see me. Why?”

“Checking in.” She glanced back at Mol. “After you two waged your little magical campaign against the Nyctus a few months back, it became pretty clear that we really had to keep a close watch on you.”

He gave a slow nod. After proving himself with three devastating magical attacks on the Nyctus, while flying with Mol and Kira, Densmore had given him an extensive target list and pretty much free reign to engage them however he chose. He’d gotten about halfway through the list, with results ranging from almost getting his butt kicked to yet more spectacular successes, but it had been enough to kickstart the ON’s campaign that drove the squids back to their current line.

It had also given him and Mol a lot of war stories to tell, except they couldn’t tell any of them to anyone, because a thick onerous blanket of security classifications had been draped over it all.

And then, with nothing but a few thank you messages from various Fleet Admirals, he’d been unceremoniously reassigned to the Hecate, and here he was.

“It really is good to see you, Mol,” he said.

“It’s good to be seen,” she replied, flashing her infectious grin as she shot back the hoary old one-liner. “It’s also good to be in the presence of an actual hero. Nice after so many losses.”

Thorn sat up. “Me? Hell, no. I don’t want to die, and I really hate losing to the squids.”

“You invented a new field of magic while you were at it,” Densmore said.

Thorn gave her a puzzled look. “New? I don’t think so. It was always there, and—field?”

“The reason you collapsed after you deflected that rock from Code Gauntlet.” Densmore looked back at the Doctor and other medical personnel hovering nearby. “May we have a moment, please?”

The doctor gave a wry smile. “Not a problem. You’d be surprised how many classified conversations occur with bedridden patients in here.”

Thorn raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Nah, not really. But I know the score when it comes to security stuff,” she said, gesturing for the other medics to withdraw her. “Believe me, when I don’t need to know, I don’t want to know.” She pointed at a panel built into the bed. “You need me, just push the big red button.”

When they were gone, Densmore turned back to Thorn. Mol hovered nearby, apparently cleared to listen on whatever was about to be said. Thorn also noticed she’d fallen into the role of lookout, keeping a wary gaze scanning around the infirmary for potential interlopers.

“Tell me,” Densmore said. “What do you remember?”

“Well, everything, right up until I don’t.”

“So you remember everything you did, everything that led up to deflecting that rock? And everything you did to cause it to deflect?”

Thorn noticed the humps of his feet under the bedclothes. They looked distant, and maybe a bit small. Finally, he spoke, sorting memory into something more cohesive than a collection of searing images. “I . . . remember my plan. My idea, and then the way we put it in play. There are a lot of moving parts, but it’s nothing new. I just assembled the tools we had, and—you saw, Captain. We have this skill. I think.”

Densmore quirked her lip in a thin smile. “Granted. And that’s why, as soon as we can after you’re out of here, I want to do a deep dive into your mind and try to glean as much about what you did as possible. I need a list of these tools as you say. About the magical field, that’s something entirely different. And, to some people in the ON, scary as hell.”

Thorn sat up a little more. “All due respect, ma’am, but what the hell is going on? What’s this about a new field of magic?”

“As near as we can tell, you didn’t just curve space, or whatever it was you did. Or you did, but that’s not really the important part of it.” Her dark gaze suddenly bored into Thorn’s. “You actually altered reality. Somehow, some way, you disconnected the reality encompassing yourself, the Hecate, and that rock, from”—she gestured around— “well, this one. You created a new, temporary reality, where an Alcubierre drive works differently. Instead of warping space into a bubble for FTL travel, in this isolated little reality you created, an Alcubierre bends space-time.”

“Sir. My mind is blown,” Mol said, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall. “Could you create a reality where I can get roaring drunk but never suffer a hangover?”

Thorn grinned, but Densmore didn’t.

“Actually, Wyant, he probably could. Or at least we have no reason to believe he couldn’t.”

Mol’s smile faded. “So, wait. Does that mean he could just create a reality where we’ve won the war and the Nyctus are, like, gone?”

“Maybe. Heluva jump, but maybe.”

Thorn looked from one to the other. “Okay, wait a second. If you’re going to ask me to start changing reality—”

“We’re not about to do any such thing,” Densmore said. “In fact, we don’t want you to make any more attempts to do that without express permission from Fleet Command. And that’s an order, from the Fleet Chief of Staff. I can get her on the comm and let her give it to you in person, if you’d like.”

Thorn shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Besides, I don’t know if I even could do it again. Safely, anyway.”

“That’s something we eventually need to find out. For the time being, though, the potential ramifications are an undiscovered country, as it were. The Hecate’s Chief Engineer said that while you were doing your thing, the ship’s Alcubierre drive was absolutely functioning normally. He couldn’t get over the fact that once you changed reality, the drive was quite happily doing something it was never designed to do. Hell, no one’s even done the math or engineering needed to build a drive that could do that. And yet, it was perfectly content, just humming along.”

“So what’s the problem?” Thorn asked.

“Well, first, the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive now doesn’t function at all. There seems to be a residual magic effect that’s confusing it, for lack of a better word. It simultaneously works one way, but also the other. And the two just aren’t compatible.”

“What about the rest of the ship’s systems?” Thorn asked, alarm in his tone. “And the crew?”

“All perfectly fine,” Densmore replied, raising a hand. “In your alternative reality, the only thing that was different was the drive. Everything else remained the same.”

“But if he had created a reality where, say, people didn’t get hung over—” Mol began, but Densmore cut her off.

“We don’t know. We’re not even sure if we can know. So this particular type of magic is now forbidden and has been assigned the highest possible security classification. And that means both of you are bound by that. Are we understood?”

Thorn and Mol both nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Anyway, the Hecate’s being refitted with a new Alcubierre drive. The old one is being pulled, so it can be studied. But that’s only part of what we want to do, and that brings me back to that deep reading of you we want to do.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes. “Does this mean you’re pulling me off the front?” Although the idea of being pulled back to more civilized surroundings had a definite appeal, the idea of being taken away from the action to be “studied,” did not.

Densmore shook her head. “We don’t have that luxury. Reality-bending aside, you’re just far too valuable an asset to tie up in being tested and scanned in some far-off research facility. We need you on the front lines, fighting the war. More so than ever, in fact.”

Thorn titled his head, curious. “What does that mean?”

“Just as I arrived here, I received intelligence that the Nyctus have started conducting raids into our territory. In some cases, pretty deep into our territory. They seem to be trying to return the favor of the forays you two made into their space. So, as soon as the Hecate is online, you’ll work aboard her on dealing with that little problem. Oh, and Wyant and her Gyrfalcon are being reassigned from the Apollo to the Hecate to help out, since you two seem to make such a damned fine team.”

Mol straightened. “Ma’am? Does Captain Samuels know about this?”

“He does, and so does the Hecate’s Captain, Tanner.” She looked back at Thorn. “We were actually going to deploy you immediately, aboard the Janus, but Tanner put up one hell of a fight to keep you aboard his ship. You seem to have impressed him, and that’s no easy feat. Tanner has a reputation for chewing through subordinates like I eat bacon. Something about high standards, and you apparently meeting them, I guess.”

Densmore stepped back from the bed. “Regardless, the Doctor wants to keep you for the rest of the day for observation and, if nothing changes, discharge you tonight. Your first stop when you get out of here will be aboard the Hecate. I’ll meet you in her witchport, and we’ll get to work on properly debriefing you.”

“No rest for the wicked, ma’am?” Thorn said.

“Or the dead,” she replied, then turned and started to walk away.

“Ma’am? Dead?”

She stopped. “Oh, did I forget to mention that you were clinically dead after your reality fiddling?”

“I—what? Dead?”

“No heartbeat, no brain activity. Dead. Finished. So, if you needed any more incentive to not try doing that again, well, there you go.” She smiled sweetly, then turned and walked away.

Thorn looked at Mol. “Well, shit. So I was dead.”

Mol just shrugged. “You got better.”

10

When Thorn first swung his feet out of bed, he expected to need time afterward to recover. After all, he’d been dead, a condition which he assumed came with some kind of hangover. Mol had been on hand with the medical staff to help him, all of them holding out ready hands to catch him if he fell.

Except, he felt fine. Not a flicker of dizziness, a hint of watery weakness in his legs—nothing. He might as well have just gotten up after a normal night’s sleep.

“I don’t know if I find that worrying or not,” Dr. Al-Nouri said, her dark eyes focused again on Thorn’s pupils as she swung her little flashlight back and forth. Finally, she shrugged, then snapped the light off and put it away. “You seem healthier than I am, which is pretty amazing for someone who was, ah, dead.”

Mol smirked, again muttering, “But he got better.”

Dr. Al-Nouri smiled. “He did. Completely.”

“So I gather that’s unusual?” Thorn asked.

Her smile faded a bit. “I’ve had lots of patients die. That’s the reality of being a military doctor during a war. I’ve had a few that we managed to pull back from the very brink, and one I can remember that entered a state of being clinically dead, but who we were able to revive. Those last few required weeks of care and therapy, and none of them were the same afterward.” Al-Nouri stuck her hands in the pockets of her white smock. “And then there’s you, Specialist. You’re”—she paused, hunting for a word, finally finding on—“different. That’s all I can say. You’re different.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that pretty much all my life, Doc,” Thorn said, smiling back at her. “So, am I clear to go?”

Al-Nouri gestured to the door out of the ward. “Any time. Your uniform and personal effects are in that locker; it’s keyed to your thumbprint. I do want to see you back here at, let’s say, seventeen hundred for some follow-up. I want to make sure this isn’t all temporary and you’re really just going to keel over again.”

Thorn thanked her, retrieved his clothes, then drew the curtain and kicked Mol out from behind it as he got dressed.

“You never struck me as the bashful type, sir,” Mol said. Thorn could hear the grin in her voice.

“The planet isn’t ready for my treasures, Mol. I’m doing this for your own good.”

She laughed. “I was going to say whatever, I’ve showered with lots of guys. Doubt I’d see anything new. And if I did, I’d shoot it.”

Thorn grinned as he fastened his uniform shirt. “Easy, big shooter.” He tapped the curtain. “And thank you for your service in protecting me from her aim.”

When he’d gathered and stowed his effects and signed about 400 different discharge documents, he and Mol headed for their first stop—the CIC. She’d been instructed to bring him straight there.

As they made their way through the FOB, Thorn was subjected to a barrage of smiles, offered handshakes, and general gratitude. On top of the routine salutes from the enlisted personnel, it all actually started to wear on him, but Mol leaned in and spoke to him in a low voice.

“The war’s become a grind. Heroes are few and far between. I say enjoy it while it lasts.”

She was right, of course. Thorn didn’t particularly crave personal glory, but he had elevated the profile of, and goodwill toward, Starcasters in general. So he kept his own smile in place and just returned the nods and handshakes, and acknowledged the well-wishes and gratitude. By the time they arrived at the CIC, his cheeks ached.

“I feel like a Greek general,” he muttered.

“No, you don’t. They’re all dead,” Mol said with a snort.

He braced himself as the door slid open. He’d expected something surprise party-like, some massive outpouring of gratitude and acclaim from the CIC staff. Thorn wasn’t looking forward to it, he realized, but as Mol said, he should ride it while it carried him. So, taking a breath, he stepped into the CIC.

A few faces turned away from consoles to look at him, and he got a few smiles and a thumbs-up. And that was it.

“Get your ass over here,” a voice he recognized snapped. It was Commodore Scoville, standing in exactly the same place Thorn had last seen him before he’d departed on his desperate mission to save Code Gauntlet.

He probably hasn’t even moved from there, Thorn thought. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d installed him in the CIC when it was being built.

“Yes, sir,” he said, wending his way through the consoles in the “snake pit,” which was the name given to the CIC’s lower level. Scoville stood in “the pulpit,” the higher command-level.

He stopped and saluted Scoville. Mol hung a few paces back. Thorn noticed that Scoville wasn’t alone; Captain Tanner, CO of the Hecate, stood nearby.

Scoville returned the salute, then shoved out his hand like it was a drill movement. Thorn took it, and the gruff Commodore shook it three times, then released it.

“Well done.”

And that was that.

“The FOB Commander passes on his own sincere thanks. He’d be here himself, except he’s off-world—meetings back at Fleet Command.”

“Understood, sir.”

Tanner stepped forward. His attitude, likewise professional, was a little more relaxed than Scoville’s. “Echoing the Commodore, here.” He shook Thorn’s hand. “That was damned good work, Lieutenant.” He gave a thin smile. “Have to admit, had some misgivings about it all when we pulled up to that rock.”

“You and me both, sir.”

“You might want to go and speak to the Chief Engineer. I think he’s both pissed and grateful about what you did.”

“Sir?” Thorn raised his brows, curious.

“He’s pissed because you broke his Alcubierre drive. Grateful because he gets a new one, and a later model at that, that he can tinker with.”

“A mixed message, I guess. I’ll proceed with care when I see the good engineer.”

“Which brings us to the business at hand,” Scoville said, gesturing to the main tactical display. It was zoomed a long way out, depicting most of human space, the Zone, and the nearest edge of Nyctus-controlled space. The usual array of friendly blue icons and red enemy ones were spattered across it, but what caught Thorn’s eye were the smattering of red icons inside human space. Some of them had penetrated quite deep.

“I heard that the squids were raiding us,” Thorn said. “I didn’t realize it was that volume of incursions, or that far inside our territory.” As he was speaking, a flicker of dread ignited in his gut and he sought out Code Nebula, where Kira was still undergoing her upgrade training. He found it free of red icons, causing the embers of anxiety to die again.

Scoville crossed his arms. “Indeed. It appears that the Nyctus are trying to accomplish several things with these raids. They seem to be testing the integrity of our line to intrusion—a troubling ploy—so we’re taking some measures to deal with that. They’re also testing our response times, methods, and from where we send help. And, they seem to be trying to gather intel. A few of the raids have made off with equipment—a few worrisome items, but nothing really critical.” He narrowed his eyes. “Some people, too. We don’t have the full picture yet, and we’re still trying to confirm who they managed to grab, but we’ve got preliminary reports from these sites that people have gone missing.”

He nodded to a Rating at a nearby console. The image changed, highlighting a half-dozen of the intruding enemy icons.

“These are all locations with personnel missing after a raid. We haven’t yet confirmed if they were snatched or are just dead, and we simply haven’t recovered their remains—although, in some cases, we had KEW impacts, so there might not be any remains,” Scoville said.

Thorn studied the map, and his dream returned: violent, intense, unwelcome.

Kira, screaming for eternity—

“Lieutenant?”

Thorn jumped and turned to find Scoville, Tanner, and Mol all staring at him, brows furrowed in concern.

He blinked. “Sir?”

“You went stock still for about five seconds,” Scoville said. “Didn’t respond to me at all, like you were frozen or something. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Maybe you should be back in the infirmary—” Tanner started, but Thorn held up a hand.

“Sorry, sir. I’m fine. I was just remembering a . . . a memory, or a dream, sort of, while I was out. Was having it when I came to, in fact.” Thorn winced at the term. Even to him, dream sounded like the exact opposite of what they needed—strategy and tactics.

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give the tiniest shit about someone’s dreams,” Scoville replied, “but given the circumstances, and who you are, is it something we should be aware of?”

“I—” Thorn started, then hesitated. He didn’t think it was important to the greater strategic picture, but the simple fact that he hesitated rang an alarm in the deepest part of his awareness.

He shook his head. “I doubt it, sir. It’s more a personal matter.”

Scoville scowled. “This is definitely a whole new ON, thanks to this magical—and don’t take this the wrong way, Lieutenant—bullshit. Can’t believe I was genuinely concerned about what someone was dreaming. We have to adapt or die off, I think.”

“Who does, sir?” Thorn asked.

Scoville pointed to himself. “People like me. There are two kinds of officers, or there will be—trained before magic was real, and after. The choice isn’t easy to accept, but it isn’t really a choice, either. I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t use what I’m given to win, and for now, that means you. That means magic, a word I considered to be mere fantasy a few years ago.”

“I understand, sir,” Thorn said, and he did. He turned to regard the map and found his attention pulled to Code Nebula. The nearest Nyctus raid was almost seven light-years away, on a planet Thorn didn’t even recognize; the map simply referred to it as a navigation waypoint. So there must have been a nav beacon there. But Code Nebula itself—

—a shrill, piercing scream of pain and terror—

—was entirely in the clear.

“Any observations, Lieutenant?” Scoville asked.

Thorn shook his head. “Sorry, sir, none. If there’s a pattern to these Nyctus raids, I don’t see it.”

“You, and the rest of our intel and ops people.”

—piercing scream—

A sudden flicker of—something. It was a thought, but an elusive one, like a dust mote drifting by and only caught out of the corner of his eye.

Then it was gone.

A surge of anger hit Thorn. The triumph he’d felt over saving Code Gauntlet drained away, leaving a hollow space inside him. Saving the FOB had been a tremendous achievement, but only in the sense that he’d stopped the Nyctus from gaining a huge, strategic advantage, at least in the nearby sectors. It hadn’t advanced the ON’s position, or helped the Fleet regain the operational initiative. It was just plugging a hole in a dam, without taking on the rising waters on the other side of it, which was the true problem.

The Nyctus, on the other hand, were still bringing the war to them, in the form of these damned raids.

“We need to strike back,” Thorn said. “Same method, same targets. No quarter given.”

“Say again, Lieutenant?” Scoville said.

Thorn spun around. “We need to raid the bastards in kind. Even if we can’t go for general fleet engagements—at least, not until we get that dust problem sorted out—we can still go back to doing what Mol and I were doing before I was reassigned to the Hecate.” He stabbed a finger back at the map. “They’ve taken some of the initiative back, sir. We can’t let them keep it.”

Scoville actually smiled. Thorn wondered if it might damage his face.

“You’re singing our song, Lieutenant. In fact, that’s why you’re here—well, aside from congratulating you for saving our collective asses. I’ve just informed Captain Tanner that the Hecate, once she’s back underway, is going to be detached from regular fleet duties and assigned to special ops. Wyant here is being transferred aboard her, with her Gyrfalcon, and then the whole lot of you are going to be dispatched into Nyctus space to, as you put it, raid them right back.”

Thorn stared for a moment. For some reason, he’d expected resistance, a list of reasons why the ON couldn’t conduct raids against the Nyctus right now. He finally settled on a terse nod, but internally, he cheered.

“Outstanding, sir. When do we leave?”

“When the Hecate can go FTL again,” Tanner said. “Unless you want our grandchildren to celebrate the one and only raid we might manage, while we do a crawl between the stars.”

“And that’s going to take a few days,” Scoville said. “In the meantime, you’re to report to the Infirmary twice a day for a check-up. And, when you’re done here, you’re to meet with Captain Densmore. She, incidentally, will be overseeing the Hecate’s mission, among others, as senior Spec Ops officer.”

“We’re being turned into a spook ship,” Tanner said. “Mainly thanks to you. I reserve the right to be either happy or furious about that once we’ve got a few ops under our belts.”

Thorn smiled. His frustration had faded against the bright promise of doing something proactive. “Well, in that case, sir, you’re welcome—or I’m sorry.”

Scoville nodded. “Very well, then. All of you get the hell out of my CIC. I’ve got a war to run.”

Tanner, Mol, and Thorn all saluted and started to leave, but Scoville said, “Oh.”

Thorn stopped and turned back. “Sir?”

The Commodore slid open a drawer on a nearby console and extracted a small box. “Fleet wanted you to have these—a Distinguished Service Star First Class, and a Wound Medal. There’s supposed to be a ceremony to present them to you.” He handed the box to Thorn. “Here. Ceremony’s done.”

Thorn couldn’t help smiling. “Thank you, sir.”

Scoville met his gaze, and for a brief moment he saw Thorn as a soldier, and not some incomprehensible wrinkle in military doctrine. “No, not this time. My thanks go to you.”

Thorn took the Commodore’s hand who, this time, shook it warmly.

“See to your duties, Lieutenant,” Scoville said.

Thorn saluted again, making the sharpest, smartest salute he could. “Aye, sir.” He left the CIC with the new knowledge that respect earned was better than any parade or medal.

The bridge between magic and war wasn’t complete in the ON, but it was getting stronger.

* * *

Thorn worked his way along the narrow gap between the bulkhead delineating the starboard side of the Hecate’s tiny hangar and the flank of Mol’s Gyrfalcon. The fighter took up most of the volume of the space, displacing the pair of small shuttles that were normally stored here. A single shuttle had been moved to her repurposed cargo bay, an even smaller space located just ahead of her engineering section. A ship of the Hecate’s class had never been designed to act as what amounted to a carrier, but an unusual mission demanded unusual measures.

“Hey, sir,” Mol called from somewhere off to Thorn’s left.

He looked that way, saw nothing but Gyrfalcon hull, then ducked down. Mol knelt under the fighter, an access panel hanging open beside her. A set of tools were scattered on the deck around her knees, and she wore a small headlamp on a band over her forehead. She looked at Thorn as he crouched, glaring the light right into his face.

He put a hand up. “Mol, we’ve got a launch window opening in, like, ten minutes. What the hell are you doing?”

“Trixie says the port backup stabilizer is still lagging by about a tenth of a second.” She looked up again, into the open port, and stuck a tool inside. “May not sound like much, but when you’re doing forty or fifty klicks a second, it adds up.”

“Isn’t that something your ground crew would usually fix?”

“Yes, it is.” She frowned and tweaked the tool. “But the Hecate doesn’t have anyone qualified to work on a Gyrfalcon, and I didn’t bring any groundcrew with me. This was just supposed to be a ferry flight for that spooky Captain Densmore of yours, damn it. Trixie, did that make any difference at all?”

“It sure did,” the AI replied through a comm hanging on Mol’s belt. “It made things worse. The lag’s increased by fifteen percent.”

“Shit.”

“The waste reclamation system is working just fine.”

“That was an expletive, not—”

“I know. Just trying to lighten the mood,” Trixie replied.

Mol rolled her eyes, extracted the tool, and glared at whatever problem lurked inside the access panel. “I don’t have time for this,” she snapped. “Let’s just hope we don’t need the backup stab on this flight, I guess.”

Thorn rubbed his jaw, staring at the fighter. He’d been so glad to see Mol that he hadn’t asked simple questions, like where the hell would they get parts. Or maintenance crew. “What happens if you need spare parts?” He feared the answer but asked the question anyway.

Mol started sticking tools back into the bag beside her. “About ninety percent of this crate can be 3-D printed by the Hecate’s maintenance shop. I’ve uploaded all her schematics to them.”

“What about the other ten percent?”

“Well, they’re all pretty much stuff that’s critical to keep her flying, so”—she stuck the last tool in the bag, rolled it up, then snapped the access panel closed—“unless you can magic them up for me, you’d better hope none of them get busted.” She started crawling toward Thorn. “Can you magic them up for me?”

Thorn hesitated, recalling his conversation with Densmore—and Mol was right, she was spooky as hell—after she’d done her deep reading of him.

“Not without a special sacrifice,” Thorn said darkly.

“Sacrifice? What the hell?” Mol asked, her eyes round with alarm. “Like, um, what kind?” She fell silent, expecting the worst.

Thorn leaned forward. “Money. I’m going to need all of your money.”

She lifted a finger and scratched her nose. “Riiiiight.”

* * *

They’d met in the quarters she’d been assigned in Code Gauntlet; it didn’t surprise him at all that there was absolutely nothing to indicate she was actually living in them—not a trinket, not a dirty sock, nothing except for a closed duffle bag. She might have literally just moved in, instead of having spent at least two nights in them already.

“You never fail to amaze,” Densmore said. “You truly did manage to change reality—and you made it look easy, at that. But even though I basically experienced you doing it in real time, experienced every thought and emotion that you did, I still have absolutely no idea how you managed it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, ma’am, I was as surprised as anyone. Once it worked, that is.”

“I know. And that’s what makes it so worrisome. Even if you never do that again—and, let me reiterate this, do not do that again—I’m still left wondering what else you might just do.”

Thorn bristled. “Ma’am, if you’re telling me to stick to conventional magic, that’s fine, but if I’m in another situation like that one—”

“Then you’ll do whatever you need to. I know that. And, short of yanking you off the front line and sticking you deep in some secure facility somewhere, there’s no way of stopping you.” She’d leaned toward him, the veil of mystery that permeated her aura suddenly gone. For a moment, he got to glimpse the actual person that was Alys Densmore.

“What I’m saying is this. You are dangerous. Profoundly so. If this was peace time, you would be in some secure facility, being studied, and more importantly being controlled. And, yes, that would be whether you liked it or not.” A sinister glint hardened her gaze, reminding Thorn that, no matter how pleasant this woman might seem, she really was not a very nice person—because nice people didn’t do the sort of job she did. “But we’re fighting what amounts to an existential war against the Nyctus, so we need you out here, doing the things you do.”

“I understand—”

“No, you don’t,” Densmore cut in. “You don’t understand at all. And that’s the problem.” She narrowed her eyes. “Try putting yourself in our boots. We’re aboard a ship, and you’re the fusion reactor. All your safeties have failed, except one. And that last one, the one keeping us all from disaster, isn’t under our control. We need the reactor to keep running, though, so all we can do is desperately hope that that last safety doesn’t go and end us all. Think about how it would feel to be aboard that ship.”

Thorn didn’t have to think very hard. He effectively had been aboard that ship, except it had been the Hecate, and instead of a fusion reactor on the brink of losing containment, it had been a rock the size of a mountain racing along just a few klicks behind him.

He looked at Densmore and nodded. “I get it, ma’am. I really do. When you said I’d do what I needed to, you were right, I will. I mean, how could I not? But I do understand what you’re saying, that instead of making things better, I could make them a whole lot worse. So I’ll promise you this: I’ll keep my sights fixed on that word need. You can bet that before I do anything that’s outside the realm of conventional magic—as we understand it, anyway—I’ll make sure it truly needs to be done.”

Densmore leaned back and nodded. “All I can really ask for, given the circumstances. But I want to make sure we both understand something. Let’s put orders and military discipline and all that aside for a moment. You just made me a promise.”

It was a statement, but it was also a question.

Thorn nodded. “I did. And it’s a promise I’ll keep.”

He’d actually expected Densmore to come back with something doubtful or cynical, but she surprised him by simply nodding. “I believe you.”

* * *

“Hey, sir! You going into a trance or something? Doing something magical?”

He blinked. Mol now crouched beside him, under the shadow of the Gyrfalcon. He’d been so deep in remembrance he’d actually lost a bit of time. The last time that had happened, he’d been thinking about his dream, and Kira.

“Sorry, Mol, no. I was just thinking about something.”

“Good, because if you’re going to do magical stuff, a little warning would be nice.”

“I won’t do any magical stuff without letting you know first.”

Unless I need to.

She pushed past him. “Appreciate it.”

“Oh, and Mol?”

She turned back.

“To answer your question about using magic to make spare parts for your ship—no, sorry, I can’t.”

She shrugged. “No biggie. The Hecate’s slated to RV with a combat supply ship in a couple of days, and it’s supposed to have a full support suite for the Gyrfalcon, including a mechanic. So we should be good.”

He followed her out from under the fighter, toward the open hatch. As he did, he reflected on how nice it would be if every problem he faced was solved so easily, and without using magic even he didn’t understand.

* * *

Thorn watched as the Hecate fell astern. He was throwing his mind ahead, into the op, but couldn’t help but feel a bit of a pang at seeing the destroyer fade away behind the Gyrfalcon. He’d started to think of her as home, more than he’d thought of anywhere as home since the destruction of Cotswold that had, in a single instant, made him both orphan and refugee. Not Code Nebula, not the FOB, and certainly not the toxic mud-ball where he’d been working when Kira first came to him.

“Theta-two-alpha, this is flight control,” a voice intoned over the comm. “You’re cleared to maneuver.”

“Theta-two-alpha here,” Mol replied. “Roger that.”

Thorn watched as Mol fired up the drive, now that they were far enough from the Hecate that the Gyrfalcon’s exhaust wouldn’t risk damaging her. The residual acceleration not offset by the fighter’s stabilizers pushed him back in his seat.

“So I’ve got the flight plan ready to run,” Mol said. “You wanna check it out before I have Trixie implement it?”

This was a little ritual that happened at the start of every op he flew with Mol. He’d long since learned, of course, that there was no need for such a check; he could absolutely trust her and Trixie to get him exactly where he wanted to go, and then bring him back home.

Yeah, home.

Still, he gave Mol a wicked grin. “What would you do if I said yes, I do want to review the flight plan?”

Mol shrugged. “I’d let you review the flight plan,” she replied, then her face fell. “And then I’d be very, very hurt.”

“Really?”

“Nah, ’course not.”

“I would,” Trixie put in. “I would be very, very hurt.”

Thorn gave a jaunty salute, knowing Trixie would see it. “Don’t worry, Trixie, I trust you,” Thorn said.

“That’s good, because if I make an error in even a single one of the several million calculations per second I perform just to keep the reactor stable—"

Thorn held up a hand. “Is this a shakedown for affection? Do you need to discuss your feelings, Trixie?”

“Actually, I do. I think my problems started when Mol refused my request for a sassier paintjob. Naturally, I—"

A chime sounded from Mol’s flight management system. “We’re thirty seconds from our first jump,” she said, looking at Thorn. “That’ll bring us to waypoint alpha. From there, you need to decide which target you want to go after.”

“Sorry, Trixie. We’ll work through your issues later,” Thorn said. Their primary target for the op was a Nyctus comm relay located by the ON’s ELINT—electronic intelligence—folks. It was definitely a high-value target, but to Thorn, kind of prosaic. Destroying it would gum up the squid’s comms for a while, and probably kill a few of them, but it came across more as a pain in the ass for their enemy, rather than something that would truly hurt. They had two alternate targets available, and one of them, a command and control node, was located in orbit around a water world. That implied squids planetside, maybe a lot of them, and causing a spectacular meteorite shower composed of fragments of their orbiting node stood to be a lot more demoralizing.

“You want to go after alt-two, don’t you?” Mol said, more statement than question.

“You’re getting to know how I think, aren’t you?”

“Yes, which is a scary thought.”

He made a rude gesture, and she laughed. A few seconds later, the countdown to the first jump shrilled through the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit.

Thorn braced himself, feeling the anticipation building as the Gyrfalcon’s drive spun up.

When the count hit zero, Trixie activated the Alcubierre drive. The universe briefly vanished, collapsing down to a bubble of warped space little bigger than the Gyrfalcon itself. During the jump, Thorn had a wild thought.

What if I’d been more ambiguous and caused all Alcubierre drives everywhere to function the way the Hecate’s old one had? It would have turned humanity into a multitude of isolated worlds in an instant, perhaps never able to exceed lightspeed again.

Densmore was right to worry.

The universe reappeared. Thorn swallowed against that faint, pervasive wave of nausea that accompanied the transition.

“Jump complete,” Mol said, waiting as Trixie confirmed their new location against a set of pulsars whose specific periods of rotation made them fixed beacons in space.

“We’re confirmed as being at waypoint alpha,” Trixie said. “Now, where to from here?”

Mol glanced at Thorn, who just smiled back.

“Target alt-two, the command node over the water world.” He smiled back. “Hey, like I said, you guys have gotten to know me too well.”

11

Mol let out a whoop as the Nyctus command and control node started to break up, the fragments glowing with the fierce heat of their atmospheric re-entry. Meteorite shower was what Thorn had wanted, and meteorite shower is what he’d delivered.

It hadn’t even been that difficult. He’d Shaded them from detection as they made their approach run, then brushed his own awareness against that of the squids aboard the node—a risky move, but a necessary one if he was going to find a weakness to exploit. One of the Nyctus had been a high-value shaman, and he detected him as soon as their minds touched; after a brief struggle for control, Thorn managed to have the squid step into an airlock and blow itself into space. Unfortunately, that alerted the node to the fact that something was up; fortunately, it also gave him the very weakness he was looking for.

Attitude control for the node as it orbited was maintained by a series of massive flywheels spinning on each of the node’s three axes. When they all spun at the same rate, their mutual centrifugal effects cancelled out. By varying their spin, though, the unbalanced forces could be used to adjust the node’s orbit. It was a clever mechanism that required no fuel for reaction thrusters, but it was also easy to break.

Even as the node began banging away with active sensors, searching for the Gyrfalcon, Thorn drew on his Scorch powers to apply the most intense heat possible to the bearings of one of the flywheels. He actually managed to cause one bearing to start melting; the flywheel wobbled, immediately tearing its mountings apart. Automatic safeties instantly started braking the other flywheels before the unbalanced forces threw the station out of control, but it’s not easy to bring something that weighs thousands of kilograms, and is spinning several thousand times a minute, to a quick halt. The station began to tumble, at the same time deflecting downward into an ever-lower orbit. When it brushed against the first wisps of atmosphere, it was all over. Escape pods rocketed away as whatever crew could abandon the dying station did.

So, mission accomplished. Now, they just had to get the hell out of here, but not before a parting shot. Thorn felt a Nyctus shaman coming into the game, too late to help but close enough to exert some magical presence in his mind. The shaman reached out, a sorcerous hiss splitting Thorn’s mind and providing a clear path to the core of alien being, a seething place of anger and frustration.

“Never lose your temper, squiddies,” Thorn muttered. “It’s only business.”

“What’s that?” Mol asked, but Thorn waved her quiet with a gesture.

“He’s a hardass, but—there. I’m in,” Thorn said. He pierced the Nyctus’ vision and saw a bulkhead shattered by some unseen impact. The alloy edge was a ragged knife, extending nearly a meter into the corridor. Thorn turned the Nyctus toward it feeling the mounting alien horror as his plan came into focus. With agonizing slowness, he walked the Nyctus forward into the razor-sharp wall section feeling—by proxy—as the metal slid quietly into the alien’s two hearts. Thorn grunted in satisfaction, looking through the squid’s eyes as it faded from existence.

The Nyctus hung stone dead on the length of metal. The last sensation Thorn had before leaving the shaman’s cooling body was a sound—pattering body fluids on the alloy deck. The sound of defeat.

Take that.

Thorn slumped back in the Gyrfalcon’s acceleration couch. “Okay, Mol, I’ve done my part. We can leave any time you’re ready.”

“Uh-huh.”

Thorn let his eyes flutter closed for a moment. The combined effects of his various ’castings—Shading the ship, using Joining to find the vulnerable flywheels while engaging a shaman in a psychic duel, then Scorching the flywheel until it failed, and finally ’jacking a squiddie—had drained him, leaving him feeling like butter scraped over too much toast. Once they were entirely clear, he’d probably take a nap.

He opened an eye. Mol had wheeled the Gyrfalcon around and lit the main drive, powering the fighter away from the carnage they’d inflicted. Beyond her, through the canopy, he could see what had to be a spectacular light show blazing across the night-side hemisphere of the planet.

“Uh, Mol? You planning on doing a victory orbit here?”

“No. Stand by.”

Her clipped tone made Thorn go rigid with alarm. “Mol, what’s wrong?”

“Not sure.” She tapped at her console. Thorn saw things in red flash up on the flight management system. That made him sit forward, hands at the ready for an unseen threat. Things in red were rarely good news.

“Mol?” Thorn asked, watching her tap the screen at a fevered pitch.

“Trixie,” she said, cutting him off. “What’s up with the Alcubierre drive’s power manifold?”

“I’m working on that now,” Trixie replied. “Please stand by.”

Even Trixie’s normally lyrical tone had an edge to it. Thorn was now almost standing, his body rigid with concern.

“Mol, talk to me.”

She scowled at her flight management system. “The Alcubierre drive won’t come out of standby mode.”

“Because of some power manifold thing?”

Mol gave a curt nod, her eyes still on her instruments. “Power has to be delivered to the drive’s core in a particular way. There can’t be more than a few nanoseconds of difference between the power going to different parts of the core, or it won’t generate a stable bubble. That’s what the manifold does.”

“And ours is—what, broken?”

“That’s what Trixie and I are trying to—”

A shrill alarm cut her off. She glanced at a new panel that had lit up.

Thorn recognized it. They were threat warnings.

“A squid frigate-class ship just broke orbit and, shit, it’s got two corvette-class ships following right behind,” Mol said.

“Can we outrun them?”

“For now.”

“For now?”

Mol turned to him. “Eventually, we run out of fuel. They’re bigger ships, fresh out of orbit, so they carry a whole bunch more than we do.”

“So when we run out—”

“We stop accelerating. And once that happens, well, Trixie?”

“Depending on certain variables at the time our drive shuts down, they will overtake us in between ten and thirty minutes.”

Thorn growled. “Science. It’s always breaking.”

* * *

Between them, Mol and Trixie powered through their options regarding the Alcubierre drive. Most were very technical and not feasible. The only one that held any promise was letting Trixie try to manage the flow of power to the various parts of the drive’s core herself. In theory, she could do it, taking over from the dedicated processor that oversaw the manifold and ensure that the pulses of energy were delivered to where they needed to go within the nearly infinitesimal windows of time required to keep the whole thing stable. The trouble was that she’d never been designed to do that, wasn’t properly wired into the drive, so she’d be working from upstream of the manifold’s balky processor—meaning it stood in her way.

“If we could access the drive,” Mol said, “we might be able to bypass the processor and connect her into the manifold on the downstream side of it.”

“Is that possible?” Thorn asked.

“Sure, if you’re talking about, say, the Hecate. The Chief Engineer can walk up to the Alcubierre drive and tinker with all he wants. Hell, he can drink coffee and listen to tunes while he does it. But if you’re talking about a Gyrfalcon, well, that means leaving the ship, opening up access from the outside, then digging around in a space the size of a closet, in an EVA suit. Oh, and with the drive running, taking a good-sized dose of neutron rads while doing it. I mean, someone might survive that, but—”

“I get it. If we shut the drive down, the bad guys catch up to us,” Thorn said, rubbing his eyes. “Don’t suppose this is a fix you could do before they get in range, huh?”

Mol just laughed.

“Why the hell isn’t there a backup?” Thorn asked. “There seems to be redundant systems for everything else aboard this thing. Why not that?”

“You would have to ask the manufacturer, who I assume was also the lowest bidder,” Mol said, then shrugged. “Besides, these things have a failure rate of . . . Trixie?”

“About one in one million, five hundred thousand, which is why it’s not considered a high-priority system for a redundant.”

“Because that would cost more money the ON doesn’t want to spend,” Mol said.

“Great,” Thorn snapped. “Lucky us, being that one-in-a-million-and-a-half case.”

Mol studied the tactical display for a moment, then looked at Thorn. “I am officially out of ideas, sir. How about you? Anything?”

Thorn knew what she was getting at. Since there seemed to be no technological way of fixing this, could he do it using magic.

He grimaced, then wiped it away with an effort. “I’ve been chewing on it. Worse comes to worst, I can probably take out one of those enemy ships, maybe two, but there’s no way I could possibly do all three before we get walloped by a KEW or missile or something. And even that assumes I don’t have to go brain-to-brain with some of the squiddies’ shaman while I’m at it.”

“So let’s call that our backup plan. How about just getting us the hell out of here?”

Thorn shook his head. He’d been thinking about that, too. No magical theory he was aware of allowed for a Starcaster to duplicate the effects of an Alcubierre drive.

Except for one—one that he, alone, seemed to be capable of. But he’d not just been ordered to not attempt to rewrite reality again, he’d promised Densmore he wouldn’t. There was no way to predict what effect trying it might have, especially since there was no artificial constraint on it this time. When he’d deflected the impactor from Code Gauntlet, he only changed the nature of Alcubierre drives inside the confines of the little bubble of reality generated by the drive itself. It had effectively kept his fiddling with reality limited to a temporary pocket universe. In retrospect, had he done that without that being true, he might have precipitated a universe-spanning catastrophe.

Which was a profoundly sobering thought, one that gave him a new and gut-wrenching insight into Densmore’s words.

. . . you’re the fusion reactor. All your safeties have failed except one. And that last one, the one keeping us all from disaster, isn’t under our control. We need the reactor to keep running so all we can do is desperately hope that that last safety doesn’t go and end us all.

He definitely got it, suddenly understanding how she felt. His ability to change reality effectively made Thorn the most potent weapon ever to exist. One so potent, in fact, that it could never be used, which meant he might as well not have the ability at all.

“From all this silence, I take it your answer to my question is no, huh?” Mol said.

“I’m thinking about it.”

Mol fixed on the flight management system, a finger tapping the fuel indicator. “Suggest you think harder and faster, sir. We’ve got about two hours left, and then it’s reckoning time.”

Thorn settled back in his acceleration couch. So fixing the drive was out of the question. Magic could help them, but probably not save them. A quick scan of surrounding space showed nothing of significance, mostly a whole bunch of black empty—

Wait.

“Mol, there’s one gas giant in this system, right?”

“Uh, yeah. Long way out. I thought about using it for some sort of gravitational slingshot, but there’s really nothing we can do that our friends behind us can’t just duplicate.”

“Sure. But that nav chart shows it’s got rings, right?”

“It does. Two sets of them, in fact, inclined at about forty-five degrees to one another. Which is pretty cool, actually.” She shook her head. “Anyway, yes, rings. Why? So what? What are you thinking, sir?”

“If I’m reading the nav right, we can get to those rings before we exhaust our fuel.”

Mol nodded. “We can, sure. But if you’re thinking we can hide among all those rocks—well, again, we can. But even if the air recycler is able to keep us breathing and the squids somehow don’t manage to find us, we’re eventually going to run out of food and water.” She shrugged. “It could buy us time, but time to do what?”

“Time, Mol, to call for help.”

* * *

It turned out that they were being jammed, because of course they were. It meant that they couldn’t communicate with the Hecate, the nearest possible help, by conventional means.

“And there’s no other Starcaster aboard her,” Thorn said, watching as the vast gas giant and its complex rings grew in the view ahead.

“So you can only talk, or whatever you call it, with other Starcasters?”

“That’s right. I can sense other minds, but so far, at least, if they’re not ’casters, I can’t communicate with them.”

“Oh. So this is really just a waste of time then.”

“Not necessarily. Just because I can’t contact the Hecate directly, doesn’t mean I can’t contact anyone.”

Mol glanced from the flight management system to the tactical display. “Well, sir, whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it soon. Those three Nyctus ships are still pretty determined to catch us—which means I’m going to have to do some fancy flying here. Better buckle in tight.”

“There a problem?”

“A problem?”

Thorn actually smiled. “Okay, another problem?”

“Well, in order to establish a stable orbit around that gas giant, I should flip and burn and decelerate us to about, oh, a third of our current velocity, give or take. But if I do that, those squids back there will be in missile range in about three minutes—and we’d be about thirty minutes away from the nearest edge of that bigger ring.”

“I’m sensing bad news coming.”

“You think?” Mol said, flashing a grin. “Anyway, instead of slowing us down with the drive, I’m going to take us right in to the planet, use the gas giant’s upper atmosphere to aerobrake us, then take us back out to the inner ring with just enough excess velocity to settle us into a stable orbit.”

“That sounds dangerous. Alarming, even.”

“Again, you think? It’s the sort of thing I might try in a simulator, just for kicks. But in real life—”

“There’s a high probability of failure, you know,” Trixie said.

“Thank you, dear. You’re really helping,” Mol replied, eyes lifted to the ceiling.

“Would you like to know how high?”

“I would not. How about you, sir?” Mol asked Thorn.

“Oh, hell no. Ignorance is bliss, right?”

While Mol went to work with Trixie on setting the right inputs on the flight management system, Thorn settled back and closed his eyes.

He would contact Kira.

He’d studiously avoided doing that while she was in training, notwithstanding his weird and disturbing dream about her. The temptation had definitely been there, but she was no doubt immersed deep in her upgrade training. He not only worried about interrupting her at an inopportune time, he didn’t want her to suspect he was somehow watching over her.

But facing imminent death at the hands, tentacles, whatever of the Nyctus seemed like a good reason to give her a call. He could alert her and then get her to transmit a message to the Hecate via a priority comm channel. It would take several hours for the Hecate to receive a message, and then she had to respond, but it was better than waiting the twelve hours remaining before Captain Tanner considered them overdue and came looking for them.

They just had to hope that hiding in the ring would buy them the time they needed.

Thorn thought about Kira, visualizing her face, and then seeing her sitting beside him in the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit, close enough to touch, easily close enough to talk to. It wasn’t hard to do—not only did Kira’s image come more easily to him than just about anyone else’s, she’d actually once sat in this cockpit with him and Mol.

Kira?

He waited.

Nothing.

Kira? You there?

Nothing but mental silence and the white-noise hum of his own background thoughts.

Kira, I need you. Please answer.

Nothing.

Kira, this is a genuine emergency. I need your help.

Silence.

Thorn opened his eyes, then waited for his vision to clear from the effects of a long-range contact. His confusion was evident, even to Mol. It couldn’t be that Kira was just refusing to answer; he’d still have a sense of her being present. Of course, she might have learned how to thoroughly shield herself, but it was unlikely she’d close him out of her psychic loop.

Unless the Nyctus could jam Joiners.

That was also unlikely, because his mind had, indeed, reached out, with nothing inhibiting it. If it was blocked, it was blocked at Kira’s—

—screamed, a shrill, piercing scream of pain and terror—

—end.

His gut twisted. Instinct alone told him something was wrong. Coupled with the vivid nature of her screams, her face, the pain—it was all too much to discount.

Right now, he needed to contact someone for help, and he could think of only one other person. Mol was still immersed in calculating trajectories and the like, so Thorn closed his eyes again.

Captain Densmore?

A flicker, a stirring in the distance, and then Densmore’s mind began to take shape, distant but powerful.

Stellers?

Yes, ma’am. We need your help.

He explained the situation to her. Even before he’d finished, she’d told him to wait out, then she’d gone to get a message to the Hecate. A few moments later, her thoughts reappeared in his.

Word’s on its way to the Hecate. We also have a patrol in the adjacent sector, led by the Draco. We’re alerting them too, though it’ll take them longer to get to you.

Much appreciated, ma’am.

Actually, the appreciative one here is me.

Sorry?

I know you could have used other means for the sake of security, to get out of your current jam, and you didn’t. That makes me feel a lot better about you roaming around out there.

Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate that.

There’s one other thing.

Ma’am?

I just want to reinforce something from your pre-op briefing. The Nyctus cannot capture you, take you alive. It could be disastrous if they do. Do you know what I’m saying here?

Thorn let himself just breathe for a moment. He absolutely knew what Densmore meant.

Stellers—?

I understand. That won’t happen.

Won’t be an issue anyway, though. Help is on the way. You just hang on.

That’s the plan, ma’am.

Thorn flicked his eyes open to find the gas giant a solid wall of pastel stripes and swirls blotting out half the star scape.

He glanced at Mol. “How long was I—?”

“About an hour. I figured I’d just let you be and hope you came to again with good news.”

“The Hecate’s on her way, with a patrol to back her up.”

Mol nodded. “So now we just have to survive this aerobraking, then insertion into the ring, then the next thing, then the next thing after that . . .”

Thorn offered her a smile. “That’s the plan.”

* * *

Thorn had been through atmospheric entry more than a few times. Rushing through a planet’s atmosphere fast enough to turn it to ionized gas didn’t terrify him, but it wasn’t something he’d want to do any more than he had to.

Or for longer than he had to, but that was what aerobraking was. Instead of a brief period of anxious incandescence, this just went on and on.

The Gyrfalcon shuddered as it passed through pockets of thicker atmospheric gas alternating with wispy patches. The variations kept the ship in a constant state of vibration. The view ahead was nothing but searing flame hot enough to make a Scorch proud. Thorn just hung on, waiting for it to end and for space to go back to being space again, quiet and empty and not on fire.

“Trixie,” Mol said, raising her voice over the rumble of abused atmosphere thundering past, “status!”

“Very, very hot.”

Mol rolled her eyes. “Can you be more specific?”

“Everything’s currently green, as you can see on your panel.”

“Sure, but you’re the one who can see trouble starting.”

“Nothing to report. Hull temperature is near design limit. And if I may editorialize, duh, but all other systems are optimal.”

“Okay,” Mol said. “We’re coming out of aerobraking in one minute. Once we do, we’ll be able to see what our friends out there are up to.”

The envelope of ionized gas enclosing the Gyrfalcon blinded them, both physically and electronically. Thorn was tempted to cast out a mental ping and see if he could fix the squids’ locations, but he decided to save his magical resources until they were truly needed.

“Ten seconds,” Mol said.

Thorn braced himself. Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if they came out of this and found the Nyctus somehow right on top of them?

The drive lit, shoving the Gyrfalcon back into a higher orbit. The bass rumble faded and the fierce glow around them dissipated.

“Not on fire is good,” Thorn said.

“Damned right, handsome,” Trixie agreed.

Mol and Thorn both watched the tactical display intently as it came out of standby mode and began to fill with data again. Had this been worth it, a good idea, or had it just let the Nyctus catch up?

“There,” Mol said. “The Nyctus ships are in a much higher orbit, way ahead of us.” She patted the bulkhead beside her. “We’re meant for atmo, they’re not. Even burning hard to decelerate, they just couldn’t slow down as fast as we did.”

“So that’s it? We’ve lost them?” Thorn asked, hopeful.

Mol shook her head. “They did just what I’d do. Instead of slowing down, they accelerated, staying in the fastest orbit they could. They’ll lap the planet in about four hours and be right back on top of us.”

“And well within weapons range, I might add,” Trixie put in.

“So we’ve got that much time. Hopefully we can gain a bit more time hiding inside that ring, but I doubt it’ll take them long to find us. What's the best possible arrival of the Hecate?”

“A few hours,” Thorn replied.

“Is a few more or less than four?”

“No idea, sorry.”

A speckled band of flickering lights was now centered in the view. It was the inner of the planet’s two rings, their destination.

“Okay, well, we’re gonna have some time to kill,” Mol said, adjusting their course slightly. “You ever play Sex or Death?”

Thorn blinked. “Have I—wait, what?”

Mol grinned. “Card game. Guys on the Apollo picked it up somewhere.”

“Oh, in that case, no,” Thorn replied, grinning back at her. “At least, not by choice.”

Mol gave a sage nod and pulled a deck of cards out of a crash-suit pocket. “Well, sir, you’re gonna learn.”

* * *

Pathetic creatures, aren’t you? Your first and only instinct is to run, and then hide, and then only after perpetrating an act of terrorism.

Thorn cut off the Nyctus shaman with a thought, hardening his mental will to iron. Just as Mol had predicted, the squid ships had lapped the planet, rising over its bulk almost exactly four hours after vanishing behind it. And, sure enough, they’d slowed and fallen into a lower orbit, one that would take them well within weapons range of the Gyrfalcon.

Thorn glanced at the nearby rocks, dark and jagged and rimed with ice that fitfully reflected both the light of the distant sun, as well as the paler light of the gas giant’s dayside. Mol’s flying had been truly superb; she’d matched the velocity and trajectory of the debris so closely that it only took a gentle puff of thrusters to bring them to a relative halt. Trixie had then rigged them for silent running, powering down everything she could.

And they waited, and played Sex or Death—which, despite its lurid name, was a surprisingly sophisticated game.

Still no sign of the Hecate, though.

“That squid still trying to rant at you?” Mol asked.

“Sure is. He knows I’m somewhere in here, but so far I’ve managed to keep him from actually getting a fix on me.”

“Small mercies,” Mol replied, staring at the tactical display. “So far, seems the squids haven’t managed to—”

“Something is happening off our port bow, high,” Trixie said.

“Can you, uh, be more specific, Trix?” Mol started, but stopped and cursed before Trixie could answer. “I see it. That rock”—she pointed at the display—“is moving.”

Thorn looked at tactical, then outside in the indicated direction. Sure enough, a chunk of rock about a third the size of the Gyrfalcon had started tumbling directly toward them.

“Shit, the squids know where we are,” he snapped, extending his awareness beyond the fighter’s hull until it touched the rock. He felt the familiar tingle of magic, with that peculiar Nyctus edge to it. With great care, Thorn drew his awareness to a point, and then let the point extend, naturally, stretching across the darkness like a tide made of raw mental will.

A shoving contest, Thorn realized, and another rock had started moving, accelerating toward them.

This wasn’t going to work. Thorn changed magical tactics and reoriented the force he was applying to push the rock aside rather than stopping it. It deflected enough that it would miss the Gyrfalcon, but he didn’t have time to be satisfied. He had to immediately turn his attention to the second rock.

And then a third. A fourth, then a fifth.

He fought the urge to curse in frustration. Volume could kill them just as easily as a single impact, because each rock required effort—bleeding him dry of magical will. He’d only sensed one shaman, but there must be more of them aboard the Nyctus ships.

Then the stones began to come alive in waves.

Thorn was targeting multiple rocks at once, pushing, pulling, and using the stony missiles against each other as they hit together hard enough to shatter. It was a tide of rocks, not a stream, and in moments, their scans were filled with tiny ghostly outlines, each coming toward their ship at blazing speeds.

“Uh, sir, hate to pile on bad news, but the squids have lit us up with targeting scanners,” Mol said. “And they’re firing actual missiles.”

Thorn’s head began to pound. “Mol, get us out of here. I can’t do—” He stopped and began to rapidly shift his attention from one rock to another, sending both on different but converging trajectories. They crashed together less than fifty meters away from the fighter, showering them with fragments that rattled against the hull.

“I can’t dilute my power any further,” Thorn growled. “Too many targets.”

“Understood. Trixie, bring everything back online,” Mol said, her fingers tapping at the flight management system as systems came back to life. “Where are we going, sir?”

“Anywhere. Doesn’t—” Thorn groaned as he deflected an especially big rock; it cast a deep shadow over them as it sailed past less than ten meters away.

“—matter!”

Mol said nothing, but lit the drive and accelerated the Gyrfalcon back into open space.

Where the Nyctus were waiting for them.

12

The Gyrfalcon powered out of the gas-giant’s ring, accelerating hard away from the Nyctus ships. It wasn’t going to be enough. The same clever maneuvers that had let them take up residence in the ring had left them with far less velocity than the Nyctus ships and the missiles now racing after them.

“How the hell did they find us?” Mol snapped, switching the Gyrfalcon’s single point defense system, a rapid-fire cannon, to active mode and powering up the reactive armor.

“Something new,” Thorn replied, giving himself a respite as they left the rocks behind. He had no doubt he’d be doing more frantic ’casting in just a few minutes and needed to catch his mental breath. “Just like we’re learning, so are they. Shoulda seen this coming. There was no way they were going to let us fight back and win without trying something else.”

“We’ve been wrong about the squids a lot, lately,” Mol said.

“Doing our best, Mol,” Thorn said, trying to keep any bitterness out of his voice—not because he was angry at Mol herself, but she was right. Every time he’d thought they had the Nyctus figured out, they came up with something new and unexpected. They adapted quickly, which meant they had to build that fact into their future assessments of them. In other words, they kept underestimating the enigmatic aliens, which was something they had to stop.

If the Nyctus could change, so could Thorn.

He turned. “Mol, let’s stop running away.”

“And, instead—” She glanced at him. “Fight?”

“Yeah.”

“Gonna be kind of one-sided.”

“If this is going to happen anyway, then I’d rather doing it facing the squids, not giving them a shot at our exhaust. We fight.”

Mol glanced at him again, then grinned, tapped the flight controls, and spun the Gyrfalcon around. A deep thrum buzzed through her structural bones as the drive lit, slowing her down and reversing her course.

“We’ll get one pass, I figure, if we can dodge those missiles,” Mol said, tightening her harness. “I’m pretty sure our rail gun will take out one of the squid ships for sure. The other two are up to you.” She inhaled sharply, triple tapping a screen. “If we can dodge those missiles, and that’s one hell of an if.”

Thorn glanced at the tracks of the onrushing missiles and concluded they would be meeting the Gyrfalcon sooner than later.

“Stop accelerating for a minute or so, Mol,” he said. “Keep us on this side of the ring.”

Mol shrugged, punched a control, and killed the drive. “I’ll bite. Over to you, sir.”

Thorn went still as a grave, his eyes closed as a cloud of gathering magic began to grow around him. Even Mol could feel it; a sensation like someone waving at her periphery, coupled with soft sounds and a presence.

The presence of magic, not science, although maybe the two were on in the same at that point, there in the humming cabin. Mol watched, fascinated by the contact of nothing and everything flickering around Thorn, and then his fingers began to move, like he was touching something distant and unseen. Onscreen, Mol called up true color and saw something flash in the distance; a light not quite like the dawn, but warm, then cooling to a deep, radiant blue. The light broke apart as Thorn lifted his hands like a director of some delicate process, which he was—

-- And a cloud of debris suddenly spalled away from the ring, rising into the path of the missiles.

Thorn felt the sudden surge of resistance, as the Nyctus shamans tried to block his mastery of the whirling debris, their power homing in on his like a beacon.

“Let them come,” he muttered, and Mol sat up, alarmed as his eyes became even more animated under closed lids.

The debris split into groups, some fast, some slowed by the Nyctus shamans, their uneven power at war across a front some ten klicks across. There were many rocks, and Thorn’s magic was something new for them—a power that spanned schools, or houses, or whatever the Nytus called their sorcery.

All that mattered was Thorn—muscles straining, breath coming shorter gasps- was winning. His tank was going dry but with a force of will wholly new to the Nyctus, he peeled their influence away in layers, stripping their minds away to reveal weaknesses that left them ripe for invasion.

The rocks flew on, and Thorn split his spell, reaching to the mind of a shaman, where he wrested control of her eyes, her pulse, her concentration. She faltered, and Thorn’s rocks accelerated, leaping into the path of the enemy missiles in a blur.

Seconds later, the missiles began to scatter, uncertain, their seekers suddenly confronted by a multitude of targets. In an instant, explosions rippled through the debris as warheads detonated, their concussive effects sending shards of debris in an arc that made chaos from the orderly flight.

Only two of the Nyctus projectiles managed to slip through. As they rushed toward the Gyrfalcon, the point-defense cannon opened up, spitting out a stream of slugs that shredded one, then the other. Their remnants pattered against the hull, a hard rain that had no effect.

Thorn let the Earther effect dissipate and slumped back into his seat, gasping. Whatever he had left, he had to save for the final act.

Mol lit the drive again, and the ship streaked through the cloud of debris, and then through the debris cloud, pulling hard at the stick to dodge the remaining rocks, their shapes glinting with malevolent shadows as they slid past, forgotten. When they emerged from the other side, the Nyctus ships were square in the middle of the view.

Just where they were needed. If you were cheering for the Nyctus.

“Hey, Trixie?” Mol said. “Do whatever you have to to keep us together for as long as you can. And it’s been nice working with you.” She glanced at Thorn. “You too, sir.”

He returned a tired smile. “So the AI gets higher billing than I do, huh?”

“Well, sir, all due respect, Trixie’s crew. You’re just a passenger.”

“I’m hurt.”

Mol’s grin faded. “Not for long, you won’t be. Got a firing solution for the rail gun and missiles. And... .go.”

Panels opened on the Gyrfalcon’s flanks, exposing missiles that leapt off their rails and streaked away. At the same time, Mol tapped at the controls, opening up with the rail gun. Thorn saw one projectile slam into a corvette, blowing off chunks of debris. A second later, the Gyrfalcon’s reactive armor erupted, blasting an incoming shot hard enough that it struck only a glancing blow. The impact still slewed the fighter hard to one side, throwing them both against their harnesses.

More missiles came powering in. The Gyrfalcon vibrated as the point-defense cannon opened up, glittering streams of tracers arcing across the star field.

Thorn decided to ignore the missiles and concentrate on the enemy ships. The damaged corvette was his target, its crew distracted by the hit and now immersed in damage control. It gave him a brief window that the shaman would otherwise have blocked; he used it to insinuate himself into the mind of the squid at the helm. A male, of middling experience but high confidence, he was just the kind of mind that Thorn needed. Slipping into the Nyctus awareness as an uninvited guest, Thorn left him a gift.

The alien suddenly saw a barrage of missiles racing in from a flank. On instinct, the creature applied a hard lateral thrust, which shoved the ship directly into the path of its fellow corvette. A few seconds later, they collided, the impact sending the already damaged ship out of control and knocking the other one out of the fight—for the moment, anyway. The ghost missiles—a construct of Thorn’s Joining, faded away, their job complete.

“Yes, well done, sir!” Mol shouted, jinking hard. “Don’t suppose you can take care of the big one, huh? That frigate?”

Thorn took a deep breath, drew his awareness to the frigate—and crashed headlong into a magical barrier of rare depth and power

“Multiples,” Thorn said, grunting with effort.

“Sir?” Mol asked.

“More than one. They’ve got a wall. Walls, maybe. Can’t get through.” Thorn began discarding plans as fast as they formed. His tank was low, his teeth ached, and the shamans weren’t second-rate crew. They were skilled, rested, and angry.

If he hadn’t exerted himself so much as they sought to escape, he might have been able to bludgeon his way through with brute force, but—

He couldn’t do that either.

He slumped a bit, then gave Mol a rueful smile. “I’m about out of juice. And ideas.”

Mol nodded and turned back to her controls, then glanced back at him. Thorn saw she was about to say something, but then seemed to think the better of it, her mouth closing with an audible click.

“I know,” he said.

She cut her eyes at him, brows lifted. “Reading my mind?”

“Don’t need to. Not sure I can, um, change the rules of the universe again, but the thought did cross my mind. It’s us or the fleet, maybe.” He shrugged in resignation, then reached out and patted the console. “Trixie, it’s been a pleasure.”

“Same to you, handsome. I’ve got some rounds in the chamber, for what it’s worth,” Trixie said.

“I defer to the captain. I’m just a magician along for the ride.”

Mol smiled as she wrenched the stick hard, the distant frigate coming closer. “Been good working with you.”

Thorn nodded. “Same, Mol.” He looked at the frigate. “Okay, blaze of glory and all that, if we’ve still got some pop left?

Mol nodded. “Trixie, if I lose control, stay on collision course with that frigate as long as you can.”

“Understood,” was all the AI said.

Thorn settled back, bracing himself as they raced toward the frigate. Mol’s amazing flying kept them clear of fire from the Nyctus ship; no matter how fast they tracked the Gyrfalcon, Mol was a little faster; a wizard in her own right.

Thorn touched his temple. “Trying to break through. I can feel their fear. They think they’re going to win, but they still fear us. Or the mass of the ship, anyway.” The shamans hammered at Thorn in a straightforward attack, free of subtlety or guile. They fought, but he was—resigned. Settled.

Peaceful, if not a little pissed.

In the last seconds, Thorn thought of Kira. He’d never managed to speak to her, even to say goodbye. On impulse, he reached out.

Kira?

—and sat up, gasping, as he heard that scream again.

“Kira!”

Mol shot him a glance, which caused her to miss a move. The Gyrfalcon shuddered and slewed hard to one side as a Nyctus railgun shot smashed into the little ship, shredding a lower panel that began streaming gases behind them, the purple flakes visible in their rear cams.

Thorn gathered himself, and Kira screamed again. He bucked against the harness, each strap cutting into his muscles, their touch hot on his skin. She was out there. And the Gyrfalcon was coming apart. The frigate adjusted course, aiming with practiced ease.

A missile, silent and silver, slammed into the frigate, cracking the ship open in a catastrophic outgassing of light and debris. Before Mol could react, a second missile hammered home, shattering the forward half of the frigate in a blinding radiance.

Mol cursed and jammed the starboard thrusters to full power. The Gyrfalcon began to tumble, the starscape spinning wildly. The unbalanced accelerations flung Thorn from side-to-side, alternately hurling him against his seat or harness in a violence that made his teeth crack together like a railer shot. The shattered wreckage of the frigate swept past, seemingly close enough to touch.

“Gyrfalcon, this is Hecate. Can you regain control, or do you need some help?”

It was Captain Tanner, his voice its usual smooth, calm baritone. He could have been asking if they’d like a cup of coffee.

Mol tapped at the thrusters, deftly bringing the Gyrfalcon back under control, despite her damage. “We got this, Hecate, thanks. Permission to come aboard, then get the hell out of here?”

“Concur, and the sooner the better, if you please. We’ve got a half-dozen more squid ships inbound, including a battlecruiser. Rather not be here when they show up.”

While Mol reoriented the fighter onto a closing trajectory with the Hecate, Tanner engaged the damaged corvettes, finishing both off with missile and rail gun fire. The Draco and her patrol arrived shortly after, her Captain bitching that they’d missed the fun.

Thorn smiled, but it was a distant thing. While Mol brought them back aboard the Hecate, he could only think of Kira’s desolate scream.

This time, it hadn’t been a dream.

13

Thorn sat in the Hecate’s witchport and watched the repeater showing the tactical display. The ship glided past a screen of scanner buoys and picket ships now standing well off from Code Gauntlet, forming an essentially impenetrable early warning network. There’d been no indication that the Nyctus would try to fling another enormous impactor at the FOB, or that they even could do it a second time, but the Commander and his senior staff were taking no chances. If the squids did try it again, they’d find the FOB’s QRF—quick reaction force—in their faces almost immediately.

And with them would be the ’casters, their magical reserves full.

After a few traffic control delays, the Hecate finally slid into her assigned berth in the orbital docking platform locked in geosynchronous orbit high above the ground-based FOB. She was capable of entering atmo, and there were facilities planet-side to handle a ship of her class, but the FOB Commander had decided to keep anything bigger than a corvette either docked at the orbital platform, or in a parking orbit. The skies above Code Gauntlet were crowded, with ships and traffic control engaged in a complex dance that never ended.

But Thorn saw the wisdom in it; ships could get underway far more readily if they were already in space and didn’t have to claw their way out of a gravity well. In terms of reaction time, the rewards far outweighed any risks.

As soon as he could depart the Hecate, Thorn headed for a common comm terminal, one not restricted to classified, military traffic. There was a bank of them in the main concourse of the orbital dockyard—and all of them were out of service. Thorn cursed. Possibly shitty maintenance but more likely there was an upcoming op and all non-essential comms had been shut down to prevent leaks, inadvertent or deliberate. There’d been much discussion about the latter; it seemed inconceivable that any human could ever help the squids, but who knew? Soldiers were people, and people were more than capable of doing stupid things, for even stupider reasons.

Thorn activated his personal comm. “Captain Tanner, Lieutenant Stellers here.”

“Go ahead, Stellers.”

“Permission to go planetside, sir? I have to send an urgent personal message, and all the comms up here are shut down. I should be able to go to the comm center in the FOB and at least get something into the queue for transmission.”

“Sorry, Stellers. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d say yes, you’ve certainly earned that kind of latitude. But I was just going to recall you to the Hecate. Captain Densmore is here, and she wants to meet with us—and last time I checked, us would include you.”

Thorn deflated, angered by the dead comms before him. “Aye, sir. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Make it quick, Lieutenant. Densmore seems to have something urgent to discuss.”

“Aye, sir.”

Kira, I’m still listening.

* * *

Thorn settled into the crash couch at the Hecate’s helm. He had only the vaguest idea of how to pilot the destroyer, and absolutely no experience doing so, aside from a single, half-hour simulator run Tanner required of all of his officers. It was the most emergency of emergency training; if Thorn had to fly the Hecate, then things had already gone terribly wrong.

Today, though, he just wanted a comfortable seat. Tanner had dismissed everyone from the bridge except for himself, Thorn, and Mol. Densmore stood at the main tactical viewer, which depicted a star chart encompassing the FOB on its far right edge, Nyctus space off to the left, and the Zone sprawled between.

Without preamble, Densmore spoke. “We’ve lucked into what can only be described as a fantastic opportunity.” She tapped an icon about halfway into the Zone, and the view zoomed in to a single star, surrounded by five planets—a massive gas-giant, two smaller ice giants, and two rocky planets, one of which orbited in the star’s habitable zone.

She pointed at the last. “We’ve learned that a Nyctus ship has crashed on this planet. It apparently had enough control on the way through atmo, though, to come down more or less intact.”

“And how do we know that?” Tanner asked.

Densmore zoomed in again, this time on the planet. The northern hemisphere was mostly water, with a few sprawling archipelagoes. The southern hemisphere was an entirely different setting, covered by an enormous continent that was bisected by a massive mountain range. The rugged peaks soared to dizzying heights, and several mountains were volcanically active. The continental interior stretched away, brown and parched, hidden from the rain shadow of the mountains, while the coastal regions were lush with belts of verdant forests. Here and there, a fan of delta announced the end of a wide, lazy river, and in one circular bay, a soaring volcano huddled, quiescent and slowly being eroded by the ocean currents.

She pointed at another icon that had appeared near the landward edge of one of the rainforests—a green one, meaning something neutral. “There’s a commercial mining facility here. Evacuated not long after the war began, but the miners left the scanners and other automated systems running. Now, this isn’t military grade hardware by any means, but remote telemetry shows that it still detected the Nyctus ship as it came down.”

She popped open a window, split between a blurred and grainy image of a delta-shaped ship framed between two mountain peaks; it trailed smoke and a few specks of debris. Beside it was the scanner track of the ship, from the moment it entered the mining facility’s view, to its disappearance in surface-clutter about thirty klicks to the north and west.

“It seems to have crashed in this area, here,” Densmore said, gesturing to a circular area about two klicks across at the end of the track. “Now, the miners might not have had the greatest airspace scanners, but when it comes to ground sensors, seismic systems, that sort of thing, well, we’ve got nothing like it. They recorded very little energy from the touchdown—almost none at all, in fact. That suggests more of a controlled crash landing than an actual impact.”

Tanner rested his elbows on the arms of his command seat and steepled his fingers. “Okay, so a more or less intact squid ship on the ground. Where did it come from? Do we know?”

“There was a clash between a patrol led by the Fornax and a group of squid ships in that system a few weeks back. For once, we had the enemy entirely outgunned and a ’caster onboard to stop any psychic warfare. The Fornax reported that they managed to destroy all of the Nyctus vessels. It looks like one survived damaged, though, and managed to set down on this planet—which, incidentally, is called Ballard’s World, apparently after the prospector who first discovered the ore deposits there.”

“Ted Rand took over the Fornax a few months ago, as Captain. Bastard keeps kicking my ass at racquetball. Looks like I can remind him—in a professional manner, of course, during a critical game point—that he let a squid ship get away,” Tanner said, smiling broadly.

“By all means, Garret, taunt away. In the meantime, we seem to have a situation where the squids have lost track of one of their own ships. A golden opportunity, maybe,” Densmore said.

Mol shrugged. “Damaged, comms out, drive out, the ships with it all destroyed, it makes sense they lost it. Probably assume it was destroyed, too.”

“Which, as I said, gives us an opportunity. If we can seize that ship, we could get a treasure trove of intel—squid tech, propulsion, power, weapons—hell, maybe even some insight into their magic.”

Thorn, who’d been simply listening with interest, spoke up. “Why do I sense there’s a but hanging on the end of all this, ma’am?”

Densmore smiled, but it was entirely humorless. “Because there is. The original plan was to send a small recon team to check it out and report back as to whether there was anything worth recovering. For reasons even I don’t understand, that mission was scrubbed and the whole op fell off the must-do list and onto the should-do-if-we-can list. But then this happened.”

She touched the screen, and another window opened. This one was a video feed from what seemed to be a security camera. It showed a compound of rough, industrial-looking buildings, with a high wall around it that was topped with wicked-looking razor wire.

“That looks awfully secure for a mining setup,” Tanner said. “Something you’re not telling us here, Alys? Like, this wasn’t just a mining op? There might have been some of your spooky stuff going on there?”

“Even if there was, Garret, do you really think I’d say?”

“Need to know,” Mol muttered, and Densmore nodded.

“Damned right. But, to be honest, no—it really is just a mining op. The wall is up because there are apparently things living in the surrounding forest that would happily chow down on miners.”

“Or recon teams,” Thorn said.

Densmore nodded again. “Anyway, just watch.”

She advanced the footage. For a moment, there was nothing, and then movement. A figure appeared on the right side of the screen and moved slowly left. The strange, humped shape and sinuous, jerky movement made it immediately clear that it wasn’t human.

Thorn sat forward, his gaze fixed on the image. “That’s a squid.”

“Indeed it is, Lieutenant Stellers. There was apparently at least one survivor of the crash. But that’s not all.”

Even as she said it, the Nyctus reached the wall surrounding the compound. It paused at the bottom for a moment, then lifted into the air, drifted over the razor wire, and vanished from sight.

Thorn stood up.

“It’s a shaman.”

* * *

Densmore cleared the various windows on the tactical viewer and turned back to Thorn and the others. “Now you see why this matter has moved back from the should-do pile to the must-do. That security imagery is from only three days ago—which means that there’s a squid shaman trapped, possibly alone, on a planet with no way to get off and without the rest of the Nyctus even knowing about it.”

“All due respect, ma’am,” Thorn said, “but how do we know the Nyctus can’t use long-distance telepathic contact the way we can?”

“We don’t. But if they do, either this shaman can’t do it, or something else is going on. Regardless, the Nyctus obviously haven’t come to the rescue of this poor bastard, at least not yet.”

“So this squid shaman traveled at least thirty klicks through hostile terrain—where scary carnivorous things are apparently lurking—to come to this mining facility,” Mol said. “Why?”

“To try to use the mining station’s comms,” Thorn said. “To make a call for help the old-fashioned way, with tech.”

Tanner lifted an eyebrow. “Tech is the old-fashioned way?”

Thorn shrugged. “Sorry, sir. For a ’caster—and possibly a shaman—it kind of is the old-fashioned way. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

“Glad that anything labeled with the entirely not-specific term tech has your seal of approval, Stellers,” Tanner said, but with glint in his eye that hinted at him doing a bit of chain-yanking right now.

“Anyway,” Densmore cut in, “the answer to that is, yes, Stellers is right. The squid broke into the comm-station and apparently tried to access the system to send out what we presume would be a distress message. It couldn’t bypass the security features, though—at least, so far. The mining station is also on the shore of a sizable lake; there were a hundred and twenty-five people living there, and that was their source of fresh water. And since the Nyctus are naturally aquatic—”

“He’s moved right into the neighborhood,” Mol said.

“Which means he’s going to keep trying to bust in the comm system,” Tanner added.

Densmore nodded. “And we have to assume it will eventually succeed, which means we have a window of opportunity here, one that’s potentially pretty limited.”

“I assume, ma’am, that this isn’t just a courtesy briefing you’re giving us here,” Thorn said.

“You figured that out all on your own, Stellers?” She smiled again, with a little actual humor this time. “Formal orders will be delivered to Captain Tanner shortly. In summary, though, the Hecate is going to travel to Ballard’s World and deliver you to the surface. Your primary mission will be taking this shaman alive. The secondary mission is recovering as much intel as possible from the crashed Nyctus ship.”

Thorn let his eyes close, briefly, as he processed the mission. “I appreciate how much faith you have in me, ma’am. I’m unsure about it doing this alone. Even one on one, a shaman might clip me if we’re fighting in a hostile landscape.”

“Oh, I’m aware of that. That’s why you’ll be accompanied by a spec ops team. They’ll be arriving here at Code Gauntlet tomorrow.” Densmore turned to Tanner. “As soon as they’re aboard, you’re to launch. The details of the op are otherwise up to you. I assume you’ll probably want Wyant here to take Stellers and the spec ops team down the surface.” She turned to Mol. “Your Gyrfalcon can carry extra passengers if it has to, right?”

“Yes, ma’am, up to eight, for short periods of time, and as long as everyone doesn’t mind getting really friendly.”

“The spec ops team is six, and you’d only be carrying them down from orbit, so that works out perfectly.”

“Uh, just one point,” Mol said. “The Gyrfalcon’s Alcubierre drive is still offline. We need to replace the power manifold, which we can’t properly do without a full workshop and probably two days of work. I haven’t even tried to book her into the FOB’s maintenance roster yet, since we just got here.”

“Will she fly?”

Mol nodded. “Well sure. She just can’t warp.”

“Good enough,” Densmore said. “Like I said, formal orders will be transmitted shortly. So, if there aren’t any other immediate questions, I’ll let you all get to it.”

She started to walk off the bridge, but on impulse, Thorn followed her. “Ma’am? A moment?”

Densmore stopped, slowed, and waved him forward. “Walk and talk, Stellers. There’s somewhere I have to be.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” He fell in beside Densmore as she made her way off the ship. “I’m hoping you can do me a favor.”

She lifted an eyebrow at Thorn. “Favors imply a quid pro quo. Are you really sure you want to owe me something, Stellers?”

Thorn surprised himself with an actual laugh. “Coming from anyone else, ma’am, that would sound strange. Coming from you, it’s a perfectly sensible question.”

Densmore snorted, and it made her younger—for an instant. “I suspect there’s an insult buried in there somewhere, Stellers.” She ducked aside as a Rating struggled past, loaded with a stack of boxes. The Hecate would normally have taken at least two or three days to rearm, refuel, and resupply, but now they had less than a day, and Tanner seemed to already be getting his crew on top of the compressed timeline.

Densmore moved back into place beside Thorn. “What would you like me to do, Specialist?”

“Honestly, it’s a personal matter, ma’am. I’ve been trying to contact Kira, Lieutenant Wixcombe, at Code Nebula. She’s there—”

“On upgrade training, I know. Doing pretty well from what I understand, too. Made leader of her squad.”

“Oh.” Thorn, hesitated, digesting that. In a few words, he’d learned more about Kira than any inquiries of his own could ever manage. “Good. I—just, good. To my point, though, been trying to contact her, with no success. Regular comms are on lockdown.”

“Security protocols are getting pretty tight, yes,” she said. “There are reasons for that”—she glanced at Thorn, a sly grin on her face—“that you don’t need to know.”

Thorn bit back a curse of raw frustration. “Don’t you ever get tired of that, ma’am?”

“Absolutely not. If I don’t need to know something, then I don’t want to know it. That way, if there’s a leak or something gets compromised, it ain’t going to be me in the hotseat.”

“Fair point,” Thorn replied. “Alright, I’ll get to it then. She’s not answering a telepathic contact. From me. There are two massive issues here, one being that Kira’s never frozen me out, and the second being that it isn’t just a lack of an answer. It’s dead air. Silence. As in, a black hole where her mental presence would be.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you. Understand you and she didn’t part on the happiest of terms when she left here.”

They reached the airlock and stepped off the Hecate, into the FOB’s orbital station. The scenery changed, but the sense of bustle around them did not. Thorn stayed with Densmore as she walked along the main concourse. “Aside from the things you explicitly don’t need to know, ma’am, is there anything you don’t?”

“As far as you’re concerned, Stellers, no, there isn’t.” But Densmore shrugged as she went on. “What’s the real issue here, Specialist? You and your friend were split up, and now she’s gone quiet, and, I might add, in the middle of intense training—"

“It’s not just that, ma’am,” Thorn cut in, stopping mid-step. Densmore did the same, turning to face him, her face peering up with a febrile intensity that would make most people look away.

Thorn did not.

He lifted a hand and began making points, marking them on his fingers. “You might not place any value in dreams—hell, I’m not sure I do, or did, but I’m seeing Kira.”

“Seeing?”

“Yes. Vividly. In color. She’s screaming, and she’s in pain. Her voice echoes through my bones and it’s not because of some—look, I know I’m a ‘caster but I’m grounded in facts. I don’t think this is my psyche expressing some bullshit schoolboy crush because we were separated. It’s something else,” Thorn said.

Densmore remained absolutely still, listening. “Okay, that is unusual. And I have to admit, a little disturbing.” They’d reached another airlock, one opening into the shuttle about to depart for the FOB’s surface facility. “I’ll do some digging and see what I can find out. Oh, and forget about owing me anything for this. Hell, you could have probably saved your ass and Wyant’s by fiddling with reality again, but you didn’t, and were ready to die for it. I think that should be worth something.”

“I really appreciate that, ma’am.”

She stepped into the airlock. “Tell me if you hear her again. No hesitation—report immediately.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

She stepped into the shuttle, which had apparently been holding for her. A few seconds later, the two sets of airlock doors slid closed, as did the shuttle’s hatch, then it separated with a puff of frozen water vapor and began to thrust away, starting its long fall to the surface.

Thorn watched it for a moment, then turned back for the Hecate. Just like the ship itself, he had a lot to do, and not much time to do it.

14

The original plan had been for Thorn to Shade the Hecate, protecting her from detection, as she cruised into the star system hosting Ballard’s World. When the Alcubierre drive cut out and the ship returned to normal, flat space, he saw no sign of any other traffic. The only power emanations detectable were whatever radiated from the mining facility on the planet’s surface—which wasn’t surprising, given that it was never meant to be a stealthy operation. The Hecate’s tactical computer filtered out every other emission and radiation source as something natural.

“Sir,” Thorn said into the intercom. “Not really sure we need to Shade the ship. I’d recommend not, so I can keep myself relatively fresh for whatever’s coming up.”

“Do it anyway, Stellers,” Tanner replied. “Just in case this is all some elaborate squid trap, I’d rather find that out before they see us coming.”

“Aye, sir.” Closing his eyes, he touched the talisman, he let his awareness radiate away from, passing through the ship, her hull, and into the vacuum beyond. When he was ‘casting Thorn did the opposite of everything he’d known as a child. Instead of being small, he became big, reaching across the black with tendrils of will that carried him on winds made of his own ability.

Gathering power from the well within himself, he began to weave. A simple act, it was a simple result- a net, made of magical will, opaque and tough, and keeping the Hecate in shadows, never directly in the enemy view.

To an external observer more than a few hundred meters away, the ship simply no longer existed. It reflected no light, emitted no heat or radiation. Ordinarily, this would create a crucial, and catastrophic problem; while warships like the Hecate were designed to minimize their emissions, their life support and other systems were intended to radiate away a certain amount of heat. Prevent that heat from escaping, though, and the ship’s heat sinks would eventually be saturated, and the crew would quickly be broiled alive.

But magic, in its enigmatic and paradoxical way, did an end-run around normal physics here, too. Thorn was able to simultaneously block the Hecate’s emissions, while not actually interfering with them at all. It was just another thing Starcasters knew how to do, without knowing why it worked.

Time passed. Thorn maintained the Shade as the Hecate fell sunward, her trajectory aligned to drop her into orbit around Ballard’s World. He kept part of his awareness on the intercom chatter between the Helm, Tactical and Engineering stations, and the occasional interjection by Tanner. Even distracted by the need to concentrate and maintain the Shade, he could hear the tension putting sharp points and angles on their words, and understandably so; the Hecate was deep in the Zone, alone and unsupported, and far from help. This had been part of the plan; the brass running the op had decided that its best protection was keeping as low-key and stealthy a footprint as possible. Even keeping a squadron on-hand to come and bail the Hecate out of trouble risked attracting the attention. Attention was bad. Stealth was good.

Not that they could even call for help easily, being well beyond the twenty-five light year range of real-time comms. Only Thorn could reach back across the gulf of space and converse with anyone. But not only would that cost more of his strength, it also assumed he was conscious—or alive.

* * *

The Hecate had slid neatly and quietly into her orbit, a low one to maximize the concealing effect of the various background emissions of Ballard’s World. She was rigged for silent running, taking everything off-line that wasn’t absolutely essential: life support, maneuvering thrusters, and passive sensors. Tanner even had her fusion plant shut down, preferring to risk having to take the fifteen minutes or so it took to fire it back up rather than let it keep spitting heat and radiation into space. It left the Hecate running on her power cells, supplemented by emergency solar power arrays she extended from her hull.

“Alright, Stellers,” Tanner said over the intercom. “We’ve done our part and settled into waiting-and-bored mode. Over to you and your team.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn turned and looked at the others jammed into the Hecate’s tiny hangar. He’d thought it was crowded in here with just him and Mol trying to work their way around the Gyrfalcon, but adding six more people, all heavily armed and armored, made it truly claustrophobic.

He took a moment to look over the spec ops team, codenamed Tiger Team Three—four men and two women, all with the alert demeanor of predators on the hunt. A cloud of competence surrounded them, and on the rare occasions they spoke at all, it was in an easy tone that was completely at odds with their appearance. Simply stated, they looked dangerous, and Thorn found himself thankful they were on his side.

The leader of Tiger Team Three, a short, dusky woman with brush-cut dark hair, turned from her squad and faced Thorn. “You care to inspect the squad, sir, before we mount up?”

Thorn shook his head. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Master Petty Officer Brand. You know your trade, I know mine. We’re about to see how much they cross over.”

Brand gave a professional smile. “Understood, sir. We always offer the courtesy.”

“And I appreciate it, Master Petty—”

“’scuse me, sir, but we don’t use ranks when we address one another. You can call me Alix.”

Thorn blinked. “First name? Isn’t that a little informal for the ON?”

“Maybe for the line, sir, but we’re spec ops. Security is what we do. Enemy hears Master Petty Officer Brand, that tells them things. They hear Alix, it tells them a lot less.”

“I’ll remember that. I like mitigating danger. Alright, Alix, I’m Thorn.”

“Understood. From now on, I’ll refer to you as Thorn, and we’ll lose the sir part as well. That way, we’re all equally likely to get killed,” Alix said.

“An admirable goal. I’ve always been a fan of shared responsibility,” Thorn said. “Even if it is the possibility of getting our brainpan cooked off by a squid.”

“That’s the spirit. Doom all ‘round,” Alix said, with a genuine laugh. She sobered, leaning forward. “Can you really—cook them off, as you say? Can they do that to us at close range?”

“Not on my watch, and, yeah. I can. I see a squid, I’m prying his head apart and using them against themselves, their squad, whatever. If I go rigid, I’m not ignoring you. One of two things has happened—I’ve ‘jacked a squid, or they’ve ‘jacked me,” Thorn said.

“How will we know the difference?” Alix asked.

“Simple. If I’m killing squid, we’re good. If I’m not, put a round in me. Somewhere survivable, if you don’t mind,” Thorn said.

Alix grinned. “Hear that, team? We’ve got permission to shoot an officer in the leg.”

“Calf muscle, trooper. Not leg. I plan on walking to the bar later,” Thorn said.

The squad laughed as one. Alix pointed at Thorn, grinning. “We’ll make a soldier of you yet.”

* * *

Mol’s fingers hovered over the Gyrfalcon’s flight management system. “Okay, we’re clear of the Hecate. Trixie’s got all the numbers crunched, so we can start deorbiting at any time,” she said, glancing at Thorn.

He nodded, while trying to avoid banging his knees into the console. He’d had to slide the co-pilot’s crash couch as far forward as possible to make a little more room for the Tiger Team. The Gyrfalcon hadn’t been designed as a shuttle or troop-carrier; the space behind the cockpit was intended for extra supplies during long range patrols or mission-specific equipment. The six spec ops soldiers jammed into it probably counted as the latter, Thorn thought, but this equipment was breathing and giving off body heat, making the cockpit close and steamy.

“Go ahead, Mol,” he said.

Her fingers moved, and a dull thrum of thrusters rattled the Gyrfalcon’s hull. She slowed, her orbit dropping, until she began falling out of orbit and into the atmosphere of Ballard’s World.

The ride down was reminiscent of Mol’s aerobraking maneuver around the gas giant, but nowhere near as intense or protracted. Tongues of flame erupted from the Gyrfalcon’s nose as it plowed through the thickening atmosphere, washed over her hull, and trailed behind her in a long, glowing wake. It also announced to Thorn that it was time for his next part in the op.

He extracted his talisman from a pocket, placed it in his lap, and let his fingers rest on the smooth, scuffed cardboard. Using the sensation of fingertips on book as a point of focus, he again let his awareness expand, until it encompassed the Gyrfalcon. Just as he’d done with the Hecate, he wove a web of concealment around the fighter, blocking its incandescent passage through the atmosphere from view.

And now we eat the sound, he thought, weaving magic around the supersonic shockwaves that followed their entry. Silent was best. Silent and invisible was even better.

The fiery light show faded as the Gyrfalcon slowed. Mol switched her flight management system to atmospheric mode, using aerodynamic forces to maneuver, only supplementing them with bursts from the thrusters. Thorn glanced back to see how Tiger Team was doing.

Most of them were asleep.

Brand—or rather Alix—was the only one clearly awake. She was reading a data-slate and idly tapping her fingers, the slow rhythm neither hurried nor frantic. When she looked up and saw him, she grinned, then went back to reading with a casual air.

Lush rainforest scrolled by beneath them, wreathed in restless tendrils of mist. Far off, on the edge of sight, a drab, grey-brown line demarcated where the coastal rainforests ended at what Thorn knew was a colossal mountain range, with nothing but the continental interior’s trackless desert for thousands upon thousands of kilometers. The thought made the Gyrfalcon, and all of them aboard it, suddenly seem very, very small.

“LZ ahead,” Mol announced. A flashing icon appeared in the view, superimposed over a clearing about two klicks away from the mining operation. The Gyrfalcon slowly veered, until the icon was centered in the screen. Thorn used it as a starting point, then let his gaze slide leftward, until he saw the tops of the towers and headframes of the mining facility poking above the trees. Beyond it sprawled a lake that stretched off into the haze of distance.

“Thirty seconds,” Mol called out.

Tiger Team Three instantly switched from relaxed to fully alert. Magazines were snapped into railers, visors dropped over faces, belts and straps cinched and tightened. Thorn touched his own weapon, a railer strapped to the bulkhead beside him, then released his helmet from its clamps and maneuvered it onto his head. He still maintained the Shade around the fighter, and would do so until they were down.

The clearing loomed ahead. Mol flared the Gyrfalcon, applied vertical thrust as the landing gear extended, then deftly dropped the ship onto the ground.

“Trixie, shutdown checklist,” she said.

Things began to scroll across the flight management system’s panel, and the Gyrfalcon began powering down. As soon as Trixie switched the engines to idle, Thorn let the Shade dissipate.

Everyone was looking at him.

His fingertips still rested on his talisman, connecting him to the power that lay between reality and his own mind—a place where magic bloomed, neither physics nor fantasy, but real in more ways than humans could perceive.

Thorn reached.

The forest drew near, becoming close, deep, and lush. Mol sat with her hand on the stick, radiating tension as she watched Thorn for any sign of stress of attack.

Life, Thorn sensed. A lot of it. But all primitive, the glacially slow growth of plants, the skittish awareness of small creatures. Fear and living and dying. The path of nature.

That was all.

He shook his head. “Nothing close.”

Alix nodded. “Okay, Tigers, as soon as the hatch opens, box formation, oriented on the ship’s six.”

Five thumbs up.

Mol studied a display. “Trixie, air quality?”

It was just a formality; humans had already been living and breathing on this planet. But regs required it.

“Decent,” Trixie replied. “I’d happily breathe it, you know, if I needed to breathe.”

Thorn rolled his eyes and Mol chuckled, but Tiger Team Three was already in motion, moving to the hatch, then spilling outside the instant it opened. There were no shouted commands, no displays of aggression—just quiet, methodical purpose, broken only by the thunk of boots and the sharp snaps of railers being cocked. In a way, Thorn found the silent professionalism far more intimidating than a bunch of noise and shouting.

Alix poked her head back inside. “Any time, Thorn.”

He’d already clambered out of the crash couch and was waiting for Alix’s all-clear. He glanced at Mol as he moved to the hatch.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, smiling, despite a sudden tension balling up his gut. He hadn’t done anything in what could be called wilderness since basic, at Code Nebula.

Where Kira was.

Thorn muttered a curse at himself. Focus, Stellers . . . focus.

“I’ll keep the motor running,” Mol replied, offering an encouraging grin.

Thorn stepped through the hatch onto Ballard’s World, and let his senses run.

* * *

Thorn watched the Spec Ops with a mixture of awed jealousy. He knew how to be quiet, but they took silent moving to levels he had never seen. Moving like spirits, they glided through the dense growth, disturbing nothing and seeing all.

Every hundred paces or so, the Tiger Team would stop, go to ground, and just listen. Since they’d left the Gyrfalcon behind, he’d heard nothing but the whisper of leaves rustling in a fitful breeze, the occasional, thin, piping of some sort of creature that seemed to lurk in the treetops—and his own pulse, steady and true. The halts gave him a chance to let his awareness drift farther out, using his own form of stealth to prowl for hints of any higher intellect too sloppy to cover their own thoughts.

But there was still nothing. The forest remained green and verdant and impenetrable.

Alix appeared in front of him, and he twitched. He hadn’t even seen her approaching, much less heard her.

“We’re about a klick from the objective, Thorn. Anything?”

He lifted his gaze, focusing on the heads-up display, where it depicted a map with their current location. The locator used a periodic burst signal from the Gyrfalcon to keep them oriented. He saw the icon indicating their objective, the mining facility, and one representing him. They had a little over one thousand meters to go, all of it downhill from here to the lakeshore.

But there was still nothing to suggest any higher life-forms anywhere nearby.

Thorn shook his head. “Nothing.”

Alix’s eyes narrowed as she glanced around, suspicious. “Could the squid be hiding himself from your magic, or whatever it’s called?”

“Magic is fine,” Thorn said, then considered the question. “The shaman might be shading—that’s what we call it—but that chews away at psychic resources. Eventually, every mask falls, and remember that we really want to take this bastard alive.”

Alix clapped him on the shoulder. “Appreciate the honesty, sir. Usually, when we do an op with a SME along, they go out of their way to make it seem they’re always on top of everything.”

“SME?” he asked, repeating her pronunciation—smee.

“Sorry, Subject Matter Expert. That’s what you are.”

He waved at himself. “You sure baggage that you have to lug along and babysit wouldn’t be more correct?”

“That’s only what we call you behind your back.” She said it without cracking her deadpan expression.

Thorn smiled, and it felt good. He’d trusted Alix before; now he believed in her, based on her easy attention to detail. “Okay, then. Anyway, if I had to guess, I’d say that the squid—or squids, if there’s more than one—are going to stick close to that lake, and the mining op. They don’t really have much reason to come wandering into the bush.”

“Unless they’ve detected us.”

But Thorn shook his head. “Not likely he could have done that with magic, unless he was specifically looking for us. And I’ve felt absolutely nothing. Of course, he could be so powerful he can completely conceal himself from, but if that’s the case—”

“We’re screwed,” Alix said flatly.

Thorn had to nod. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Alix hefted her railer. “I love my job. Really,” she said, then slipped away.

Ahead, the team began moving again, silent as ghosts.

* * *

They stopped again about six hundred meters short of the mining compound. Thorn could see the lake through the trees now, a dark, purple-blue expanse of water under a sky seemingly veiled with a high, permanent yellowish haze. The pre-op briefing had summarized Ballard’s World as terrestrial, but with an inordinate amount of active volcanism, so the air was high in carbon dioxide; this could have led to a spiraling greenhouse effect, except that stratospheric haze of volcanic dust and gas ate up sunlight, so the two forces balanced out. That was good, because a little unbalance either way and Ballard’s World would either be a steamy hellhole or a frozen hellhole.

Thorn opened his awareness again, but cautiously. He didn’t want to tweak the squid shaman’s senses at all, if he could avoid it. They’d brought several measures with them to incapacitate a Nyctus, everything from physical restraints to a drug that, based on tests on squid corpses, should be neurotoxic enough to render one helpless. It was all speculative though, and really depended on getting to their target while it was unaware.

Thorn was crushed by something that erupted from the underbrush, slamming into his ribs like an orbital strike. His breath left in a surprised whoof as dank moss filled his mouth with an earthy, mineral taste. Claws raked him, and he rolled, striking back in animal desperation as he unleashed a furious flurry of punches, kicks, even biting at something that might have been a small, scaly ear, tearing and spitting and gouging all while growling with a sound that was far in his evolutionary past.

An acrid stink filled his nose and pain bloomed again with each breath; the creature levered two legs up underneath him, preparing to kick his guts out with claws that flashed black in the wan light. Thorn sank a thumb into something that felt a heluva lot like an eye; he was rewarded with a gelatinous squirt of warm fluid, then he pushed on and tore at the animal with both hands even as it rhythmically kicked and kicked, shredding his armor and finally touching skin with a talon that felt like a sword.

Thorn drew in his power, feeling a sear of heat as he began to cut loose with the fatal blast—

—A crack sent his ears to ringing, and the weight on him shifted, then shifted again in a liquid tumble.

Alix stared down at him, searching his eyes. “Thorn? Thorn, can you hear me?”

“Yeah . . . I . . .” Thorn began, then took a moment to just suck in air. Adrenaline kept his heart hammering away, loud enough that he was sure even the squid shaman must be able to hear it without magic.

Alix kept her gaze locked on his. “Thorn, just look at me. Toff here is going to patch up that wound, okay?”

He nodded. Alix’s brusque confidence kept him steadied. The other soldier, Toff, did something that made a hissing sound, then the pain in his shoulder, which had gone from keen flame to deep, diffuse ache, faded.

With their help, Thorn sat up. He looked at whatever attacked him, which was now sprawled off to his left.

“Holy shit.”

Alix nodded, then poked the beast with a toe. “Right? Nasty little critter. Meet one of the local carnivores. Carnivore, meet Thorn. He’s the one who took your eye.” She prodded the creature again, eliciting a stream of fluid from the mouth. “And your life.”

The beast was almost three meters long, quadrupedal, but with an extra pair of prehensile arms ending in claws that looked even more lethal, now that Thorn could see them clearly, than they had in the chaotic moment of attack. It had a tough, leathery hide sprouting coarse, wiry fur in patches, and its mouth bristled with teeth.

Teeth. Many, many teeth. Hundreds of them, it seemed, each a serrated horror seemingly purpose-made to shred the flesh of someone named Stellers.

“And I thought Murgon sucked,” Thorn managed.

He took one more breath that tasted of wet moss and a lingering hint of primal fear, then pulled his eyes away from the nightmarish corpse. He was able to stand, and although a deep, dull ache remained in his shoulder, he could mostly use his right arm.

“You’re lucky,” Toff said.

Thorn shot a glance at the creature. “You have a strange definition of what constitutes luck.”

Toff smiled, shaking a can of wound sealant. “Single puncture wound, in and out, into muscle. Doesn’t seem to have hit anything vital, nerves or blood vessels.” Now it was Toff’s turn to regard the monster. “Considering what could have happened, yeah, I’d call that luck.”

Thorn had to concede that. Toff handed him a canister of first-aid spray, a combination of dressing, antitoxin, antiseptic, and anesthetic all in one, and told him to apply it to the wound as he needed to.

Alix ran a finger along a rough furrow plowed through Thorn’s body armor. “Did you say something about not wanting to wear this? That it might get in the way of your cosmic casting, or whatever it’s called?” She tapped his armor, then whistled. “Worth everything we paid for it.” A smile quirked her lips, and she crouched easily next to Thorn, railer still at the ready.

“It’s Starcasting, thank you very much,” Thorn said, breathing more easily now as his heart finally slowed from racing, to merely pounding. “And, yes ma’am, you were right about the armor. Oh, by the way, here’s a new hand signal for you and your team to use.” He lifted his finger in a rude gesture.

Alix didn’t even blink. “Already use that one all the time—a few times since we landed, actually, while your back was turned.”

Thorn managed a weak smile, then patted the air. “I’m fine with that. You mind taking the next one before it, ah—”

“Kicks your guts out?” Alix said cheerfully.

“Yes. Well put,” Thorn said.

“Consider it done. Don’t like the smell of them, let alone the damned teeth. We’ll double down. Can you stand?” Alix asked him, extending a hand.

“Damn right I can. I’m not sitting around with those things out there.” Thorn grunted as she pulled him to his feet, then stood swaying as he got his bearings. The wound spray was nothing short of miraculous, and he couldn’t feel a thing. “Let’s go. And thanks.”

“Haven’t lost a SME yet,” Alix replied. “Not going to break our winning streak for you.” She offered a glimmer of genuine smile, though, then slipped off through the undergrowth.

* * *

Thorn caught movement near the compound wall and tensed. But it was Alix and her fireteam partner on their way back from their recon jaunt. The rest of Tiger Team Three had “gone firm,” forming a protective ring around Thorn while he carefully explored the ether around them for any hint of the Nyctus shaman.

He shook his head as Alix crouched beside him. “Nothing,” he whispered. “For whatever reason, that shaman seems to be entirely off the air.”

“No physical signs in the compound, either,” she replied, then narrowed her eyes. “Correction. We found some tracks that definitely aren’t native fauna, but we already know the squid was here. We can’t find anything fresh, since the last time it rained a day or so ago, anyway.” She shrugged. “Maybe it's dead. Could have been injured, sick, whatever.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t really add anything,” Thorn replied. “So you might be right. I just don’t know.”

“All due respect, but you didn’t sense, or detect or whatever, that critter that almost ate you,” Toff said. “And it was very much there.”

Thorn waved a hand around him. “It’s not like I’m always on. Sensing other conscious minds is something I have to do, with intent. It takes some concentration, separate from trying to be silent in the brush.”

“Well, you get to make the call, Thorn,” Alix said. “We either stay here and keep trying to find the primary objective, or we suck back, return to the ship, and go after the secondary.”

Thorn whistled through his teeth, thinking. The orders had been clear; this was his call. If the shaman was dead or had returned to his own crashed ship, then they could just end up wasting a lot of time here—keeping Mol on the ground and the Hecate in orbit while doing it. On the other hand, if he had gone back to the crash site, then—

Thorn froze.

Something had just brushed against the edge of his mind.

Alix tensed, sensing the change in Thorn’s demeanor. “Thorn? Talk to me.”

“He’s here, somewhere nearby. The Nyctus shaman is here. I just felt him.”

Toff cursed. “Shit, did it detect us?”

Thorn considered the question, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve been keeping us Shaded, basically hiding us from psychic searches.”

“Thought you said you had to concentrate to do this stuff.”

“The Shade is a fire and forget. As long as I have power and set the intention, it exists. It’s in place, and whole,” Thorn explained.

“So can you tell where it is?” Alix asked.

“Not without actually searching for him—and that’s where this is more like shooting a weapon. There’s a good chance he’ll see me at the same time I see him.”

“Let’s make that plan B,” Alix said. “We’ll try to do this the old-fashioned way first. As long as you can prevent that squid from seeing us, we’ll do the rest.” She tapped a tranq-pistol holstered on her tactical harness. They each had one of the single-shot weapons, loaded with one projectile containing the untested neurotoxin that they hoped would subdue a Nyctus, plus two more shots each. She gave Thorn a searching look. “But if this doesn’t work—”

“Then it’s one of these,” Thorn replied, lifting his railer. “I know.”

Alix nodded and passed quick orders around the Team, then they set off to make a circuit of the compound. Thorn now put extra effort into his Shade effect, making it as secure and yet as transparent as possible. It was more complicated than just erecting a mental barrier to block the squid magic; if the shaman just slammed headlong into a psychic wall, it would obviously know the wall was there and was being produced by someone of talent and power. Thorn had to be more subtle, focusing on refracting the squid’s magical probes around them, and into blank ether, rather than just stopping them outright.

They reached the far side of the compound, then stopped. Thorn used the pause to refresh the spray dressing on his wound. It got complicated here, because the two hundred meters or so between the facility’s nearest wall and the rocky lakeshore was most clear of undergrowth and covered instead by some sort of fluffy, tangled grass. A well-worn trail led from a gate in the wall down to a shed propped over the water on pilings. A pipe led back to the compound. It must be a pumping station, sending fresh water back for storage.

The hint—a whisper, really—of the shamanic mind touched him again, less shy than before. It was stronger this time, and more deliberate.

“I think he’s getting suspicious,” Thorn whispered, as Alix plotted with Toff for the best route across the stretch of mostly open ground.

“Meaning?” Alix asked.

“He’s ’casting around more, and being a little more aggressive about it.”

“Can you clarify? We’re in your playground now, not mine,” Alix said.

“If he were a ship, he’s put more power into his sensors. I’m able to deflect him, but if he keeps amping himself up like this, he’s eventually going to notice he’s being deflected.”

“So we’re on a clock here.”

“Yeah, we are.”

“Okay, then.”

“Mol here,” a voice said over their comm net. “Just got a message from the Hecate.”

Alix looked at Thorn, who nodded and replied. “Go ahead, Mol.”

“Tanner says he just got a burst transmission from Fleet. The squids here must have managed to get a message out. Some asset our intel people have in the Zone just detected a squadron of Nyctus ships on a trajectory to bring them straight here. Estimate was twelve hours ETA when the message was sent, which puts it down to six to eight hours with transmission delay.”

“You were saying something about a clock?” Thorn said.

Alix shrugged. “I hate being right about that.”

“Okay, well, we’re doing our best here, but we’re having trouble finding them.”

“Might be able to help with that. According to Tanner, someone’s transmitting from inside the compound while we speak.”

Thorn stiffened, his eyes drawn to the wall with unerring aim. “That’s where he is,” Thorn said. “He’s inside there, right now.”

Alix made a hand signal to the squad, and the team moved like a school of fish—one direction, one purpose, no wasted motion.

Alix turned back to Thorn. “Ready to move?”

“As much as I’ll ever be.”

She nodded and made a move out gesture, then they started toward the compound, railers at the ready. Half of the team kept their attention focused on the gate and the wall around it. So did Thorn.

Fortunately, two of the team kept their focus swiveling around, covering everywhere else, which is why they weren’t completely surprised when the world exploded into chaos.

15

Kira snapped her eyes open. Impact noises, she thought. And heavy.

She blinked. She had been surrounded by thick forest filled by tentacled monstrosities. She remembered seeing Gillis taken by them, and Riley, and Rainer. A mass of boiling, writhing tentacles and panicked retreat, all under the canopy of an uncaring forest.

Gasping, she sat up. She wasn’t in a forest anymore. She was in a room. A small room, the walls, floor, and ceiling made of metal. There was a door, a single, dim light source set in the ceiling, and something bucket-like in a corner.

Wait—so the horror on the planet had just been a nightmare of some sort—

Another heavy crash, and the room shuddered, tossing her to one side in a stagger. She still didn’t understand what was happening. She tried standing, but her legs wobbled like springs. Instead she crawled on her hands and knees to the door.

“Hey!”

Her voice was just a croak. She sucked in a breath to shout again—

But her cry was truncated by a third impact, more massive than the last two. Everything tilted hard to one side, and Kira slid into the wall.

She shook her head, trying to clear away a fuzz like stubborn cobwebs. She was aboard a ship? Locked in a brig of some sort?

Realization flooded her, with raw, panicked terror thundering in right behind it. She’d been taken. A prisoner.

Of the Nyctus.

“No!” She threw herself at the door. “NO!”

The door slid open, dumping her into a dark corridor. She saw legs. Feet.

Gasping with fear so extreme it was almost physically painful, she looked up.

It was Rainer. Riley and Gillis were right behind her. Gillis gripped a snub-nosed weapon like a submachine gun. Like her, they were all were grimed with dirt and sweat, their fatigues torn and stained, bruises and cuts dark against their skin. But each also radiated a grim, fatalistic resolve.

“Kira!” Rainer shouted. “On your feet! We have to get out of here!”

“Wait, what?” She shook her head. “What’s happening?”

Another heavy crash and a sudden burst of acceleration flung them all into the bulkhead. The lights, already dim, flickered, died, then came back on.

“We’re escaping the squids!” Rainer shouted back, grabbing Kira’s arm and urging her along the corridor. “Let’s go!”

Kira stumbled along a few paces, as though she was plowing through the molasses-thick unreality of a dream. Another bang, another flicker of lights. She slammed hard into the bulkhead again, the shock seeming to shake her sluggish thoughts free.

She spun on Rainer, a torrent of questions on her tongue, but only one came to the front. “Where are we going?”

“Escape pod, shuttle, any way of getting off this squid bucket!”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, this ship is under attack.” Gillis spun and looked back the way they came. As he did, something stumbled into view at a far bend in the corridor. Pale, tentacles, less than two meters tall—

A squid. A Nyctus, in the flesh. Kira had only ever seen imagery.

Gillis raised his weapon and sprayed the corridor with a hail of wicked darts. A barrage of flashes and sparks erupted around the alien, and it toppled back in looping arcs of viscous fluids, their wet impacts streaking the walls, the floor. Droplets landed on Kira’s skin, obscenely warm.

Rainer shoved at Kira again. “Discuss later. Fight now. As of this instant, we need to find some way off this ship so we can be rescued!”

Kira gaped for a second. Rescued, but also under attack. That meant one possibility—

The Orbital Navy. Somewhere nearby, there was at least one ON ship.

All they had to do to get to it was get away from the Nyctus, find a way of negotiating who-knew-how-much hard vacuum, through an ongoing battle, then somehow signal to the ON who they were and—

And it didn’t matter. They’d most likely die long before they got anywhere near actually being rescued, but it was still vastly better than remaining prisoners of the Nyctus.

* * *

“It has to be an escape pod,” Riley snapped.

Kira peered into the small compartment. It was a dead end, on the other side of a single means of ingress, an unguarded airlock. While her mind raced, Kira heard Riley continue firing, muttered curses punctuating each ringing metallic impact of his gun.

“I think that’s it. Whatever passes for a mag on this thing is empty.”

“Kira, we’ve got to—” Rainer began.

Whatever she was going to say was cut off by the heaviest impact yet. Kira was slammed hard into the hatch coaming, igniting a deep flare of pain in her shoulder. Somewhere behind them rose the clamor and shriek of tearing metal. An instant later, a wind gusted around Kira as the atmosphere was pulled toward a hull breach in a hissing shriek. It wasn’t an explosive decompression, but a decompression, nonetheless.

“Kira, it’s now or never!” Riley shouted.

Pass through the airlock, into a dead end—or don’t, and just end up dead.

“Let’s go, inside!” Kira shouted, pushing Rainer through the hatch, then Riley, then Gillis. She entered last, just as another squid appeared only a few meters away. It raised something like a pistol—

“Take cover!” Kira barked. She was alert and ready.

—and snapped out a shot that clanged off the coaming and ricocheted into the compartment, missing Rainer’s head by centimeters. Kira braced herself to charge the squid, maybe get to it before it could kill them all, maybe save the others—

But the outer hatch abruptly slid closed. Kira dove into the compartment as the inner hatch followed suit. A sudden, thick silence engulfed them.

“Hang on!” Riley shouted over his shoulder. “I’m not sure what this is going to do—”

There was a loud clang, followed by a surge of acceleration. Through a small viewport, Kira saw the outer airlock hatch suddenly begin receding amid a sudden cloud of vapor, then dwindle away into the flank of a squid cruiser.

Kira spun around. “Holy shit, Riley, you know how to fly this damned thing?”

“Hell no. But if it’s an escape pod, it’s probably meant to be used by anyone, not just a pro pilot, right?” He gestured at a panel. “I just pushed that big flashing control right there. One button, one function. Just like ours.”

Kira nodded, taking a moment to catch her breath. Rainer slumped into what was probably meant to be a crash couch, but it was far too small for her, and not shaped for a human body at all. She looked at Kira.

“I can’t believe this shit is real.”

Kira perched on the next couch beside her, every muscle in her body singing with tension and residual fear. There were twelve seats, plus one at the lone control panel. She glanced back at the cruiser. Gaping rents in its hull were pouring out atmosphere in shimmering clouds; a few of them belched tongues of flame that briefly turned into incandescent spheres before dissipating into vacuum.

Thirteen crash couches. That meant thirteen squids that wouldn’t be getting off that ship—at least, not on this lifeboat.

Kira slumped back again, muttering.

“What’s good?” Rainer asked.

“What?”

“You just said ‘good.’”

Kira didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud. She gave a weary shrug. “Squids dying.”

Rainer agreed, shaking his head lazily. “That is good, yeah.”

* * *

Well, this sucks, Kira mused, summing up their situation. They’d survived an array of attacks, imprisonment, battle, and outright hand-to-hand combat, followed by the most daring escape she could imagine.

Only to die of thirst, starvation, or asphyxia in space, aboard a squid escape pod whose tech they knew next to nothing about.

“Sorry, guys,” Gillis said from where he drifted above the control panel. The pod was far too small to have any sort of induced gravity, so they all floated in no-g. “I don’t see anything here that might be a comm.” He tapped at the control panel, irritated. “Just a launch button and a few basic attitude controls.”

Kira pointed at one of the small features, the movement making her begin edging toward one side of the little craft. “It’s probably broadcasting an automated distress beacon, like our life pods do.”

“Great,” Rainer said. “So we can get rescued by the squids and start this all over again.”

Kira looked out the viewport. The cruiser was now barely visible, just a speck against the starfield, detectable only because of the inconstant flicker of—

It suddenly vanished in a dazzling flash. Kira blinked away the purplish afterimage and turned back to the others. “Well, they won’t be rescuing us now.”

Rainer crossed her arms and closed her eyes. “Good. Hope it hurt like hell, too.”

Gillis hissed in frustration. “There are a few other controls here, but I can’t tell what they do. I mean, I can’t even bring up a nav display, so I can’t tell if we’re in open space, or about to start falling into some star like orbital slag.”

Something occluded the viewport. Kira tensed and pulled herself back to look out into what should have been deep space, her brows lifting in alarm when she realized there was no more starfield.

Outside, there was a blank wall of something metallic.

Kira murmured a curse, then turned from the viewport, her face grim. “Think we can probably drop worrying about crashing into stars or planets or anything else and start worrying about this.”

Something made contact with their craft, and then the entire pod shuddered as it began a gentle acceleration. It went on for about ten minutes, with a few abrupt changes in the direction they were traveling. Painfully bright light flooded the ’port, followed by a final, hard bump, and gravity returned with a stomach-churning lurch. Choking back a frisson of alarm, Kira steeled herself and looked outside.

A face stared back at her.

A human face.

She even recognized him—Carter, or Carson, she couldn’t recall which, other than that he was Security Chief aboard the Andraste, the ship she’d once, and briefly, commanded.

Kira put her hand on her hips, sucked air through her teeth, and then said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

* * *

Kira felt like she was dreaming again.

She stepped out of the ground car that had brought her from the airfield and spent a moment taking in Code Nebula.

Riley grinned, a guileless expression of relief and joy. “You know, I think I’m happy to be back.”

“Happy. Huh. Well—yeah. Happy,” Rainer added.

Kira tried a grin. “Thank you, Commander Redundant.” She felt a moment of sheer dislocation—a few days ago, she’d been in the same spot, preparing for a mission. She was here again, but the space between was filled with nightmares.

She shook away the memory. “What I don’t get is why they brought us back here to be debriefed. You’d think that Fleet would bring us somewhere like Code Gauntlet, or a spook shop hidden away on some planet somewhere—”

Her voice trailed off. “Hm.”

Rainer, who was heaving her duffle bag out of the ground car, glanced up at Kira. “What?”

“They managed to rebuild—” Kira began, but broke off. She’d just seen the barracks that had burned down, killing one poor Scorch, and almost killing Riley and herself, intact. Somehow, she’d thought, in the few days she’d been away, they’d completely rebuilt it. But no, there was just a blank foundation, cleared of debris and wreckage, which made a lot more sense.

“I’m seeing shit,” Kira said. “Although I wouldn’t mind seeing more food. And a cot. And then more food.”

“Damned right,” Riley agreed.

“But first, HQ and check in. Then, we see what we’ve missed,” Kira said.

They made their way around the edge of the parade ground, past the barracks where she and the others had been living while at Code Nebula, to the HQ building. Inside, they found Narvez and Fielder waiting for them, along with the expected spook, a Commander who somehow managed to be the most nondescript man Kira had ever seen. She doubted she could even remember his face a few seconds after looking away from him, so forgettable was the cloud surrounding his presence.

Narvez and Fielder looked different, setting alarms off in Kira’s mind when she placed their expressions.

They weren’t angry, or blank, or even bemused. Both officers looked pleased to see her, like she was the missing piece of a puzzle. Then someone new spoke, and the room got small in a hurry.

“Hello, Kira.”

She turned to the voice.

It was Thorn.

* * *

“Thorn—” she began, then shook her head. “What are you doing here?” She moved to embrace him but made it only a quick hug, given the professional setting. Her body vibrated with unspoken relief—at his voice, his face, and knowing he was alright—that they, the survivors, were alright.

“The powers that be decided that I could help debrief you. Anything you learned about the squids can be useful, but anything about their magic in particular could be vital.” He shrugged. “In a departure from my usual duties, I’ll be the detail guy. Since we know each other, command thinks that—”

“I’ll spill more. Got it,” Kira said, but she wasn’t even mad. The decision made sense, and she was still immensely happy that Thorn was there, in the flesh.

“I hate to break up this touching reunion,” Narvez snapped, “but we’re here for a purpose. Wixcombe, come in.” She turned to Rainer, Gillis, and Riley. “The rest of you will be debriefed in turn. You are not to discuss anything you experienced, in order to avoid contaminating one another’s accounts any more than they are already. Is that understood?”

A chorus of “yes, ma’am” followed as the three made themselves comfortable to wait—or, more like, to engage in the time-honored military tradition of sleeping when you didn’t have to specifically do anything else.

Kira stepped into the Training Company Commander’s office, the same place she’d been first introduced to the op that had gone so disastrously wrong. Narvez, Fielder, and the spooky Commander sat on one side of the conference table, Thorn on the other, and Kira at the end.

“Alright, Specialist Wixcombe,” Fielder said. “In your own time and words, tell us what happened from the moment you started the op rehearsal.”

Kira hesitated a moment. It seemed strange, now that she thought about it, to be debriefed by Narvez and Fielder; they were training officers, not part of the intel cadre. Yes, the mysterious Commander was here, but he seemed content to leave the debriefing to the others, remaining a gray presence at the periphery of her awareness.

After taking a breath, Kira began to speak. “We were ambushed.”

“Ambushed?” Narvez asked.

“Yes ma’am. And by . . . things. Constructs, unlike anything I’ve seen, or even imagined. Mobile, tentacled, armored, and deadly. They came in force, attacked us during our exercise, and overwhelmed us. We were taken, one by one, and after we’d exhausted our ammo. The fight could only end one way, and it ended badly.”

“Taken to where?” Fielder asked, his tone bland. There was something suspicious lurking behind his eyes. It made Kira angry, then she stilled herself.

“I don’t know, sir. I know less than you think, and probably more than I can imagine. We were prisoners, and we’d still be prisoners if not for some damned lucky shooting on the part of the Navy. We ’jacked an escape pod, took a couple excellent guesses as to what the controls were, and managed to get somewhere that we could be picked up by the Andraste. The truth is, nothing of our actions was anything other than dumb luck, and the squid kept security so tight I couldn’t—I mean, none of us could Join with them and peel away any useful intel. Most of our, ah, stay is just a damned blank. It’s like they suppressed my memories as we left, or maybe I’m just having recall issues,” Kira said.

Thorn leaned forward, his face kind. “What can you tell us about the squid’s magic? Anything beyond our knowledge of it from where we sit?”

“Not much, unfortunately. This was all about firefights and physical action. There really weren’t many opportunities to use magic.”

He smiled. “It was a massive screwup that you got taken, and frankly, the fact you’re alive and can remember anything at all is a victory.”

Kira wanted to argue that she didn’t see her situation as a victory at all, but she just smiled, because Thorn looked so earnest.

“In any case, Wixcombe,” Narvez cut in, “you’ll be delivering a briefing to some new officers here at Code Nebula. It’s why you’ve been brought here.”

“Sorry—a briefing, ma’am? About what?”

“About everything. You’ve been out there, done more than most. We want you to recount everything, brief these new officers on every piece of knowledge and experience you have. Any of it could prove useful to them.”

Kira blinked. “That’s it? That’s all?”

“We’d like you to begin that immediately, Wixcombe,” Fielder said. “We can have the class assembled and—”

“Excuse me, sir, but I really need a bit of time to, well, finish recovering. Can we take a day or so?”

Narvez, Wixcombe, and the silent Commander all exchanged looks, which made Kira even more curious. It wasn’t an unreasonable request. The checkup she’d received from the ship’s surgeon aboard the Andraste had been surprisingly cursory; basically, he’d looked Kira over, listened to her heart, took her pulse, then declared her fit.

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request,” Thorn put in. “Sirs, ma’am, it would give me a chance to do a little more work with Wixcombe, maybe glean a little more about the squids’ magic.”

Kira said nothing, just kept her eyes on the superior officers arrayed across from her on the smooth, empty table.

Narvez scowled. Fielder, though, finally nodded. “Alright. When you’re dismissed from here, Wixcombe, you’re on free time until tomorrow at zero-eight-hundred, at which time you are to report to classroom twelve-A to address a class of trainees. You’re not to leave Code Nebula in the meantime. We want to ensure these new officers are as ready as possible when they head out to meet the squids for the first time, so your briefing is to be complete and comprehensive.”

“You are not in possession of any information that would be considered sensitive enough to be protected from them, so you’re cleared to present and discuss essentially everything you know, and answer whatever questions they may pose to you,” the voice said. It was mild, new, and belonged to the Commander who blended into the walls. Like his utterly forgettable appearance, his speech left no impression in her mind whatsoever. She was left with the memory of what he’d said, but no sense of how it had sounded. The man took plain to a whole new level; Kira suspected some sort of magical psychic effect.

As for what he’d said—

“Sir, if I may,” Kira replied to him. “The op I was recently involved in—the one we were preparing for when we were attacked by the squids—was classified Secret-Three. That means I can’t reveal anything about it, Commander?”

“Yes, I am a Commander.” A hint of smile appeared and vanished, the only thing resembling an emotion she’d seen from the man. “It is no longer classified Secret-3. The op itself never occurred, and never will.”

Kira looked at Fielder and Narvez. She seemed to disapprove; he simply nodded.

“If you need this to be ordered in writing, Specialist,” the Commander said, “that can be arranged.”

“No, that won’t be necessary, sir. I’ll be ready to brief the trainees at oh-eight hundred.”

She was curtly dismissed. Kira stood, while Thorn excused himself and followed her out. Rainer and the others were still sitting in the outer office and gave her curious looks as she walked past. She simply shrugged and offered a reassuring smile.

“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re being very gentle.”

“Narvez and Fielder, gentle?” Rainer chuckled. “This I gotta see—”

“Lieutenant Rainer,” Narvez’s voice snapped from the inner office. “You’re up.”

Rainer’s smile vanished; she stood and headed for the door. Kira continued in the opposite direction and stepped outside into the warm afternoon sun.

“You done well in spite of the shitstorm, Kira,” he said, smiling.

Kira began to walk, Thorn in step beside her. “Wasn’t hard, since there was no actual debriefing—just me telling them what happened, then getting out. As to the aftereffects, I can’t even begin to process this. We lost, Thorn. We got our asses handed to us, were taken as POWs, and then somehow disgorged into the middle of a transit lane that let us find the Andraste. Or they found us. You get it, but—what happened back in there? Felt like an afterthought.”

Thorn shrugged. “That’s how it works. The first session is, to use your word, gentle. You’ll have another couple of sessions coming up that’ll drill down into more details.”

Kira returned a nod. It made sense, actually. Still, though, something about it had seemed slightly off. It was as though there was more going on here, like she was seeing the surface of a pond, but not into its depths.

“Anyway, I was hoping we could take some time this evening together,” Thorn said.

Kira smirked. “Fraternizing—and doing it here, right in Code Nebula?”

Thorn laughed. “No, I actually meant in a professional capacity. While you’re going to be answering their questions, I’d like to get a closer look at the source material for them and do some Joining with you.”

Kira started to nod, but stopped herself and just said something that popped into her mind. “I didn’t think you had much use for Joining,” she said, remembering every nuance of their discussion back at Code Gauntlet. Finding common ground about the value of Joining was one of the moments that saved Kira, because she knew he understood her—and valued her as well.

Thorn shrugged. “It has uses. This happens to be one of them.”

“It has uses.”

“Many uses, and in some circumstances, it can be critical. I mean, we can’t really base a war on it—”

“The squids sure seem to think you can. They’ve done some of their most devastating stuff to us with Joining—probably their worst attacks, in fact,” she added, glancing at Thorn sidelong.

He shrugged again. “You can’t really compare them to us. They’re different.”

She smiled. “That’s true. Anyway, I’ll let you know if I’m up to it tonight. I have to prepare for that briefing in the morning, and I’d really like a little down time.”

“Fair enough. I’ll come and check in on you later—say, around twenty-hundred in your barracks.”

“Thorn?”

“Yeah?” He paused, coming back to her, if only a half-step.

“I’m glad you were here. For the first—just, glad you were here for me, is what I meant to say.”

“I wasn’t there when you needed it, but I am now,” Thorn said. “Go burn up some miles. Get a hard sweat going, and get your head right. Then, see me later. We can keep talking then. I know it’s not over for you, not in your head and not here.” He pointed past her, to a squad of trainees ranked up in PT gear. “How about them?”

She looked over her shoulder, catching their complaints on the wind, then smiled. “They’ll do.”

* * *

Kira stopped in the clearing where she and Rainer broke away from the stolen map image.

This is where it happened. The decision.

The early evening sun slanted through the trees; it was still pleasantly warm, but no longer hot. She turned to the uphill trail, the one that led the correct way, to the end of the route. Then she turned ninety degrees and started down the other one, the one that apparently headed into the dreaded Fire Swamps.

She’d never been this way before. She doubted that few people not tricked by the exercise map had, either. The Fire Swamps had a sinister reputation among the population of Code Nebula, pretty much to the point of dark folklore. The Swamps were grim. Sodden. Thick and trackless. Almost everything was neurotoxic, plant and animal venoms causing searing pain, even just with an incidental touch, that gave the vile place its name.

Kira wanted to see the feared and hated swamps for herself.

The trail descended steeply at first, weaving like a switchback among jagged rocks outcropping from the hillside. Eventually, though, it flattened out, still maintaining a downward grade, but a gentle one.

As she ran, the air became thicker, warmer, more humid. Pools of blackish, scummy water appeared among the trees and brush lining either side of the trail. A damp stink of growth and decay filled her nostrils as she breathed.

She pushed on.

Now the light began to fail. A mist rose among the trees, which had become larger and taller, but also unhealthier—they were increasingly barren of leaves, their bark peeling and grey. Moss hung in thick skeins from their skeletal branches. Everywhere that wasn’t trail was now water, slimy black muck, reeds, ferns, or thin, whip-like plants that would make any passage through them a nightmare of tangled, woody stems.

It was now twilight. Moss-shrouded trees marched off to the edge of visibility, before being lost in the mist. The air had become so hot and dank that sweat rolled down Kira’s face. Her feet were splashing through puddles of water on the path, now little more than a muddy track. It would, she saw, soon meander off into a few diffuse openings through the undergrowth, then vanish completely. A sudden, ear-scraping buzz announced the arrival of an insect as long as her thumb, something like a vile cross between a spider and a hornet. It zoomed in and she swatted at it, knocking it away; just that fleeting instant of contact left her fingers tingling and itchy.

Kira stopped. All around her now was a dreary hellscape of massive, skeletal trees, sucking black mud, pools of foul water, undergrowth with jutting thorns glistening with slimy venom—and mist. Mist shrouded all of it, leaving Kira the center of a tiny island of awareness.

As soon as she thought it, she heard a heavy snapping and wet sounds, as though something big prowled the swamps just out of sight to her right. To her left, something else uttered a long, mournful cry, rising and falling like a siren before it abruptly cut off. More of the big spider-wasps hummed around her.

Kira waved away the bugs.

This is the bleakest, most miserable, desolate place I’ve ever seen.

And then she barked out a laugh, turned, and started back the way she’d come. At least swamps had atmo, unlike hard vacuum.

Little truths, she thought, and began to run.

* * *

Kira heard footsteps approaching, booted feet clunking against the barracks floor. She opened her eyes and saw Thorn, smiling, standing over her. After her run, she’d come back and caught some rack time, luxuriating in the sensation of gravity, clean sheets, and the kind of tired feeling you earn.

“Wakey, sleeping beauty. Duty calls.”

Kira wiped at her eyes, then yawned, hugely. “Duty? Thought we were just talking?”

“Talking, sure. Or Joining, if you’d like.” There was an eagerness to Thorn in words and pose. He leaned forward, a tilt so small she almost missed it.

She stood. “Nah. I don’t think so.”

Thorn’s grin faltered. “You okay, Kira? The doctors cleared you, but—”

“Oh, I’m fine. Felt well enough to go for a run, in fact. Decided to take a jaunt into the Fire Swamps.”

The rest of Thorn’s grin drained away. “The Fire Swamps? Why? Why the hell would you want to go there?”

“I know, right? The place is awful. As bad as I imagined it. Worse, even.”

“Okay, well, I guess you got that box ticked then, huh? Nothing you ever have to do again.”

“Nope, I don’t need to go back there, you’re right. Once was enough. It showed me how ridiculous the Fire Swamps are.”

“I . . . don’t get it. Kira, what are you—”

“I’d never seen the Fire Swamps before, Thorn. I only had what I imagined about them to go on, and that was really bad. You start hearing about them on day one as a Trainee here, about how horrible they are, about how Trainees have gotten lost in them, never to be seen again, or only found as bones, or blah, blah. It’s great Code Nebula mythology—but that’s all it is, mythology.”

Thorn frowned at her. “Kira, I think we need to get you—”

“To a doctor? Why bother? I don’t expect he’ll actually know anything about medicine, after all.”

“Kira—”

“Thorn, everything is exactly how I know, or at least expect it to be. I expected the Fire Swamps to be awful, and they were—so much that they came across like a cartoon, or a description of evil swamps in some fantasy novel. I’m sure the real Fire Swamps are actually just a mundane wetland, serving as a cautionary tale for the trainees.”

Thorn said nothing, his eyes flat.

“Doctors can take my pulse and stuff, but they don’t know anything more than that, because I don’t. Narvez is a complete bitch, for no reason, because that’s what I think of her. Commander Spooky was a total blank, the perfect image of what I imagine a covert ops type, or a spy to be. And you—you keep being a touch condescending but friendly, just like you were back at Code Gauntlet before we—before we understood each other. And I mean just like it, because that’s my last memory of you, the one that’s been stuck in my mind since I left there.”

“Kira—”

But she didn’t relent. “Our escape from that squid cruiser was the dumbest of dumb luck, every step of the way. We were picked up the Andraste, because that’s the first ship that comes to mind when I think of an ON warship.” She turned to the window, looking across the barren foundation of the burned-down barracks in the distance. “And what started me thinking this way? That damned barracks. When I first looked at it, I saw it there, completely intact—and then I remembered it had burned down and, what do you know, it suddenly was.”

She wheeled back on Thorn.

“So all of this is exactly what I expect it to be,” she snapped, gesturing around. “We all see the world through our own eyes, filtered through our own memories and experiences, Thorn. But this all makes it literally true. This world is what I see. It is my memories and experiences.” She pushed her gaze into his. “So just what the hell is going on here?”

Deep inside, Kira knew the answer, and it started acrid, boiling panic and fear to churn in her gut. But something else kept it clamped down, kept it from bubbling up and consuming her. It was anger. Rage, even.

Thorn finally sighed. “It’s unfortunate this didn’t work. We had our doubts but thought it was worth a try.” He smiled. “We’re really not a cruel people, Kira Wixcombe. But there are things locked away behind your mental defenses—which really are quite formidable, by the way—that we need to know. So, now we have to do this the much harder and more unpleasant way.”

As Thorn spoke, everything around Kira—the barracks, Code Nebula, the world itself—turned grey and colorless, then vanished like the mist in the Fire Swamps. When the last of it cleared, Kira lay on a hard table, strapped in place. Thorn stood over her.

“We’re sorry for this, Kira Wixcombe. We really are.”

The voice changed first, switching from Thorn’s mild baritone to a liquid burble, yet she understood. Screaming inside, Kira understood every word of the apology, even as Thorn vanished, but not all at once. His blonde hair faded, features blurring, shifting, rippling in a noisome pattern until all that was left were the tentacles. The bulbous eyes. Nubby teeth. Flashing colors on the damp skin, and the Nyctus wrapped her in a repulsive touch, arms closing over her until she could do nothing but scream until the light, like her mind, began to fade.

16

Projectiles hummed through the air, slashing through the grass around Thorn, neatly truncating the tough stalks. He had the impression of spinning blades, like shuriken, only traveling far faster than they could ever be thrown. He saw one of the Tiger Team soldiers go down in a spray of blood, but the others immediately returned fire and dashed for cover. Thorn did the same, double-tapping out railer shots as he’d been trained, then diving for a covered fire position—

And realizing that the incoming fire was originating from the lake, not from the compound.

Alix snapped out orders. Two of the Tiger Team members, with underslung grenade launchers on their railers, coughed out a pair of projectiles that sailed back toward the lakeshore, each detonating with an ear-splitting crack. She then ordered the Team back into the bush line they’d just emerged from, dragging their wounded comrade with them.

Thorn’s world had been reduced to a few square meters; all he could see was grass. The bizarre blade rounds still buzzed overhead, slicing off greens stalks that bled sap onto Thorn’s body armor.

“Thorn,” Alix shouted. “Pull back to the bush line!”

“Will do!” he called back, “Just as soon—"

He trailed off. Against the snap of railers, the buzz of the fearsome blades, and the occasional blast of a grenade near the lakeshore, Thorn didn’t hear something else, but he experienced it.

From the compound, to his right and behind him, rose a psychic clamor—a shaman gathering power, prior to releasing it in some sort of eldritch working. But something similar, if a little less distinct, simmered down near the lakeshore.

There were two shamans here.

And now, the whole expedition teetered on the brink of disaster. Alix and her Tiger Team were good, but they were no match for a pair of squid shamans.

Thorn wasn’t sure he was, either. If he wasn’t, then this was all going to go to shit pretty fast.

Which meant he had to Shade himself and the Tiger Team from the psychic influence of the squids, while also fending off any magical attacks, and through it all look for an opportunity to take one of the shamans alive.

One. That was the key.

Something rose into Thorn’s view by the lake, over the grass and silhouetted against the sky—a shimmering, silvery column of water. At the same time, a wave of psychic force slammed into Thorn from the direction of the compound, brutal, hard, and raw.

He had to equalize this battle, and fast.

“Alix, pull back!” he shouted, yanking the mag from his railer and tossing the weapon away.

“Not gonna leave you—”

“Do it! Not far, stand ready to come back!”

“Will do.”

Thorn turned back just in time to crash headlong into chaos.

The Nyctus were making an all-out effort to blitz them and win fast, without giving Thorn and Tiger Team Three a meaningful chance to respond. Thorn drew in power with the speed born of desperation, then hurled it back out as a shield against the mental assault from the shaman in the compound. He winced as some of the powerful attack leaked through, like light around a closed door. Compulsions clawed at his mind, trying to find purchase and turn him on his companions. He recrafted his defense into a slippery morass, like grease, against which the squid’s attack slid and deflected.

At the same time, the column of water bent toward him, about to become a battering ram. The logical thing to do was block it, but that would use up whatever capacity Thorn had left—and he knew that playing defense was a losing strategy. Instead, with his remaining strength, Thorn sent out a psychic pulse, gritting his teeth through a suddenly pounding headache, looking for—

There. Not the shaman by the lake, but one of the squid soldiers with him. He buried his will, his awareness, into the squid’s mind, ruthlessly brushing aside the creature’s identity and turning it into an extension of his own will—practically his own body.

Gripping the blade gun, he turned and opened fire, the shuriken-like projectiles spitting out of the weapon directly toward the shaman.

With the last of his own volition, Thorn leapt hard through the grass, toward—nothing, just a random direction. A second later, the water-hammer slammed like a battering ram into the spot he’d been a second before; the impact flattened grass and blasted a muddy crater into the ground. The impact did catch his left foot, making his ankle flare with incandescent pain.

The agony almost broke his already fractured concentration. In a few seconds, the shaman in the compound would batter through his defenses, which would be the end of things. But Thorn focused on the soldier he’d co-opted; the shaman by the lake had already started a frantic ’casting to try to wrest control back, but just a fraction too late.

Whirling blades bit into the pale flesh, vivisecting the alien and dropping it into chunks that wriggled and fell still.

Thorn thudded hard into the grass, finishing his leap. The combined shock of landing, and the white flash of pain in his ankle conspired to make his psychic redoubt falter and crack. The shaman in the compound pounced, driving its consciousness into his, shoving it away into the far regions of mental oblivion, and Thorn couldn’t stop it. For an instant, he lost control, the shaman a sudden and darkly triumphant compulsion manipulating him like a puppet.

Except he had no weapon, and his own magic was, for the moment, all but exhausted. With a burst of frustration, the shaman realized he’d taken control of what amounted to an ordinary, unarmed man. But that wouldn’t last, as the shaman fought for complete and lasting control, forcing Thorn to roll in the grass, digging deep in a desperate struggle to fight off the attack, to fight to even remain who he was—

And then it was all just gone, the effect vanishing, like an intense fever suddenly breaking. It was as though the shaman had just given up and stopped his own magical attack.

For a moment, Thorn just lay there, gasping. Then something buzzed overhead. Shit. The remaining squid soldiers, including the one he’d taken control of, were still near the lake, and were now closing on him. He might have fended off the squids’ magic, but their wicked blade guns would chop him to pieces as effectively as they had the shaman.

“So friggin’ tired of knives,” Thorn muttered, watching a stream of whirling blade rounds hiss overhead. He tried to get back to his feet, but his ankle failed in a blast of pain, and he pitched back into the grass with a groan. The squids’ fire intensified, rapidly coming closer. Above him, their glittering rounds sang a song of merciless intent, cutting the air with keening whistles.

A massive shadow swept overhead. Thorn found himself gaping up at the belly of the Gyrfalcon as it thundered over him. A second later, the point-defense cannon roared, churning the ground between Thorn and the lake into geysers of mud and gory fragments of Nyctus organs.

Thorn rolled over, levered himself to his knees, and scrabbled around for his railer. It took a moment in the tall grass, but he finally found it, snapped a new mag into it, sucked in a breath that tasted like mud and looked around bleary-eyed, in pain, and happier than he’d been in years.

“Alive,” he said, then held his railer out in a hand that wavered from sheer exhaustion. “Alive.”

The Gyrfalcon completed a tight, graceful turn over the lake and zoomed back toward the mining compound. Thorn saw no more squids down near the lake shore; instead, starting about ten meters away from him, a swathe of ground had been battered into muddy craters by the point-defense cannon firing in ground attack mode. He spun back toward the compound, railer raised, sucking in both a real breath and a magical one, ready to block, or at least blunt, another attack from the squid shaman.

The gate swung partway open. Thorn braced himself, wincing around his wounded shoulder and ankle, lined up a shot, then lowered the railer. Alix had poked her head through the gate, giving a thumbs up.

Mumbling dire threats at the Nyctus in general, Thorn dragged himself to his feet—or actually foot, because his injured one would bear almost no weight without sending a blast of pain rocketing up his leg. After unloading his railer, he turned it into a makeshift crutch and hobbled his way toward the gate.

* * *

“Think you broke it, sir,” Toff said, eyeing Thorn’s swollen ankle.

“I didn’t break anything. It was the damned squid with its water hammer,” he shot back. Waves of pain radiated from his purpling ankle. Toff held Thorn’s boot, which suddenly looked far too small to fit back onto the swollen joint.

Thorn lay in the shadow of one of the buildings in the compound, watching as the Tiger Team hefted a litter holding the second, more powerful squid shaman. Alix pointed at the gate, and the Gyrfalcon squatting in the grass beyond it, its idling engines rumbling away. She watched as it was loaded aboard the fighter, then moved to join Thorn and Toff.

Thorn squinted up at her. “How’s your teammate?” He was referring to the Tiger Team soldier who’d been gunned down at the outset of the firefight, their only casualty, thankfully.

Well, aside from Thorn himself, with his punctured shoulder and smashed ankle.

“Stable. That squid blade glanced off his thigh armor, right up into the joint at his waist. One-in-a-million fluke, but there you go.”

Toff had finished applying a liberal coating of first-aid spray on Thorn’s ankle, mainly to dull the pain, and was readying a bandage. “Odds don’t matter in combat,” he said. “Things happen or they don’t.”

“Interesting way of looking at probabilities,” Thorn said. “But you’re right.” He turned back to Alix. “So, just how the hell did you manage to get inside here and incapacitate that shaman? That whole battle was, what, maybe thirty seconds?”

Alix grinned. “More like almost four minutes from first contact.”

Thorn blinked. “No.”

“Yeah.”

“Time doesn’t matter in combat either,” Toff put in, carefully wrapping the bandage around Thorn’s ankle and foot.

“Let me guess, it’s either fast or slow,” Thorn said.

“Pretty much.”

He smiled and looked back at Alix. “Could’ve sworn it was way less than that.”

“Enough time to get to the wall, climb it, and get off some tranq shots off on the squid shaman who was standing right about here,” she said. “I was kind of hoping he’d be tied up dealing with you, and he was.” She narrowed her eyes. “Lesson in that for you, Thorn. You ’casters are freakin’ incredible, but when you’re in the middle of doing what you do, you’re really vulnerable.”

“Yeah, point taken. Facing two of the bastards kind of took everything I had.”

“Anyway, I figured the only way to make sure you didn’t get whacked by the other squids was to call Mol for help. Fortunately, she’s pretty damned smart and had already lifted and gone into a holding pattern when we said we’d reached the compound, just in case we needed her.”

“Huh. Using the—ouch!” He shot a glance at Toff, who shrugged.

“Sorry. You want gentle, find a cuter nurse with small hands.” He’d finished with Thorn’s ankle. “You should be able to walk, more or less. But that foot’s gonna stay bare for now, because there’s no way you’re getting a boot back on it.”

Thorn tilted his head to one side, conflicted by the diagnosis. “Thanks, Toff. Oh, and who says you’re not cute?”

The gruff, bearded soldier grinned back. “Sorry, you’re not my type. I would never date an officer—I got standards.”

Thorn laughed and turned back to Alix. “Using the Gyrfalcon for air support was never part of the plan.”

She shrugged, placid with her facts. “The plan gets you to the battle. Once the shooting starts, you just make it up and hope it works out. Friction of war and all that.”

Thorn nodded, then winced as Toff helped him to his feet. With the man’s help, he hobbled to the Gyrfalcon and awkwardly clambered aboard her. The litter holding the squid shaman had been clamped down to the deck, with the rest of Tiger Team Three squeezing in around it. Thorn gave the creature a grave look, then reached out with a tentative mental touch, testing the shaman’s level of consciousness. He touched a chaotic morass of thoughts and memories and emotions that came together in a pool of otherness, alien and harsh. The neurotoxin obviously worked, preventing the creature from forming any sort of coherent mental actions or responses.

Mol grinned at Thorn as he slumped into the crash couch beside her. “Hey, sir, you’re getting my ship all dirty. Oh, and you stink.”

“Good to see you too, Mol.”

Her grin widened, and she turned back. “Everyone . . . and everything,” she added, looking at the Nyctus, “aboard?”

“Good to go,” Alix called back.

Mol looked at Thorn as she tapped at the controls, then she closed the hatch and spooled up the engines. “Tanner wants the enemy taken back to the Hecate before we do anything else, so we’re headed back up into orbit. He’s going to give us a two-hour window to come back down to the wrecked squid ship and do whatever salvage we can, then we’re getting the hell out of here before the Nyctus show up in force. Oh, and by we, he doesn’t mean you. You’re staying on board the Hecate to babysit our new friend back there.”

Thorn sank back in the couch. “Sounds good to me. I’ve done my planetside thing for this trip.” He closed his eyes as the Gyrfalcon lifted, but opened them again and looked at Mol.

“By the way, thanks for saving my ass down there. Kind of last minute, though.”

“Gotta keep it exciting.”

Thorn laughed and closed his eyes again. By the time they were climbing through the stratosphere, he’d drifted off to sleep.

17

The Hecate’s infirmary proved more than up to the task of getting Thorn back on his feet—both of them—but couldn’t completely undo the damage from his wounds. His shoulder and ankle both still ached, but he could live with it. Had to live with it, because Tanner wasn’t giving him any time to relax. He wanted Thorn on top of the security around the Nyctus shaman, who was being kept drugged with the neurotoxin, securely bound, and kept in an airlock. Tanner made it clear he was going to be taking no chances.

“If you have even a glimmer of suspicion that squid is getting out of control, you sound off, Stellers,” he said. “No heroic attempts to save the day.”

Thorn had been getting himself dressed again in the infirmary. “Understood, sir. I’d only suggest that we hold onto blowing that shaman out of the airlock as an absolute last resort—”

“Last resort? Yes. Absolute? No. If I think it needs to be done, it will be done.”

“Who’s got their finger on the button, sir?”

Tanner had returned a thin smile. “I’m not going to tell you who, or even how many are ready to open that outer door.”

Thorn stared.

“The mind the squid’s most likely to encounter is yours, Stellers. And if you don’t know—”

“Then it can’t find out,” Thorn finished, nodding. “Good idea, sir.”

“Every idea I have aboard this ship is a good one,” Tanner said equably. “The best one aboard, in fact.”

That took Thorn aback, but he caught a rare glimmer of actual humor in the Captain’s eyes.

Mol had returned to the surface, taking Tiger Team Three and an engineering detachment down to the crashed Nyctus ship. Thorn had had to watch on a tactical repeater from the bridge, while keeping close company with their “guest.” It was unlikely that there were any squids, much less more shaman, in or around the crash site; Thorn had reached out and found no signs of life in the area that weren’t indigenous. That, it turned out, was a problem all on its own.

“The Nyctus haven’t destroyed their ship,” Alix said over the comm, as voice-over and imagery from the Gyrfalcon scrolled through a window on the tactical display. Mol was orbiting the fighter over the wreck, keeping a prudent distance. “The rear two thirds of it still look pretty much intact.”

“Maybe they had no way to destroy it,” Thorn said, but Tanner, Mol, and Alix tripped over one another answering. The latter two immediately deferred to Tanner, whose reply was characteristically curt.

“It’s a warship, full of things intended to go boom. The wonder is that it didn’t explode when it hit. That means they chose to not destroy it.”

“Which means it’s probably rigged to explode if we try to enter and recover anything,” Alix said.

“Roger that,” Tanner replied. “And we don’t have time to screw around finding and disarming traps. Wyant, you stay aloft, let your passengers gather as much info as possible remotely. Thirty minutes, then I want you back aboard.”

“Roger, sir,” Mol answered.

Thorn gave a relieved sigh. The whole idea of Alix and her people entering the crashed squid ship, without any clear knowledge about what dangers they might face—including the possibility of more squids—had made him decidedly uncomfortable. He’d become quite attached to Alix, Toff, and the others—not to mention Mol herself, of course—and would have found it tough to deal with losing any of them, especially without being in a position to even try to save them.

Besides, he thought, staring at the unconscious shaman strapped into the airlock, I’ve got this guy to deal with. He—or maybe it was she, if that sort of thing even universally applied to the Nyctus at all—stood to be a far greater intelligence coup than any number of bits and pieces of their technology.

As long as they could keep him alive and under control until they returned to friendly space, that is.

* * *

Thorn blinked slowly, paused outside the bridge, and yawned. He wasn’t sure why he’d been summoned, especially from the brief period of sleep he’d been allocated, before having to settle in again to monitor their prisoner.

He stepped onto the bridge. He’d managed to make himself presentable, uniform and all, just as Captain Samuels of the Apollo would have demanded. Tanner seemed a little more lax, obviously having come from his own rack time, and now dressed in what amounted to PT strip. He hadn’t reclaimed his command seat from the Watch Officer, though, and stood near the comm station, reading something on the display.

“Stellers, over here.”

He crossed the bridge to join Tanner. The XO was also present, a woman of forty named Raynaud. With short dark hair, black eyes, and carved cheekbones, she had a natural air of command. She also looked like she’d just tumbled out of bed.

“Sir? Something wrong?”

Tanner shrugged. “Wrong? Don’t know.” He gestured at the screen.

PRIORITY PRIORITY PRIORITY

MESSAGE BEGINS – ON HECATE ACTION RED – CHANGE COURSE TO INTERCEPT ENEMY VESSEL ON SPECIFIED TRAJECTORY. ENEMY VESSEL IS SUB-CORVETTE CLASS AND IS BROADCASTING DISTRESS BEACON IN CLEAR. YOU ARE CLOSEST SHIP. INVESTIGATE AND REPORT – MESSAGE ENDS. NAV DATA FOLLOWS.

Thorn skimmed over the details of locations, trajectories, and velocities, which mostly meant nothing to him without a star chart to reference. Then he turned to Tanner.

“A squid ship in trouble? Seems pretty suspicious, sir.”

“To put it mildly, no shit, Stellers. But there it is. The sensor telemetry that came appended to this message—which we’ve authenticated, by the way—confirms it. A squid ship, about the tonnage of what we’d consider a sloop, returned to normal space here”—he tapped the display to switch to a star chart depicting the data and pointed at the beginning of a red trajectory track—“and is now traveling this way at high sub-light. On its present course, it’ll make planetfall at Rubicon . . . in about eighty-five years.”

“And broadcasting a distress beacon? In the clear, unscrambled?” Raynaud said. “A defector, maybe?”

“Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing,” Tanner replied, rubbing his chin. “Stellers, thoughts?”

Thorn blinked eyes that still felt full of sand. “A question, actually. Why us? We’re en route back to friendly space with a high-value prisoner. Shouldn’t that take priority? Especially with a squid task force only a few hours behind us—at least, in theory.”

“All very good points,” Tanner replied. “We still can’t confirm if the squids coming to ruin our day at Ballard’s World actually decided to come after us, but we have to assume they have. However, you’ll notice that phrase ACTION RED, along with the fact we’re the closest ON ship. The next closest, the Fury and her patrol, is another full day and a half away. We can be there in about eight hours. That RED doesn’t give me much latitude to question this—as in, none at all.”

“It’s damned lucky that we happened to be the closest ON asset,” Raynaud said. “Maybe too good.”

Tanner nodded. “Exactly. I can’t help but feel that maybe we’re being set up for something here.”

Thorn’s eyes lost focus as he sifted possibilities. “You mean some squid plot to rescue their shaman? Is that even feasible, sir? I’m not a navigator, but isn’t this data saying this sloop would have to have gotten underway about two days ago?”

“That is almost a full day before we even arrived at Ballard’s World,” Raynaud said.

“Sure,” Tanner replied. “And not that long ago, I would have agreed with you, that these things couldn’t be related.” His wintry grin was almost playful. “But that was then, and this is now. I can’t discount the fact that the enemy might have somehow known this was going to happen—that they saw into the future, saw we were going to capture their shaman, and this is their way of getting him back.” His eyes narrowed. “Is that possible, Stellers? Could the squids be able to see into the future?”

Thorn shrugged, palms up. “Doubtful, sir. Magic seems to be constrained by time as much as anything else.”

“Doubtful doesn’t mean no.”

“No. Sorry, sir. It doesn’t,” Thorn admitted. “So probably not?”

“That is absolutely no better.” Tanner rubbed his chin again. “Well, investigating this is going to cost us about a day, but it is still going to get us closer to friendly space.”

“And it’s an order from Fleet,” Raynaud said.

“And it’s an order from Fleet.” Tanner looked at the Rating manning comms, who’d just been trying to stay out of the way while they talked. “Send my acknowledgement back to Fleet, then send this nav data to the Helm.” Tanner turned to the Watch Officer. “As soon as the Helm has the new course data plugged in, go ahead and implement it. I intend to get the remaining sleep I have coming to me.”

The Watch Officer nodded. “Aye, sir.”

Thorn followed Tanner and Raynaud off the bridge, heading for his own bunk.

Time travel?

No.

But they really didn’t know much about what the Nyctus could do.

Thorn let that thought fade, but as he lay in his bunk and stared into nothing, he couldn’t shake a faint, persistent feeling of dread about what they were going to find aboard that rogue Nyctus ship.

* * *

Thorn once more sat cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport, his attention shifting between his awareness of the drugged shaman in the airlock, the tactical display repeater from the bridge, and his immediate surroundings. Sleep had done him a world of good; he hadn’t realized just how much the foray down to the surface of Ballard’s World had depleted him, body and mind. He felt far more in control, and that was despite the aches in his shoulder and ankle. The treatment he’d received from the Hecate’s infirmary had done wonders for both wounds, although he still couldn’t get a boot on his injured foot and had to settle for PT shoes.

“Alcubierre drive cut-off in fifteen seconds,” the Nav Officer said over the intercom.

Tanner immediately spoke up. “All stations, make sure your toes are right on the start line, here. If this looks anything even remotely like a setup, I want to be back underway at plus-light before the Alcubierre cores even had time to cool off.”

Acknowledgements rattled in, crisp and decisive. Everyone was already tensed right to the edge of readiness; Tanner had made his expectations clear during his pre-op briefing an hour earlier, right after an early and abbreviated breakfast. Thorn didn’t need magic to know the man was not happy about this detour, and couldn’t really blame him. The Hecate was alone in the hostile space of the Zone, still a good distance away from friendly space, and had a valuable and potentially dangerous enemy shaman aboard. He’d used the phrase “an abundance of caution” at least a half-dozen times during the twenty minute briefing.

The alarm warning of Alcubierre drive cut-off sounded; a few seconds later, Thorn was hit by that slight, dislocating wrench as the Hecate’s miniature universe vanished and she slid back into the real one.

Thorn watched the repeater. Data immediately began to sluice into the ship’s sensors, the computers rendering it down to an instantly digestible tactical picture.

There it was, about 10,000 klicks distant—a small ship, about a third the size of the Hecate, of definite enemy design. It radiated an entirely unremarkable set of emissions, exactly what would be expected of a small ship underway, coasting on momentum alone, on a fixed trajectory and velocity.

There was nothing else. To the limits of the Hecate’s sensor range, space was utterly empty.

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “You’re on. Talk to me.”

“Aye, sir. Stand by.”

Thorn, his talisman in hand, closed his eyes, surrounded himself with an airtight bubble of identity, and opened the witchport. The curved hatches slid smoothly aside, exposing Thorn to the full weight of hard vacuum and radiation that was space.

Hello again, he thought, as the yawning black filled his sight.

He only felt the hostile environment as a faintly cold sensation, the rest of his awareness expanding as a wave that radiated away. Directionless and powerful, his focus split in two; a small, intense point of magic remaining with the captive shaman. This bit of magical dexterity cost him time, but not much—he was still strong enough to continue questing through the dark for bright points. Each light was the signature of a shaman, their power impossible to hide, entirely, and so Thorn kept on, seeking and drawing near to the flickering lights of alien souls bent on his destruction. As to resolution, there was little, but he didn’t need it. The lights were fuzzed but present, and that was good enough for a ‘caster of Thorn’s range and ability.

Despite Tanner’s abundance of caution, Thorn opened his power wider still, like the cowl of an ancient lamp spilling light across a darkened room. There, he saw the Hecate, then the little Nyctus ship, and no other sources close enough to matter.

Yes. There.

Thorn opened mental eyes wider, his vision piercing the dark with the fury of his stored magic. He took a moment to confirm what he’d found, then ended his psychic foray into space and opened his actual eyes, blinking them at the abrupt transition.

“Captain, Stellers here.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, I’m only sensing one living being aboard that squid ship.”

Tanner must have caught the tension in Thorn’s voice. “More information sooner, if you please, Stellers.”

Thorn looked at the image of the Nyctus ship locked into the middle of the tactical display.

“Whoever’s aboard that ship, sir, it’s not a squid. They’re human.”

* * *

Thorn settled himself into the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit, a much more unwieldy process this time, thanks to the bulk of the assault EVA suit. A combination of vac-suit and armor, he’d only donned the cumbersome suit—better known as vac-armor—three or four times in his career. Once for orientation training, with every other instance being a refresher session to keep him current. He’d never actually worn the suit into battle, or for anything that wasn’t strictly controlled training, in fact, and never really expected he would. Boarding actions were complicated, high-risk affairs, rarely launched and then only by dedicated marines trained and equipped to fight in airless no-g.

He took a breath and rested his bulky helmet in his lap. First time for everything.

“Everyone comfy,” Mol called out once she and Trixie had finished the Gyrfalcon’s pre-flight checklist.

Thorn gave a thumbs up. Alix banged the back of Mol’s crash couch.

“Tiger Team Three’s good to go,” she said.

That made Thorn feel better, at least. He felt an affinity for Alix’s tough little outfit, having developed that cohesive bond of trust and respect that turned a group of soldiers into a team. It didn’t surprise Thorn at all that Alix and her people were fully vac-armor qualified; Tanner had decided to send them to the squid ship and keep the Hecate’s single squad of marines back in reserve. If they were needed, they’d cross the gap in the destroyer’s shuttle.

But there was only a single life-form aboard the squid ship, apparently human. That should be well within the capabilities of the ON’s most potent Starcaster, and one of its more skilled and accomplished spec ops teams, to deal with.

That diffuse feeling of dread had only intensified, like someone slowly turning up the power on a weapon getting ever closer to an explosive discharge.

“Gyrfalcon, Hecate flight control. You’re clear to launch.”

Mol acknowledged. Once the hangar doors were fully open, she applied a puff of thrusters, and eased the fighter into space.

When they were clear to maneuver, Mol accelerated the Gyrfalcon toward the distant Nyctus ship. It would be nearly a half-hour flight; Tanner had kept the Hecate well clear of the enigmatic craft, much further away than was normal for a boarding action. That was his abundance of caution once more at work.

“Stellers,” came Tanner’s voice. “I’m on privately with you. Got a question for you, and I want you to take your time answering.”

“Aye, sir,” Thorn mumbled into his suit mic.

“When you left, you didn’t make eye contact with me. I’ve been around for a year or two, and that means one of two things. You’re guilty of something, or you suspect something. Which is it? Because I have some thoughts,” Tanner said.

“I—you’re right, sir. The latter. Call it my magical cynicism,” Thorn said.

“Anything to do with Wixcombe?”

“She’s a part of it, certainly, but it’s more a state of being on high alert. I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really don’t like what I’m not seeing,” Thorn admitted.

“Same here. I trust a good firefight. I don’t enjoy surprises, which is why this war is making me lose my youthful enthusiasm. Anything you can do beyond going into that ship?”

“No, sir. That’s the solution.”

“Then keep your head on a swivel, and me in the loop. Tanner out.”

“Okay,” Mol said, cutting into Thorn’s silent moment, “we’re here. All non-revenue passengers disembark, please!”

Alix gave yet another thumbs up, then she and the Tiger Team Three, enclosed in their clumsy vac-armor, exited through the Gyrfalcon’s airlock in pairs. A true assault shuttle would allow a whole platoon to disembark at once, but the fighter was just that—a fighter. Dismounting in pairs during a boarding action would normally be suicide.

Thorn gave Mol a cheery smile as he picked up his helmet. “Wish me luck out there in that hard, cold, life-destroying vacuum.”

“You’ll be fine,” Mol said, but her own smile suddenly faded. “But be careful, okay? Got a funny feeling about this one.”

Thorn paused, his helmet lifted partway to his head. Mol wasn’t a talent, but that didn’t mean she was free of instincts. Rather than add to her alarm, he chose to smile and suit up. “Bet on it.”

“Good.” She clapped him on the chest and turned back to her station, but her eyes were troubled. The look didn’t fit her face.

Thorn moved to the airlock. As the inner door cycled closed behind him, he could see through the small viewport that Alix’s team had already strung a tether between the Gyrfalcon and the squid ship, and were now working on getting its airlock open. Toff, who was accompanying Thorn across, smacked Thorn’s arm to get his attention and said, “Buddy check.”

They each examined the other’s vac-armor as the airlock depressurized. This was SOP; any telltale puffs of vapor might indicate a leak that could take time to register on the suit’s own pressure gauges. Everything seemed good, though.

Toff looked through the visor, straight into Thorn’s eyes. “Okay, sir. I’m with you all the way across. You start to run into trouble, you just sing out and I’ll be there for ya.”

Thorn estimated the distance and pointed. “Glad to hear it. Do I have permission to accelerate you using magic?”

“I—uh—”

“Kidding. I appreciate the backup. We’ll be fine,” Thorn said.

“Oh. Heh. Ah, you’re kidding. Good,” Toff said, looking like anything but a highly trained killer. Then Thorn grinned, the door opened—

—Thorn stepped into nothing, and flew.

18

The crossing had been far easier than Thorn had expected; with a carabiner hooked onto the tether and Toff right there, he was really in no danger. Mol had put the Gyrfalcon into station keeping, Trixie periodically shooting a brief stream of exhaust from a thruster to maintain their position, but the two ships could have been parked on a tarmac.

Thorn reached the enemy ship. He’d kept his eyes fixed on the far end of the tether, not trusting himself to look around, into the big black, for fear of a surge of vertigo that often afflicted those not used to it. He was surprised, and pleased, to find that the Tiger Team had already opened up the squid ship, so he was able to step right into the airlock at the other end.

He found Alix and her people just inside, weapons raised, the barrels trained up and down a short corridor. The stubby jet guns were specifically made for no-g work, soft-launching their projectiles, which then accelerated by means of a built-in booster motor. They were short range weapons, meant for close fighting. Each round used a small shaped charge warhead, rather than kinetic energy, to deliver their punch. Thorn noticed that the squid ship indeed lacked artificial gravity but, based on his suit’s heads-up data, had a breathable atmosphere. Still, Alix insisted they stay sealed in their suits, probably a sensible precaution.

“Any insights, Thorn?” Alix asked.

He touched the suit pocket containing his talisman. It was a less perfect way of interacting with the old book than actual, physical contact, but even such a ‘virtual’ touch gave him a sense of focus. Once more, he extended his senses, and felt nothing. There was nothing living aboard—

There.

He pointed forward. “The life sign is that way.”

“Then that’s the way we go.” She sent a SITREP back to Mol, who relayed it to the Hecate, then led the way forward.

Thorn followed the Tiger Team, with only Toff behind him, bringing up the rear. They passed through a compartment, then along another corridor. Something immediately jumped out as they progressed.

“This ship has been stripped,” Toff said.

Thorn ran a hand along exposed conduits, truncated power distribution nodes, and dangling skeins of what appeared to be optical cable. It quickly became clear that the ship was essentially an empty shell, devoid of anything even resembling an intact system.

Thorn’s unease only grew.

They reached the forwardmost compartment, the bridge. The human life-sign emanated from here.

Alix gestured a couple of men from her team forward. They paused at the door, breaching charges ready.

“Hang on,” Thorn said. “Just try to use the door control.”

One of the pair looked at Alix, who gave a thumbs up. The vac-armored figure returned the signal, then turned back and tapped at the door control.

The door slid open.

“Just like the airlock,” Alix said. “Nothing on this ship has been locked down.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “That’s because this isn’t a defector or anything like that. This is deliberate. This is a delivery.”

“A delivery of what?” Alix asked.

Thorn pointed, suddenly certain. “Whoever’s in there.”

He saw Alix stare back at him through her faceplate for a moment, then transmit another SITREP. Mol acknowledged, and Tiger Team Three entered the bridge.

“Clear!” Alix called.

Toff tapped Thorn; he rose from his crouch and followed the team in. He immediately saw that the bridge, like the rest of the ship, was entirely stripped of anything but a single console, which had been cabled into several stations. Thorn didn’t need to be an engineer to know it was nav, helm, propulsion, and probably life-support. Nothing else was needed for what the squids had done here.

Alix gestured forward to the command seat. Thorn saw a figure strapped into it—a man, unconscious but alive.

“Any idea who this is?” Alix asked.

Thorn looked at the face but didn’t recognize him. He was clad in a tattered stealth suit, garb meant for ground combat on a planetary surface. That was it.

Thorn shook his head, and his sense of dread lifted another notch, convincing him that he was now part of something bigger, and too close to see it in its entirety.

“No idea,” Thorn said, slowly, letting his eyes linger on the man’s features.

Alix looked around. “Let’s get him out of here and back to the Hecate. They should be able to ID him back there.”

Thorn nodded but said nothing. There was ’casting, and then there was instinct. Right now, both were telling him something wasn’t right.

* * *

“Facial recognition IDs him as Jack Gillis,” Tanner said, arms crossed. Specialist, Orbital Navy, service number 24786-A.” He glanced sidelong at Thorn. “He’s apparently one of your people, a Starcaster. You sure you don’t know him?”

Thorn stared at the face behind the glass of the quarantine booth. The man—Gillis, apparently—had been brought aboard via a sealed litter, then placed in the booth, against the possibility of contagion. He was still unconscious; the Hecate’s med staff were trying to figure out why.

“Sorry, sir. There aren’t a lot of Starcasters I know. Maybe a few hundred now in all. But that’s still a lot more than I’ve met personally.”

“Well, unfortunately we don’t have any other info about him,” Tanner went on. “For obvious security reasons, we don’t carry data about individual personnel who aren’t actually assigned to the Hecate. Any other personnel data we have is solely for ID purposes.” He glanced at Thorn again. “Mainly to ID bodies.”

Thorn nodded. “Aye, sir. I kinda got that.”

“Well,” Tanner said, “our Chief Engineer has gone over that squid ship. It’s just a hulk. Its trans-light drive was destroyed, apparently by an explosive charge, when it went sub-light, so even if we wanted to pilot it back to friendly space, we can’t. We’re going to destroy it, then get underway. Unless you can think of any reason we should hang around here—and it would have to be a damned compelling reason for me to say yes.”

Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. I—”

Tanner raised a brow. “Something wrong, Stellers? Something I should know about?”

He shook his head again. “No. Or—I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“That’s three answers to my question, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir. I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else going on here. Something bigger than what we’re seeing.”

Tanner sighed. “Don’t suppose you could be even a little more specific.”

“Sir, in a word, no.”

“Well, if you do—”

“Captain Tanner?” a voice cut in. It was a med tech who was inside the quarantine booth and bundled up in a hermetic suit. “There’s something here.”

Tanner waited, but the tech just kept working with deliberate slowness, extracting something from a pocket on Gillis’s stealth suit.

“Don’t like being kept waiting,” Tanner snapped, but he froze as the tech turned, holding a small object in the jaws of forceps.

Tanner cursed. Thorn went rigid with anger, hands curling into fists.

It was a severed human finger.

* * *

Thorn tried to make himself comfortable in the Hecate’s witchport, sitting cross-legged on the cushioned deck and letting the quiet of the stars wash over him. But his mind was in turmoil. Time and patience were in short supply when waiting on a squid plot to develop, and Thorn was convinced that was exactly what he was asking himself to do: wait and see.

For a ’caster, neither were good options. For a Navy, the same.

“All stations, stand by,” Tanner said. “Tactical, you are weapons-free.”

Thorn fixed his attention on the squid ship. Tanner intended to destroy it, but the squid wouldn’t care. The hulk had served their purpose, delivering the man named Gillis to them, along with his horrific cargo.

Not one severed human finger, but three.

And none of them were his. That suggested that the Nyctus had three more people in captivity. There were no records of captives being taken in any intel reports, but the Hecate’s database was several days out of date now, failing to update as they were outside real-time comms range of the nearest ON installation. Alix also pointed out that if Gillis had been involved in something spooky, an op run by spec ops, there’d be no open record of it anyway. That said, when Tanner had asked her if she knew Gillis, she’d shaken her head.

“No, sorry sir. But we’re so compartmentalized, I could step on the toes of someone from another Tiger Team and never recognize them.”

Thorn had wanted to see if he could sense any lingering residue of identity in the severed digits, but the Hecate’s surgeon insisted they, like Gillis, stay in quarantine. But Thorn needed direct contact with them to be able to detect anything useful, and Tanner wanted him at his station, in the witchport, so they could haul ass, as the Captain had put it, to friendlier space. Experiments would have to wait, in favor of completing the Hecate’s mission.

So Thorn once more had to shove his feelings of dreadful anticipation aside, at least until they got close to Code Gauntlet and the risk of contact with the Nyctus was no longer high.

The Hecate shuddered as her railguns opened up. A brief burst of fire was enough to smash the squid ship to shattered debris.

“Confirm target destroyed,” the Tactical Officer announced.

“Alright. Nav, let’s be on our way,” Tanner said. At once, the stars began to wheel around the witchport as the Hecate aligned herself, prior to lighting up the Alcubierre drive.

Once that was done, the Hecate would warp her way back to Code Gauntlet. When they arrived, Thorn resolved to contact Kira—conventionally or telepathically, it didn’t matter. He’d find her, reach her, and put the distant screams to rest. He would purge the psychic baggage of his visions, and he’d do it on Code Gauntlet. The sheer depth and reality of his visions troubled him in ways magic had never done before, and Kira’s ensuing silence was like throwing fuel on the fire.

One word, and I’ll know. And then I can cleanse this feeling, he thought. Beyond, the stars and universe hissed and popped in their eternal song, soft and ever-changing in his senses.

The starfield stopped rotating. In a moment, the Alcubierre drive would twist the space around Hecate into her own little pocket universe, a faster-than-light ripple in reality itself—

Stellers.

He jumped at the single word. It cracked like a whip in his mind, Densmore’s psychic voice ringing with urgent authority.

I’m here, ma’am. Did you find out anything about Specialist Wixcombe?

A pause. A long one, leaving Thorn expectant and edgy.

Yes. However, I have security concerns about discussing this, even this way. We should wait until you return to Code Gauntlet.

Ma’am, we’ve never had any indication anyone could eavesdrop on this sort of communication. Why now? What’s going on?

Stellers, I really think—

Ma’am. You’re the one contacting me. The only reason you’d be hesitating after doing that is because you’re having second thoughts. And you wouldn’t be having second thoughts unless there wasn’t something wrong. It might be against the nature of this business, but I’m asking you for the truth. In as few words as possible.

Thorn braced himself as the stars sang into the quiet.

Stellers, look. There are aspects to this that you just aren’t cleared to know.

Bullshit. The curse rang out across the darkness before Thorn could stop it.

Stow that, Specialist. You’re not—

I know what I am, and I know when I’m being lied to. You forget, ma’am, I was a castoff. A forgotten kid, leftover and worthless. I know bullshit when I hear it, so spare us both the indignity of your lying.

Silence.

Tell me what you can about Kira. I don’t give a shit about any of your other secrets. I kept my promise to you about operational methods. I’m asking you to keep yours, Thorn said.

What promise?

The one you made when you took your commission. To protect the Navy and all of us. Remember?

A sigh echoed across the miles, long and frustrated. Thorn could feel her roiling emotions leaking through even though she tried to contain them.

An opportunity presented itself to us.

I’m listening, ma’am, Thorn prompted.

We judged Wixcombe and several of the ’casters training with her to be perfect for this op. So, we tasked her to command a team of three other ’casters. She did it.

Thorn shook his head. A special op—ma’am, Kira’s a line officer, like me. She’s not trained in special ops—

Stellers, you’ve been doing almost nothing but special ops since you finished basic training at Code Nebula. And it’s not like we’re talking about recruits here. Wixcombe was already a serving Lieutenant when she brought you into the ON.

He took a breath. Okay, all fair points. Thinking of Kira as somehow unready was childish. She was an officer. She was tough.

In any case, Densmore went on, she was given the tasking she was given. We’re fighting a war here, Stellers, so we all do what we have to do.

So what happened?

Then it hit him like a rail gun shot. Kira had gone on this op with three other people. A total of four.

And Gillis had three severed fingers jammed into his pockets.

Wixcombe and her detachment were engaged in conducting a rehearsal for their op. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that the Nyctus conducted a raid in the middle of things. It was very targeted and very deliberate, to the extent that we can’t rule out the possibility that it was the actual objective of a whole series of raids that happened about the same time. The squids might have been trying to confuse us as to their true purpose, by launching—

Ma’am, to repeat. What happened? Thorn asked her, but all of that strange, diffuse dread was suddenly beginning to coalesce. That menacing figure looming behind him was stepping into view.

The Nyctus arrived in force. They knocked aside a pair of frigates that had been assigned as cover, then used surgical KEW strikes to take out command and support for the rehearsal exercise.

Thorn sagged, trying to catch his breath. KEWs had killed his family and ended his childhood, and now they’d taken Kira from him, too.

Except, no. This would be worse than death, in its own special, terrible way.

Then, Densmore went on, they landed and, as near as we can tell, took Wixcombe and her detachment prisoner. Then they left. That’s all we know.

There it was. That sinister presence that had been his lurking shadow now stood before him, revealed in all of its terrible truth.

A long moment passed with Thorn as empty and cold as space.

The nav alarm sounded. The Hecate was about to fire up her Alcubierre drive.

Thorn ignored it. He ignored everything.

Until he didn’t, and a vast swell of emotion erupted like a supernova, filling that cold void inside him with incandescent heat.

Rage. Fear. Frustration.

Guilt.

Thorn had to get to Kira. He had to save her, rescue her from the Nyctus, who could be doing anything to her.

Thorn threw his consciousness out into the cosmos, desperately seeking Kira, even a flicker of her as he howled into the dark, his rage taking shape, twisting, pitching, and tearing at the fabric that carried the Hecate forward on her great engines. Thorn’s rage caught their speed, passed it, rendered it silent, and seized the ship in a cocoon of his anger, flawed and dark and moving.

The Hecate’s Alcubierre drive activated, but instead of warping herself toward Code Gauntlet, the drive and the ship rode on Thorn’s cataclysmic power, and the stars changed in a smear of wan light, leaving concepts like speed and location far behind.

19

Kira dragged herself to a sitting position, propped against the cold alloy bulkhead of her cell. She took a moment just to breathe.

Then she spit blood and laughed, smearing the repulsive gobbet with a foot.

There was no humor in it. There wasn’t even an elementary particle of humor in any of this. But she still found it funny.

The Nyctus couldn’t break her.

Or, more specifically, they couldn’t break through her psychic defenses, which rose around her titanic, unmoving—implacable. They were an extension of the power blooming in a magical center, a place that had always been there, but never truly tapped. A new place. A dangerous place, for the Nyctus.

Physical torture hadn’t worked. If anything, it forced her inside, to explore the halls of power that continued to rise, running into the deepest recesses of her mind even as nerve endings shut down, refusing to play their part any longer.

The squids gave up on that and tried shifting tactics. They began torturing Rainer and Riley in front of her.

In desperation, Kira tried offering them information, something to get them to stop abusing her friends. But she really didn’t know much of any value—nothing that seemed to satisfy the squids, anyway. She begged and pleaded with them to find out just what it was they did want to know, but they remained mute. And still that psychic barrier endured, an unbreakable wall sealing off her mind.

Then the Nyctus abruptly changed tactics again, encircling her with several powerful shamans who bathed her mind in raw destructive force—unfocused, savage energy far different than the carefully crafted attacks that tried to invade any cracks in her defenses. The air hummed with a discharge as their massed attack rose and fell in waves, each subsequent attack spiraling to new heights of punishing fury.

They failed.

And that was what was so humorlessly funny about this. Kira had been able to hold out against the most extreme suffering of both body and mind—and she wasn’t even sure how she did it. It was as though there was another presence deep inside her, one unfazed by her horrifying situation.

She let her head slump against the wall. For a while, she just sat like that, knees drawn up, eyes closed, trying to think of nothing, nothing at all—

Kira’s eyes blinked open. Wait. There was a cloud of silence around her.

Mental silence.

For days, she’d been pummeled with attacks of every kind—frontal, mass incursions by more than one shaman, sly, sideways attempts, prying at the edges of her mind, but always an attack. Always a need to defend.

But now, there was nothing. Her mind was blessedly empty of strife and turmoil. It was just her, Kira Wixcombe, inside her own head.

They’d tried to use Rainer and Riley—but not Gillis, for some reason—against her. Or, more correctly, use her fondness for friendship with them as a lever to break her. But they hadn’t similarly tried to use her against them, for one simple reason.

The squids weren’t interested in using her to apply pressure to Rainer or Riley because they weren’t really interested in them. A Hammer and a Scorch were potent in their own ways, but the Nyctus seemed to be more than capable of producing inordinately powerful elemental and physical effects with magic already. They were also potent Joiners.

But so was Kira. Her Joining was a similar kind of magic to their variety. She sat up, her stomach growling impolitely, reminding her that she was hungry and thirsty. Other than a repulsive nutrient paste that tasted of salt and dirty laundry, she’d had nothing. Licking her lips, she settled herself, reinforcing one thought, one purpose.

One truth.

Everything the Nyctus tried had failed.

She remained unbroken. Hungry, sore, angry, and wounded, but unbroken—and retaining enough of her facilities to begin piecing things together. Hints. Shadows. Whispers, in a tongue she didn’t need to understand to use, gaining mental traction as she worked carefully toward a conclusion she knew the squid wanted hidden from her mind’s eye.

Kira had one resource at her disposal, and it was something so dangerous even considering it made a chill climb her spine, unwelcome but energizing.

Lots to lose, she thought. Squaring her shoulders, she tried to regain some measure of comfort, breathing carefully for every part of her body. In great, gusty sighs, she filled her lungs to bursting, fizzing her mind with an energy born of desperation.

She took a final deep breath. Only one way to find out.

* * *

Kira almost toppled into disaster.

While experimenting with what seemed to be far more psychic potential than she’d realized, trying to consciously shape it into something other than a wall, the squids tried probing her thoughts.

As soon as she felt the first brush of an alien mind against hers, she panicked and almost prevented her psyche from properly erecting its own defenses. Only on the very edge of being too late did she surrender control to her mind’s construction, a soaring power that grew naturally from within, as easily as her earlier deep breaths. She had the measure of it now, a fine-tuned strength that expanded with each push of her mind, flowing outward in fits and starts.

In seconds, she faced her first test.

The incoming probe crashed headlong into the barrier as soon as it was in place. Nerves humming, she sat still, her mind as quiet as it could be, wondering if the squid detected her efforts—

—or it was a standing attempt to infiltrate her mind. Feeling her way, she decided that yes, it was merely a barrier left in place by the Nyctus, no doubt maintained by junior shamans who were tired, distracted, or both.

She let her nerves settle, growing confident enough to try again with great care. Drawing from the deep pool of her own power, she deliberately weakened her defenses to try sending out a tendril of thought, seeing if she could scry anything about her surroundings. A crack in her armor through which she sent a thought, nebulous, wandering, and thin.

Wispy, her presence drifted, and Kira began to touch other minds, squids elsewhere in this complex, or station, or wherever she was. And maybe that was a good first goal, finding out exactly where the Nyctus had brought her. First, she would find a where. Then, she could craft an escape, or at minimum, an attack of her own. She vowed that no matter what her fate, it would not be without a high cost to the squid. Of that, she was certain.

It took hours of slow, methodical effort, her touch lighter than a whisper, and with the motion of a shadow. Any time she felt her awareness brush against something she thought might be a shaman, she hastily withdrew, as though touching something hot. Eventually, she began to get a feel for what she was trying to do and started probing a little more vigorously, moving her mental presence from a zephyr to a soft wind, shifting, fleeing, never in one place for too long.

Clever. Fleeting. Watchful.

She became much better at detecting countervailing attempts by the squids to probe her in return. It proved to be as simple as just stopping whatever she was trying to do. Her mind, driven by primal instinct, simply and instantly slammed those impenetrable shields into place, a gray wall of nothing that the squid saw, in their mind, as empty space

Exhausted, she reached her limit and had to rest, arms slicked with sweat, her brow aching from being furrowed with effort. She leaned back, thinking to sleep—

—the world became a blur of hissing, oppressive weight, an acrid, bestial stink, jagged claws striking again and again—

Kira gasped herself from the twilight of near-sleep she’d entered. No surprise she’d drifted off—utter exhaustion tended to do that. And given the circumstances, she could probably forgive herself for having nightmares. But this had been so clear, more like a memory recalled in vivid detail, right down to the alien odor of a predator beyond her memory or understanding.

Her brow creased again, anger suffusing her cheeks. It had felt real—but also detached, as though it hadn’t been happening to her, but to someone else. Violence once removed.

She exhaled, hard, and simply lapsed back into half-consciousness. The arrival of more nutrient paste and water roused her; the paste tasted like wet cardboard, but she made herself eat every molecule of it to keep her strength at something more than collapsed in a heap.

Then she resumed her psychic experimentation. She had miles to go in her mind before she could make the Nyctus pay. With her eyes half-closed, Kira drew her intentions to a point and began to wander again, ghost steps through a land littered with the bright, hateful minds of her captors.

* * *

A breakthrough.

It had turned out to be deceptively easy. Kira was finding it laborious to the point of exhaustion to cajole her newly empowered Joining to accomplish what she wanted. It was, she thought, like chiseling marble, trying to craft a statue—slow, demanding, and frustrating. Exasperated and ready to give up, at least for now, Kira essentially just wished to realize what she was trying to do and enter the mind of a squid that wasn’t a shaman.

So she did.

It was a moment of stunning revelation. She’d been focusing on the process when she should have been focusing on the result. Just as her mind knew how to protect itself in a reflexive way, like jerking that burnt hand back from that hot surface, it knew what it needed to do to give her the result she wanted. She just had to concentrate on what that result was.

Results first, and her mind would follow.

“Huh,” she murmured. An officer who dealt with naval matters for most of her career, the idea that magic could craft reality was still nearly as alien to her as the Nyctus. And yet, the realization moved her much further ahead than all her previous work. In a moment of unalloyed joy, she found herself in a Nyctus mind, riding along like a passenger peering out through the alien’s senses.

The squid knew nothing.

Kira withdrew, then waited and stared at the door. She needed to know if the Nyctus had somehow detected this inaugural use of her new powers.

Nothing.

She let herself mentally roam again, jumping from one alien to another. As she did, she started to build up a picture of where she was—an orbital platform over a world that seemed to be mostly water, frozen into colossal ice fields at the poles. More importantly, though, she was able to start assembling bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned from the blissfully unaware squids into a growing intelligence picture.

One squid had arrived on a cruiser that was redeploying to another sector.

Another was awaiting a ship that would bring it to that same location.

A third squid was engaged in the Nyctus equivalent of logistics planning, seeing to the movement of helium-3 fuel to—again, that same place.

Something significant was happening in that sector that seemed to be preoccupying a lot of the squids’ attention.

Busy squid. Think I’ll keep looking.

Kira was pondering this when the door to her cell slid open and a procession of Nyctus entered. She started to stand, but two of the creatures shoved her back to the floor, one of them striking her with a truncheon that also delivered a powerful electric shock in a dazzling blue flash. Her legs and right arm went instantly numb, and a thin, shrill whine filled her head. Her right arm was pinned, her hand splayed out. Then some sort of blade, glowing like the exhaust cone of a fusion drive, fell. Kira screamed, or tried to—

But all that came out was a strangle cry as the blade neatly severed her middle finger and cauterized the wound with a whiff of burned flesh. A blast of exquisite pain flashed up her arm, despite the numbness, and turned her mind dark and blank.

20

Thorn blinked and found himself looking up into sterile, white light. He wondered if he was dead? But wasn’t death supposed to be all about white lights?

“Specialist Stellers?”

Apparently, death also sounded like the Hecate’s ship surgeon, Quinn.

He turned his head and found the doc looking down at him. “Specialist Stellers? Tell me your first name.” Her cherubic face was lined with worry.

“Uh, Thorn, last time I checked.”

The doc nodded, then raised his voice. “Captain Tanner? Stellers is awake.”

The reply was curt. “On my way.”

Thorn sat up and stared around blankly. “What happened? How did I get here?”

“Some damned magical thing I don’t pretend to understand,” Quinn replied. “What do you remember?”

Thorn’s eyes lost focus as he tried to reclaim memories that were faded, or outright fragments. “I was in the witchport. The Hecate was just about to get underway—”

Tumblers clicked in his mind. And remembering became surging panic.

“Kira!”

Quinn grabbed Thorn’s shoulders and locked gazes with him. “Stellers. Focus. I have orders from Captain Tanner that if you start to show any signs of instability, I’m to pump a shot of sedative into that IV in your arm.”

Thorn stared for a moment, breath caught in his chest. “Kira. Wixcombe. The squids have her.”

“I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that Orderly Verdin there has her finger on the sedative button and is a heartbeat away from pressing it.”

Thorn turned to where Quinn had gestured. Sure enough, a medical Rating stood with her finger literally resting on the IV’s controller, her face a mask of cool professionalism.

Thorn paused, licked his lips. “Okay. Yeah. I get it.” He looked up, eyes regaining some semblance of focus. “Look, I’m not going to lose control—”

“A little late for that,” a new voice snapped. Tanner strode into the infirmary, his face tinged red with anger.

Thorn blinked at him. “Sir, I—”

“Don’t talk, Stellers,” Tanner said. “Listen. I don’t know what you did, but somehow you moved us.”

Thorn blinked again. “Moved?”

“Moved. We activated the Alcubierre drive at about the same instant you had some kind of magical meltdown. So, instead of a relatively sedate, trans-light flight back to friendly space, we’re somewhere else entirely.”

“I don’t understand. Where are we?”

“That’s a damned good question. Nav is trying to find reference pulsars so we can fix our location. So far, we’ve located two, which is enough to tell us we’re somewhere spinward and closer to the galactic core than we were. That narrows it down to an area the size of we’re screwed.” Tanner leaned closer, his glare intensifying. “So you tell me, Stellers. You answer your own question. Where are we?”

Thorn just stared back. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know.”

“Okay, how about this? What the hell happened?”

Thorn thought back to those last moments in the witchport. “I was in the ’port, reaching out—”

“Where?” Tanner asked. “I need details, not this vague bullshit. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. I . . . I was reaching out, using my awareness, and I detected Kira Wixcombe. I know it was her, and I know she was in grave danger. If you ask me for evidence, I can’t produce it, no more than I can show you magic as a material. I can only show you results,” Thorn said.

“You’re shitting me,” Tanner said flatly.

“No, sir. I heard her, and—”

Tanner rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in furious frustration. “And you reached out and dragged us through space-time with this friggin’ magic you use like an unshielded bomb.”

“I did, sir. I heard her, and I knew she was—"

“Stellers!”

The single word cut through Thorn’s reverie like a knife.

“Sir?” Thorn found it hard to meet Tanner’s eyes. Kira was out there, and he had the means to find her. To save her, and to kill Nyctus while doing it, if only he could be let off the leash.

“Listen to me, Specialist. You will not lose it on me. Not again!” Tanner stepped forward, his presence a growing storm. “You are responsible for what has happened. As one of her crew and an officer, you are responsible for this ship, for the welfare of it and its crew, and for its ability to wage war against our enemies. That is your duty. Do you understand?”

“I—” Thorn finally nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Bullshit. I don’t think you do. You’ve become target-locked on your friend. You’ve lost situational awareness. Ask Wyant about that. She’s a fighter pilot, she lives and dies by knowing or not knowing what’s going on around her. And right now, you don’t.” Tanner drove on, implacable, not giving Thorn an instant to react. “That’s when soldiers die, Stellers. And that’s when they get other soldiers killed. Now, I don’t give a shit if it’s a friend fallen in battle, or captured, or a loved one dead, or someone who’s been dumped by their partner. It all comes down to the same thing once you step through that airlock, onto my ship. You have a job to do, and you do it, and you don’t get target-locked on anything that will get in the way of that.”

Thorn nodded once, looking the captain in the eye.

But Tanner wasn’t done.

“Now, it’s bad enough when a Rating, or a systems engineer, or someone like that loses it. But you, Stellers—you’re a special case. You can bend and twist reality. You can steer asteroids with your mind. You lose it, and we end up catapulted who knows where. So, I need to know, Stellers, right now—can you guarantee me, one hundred percent, that you will focus on your job? And I mean one hundred percent, so you’d better be honest, not just with me, but with yourself. Because if you can’t, then we face a really serious decision—what to do with you.”

Thorn lifted his gaze back to Tanner’s. The man said no more, but Thorn knew what he meant. It was an unspoken promise, not a threat.

Thorn took a deep breath. “Sir, you’re right.”

“No argument here.”

“I am still affected by what’s happened to Kira. But I won’t let that get in the way of doing my job.”

Thorn spoke as honestly as he could. Tanner and the ship deserved it, and he truly did not want to let this man down again.

Tanner maintained his stare for a gravid moment, then nodded. “If you’d tried to tell me you were over what’s happened to your friend and you’d just get on with the job, I’d have relieved you of your duties and put you under guard right then.” The man’s face softened. “War is a horrible, miserable experience for us all, Stellers. It leaves us all dragging ghosts along behind us. But while we’re out here, in the shit, that’s where they have to stay—behind us. Not forgotten, always in our thoughts—but out of sight. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“This time, I believe you. Okay, so now that that’s done, we can move onto the next problem. We could be anything from days, to weeks, to months away from home. We won’t know for sure until we get a decent fix on our present location. I can live with days if I have to. Weeks or months are a no-go. Not only do I not want to keep the Hecate out of action that long, I don’t want to try and keep that squid under wraps the whole time.”

Quinn, who’d been trying to look like she was busy and not overhearing their entire conversation, cut in, her dark eyes hooded with concern.

“We don’t have anywhere near enough of that tranq we’re using on it to last more than a few days anyway, sir. And the thing seems stable, but keeping it drugged up like that much longer is probably going to have long-term health effects.”

“Not that I especially care about its health,” Tanner spat. “But I’d rather not deliver a corpse to the ON spooks. That doesn’t really matter, anyway, because we’ve got about thirty days of food and potable water aboard, so that’s the clock we’re on. So, Stellers, since you got us into this, can you get us back out?”

Thorn glanced once at the man named Gillis, thought about the severed fingers he’d been carrying, then knew he had no answer—at that moment. “I don’t know, sir. I’m going to have to take some time to work that out.”

“Then get started, Lieutenant. Keeping an eye on that squid and getting us back home, that’s your job. Everything else takes a back seat—well, except for one thing, first. You say you talked to Captain Densmore. And you did it live, despite us being well outside the twenty-five light-year range of normal, real-time comms. Can you do that again, and let her know what’s happened?”

“I’ll get right on that, sir.”

Tanner nodded again. “Very well. Get to work, Specialist. Dismissed.”

Thorn hesitated, then offered his Captain the sharpest salute he could manage.

* * *

Five weeks.

That was how long the Hecate, using her Alcubierre drive, would take to return to ON space. The Nav Officer had finally pinned down four reference pulsars, confirming their identity by their unique and very specific rotational periods, giving them their current location to within a light-year. Since the speed at which an Alcubierre wave propagated through space-time was a function of the power used to generate it, the Chief Engineer figured he might be able to get that closer to four, if Tanner was willing to shut down everything not considered absolutely essential to getting the crew home alive.

Except there was a problem. Thorn’s uncontrolled release of magic had apparently dumped far more power into the Hecate’s drive than its components were ever meant to take. For a moment, the destroyer had become the fastest thing in the observable universe, and perhaps the fastest thing there had ever been. She had covered thousands of light-years in an instant. But the resulting damage to her drive left it dead, and it was going to take at least several days to repair and bring back online.

It got worse. Thorn was just as off-line as the drive. Whatever he’d done in his wild instant of expansive power had drained him of his ability to ’cast. At best, with effort, he could maintain watch over the Nyctus shaman. But that was all, which meant he couldn’t contact Densmore.

“Is it permanent?” Tanner asked, looking up from the tiny desk in his briefing room. “Because if it is, then there is no way we’re getting all of this ship’s crew home.”

The phrase all of brought Thorn up short. It was appalling to think that Tanner was already considering contingencies, which could include somehow reducing the size of the Hecate’s crew. But if she didn’t have enough supplies for all of them, she would have sufficient for some of them.

That would be one hell of a ghost for Thorn to drag around.

But he’d resolved to be honest with Tanner, so all he could do was shrug. “I don’t think it’s permanent, sir, but honestly, I don’t know. It’s not like we have a manual about how Starcasting works.”

Tanner looked at Thorn for a moment, then simply said, “Keep me posted.”

Thorn now rattled around the Hecate with not much to do. Until he was able to resume ’casting, he was little more than an underemployed officer with few useful skills. He’d finally settled on just trying to stay out of the way—and that included out of the way of the crew, as much as he could, to avoid the scathing bitterness of the looks being shot his way.

He finally returned to the infirmary, struck by the fact that he might be able to accomplish something useful there.

“How long does he need to stay in quarantine?” Thorn asked Quinn, while looking at Gillis through the transparent wall of the booth.

“Protocol demands another three days. Why, Lieutenant?” Quinn asked. She pulled at her bottom lip, not looking away from Gillis.

“I’d like to try doing a Joining with him. I can’t do much else right now, but I might at least be able to glean something useful from him. I mean, the squids went to a lot of trouble to send him back to us. The question is, why?”

“Is that something you can do from out here? Those protocols I mentioned a minute ago say that no one but essential medical personnel are supposed to enter an active booth.”

“Ordinarily, I could, yeah. Right now, though, I need direct contact with him if this is going to work.”

Quinn gave Thorn a doubtful look and contacted Tanner, who, to the surprise of both of them, gave his go-ahead. Thorn got bundled into a hermetic suit, passed through the tiny airlock, and moved to Gillis’s side. He couldn’t help noticing the three severed fingers each sitting in a jar of preservative fluid nearby.

The spoils of war, Thorn concluded, then turned his attention back to Gillis. Quinn had already warned Thorn that skin-to-skin contact was out of the question—unless he wanted to spend the next few days as Gillis’s roommate—so he had to settle on a less-than-perfect contact through the suit’s glove.

Taking a deep breath, Thorn pushed his awareness through the join of his gloved fingers and Gillis’s wrist seeking a connection, no matter how tenuous. He wasn’t used to having to expend so much effort to do this; by the time he was able to finally Join with the unconscious man, Thorn’s heart raced and sweat beaded his skin under the suit.

Darkness. Pounding fear. Running. Something monstrous, something with tentacles right behind. And now ahead as well, and all around—

Thorn relaxed and let the Joining end. The man seemed to be trapped in a nightmare, probably at the moment of his capture. Everything afterward collapsed into an incoherent smear, just fragments of images, a slurry of disjointed thoughts and feelings and emotions.

“You okay?” Quinn, monitoring from outside the booth, called over the intercom.

“I—yeah. I’m fine.” Thorn noticed that the doc wasn’t alone; a Rating named Onoda had joined him. Thorn immediately noticed he was armed, serious, and alert.

“I get why you’re here,” Thorn said, offering a grim smile. “But are you really going to shoot me right through the booth?”

“Yes, sir. Loaded armor-piercing for that very reason.”

Thorn titled his head respectfully. “Fair enough. If you’ll excuse me, then.” He Joined Gillis and was swept away in the terror and turmoil.

Darkness. Pounding fear. Running—

Thorn started to relax again to let the Joining end. This man required far more care and intervention than he could offer him. As he did, though, something snagged at him, like catching a chipped fingernail on fabric.

Someone else was here. Someone was standing in that darkness filling Gillis’s mind, and watching.

We

See

You

Thorn tore himself out of the Joining. As he did, the full realization of what was going on hit him like a particle-cannon blast.

The Nyctus were using Gillis as a conduit. They were hiding themselves in the shadow of his identity and using his mind as a place from which to observe—to spy.

And now that Thorn had discovered that, he was of no further use to them.

Gritting his teeth, Thorn Joined Gillis again, drawing in every last fiber of magical strength he had to drop a barrier around the man’s mind. Then he let go of Gillis’s wrist, slapped at the airlock control, and stumbled into the tiny booth. As he did, on pure instinct, he grabbed one of the jars containing a severed finger.

Onoda drew and raised his sidearm.

“No!” Thorn snapped. “No. Evacuate. All around. There’s a bomb!”

Quinn gaped. Onoda hesitated, then aimed.

“A bomb! I can keep it from detonating, but not for long!” Thorn pounded at the airlock door, then plunged through when it opened. He stayed on his feet, only to find himself staring into the muzzle of Onoda’s pistol.

“Kill me, you die. Run!”

Onoda locked eyes with Thorn for an instant, then dropped his pistol, grabbed him, and heaved him away from the quarantine booth. Quinn hit the intercom panel, triggering an alarm that would send the crew to general quarters.

“All hands!” he shouted. “Evacuate zone five-alpha now!”

Thorn was able to maintain his Joining until they reached the corridor, then it faltered in a shimmering curtain of mental energy, diaphanous and torn.

The world turned white.

* * *

“Nothing is ever boring with you on board, is it, Stellers?”

Thorn blinked up at the voice. Tanner loomed over him, his face a mix of deep concern and even deeper anger.

“Sir, what?” Thorn licked his lips. “What happened?”

“Well, we lost most of zone five-alpha, which means three decks amidships are now open to hard vacuum.”

Thorn struggled to raise himself on his elbows. He felt like he’d been punched all over, and repeatedly. Spray bandages dotted his flesh, covering minor wounds, while a large dressing was wound around his right arm. That was all on top of the wounds he’d taken on Ballard’s World.

Do I feel like shit.

Finished inspecting himself, he blinked and looked around. He lay on a litter in the mess, which had been repurposed into a makeshift infirmary. There were other litters, other casualties sprawled to his left and right. “How many?”

“Four dead. Six wounded, including you. It would have been more like fourteen dead if you hadn’t managed to keep a lid on things until Quinn hit the alarm and got the evac order out,” Tanner said, his voice rich with disgust.

Thorn slumped. “Sir, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You did exactly what I wanted from you: your job.”

Thorn stared. So Tanner’s tone wasn’t directed at him, but at the squids who’d just attacked his ship.

“I’m sick of being on the back foot here, Stellers. Please tell me that that explosion knocked some of your powers back into you.”

Thorn stared. “Sorry, sir, but what?”

Tanner waved a hand. “Some old comedy thing—guy gets hit on the head, loses his memory, gets hit again and gets it back.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works, sir.”

“It—hell, it doesn’t matter! I’m reaching for stardust here, Stellers. We need a break, and you’re what I’ve got to get one.”

Thorn considered Tanner’s question. That dry wellspring of magical potential did seem to have refilled a little. It wasn’t his full potential by any means, but it was much more than he’d had. Experimentally, Thorn raised a hand and conjured a bluish point of light.

“I—yeah, I do seem to have gained some of it back. It was probably the—” He glanced at the ship-time on the mess chrono. “Holy shit, almost twelve hours I was passed out?”

“Whatever works,” Tanner said mildly. “Now, what happened?”

“He wasn’t Gillis, sir, and I knew it almost immediately. Wait, that’s not—he was Gillis, but his trauma was so close I could taste it. I felt his fear, his lingering pain, and underneath it all, I sensed them.”

“The squids?” Tanner prompted.

“Yes, sir. Their hand—tentacle, whatever—was all over his mental bruising, and then I peeled away the memory and could see. I mean, I could actually see his damage, what they’d done to him. It was as lurid as a bruise on his face, and in that instant I knew. They broke him, saddled him like a beast, and wired him to kill,” Thorn said. “They were hidden in his mind. Like parasites.”

“And they had a failsafe,” Tanner finished, shaking his head in anger at their devious, repulsive invasion. “They’d implanted a bomb in him, some sort of organic explosive that didn’t immediately show up in the doc’s assessment of him. Apparently, all he could see with the equipment in that damned quarantine booth was an unidentified mass, which he thought was a tumor or something.” He spat a curse, making a fist so hard his knuckles cracked. The captain was pissed.

“Sir, the squids were able to maintain a standing Joining with Gillis, something that should take a lot of ongoing effort. When I Join with Captain Densmore, it’s something we can only maintain for short periods of time.”

Tanner narrowed his eyes. “So? Maybe the squids are just much better at it then we are.”

“I don’t think so. See, they screwed up. They couldn’t resist gloating. And when they did, I could see how they maintained the link. They’d taken a small piece of flesh off his body, somewhere where it wouldn’t be obvious. Now, there’s a Starcaster theory called contagion—and no, I don’t mean disease. Basically, a piece of something continues to act as though it’s part of that something, even if it's physically separated from it.”

“So?”

“So, the squids used that bit of Gillis to keep their Joining with him going. Now, as I was getting my ass out of that quarantine booth, I grabbed one of those severed fingers. It was just on a whim—on instinct. But I’d just been in Gillis’s mind. He was captured along with Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe. She’s . . . obviously very close to me. That finger just seemed to be the right one to grab.”

“So what? You think you can link up with Wixcombe, using—can’t believe I’m saying this—her severed finger?”

“Yes, sir. It’s worth a try.”

“Well, that finger was put away somewhere secure—didn’t seem right to leave it sitting out in plain view.” Tanner waved a hand, questioning the squid tactic. “What would be the point? Besides reassuring yourself that Wixcombe’s alive, that is?”

“Don’t deny that’s part of it, sir. But if she is alive and has learned anything about the squids—”

Tanner’s eyes went flat, but he finally gave a single nod. “Alcubierre drive’s still out, we’re further from ON space than anyone’s ever been, I’ve got a hole in my ship and dead crew—right now, I’ll take anything I can get. Do whatever you have to do, Stellers.”

Thorn worked himself to his feet, wincing as he did. Fortunately, the blast from the implanted bomb had been diminished by the tough, plasticized glass of the quarantine booth and the intervening bulkheads; most of what had hit Thorn, and those with him, had been a concussive effect. It left him feeling more than a little tenderized but still on his feet.

“On my way, sir,” he said to Tanner. “If you need me, I’ll be in the Witchport.”

* * *

Kira had almost finished a dark plunge into a bottomless abyss of despair. She could hold out against the squids and their intrusions into her mind pretty much forever, but that was it. All the information she’d managed to gain was, in the end, useless. She was going to die, and it was going to die with her.

Kira?

She blinked, then dragged her head up from her chest and looked around. Just her cell. She’d heard nothing, least of all Thorn’s voice—

Kira!

She laboriously sat up. It sounded like he’d been right there.

But he wasn’t, of course. “Hallucinating,” she whispered. “That comes . . . just before the end . . . right?”

Dammit, Kira, I can feel you there. Answer me!

Kira’s head snapped up this time.

Okay, that was not a hallucination.

It really was Thorn.

21

Thorn? Is that really you?

He could feel the fear, anguish, and despair flowing across the Joining between them, flooding the witchport around him like stale, suffocating air. Thorn shouldered his way through the emotions and focused on Kira.

It’s me. I’d ask how you are, but—

Definitely don’t recommend this as a vacation experience.

He smiled. Kira, look, I just want to—

Wait. Stop. How do I know it’s really you?

How? His jaw went tight with frustration. It’s me, Kira, believe me.

I really want to. But the squids have tricked me before. They lifted my own memories from my mind, then used them against me. That included you.

Thorn frowned. If she couldn’t simply feel from the Joining that it was him, how could he possibly prove it to her?

Thorn, tell me the name of the pilot and the AI we flew with.

What? Mol and Trixie?

After a moment of hesitation, a flood of relief poured across the Joining. Okay, that’s something I’ve been able to keep from the squids. They’d have no way of knowing that.

Doubt flickered in Thorn. Could the squids be pulling a fast one on him? Was this really Kira? Even using her severed finger as a focus—which was, he had to admit, supremely weird and grisly—could they be manipulating this whole situation?

But he dismissed the idea. The Nyctus might be able to use facts, memories of experiences, against them, but he couldn’t believe they could so thoroughly mimic the emotions he felt wafting across the Joining from Kira. Those were just too real.

Told you, it’s really me.

There was a long pause. Thorn could tell she was crying. He hesitated to intervene, but this wasn’t just about confirming she was alive.

He was about to say so, but Kira’s presence suddenly hardened with resolve. Sorry, I’m just— She paused. This has been really bad, Thorn. But how the hell did you even find me?

Thorn looked at her severed finger, immersed in preservative in a jar. Okay, this is going to sound pretty grim, but I’m looking at your finger right now.

My—

Kira?

Okay, hang on. Just . . . give me a second.

Thorn waited.

Alright. Okay. How? How did you—no, wait, never mind. Don’t tell me anything I don’t need to know. Although, how the hell did that happen? What were the odds that you’d end up with it?

Maybe our fates are intertwined and it was the actions of an invisible hand of destiny drawing us together.

What? Really?

No, of course not. Absolutely just a coincidence, Thorn said. Still kind of improbable, but improbable things do happen. For that matter, considering where the Hecate was at the time, the odds probably weren’t even that bad—

Already told you, don’t tell me anything I don’t absolutely need to know, Thorn. I might have been able to hold the squids out of my mind so far, but I don’t know if I can do it forever.

Thorn had to nod at the wisdom of that. Moreover, he’d been agonizing over what to tell her about Gillis, since he and Kira had obviously been comrades, part of the same team, but this gave him an out, at least for now.

There are some things you need to know, Thorn, so just listen.

Listening.

Good. He felt her take a deep breath across the miles, then she spoke in his mind, her voice clear, calm—measured. I learned something about my ability. It’s . . . more than I ever imagined. It’s an ocean where I thought it was a pool, and in order to find it, I had to be under duress.

I’d say this qualifies, Thorn said.

Kira laughed, a brash sound in Thorn’s mind. You have no idea. I found my power, Thorn. I had to go slow, like crawling, but then it seemed to be more natural. Like I’d always known how, but had to find my path again. Once I did, I could touch the squid minds and jump away, leaving them unaware. They tried to break me, Thorn. They tried and failed. They can’t break me, and they know it.

Kira, look, I have to get this info to the people who need it. That means I’ve got to leave you for a while.

I know you do.

I don’t want to.

I know you don’t. I don’t want you to, either.

But—

You have to. Go. Do what you need to do. I’m not going anywhere. Just make sure of one thing.

Name it, Thorn said.

Come back to me.

I will, he vowed.

I know that, too.

* * *

Tanner put his hands on his hips and stared at the tactical display that currently depicted a portion of the Zone, straddled by ON space on one side and Nyctus territory on the other. It had been painted with icons representing the situation that Kira had described to Thorn; one cluster of icons, in particular, held the Captain’s attention.

“How sure are you that this is right?” Tanner asked, eyes still fixed on the chart.

“Well, Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe—lifted this from the minds of the squids on the orbital platform where she’s being held and pieced it together,” Thorn replied. “It’s probably not complete, of course, and also probably full of errors about the specifics, but she’s sure that this is what the squids are planning.”

Tanner rubbed his chin. “Massing a fleet here, apparently to attack across the widest and most open part of the Zone. Doesn’t seem to make sense.” Over his shoulder, he said, “XO, what do you think?”

Raynaud stepped closer to the screen. “It doesn’t make sense, sir, you’re right. That makes it pretty much the last thing we’d expect them to do.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Tanner replied. “Just because something isn’t obvious, though, doesn’t make it a good idea.”

While the others had been speaking, Thorn had been studying the chart, looking for some reason the Nyctus would choose such a risky operation.

Wait. Risky to them, but they were humans—

“Sir,” he said. “We need to look at this like the squids would.”

Tanner gave him a sharp glance. “Squid or human, the basics of military ops are pretty much the same,” he said, but as he finished, his face had already started to show a hint of doubt. “Aren’t they? What are you getting at, Stellers?”

Thorn stepped up beside the XO. “It’s a long way across the Zone, yes. And if it was us, planning a conventional military op, we’d look at all that empty space as empty space. But it’s not.” He touched a label on the map, expanding it.

Thunderstorm Nebula.

“This nebula isn’t very big, but based on these data, it’s pretty dense.” He turned and looked at Tanner. “Lots of dust.”

That made Tanner take a step forward. “Use the nebula as a staging point, maybe even a sort of FOB. That would put them within a short trans-light flight of . . . what, two of our own FOBs, including Code Gauntlet and a half-dozen heavily populated worlds.”

“Because they know we’re steering well clear of dust clouds,” Raynaud finished.

“Or we used to, last time we weren’t a ridiculous amount of light-years from friendly space,” Tanner said. A glimmer of humor colored his tone. “But there’d been nothing to hint at us having a solution to them blinding us with dust, so it’s probably safe to assume we don’t—and that’s what the squids are counting on.”

“Well, this is amazing information,” Raynaud said. “But we can’t do a damned thing with it. We need to get it to Fleet.”

She and Tanner both turned to Thorn.

“Now that I seem to be getting my full powers back, I think I can make that happen, sir, ma’am, yes,” Thorn said, answering the unasked questions.

“Now how about getting us closer to home?” Tanner asked. “The novelty of being the furthest-traveled ship in history has pretty much worn off.”

“That’s next on my to-do list, sir, for sure.”

* * *

Stellers, Densmore said, you’re telling me that you’re thousands of light-years away right now?

Yes, ma’am.

And that was your doing?

Yes, ma’am. But I don’t think that’s the most important thing right now—

No, of course not. The squids and their offensive is. How certain are you that Wixcombe’s info is correct?

Thorn’s immediate thought was, I trust Kira, of course it’s correct. But that was a purely emotional response. The fact was, he really had no objective way of knowing how accurate the things she’d learned were.

I don’t know, ma’am. I’m only relaying what Kira told me. I get it, you’re going to want to corroborate this—

I think we already have.

Sorry?

I won’t go into details, but I just attended a briefing that described an unusual increase in signals traffic from that same sector. Fleet intelligence is trying to make sense of it. This new info seems to do just that.

So, what do you intend to do about it, ma’am?

I’m not prepared to share detailed plans with you, Stellers, for obvious reasons. But let’s put it this way—if this works out the way I’m starting to think it might, it could change the course of the entire war.

Thorn turned a strange new thought around in his mind, feeling its unfamiliar shape.

The war, being over.

If there’s anything else I can do, ma’am—

There is, Stellers.

What’s that?

Come home. Oh, and try to do it with that shaman you captured still alive. If nothing else, I’d like to finally look one in the face—maybe punch it a few times.

Gotcha, ma’am. I know exactly how you feel.

* * *

Thorn strode along the detour corridor because of the gaping hole where the infirmary and compartments around it used to be. He’d never really appreciated the clever design that went into warships, and especially the redundancy—the forward crew mess was specifically intended to function as an alternate or supplementary infirmary; there were three parallel corridors running the length of the ship, with abrupt right angles built into them to diminish blast effects that would otherwise propagate along them; power was distributed along four main bus conduits, port and starboard, keel and spine, with all critical systems cabled into at least three of them. It meant that, despite her grievous wound, the Hecate was still essentially ready for battle.

Unfortunately, that battle was happening a long way away. Thorn could tell that deeply frustrated Tanner. Here it seemed that the ON was about to deliver what could be a knockout blow to a major part of the Nyctus fleet, but his ship was so far from the action they might as well be in a whole separate universe.

Thorn stopped at a cross corridor and waited as a pair of Ratings wheeled a cart laden with rations, based on the writing on the crates. That was the downside of having the forward mess repurposed into the infirmary; all meals now had to be served in the aft.

Thorn!

The psychic shout made him reel back, where he slumped against the bulkhead. He shook his head. One of the Ratings looked at him as they passed, then stopped.

“Sir, are you alright?”

Thorn!

He waved the Rating off.

Kira?

Thorn, they found out!

They what? What’s going on? I was just heading to the witchport to try and contact you. How the hell are you doing this?

Doesn’t matter! The squids have found out we’ve been talking like this! They’re coming!

Thorn stiffened, acrid dread surging through him like bile. What do you mean? he asked, a ridiculous question, but he had nothing else.

The squids—I was probing them again, and I saw it. Somehow, they know we’ve been talking like this. They’re coming to— shit. This . . . this is it, Thorn. They’re going to kill me to stop this.

Thorn stared at the floor, his body rigid with anger. He was about to experience Kira’s awful, violent death and couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

He shook his head. No. That wasn’t going to happen.

“Sir, do you need help?”

His head snapped up. “Get away from me!”

The other Rating hit the intercom and shouted for Security. Thorn didn’t have time for that and focused his attention back on Kira.

Thorn, I—oh. Oh. Okay. I just want to say this. Thorn—

What?

Just shut up and hang on.

I don’t understand! Thorn, they’re almost here.

Quiet. I need a moment to—just, stay quiet. Stay small. Make your thoughts small, and keep them on me, okay?

Thorn—!

He ripped his talisman out of his tunic pocket, squeezed the smooth, worn book, and focused every particle of himself on that union of flesh and cardboard.

A sudden memory erupted from the point of focus.

There was a dazzling glare as the KEW thundered out of the sky of Cotswold, about to lay waste to everything that mattered.

No, Thorn thought. Not again. You don’t get to take Kira from me, too.

Because—

Because this is how the universe works.

Another searing flash enveloped him, just like the impact of that KEW on Cotswold, and once again Thorn was hurled into endless night.

* * *

Thorn blinked. Saw nothing but a smear of wan light.

Blinked again. That time, there was a shape, blurred but gaining detail. Okay. This is something new.

He forced his eyes open. The blur resolved into a face. Grimy, bloody, bruised—

But he recognized it instantly.

“Kira?”

It came out as just a hoarse croak, but it was enough to make her eyes flicker open and look into his.

For a moment, they both just stayed that way, looking into each other’s eyes and trying to make sense of it all.

Finally, she said, “Thorn?” Her voice was as weak and raspy as his.

He opened his mouth, but this time nothing came out. He tried to find his voice, but before he could, another one cut him off.

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “You know the rules about bringing companions aboard my ship without permission.”

He turned and found himself looking up at the Captain, who was flanked by a pair of ship’s Security. He was still lying in the corridor, flat on the deck; the two Ratings who’d been lugging supplies along the cross corridor just stood, eyes as wide as full moons.

“Thorn?”

He turned back to the hoarse whisper.

“Kira, are you really here?”

“You tell me,” she said, then swayed with shock and exhaustion. A tear rolled down her cheek, and it could have been from joy or pain. Maybe both.

“I know exactly how you feel, Lieutenant—Wixcombe, I assume,” Tanner said. “Dealing with Stellers makes me want to cry, too.”

Kira’s lips curled up, making her wince from a cut. “I’ll cry later. For now, let’s talk about chow.”

* * *

Kira proved to be malnourished and suffering from many injuries from her ordeal, but she was otherwise in surprisingly good shape. Quinn declared her fit enough for light duties, then discharged her into an immediate face-to-face meeting with Tanner, Thorn, and the XO in a compartment used for spare-parts storage.

“Sorry, Wixcombe,” Tanner said, “but until you’re cleared of any security risk at all, you’re banned from the bridge, engineering, fire control—for that matter, most of the ship.”

She nodded. “Understood, sir.”

Tanner turned to Thorn. “Okay, Stellers, you have some explaining to do.”

Thorn nodded, wincing as he did. His extravagant expenditure of magical power had, once more, left him feeling utterly drained. This time, though, he was sure he’d eventually recover.

“I—” Thorn began, then shook his head and sighed. He owed Tanner the whole truth. “I did something similar to what I did to deflect that rock from Code Gauntlet. I rewrote reality, to make it possible for me to pull Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe—out of danger. The squids were about to execute her. As to how I did it, I have an idea. I can remember the shape of my spell, sir.”

Tanner looked at Kira. “That true, Lieutenant? Execution? Imminent?”

“Yes, sir. The squids somehow figured out I had managed to start eavesdropping on them psychically and were coming to put a stop to it.”

“What that means, sir,” Thorn went on, “is that I disobeyed a direct order from Captain Densmore to not attempt that again.”

Tanner turned to Raynaud. “Fetch Captain Densmore for me, would you?”

The Xo gave him a blank look, her dark eyes inscrutable. “Oh, that’s right, isn’t it?” Tanner said. “She’s not here.” His lip quirked upward. “You don’t work for Captain Densmore, Stellers. You work for me.”

“I also promised her I wouldn’t do this again.”

“Okay, that is between you and her,” Tanner said, then narrowed his gaze. “Although, I’m getting the sense there’s more to this than you’re letting on. Is there some sort of implication to what you’ve done here, Stellers? Something that might be bad for this ship?”

“That’s the trouble, sir,” Thorn replied. “I honestly don’t know. When I deflected that rock, we got very, very lucky. Since everything I did was inside an Alcubierre bubble, it was isolated from the rest of the universe. But this wasn’t. So I don’t know what sort of effects this might have had.”

Tanner rubbed his chin, giving the possibilities a moment to sink in. “Well, that’s well above my pay grade, especially right now. As of this moment, my concern is the ship. Although”—he looked at Kira, then back to Thorn—“you rescued a comrade from the grip of the enemy,” he said. “No matter what else that leads to, there is that, Stellers.”

Thorn smiled at Kira. “Honestly, sir, I’d do it again, too.”

Kira smiled back, but it quickly faded. “I only wish we could have rescued Rainer and Riley, too.”

She didn’t say Gillis, because Thorn had already explained to her what had happened. It drew his attention to the bandage on her missing finger. Kira was being strong about all of this, but Thorn knew there’d be a reckoning coming when she had to confront and deal with everything she’d been through.

For now, they all had immediate matters to face, the first of which was getting back to friendly space. And that led to the question that Thorn knew Tanner was going to ask next.

“So, Stellers, you moved us out here, to the middle of galactic nowhere, and now you’ve moved Wixcombe across who knows how many light-years to join us. Can you do it a third time and move us back?”

“For that matter,” Raynaud put in, “are you sure moving Wixcombe, or whatever the right word is for it, could cause these long-term effects you’re worried about, or was it only possible because you moved the Hecate in what seems like pretty much the same way first and already caused them?”

Thorn hesitated. It was a good insight from Raynaud, but one to which he had no answer.

“My only answer can be—maybe, but I’ll try like hell to make it a definitive yes.”

Tanner gave a single nod. “Well, then your priority is now to find an answer to that question, Stellers. Wixcombe, you obviously need to be debriefed, but we have no one on this ship qualified to do it properly. The XO is going to take a statement from you. I need you to give as much detail as possible about your captivity with the Nyctus. That’s priority, after which you’re going to help Stellers out any way you can. You’re still restricted from critical areas of the Hecate, though.”

Raynaud answered quickly. “Understood, sir.”

“In the meantime, the life of this ship goes on. The Chief Engineer informs me that the Alcubierre drive is about a day away from being operational again. We’ve revised our ration schedule, which should give us enough to get back to ON space the old-fashioned way, but we’ll have to keep an eye out for fresh water sources along the way. Comets are handy like that. So, ladies and gentlemen, with that, to your duties.”

Thorn walked with Kira as they left. They made inconsequential small talk, which fell absolutely flat; Thorn finally rolled his eyes and pulled Kira into a stores compartment.

“I think we need to talk,” he said, “and I don’t mean about how good the food is aboard the Hecate compared to the shit the squids were giving you.”

She returned a faint smile. “It was pretty bad. Almost as bad as that sandwich paste you tried to pass off as edible back on Code Gauntlet.” Her smile vanished. “But you’re right, I think we do.”

“So let me start—”

“Thorn, look,” she cut in, “when I started to, um, confess—”

He shook his head, once. “That’s not what I meant. That’s . . . for another time.”

“Seriously? It was a touch dramatic, even for wartime, Thorn.”

“Uh, yeah, I was there, remember?” He smiled. “Let’s stow that for the moment. Right now, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

She just stared. “About what, exactly?”

“About doubting you. About doubting your abilities as a Joiner. I was wrong. Not only are you a skilled Joiner, Kira, you’re also powerful. I don’t know if you realize how powerful.”

“I—well, know that I gained some power while the squids had me. I put it off to something like . . . like adrenaline, I guess. A surge, in the moment.”

“Yeah, except that surge never went away. Kira, the only reason I was able to pull you back here was because you opened the conduit. You called me. In fact, you’ve been calling me for a while now, but in my dreams. I guess that’s when my mind was most receptive to it.”

She looked askance, then shook her head. “I don’t remember trying to contact you—”

“Maybe not, but you were. Your mind was. To me, it was—you were screaming. It was awful. Soul-killing. I put it down to stress. But you were broadcasting even then, even if you didn’t know it.” He shrugged. “As far as I know, the only others who can do that, over any distance, are me and Captain Densmore.”

“Where are you going with this, Thorn?”

“Right now, right back to where I started this. By apologizing to you. I underestimated you, because I was being cocky and arrogant.”

“As far as I know, you’re the strongest Starcaster we know of, Thorn, at least so far. I let that start making me resentful.” She smiled, a little more genuinely this time. Thorn wondered how long it would be before her true, warm smile was back—or if it would ever be.

“Anyway, that’s my way of saying I was part of the problem, back on Code Gauntlet,” she said. “So, I’m sorry, too.”

“I think two sorrys cancel out, meaning we’re good,” he said.

“I think that’s how it works, sure.”

Thorn gathered Kira in his arms, an embrace that was apology and comfort and affirmation, all in one.

They stayed that way until the door slid open and a surprised Rating with a data-pad stopped, one foot over the coaming.

“Oh, uh . . . sir, ma’am. I, uh—”

“Don’t mind us,” Thorn said. “We’re just in here fraternizing like hell.”

The man chuckled. “Don’t blame you a bit, sir. I probably would if I could, too. Meantime, though, I need to scan ID codes on all these crates. I can work around you, if you’d like.”

Kira stepped back from Thorn. “Nah, that’s okay. I think we’re done fraternizing. For now.” Her smile was filled with possibility.

* * *

The squids were coming, she could feel them, they were coming to kill her, they didn’t need her anymore—

Kira bolted upright in bed, gasping as the images faded from her mind, her heart pounding like she’d been miles deep in a punishing run. Acrid sweat drenched her and dampened the sheets. She swung her gaze around in the darkness, panicking—Thorn, Captain Tanner, the Hecate, all of that was just a dream, and she was still really mired in the nightmare of her captivity—

But a dull rumble filtered through her racing thoughts. It was the pervasive sound of ventilation, air exchangers, a power plant, a running Alcubierre drive.

“Oh, shit,” she muttered, and swung her feet out of bed. Of course, she was aboard the Hecate. Death had been close, but she was safe. Or as safe as she could be thousands of lightyears from home on a warship.

“Lights.”

She crossed to the tiny sink in the closet-sized quarters she’d been assigned and hit the valve, but nothing happened. Oh. Right. Water rationing. She had to settle for scrubbing her face with a dry towel. As she did, she forced away the last dregs of that panic. That had been the dream. The squids weren’t coming for her. It didn’t matter that they didn’t need her anymore, because she was safe—

She lowered the towel.

Wait.

Something wasn’t right.

For a moment, that dreadful panic started to bubble up again, but she once more shoved it back down. Whatever was wrong wasn’t about what was happening now. It was about something that had happened before. Kira had always been a methodical thinker—it was how she survived in the orphanage, always thinking ahead, moving quickly, and seizing on details.

Raynaud’s face hove into view, a memory. A clear memory, of questions during the debriefing, all of it recorded as she methodically catalogued her ordeal, each horrific memory saved to be examined. Considered.

Shared.

She thought again about the nightmare that had just awakened her—

And there it was. She was being chased, but not by the squid.

Kira tumbled out of her quarters and hurried to find Thorn.

* * *

Thorn just blinked, fighting through the woolen fugue of his first deep sleep in days. Kira stood before him, thrumming with frantic energy. That look cleared his mind in a flash, and he waved her in.

“Tell me,” he said.

She stood, moving silently as she finished working out the details in her mind. When she was done, her gaze landed on Thorn, bright with triumph.

“It was all a lie. Complex and devious, but a lie nonetheless.,” Kira said.

“What was?”

“Everything. Everything I learned from the squids.” She cursed. “They were a step ahead of me the whole time. Shit, I should have seen it—”

Thorn took her hands. “Walk me through it. I see the value in sending you with bad intel, but . . . how do you know?”

“I already said it. Everything. All the ship movements, all the supply and logistical activity, command and control measures—all of it was a lie. They were feeding me that information, Thorn.” She looked into his eyes. “They were setting a trap for the Fleet and using me as a trigger for it.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Sell me on it. What’s the proof? Remember, we’ve got to sell this to Fleet. And Tanner.”

“It’s because of something I remembered while giving the XO my statement. I hadn’t even realized I’d remembered it until just a few minutes ago.” She took a shuddering breath. “They were done with me, Thorn. They didn’t need me anymore. I could tell. I saw it in their minds while they were coming for me. They didn’t need me anymore.”

Thorn stared, lips pressed in a line. He didn’t see—

And then he did.

“They were using you for something. And that something was done, so they were going to kill you.” His voice trailed off as he panned through the implications.

“Yeah. Exactly. They were using me to set a trap for the Fleet. If the ON moves to pre-empt that supposed offensive, they’re going to be ambushed.” She sifted details, hints—every nuance of her ordeal, coming back to the same conclusion. “They’re not human. They’re utterly, wholly alien, so this bullshit? Using me? It’s exactly what we should have suspected.”

Thorn looked dubious. “How could they possibly have known that you’d read their minds then talk to me and give me that info?”

Kira wiped her face with one hand, fighting a sudden wave of exhausted despair. “I was wondering that, too. But then it hit me. How did they know to attack that rehearsal exercise I was doing with Gillis and the others? How did they know where we were so they could take out everything else, then send a bunch of damned robots—which are immune to Joining—down to the surface to capture us?”

“Shit.” The pieces clicked for him all at once. “A spy.”

She nodded. “Somewhere in the ON, yes. Somewhere pretty high up, too. High enough that they knew about the op I was assigned with my team. High enough that they know that you can contact others telepathically, over long distances, in real-time. And someone who knows that we’re close, so you’d try to contact me when you thought I was missing.”

As Kira talked, Thorn looked over her shoulder at a spot on the wall.

Only one person fit all those criteria. Only one person he could think of, anyway.

“Densmore,” he said.

Kira stared, then nodded. “It would fit.”

He looked at Kira. “If that’s true, then she used both of us.”

“She did, yeah.”

Thorn hit the intercom to call Tanner.

The voice that came back was slurred from sleep. “Is this really urgent, Stellers?”

“The Fleet’s heading into a trap, sir.”

This time, Tanner’s voice cracked like a whip. “My briefing room, now.”

* * *

“Alys Densmore?” Tanner said, crossing his arms. “Hard to believe.”

“Yes, sir,” Thorn replied. “But it fits.”

“Can you contact anyone back at Fleet besides her?”

“No. And if she’s compromised—”

“Then even if you contact her with this, she won’t do a damned thing to stop it.”

“It’s worse than that, sir,” Kira put in. “If Thorn contacts her, she might just double down and try to get even more of the Fleet committed.”

“But she doesn’t know what we know,” Raynaud said. “Or at least what we suspect. She doesn’t even know that you managed to retrieve Wixcombe.”

“Unless she’s in contact with the squids and they’ve let her know,” Kira replied.

The XO nodded at that, but Tanner shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. She knows we’re out of the picture, and that the only one Stellers seems to be able to contact is her. So she’s gambling that we’ll stay out of the picture until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“Pretty good gamble,” Raynaud muttered.

Tanner nodded. “It is.” He turned to Thorn. “Unless you can figure out a way to get us back into the picture, Stellers.”

While the others had been talking, Thorn had been letting his thoughts roam. Several disconnected things were starting to come together. He looked at Tanner.

“Sir, I’m assuming the order for me to not, ah, alter reality no longer applies?”

“The one Densmore gave you? What do you think? Besides, I already told you, you work for me.”

“In that case, sir, I’m going to ask you something you’re going to hate,” Thorn said.

Tanner sniffed. “Stellers, you just described the life of an ON officer.” He leaned forward. “I’m assuming this is something to do with magic, a complex plan, and the utilization of tactics that make my skin crawl?”

“Naturally, sir.”

Tanner smiled, long suffering but resigned to whatever happened next. “But of course. So, Starcaster, what do we do?”

22

“We’re ready, Stellers,” Tanner said. “All stations, Lieutenant Stellers has command. From this point on, you work off his marks.”

Thorn made himself as comfortable as he could, then grabbed his talisman in both hands, rested it on his crossed legs, and opened the witchport. A last waft of air lingering after depressurization puffed away as vapor against the stars.

“Kira,” he said. “How about you? Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Okay.” Thorn filled his lungs, let it out. He repeated the process, but even slower, with a deliberation he’d come to know as the sharpening of his power. Let his full awareness sink into the press of his fingertips against his talisman, feeling the whorls of each finger like a familiar story.

“Nav, Engineering, stand by.”

“Alcubierre drive ready to engage,” Fulbright said. To his credit, there wasn’t even any reluctance in his voice. He was obviously as ready as anyone to return home.

“Nav confirms,” another voice said. “Never entered data like this before, but it’s ready when you are, Lieutenant.”

Thorn’s awareness now expanded from his fingertips, swelling to encompass the Hecate, and especially her Alcubierre drive. He could feel it as a locus of potential, a beacon of possibility, waiting to come to life. All it needed was a flow of certainty, and that’s what Thorn was about to give it.

“Activate the drive.”

There was a distant thrum as the Alcubierre drive lit up. The universe shrank until it was a space and time barely larger than the Hecate herself. True to its nature, the resulting ripple in reality tried to collapse as creation tried to restore its naturally flat character. The collapse went on and on, a wave continuously trying to break, but at superluminal speed. As it did, it carried the Hecate—which was, from the internal perspective of its miniature, isolated universe, entirely motionless—along with it.

It was how an Alcubierre drive worked. But Thorn was about to change that.

Now that he’d touched the boundaries of the Hecate’s tiny universe, he pulled his awareness back, collapsing his sense of self until he was focused on the drive. Only the amount of power being fed into the drive limited the speed at which it could propagate the Alcubierre wave through space-time. That was as much a constraint of the drive’s engineering as it was the power that could be fed into it; a given drive could only handle so much input without being damaged. That’s what had happened when Thorn had, in a wild, uncontrolled burst, swept the drive and the ship up in his outpouring of raw emotion. He now did much the same thing, but in a methodical, controlled way.

Thorn fed magical might into the drive, because that’s how it worked. The more he fed in, the faster the Hecate’s bubble of reality tore through the firmament of the greater universe. What would have been weeks of travel had become days.

But that wasn’t enough. He felt his muscle seize and pushed harder. Space warped to an ever-greater degree, shoving the Hecate’s bubble along even faster. The distortion bent around, straining to break free until reality and unlimited travel met in one point—at a place where the Hecate streaked through space.

In another moment, the two points would coalesce, and a wormhole through creation would open, yawning away into impossibility. It was probably something like this that had flung the Hecate so far in the first place. The Chief Engineer, when Tanner had asked him about the possibility of this and its implications, could only shrug. The math said it could be done but offered nothing about whether it should be.

Thorn was tempted; it would reduce what was now hours of flight time to essentially no time at all. But he didn’t, and fought just to keep the drive running on the edge of tearing space apart. His head began to pound, his pulse throbbing behind his eyes like bursts of lightning, red crackles that surged to life and died, all in the curtain of his vision. He pressed down hard on his talisman, keeping his focus fixed on it, ignoring his racing heart, the way pressure was mounting in his head—just a bit longer—

An alarm chimed faintly through the rushing in his ears, as though from far away. The drive was about to cut off.

Thorn slowly let his extravagant expenditure of power slow from a flood, to a rush, to a trickle. The drive spooled down, the distortion looming behind the Hecate and driving her forward receding. Now she raced along at no more than a normal pace for a drive of the type she carried.

Another chime, and the drive cut off. What had been a featureless and dimensionless darkness around the witchport became a starfield.

Thorn slumped back, gasping, soaked in sweat, his muscles howling with residual anguish and his teeth clenched so tightly, he had to work his jaw open in fits and starts. Controlling his expenditure of power in a deliberate way prevented him from simply passing out, as he had before. But it left him feeling no less drained.

Still, he roused himself. Everything depended on the next message from the Nav O, who would be finding pulsars and using them to fix their position.

“Nav here. We’re inside the envelope. We’re home.”

Thorn pulled in, then released, a deep breath. Sweat stung his eyes, and he wiped at a drop of it clinging to the end of his nose.

Tanner spoke. “Well done, crew. All stations, I am resuming command. Tactical, I need a picture of what’s going on.”

“Got it, sir,” the Tac O said. “And it’s not pretty.”

* * *

Kira snugged her harness, cinching herself more tightly into the Gyrfalcon’s co-pilot’s station. Mol had finished the pre-flight checklist, and now they just waited for the short Alcubierre hop into what seemed to be a ferocious battle—and one that the ON was losing.

She glanced back. The Nyctus shaman was strapped to the litter tighter than the spec ops squad leader, Alix, was belted alongside on her own crash couch. She had two more of her people with her, but had only caught the name of one, Toff. The three of them all had weapons ready, trained on the squid, in case it tried to resist or hit back. None of them smiled, and none of the weapons wavered. At all.

“Gyrfalcon, Tanner here. Alcubierre cutoff in thirty seconds. Based on those last sensor returns, it’s going to be one hell of a shitstorm out there once we’re back in normal space, so haul your asses out of the Hecate asap so we can start maneuvering.”

“Roger that, sir,” Mol said, nodding as the hangar doors slid open. Nothing but a colorless distortion greeted them, the twisted space of an Alcubierre bubble.

Kira braced herself. She’d unwittingly doomed the ON fleet. Now, it was time to save it.

The drive cut off sounded, and the view abruptly switched from nothing to, as Tanner had so aptly put it, a shitstorm.

Mol called, “Here we go!” Then she powered the Gyrfalcon out of the Hecate’s hangar. She didn’t wait for clearance to maneuver from the destroyer and immediately began to dodge with furious purpose. Their first hop, the one enabled by Thorn, had brought them close to the sector where the ON had been lured into a trap; two more hops, far shorter and more conventional, had plunged them almost into the middle of the fight. Now, flashes rippled through space around them as the two massive fleets slammed headlong into one another, filling the void with energy and violence.

Or, rather, the ON fleet had slammed headlong into the Nyctus. The squids, in turn, had sprung their trap, and now the ON task force was hemmed in, surrounded on three sides and taking both raking and flanking fire. As Mol jinked and swung the Gyrfalcon through the raging battle, Kira watched the battered ON ships. They raced past a destroyer that had been torn in two by a KEW, dodging debris she carefully avoided looking at too closely. Beyond that, glowing plasma streamed from a battlecruiser, her drive section laid open to hard vacuum. All around them, shredded chunks of hull plate and buckled structural members tumbled amid clouds of smaller wreckage and thin arcs of vented atmosphere.

Mol fired the thrusters hard, dodging around the nose of a corvette. The rest of the ship was simply gone. “Where are we going, Kira?” she called.

Kira forced herself to concentrate. She needed to find—

“There!” she shouted, pointing out the canopy in a vague direction that encompassed half the universe. “Check that, there,” she said, jamming a finger at the tactical display. “That point. A big squid battleship. Move us toward it without us dying, if you please. Hate to be late for this rendezvous.”

“On time and alive. It’s practically my motto,” Mol chirped, punching commands into the Gyrfalcon’s controls. As she did, they were burst-transmitted back to the Hecate, which had swung to place her bulk between the thick of the battle and the fighter.

“Okay, they’re acknowledging,” Mol said. She looked from the implacable array of Nyctus ships ahead, to Kira. “You’re sure about this, huh?”

Kira nodded. She knew the slightly greasy feel of squid minds far better than she ever wanted to, and the dark thoughts of their shamans in particular. “Yeah, if we’re going to do this, there’s our best shot.”

As Mol applied thrust and the Gyrfalcon swept off toward the target Kira had selected, the Hecate sailing alongside, Kira glanced back at Alix, Toff, and the drugged squid. Incredibly, Toff’s eyes were closed.

“Is he asleep?” Kira asked.

“Nope,” Toff said without opening his eyes. “Just resting. This way, if we go boom, I don’t see it coming.”

Alix grinned. Both of the spec ops soldiers seemed entirely relaxed, which was a pretty incredible thing, given the circumstances. But Kira couldn’t help noticing a restrained menace under the casual exterior, like springs coiled up and about to be released.

She met Alix’s eyes. “You’re clear on what you need to do, right?”

Alix nodded. “Hopefully nothing. But if it looks like things are going wrong”—she gestured at the squid with the toe of her boot—“he’s the first one to die.”

Kira nodded and turned back to find the Nyctus ships looming far closer than they’d seemed just a few seconds ago. Mol jinked around an ON battlecruiser, her hull scarred by blast marks and a gaping hole in her side. But she was still fighting, her rail guns and missile launchers still defiantly landing hits on the Nyctus.

She made a promise to the unseen crew as they swept past.

I got you into this, so now I’m going to get you out.

* * *

Thorn wished he’d had more time to recover from bringing the Hecate back into known space. But the two subsequent Alcubierre hops that had brought them here, to the battlespace itself, lasted barely an hour. He still felt leached, like something had drained his blood and will, leaving him an echo. Or a husk.

He opened his eyes and looked out the open witchport at the vast and violent chaos of the fleet battle raging all around the Hecate now. As he watched, rail gun shot from a trio of ON ships tore into a massive squid carrier-class, shredding hull plates in a glittering arc of plasma and debris. Before the ON ships could turn, a second Nyctus ship rolled between them, firing at what was essentially point-blank range. A titanic flare of light signaled the end of one ON cruiser, even as the other two began to pour a hail of fire on the fleeing squid ship. At every point in his field of vision, there were ships, and death, and the lights of unlimited space warfare as sailors fought and died without ever seeing the enemy up close.

Thorn shook himself with an effort, leaving the reverie behind. He didn’t have the luxury of time. What he had was a task. A goal.

That, he could understand.

He clutched his talisman with the ferocity of an unbreakable promise. “Sir, I’m ready,” he said to the air.

“Understood,” Tanner replied. “We’re keeping station on the Gyrfalcon, per the plan. We’ll do all we can to protect it, but we’re just one ship, so this mostly comes down to you, Stellers.”

Thorn could hear the grudging acknowledgement in the Captain’s voice. Destroyers like the Hecate weren’t designed for frontal line action; they were meant to prowl the edges of battles like this one, covering the flanks of the capital ships, giving fire support and looking for targets of opportunity. If she were to come under sustained fire from the battleship ahead, she’d be reduced to scrap in minutes.

“Got it, sir,” Thorn said. “I’m ready.”

“Signaling the Gyrfalcon now.”

Mol’s voice came back, muffled and clipped by the high compression of the burst transmissions. They had to keep the squids thinking the Hecate and the Gyrfalcon were unrelated, just two more ON ships caught up in a fight for their lives. Even if the Nyctus caught their encrypted burst transmissions, there’d be nothing to indicate what they were about.

“Roger, Hecate,” Mol said. “Stand by.”

Thorn closed his eyes, summoned and gathered what power he could find, and shaped it into a shield, a protective cocoon of magical force enclosing the Hecate.

Kira’s voice followed Mol’s.

* * *

“I’m going in . . . now,” Kira said, drawing on that enormous reservoir of potential she’d discovered in herself, shaping it into a Joining she’d been practicing in her mind since Thorn first came up with this, and hurling it—

Into the back of the Gyrfalcon, into the mind of the unconscious shaman.

In a few seconds, they’d know if this was going to work, or if all of this had been futile, a lost cause from the start. It all came down to one thing Kira thought she’d learned about the Nyctus.

That they weren’t some sort of hive mind.

There were dozens of Starcasters in the ON, but Kira only knew a few of them. Most were utter strangers to her. They’d had no idea if the situation was the same for the Nyctus shaman. For all the ON knew, their shaman might be some sort of collective, sharing thoughts like the individual cells in a brain. But Kira had been given a unique opportunity—she’d been able to touch the minds of her squid captors, lifting not just information—which had proved to be mostly false—but also a diffuse understanding of the creatures themselves. Like humans, they were individuals, not some sort of shared consciousness. That in itself was an important piece of knowledge, but more immediately, it gave her an opportunity—or, at least, she was almost certain it would. Of course, she could be wrong, and squids, or at least their shaman, did share thoughts on some level.

Well, let’s find out, Kira thought, and set about turning herself into a squid.

She reshaped the incoherent thoughts of the drugged shaman, draping them like a veil over her own. On some deep, instinctual level, the creature’s mind rebelled, trying to expel her the way someone just punched in the face might spit blood. Kira pushed on, shoving through this primitive, hind-brain defense, and immersing herself in the shaman’s chemically induced swirl of fractured consciousness. Ruthlessly, she suppressed the creature’s identity, crushing it down into a dark, dim place, and substituted her own.

Kira tried something simple, like opening her eyes. At least that’s what she intended to do, but the squid eyes didn’t so much open as they did reshape themselves, losing opacity as lenses slid and fluid drained away to reveal—

—Alix and Toff looming over her, their faces radiating potential violence.

Glad they’re on my side, Kira thought, then twitched. Oh. Shit.

Kira was now a Nyctus shaman. Or she was shaman-ish; it was more like piloting the alien creature than actually being it. But it was close enough, and that meant step one was complete. Now for step two.

As she reached, mentally, toward the massive enemy battleship, it struck Kira how dependent she was on Mol and Toff to keep her alive. She no longer had anything but a distant, vague awareness of her own body; it was effectively just cargo aboard the Gyrfalcon.

Didn’t matter. Kira pushed her consciousness toward the enemy battleship—

And was greeted with a wall of psychic iron.

* * *

As the Hecate emerged from the ON battle line, she started to draw fire. Not much; most of the KEW’s and missiles swept past her, racing toward the capital ships. But the Nyctus made enough note of the destroyer to begin lobbing violence her way.

Tanner rattled off orders to the Helm over the intercom, then to Tactical. The Hecate slewed and swung about, putting on bursts of sudden acceleration, then abruptly slowed again. He handled the destroyer like a fighter, dodging and weaving her through the Nyctus fire, closing on their own battle line.

More and more incoming fire began to converge on her. A missile detonated against her reactive armor with a heavy thud. Then another. Her point-defense batteries poured streams of tracer-bright rounds in glittering arcs, tracking incoming projectiles. It was an amazing effort, made even more brilliant by the fact it was mostly working. The Hecate raced on, as though making a determined death ride straight at the Nyctus line.

Which was exactly the point. She made herself the most obvious target in the battle. That meant the Nyctus concentrated ever-increasing fire on her, enough to saturate her defenses and then overwhelm them. That should have been enough to guarantee her fate.

And that was where Thorn came in.

He tensed and solidified the shield he’d created around the destroyer, becoming a living conduit for raw magical power. He shaped it into an implacable barrier, against which the savagery of the Nyctus flared, and then died.

Wreathed in a nimbus of impacts and explosions, but otherwise unharmed, the Hecate sailed on, flying straight into hornet’s nest.

Now the Nyctus were fixated on putting an end to this upstart destroyer, whose wild charge had begun to pull in more ON ships. The Hecate was becoming the tip of a massive wedge, aimed at the heart of the Nyctus battle line making up the right flank of their surprise attack on the Fleet.

In the vast confusion, a lone Gyrfalcon attracted almost no attention at all. A single fighter just wasn’t important enough; it couldn’t, after all, swing the battle by itself.

* * *

Kira met the barrier the enemy shamans had erected around the battleship and her consorts, a solid wall of denial intended to keep any psychic intrusions by their enemy at bay.

But Kira wasn’t an enemy. She was a Nyctus. The barrier barely registered her awareness as it passed through. There were, after all, many good reasons to allow the shamans to commune among themselves, and she was just one of the gang.

Kira’s mind entered the bridge of the massive Nyctus ship, and with the grace of a dancer, she brushed against the minds of the crew, including three shamans imperiously watching the battle unfold. One of them spared her a thought, its tentacles waving in lazy, unconcerned arcs.

Bored. The bastard is bored, Kira thought, a spike of hate searing her mind. She iced it and moved on, returning to her diamond focus. Like fog rolling downhill, Kira continued her quest, tasting the moment and finding it to her liking. This is it, she knew. This was the moment. If the squid recognized her as one of its fellows that shouldn’t be here, who’d been lost days ago in a minor skirmish in the Zone, then the deception would fall apart. Kira braced herself, mind flowing, shimmering—invading.

Do you have a purpose for this contact, or are you simply here to share in the glory, brother?

Kira resisted a surge of relief. She spoke with the nerves of a junior officer, unsure but opportunistic.

I’m concerned, she replied. The enemy seems to be making a determined counterattack.

The speaker was imperious and brusque. It matters not. This battle is won. The humans are already all dead. They just haven’t realized it yet.

The shaman’s attention wandered off to the battle, to the apparent death ride of the ON fleet. As it did, and he lost focus on Kira, she pounced.

She ruthlessly tore the squid’s thoughts apart, leaving it reeling. It gave her the moment she needed; she’d planned to have it psychically attack the bridge crew, hoping she had enough power to overcome them and seize control of the ship, at least briefly. But she saw a better way.

Near the shaman stood a warrior, a guard on-station against the admittedly remote possibility of an enemy boarding action. While the shaman staggered, she flicked out a tendril of thought, punching it into the warrior’s relatively weak mind.

Now, let’s see how much power I’ve actually got.

Kira now controlled three squids: the drugged shaman aboard the Gyrfalcon, the second shaman aboard the battleship, and the warrior. Her power waned, but she tapped the last of it as a drunk tips bottle, feeling the satisfying lurch in her pool of magic.

I have enough for this.

She raised the warrior’s blade gun, pumped two rounds into the second warrior on the bridge, then proceeded to gun down the shamans and the rest of the bridge crew, sparing only two—the ones she’d recognized from their thoughts as the helm and gunnery officers.

I’ll be needing you in a moment, friends.

The tidy discipline of the bridge collapsed into chaos and gore. But Kira wasn’t done. She turned the blade gun on the warrior, remorselessly forcing it to kill itself, then poured the rest of her power into seizing control of the two remaining squids.

The battleship’s massive batteries smoothly reoriented, slewing away from the approaching ON ships. Their massive barrels now pointed at—

—their own ships.

Alarms immediately began to sound, automated safety systems activating to prevent a friendly fire disaster, but the gunnery officer knew how to override them—and so, therefore, did Kira.

The alarms went silent. A few seconds later, the battleship opened up again, pouring broadsides into the Nyctus ships around it even as Kira commanded the helm to start the huge ship swinging. The engines howled to full burn as well, driving it toward a flanking battlecruiser.

That’s good. All ahead full, Kira said, and the Nyctus she controlled gave a squeak of fear.

* * *

Thorn grunted as enemy fire slammed into his shield, an endless tsunami of psychic impacts as real as if they were striking his flesh. His grip on The Hungry Trout was so tight the cardboard bent inside his palm. He couldn’t endure this much longer, was almost spent—

The Hecate shuddered as a KEW—rock with some ice and iron, a lethal mix—struck her a glancing blow. Distant alarms sounded; he heard Tanner, his voice as flat and calm as ever, order damage control to respond. A few seconds later, another missile struck, the reactive armor deflecting most of its blast; but another followed, slamming into much the same place as the spent armor and gouging a hole into the destroyer’s flank. More alarms sounded, their relentless howl adding to the unlimited chaos erupting across the big ship.

Thorn teetered on the edge. He simply had no more power to spare—his reservoir running dry, waves of nausea began contorting his psyche. His physical body was twisted as well, sweat sluicing in his uniform from a silent war being fought inside him.

His shield began to falter—

And silence. Blissful, perfect silence as the alarms died with a startled squawk over the ship-wide channel.

There were no more impacts. His power had faded, rendering the shield a ghost of its former self, but the Nyctus fire had slackened dramatically. When he opened his eyes, he saw why.

A massive battleship looming just ahead of the Hecate had suddenly gone rogue, pouring torrents of fire into unsuspecting and unprepared Nyctus battlecruisers, heavy cruisers, and destroyers. The powerful ship quickly crippled a swathe of the squid battle line, throwing the entire Nyctus flank into confusion.

In quick succession, three salvos of KEW shots tore into the Nyctus cruisers, each impact sending a plume of atmo, plasma, and dead enemy into the black in a cone of destruction some hundred meters wide. One cruiser detonated in a white-hot cloud, leaving nothing but an afterimage. The second Nyctus ship hit by friendly fire was a battlewagon hundreds of meters long; it too was raked by KEW but with a different result. In a silent howl, the ship cracked in two halves, each spinning wildly and crashing into yet another wounded Nyctus ship of the line—the space between the ships was filled with crew, and debris, and flashing lights from systems flaring into raw energy.

Dozens of Nyctus wriggled as they died, the hard vacuum freezing them to their twin hearts even as the fleet came apart around them.

Now the entire ON fleet was in range, and the big rail guns spoke with silent lethality. Ten meter rods tore into Nyctus ships, each impact shearing through the reactive armor like it was a paper toy. As holes opened in the targets, ON gunnery locked on with massive lasers, frying the interiors of Nyctus ships, leaving seared, molten decking and destruction along the way.

Thorn sensed death.

Not ordinary death, but the death of ships. The death of a fleet. The end of things for an entire battle group, each Nyctus mind shrieking into the void, their voices heavy with pain, rage, disbelief—music to Thorn’s ears.

And now, at that nexus of battle where will becomes reality, the battleship swung its ponderous bulk hard, locking itself on a collision course with a wounded battlecruiser, trying fitfully to leave on the power a handful of shamans could manage.

It would not be enough.

Thorn smiled. Kira had, it seemed, played her part perfectly.

But the battle was far from done. The center and far flank of the Nyctus force were still mostly intact, sending unshielded thoughts of panic and horror at the dramatic reversal they witnessed. Thorn measured every bit of mental data he could glean, stitching an image of the battlespace that he could use to help the fleet render every squid ship into drifting scrap.

The Nyctus were losing, but not lost—at least not in their cold minds, where failure at the hands of humanity had never been given a place to take root.

Taking a deep breath, Thorn readied himself to start ’casting again, using whatever strength he had left to help turn the battle—if not to a complete rout, then to a victory for the ON that would echo through the ages.

He lifted his hands, closed his eyes, and pushed.

* * *

More automated systems kicked in, while squids in other parts of the battleship frantically worked to reassert control. Kira saw the bridge consoles go dead as they were locked out, which meant she’d done all she could here. She began to withdraw but hesitated, then flicked her consciousness toward a shaman she recognized as an elder of its caste. It was still alive, but dying, its guts shredded by the warrior’s blade gun.

Looks like you lose, she said.

The creature’s awareness flickered, then solidified, focusing on her.

You’ve won nothing.

Kira’s mood shifted to feral glee.

I think you’re all going to die, and we’re going to see it happen. Thorn is coming for you. We are all coming for you.

As she spoke, she remembered those awful seconds when she felt the squid approaching, murder in their alien minds because she had outlived her usefulness. If it hadn’t been for Thorn, she would have been this squid, about to die and helpless to do anything but know it.

The squid’s thoughts remained defiant, but Kira could feel the mounting terror behind them. Its arrogance was now a façade.

There it is, she said. There’s the fear. Yeah, that’s all I wanted. Your fear is a perfect betrayal, here at the end.

She started to break the Joining, but spared another moment.

Can you hear me still? Kira asked.

I hear an upstart—a race destined for slavery and death at our touch. A servile animal who has taught itself tricks—

Kira laughed across the miles, and the Nyctus fell silent.

You will only serve as debris. Die badly, coward, she sent.

The Nyctus said nothing, but Kira sensed its life draining away. She watched the battleship crash into the cruiser, both ships ringing with the tortured impact as mass and velocity came to bear on things that were not built to last forever.

Kira let the Joining end, saying nothing else as the lingering flame of Nyctus spirit was snuffed out. Extracting herself from the shaman was complicated. The squid was dead, she was not, and as she emerged from her place between their minds, she blinked, bewildered but smiling.

With alarm, her smile faded. Mol was maneuvering hard to avoid a squid missile.

“Mol?”

Mol glanced at her. “We done? Because if so, the Flag’s ordered a general engagement, Hecate at the point. This whole squid flank is falling apart, and it looks like the rest of their fleet is starting to pull back.”

“They probably don’t know what happened, exactly, and don’t want it to happen again,” Alix said.

Kira sagged. “I’m done. Just a passenger now,” she said, her voice thick with fatigue.

“Roger that,” Mol replied, her fingers dancing over the controls as she powered the Gyrfalcon toward the thick of the fight.

Kira looked back at Alix. “How’s our friend?”

The leader of Tiger Team Three shrugged at the Nyctus shaman. “As dormant as ever. This has actually been a pretty boring trip for us.”

Kira looked at Toff. The man’s eyes were still closed, and—was he snoring?

“Unbelievable,” Kira muttered, chuckling.

Alix looked at Kira. “So, I know these bastards had you, Kira. I know that had to be rough.” She glanced at the shaman. “Do you want this damned thing to survive? Or should we, you know, lose control of it and have to put it down?”

Kira gave a tired smile. “I’ve had my fill of killing squids today. Let’s bring this one back and see if we can figure out what makes them tick.”

To herself, Kira thought, You won’t like the new me, friend. Or Thorn, for that matter. Gonna be a long day for you . . . soon.

The shaman remained quiet, though Kira thought one of its tentacles twitched.

* * *

Perched in the witchport on the Hecate’s prow, Thorn realized he was further forward than anyone else aboard the destroyer, which was itself leading the Fleet on a charge that was breaking the Nyctus battle line.

He was literally the tip of the spear.

Inside him, his reservoir began to fill, energized by the collected victories around him. Sailors shouted, cursed, and prayed—all of their hopes and thoughts pouring across space in a storm of will that lit a fire in the place where Thorn’s magic bloomed, like new shoots under the soft rains of spring.

He was renewed. Rousing himself, Thorn gathered his power and began to ’cast, laying destruction about him as the spear plunged deep into their enemy.

He drew focus on a massive airlock amidships on a Nyctus ship, rolling hard to port. With a thought, he opened a crack—small, but then small cracks are just as lethal in the hard vacuum of space. Then he shorted the electrical systems along a bulkhead, sent the Nyctus against each other in an orgy of violence, and watched, placidly, as the enemy vessel began to spit fire before collapsing in a nova of white light.

“Next,” he muttered, bringing his attention to an enemy ship nearly five hundred meters long. A planetkiller, he thought, feeling the shamans aboard as they put up a wall of defensive magic against his incursion.

But they were distracted by the battle.

One junior officer faltered—just a wobble, really, and Thorn was there, piercing the defenses like a javelin as he made a crewman send the power system into overload with the touch of a single tentacle. In seconds, the spike cooked off wires and conduits, sending flames and searing chemicals through the air, into the water of their tanks and through their bodies.

The ship died in a series of explosions along the flank, each section venting to hard vacuum before the hull shattered in three uneven pieces, whirling like the edge of a demented knife.

Railgun rounds, lasers, and a lone missile launched from an ON destroyer flared around Thorn in a symphony of silent, lethal violence.

And then there were no more Nyctus ships to target with fire or force.

The Hecate, battered but still flying, had broken completely through the squid force, scattering it. The rest of their fleet lost its nerve, their resolve broken by an attack they couldn’t understand, by a magical manipulation that had turned what had seemed to be decisive victory into a suddenly uncertain outcome. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know their thinking.

The risk was too great. There would be other fights.

One by one, the Nyctus ships began to vanish as their trans-light drives lit. In moments, the surviving ON fleet was alone, left with only a few, crippled enemy ships to mop up.

Thorn?

It was Kira, her voice wafting through his exhausted mind. He smiled. She was still alive.

I’m here.

Guess it worked, huh?

Guess it did.

Mol’s on her way back. We should be aboard soon.

Good. Oh, and Kira?

Hmm?

You’re definitely top ten Joiners. Top ten?

In this engagement? Easy.

He felt her laughing. I am so going to kick your ass, Stellers.

He closed his eyes, slumped back, and smiled.

Bring it, Wixcombe.

Epilogue

Thorn stood with Kira, Tanner, and Mol, watching as the Nyctus shaman was unloaded from the Hecate for transfer to a shuttle down to Code Gauntlet. He had no idea what would happen to the creature after that, but he didn’t need to know—at least until somebody decided he did. The docking concourse of the orbital component of Code Gauntlet was strangely quiet, emptied out by the security detachment escorting the Nyctus prisoner.

“Surprised the thing made it back aboard alive,” Tanner said, glancing at Kira sidelong. “Figured it would probably end up dead. You know, a casualty of the battle.”

Kira shrugged. “Who knows, sir? We might learn something useful from it yet. If its brains haven’t been entirely scrambled by all this time being drugged, that is.”

Thorn understood. His gaze slid away from the shaman, and he regarded Kira, watching her with mixed admiration and concern.

Tanner turned to Thorn and Kira. “Between the two of you, you’ve nearly wrecked my ship and flung it halfway across the galaxy. I’ve got every right to be pissed at you about that—and I am.”

Thorn and Kira both nodded. “Understood, sir,” Thorn said. Was this a preamble to having him reassigned somewhere else? Had Tanner had enough Starcasting aboard his ship?

“Between the two of you, you also almost got the Fleet wiped out, and then made the Hecate instrumental in turning that around, taking what would have been a huge defeat and turning it into a not-too-bad victory. So there’s that, too.”

Thorn looked at Kira, who gave a slight shrug. “Sorry, sir, but is there something you’re trying to tell us here?”

“Fleet wants you moved to a capital ship,” Tanner said. “Both of you, in fact. But being Captain of the ship that turned a major battle gives me some clout. I can use a chunk of it to keep you aboard the Hecate, at least for now. But I’m not going to do that if you want to move up, Stellers. Not going to stand in the way of that.”

Thorn saw the squid shaman loaded through an airlock farther up the corridor, its inert body strapped to a rolling gurney pushed by a pair of armed personnel. He shook his head. “I’ve only just got the cushions in the Hecate’s witchport arranged how I like them, sir. I’d hate to give that up.”

Tanner gave him a wintry smile. “Not sure whether to feel dread that you want to stay aboard my ship, or be happy about it. Maybe some of both.” He turned to Kira.

“Can’t say where you’re going next, Wixcombe. I know you were given an on-the-fly debriefing on our way back here, but Fleet wants you for a detailed session once you’ve had a couple days of leave. You’ll be given a new assignment after that.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Rumor is that you might be assigned to work directly under Captain Densmore.”

Kira frowned. “Oh.”

“Oh, indeed. You ever need a bunk, though, Wixcombe, there’s one aboard the Hecate for you. After you . . . observe Densmore for a while.

“Observe, sir?” Kira asked.

“Let’s call it that. For the moment,” Tanner replied, his face giving nothing away.

“Thank you, sir. I might just take you up on that, and I’m in the mood for some observation, given my recent history,” Kira said, matching his bland tone. They were saying little, but each understood what was happening. Densmore would be rooted out, but it would be done outside channels. Quietly, until the need for stealth was past, and then Alys Densmore would be dealt with in a manner befitting her status.

“I’ll help,” Thorn said, earning a small grin from Tanner.

“I welcome the assistance. Travel safely. Oh, and Stellers?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t lose your temper. Every time you do, I end up on the other side of the galaxy.” Tanner tapped Thorn on the chest and walked away, whistling. His task was huge—fixing the Hecate and rejoining the fight.

“Observe. Interesting term,” Thorn murmured.

“And chosen for a reason. Let’s keep this quiet,” Kira said.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Consider me dumb on this one. I don’t do spy shit,” Mol said brightly. “Happy to space a spy for you, though. Now about the next two days—you guys looking for a ride?” I’m heading planetside. The Gyrfalcon still doesn’t have a working Alcubierre drive, so I’ve got some shop time lined up for her down in Code Gauntlet.”

Thorn looked at Kira. “I’ve got a couple of days of leave. Think you do, too?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Got room for us?” Thorn asked.

“Sure, but crowded, mind you,” Mol went on, turning to start back into the Hecate, to her hangar and the waiting fighter. “Bringing Tiger Team Three down, too. Apparently they have a post-op ritual of getting wildly drunk and . . . well, let’s leave it at that.” She grinned. “Alix says she can drink me under the proverbial table. Isn’t that adorable?”

Thorn laughed. “She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into.” He turned back to Kira. “Care to spend our first day of leave hungover with me, hating the sun and life in general?”

Kira grinned back. “First you yank me out of trouble, and now you’re going to lead me right back into it.”

Her grin faded, though. Thorn knew she was suddenly remembering the ones that had been left behind—Rainer and Riley.

It was quick, Thorn told her silently.

You think?

I know. I don’t feel them. Doesn’t make it hurt less.

I—yeah, Kira said, a plastic grin on her face so Mol wouldn’t sense their grief.

Together, they followed Mol back into the Hecate. Behind them, the docking concourse, now released by ON security, was starting to come back to life.

Thorn walked slowly, reaching out to the shaman as he did. It took a moment, but then he sensed its mind—fuzzed, but present.

I’d get used to this if I were you, Thorn sent.

Moments went by, then an answer, dripping with arrogance.

Used to what, you larva?

Thorn felt his lips curl, then sent a final word. Losing.

* * *

Keep reading to continue the story in CRIMSON SUN.

Prologue

The screen door banged behind her as the little girl came tumbling out onto a broad porch, her small feet busy as she laughed her way through a cloud of fat, indignant insects that buzzed away at her approach. Their green bodies shone in the bright light. She leapt off the bottom step into the lush grass, landing awkwardly, then she stumbled and pelted ahead in the way that only children can, somewhere between joy and chaos.

She kept her feet pumping and ran on, leaving a wake of clacking, buzzing bugs roused into flight by her flailing passage, their only accompaniment her silvery laughter. It was late morning, and behind her in the grass, the girl left a trail of passage. Overnight dew, now burning off in the brilliant sun. A path, wandering as she did, her eyes lifted up into the sky, where the angry bugs dispersed in fading metallic sounds.

“Lookit!” she said, raising the doll she’d been cradling in her arms—a smiling boy with wild, dark curls of hair and crude insignia patches sewn to each arm of its tattered shirt. “Lookit, Mister Starman! Lookit the bugs!”

She turned a circle so Mister Starman could see the fleeing bugs; he took it all in with his usual cheerful smile but had nothing to say about it. He wasn’t chatty. Just happy, and a good companion.

The girl shrugged and broke back into a run, aiming for the cool shade under the sour-fruit trees at the edge of the orchard, their limbs drooping with dark green globes.

Partway there, she stopped again and squinted up against the yellowish dazzle of the sun that was framed so perfectly in the cyan-blue of the sky. Of course, this was why she’d come outside in the first place as soon as breakfast was done. She shifted Mister Starman to one arm and raised the other, pointing with a small finger. Her eyes narrowed in the light, cheeks already pinking with the heat of a summer’s day.

“Awwww.”

No horse.

Yesterday, there’d been a horse in the clouds, trotting slowly across the sky. She loved horses, even though there were none here on Nebo. There were hulking, smelly things called broad-backs that sometimes pulled the plows and wagons, but they were nothing like the ethereal horses.

Since discovering them on the vid during learning-time, all she’d wanted to do was watch the sleek, beautiful creatures, with their intelligent brown eyes and their flowing manes and tails. It didn’t matter if they trotted or galloped or just stood still; the elegant creatures had utterly captivated her. That’s why seeing one in the clouds yesterday had been so exciting.

Mister Starman hadn’t been with the girl, though. Mommy had insisted on cleaning him up, then leaving him to dry for the day. And now the beautiful horse in the clouds was gone, leaving the girl’s lips in a moue that began to fade as fast as it formed.

She dropped her arm and frowned. Her black robe seemed eager to slurp up the heat of the mid-morning sun—a steamy heat, because it had rained only a little while ago on top of the dew, and now the air felt the same way it did in the bathroom when the shower was running. Her frown fell away as she looked around for some sort of relief that didn’t mean going back inside. Learning time would start right after lunch, so she only had until then to—

She wasn’t sure what. She’d come outside to see the sky horse, but it had trotted on to—somewhere else, beyond her limited horizons.

“I’m hot, Mister Starman,” she said, careful with her s sounds. “Are you hot, too?”

He didn’t reply and just kept smiling, but the girl thought she saw a glimmer of sweat forming on his fabric brow.

“Yeah, you are. Let’s, uh . . .”

She looked around but stopped when she faced the sour-pod orchard that sprawled off behind the house. The shade beneath the leafy trees looked so cool and inviting.

“Let’s go there!”

She bounced off, skirting the grav tractor with a broken strut, reaching the shady gloom and stopping again to take her bearings. The air under the trees still had a thick, sultry heat to it, but without the glare of the sun it seemed cooler. At least, cool enough to stand, take stock, and find a good place to sit. The girl was too young to have a schedule, so selecting a tree to lean against would be one of the most important events of her day.

Settling back against the rough bark of a sour-pod tree on the edge of the orchard, the sky was still visible, spreading away in an endless dome of blue.

“Hope the horse comes back,” she said, eyes wide and round.

She kicked off her shoes, then wiggled her toes and settled herself in. She sat Mister Starman on her lap, his back against her chest, and peered closely at the doll when she saw one of the patches on his shirt had started to come free, loose threads dangling. The patches had symbols on them, and words she couldn’t actually read, but she knew what they said anyway. Daddy had told her.

“That says Orbital,” he’d told her, one calloused finger pointing at the first word. “And this one says Navy.” He moved his finger back to the first word, then traced both as he spoke. “Orbital Navy.”

“Ortib—”

He smiled. “Orbital.”

“Orbit—al.”

She’d eventually gotten it, even if she didn’t know what the words themselves meant. It didn’t matter, though, because Mister Starman did. He knew all about Orbital Navy, and lots of other things, too.

But not horses. She had to tell him all about horses.

Sighing, she looked back up at the sky, still unhappily free of dancing horses. There was a cloud that looked like a bunny, and another like some kind of spiny thing, maybe a jawfish, like the ones that made it so you couldn’t swim, except where mummy and daddy said it was safe? Uncertainty pulled at her tiny brow as she watched the clouds bloom, their edges swirling and dancing as a hidden wind began to pull hard, high above.

Then something did appear, and it was no horse.

It was a hard, fierce point of light, so bright it hurt to look at. It was like a little piece of the sun had broken away and now streaked across the sky. The sun shard left a glowing trail behind it, but it was utterly silent.

“What’s that, Mister Starman?”

He didn’t seem to know.

A huge bang walloped her, like a blast of thunder. The girl jumped and looked around, heart pounding, suddenly breathless with confusion.

“What’s that?” she asked, but Mister Starman had no answers.

The dazzling mote of light fell across the sky, toward the horizon. A steady, rumbling thunder seemed to follow it. The light touched the distant hills and vanished—

Then the entire sky in that direction lit up, as though from a tremendous flash of lightning in the late summer storms. The girl winced at the glare, instincts humming in her little body.

No, she thought. No, no. This isn’t right. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Pieces of the sun didn’t break off. Thunder and lightning didn’t come from a sunny, empty sky.

Mister Starman agreed. He showed it by starting to glow a soft, shimmering blue. He did that sometimes, when she wanted to change things. To make them just so.

Another piece broke off the sun. Then another. The girl shook her head. No. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it worked. Pieces didn’t break off from the sun.

The bluish glow swelled, filling the air around her like a pool, outward, slipping, spilling, pouring over grass and broken grav-tractor alike. In seconds, the coruscating light swept through the sour-pod trees in a flood of brilliance, rendering every part of the house and barns in sharp, cobalt relief.

The light did not stop there. It went on, a silent flood turning her world the most perfect blue. A cool color, not like the broken piece of sun that spat anger as it fell.

The doll seemed to smile as he glowed, bright enough now to push the sunlight away. On the small, fabric face, a look of relentless good cheer beamed, and the sunlight began to fade, replaced by a pure blue that curved up and out in a dome of dancing energy. The temperature dropped. The girl smiled, knowing Mister Starman would make things all right. That was what he did.

A boiling wall swept over the distant hills and raced toward the farm. Everything vanished behind it, leaving only hazy visions of scorched ground and tattered trees, their bark and leaves flashing into ashes as the lethal procession vaulted forward, inevitable as the wind. In just a few seconds, it washed over the blue glow—and was deflected, around and up, until the farm and the grass and the orchard were just a bubble of unchanged calm encased in roiling fire.

It only lasted a brief moment, then raced, trailing tongues of flame that slid across the bubble, seeking a way inside. The sky returned, but it was different—pale, shimmering, shot through with more pieces of the sun, all of them streaking with blasts of thunder toward a colossal, black cloud now rising and spreading from beyond the hills.

“No, no, Mister Starman,” the girl shrieked. “Make it stop, make it stop!”

Mister Starman happily obliged. Streams of blue radiance shot up from the bubble, reaching for the sun shards like grasping hands. Each time they touched one, it simply vanished, poof, gone. But there were more, there were always more. To the girl, the sun was falling apart, and she wondered if anything would be left behind. She was a brave girl, but the thought of endless dark touched her fears, and she clutched the smiling doll even tighter.

Something warm and wet slid across the girl’s lip. It tasted of salt, and the way the old scrap metal daddy kept in a bin behind the barn smelled. Trembling, she touched her mouth, then pulled her finger away. It was crimson. It was blood. Her nose was bleeding.

No.

Mommy. She needed mommy.

The girl drove herself to her feet, meaning to run back to the house, find mommy, and get her to make all of these horrible things stop. As she did, the shimmering blue light faltered.

It was replaced with a searing white glow. The girl spun around to see that one of the sun shards hadn’t been sent away by the blue light, and now the errant piece of fiery debris fell toward her in a long looping arc. It was the biggest by far, swallowing most of the sky.

The girl began to cry harder, a hiccupping sob that shook her shoulders as the sky kept falling, and the world flared into ruin everywhere except in the bubble of deepening blue light.

Mister Starman smiled and tried to help, tried to gather some of the blue light, or so the girl thought—she could tell he was trying to make everything right again. But he didn’t have enough time, and the fragment hurtled to the ground spitting red and orange sparks, the air around it scalded to furnace heat.

The white light filled her eyes, and the doll said nothing. Neither did she, and the world rang like a bell, mortally wounded from the falling pieces of sun.

* * *

Thorn!

Stellers! Stellers, what’s wrong?

The voices drifted out of the light that had become everything, everywhere. A white so bright it filled his head, displacing coherent thought. He recognized the words, Thorn, Stellers, what’s wrong, but couldn’t attach any meaning to them. They were just sounds—noises that meant something, but he couldn’t discern what. There was only the light. The world was made of light.

Stellers! Shit, infirmary, crash team to the mess hall!

Okay. Okay. Those words—they did mean something. He was Stellers. Infirmary was—a place. Crash team—

The meaning of crash team flickered tantalizingly close, then vanished behind a wall of pain.

“Stellers, look at me! Look at my eyes!”

Thorn groaned. The light had become pain. It filled his head completely. There was nothing else, just pain.

His pain. But also the pain of others. A multitude of minds shared this agony with him. Some were familiar. One, though, was unmistakable.

Kira.

She was screaming. It was like the dreams and visions he’d once had of her, when she was taken by the Nyctus and nearly killed. Except this time he was screaming right along with her, his vocal chords straining to the point of shear.

“Stellers, dammit, look at me!”

The voice rang through the pain like a whip crack, cutting it apart, revealing a face looming over his. Through the pounding agony, he recognized it.

Tanner. Captain Tanner. Commander of the Hecate.

“Stellers! Can you hear me?”

Thorn nodded, or thought he did. Tanner’s face resolved as that infinite white pain gradually receded, like a tsunami slowly draining back out to sea. More details swam into view. Pipes and conduits lined the ceiling, beyond Tanner’s face. People moved around. Voices—

“Stellers, nod if you can hear me.”

Thorn did. This time, he felt muscles contract, and his field of vision moved.

The white agony had faded into the edges and margins now, a painful nimbus that haloed everything Thorn could see. Even that was subsiding now, and Thorn nodded again.

“Sir—”

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “Don’t try to move.” He turned to—someone, but Thorn couldn’t see who. “Where the hell’s that crash team?”

“Right here, sir,” someone called. There was a clatter as more people appeared—off duty crew in various states of dress, a security team, grim with purpose, and now medics with crash bags slung over their shoulders, a stretcher floating along on grav repulsors.

“Okay, Stellers, these people are going to take care of you. Don’t—”

“Sir—”

“—try to move. Just stay still, they’ll—”

Thorn shook his head this time. “No. Sir. We—” He had to stop and swallow, his voice scraping against his throat like shards of glass. “Nebo.”

“Nebo. What about it?”

“Nebo—” Thorn levered himself to his elbows. He lay on the deck in the mess, the dinner of passable stew he’d been eating spattered across the bench where he’d been sitting, dripped onto the deck plates beneath in slow, gooey dollops. “Nebo,” he tried again. “Attacked. It was—”

“Attacked? Nebo was attacked?”

Thorn nodded.

“How do you know?” Tanner shook his head. “Never mind. Look who I’m talking to.” The Captain gestured the medics forward and stepped back, activating his personal comm. “Nav Officer, calculate the flight parameters to Nebo and get them verified by Engineering. I’ll be on the bridge in ten. Be ready to fly then.”

“Aye, sir,” the Navigation Officer replied.

One of the medics clamped a diagnostic tap around Thorn’s wrist. The other handed him a disposable wipe. “Your nose is bleeding, sir,” she said.

Thorn sniffed and caught that unmistakable tang of blood in the back of his throat. As he wiped at his nose, Tanner returned to his side. “Okay, Stellers, while these good folks do their job, you’d better tell me what’s going on.”

* * *

“Stellers, one last check before we hit Alcubierre cutoff,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?”

Thorn ran a hand across the midnight velvet of the witchport’s thick cushioning. He’d been asking himself the same question. He did feel fine, but he’d also felt fine right up to the moment the powerful vision—or hallucination—body-checked his conscious awareness into a half-dead heap in the mess. Never before had he experienced something that intense, that—

Overwhelming. That’s what it had been. It had been utterly overwhelming. Whatever the cause, and despite his formidable talents as a Starcaster, he’d been wholly unable to sense it coming, or do a thing about it when it did.

He drew a slow breath, assessing. “Aye, sir,” he said. “I feel fine. A little dragged out, bit punchy, but otherwise fine.”

“Kind of wish the medics had found some reason to shove you into the infirmary and keep you there, to be honest. Thought we were past the whole Starcasters-are-unpredictable-and-therefore-dangerous thing by now.”

“Sorry, sir, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”

A moment passed. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know what Tanner was thinking. Despite almost three years having passed with him as the Hecate’s Starcaster and him having proven over and over again how valuable his magical talents were, the old thinking hadn’t really gone away. Tanner was better than most mundanes by far, but even he still had a simmering reservoir of superstitious distrust not far beneath the surface. It might be buried deeper in Tanner, but it was still there.

The logic was simple. Starcasters use magic. Magic defies scientific analysis and can’t be quantified, so it remains an unknown thing. And unknown things are frightening.

“Don’t need to tell me anything else, Stellers. One of my officers tells me they’re good to go, I believe them.”

Thorn offered the intercom a tired, but appreciative smile. Tanner really was better than most.

Thorn braced himself as the drive’s cutoff alarm chimed, then snapped his helmet in place, but left the faceplate open. A few seconds later, the Hecate’s private little Alcubierre universe winked out of existence, depositing the ship back into real space, in the Nebo system. With a small lurch that sent Thorn’s breather swinging under his chin, reality changed, and with it, a sense of calm descended on the ship.

Thorn focused on his talisman, his battered children’s book, now strapped in a purpose-made pouch on his crash suit, then he decompressed the witchport and opened it to the hard vacuum of space.

The planet called Nebo lay directly ahead, a tiny, sunlit half-disk. Tanner had brought the Hecate in as close to the planet as he dared, while still leaving the destroyer space to maneuver—and fight, if necessary.

A glance at the repeater tactical display mounted in the witchport showed no other ships in the system, though. Tanner had requested that the nearest ON assets, a potent fighting patrol centered on the battlecruiser Hammerfall, stand ready to help, but he hadn’t yet received a reply because of the distance involved. That left the Hecate on her own—but she was a capable ship, able to outgun anything smaller than her, and outrun anything bigger.

“No comm emissions from the planet,” the Comms Officer said over the ship's channel. “They’ve gone completely dark.”

Thorn inhaled, nerves dancing. A planet with almost a billion people living on it? It should be a hub of comms traffic. His gut tightened, like someone had started turning a vise.

Data kept sluicing in through the Hecate’s scanners. The picture steadily developing was ominous. No comms emissions, no local or orbital ship traffic, spectrographic data from the atmosphere that was all wrong.

“Stellers, you have anything?” Tanner asked.

“One moment, sir.”

Thorn touched gloved fingers against his talisman. He’d learned that direct physical contact, while slightly better, wasn’t necessary; it seemed that his intent to touch the old book was enough to let him focus his powers through it. Using it as a springboard, he cast his awareness ahead of the ship and pushed it through the dead space of hard vacuum until it brushed against the planet called Nebo.

Fire. Riven earth and shattered rock. Destruction, on an apocalyptic scale.

Death.

Thorn let his awareness snap back into place, like a stretched rubber band. It left him gasping for a moment, catching both his physical and mental breath as the echoes of Nebo began to fade from his awareness.

“Sir,” he finally said. “Stellers here. Nebo is dead. Utterly dead.”

1

“So it looks like every Starcaster, every single one, experienced essentially the same thing you did,” Tanner said, lifting a data slate so Thorn could see it. “The Hammerfall has reports from across four sectors, and they were still coming in when she passed out of range of real-time comms.”

Thorn quickly scanned the data slate. Seventy-one incidents were recorded, and three of them had been fatal—two Scorches who’d simply lost control of their powers and immolated themselves, and a Tidal who’d succumbed to a truly freakish accident. She’d had the misfortune to be on an EVA when the vision struck and managed to drown herself in her own vacsuit before anyone could intervene. Tidals could not only control water, they could make it, and in losing control of her ability, the ’caster shifted from target to victim in one fatal moment.

Thorn nodded. “When I first came to after the vision ended, I thought I heard screaming. Many people, all screaming together.”

“You made quite the bloodcurdling howl yourself, Stellers,” Tanner said.

“I thought it might be the stew,” the XO, Raynaud added. “That first mouthful almost made me scream, too.” She smiled, dark eyes lively, but Thorn could tell it was empty of humor, just an attempt to lighten the gloom gripping the Hecate’s bridge.

“The vision of what happened here affected all Starcasters, everywhere, all at once,” Thorn said, working through the implications. Or trying to. It was all new to him

“So it appears,” Tanner replied. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea, sir.” He’d already recounted as much of the horrific vision as he could remember to Tanner and the Raynaud, holding nothing back. “It must have something to do with that little girl. She was clearly powerful—hell, powerful enough to shield herself from a KEW (Kinetic Energy Weapon) impact and knock more KEW’s right out of the sky.”

“That sounds like some you-level magic,” the XO said.

Thorn shook his head. “I doubt I’d be able to pull that off, ma’am—not without doing things to reality that we might really regret. What she did doesn’t seem to have had any lasting effects, though. And she was just a little kid—three or four years old, maybe. I’ve never heard of a child manifesting more than the occasional, random effect, like starting a fire, freezing the water in a pot, that sort of thing. It’s just enough to flag the fact they actually have magical talent, and that’s it.”

Tanner turned to the main viewscreen. “Well, it seems the Nyctus somehow recognized what she was capable of and decided to put an end to it,” he said, his voice soft and somber.

Thorn turned to the image of Nebo.

The archive entry for the planet showed it as a pleasant world, green continents amid blue water. The particular combination of Nebo’s orbit, its axial tilt, the nature of its star, and myriad other factors made it not only Earth-like, but better than humanity’s home planet in many ways. It had better, more stable climatic conditions over a larger proportion of its surface; aside from a few mountain ranges and the climate extremes at its poles, the whole planet was lush forest and arable land.

Abundant, predictable rainfall, along with temperatures that varied only slightly from nearly ideal, meant the growing season across most of the planet lasted almost eight months out of the thirteen defined by its orbit. There was a single, large moon, buttery gold and holding stubbornly to some atmosphere, with polar caps and great canyons that cast deep shadows, shifting as the moon moved in its eternal dance.

It was as though someone had looked at Earth, identified all the faults and imperfections, and then designed a planet to fix them.

But no more.

Thorn stared hard at the blasted, scoured surface scrolling beneath the orbiting Hecate. They were over the nightside, so he could see the orange glow of magma leaking through cracks and fissures radiating out from the gaping wounds of KEW impact craters. The rest of the shattered surface was mostly dark, the firestorms that had devoured any available organic matter long since burned out. The atmosphere itself glowed slightly, though, a diffuse shimmer of superheated air. The lowest surface temperature the Hecate had recorded was just under three hundred degrees celsius, ranging up to nearly five times that close to the biggest impact scars.

“Stellers?”

Thorn turned. His hands hurt; he realized he’d been squeezing them hard enough to leave fingernail imprints on his own palms, but even then he had to exert some deliberate effort to unclench them. “Sir?”

“Since it appears there’s nothing more we can do here, I want you to report to the infirmary. The Doc’s going to do a complete workup on you.”

“Sir, I’m—”

“Going to the infirmary, like you were just told,” Tanner said. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”

Thorn let out a slow breath, then nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Carry on, then.”

Thorn saluted, turned, and strode off the bridge. He glanced back once at the ruined planet.

There’s nothing more we can do here.

There wasn’t. There would be no rescue, no recovery, no enemy to fight—just a world scoured by force and flame down to its bedrock, and nearly a billion souls cremated in the process.

And all of it—what, to kill one little girl?

He spun about and marched off to the infirmary, once more squeezing his hands tightly enough to hurt.

* * *

Thorn blinked. The sterile efficiency of the Hecate’s infirmary loomed whitely around him. He still wore his uniform, less tunic and boots, and still lay on a gurney, waiting as patiently as he could while the medical scanners assembled a picture of his condition. He really didn’t think the system would find anything actually wrong with him, aside from a surplus of frustrated anger.

Movement to his right caught his attention. He turned and saw several figures, garbed in sterile surgical suits, surrounding another bed. He could only catch glimpses of whoever was in it—the humps of feet under a draping sheet, part of a bare arm, tousled hair against a pillow.

Someone must have been injured—badly, too, from the number of personnel attending to them. An accident, Thorn assumed. They did happen, often enough that command staff incorporated a factor in their work for out-of-battle casualties. The navy was a dangerous place, with personnel taken out of action by mishaps like falling, having things fall on them, burns, electrocutions, or even just simple illness. Thorn opened his mouth to ask the nearest of the med staff what had happened—

But froze when the medic moved aside, letting Thorn see the face of whoever was the focus of so much care and effort.

It was Tuck Ander.

Thorn closed his mouth again. Tuck Ander. Here, aboard the Hecate. How had he not known? The Hecate wasn’t that big a ship. Thorn hadn’t seen Tuck since they were recruits training at Code Nebula. Even then, Tuck never graduated. He’d struck a superior officer, a capital offence in the ON. However, he’d done so using magic, which had let him avoid execution on the technicality that he hadn’t used fist or foot—a loophole now closed, thanks to Tuck. Instead, he’d been drained of his ability to interact with magic, a dire outcome that had ended his career as a Starcaster before it even began.

Which meant Tuck being here, on the Hecate, made no sense whatsoever. And neither did the procedure being performed on him—the same one that Thorn had been made to witness when Tuck was rendered magically null, a violation of hideous proportions. The same ominous electrodes were attached to Tuck’s shaven skull, leading to devices—sinister in appearance—that had forcefully siphoned away his magical power. One of the med staff activated the machinery, and the same awful process Thorn had been forced to observe—four years ago, now? Five? It didn’t matter. It was happening again.

Except it was worse. It wasn’t just Tuck’s magical potential that the machines were sucking away. His essence seemed to diminish, too—his eyes becoming dull, like frosted glass. His skin turned sallow and waxy, and his body seeming to shrink, collapsing in on itself like a deflating balloon. As Thorn watched in horrified fascination, Tuck was reduced in the same process as before, but this time, it didn’t stop when the man was a sobbing, broken husk. It went on, the skin on Tuck’s body growing pale, then withered, and then flaking like a mummy found in some forgotten kingdom, a hollow-eyed echo of the man he’d once been.

Thorn finally managed to croak out a word.

“Tuck?”

The leering skull that had been Tuck slowly turned toward him, jaws opening impossibly wide as the thing—it wasn’t Tuck, of that Thorn was sure—tried to speak. It could not, but managed something even worse. A whimper, so human and piteous as to make Thorn flinch as if he’d been struck.

Thorn needed to know why this was happening, and how. He began to ask, drawing on his well of courage to demand an answer for why Tuck was being broken all over again in a ghastly repeat, but the world fell away in a howl of wind, tearing the words from Thorn’s throat in a sickening change of pressure. His breath gone, Thorn stared in horror at a storm cloud, black and roiling that covered Tucks bed like a curse. The cloud was perfect in detail, raging about the bed in small fury, as if seen from a distance, though the ozone-scented air filled Thorn’s senses as a peal of thunder broke loud and rolling, signaling the wind to cut loose in a circular fury. Instruments, linens, trays, and anything not fastened down began to whirl as lights flashed and Thorn’s pulse spiked with adrenaline near killing levels.

The staff knew nothing. Moving quietly, they sensed, saw, and reacted to—nothing. They stood as islands, implacable and mute.

Now Tuck fought to lever himself up, his mouth working hard on words Thorn couldn’t make out in the wild tempest. Thorn swung his feet off the gurney and pushed into the storm, reeling from side-to-side as blasts of wind hit him like hammers made of ice. He ignored the med staff and focused on Tuck, who fought with desperate effort to say something to him.

As soon as he was in reach, a bony hand punched out and grabbed Thorn’s arm in an iron grip. Tucks empty eyes bore into his, and he finally managed to cough out a single word.

“Witness!”

As Tuck spat out the word, he jabbed his other hand at the med staff. Thorn turned in time to see the wind rip away their medical garb, exposing wet, grey skin, bulbous eyes, and tentacles.

Nyctus. They were all Nyctus. And they were here, on the Hecate.

“Thorn,” Tuck hissed. “What next?”

Thorn opened his mouth to scream for security, but a vicious blast of wind blew him backward. Now he could feel his own power being bled from him, like someone reaching deep inside and pulling.

Thorn drew himself back, desperate to get away from Tuck, from the storm, from the Nyctus. He crashed into something and fell—

Flat onto the gurney, where he just lay, blinking, the overhead lights harsh in his vision.

There was no storm, just the soft, white-noise rumble of the Hecate’s systems. Thorn rolled his head to the side and saw no Tuck—and no Nyctus. He saw only the ship’s surgeon, Quinn, and a nurse, both muttering over a medical display.

“Doc?”

Quinn looked up, her dark eyes snapping to focus on him. “Ah, Lieutenant Stellers. Sleep well?”

Thorn swallowed hard. His heart still pounded in his chest, a staccato, loping beat of two notes that translated to a fear response so ancient, it had no name, only a sound. “I was asleep?”

“You were. Not a problem, though,” the surgeon replied. “And actually better, in a way, since we get better data.” He pointed at the display. “Looks like you were dreaming, too.”

“I . . . was, yeah,” Thorn said, letting his head sink back down on the pillow. He’d had the dream before, of being back at Code Nebula and once more witnessing the horrifying removal of Tuck’s capacity to perform magic. The procedure itself had been bad enough, but the recurring dream added the even more horrifying drain of Tuck’s life force, and his reduction to a cadaverous shell. It had been a horrific thing to see, so it wasn’t surprising the event haunted Thorn, a constant echo of the time he’d seen a ‘caster broken back to pure humanity, like a maestro who loses the ability to hear and speak.

Tuck had known magic, and then he’d known a void. The emptiness was cruel enough. Living beyond the procedure was a kind of walking death, known only to Tuck and the few other ‘casters who had been deemed too dangerous to continue practicing magic. It was a small group of souls who were bereft of the spark within them, and Thorn still felt pangs of guilt every time he thought about Tuck’s sad eyes and shaking body.

But there had never been Nyctus before. Never.

“Well, Lieutenant,” the surgeon said. “You’ve got a slight buildup of metabolic toxins, which suggests you need a good night’s sleep. Your electrolytes are a little off as well, so eat something before you rack out. Otherwise”—Quinn paused and looked at the nurse, who shrugged before turning back to Thorn—“you’re in pretty much perfect health.”

Thorn sat up. “Please tell the Captain that. I’d be grateful. Maybe throw in a few words like superb and remarkable.” He tried to sound offhanded about it, but his heart was still racing—something the ship’s surgeon could readily see on the display.

“Take it those dreams were unsettling,” the surgeon said, then looked up and gave Thorn a sly smile. “Or just exciting? No—don’t tell me. Your dreams belong to you alone.”

The nurse chuckled. Thorn forced a smile, but it felt waxy on his face.

“Let’s go with exciting, sir,” he said, reaching for his uniform and boots. Eyes averted, Thorn dressed and thought of Nyctus, and secrets, and memory.

* * *

Thorn touched the ID panel beside the door to Tanner’s planning room, located immediately behind the Hecate’s bridge. The door slid open, and Thorn stepped forward,

Then he stopped, seeing the little room jammed with people.

“Squeeze in, Stellers,” Tanner said, gesturing him forward. “Everyone get cozy.”

Thorn pushed his way, sliding between the XO and the Hecate’s Security Chief, a man named Braxton who had, in the three years Thorn had known him, smiled once. Besides them and Tanner, the ship’s intel officer took up virtually all of the remaining space. As Thorn pushed against Braxton, the man glared at him—a bit unsettling, since their faces were about twenty centimeters apart.

“You realize you have to buy me dinner now,” Braxton deadpanned.

Thorn gave a grim nod. “Only if you take me dancing after.”

Braxton let a glimmer of a smile leak through his eternal scowl, then they both turned as Tanner cleared his throat.

“Save the romance for your off time, kids. We’ve got Nyctus to hunt,” the Captain said, Thorn chuckled along with all the rest, even though the dream he’d had in the Infirmary about Tuck still hung around, dark and unwelcome. Tanner didn’t even crack a smile, and just pressed on.

“The reason I’ve had you all jam in here is this,” Tanner said, touching a control and bringing an image up on the screen mounted on one bulkhead. Thorn had to crane his head around the XO’s to see. The image was that of a man, dressed in an ON uniform, sitting at a console aboard—a ship, although there was nothing to indicate which one it was. Probably a capital ship, given the expansive bridge, but that was all he could tell.

A moment of silence was finally broken by the XO.

“Okay, sir, it’s . . . someone, sitting at a bridge station.” She looked at Tanner. “Is there something more I should be seeing here, sir?”

Tanner opened his mouth to reply but paused as Thorn leaned forward.

“You have something to add, Stellers?” the Captain asked.

Thorn examined the image. That face—

“I’ve seen this man before” Thorn curled his lip. It hadn’t been someone he’d met at Code Nebula; he knew all those people well enough that he’d recognize them without trouble. Who then?

“Wait,” he said, as the memory popped open like a new data window. “Right. I don’t know his name, but he was the Tactical Officer aboard the Centurion.”

“Right first time, Stellers,” Tanner replied. “Which leads me to ask, how do you know this man?”

“Well, I don’t, actually.” He went on to explain how, not long after being assigned to the Forward Operating Base known as Code Gauntlet, Thorn had been tasked to assist in figuring out how the Nyctus were degrading ON sensors. This involved watching the Centurion’s flight-recorder data play out the doomed ship’s final moments, from the perspective of the bridge crew.

“And this man was the Tactical Officer.” Thorn looked at Tanner. “How long ago was this image captured, sir?”

The intel officer answered. “Three days ago, aboard the Colossus.”

“She’s Admiral Best’s flagship, isn’t she?” the XO put in. “Command ship for the whole Rimward Fleet?”

“That’s right,” Tanner replied.

Thorn took a moment, letting the information percolate through his overloaded senses. This, the images of Tuck, and his vision of the little girl on Nebo were all combining to cause hairline cracks in his certainty about what was real. The unnerving moment passed, and he spoke up.

“So he survived the wreck of the Centurion?”

“That’s what we’re supposed to believe, yes,” Tanner said.

The Security Chief’s frown deepened. “Supposed to believe, sir?”

Tanner nodded at the intel officer.

“The Centurion took a direct KEW hit on her bridge just a few minutes into the battle. Fleet Intel has reviewed the imagery and came to the conclusion that no one could possibly have survived it. Not a missile. A KEW, at hard acceleration, and a direct hit.”

Thorn remembered standing on the Centurion’s virtual bridge in the simulator at Code Gauntlet, watching the grim recreation of her last minutes and how it had so abruptly ended. The imagery run after that, taken from the external feeds of surviving ON ships, caught the battlecruiser’s destruction in horrific detail. There was no way anyone could have survived that. And yet—

“Flukes do happen, sir,” he said. “I’ve heard some pretty wild tales of skin-of-the-teeth survival in battle.”

“And some of those are even true,” Tanner replied. “But yes, that does happen, and it does seem to have happened in this case.”

Now it was the XO who looked confused. “So what are we doing here then, sir?”

“Appearances can be deceiving, XO,” Tanner replied. “This man somehow didn’t die aboard the Centurion, it’s true. But he wasn’t found and rescued by the ON. Instead, the man simply resurfaced about six months ago, claiming that he’d been found by salvagers, managed to get away from them, then made his way back to ON lines. I’m a fan of dumb luck, but this stretches my concept of it and tickles my natural cynicism. I know I’m guilty of being overly cheerful—”

Someone snorted, but Tanner went on, unperturbed. “And yet, I’m left with an intense need to know how this could have happened, given that good luck rarely occurs when we’re fighting an enemy as creatively evil as the squids.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes. The story was plausible; there were salvagers, grubby opportunists, who carried on the age-old tradition of plundering battlefields after the fighting was done.

“But we don’t believe that, I gather,” the Security Chief said.

“No, we do not,” Tanner replied. “People, meet our newest Nyctus problem. We call them Skins.”

2

“Lieutenant Wixcombe, report to docking port four ASAP.”

Kira glanced up as the synthesized voice spoke over the general address system, then sighed in disgust. Finally, she’d managed some free time, having bargained with both the Duty Watch Commander and another of the Stiletto’s Lieutenants, a sallow-faced young man named Davis, who totally sucked at poker. With two more favors in her bag, she’d used the first to finally get more than a few hours of sleep, and had planned to use the second to get serious about contacting Thorn.

But now—

“Lieutenant Wixcombe,” the mechanical voice repeated. “Report to—”

“Yeah, yeah, on my way,” she snapped, prying herself out from behind the tiny worktable in her cramped quarters. The Stiletto, a heavy cruiser, was by far the most spacious ship to which Kira had yet been assigned, but crews grew in proportion to the size of the ship, so it really wasn’t any more spacious than, say, the Hecate—not on a per-person basis, anyway.

Still, she thought, fastening her uniform and grabbing her cap, the ON could no doubt make an empty field seem crowded.

She made her way along narrow corridors, stepping over hatch coamings along the way with practiced ease. Captain Densmore insisted that every member of the Stiletto’s crew be able to navigate every centimeter of the ship in complete darkness while blinded by smoke. It was a dedication to crew survival Kira hadn’t heard any other Captains practicing.

It was also another reason Kira was convinced Densmore actually wasn’t a spy for the Nyctus.

She stopped to let a trio of crewmen pass by, each carrying a hefty power cell. They nodded as they passed Kira, and she nodded back, a formal acknowledgement of an officer by enlisted Ratings when there wasn’t room to properly salute.

She carried on, heading for Docking Port Four. She had no idea why, but that was typical aboard the Stiletto. Technically a ship of the line, the Stiletto was actually much more specialized. If she was on the front line, then something had gone really wrong in the war. Her real mission was support for covert ops. She deployed and recovered spec ops teams and other intel specialists on furtive missions, most of which Kira knew absolutely nothing about. But then she didn’t need to know about them, and was only read into those missions she did. Keeping secrets came naturally to intel officers. Keeping secrets on the Stiletto was practically religion.

She stopped again, this time to let a forgettable man in a plain day-uniform pass by. The man, who barely acknowledged her, had no insignia or rank badges, just a security chip with a four-digit number on it—5783. Kira watched him recede down the corridor. Whoever Mister 5783 was, he wasn’t ON.

That was another reality about the Stiletto; ON ships did sometimes carry civilian personnel, usually shipyard representatives overseeing flight trials, various types of contractors, or certain mission specialists. Densmore’s ship had more than its share of civvies aboard, though, all of the spooky variety. Kira wasn’t even sure how many civilian personnel were aboard the Stiletto. She presumed someone had a head count for civvies, in case the ship ever got into trouble and had to be evacuated.

Although Kira suspected the Stiletto would likely be scuttled long before there was any threat she might be compromised by the Nyctus.

The only thing she did know about Mister 5783 was that the blue diamond on his security chip marked him as a member of the ELINT—electronic intelligence—department. That was the Stiletto’s other major role—eavesdropping on electronic comms of all types, from transmissions to the characteristic EM emissions of ships underway.

ELINT occupied almost a third of C-deck, a part of the ship into which Kira had only been once—and then with most consoles covered up. That was part of Densmore’s everybody-know-every-centimeter-of-the-ship-even-in-the-dark thing, but Kira was absolutely confident that after only one visit, she’d be able to get hopelessly lost in ELINT, even with the lights on.

Intel was a world of compartmentalization. And the more Kira learned just how compartmentalized it was, the more dysfunctional it all seemed.

She reached Docking Port Four, to find Densmore already there. A striking woman, Alys Densmore had a perpetual sense of knowing about her—both of secrets kept and the ability to glean anything from anyone, a kind of prophet whose sole purpose was to sniff the wind and understand who held what advantage at any point in the war. On one level, it made her mysterious, an enigmatic, figure of vague menace. On another, though, it just made her annoying.

“Ma’am,” Kira said, saluting. “I was called here, but I’m not sure why.”

Densmore nodded. “In about ten minutes, a civilian shuttle is going to dock here. It will contain the pilot and one passenger. The passenger will be your responsibility. You will escort him to briefing room five-alpha and proceed to debrief him. I’d like your summary report on my desk by oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

Kira suppressed a grimace that all commanding officers could sense no matter how minor. It was in their skill set, and thus Kira’s face was a marvel of neutrality. Not only was she going to lose the duty-free shift she’d bargained for, but now she was going to be stuck babysitting some civvy for who knew how long. A hint of her displeasure must have leaked into her expression, because Densmore gave her a narrow-eyed look.

“Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”

“No—” Kira began, then stopped, because there were moments, rare but important, where being wholly honest with a superior officer was the best course of action.

“Actually, ma’am, there is. I’ve been aboard this ship for almost three years now, and you’ve consistently rated me above grade that entire time. I’ve never been late for duty. More often than not, I’ve stayed on duty past the end of my shift to help with some damned thing or another. I—”

“Am getting burned out,” Densmore said. “Is that where this is going, Lieutenant?”

Kira gave a slow nod of grudging admission, realizing who she was speaking to. “Actually, ma’am, I think that is part of it.” She shook her head. “No, that’s actually all of it, really. I just need some time to recharge. I’m roasted, and not in a good way. My judgement is—it’s not bad, but it’s not what it should be, and you deserve my best.”

“And you want to try to meet up with Lieutenant Stellers?”

This time, Kira avoided a scowl. It really wasn’t any of Densmore’s—or anyone else’s—business, what she got up to during her personal time off. But her relationship with Thorn was no secret to Densmore; in fact, she probably knew as much about their relationship as anyone. So Kira finally shrugged.

“If I can track him down, yes. I haven’t seen him in—” She paused, thinking. It had to be at least six months, a brief cross-over of their paths at Code Catapult, an ON’s FOB—forward operating base. The Hecate and the Stiletto had both docked there for resupply, giving them almost two full days together. There’d been no time together since.

“About six months,” Densmore said, offering Kira a thin smile. “You met him at Code Catapult.”

Kira smiled back. “You certainly know your crew, ma’am.”

“I know everything, Wixcombe,” Densmore said, her smile taking on a more predatory edge. But she immediately relented into something more like actual good humor. “Which means I also knew you’d finagled this duty shift as time off.”

Kira blinked. “Wait. You knew that, and you assigned me duty anyway, debriefing this civilian—”

“When you’re aboard this ship, your time is my time, Lieutenant Wixcombe.”

“Yes, of course, ma’am, but—” Kira let the complaint die of natural causes. She really didn’t want to get into this.

But Densmore let herself grin, if only just. It was a look of understanding, forged over years of dealing with the machinations of junior officers and their complex lives. “You wanted the time to try and contact Stellers, because you’ve been trying ever since the Vision of Nebo, but he hasn’t been reachable.”

“You know, ma’am, I appreciate that you’re the Captain and all, but I think your crew—and especially your officers—are entitled to some privacy.”

Densmore held up a hand. “No, I haven’t been eavesdropping or spying.”

This time, Kira forced herself to maintain her composure, while quietly reinforcing the shield she’d erected around her thoughts. Her captivity by the Nyctus had shown her that, when it came to locking down her own mind, there was almost no one who could enter that space without her permission. Thorn was the only exception. She’d done so ever since, partly out of sheer reflex, born of the trauma of that awful ordeal as a captive of the squids.

But a big part of it was Densmore herself. Kira and Thorn had come to suspect that Densmore might be in league with the Nyctus, which would be a massive problem for the ON. They’d shared their concerns with Captain Tanner of the Hecate, who’d offered to keep her aboard his ship, when Fleet began talking about assigning her to work for Densmore.

After some thought, she and Thorn had decided that putting her in close proximity to Densmore might be for the best. They didn’t have enough evidence to actually level any sort of accusation against her, so the best they could do was have her accept the posting to the Stiletto—with Tanner’s help—to keep an eye on the enigmatic woman.

And here she was. Three years had passed, and she’d found absolutely no evidence Densmore had any connection to the Nyctus at all. Kira had concluded they were wrong, Densmore wasn’t compromised—but she still kept her thoughts guarded. The woman finding out that Kira had been spying on her, to see if she was a spy, would at least lead to a tense, awkward conversation.

But Densmore had just made an explicit reference to spying. Did she know, or at least suspect something, after all?

All of this flashed through Kira’s mind in a moment, firmly behind her formidable mental shields. Densmore didn’t seem to notice, though, as she just kept on speaking.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of Stellers myself,” she said to Kira. “I have no doubt you have too, and I assume you’ve had no success either.”

“Yes, ma’am. Right after the Vision, I tried to contact him. I’ve tried several times since, but gotten nothing,” Kira said.

The Vision. That’s what the Starcasters had come to call the gut-wrenching event, when they’d all witnessed, firsthand, the destruction of Nebo by a Nyctus KEW bombardment in real-time, and from the perspective of a remarkable little girl. Kira still hadn’t begun to really process the implications of it, which hit her harder and more deeply than most. In fact, she’d been avoiding it, just keeping the horror of it in a part of her memory she could ignore.

For now. But not forever.

She needed to talk to Thorn.

The certainty of it, the absolute necessity to contact Thorn, made up her mind for her. “Ma’am, I’ve taken no leave in three years. Most of that time, I’ve been aboard this ship, doing what I think is some pretty damned good work for you.” Her body language was rigid with decisiveness. At a cool look from Densmore, she settled back, hands held still with an effort. “I want to take some leave now. I’ve earned it, and I’m entitled to it.”

Densmore gave that slightly predatory smile again. “The exigencies of service, Wixcombe. We’re at war, so, yes, you might have earned it, might be entitled to it, but I don’t have to approve it at all.”

“Ma’am—”

“But I will,” Densmore went on, her smile fading. “The fact is, you have done damned good work, and if I refuse this request for leave, I know what will happen—you’ll start doing your job, and nothing more.” She shook her head. “In the type of work we do, doing your job isn’t enough. I need you at the tip of the spear, not somewhere back along the shaft, just helping to push the tip along.” She glanced at the docking port; the panel beside it showed that the approaching shuttle had been captured by the auto-docking system and would be connected in just over a minute.

“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 closet 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—

But it wasn’t the Joinings themselves, which were mentally demanding, though not enough to leave him this dragged out. No, this fatigue came from inside his own mind, which had slumped into a chaotic mess of overlapping thoughts and unaccountable feelings. Between the two, Thorn knew he was changing. After years as an orphan, he’d found a home in the navy, but now his job was wearing him down from the inside out.

“It’s better than slinging mud, but worse than the coffee I drank while slinging mud,” he said to the ceiling. The thought of bad coffee made him wince, and that brought a pang of awareness about what he was missing, and why. He began to count missions on one hand, and then two. Then, he mined the memories and found—

The missions weren’t overtly lethal. The whole war, in fact, had devolved into a weird, simmering series of border raids and odd clashes. Nyctus ships were rare. Their fleet was unseen. Their attack on Nebo had been the most presence Thorn had seen or heard of in months, if not over a year.

“I don't miss seeing the squid, no matter how charming they are. And now I’m talking to myself.” He stretched a bit, found the position wanting, and moved again. “Not sure I like myself enough to be my only friend.” That made him laugh, then the heart of his worry thumped to life in one thing, one image, one memory.

The Vision.

And there it was, of course. It wasn’t about being sick, or scared, or traumatized by battle, and he knew that. It was about the Vision, and his dream about Tuck, and neither of those were things he’d wanted to delve into very deeply. Those things did scare him, in a profound way.

Especially the Vision. Seeing Tuck torn apart all over again was a clarion call to hidden pain, but it had faded, because it had to. It was only a dream, in one sense—gruesome, brutal, and heavy in his senses, but only a dream.

No, it was The Vision that left him here, untethered in a sea of memory, free of purpose, and missing Kira, though he would not admit it. Not yet.

Watching the destruction of Nebo from the perspective of a little girl was wholly unnatural. Of course. There couldn’t be any joy in experiencing the final, terrified moments of an innocent child. Thorn knew full well such a thing would naturally be traumatic, a wrenching enough experience that even hardened combat veterans would probably have trouble dealing with it.

He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “No mud. Still better than Murgon-4,” he said, and it was. A damned sight better.

He stopped and stared at the toes of his boots.

A question had just occurred to him, one so obvious he couldn’t understand how he couldn’t have thought of it before. An abyss yawned before him, darkly beckoning to his sense of needing to know.

Who was that little girl?

Thorn had to stand. Of course he wondered who the girl had been. She’d obviously been a nascent Starcaster—and a powerful one, at that. The Starcaster Corps speculated that the Nyctus had attacked Nebo specifically to kill her, which had all sorts of terrifying implications on its own. For instance, how had the squids learned about her in the first place?

The doll was a mystery. The patches on it were not. It was an ON figure, clutched by a child who was far too young to grasp what such symbols meant, and as Thorn began to pull the knot apart, questions led to few answers, but a growing sense of unease at his ignorance about the child.

Why now?

His instinct was reflexive. His desire to follow through was—less so.

“Time to see Kira. There are things to know.” He didn’t relish her knowing gaze, but he understood that if he wanted to know what happened on Nebo, it started with the Vision, and it ended with Kira.

Kira, don’t answer. Know this. I’m on my way.

The stars listened, and Thorn stood, ready to find out what came next.

4

Kira was tired of explaining why, if she was on leave, she was sitting in transient quarters in Code Gauntlet, awaiting the arrival of the Hecate. Personnel on leave didn’t hang around military installations, eating military food and sleeping in military beds. They returned home to see family, or went to resorts or casinos, or just dove into a pool of booze and only resurfaced when their leave was done.

Several times, she’d had to explain herself to various Code Gauntlet authorities. Fortunately, being a Starcaster, she could simply refer to vague, mysterious reasons related to her ’casting that she needed to be there, and she was generally left alone. The questioners invariably walked away shaking their heads. Whether it was because they felt sorry for Kira, having to waste leave by hanging around an FOB for enigmatic, magical reasons, or just thought she was stupid for going along with it, she didn’t know.

It didn’t matter, though. The Hecate, which had been delayed a day, was finally here. As she made her way along the broad concourse that ran the length of the base’s orbital docks, she could see the destroyer just a few berths away. Looking through a viewport and seeing her name and registration number emblazoned on her dark grey flank in stark white gave Kira a thrill of anticipation. In a few minutes, she’d see Thorn.

She slowed. Anticipation, yes. But also dread. After his brief message, the silence was shattered, only to be replaced with questions of her own, left unanswered by the light years between them.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe!”

Kira turned to the voice and saw Mol Wyant’s grinning face peering between a burly pair of ON Ratings. Without hesitating, she pushed between them. “Step aside. Top secret mission in place.”

“Aye, ma’am,” the taller sailor said, touching fingers to brow.

“Specialist Wyant,” Kira said, smiling. “Good to see you. Gather you’re still assigned to the Hecate?”

“Good to be seen. And yup, Trixie and I still call the Hecate home.” Kira smiled, genuinely glad to see Mol’s friendly face. It was unusual for a destroyer of the Hecate’s class to carry a Gyrfalcon fighter; it had been a temporary arrangement that became permanent.

“So what brings you to beautiful Code Gauntlet?” Mol asked. “Last I heard, you were assigned to—the Stiletto, right? Spook ship, stealthed up and away from prying eyes?”

Kira’s smile widened. She genuinely liked Mol Wyant and would have preferred to use her first name to greet her, were the circumstances not so public. Although she hadn’t seen Mol in months, just a couple of years before she and Thorn had spent many days aboard her Gyrfalcon fighter, waging a covert campaign against the Nyctus.

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to space you. You know, rules,” Kira said.

Mol laughed. “I know you’re joking, but I have carried passengers who tell me that unironically.” Her laughter faded, and she gave Kira a sidelong look. “You are joking, right?”

Kira made her face grave. “No.” As a hint of alarm crept onto Mol’s face, Kira laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not that spooky—not yet, anyway.” She glanced along the concourse, to the Hecate’s docking port. “No, I’m just taking some leave, so I thought I’d—”

“Wait,” Mol said. “You’re taking leave—here? At Code Gauntlet? Okay, maybe you’re not spooky, but crazy, yeah. Leave is meant for beaches and such, not a grim shithole like this—”

Mol suddenly stopped as understanding dawned. “Oh. Okay, I get it. Yeah, he’s still aboard.”

Kira nodded. Coming from anyone else, it would have been presumptuous enough of a comment to earn a snappy rebuke. Coming from Mol—well, she, Thorn and Kira had spent enough time together aboard the Gyrfalcon, that she considered Mol a friend. So she smiled. “Saw right through me, huh?”

“Again, Lieutenant—leave at Code Gauntlet? Not hard to see past that.” Mol narrowed her eyes. “Everything okay with you two? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.”

“Why? Did Thorn say something to you?”

“Uh, no. It’s just that you’re not exactly rushing on board the Hecate to see him. Instead, you’re standing here talking to me.”

Kira was about to brush her comment off, but she stopped and looked around instead. The two hulking Ratings Mol had displaced to get to her were definitely within earshot; she could hear them arguing over money that somebody owed to somebody else. She nodded for Mol to step away from them, closer to the bulkhead.

“Has the Hecate been involved in any major ops, lately?” Kira asked. “And no, you don’t need to go into details. I’m just wondering if there’s been a lot of stress on the crew, things you guys have to keep under wraps.”

Mol just shook her head. “Trixie and I haven’t fired a shot in anger in months. Neither has the Hecate. We chased a few suspected Nyctus patrols that turned out to be sensor ghosts, saw a whole lot of stars, and that’s about it. We think of it as a touring vacation, sorta, but on the edge of enemy territory. With the Nyctus having pulled back, flights have been like sitting and watching a bulkhead rust. Why?”

“Because Thorn’s been totally silent. I’ve tried a few times to reach out to him, using Joining, and I know he’s there, but he won’t answer. I was just wondering if there was something going on that would be, you know, making him do that.”

“Nothing I’m aware of,” Mol said. “Why don’t you just ask him? Kinda the reason you came here, right?”

“That’s the plan, yeah,” Kira replied, looking again at the Hecate’s port. “Which means I guess I’d better go find him.”

“You don’t sound excited about that—which I get. You’re worried what he’s going to say.”

“Yeah.” Kira sighed. “To be fair, I wasn’t exactly the best communicator before the Vision happened, and I ghosted him a little. Maybe a lot.”

“I heard about that. Some kind of big psychic shock wave, right?”

Kira winced in remembrance. “Something like that. Anyway, you put the missile right up the exhaust port—I do need to just go talk to him.” Kira didn’t move right away. She’d come all this way, but these last few steps to the Hecate suddenly seemed like a steep slope she had to climb—one she might just end up tumbling right back down.

Mol jerked her head at the docking port. “So go do that, ma’am. Or go check out all the luxurious vacation options Code Gauntlet has to offer and forget about it. Hey, I understand they’re serving rice pudding in the mess tonight.”

“I hate rice pudding,” Kira said, smirking at Mol, then turning and starting for the Hecate. “I’ll see you later, Mol.”

“I’ll be eating aboard the Hecate tonight, if you need to find me,” Mol replied. “I hate rice pudding, too.”

* * *

Kira stepped through the airlock to find herself face to face with a dour, blank-faced ON Marine standing watch at the Hecate’s hatch. She stopped and identified herself to him, returning his salute.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but no personnel are allowed onto or off of the ship without the Captain’s approval,” the man said. He used that flat, clipped tone that seemed to be issued to all Marines at some point during their basic training.

“Alright, so let the Captain know I’m here,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

The Marine unclipped a data slate from his belt and scanned it, but he didn’t turn to the intercom. “Sorry, ma’am, but the Captain issued a list of personnel who are eligible to board the ship. His orders are that no one else goes aboard.”

Kira scowled. “So, if an Admiral walks up to you and wants to see the Captain, he doesn’t get to board?”

“No, ma’am, he does not. And all due respect, but you’re not an Admiral.”

Kira felt her cheeks flush in disbelief, stuck between outrage and bewilderment. Ships always had some sort of security on station while docked, but it wasn’t usually this unyielding. Just what the hell was going on? Was this somehow related to Thorn’s dogged silence?

“Kira?”

She turned to the voice.

Thorn stood in the airlock, staring at her with a half-smile, about to disembark the Hecate.

“Thorn,” she said. His name was enough, just then.

Thorn shook his head to clear the surprise. “What are you doing here?”

She was tempted to try Joining right here and now, to see if she could discern something about what was going on with Thorn. But she didn’t. Again, there weren’t many people who could stop her Joining, if she was determined to do it. But Thorn was definitely one of them—and an attempted magical intrusion into his mind was not the sort of greeting he’d likely appreciate.

“I’m—” She stopped and glanced at the stone-faced Marine, who was apparently fascinated by something in the distance. Thorn noticed and gestured her into the Hecate. The Marine opened his mouth, but Thorn raised a hand.

“She’s on my recognizance,” he said, voice crisp with authority.

The Marine’s eyes narrowed a fraction, but he finally just nodded and turned back to his post.

Thorn led Kira through the airlock, along one corridor, then another that dead-ended at a closed hatch marked Machinery Space 1674-D.

“Kira,” Thorn said, suddenly grinning. “What the hell are you doing here? I didn’t see the Stiletto on the docking roster.”

“She’s not. In fact, she’s four sectors away right now.”

“Wait—have you been reassigned? So no one’s near Densmore?”

“Oh, for—Thorn, Densmore isn’t a spy.”

“Really? You’re sure of that?”

“As sure as I can be. I mean, anyone could be a spy, right? But, in almost three years, I haven’t seen a thing that suggests to me that she is.”

“Okay, but—”

“Thorn,” Kira said. “I didn’t come here to talk about Densmore. And no, I haven’t been reassigned off the Stiletto. I’m . . . on leave.”

“On leave? Where are you heading?”

“What do you mean?”

Thorn gave a lopsided grin. “Well, you sure as hell didn’t come to Code Gauntlet on leave—” he started, but his face fell as he understood. “You did come here on leave. Strange choice for a place to unwind.”

“Thorn, I came to see you. You’ve been refusing to talk to me for weeks now.”

A shadow passed across Thorn’s face, hinting at some sort of pain, anxiety, or uncertainty—or maybe all of them—that he was deliberately keeping buried. Had he not been the Starcaster she was, she might have tried to suss out something about it with her Joining. But she didn’t and just waited for his reply.

It took a moment. Kira could see him assembling his thoughts, thinking of how he would answer her, and what his cryptic message had meant.

“I’m glad you’re here. I know it might not seem like it, but—yeah. It's good that you’re here. This isn’t the moment, but soon.”

“You’re being evasive, Thorn. What the hell is going on?”

Thorn shook his head. “I need a moment, myself, just as you have. Where are you quartered?”

“Transient quarters. Room one-seventeen-delta.”

“Okay. I’ll be in touch. No matter what, don’t leave.”

He leaned in, kissed her quickly, then walked away. The kiss was more than casual, and less than intimate. It was a noise, a touch, and then it was over, and the sound of Thorn’s feet faded away, leaving the uncomfortable hum that closed around Kira and her growing sense of abandonment.

“Bullshit,” she muttered, suddenly angry—but also worried. There was something happening behind those eyes of his, but he was too damned good at hiding.

Now, more than ever, she needed to talk to Thorn. She had to tell him what she’d come to tell him. But time was no friend of hers, and patience was something she’d run out of. Her greatest fear was the navy getting in their way and eating up the time they had with bullshit that would stop them from coming to a resolution about their past. And their future.

There was a simple way to deal with that. Kira walked back to the main corridor, but instead of heading back to the airlock, she turned the other way and started deeper into the ship, before that Marine and his icy gaze came looking for her.

* * *

“Help me understand, Lieutenant,” Captain Tanner said. “You want to spend your leave aboard the Hecate.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just to be clear, we are not a cruise ship. We don’t carry passengers.”

Kira nodded. She’d forgotten how small the Captain’s planning room was; it jammed her uncomfortably close to Tanner, one of the few senior ON officers Kira genuinely respected. And, yes, that respect did lead to a touch of fear. Not of the man, but of letting him down, not meeting his expectations—

Or asking him what amounted to nothing more or less than a major favor.

“I understand that, sir. What I’m hoping I can work out is some sort of temporary posting, from the Stiletto to the Hecate.”

Tanner steepled his fingers and leveled an intense look on Kira. “Far be it from me to balk at getting another trained and experienced officer aboard—an officer whose work I already know, and a Starcaster, at that. But I suspect Captain Densmore will have something to say about it.”

“Yes, sir. I’m hoping that—” She stopped. She really was asking Tanner for a major favor, one he was under no obligation to even consider.

“You’re hoping that I’ll contact her and work out a temporary assignment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?” Tanner leaned back in his chair. “Why the sudden interest in being assigned to my ship?”

Kira had been making it up as she went along, so she didn’t bother trying to formulate some careful response, and just said what came to her.

“I need to spend some time with Lieutenant Stellers, sir. I’m worried about him, and well beyond the usual concerns because of his, ah—”

“Tendency to stay silent, avoid conflict, and move like a wraith unless you pin him down and ask him direct questions?” Tanner offered, thorough and accurate to a fault.

“Exactly, sir.”

“Sounds like you want me to abet fraternization, Lieutenant. If you two are that desperate for each other’s company, why not just coordinate your respective leaves?”

“Sir, this isn’t about fraternization. It’s—” Kira struggled for the right words. “It’s about Thorn—Lieutenant Stellers. He’s closed in on himself. I’ve tried talking to him via Joining, and he refuses. Just now, when I saw him down at the airlock, he didn’t seize the opportunity, so to speak, and that’s a problem for all of us.”

“All of us?”

“Yes, sir. He’s more than a simple gun you point at squid, and I think we both know it. This isn’t like having just anyone start suffering from burnout, or whatever’s happening to him. He’s a Starcaster—and a powerful one. Probably the most powerful around, at least right now. Maybe ever. That’s no ordinary weapon. That’s someone who can turn the war, and he can’t do it without being clear with me, not as a fellow officer, but as what—as who—we are, to each other. I know you have reservations about magic in general, sir—hell, I do, and I’m a Joiner. What I’m asking for is the chance to bring him back from this drift. From this place where he might lose his edge at the worst possible time, and all because I didn’t do everything I could to tell him the truth. About me. About his family. And maybe most of all, about the future.”

Tanner leaned back, his diamond gaze focused on Kira. She knew the man, had worked for him, and respected him immensely. She wanted to go on speaking, to give Tanner the entire picture, but couldn’t. Not before she’d finally had a chance to talk—really talk—to Thorn, anyway.

The penetrating silence went on. Kira started to deflate. Tanner was going to order her off his ship, tell her to start behaving like an ON officer and not some love-sick schoolgirl, because that’s what she was sure he thought this was about. Kira missed Thorn, desperately needed to talk to him, to be with him—

Which suddenly seemed so pathetic, even if it was just an outward appearance, that she opened her mouth to withdraw the request, then just be on her way.

But Tanner spoke first. “I’m going to approve your request, Wixcombe. I’ll contact Captain Densmore and work out the details. She owes me a favor or two, so I’ll call at least one of them in.” He leaned forward. “Temporary assignment, Wixcombe, not permanent. We’ll call it a cross-posting, come up with some operational reason for it to keep Fleet’s personnel branch happy.”

Kira blinked. “Oh. I—” She shook her head. “Thank you, sir.”

“Will there be anything else, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir,” Kira said, then stopped herself. “Actually, yes, sir, there is. Why did you change your mind?”

“Don’t normally explain my decisions to subordinates, Wixcombe, unless I think there’s good reason for it.”

“I understand, sir. But you were going to say no, and then you said yes. All due respect, sir, but I worked for you long enough to know that you don’t do things on a whim. And I know I’m being presumptuous as hell, here—”

“Lieutenant Stellers is an integral member of my crew,” Tanner cut in. “In many ways, he’s the reason the Hecate has the combat record she does. That’s because he’s a powerful Starcaster, just like you said.” Tanner leaned back again and sighed. “Honestly, I hate it. I hate that magic has become such a fundamental part of how we wage war. Magic is almost impossible to understand. It’s a huge factor in our ops planning, even though not all that long ago it didn’t exist outside of fairy tales. The rules around how it works aren’t clear, and seem to change. War was already a damned messy affair before magic came along, and now it’s a whole lot messier because of it.”

“Sir, the Nyctus—”

“Are the reason for it, I know. They use magic, and they’ll kick our asses with it if we don’t out-magic them right back. I get that. I hate it, but I get it, so I just get on with the job.” Tanner rubbed at the bridge of his nose with two fingers, then sighed. “All this is to say, Wixcombe, that while magic is here, and here to stay, it has made my life a whole lot more difficult. I absolutely rely on Stellers to be my expert on the subject, and to do all the magical things he does to help us win battles. But I agree with you—there’s something wrong with him.”

“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking—what makes you say that? What have you seen?”

“Nothing overt. Stellers is continuing to do his job competently and well. But . . . it’s there. You don’t get to command a ship without learning a few things about people along the way. Stellers is starting to show some cracks. Hairline cracks, barely noticeable, but cracks nonetheless. Now, again, I need Stellers, and I need him whole and intact. I can’t use any crew member who can’t do their job, and that’s doubly true for my Starcaster. If he finally cracks and falls apart, though, not only am I left without a Starcaster, I may be left without a ship. Having someone who can move asteroids suddenly lose it—” He left the thought on a shrug. “Anyway, now that you’ve told me about your concerns regarding Stellers, I’m even more worried. So I need you to help me with him, Lieutenant. I need to know if he’s good to carry on, or if I need to find a new Starcaster for the Hecate.”

Kira’s eyes widened. “Wait—sir, are you asking me to spy on Thorn?”

“I’m asking you to do your job as a ON officer, who puts the welfare of the Fleet and the state ahead of all personal considerations. You know Stellers better than anyone, I’d venture, and you’re also a Starcaster yourself. That makes you the best candidate to do this. In some sense, you’re the only candidate for the job. You knew him when he was Thorn, and that matters to someone who’s endured that kind of trauma. You were there.” He cleared his throat once and looked away. “We’ve all been scarred by this war, Wixcombe, but the pain came earlier for some of us. As much as anyone can know Stellers, I think—no, that’s not true. I know you understand him, even if things are frosty right now.”

“Frosty? Sir, I—”

He held up a calming hand. “It’s my job to read people. You use minds. I use information and what I can see.” Tanner leveled that keen gaze on her again, then his eyes softened, but only slightly. “I’d point out, Wixcombe, that you came to me, asking for temporary assignment to the Hecate so you can spend time with Stellers. I’m granting your request, but under my terms. If you can’t do that, Lieutenant, then the airlock is that way,” he finished, pointing down to his right.

“Sir, aren’t you concerned about my objectivity in all this?”

“Should I be? Are you telling me that you, an ON officer, would be unable to put the mission first?”

Kira took a slow breath, suddenly remembering a conversation she’d had with one of the instructors at Code Nebula when she returned there for upgrade training.

. . . we can’t compromise what truly matters—the mission, the instructor, a Lieutenant-Commander named Fielder, had said. Whatever mission we’ve been given, it takes absolute priority over everything else. The mission is the only thing that matters. The outcome of a battle, a campaign—hell, of the entire war might hinge on the mission you’re given. Do you understand that, Wixcombe?

She’d respected Fielder, just as she respected Tanner. And both had the same message—the mission has to come first.

“No, sir. If I have any concerns about Lieutenant Stellers, I’ll share them with you,” Kira finally said.

“Good. Find out what’s going on in his head, Wixcombe. He’s holding something back.” He pinned her with a commanding stare, and Kira, for all her talent, felt young in that moment. “Just like you are. So if those things are related somehow, Lieutenant, I’m trusting you to reconcile them.”

The gleam of knowing in Tanner’s eyes stuck with Kira long after she’d saluted him and left the Hecate to retrieve her kit. She’d have thought he might have some latent ability for Joining, but not everything came back to magic. No, Tanner was really just that sharp, and he’d admitted as much to her, but she was so wrapped up in her own issues, she’d let it slide by.

Won’t do that again, she thought.

After all, he’d just taken a poorly conceived, almost desperate plea from Kira to come aboard the Hecate, turned it into a crucial assignment, and now expected her to do the right thing in carrying it out. Tanner was a genius among officers, and she was learning to trust him through sheer force of his being insightful—and correct.

Duty came before all else. Even pain.

Which reminded her, as she passed through the airlock, past the hard scowl of the Marine she’d managed to bypass, of something her father had once told her, while she was still a teenager. You could tell what the right thing to do is, her father had said, because it’s almost always whatever sucks the most.

5

Once more, Thorn squeezed into Tanner’s planning room aboard the Hecate. The ship was a day out from Code Gauntlet, in company with her sister ship, the Circe, escorting a pair of fuel tenders to a replenishment point a few light-years into the no-man’s land separating human and Nyctus space, popularly known as the Zone.

It wasn’t particularly sexy work for a warship, but it was essential; all ships required helium-3 to fuel their fusion reactors, so the forward replenishment points, or FRPs, were an important factor in maintaining an ON presence in the Zone. It saved having to withdraw forces all the way back to the various bases for immediate resupply of critical combat supplies. There would likely have been one or two arsenal ships in company as well—specialized freighters loaded with expendable munitions, such as missiles and mines-- except no one was doing any shooting, so there were no munitions that needed topping up.

Assignment to one mission didn’t preclude being involved in others, though, as Thorn knew they were about to find out. Tanner had called him in response to some urgent transmission from Fleet. He arrived in Tanner’s planning room to find the XO and the Tactical Officer already there.

“Sir, reporting as ordered,” he said, saluting Tanner. “I—”

He stopped as the door opened again and Kira entered.

“Sir,” she said, saluting. Thorn caught a quick, sidelong glance directed his way. He carefully ignored it.

That Kira had been able to wrangle an assignment aboard the Hecate—even a temporary one—gave Thorn pause and made him confront some of his simmering confusion about the gulf between them. It could easily make him suspect Tanner and Densmore of collaborating on it, but they were consummate professionals, and he didn’t think his connection to Kira took precedence over the fighting readiness of an entire ship.

“She’s on a special assignment,” Tanner said, seeing the suspicion on Thorn’s face. “Is there a problem, Stellers?”

“There’s—” Thorn started, then shook his head. “No, sir, no problem. It was just . . . a surprise.”

“You’re the ones who convinced the powers that be to assign her to Captain Densmore’s command. And you don’t work around Alys Densmore for long before you’re involved in some scheme or other. It’s in her nature,” Tanner said, then leaned back in his chair, face inscrutable. “I’d suggest you make peace with Wixcombe.”

“We’re not at war, sir.”

Tanner smiled, and it was the face of a man who knew combat and relationships were neighbors at times. “Of course not.”

“Yes, sir,” Thorn said, weighing Tanner’s words. He fought the urge to slip from the cabin and take refuge in his witchport, while around him, the business of war went on, regardless of the disconnect he felt with Kira. It wasn’t easy dodging someone aboard a warship to begin with, and the Hecate wasn’t exactly a battleship. It made his life more difficult, at a time that difficulty was inconvenient.

And that meant that avoiding Kira wasn’t going to happen, and Thorn knew that just then, the gears of fate were nudging him in the right direction. There had been a gap, like two ships in a dock, their own inertia either pulling them apart, or pushing them together for an inevitable collision.

He was connected to Kira in ways the ON could never understand. He was also, in his own way, fearful of her. She alone understood what made him. Where he’d been.

How he had been forged in the ashes of a disaster, his ability awakened by a blood price so horrific that for years, Thorn suspected he would never be able to relate to another human, at least not in any normal sense. From orphan to sullen field worker—

—to Starcaster. And now, a shaper of the rules that made ships fly on thought, and war possible with pure will. He was a dangerous, uncertain thing in a galaxy made of known quantities, and for that and many other reasons, Thorn had pushed Kira away.

I fear myself. Thorn felt his mouth twist in disgust. He shook his head, looked to Kira, and reached his decision. Problems are only hard up until the point of decision. After that, they’re easy. He did the one thing he could to begin building a bridge back to her. He smiled, and it was sad, honest, and hopeful, and Kira understood. Whatever had gone on before the Vision, Thorn would erase it. And it started right in that moment, with a simple look.

“Alright,” Tanner said, breaking Thorn’s epiphany. “I’ve got Commander Ephraim from Fleet Intel on the line. He has something he wants to discuss with us—and, more specifically, with you, Lieutenant Stellers.”

Thorn stared. “Fleet intel, sir?”

Tanner tapped a control. The viewscreen mounted on the bulkhead behind his desk lit up with the image of a lean, surprisingly weather-beaten man with a patchy beard, sitting against a neutral background. “I’ll let Commander Ephraim explain.”

Thorn noticed that an icon hovered in the bottom-right corner of the screen, indicating that the transmission was encrypted. And it wasn’t just standard encryption, used for all routine military traffic; this was high-level, weapons-grade encryption, the kind only used for things most secret or sensitive.

“Alright, people,” Ephraim said, “We’ve come into possession of some intel that we need to follow up. Are any of you familiar with the name Pool of Stars?”

Thorn shook his head, as did Kira and the Tac O, a serious man named Osborne who kept his red hair shaved almost to his skull. Raynaud, however, nodded with the sage air of a naval historian.

“She was the first Alcubierre-capable ship humanity ever developed,” she said. “As I recall, she successfully managed some short trans-light journeys during her trials, but the first time she was deployed on a long flight, she disappeared.”

“Correct,” Ephraim replied. “She was launched almost two hundred and five years ago, now. She’d been equipped with the very first operational Alcubierre drive, and as your XO says, was involved in flight trials when she vanished. Engineers at the time knew there were potential problems with the Alcubierre drive in its first iteration and were investigating solutions when they lost the ship.”

“Wave cascade,” Tanner said.

“That’s right,” Ephraim replied. “So, when—”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Thorn cut in. “But—not an engineer here. What’s wave cascade?”

“Early Alcubierre drives had a tendency to run away, potentially sending ships further—and much faster—than was ever intended,” Tanner said. “We’ve got governor systems on modern drives that prevent that—in extreme cases, an automatic cutoff will collapse the Alcubierre wave and return the ship to normal space. The loss of the Pool of Stars was a major impetus to solve the problem.”

“So she was destroyed?” Kira asked.

“That’s been the assumption all along,” Ephraim replied. “We didn’t know for sure, because an uncontrolled wave cascade could very well have sent her so far out that any distress messages from her still wouldn’t have made it back to human space.”

“They had a trans-light drive, but no way of communicating faster than light speed?” Osborne said. “Ballsy.”

“I’ll say,” Raynaud said. “Imagine being about to activate that drive, to travel even a single light-year, and knowing that if something goes wrong, it’s going to be a minimum of one year before anyone else even knows about it.”

“The sort of people who willingly do that are a special breed for sure,” Tanner said. “But I doubt that you’ve called us up just to discuss the history of spaceflight, Commander.”

“Indeed. Like I said, it had been assumed that the Pool of Stars had been lost, and likely destroyed. Well, the lost part is certain, but the destroyed part, not so much.”

“She’s been found?” Thorn asked. If so, that would be an amazing discovery, he knew, even if he wasn’t a subject matter expert in spaceflight. The very first Alcubierre-capable human ship—

Ephraim shook his head. “No, we haven’t found her. But, about two weeks ago, the frigate Spectre was doing a forward patrol in the Zone. She’d traversed all the way across and actually poked her toes into Nyctus space. While she was doing that, she detected a weak radio transmission, one that clearly didn’t have a natural origin. She was able to clean it up enough to tell it was a human source—but one either deep inside, or even beyond Nyctus space.”

“It was from the Pool of Stars?” Thorn asked. “What did it say?”

Ephraim shrugged. “Not much. It was an automated distress beacon.” He curled his lip; as he did, Thorn realized that what he’d thought was leathery skin from long exposure to the elements was actually scarring. At some point, Ephraim had been seriously burned. It wasn’t unusual for personnel injured in the line of duty to be assigned to staff jobs in headquarters, if they could still produce but were no longer suited for frontline deployments. It was a stark reminder that the effects of the war propagated far beyond the simple duality of just life and death.

“What’s the point of a distress beacon on a trans-light ship that doesn’t have trans-light comms?” Osborne asked.

“It’s called being hopeful, Tac O,” Tanner said. “The alternative is to have no beacon and just give up hope altogether.”

Osborne nodded in the silence that followed, letting the enormity of such danger settle over them all.

“Anyway,” Ephraim went on. “This tells us that the Pool of Stars was still intact when she returned to normal space—or at least intact enough to transmit this message. It means she may very well have survived and might even still be out there.”

“All due respect, Commander,” Kira said, “but, so what? Even if she is still out there, in one piece, that makes her—what, a historical curiosity? Why is Fleet intel involved?”

“Because, Lieutenant,” Ephraim replied. “As I said, the Pool of Stars seems to have entered, and perhaps passed through, Nyctus space. We’re speculating that it was encountering her that alerted the Nyctus to the existence of humans in the first place. More importantly, we’ve been wondering how the Nyctus were able to so quickly co-opt humans and turn them into Skins. Either they’re really fast studies—which, yes, is a possibility—or—”

“Or they’ve had time to study us,” Thorn said. “And by us, I mean the crew of the Pool of Stars.”

“But they’d all have been dead for years!” Osborne said. “They’d be studying nothing but corpses, or what’s left of them.”

“That’s where all of this gets both interesting and a little tough to understand without an advanced degree in space-time mechanics,” Ephraim said, raising a data slate and reading from it. “Wave cascade can result in significant displacement in all four standard dimensions, from the perspective of an outside observer. From the perspective of an observer located inside the runaway Alcubierre bubble, there is no such displacement. The lack of displacement in the three spatial dimensions is both implicit in, and fundamental to, modern Alcubierre drive technology, but—”

Ephraim stopped, scowled, and tossed the data slate back onto his desk. “To hell with that. Bottom line is that from our perspective, the Pool of Stars vanished two centuries ago because of a wave cascade. But from the perspective of her crew, it’s quite possible the wave cascade means that no time passed for them at all. So, if they only emerged from the wave cascade, say, two years ago—”

“Then, as far as they’re concerned, only two years have passed since they left the year 2096,” Kira said, her voice soft with wonder.

“Indeed,” Ephraim replied. “Which means they may still be alive.”

“Which means they might be prisoners of the Nyctus,” Raynaud added. As soon as she said it, Thorn felt a sudden tension in Kira’s demeanor.

“And that brings us back to the serious matter of the so-called Skins,” Ephraim went on. “The Nyctus have somehow very quickly figured out how to co-opt humans so thoroughly that we’re not even sure if the Skins know that they’re Skins. Our scientific intel arm has been working with the Starcaster Corps to come up with possible explanations—and, so far, they haven’t. None of them believe that it would be possible for the Nyctus to do this if they haven’t had time to study and experiment on humans for longer than the war’s been going on.”

“But we don’t know that’s the case,” Tanner said. “You’re surmising that, but, like you said, you don’t know it.”

“We don’t, no,” Ephraim conceded. “It’s all really conjecture, based on what we know about the Nyctus—which admittedly isn’t all that much.”

“Sir,” Kira said. “There is another possibility. I—” She stopped and took a breath. “I was taken captive by the Nyctus, along with three other humans.”

“We’re well aware of that, Lieutenant,” Ephraim replied.

“Well, then doesn’t that offer a simpler answer? That it was . . . it was us that the Nyctus studied? That they figured out how to control humans through us?”

Thorn felt the sudden, desolate guilt and sadness radiating from Kira. It only lasted an instant before her innate mental shields slammed into place, but it was very much there.

“They did manage to control the fellow who carried the bomb aboard the Hecate,” Raynaud said. “I . . . I don’t remember his name—”

“Gillis,” Kira said. “His name was Gillis.”

Raynaud nodded and offered Kira an apologetic look. “Right. Gillis. Maybe that was an early attempt at a Skin.”

Kira offered a bleak nod back. “That’s what I mean.”

“Honestly, Lieutenant Wixcombe,” Ephraim said, “we’ve considered that. Considered it, and rejected it. You and your colleagues were all Starcasters. None of the Skins we’ve detected are. Moreover, the Starcaster Corps itself tells us that it’s unlikely the squids could establish lasting control over a Starcaster, because of—well, magic.” He waved a hand. “Look who I’m telling here.”

Kira just nodded again, but Thorn didn’t need Joining to tell she wasn’t convinced. He resolved to move their quiet discussion up in time, but a more pressing question hovered in the planning room now.

“Sir, where are you going with all of this?” Thorn asked Ephraim. “You specifically asked me to attend this meeting, so I assume you have some sort of plan that involves me? Or, at the least, some aspect of my ability?”

Ephraim nodded. “Fleet wants to find the Pool of Stars, if she’s still out there and intact. If she’s fallen into Nyctus hands, they want to know that. And if they have her crew, and any of them are still alive, they want to know that, too. Ultimately, they’re hoping this will provide some answers regarding how the Nyctus are turning humans into Skins.”

“At the risk of sounding kind of callous,” Tanner put in, “why not just take one of the Skins into custody and study one in the flesh? We’ve done far worse. It is, after all, war.”

Thorn glanced at Tanner. He was right; it did sound callous. Since they didn’t understand the Skins, they had no idea how human they really remained. Studying one might be tantamount to killing it.

But he got it. This was war, and war was a callous thing.

“We’ve identified five Skins now, and we are doing our best to screen for more without unduly alerting anyone. Fortunately, in war time, people are willing to put up with all sorts of scrutiny, including some egregious violations of their privacy, in the name of security. So we’ve built some extra vetting procedures into our standard security screening.” He waved helplessly in the face of this breach of trust. “Until then, Fleet has decided to just keep the Skins we know about under observation. We’ve manipulated regular personnel movements to move them into areas where they don’t have access to critical systems or data—or, if they do, it’s data we want them to see.”

“That is one hell of a risky game,” Raynaud said, shaking her head. “Wouldn’t we usually just round spies up?”

“Eventually, we will,” Ephraim replied.

Thorn leaned in. “Again, sir, this is all really interesting, but—”

“But I said we want to find the Pool of Stars, or at least learn what happened to her,” Ephraim said. “That’s going to be your job, Lieutenant Stellers. You’ll continue using the Hecate as your base of operations. Captain Tanner will be sent full orders shortly. Effective immediately, this will be the priority mission for you, and for the Hecate. We’re also going to send some missions specialists to work with you. The frigate Mystic will be departing shortly with them aboard and will rendezvous with you to transfer them over.”

Thorn felt himself agreeing, but the enormity of the task suddenly loomed over him, like a massive wave about to break. The idea forming before Thorn meant taking the Hecate deep into Nyctus space, and possibly even into regions unknown—all to find an ancient ship that may or may not have been destroyed two hundred years ago.

For good measure, the ship might be in control of vicious squid who were masters at twisting humans into unwitting spies.

Thorn took a calming breath, feeling the inner reserves of magic rippling in anticipation of future use. Being hit by a breaking wave was fine, as long as you were able to come up for air and keep swimming afterward. Otherwise, you drowned.

“Understood, sir,” was all Thorn finally said. He felt Kira looking at him but kept his gaze fixed doggedly on the screen—

Which switched from Ephraim’s image to that of a ship.

“This is the Pool of Stars. She was a big deal back in her day,” Ephraim voiced over the image. “So there’s a lot of imagery and video of her. We’ll be sending along a complete package—plans, schematics, details of her crew, everything we can dig up.”

Thorn stared at the image, a series of boxy modules held together by an open latticework of girders. Conduits snaked across every exposed surface; a small forest of antennae protruded from points all over her awkward shape. The Pool of Stars looked more like a half-constructed building than anything recognizable as a ship.

“Holy shit,” Osborne said. “Hard to believe anyone would be willing to fly in that thing.”

“They put an Alcubierre drive on that?” Raynaud asked, then glanced at Osborne. “To use your word, Lieutenant, that was damned ballsy.”

“She was cutting edge tech in her day,” Tanner replied. “I’m sure that her crew would look back at the ships that carried the very first humans into space and say the same thing about them.”

Thorn leaned in closer to the image. Something had caught his eye. “Can we zoom in on her bow,” he asked, pointing to a blurred area. “There’s something there.”

His voice activated the zoom function, causing the image to expand and focus on the prow of the ship. That meant the largest and forward-most of the chunky modules, which Thorn assumed contained the bridge and crew hab.

“There,” Thorn said. “That, right there. Some sort of marking or insignia. What is that?”

He pointed at a cartoony painting on the side of the module of a virginal woman in white, sitting primly sidesaddle on a donkey. Beneath her chastely crossed ankles the words Una’s Ass were written in a flowing, cursive script.

“It’s your lucky day, Lieutenant,” Ephraim said. “You’ve got a guy briefing you who can actually answer that question. I’ve long had a passion for ancient military tech, and especially for the air-breathing flying machines of the Twentieth Century. That, my friend, is nose art. Crews painted nose art on their machines for a whole bunch of different reasons, everything from personalizing their particular craft, to offering very visible, and often pretty rude defiance to their enemies. Mostly, though, they did it for luck, believing that it would give their machine a personality, one that would fight right alongside them. Early ON ships used to do it, too, honoring traditions from those ancient wars.” He smiled. “This is a pretty tame example, frankly. Some of it was quite, um, raunchy.”

“They did it for luck?” Thorn asked.

Kira was the one who answered, her gaze on Thorn.

“Doesn’t look like it worked.”

6

They waited for the Mystic to arrange a rendezvous with the Hecate and transfer whatever mission specialists were coming to work with Thorn, and Tanner decided to use his newfound freedom once they were done escorting the fuel tenders. He had the navigation officer use the frigate Specter’s data to determine where they could intercept the ancient distress call; the Pool of Stars was a mystery, but not without some known data points from which the crew could work backward.

It wasn’t much of a navigational problem; since they knew the exact rate at which the message was traveling—the speed of light—and when and where the Specter had encountered it, working out an intercept point wasn’t tough. The tough part was the fact their destination was a point almost three quarters of the way across the Zone, alarmingly close to Nyctus space.

“We could wait a few years,” Raynaud offered, “and give the signal time to reach safer space.”

Tanner gave her a look, but she just smiled and shrugged in response. But it nudged discussion in the direction of what was becoming an increasingly evident elephant in the room.

The Nyctus were gone.

“Okay, of course they’re not gone,” Tanner said. “Intel is still detecting activity over there, so the squids are somewhere on their side of the Zone. Since their attack on Nebo, there’s been virtually no evidence of Nyctus activity any closer to ON space.”

“Maybe we hurt them a lot more than we thought in that last fleet clash,” Osborne suggested. “Maybe they’re off licking their wounds somewhere.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes at the star chart depicted on the main view screen on the Hecate’s bridge. They’d found absolutely no evidence that anyone aboard the ship was a Skin, so Tanner felt more comfortable moving tactical discussions out of his cramped planning room and onto the more spacious bridge.

Thorn crossed his arms. “I don’t think so,” he said, thinking of the battle Osborne was alluding to. It had been a trap set by the Nyctus, an ambush intended to catch and destroy most of the ON fleet. Arriving at the last moment, the Hecate and Mol’s Gyrfalcon had carried Thorn and Kira respectively to where they’d been able to disrupt an entire Nyctus flank with magic, forcing their withdrawal from the battle. “I was there. We drove the squids off, but we didn’t rout them. All we really did was stop them from destroying our fleet.”

“So what the hell are they up to over there?” Raynaud asked.

Tanner gave his head a slow shake. “That’s the question of the day, now, isn’t it?”

* * *

Thorn shook his head at the Rating sitting across the mess table from him. “No, I don’t think the Nyctus have all died, crewman,” he said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

“You sure, sir? You can . . . you know, tell stuff like that, using your magical powers, right? I heard that the Nyctus all died off.”

“To a plague,” another Rating said.

“Actually, I heard it was a bio-weapon, one we developed. And now the brass are worried it might backfire and infect us, too.”

“Okay, hold on a second,” Thorn said, raising a hand and his voice. “These are rumors, people, and not very good ones.”

“You know what they say, sir,” an Engineering Petty Officer put in. “If you haven’t heard a rumor by end of shift, start one.”

This time, Thorn did roll his eyes. “If only everyone waited that long.”

Thorn studied the mess, now a far different space than when he’d come aboard. The officers normally ate in their own, but Tanner had, some months ago, repurposed the officers’ mess for storage—anything that could be removed from the magazines, that wasn’t actually a weapon, was now stored in there, meaning the magazines could squeeze in more munitions.

The move had been accompanied by the usual muttered grumbles and cursing. The officers weren’t especially happy to mess-in with the crew, but it went the other way, too. Having the officers around forced a tense formality among the Ratings and Petty Officers that was only just starting to abate. To help, the officers normally sat at separate tables, but Tanner had stood down all but critical crew functions for a day to give the Hecate’s people a break before they launched into the far-flung reaches of the Zone.

So here Thorn was, jammed in with a table full of enlisted personnel who seemed to think this was the perfect time to float every outlandish theory about the Nyctus for his review.

“Rumors are just that—rumors,” Thorn said. “What we know is that the squids have gone quiet. But they’re still out there, hunkered down in their own space. We’re not sure why. And we assume that they’ll eventually be back. That’s it, that’s all, people. Unless Captain Tanner says anything different, any stories you hear are just unfounded rumors, got it?”

The Ratings all nodded and muttered, “Yes, sir.” The Petty Officer just grinned.

“There you go, sir. You’ve finally put an end to rumors in the Orbital Navy. Who’d have thought it would be so easy?” His grin fell, replaced by a look of cherubic innocence that was, no doubt, utter bullshit. “Kinda makes you wonder why no one thought of it before.”

Thorn glared at the Petty Officer. “I mean this with the deepest affection and respect, Petty Officer, so don’t take it any other way.” He smiled. “Screw you.”

The Petty Officer laughed.

After dinner, Thorn started back to his quarters. He technically had the same day off everyone else did, but he didn’t intend to use it for leisure. The voluminous orders transmitted from Fleet were a maddening combination of intricate detail and broad, unanswered questions. He needed time to read and digest them.

Thorn drew to a stop rounding the corner, nearly colliding with—

Kira.

“Hey,” she said. They were inches apart, the frost thawing with each passing second. That was good.

“Kira. Hey.”

“Isn’t this the part where you explain how you’re too busy to talk and run away?”

Thorn started to bristle—but then, he didn’t. Because she was right, and his views had changed since his decision. She just didn’t know it yet.

So he smiled. “Yeah, I deserve that. But so do you. Before the Vision—”

“Thorn, we need to talk. But not here, in a—”

They both paused and moved aside as a Rating pushed past them, muttering, “Excuse me, sir, ma’am.”

“In a random corridor,” Kira went on. “I’ve got a meeting with the XO that I’m going to be late for in about one minute.”

“Yeah, I have to dig into those orders I got,” Thorn replied. “Seems like it’s a day off for everyone else.”

“Not off,” Kira corrected him. “Low ops.”

“Right. Low ops. Not for the officers, though.”

“That’s why we get paid the big bucks.”

He smiled. “Really? When does that start?”

“Twenty-hundred, Thorn. I’d say in your quarters or mine, but I don’t think Tanner would be impressed. Anyway, I’ll find a quiet spot.” She met Thorn’s eyes directly. “Please be there, Thorn.”

He sighed, then smiled again, and this time, she saw it reach his eyes. “I will.”

She nodded, then pushed around him, heading for her meeting. Thorn carried on to his own quarters, and the intentionally vague orders that awaited.

* * *

Thorn had to stop and turn around. He needed to see Tanner, to discuss and clarify particular points of Fleet’s orders, but the conversation he’d overheard, drifting out of a machinery compartment, was something he couldn’t ignore.

“Did I just hear what I think I heard?” he asked, stepping into the compartment. Two Ratings, a Senior and a Junior, were kneeling among a disassembled water reclamator, doing some maintenance or repairs. Thorn was starting to wonder just how much of the crew was actually getting time off during this day of low ops. As soon as he entered, they both jumped to their feet, got to attention, and saluted.

“At ease,” he said. “Now then, maybe you guys can tell me this theory of yours—the one you were just talking about.”

“It was nothing, sir,” the Senior Rating replied. “Just—”

“A joke,” her colleague put in. “It was just a joke, sir.”

“Really? Well, tell me. I love a good joke.”

The Senior rating turned red. “Sir, we’re sorry—”

“I’m waiting to laugh, Rating. There’s nothing like unbound hilarity to make my day, truly.”

The woman sighed. “I heard someone say that . . . there’s a truce. The ON and the squids—it's like a cease-fire. And there are negotiations going on.”

The Junior Rating snickered. “Negotiations.”

The Senior Rating glared at him. “Yeah. Negotiations. Of a . . . a particular type.”

“That being?” Thorn asked.

“That—well, you know, sir. The squids . . . tentacles—”

The Junior Rating snickered again.

Thorn balled his fists, staring up at the ceiling. “Give me strength that I can ignore squid-humping rumors.”

He turned, fighting to school his features into a hardened mask, then turned back and lifted a finger.

And burst out laughing anyway.

“Okay, that’s . . gross. Imaginative, but—holy shit. Gross.” He shook his head at the two Ratings, who were both grinning. “Let’s put that one to bed, shall we?”

The Junior Rating snorted, desperately trying to hold in a laugh.

“Okay, bad choice of words. Let’s just let this rumor die.”

The Senior Rating nodded. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Thorn received their salutes, then hurried away to find somewhere he could finally stop and laugh.

But the laughter quickly faded. As ridiculous as some of the rumors were, they all underscored a basic truth—the Nyctus had apparently pulled back from the Zone and gone ominously silent, and no one knew why. The rumors were just nervous people attempting to fill in the lack of knowledge with something.

The fact was, Thorn knew, whatever the squids were up to, it wasn’t going to be something silly, or even remotely amusing.

7

Thorn glanced at the time. Eighteen fifty. Just over an hour before he was supposed to meet with Kira. She’d suggested the Hecate’s gymnasium, a tiny compartment tucked away just ahead of engineering. It was the only space on the ship you could actually reserve and have any degree of privacy. Kira had managed to book it for twenty-hundred, which awkwardly left Thorn with enough time that he had to fill it with something, but not enough that he could actually start anything substantial.

He thought about just heading back to his quarters but felt restless, on edge, like something important was about to happen. And, depending on whatever it was Kira wanted so badly to talk to him about—his pride, apparently, but Thorn knew it was going to be about more than just that—it might end up being something especially important.

He’d actually aimed himself for his quarters when inspiration struck. He doubled back a short distance, then turned a side corridor and followed it to the only other space aboard the Hecate, besides the gym, that existed solely for the crew’s well-being: her so-called library.

So-called because, while there were actually some physical books here, the main purpose of the place was to be a quiet space for study. At any given time, a good half-dozen of the Hecate’s crew were preparing for some sort of upgrade training. Courses were required to get certified on some systems, or to keep certifications up-to-date; successfully passing certain courses were also typical prerequisites for promotion. The library gave those people some relative peace and quiet, where they could work on preparing for upcoming courses.

Since it could only comfortably fit three people—four, if they were especially close friends—the crew were supposed to book it ahead of time. Thorn actually expected to find it occupied, then head for his quarters anyway, but was pleasantly surprised to find the next booking for twenty-hundred. He told the computer to sign him in, then stepped into the cramped space and prepared to settle in—

He stopped. Someone was already here, sitting at the table.

Thorn smiled. “Mol?”

She glanced up but said nothing, just smiling and waving. Thorn saw she had earbuds in.

He leaned toward her. “Mol, what are you doing here?”

She pulled out the earbuds. “Tell me what you think of this,” she said, tapping a control on the terminal she was using. A torrential rain of sound suddenly flooded the library, a cacophony of noise, like someone had thrown a throttled-up thruster pack into a trash reclamator. Someone who could have been male or female screamed along with the racket. Thorn knew how they felt; he suddenly wanted to scream, too.

He shook his head and made a cutting motion across his throat. Mol touched the control again. The silence that thundered down in place of the discordant mess of sound rang with the rush of blood in Thorn’s ears.

“What the hell was that?” he asked.

“You can blame Trixie,” Mol replied. “For, um . . . what you just heard.”

“Trixie? What, she’s turned on us and plans to use that ear-splitting racket as a weapon?” He feigned horror. “I’d rather face the squids, thanks.”

“No, that’s”—Mol made air-quotes with her fingers—“music.”

“It really isn’t.”

“Yeah, it is. She discovered it a couple of weeks ago in some archive or another when I made that run to that new FOB—you know, Code Broadsword. I think one of the AI’s there is a bad influence.”

“Again, Mol—not music.”

“Actually, it dates from the late Twentieth Century. It’s called”—air quotes again— “punk.”

“Punk.”

“Punk rock, actually. Apparently, it was really popular.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Mol shrugged. “Trixie’s programming is designed to allow her a degree of choice in how she develops her personality. According to the AI people, it actually improves her ability to do the rest of her job.”

“And that was what she chose?” Thorn asked, pointing at the terminal. “That . . . punk rock?”

“She says she’s going through a wild phase.”

Thorn shook his head. “She’s a computer. Can’t she listen to all the punk rock, or anything else she wants, like . . . internally? Inside her computerized brain? It’s all just data, right?”

“Oh, she does. But she wants to share her love for the music,” Mol said, curling her lip. “So, I’m trying to, if not actually get into it, at least be able to put up with it.” She grinned. “I’m up to almost five minutes, now.”

“Well, you played about ten seconds for me, and that’s enough.” He glanced at one of the other two terminals. “I was going to do a little research, but if you want to use this place—”

“No, I just popped in, found the place empty, thought I’d take advantage of it,” Mol said. “If I try it aboard the Gyrfalcon, then Trixie won’t leave me alone. And I’m in shared quarters, so there’s always some commotion going on there. Quiet like this gives me a chance to, you know, contemplate what I’m hearing.”

“It sounds like an overloading reactor. What is there to contemplate?”

“You’d be surprised. Punk seems to be all about anger at authority, raging against an impersonal uncaring system.”

“You’re right. I’d be surprised.”

Mol gathered her things and stood. “All I’m saying is, next flight aboard the Gyrfalcon, brace yourself—Trixie’s gonna want to share her new love of punk with you.”

Thorn twitched. “Oh. Um. Well, I consider myself warned.” He smiled gratefully at Mol, who slapped his back and left, snickering at the inevitable discussion of musical styles and taste.

Thorn was left in an uncomfortable limbo. He still had almost a full hour to kill before meeting Kira, so he sat at a terminal and had it search the ship’s archives for every reference to the Pool of Stars. He could have done this in his quarters, but he spent enough of his days jammed into them and appreciated having somewhere else he could be jammed into.

The orders from Fleet had been accompanied by a background briefing on the Pool of Stars, but that had been more clinical, factual, all schematics and flight reports and log entries. Thorn wanted to learn something about the Pool of Stars not as a machine or a technical achievement, but as the place a group of people called home, at least for the durations of her various flights. He also wanted to know more about those people—who they were, where they came from, their backgrounds . . .

The screen filled with references to the Pool of Stars. There were a lot of them, everything from mentions in esoteric scientific and engineering papers, to off-handed references in pop culture entertainment. Thorn skimmed through them, his focus rapidly zooming in on one, particular attribute of the Pool of Stars: her nose art.

He found a single reference to it—a mention in a news article of the artist, a man named Carew, a power plant engineer who was apparently also an on-again, off-again member of her crew. It wasn’t clear if he’d been aboard for her last, seemingly final flight. In fact, a definitive crew list at the time of her loss was surprisingly hard to find. He ended up finding three, none of which were quite in agreement. As for the nose art itself, though, there wasn’t much recorded, aside from a single, high-res image.

It offered no new insights into the artwork, just more detail. It was, Thorn thought, quite well done, albeit not perfect. But then the man named Carew had donned a vac suit and painted his artwork in zero-g, so imperfections were hardly surprising. In fact, considering the circumstances of its creation, it was damned good.

Thorn stared at the art. There was something about this image that . . . that resonated with him. He wasn’t sure why. He’d never been a fan of pop art particularly, mostly because he’d been too busy surviving to develop a sense of whimsy. It was amusing, and a little racy, but there was something more to it than that.

He finally gave up and cleared the terminal, with about ten minutes to go to his meeting with Kira. Sometimes, he thought, not thinking about something was the best way to get it to make sense. And with Kira only a few minutes away, she was the foremost thing in his mind.

It was time to finish the bridge and reconnect with her. It was time to get rid of doubt, and what started with his decision would end with the truth.

* * *

Kira had booked the gym for nineteen-thirty, giving herself a half-hour to get in some workout time. She pounded away on the speed bag, ran a few sets on the resistance machine, and generally worked up a hard sweat. The tense dread she’d been feeling about finally confronting Thorn with the things she had to tell him had dissipated some by the time she was done, washed away by sweaty exertion and endorphins.

Then Thorn strode into the gym, and it all came flooding back.

Thorn gave her a thin smile. “I didn’t think we were actually coming here to, you know, workout. If I had, I would’ve worn my PT gear.”

Kira shrugged. “That’s okay. I think I’ve done all I want to for now.”

Thorn’s smile widened briefly, then faded. “Well, you wanted to see me. Here I am.”

“Yes. Here you are.” She put her hands on her hips. “Which is amazing, actually. I’m surprised how hard it can be to track down someone on a ship the size of the Hecate.”

“I’d say I was buried in work, but we know that’s not true.”

“I—what?” Kira asked. His admission brought her up short. “You’ve been avoiding me. You were avoiding me before I got here. Why the . . . why the change in tone? It’s not unwelcome, just—"

Kira saw Thorn tense up, but then it broke and his eyes softened. “I’m not sure why we let this happen, but I know my part has ended.”

“Oh. Um. What was your part?”

“The gap. The gulf. The distance. All of it.” Thorn let his shoulders fall in either admission or defeat—or maybe, it was hope. He took her hand, lightly, uncertainty vibrating in the grip. “We came from the same place, and I don’t know if we can ever truly escape it.”

“Thorn, we’ve barely seen each other for three years. Three. Years.” Kira held his hand, but her instincts hummed with a desire to pull away. She was pissed. “I know we’re ’casters and at war and all—the usual things people go through.”

His snort echoed off the walls. “After a life in the home, and surviving falling rocks.” He shook his head slowly. “We’ve both had shitty hands of cards. But not now, despite the war. We were never going to be close on a daily basis, the Navy will see to that.”

“A happy officer is an officer in need of something more to do. Preferably at an inconvenient time.”

“And ten light years away. With no coffee,” Thorn added, and they both laughed, soft but with relief.

“Now that we understand the condition, what’s the cause? Other than me? This happened before the Vision, Thorn.”

“And me?” Thorn sighed again, but his fingers tightened around hers. “We’re strangers, and it didn’t happen overnight.”

“We aren’t.”

He tensed again, turning away, but whirled to face her, his features heavy with the effort a man sifting memories—and finding stones. “That goes two ways, doesn’t it? Before the Vision, I remember trying to get hold of you over, oh, what was it, two years?” He sighed, long and slow—the sound of tired understanding. “Seems to me that you were always busy—with work, wasn’t it? Too busy trying to deal with Densmore to ever have more than a minute or two of conversation. Or you were buried in work assigned by Fleet. Or you were at, on your way to, or coming back from some temporary teaching assignment at Code Nebula. And when we did talk, it was all the most insubstantial bullshit. You’re a stranger to me, in some ways, even though I know it’s not our”—he searched for a word, found it—“it’s not our natural state because of how much we’ve gone through. Together.”

“Thorn. We’ve both been terrible at doing this.” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down, easing out her own sigh. “How about we both accept that and start communicating properly now? Before things get too shitty and we start to forget? I don’t want to forget. Not now. Not in the middle of this war, and not ever.”

Thorn said nothing, and the silence grew, fat and aggressive.

Then he spoke, and it was a step. Small, but a step. “Alright. We’re not kids. This ends, or—go ahead. I’ll listen.”

As soon as he said it, Kira’s thoughts swirled with things to say, and where to start. In a flash, it became clear. Not easy, but clear.

“Thorn, you’ve got to be really careful about this ship, the Pool of Stars,” she said.

Thorn just stared at her. “Okay, that is entirely not where I expected you to go with this. What do you mean? Why do I have to be careful? And why did you mention something about my pride when we talked in the corridor?”

Kira tossed the sweaty towel in the used laundry bin. “It all goes back to the Vision,” she said, forcing herself to turn and face him, her eyes bright with care, and fear, and maybe, if she looked inside, a loss that couldn’t be washed away. A stain made of hurt. Now that the time had finally come for this conversation, she wanted to be just about anywhere else. She wasn’t even sure she could do it, but she tacked hard to buy time.

“Tell me what you saw. We’ll get to . . . to ancient history in a minute,” Kira said.

Thorn stared, but only for a second. “Alright. I know the difference between a dream and a vision. What I saw was neither. It was a visitation. A trip. I was on Nebo, with this little kid—a girl, and then the skies opened up.”

“KEWs?”

“Like you can’t believe. Like when we were kids. Just hammered the world and kept coming. Massive strikes, and the kid, she was able to check the storm.”

“What? Storm?” Kira asked.

“The pressure wave, and the debris, the fire—all of it. She was able to shift physical matter around us or at least her, since I’m not really sure I was present. What I know is that kid is a ’caster of such raw power she makes me look like a trainee. You understand? She could alter the atmosphere itself into a bubble. More radical than anything I’ve ever seen.”

“More radical than, say, pulling a ship through space-time?” Kira asked slyly.

Thorn grinned. “Fair enough. But more than anything I’ve seen planetside.”

“What happened? After the KEWs? The fire?”

“I ended up in the infirmary to be checked out. Turned out to be clean, but I kept on with being not right. This time, it was the Nyctus.”

“You Joined? With squids?” She was aghast at the possibility, especially so soon after the Vision, which rang every ’caster like a bell.

He shook his head. “Not like that. This was more like a dream, or a psychic echo. I saw the Nyctus emerge from inside our people. Like they were wearing costumes. Onboard a ship.”

“Thorn, have you talked to any other Starcasters since then?” Kira asked.

“No. Aside from our short stopover at Code Gauntlet, where you managed to get yourself assigned to the Hecate, we’ve been in the black ever since.”

“Well, I’ve talked to a few. Every one of them describes the Vision exactly the same way. No one seems to misremember it, even down to the tiniest details.”

“I read the summary report put out by the Fleet’s Master Starcaster,” he replied. “It was pretty clear about that. So?”

“So, I remember things differently,” Kira replied.

Thorn gave her a sharp look. “Differently how?”

“The Vision I had was identical to yours, right up to the end. Something happened that was different from what every other Starcaster experienced, at least as far as I know. The . . . the little girl, she spoke to me.”

Thorn’s eyes widened. “What? What did she say?”

“The final explosion just—it just stopped. Everything just stopped. The girl turned right to me, and—”

Kira had to stop for a moment. Her throat had clamped painfully tight, and tears brimmed in her eyes. She pressed on.

“—and she turned to me, and she said, ‘They will try to find the Star Pool. It will be very dangerous. But the real danger is pride. Pride makes terrible things happen.’” She took a long, slow breath. “The last I saw of her, she’d mounted a horse and rode off, straight into the blast of that last KEW, the big one, the planet-killer.”

Thorn kept staring. Kira could see his mind racing back and forth through her words, as though struggling to understand them. When he finally spoke, though, it was to focus on something Kira hadn’t even considered especially important.

“A horse?”

Kira frowned, then nodded. “Yes. A horse. I don’t think that’s—”

“Are you sure it was a horse?”

Kira shrugged and shook her head. “Yes, I’m sure. I remember it as clearly as the rest of the Vision, the same way every other Starcaster does.” She bit back a curse. “Her brain was so . . . so fried at the end. It was just her synapses firing . . . firing blanks.”

Thorn yanked a data slate out of a belt pouch and started poking at it.

“Thorn,” Kira said, then stopped again.

It was time for the hard part. The hardest part, really. Ever.

She summoned her breath and her courage. “Thorn—”

He raised the data slate and turned it to her. Its screen held an image of a virginal girl, astride a donkey, the calligraphed words Una’s Ass—

It took her a moment to place it. Right, it was the so-called nose art that had been emblazoned on the Pool of Stars.

She looked at Thorn. “You think—what, these things are related?”

“Well, star pool—Pool of Stars,” he replied.

“You were assigned to find the Pool of Stars long after the Vision, though.”

“You’re trying to make logical, real-world sense of a prophetic vision simultaneously sent by a little girl on a dying planet to Starcasters all over the League? Some of them a few dozen light-years away?”

“Alright, so what do you think it means?”

“Maybe nothing. But I think we really need to find this ship, the Pool of Stars, now.” He stared at the speed bag. “I’m going to need more info before I can do that, though. That nose art—I think it’s somehow the key. Shit, we’re magicians fighting a war against star-faring squid who happen to be psychic.” He waved his hands in disgust. “At this point, nothing tracks with who we used to be as a species. The old humanity is gone. What we are now can take something like symbols and visions seriously, because we operate outside the physical world.”

“If that’s true, then why ignore something that sounds a heluva lot like a warning?” Kira asked. “What if the kid is telling you not to go looking for the ship? What if she knows something?”

“The bigger question is, why did she send this message to you, instead of me?” Thorn cut his eyes at her, watching.

“Because she didn’t know you were going to be tasked to find that ship.”

“Neither did you. We need to figure out what makes you so special to this girl, compared to all the other Starcasters.”

Kira took a deep breath. “Thorn—”

“We’ll talk later, Kira,” Thorn said, his face closing off from her.

“Thorn, wait. This isn’t everything.”

“Later,” he called back over his shoulder. “I have to talk to Tanner, and then to Ephraim at Fleet Intel.” He stopped and gave her a grin—more like the man she’d known. “We will. It’s okay. Or, at least, it’s going to be.”

She watched him pass through the door and vanish into the corridor. She could have gone after him; hell, she could have stopped him at any time, demanding his attention. But her voice caught in her throat and she just stood and did nothing.

And she felt relief.

She’d managed to avoid the second part of their conversation, and all she felt was relief. That made her either a coward, or unprepared, and Kira was neither. Not since the day she put on the uniform.

“One step at a time,” Kira told herself, thankful that the ice had broken, or at minimum, cracked. She would shower, then eat, and then think, but in the end, she knew that the inevitable would be waiting. Just like the Nyctus.

8

Thorn waited as the Mystic’s shuttle clunked and bumped into place, latched to the Hecate’s docking port, and the airlock began to cycle. The frigate had finally caught up to them shortly before the destroyer started its journey to intercept the distress transmission from the Pool of Stars. Thorn had wanted to do that first, but Fleet insisted that the Hecate pick up the mission specialists assigned to the op first. It had left Tanner spending almost three days in a holding pattern, orbiting a binary pair of white-dwarf stars to save fuel.

“Do you know these people?” Tanner asked Thorn. He glanced at a data slate. “Specialists Bridmante and—Justice.” He slipped the data slate back into his belt pouch. “Specialist Justice missed his calling. Name like that, he belongs in the JAG’s corps.”

“I’ll bet he’s heard that before, sir,” Thorn agreed. “But no, sir, I don’t know them, except by name. Believe it or not, sir, Starcasters don’t all know one another.”

“What the hell do I know, Stellers?” Tanner snapped. “You could tell me you Starcasters are all a hive mind, and I’d probably believe it.”

“I can guarantee you, sir, there’s not another Starcaster out there I’d want to share a mind with.”

A rare glimmer of mischief flickered across Tanner’s face. “Not even Lieutenant Wixcombe?”

“Especially not her, sir.”

Tanner actually grinned. “Been through two marriages, Stellers. I hear you.”

“Between that and the extra bone in—”

“Wait, what?” Tanner asked, stunned. “Extra bones? You have physical changes? Why wasn’t I—”

Thorn’s sly grin caught Tanner unaware, and he snorted with laughter. “While my official position is to be a humorless martinet, that was . . . well played.”

“It never happened, sir.”

“Even better. Let’s greet our guests.”

The airlock unsealed and began to open, and the good humor vanished from Tanner’s face like someone had thrown a switch. Two people emerged, stopping and saluting smartly. One of them, a formidable woman who seemed made entirely of planes and angles, spoke.

“Sir, Specialists Bridmante and Justice reporting for duty aboard your fine ship. Request permission to come aboard.”

While she rattled off the customary verbiage of someone coming aboard an ON ship for the first time, Thorn watched both her and her companion. They were both Starcasters, but both had also been trained in secondary duties, according to their files—Gela Bridmante in linguistics and cryptography; Justice, whose first name was D’Artegal, in xeno-engineering. Their secondary skills reflected the work they’d been doing since graduating from Code Nebula, neither having, according to their files, served as Starcaster aboard an ON ship.

This was, Thorn knew, a serious point of contention in the Fleet. Some in Fleet Command thought that priority should be given to putting Starcasters in ships, many of which had none; others believed it was essential to reserve some Starcasters for high-level intel and staff work. Thorn’s sympathies tended to the former group, because a ship without a Starcaster was, in any confrontation with the Nyctus, much less capable than one with a Starcaster.

Of course, Thorn had developed a healthy suspicion, bordering on contempt, of anyone who worked in the shadowy world of intel. That was, he knew, probably a result of his even deeper suspicions about Alys Densmore, who had come to symbolize the whole compartmentalized, distrustful, twilight realm inhabited by the spooks. It tended to spill over, though, coloring his view of anyone from that sinister place.

Including these two.

“Permission granted,” Tanner said, returning their salutes. “This is Lieutenant Thorn Stellers,” he went on, gesturing at Thorn. “He’s the leader of this particular op. You’ll be working for him. We, of the good ship Hecate, are just his ride.”

Thorn turned to Tanner to object to that, but the Captain just turned away. As he did, though, Thorn caught a twinkle in Tanner’s eye. As he withdrew, leaving Thorn alone with the two new arrivals, it struck him how inordinately satisfying it was to have apparently earned Tanner’s trust and respect. He was, in almost every way, the exact opposite of Densmore— Tanner was honest, forthright, and had no patience for shady plots and schemes. Scheming was Densmore’s lifeblood.

Thorn turned back to the two mission specialists. Both held the rank of Senior Petty Officers, which meant he outranked them. He didn’t want to let the formality of rank codify too much of his relationship with them, though. Not only was it not his style, but he also needed to learn as much as he could about these two, since he was going to be trusting them—well, a lot. Stiff adherence to the niceties of the chain of command created artificial barriers that were just going to get in the way.

So Thorn stuck out his hand. “Thorn Stellers. Aboard the Hecate, it’s expected that you’ll call me sir, of course. But when we deploy away from the ship and face possible confrontation with the squids, it’s Thorn.”

“Looks like you’ve worked with spec ops before—sir,” Bridmante said, shaking his hand. “All first names on ops and such.”

Thorn just smiled.

So did Bridmante. Thorn wasn’t sure if she was testing his commitment to OPSEC—operational security—by fishing for previous involvement with special ops. But knew she would have expected him to remain coy about it, so he did.

“Anyway, sir,” Bridmante went on. “You can call me Brid. As for D’Artegal here—”

“Dart,” the man said, taking his turn to shake Thorn’s hand. “Nice to meet you, sir. You’re pretty well known throughout the Starcaster Corps.”

“Hell, the whole fleet,” Brid added.

Thorn gave Dart a once-over. Unlike the angularity of Brid, Dart had a softer, sleeker look to him, a smooth leanness that reminded Thorn of a swimmer, or a long-distance runner. “Just a guy doing his job,” Thorn replied, offering a self-effacing smile. “Anyway, let me show you to your quarters. You’re bunking in together—if that’s okay.”

They both fell in with Thorn as he started to walk. Behind them, the Mystic’s shuttle undocked with a soft clatter.

“Racking us together? Isn’t that a little . . . edgy, for the ON?” Brid asked.

“Why, because you’re male and female?”

“That would be why, yes, sir,” Dart said, smiling. “Any other ON ship I’ve been aboard has been pretty sticky about mixed-sex accommodations.”

Thorn shrugged. “Captain Tanner is a very—” He paused. “Best way to describe it is a very results-oriented guy. He generally doesn’t care much what you do, both in your job and your downtime, as long as you deliver what he needs from you, when he needs it.”

“That’s an enlightened attitude,” Brid said. “Even for now.”

“Probably why he’s still commanding a destroyer and hasn’t been posted up to a cruiser, or a battleship,” Dart said. That brought Thorn to a sudden stop.

“He has been offered postings-up at least twice. He’s turned both offers down. Captain Tanner believes he can accomplish more for the ON as skipper of a destroyer, constantly out here in the black, hunting for the squids, than master of a big capital ship that only comes out to play for major fleet actions. I happen to agree with him.”

Thorn realized he came across as a dedicated booster for Captain Tanner with his stern words—and, to some extent, he was. But this was also a chance to test the reaction of these two to overt military authority. There was a place for Thorn to be laid-back and chummy with Brid and Dart, but not at the expense of Specialists Bridmante and Justice knowing their place relative to Lieutenant Stellers.

To their credit, they both stiffened and nodded. “My apologies, sir,” Dart replied. “Didn’t mean to sound disrespectful.”

Thorn nodded, as neutral as he could be. “Good. Now, let’s get you two settled in.”

* * *

Thorn sprawled across his rack and scrolled through the report he’d been sent by Brid, a summary of background work she and Dart had done on the Pool of Stars. It was, he had to admit, one of the best-written and most comprehensive reports he’d ever read. Somehow, it managed the dry, dispassionate tone of a typical staff report, while also managing to be an entertaining read.

More to the point, though, he hadn’t even asked her for it. Brid had just sent it to him, shortly after she and Dart had settled into their quarters. He’d planned to give them a low-ops day, to acquaint themselves with the Hecate, and here she’d already done a good day’s work.

He finished the report, went back to the beginning, and started a second, more careful read. The report had triggered more than a few questions, some to clarify the points she’d raised, others the basis for further investigation. As he did, the door chime sounded. He sat up.

“Come in.”

The door opened, revealing—

Brid.

“Sir,” she said. “I was just wondering if you had any questions about the report I sent you.”

Thorn blinked. “Uh . . . I do. Or at least I will. I just finished reading it and was going to make some notes—”

He stopped, staring at her. “You’re a Hammer, right?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Not a Joiner.”

Brid laughed. “Didn’t have to read your mind to figure you’d have questions, sir.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t,” Thorn replied. “Well, like I said, I’ll make some notes, including some questions, and we can discuss them—let’s say tomorrow, at oh-nine-hundred. Until then—”

“Sir,” she interrupted. “I wonder if I could have a moment of your time.”

“Of course. Come in and close the door.”

She did. “Sir, I just wanted you to know that Specialist Justice and I—” She searched for the right words, found them, and smiled with warmth. “We’re thankful that we got to share a cabin.”

Thorn gave a slow nod. “Ah. Well, I think it’s safe to say, that’s not the reason. We only had one room left available for Petty Officers, so—”

“No, I get that, sir. And don’t worry, it’s not like Dart and I will be, ah, broadcasting our status. I just wanted to make sure, in case you caught wind of anything, even from our postings prior to coming here—”

“I said Captain Tanner was results-oriented. So am I. Just don’t let it become a problem.”

“Don’t worry, sir. You’re in the ON long enough, you get the knack of keeping things under the sensors,” Brid said.

“Fair enough,” Thorn said.

It was something he and Kira had always been very careful about, confining their more energetic social activities to periods of mutual leave, and even then, generally away from ON installations. Not that they hadn’t considered it; the thought had even flickered through his mind recently, since Kira had come aboard the Hecate—

Of course, they should probably work on just talking to one another, actually communicating, first. It was something they’d never been good at.

He yanked himself out of his reverie. “Is there anything else, Specialist?”

“No, sir.”

“Carry on, then.”

After she was gone, Thorn turned back to her report. He reached the first bit he’d highlighted, and started to assemble a question—

She’d shown up at his door, right at the very moment he’d been thinking he needed to talk to her.

Coincidence, of course. And yet, something tickled Thorn, like a minor itch whose location he couldn’t quite pinpoint.

He finally gave up and dove back into the report. Fleet confirmed that Brid and Dart had been screened, to confirm they weren’t Skins, before being deployed. They’d been aboard the Mystic, and now the Hecate, ever since. Still, Thorn resolved to do a little digging of his own, just in case—

He sat back. No. The perfect person to do it was right here, aboard the Hecate—the most powerful and capable Joiner he knew.

He tapped the intercom. “Kira, Thorn here.”

“I was just going to call you, ask you to go to dinner.”

“Dinner? Yeah.” Thorn replied. “Dinner would be good.”

* * *

“You want me to look into their minds?” Kira asked, her food momentarily forgotten. “Do you think Skins could actually have slipped through all the screening Fleet would have done?”

Thorn sucked air through his teeth, lips pulled back, but he said nothing. He and Kira had brought dinner to his quarters, which didn’t make for the most comfortable dining. She sat at his desk, while he sat on his bunk, his plate on the fold-away tray-desk combo that he could swing out of the wall. The only thing resembling private dining aboard the Hecate would be Tanner’s exclusive privilege, his cabin actually big enough to have a table with two chairs.

Dinner with the Captain had one of two connotations—either the invitee was about to be praised for something well done, or even informed of an award or promotion; or they were in shit for some reason, but not in a way that warranted formal punishment under the Orbital Navy Code of Discipline and Conduct.

“I’ve got no idea how good a job Fleet did,” Thorn replied. “I’d just like to satisfy myself that these two are on the level. I’m the one who has to work with them, potentially even travel, go on ops alone with them—not Ephraim or anyone else.”

“Densmore,” Kira said.

“Yeah, Densmore, too. So I was hoping—”

“No,” Kira said. “Densmore is calling me.”

Thorn heard a faint, repeating hum from Kira’s comm. He waved at it, telling Kira to go ahead and take the call. She nodded, unclipped an earbud from the comm, lifted it into place and activated it.

“Wixcombe here, ma’am.”

Thorn waited, resigned to hearing one end of a conversation while dinner got cold.

Kira made a face, pointed at the earbud, then gestured to the door. “Yes, ma’am, I can be alone. Just hang on a moment, please.”

She stood and muted the comm. “Be right back.”

“Uh-huh.”

Kira left Thorn’s cabin, closing the door behind her. He rolled his eyes up in disgust. Densmore seemed awfully determined to keep in pretty much constant touch with Kira. Unfortunately, the Hecate was just close enough to be in real-time comms range to the Stiletto, which was up to some spooky business or other in an adjacent sector of the Zone. That would change tomorrow, when the Hecate made her next Alcubierre hop, closing half of the remaining distance to their intercept point for the distress message from the Pool of Stars. Until then, though—

The door opened and Kira came back in, clipping the earbud back to her comm. “Sorry about that. I did leave the Stiletto kind of abruptly, and had some things going on.”

“Not a problem,” Thorn said, waving a hand. “Honestly, I’d rather you stay as close as you can to Densmore.”

Kira sighed as she sat down. “Thorn, it’s been three years. I’ve been with Densmore virtually all that time—oh, and by the way, talk about taking one for the team.” She curled her lip. “Alys Densmore isn’t the easiest person to work for. And she’s not a spy for the squids.”

“If that’s true, then we have no explanation for how your op got compromised and you got captured, or how the Fleet was lured into that Nyctus trap in the first place.”

“Thorn, there are lots of places that could have leaked along the chain.”

“With no evidence any of them ever did,” Thorn replied. “Tanner has friends in various high places and discreetly had them check records of comms, audit logs, signals intel data—” He grunted, once. “Actually, Tanner is really well connected, now that I think about it. No wonder he manages to keep getting away with turning down an up-posting to a bigger ship. That’d be a career killer for most Captains.”

“Thorn, if Densmore is compromised, then it’s in a way that—”

A hum from her comm cut her off. She glanced down at the preview display and sighed.

“Really?” Thorn said flatly. “Again?”

Kira spoke as she stood. “She had a question. I gave her a reference to look up—I guess she did that and, well, has more questions.”

“Is the outcome of the war going to turn on you resolving all of this stuff before dessert?”

Kira shot him a look of apology and left the cabin again.

Thorn crossed his arms. This is bullshit.

Could Densmore be aware of the fact he and Kira were meeting and was deliberately trying to sabotage their conversation? Kira still insisted she had things to talk about with Thorn; it had something to do with the Vision, he was sure, but now Kira seemed the one reluctant to open up. She’d apparently experienced the Vision differently than any other Starcaster, the little girl appending a message intended only for her before—before it ended. Kira seemed to think it was a warning, intended for him, because he was the one who’d be seeking the Star Pool.

If that was the case, though, why hadn’t she sent the warning to Thorn directly. She was obviously a latent Starcaster, and a powerful one, so she had the means. Why send it to Kira? Could it be meant for her?

The door opened and Kira came back in, but she didn’t sit down. She opened her mouth, but Thorn cut her off.

“You have to go and do something for Densmore. It’s urgent and can’t wait.”

“I’m sorry, Thorn.”

He put his fork down with care. “Doesn’t surprise me, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t help feeling she knows you’re trying to spend time with me, and she doesn’t want that to happen.”

Kira stopped and stared at Thorn. “What the hell are you talking about? How would she even know?”

“She’s a Starcaster, Kira. And a damned good one. She’s one of only a few that can Join over interstellar distances, remember?”

“She’s not in my mind, Thorn. I’d know if she was.”

“I don’t think she has to be. She knows you well enough that she can probably just skim your surface thoughts, and do it without you even knowing it.”

Kira narrowed her eyes. “Okay, this is getting a little ridiculous, Thorn—” She stopped and shook her head. “No, not ridiculous. Paranoid, more like.”

“The Nyctus have compromised people into Skins, Kira,” Thorn replied, his tone hardening. “It’s a genuine, serious threat. A little paranoia isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when you might have an agent of the enemy sitting at the workstation next to yours.”

“This isn’t a little paranoia, Thorn. This is a lot of paranoia. I mean, think about what you’re saying here—that Densmore is sitting light-years away aboard the Stiletto, putting the effort into keeping her awareness focused on me, just so she can disrupt our dinner plans.”

“If she doesn’t want us to talk—”

“We could talk any time. She can’t possibly monitor me constantly.”

“Honestly, Kira, you don’t know that,” Thorn grated. “You don’t know how much of a threat Densmore considers you to be, or how much she’s prepared to invest in keeping track of you.”

“You think she considers me a threat?”

“You’re one of the most powerful Joiners in the Starcaster Corps. Maybe the most powerful. Of course she considers you a threat.”

“Only if she’s actually compromised, and again, Thorn, I don’t believe she is.”

Thorn pushed his meal away. “Kira, look—”

“No,” Kira snapped. “You know what? I don’t have the time or the energy for this right now.” She turned to the door. “I’ll get back to you about your new colleagues, and whether they might be spies, too. Anyone else you suspect? Tanner, maybe? How about me?”

A dozen things tumbled through Thorn’s head, a barrage of responses he could fire back at Kira. All of them were some version of trouble. Instead, he let silence rule for a moment, taking the cloud of anger away to be replaced by resignation and exhaustion. Those, he knew well.

“Goodnight, Kira.”

She locked eyes with him for a moment, seemed about to relent—

Then turned and left.

Thorn looked down at his dinner. The gravy had started congealing into something gelatinous. He dropped his fork again and gave up. Even the best ship-board food wasn’t good enough to consider eating cold.

One step forward. One step back.

9

Thorn had already pondered his next move for several minutes and decided to come out swinging. He pushed forward, aiming to assume a dominating position, from which he could threaten either of his opponent’s flanks.

His opponent reacted immediately, lunging straight for his only real vulnerability—

“Check,” Brid said, smiling.

Thorn leaned back. This was the fourth game of chess he’d had with Brid, and he hadn’t won one yet.

Thorn considered the board, then tipped over his King. “I’m seeing checkmate in four moves, and there’s not much I can do about it, so—yeah.”

“Three moves, actually,” Brid said, moving her pieces to demonstrate. Thorn shook his head.

“Well, shit.”

They shook hands, and Thorn stood. “Well, I have a duty watch shift coming up on the bridge,” he said. “Maybe I’ll give you another chance to wipe the deck with me tonight.”

Brid grinned. “Once you get used to my style, you’ll be the one consistently beating me, sir. Happens every time—I have the upper hand, then it all gets turned around. I’m used to it.”

Thorn smiled back. “Ah, so it’s something about your style that I need to suss out, huh? Good to know.”

“Of course, that might just be what I want you to think, sir,” Brid replied, winking. “Oh, by the way—I thought Starcasters were normally exempt from doing duty watches.”

“Not aboard the Hecate,” Thorn replied. “Captain Tanner expects every officer aboard to be able to take command, if they have to, and manage at least a halfway competent job. That includes yours truly.”

He grinned and left with a wave.

As soon as he was out in the corridor, though, his grin vanished.

Thorn didn’t mind losing to Brid; hell, he knew he was a decent chess player, if not a brilliant one. But he’d never faced an opponent like Brid, who seemed to know what his moves were going to be before he did. He typically spent time considering his move, then made it, and Brid immediately responded with a move of her own.

And it wasn’t just chess. He’d watched her repeatedly win at poker, blackjack, and euchre; she’d also defeated the Hecate’s champion player of CQBSIM, a close-quarters battle simulator that was, in theory, meant as a training tool, but that frequently got used as an elaborate computer game by the crew.

Brid was an intel wonk—supposedly. But she seemed awfully capable in CQB for someone whose background was linguistics and cryptography.

He’d spent less time with Dart who, as an engineer, was more interested in his own kind. He mostly hung out with the Hecate’s engineering crew and had racked up an impressive amount of winnings from the games he played with them. It wasn’t real currency, of course; Tanner allowed games like poker on the understanding they were to only be played for bragging rights, not create real-life debts.

So Brid and Dart were good at everything they did. They’d done exemplary work on the Pool of Stars op, drawing insights and proposed courses of action out of the data that Thorn hadn’t even considered. Both seemed ready to answer every question he posed to them, in the moment, without consulting references. Brid in particular seemed to have a way of anticipating the things Thorn was going to want or need.

And yet, Kira insisted they were clean. She’d surreptitiously used her Joining to peer into their minds and found nothing to suggest they were compromised by the squids, or anyone else. Thorn had no reason whatsoever to doubt her, which meant that should be that.

But it wasn’t. Thorn resisted doing his own peeking into their minds, simply because while he might have Kira’s sheer power as a Joiner, he didn’t have her finesse. He’d wouldn’t be quietly peering into their thoughts; he’d be breaking in and rummaging through them like a burglar, and a none-too-subtle one at that. So, all he had to go by was his own observation of their exemplary behavior, as well as Kira’s findings—and the fact that their final screening before being assigned to this op had been done by, or at least under the supervision of, Alys Densmore.

Tanner had brought that little gem to Thorn’s attention. “Thought you’d be interested to know that we weren’t the first rendezvous the Mystic had. They made a stop along the way.”

“Where, sir?” Thorn asked.

“The Stiletto.”

Tanner hadn’t said anything else, but he hadn’t needed to. He was in the know regarding Thorn’s concerns about Densmore’s loyalty and had been instrumental in getting Kira assigned to the Stiletto in the first place. So, he’d just given Thorn a bland look, then left him to carry on. Sometimes, unspoken things sounded loudest, especially with an officer as capable as Tanner. He could lift one brow and issue an order; with a look he could issue three.

In fact, the only thing that made Thorn truly doubt that Brid and Dart were Skins or spies was that it was too obvious. Competent spies generally didn’t draw attention to themselves by being supremely capable and competent, to the point of being over-the-top about it. These two didn’t seem to care, though, and were happy to flaunt the ways in which they were seemingly better than anyone else—and that was in essentially all the ways.

Thorn turned to his terminal and once more called up the personnel files he’d been sent regarding Brid and Dart. As their current commander, he was entitled to full read and write access to their files. Nothing in them set off any alarm bells, which was itself a problem. Like them, their files were just too clean, too neat, too perfect.

He studied the screen and its odd story of flawless competence, then cleared it, stood and reached for his cap. He needed to talk to Tanner. If anyone could get access to the records that weren’t being shared with Thorn, it would be him. Because there would be such files. Spooks maintained their own records, most of which were heavily classified, and some of which weren’t even formally acknowledged as existing in the first place.

It would be a longshot whether Tanner could get access to them, though, and he might not even want to. It would almost certainly require calling in yet more favors at Fleet, and Thorn wasn’t sure how many of those he had left.

Favors were like aces. You held onto them until the moment was right.

* * *

Tanner called Thorn into his quarters shortly before the Hecate’s final Alcubierre hop to intercept the distress signal. The Captain had actually kept the destroyer on station longer than the original timetable for the op projected, so he could remain in real-time comms range of an ON relay station. Fortunately, the timetable was entirely at his and Thorn’s discretion, so it didn’t provoke any questions from higher authorities regarding the holdup. As far as anyone else was concerned, Tanner needed real-time comms with ON headquarters for a while longer yet, and that was that.

But apparently, he’d finally heard something. It had only taken half a day, at that, so it didn’t even set the op timetable back much—certainly well within the slack they’d deliberately built into it, to account for unexpected delays like this one.

“Stellers,” he said, when Thorn entered and closed the door. “Sit down.”

Thorn sat in the designated chair. He could immediately tell that Tanner had something of substance to tell him—something more than, sorry, came up dry, can’t help you.

“I’m about out of favors at Fleet,” Tanner said. “And I actually owe a few now. But I was able to get an overview of Fleet intel’s dossiers on Specialists Bridmante and Justice.”

Thorn nodded. “Anything you think I should know about, sir?”

“That they’re apparently as good in the spook world as they are anywhere else. They seem to be the people Fleet intel throws at their toughest problems, because they know they’ll deliver.”

Thorn nodded again. “Okay, sir. But?”

Tanner gave a thin smile. “But, they were recruited by, and spent most of their careers to date working either directly, or indirectly, for—”

“Captain Densmore.”

“Right first time,” Tanner said. “You could say that these two are Alys Densmore’s protégés.”

Thorn leaned back. “Well, shit. That’s not good news.”

“I thought Wixcombe checked them out at your request, and they turned out clean.”

“She did, yes.”

Tanner frowned. “So what are you saying, Stellers? That you don’t trust Wixcombe, now?”

“Oh no, sir, it’s not that at all. I’m sure that Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe—did her best to try and uncover anything to suggest they aren’t what they seem to be.”

“So are you saying the squids can hide their . . . implanted influences, or whatever, and do it so well that even Wixcombe couldn’t find it? I gather she’s pretty good.”

“Oh, better than pretty good, sir. Probably the best. But we don’t know much yet about how the Nyctus are doing what they do to the Skins, so we aren’t really sure what they might be able to do or hide from us.”

Tanner let a ripple of disgust cross his face. “So you’re saying we might have Skins aboard the Hecate after all, because you couldn’t detect them? That’s a worst-case issue, Stellers.”

“I know it is, sir. But it comes down to—I don’t know what I don’t know. We know that we can magically detect the Skins we’ve discovered so far, but does that mean we can detect all of them out there?” He shrugged. “There’s no way to know that, sir.”

Tanner leaned back and stared at Thorn, contemplating him for a moment.

“So, from your reaction to all this, I’m assuming you still don’t trust that Densmore isn’t a spy for the Nyctus.”

“Another thing I don’t know, sir. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, though.”

“I spoke to Wixcombe. She believes Densmore is clean.” Tanner’s eyes narrowed in a curious way. “So, are we looking at another example of possible collusion involving Wixcombe?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so—”

“Incompetence?”

Thorn gave his head a hasty shake. “No, sir. Kira’s one of the most—”

“So, inability then.”

Thorn had to nod this time. “It’s possible.”

“How about innocence?” Tanner asked. “Is it possible that none of these people are compromised, and you’re seeing the squids insinuating their tentacles into things, when they aren’t?”

“Yes, sir. That’s definitely a possibility, of course. But if we’re wrong, we face leaks of crucial info—or even worse—to the Nyctus. It seems to me a little caution is justified.”

Tanner stood. “Alright, Stellers, I’ll back you on that, if that’s your position. But that means you have to make a hard decision here. If you believe this, that the squids are manipulating these people, then you have to include Wixcombe in the suspect list. She’s involved in all of it. She’s the one who’s been working with Densmore for the past few years and is now trying to convince you she’s clean. She’s the one who investigated our two mission specialists—again, Densmore’s people—and insists they’re clean, too. Oh, and let’s not forget she got herself assigned to the Hecate only days before those two showed up here.” He shrugged. “Could’ve known they were coming, right?”

“Sir—"

“She’s also the only one of all of them who’s been a prisoner of the Nyctus,” Tanner went on. “In her own debriefing, she described how they manipulated her mind to make her think she’d managed to escape them, as a way of digging information out of her.”

Thorn had opened his mouth several times while Tanner had been talking, but hadn’t been able to formulate an objection before he’d gone relentlessly on to his next, damning point.

“So, if you believe Bridmante and Justice are a possible security threat, and you believe Alys Densmore is a possible security threat, then it’s because Lieutenant Wixcombe is either unable, or unwilling, to determine otherwise. So which is it, Lieutenant Stellers?”

Thorn stared back at the Captain for a moment. He desperately wanted to rail back against Tanner’s harshly unforgiving analysis of Kira’s role in all of this—

But he couldn’t, because Tanner was right.

“I don’t know, sir,” was all Thorn could say, and even that didn’t seem like enough.

* * *

Thorn sat cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport, staring into the void. The destroyer had finally started its last, and longest, trans-light hop to the remote part of the Zone where they intended to intercept the distress signal from the Pool of Stars. He’d decided to take advantage of the resulting lull, the Hecate being enclosed in her Alcubierre bubble and effectively isolated from the rest of the universe, to take some time to just think. The soft, quiet darkness of the witchport was perfect for that.

And no one would disturb him here, either, at least not without good reason.

Kira a spy?

No. Of course not.

And yet.

She had been taken captive by the Nyctus, and held by them for days. By her own admission, they had managed to infiltrate her mind, and although she’d been able to stop further intrusions, there had definitely been one—and during it, they had completely overwritten her ability to distinguish what was real. She’d been working for Densmore, who Thorn suspected was a Nyctus agent, for more than three years, but insisted the woman was clean. There were no apparent connections between her and the two overachieving mission specialists, except for one through Densmore. And Kira claimed that they were clean, too.

And then there was the fact that Kira had been clearly holding something back from him. Before the Vision, she’d avoided him like some xeno-plague. Yes, he’d likewise avoided her after the Vision, but only because he’d been struggling to maintain his own equilibrium.

But she’d wanted to talk to him.

Before even realizing it, he’d called up Kira over the intercom.

“What is it, Thorn?”

“Kira, let’s have dinner again. But let’s do it right. Meet me in the witchport at nineteen-thirty. I’ll make sure no one can disturb us.”

After a pause, Kira came back. “Are you sure, Thorn?”

“About dinner? Yeah, I’m into eating.”

“No, I—alright. I’ll be there.”

Thorn let out a slow breath when she signed off the intercom. Tanner had been right—if Densmore, and possibly also Brid and Dart, were compromised, then Thorn needed to know, right now. If Kira couldn’t discern it, he was left with two possibilities.

Catching this brand of spy was beyond her ability.

Or she was part of it herself.

* * *

“Cozy,” Kira said, settling onto the cushioned deck of the witchport. She glanced up at the closed dome just centimeters over her head. “Very cozy, in fact.”

“By cozy, you mean cramped. Well, it is meant for one person, so it wasn’t exactly designed with socializing in mind,” Thorn replied.

She waved at the vastness of space. “If you opened the port up, it might not seem quite so cozy.”

“Cramped.”

She smiled. “Yeah, cramped.”

“I could, but maintaining atmospheric integrity takes a bit of focus. I’d rather the focus be on—whatever reason we’re here.”

Her comm hummed. A few seconds later, so did Thorn’s.

“Densmore,” she said.

“And Brid, for me,” he replied. “Convenient, isn’t it?”

Kira shut her comm off. “Screw her.”

“Yeah, Brid can wait, too,” he said, switching off his own comm.

“She’s just going to go to Tanner and say she needs you urgently.”

“And Tanner will tell her I’m sequestered and am not to be disturbed before twenty-two hundred hours.”

Kira gave him a surprised look. “You’ve managed to get Tanner to cover for you? I’m impressed.”

He gestured at the thermal box holding the two meals he’d brought from the mess. “Let’s eat before they get cold.” He almost added, like last time, but didn’t. They’d spent enough time second-guessing, dodging, and bickering with one another. It was time to sort things out, and that started with the elephant in the witchport.

“Kira,” Thorn started, as they both picked away at their meals—passable hot beef sandwiches, with a side salad that was actually pretty good. “We need to talk.”

“Really? Huh. I had no idea. As to that phrase, well, it chills my bones—”

Thorn raised a hand. “I’m proposing, right now, that we both acknowledge we’ve been really bad at this and start fresh, okay?”

Kira leaned back a bit, studying Thorn, apparently to gauge how serious he was being. He let her.

“Okay, then. Let’s do that.”

“Alright. So—”

Thorn launched into his speech. “Here’s what I know.” He began to tick points off on his fingers. “Densmore could be dirty, and I know you don’t think so, but it’s hard for me to excuse everything I see. There are too many hints, actions, hell—even feelings I get, as a ‘caster, like I’m being handled or scanned, or maybe a process that’s beyond me since the spy game isn’t my home field. As to Brid and Dart, it’s more of the same, although I admit that some of that could be pure instinct.” With each statement Kira looked alarmed, then angry, and then understanding.

“Tell me more about Brid and Dart,” she said.

“You’re not pissed about the first accusations?”

“I mean—just humor me.”

“They’re good at everything, including anticipating my needs. Your needs. Our positions. Look, we’re ’casters, we know the difference between luck and—”

“—magic. Yeah. I get that,” Kira said.

Thorn steeled himself. “And not to repeat myself too much, but this makes you look guilty as hell. Of something.”

He expected Kira to at least be pissed, and quite possibly to storm off, outraged at what she could easily see as a betrayal. The worst part was that if she did, it would only add fuel to the fires of suspicion starting to flare up around her.

Kira laughed.

Thorn gave a bewildered snort. “Kira, this isn’t funny.”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “Of course it’s not. In fact, it makes perfect sense. I’m laughing because I didn’t see it.”

“You—wait. What?”

“Thorn, the case you’ve laid out is a pretty damning one. I’ve been insisting Densmore is clean, because if she’s not, then I’m either incompetent, or I’m in on it. And it makes absolute sense to think that, since I was the squid’s captive.”

Thorn shook his head. “Kira, I don’t believe for a second you’re a spy or a traitor.”

“But you’re convinced Densmore is, right? So that puts me right into either incompetent or culpable territory.”

“Or maybe the squids are able to do things we simply can’t detect.”

“Sure. These things are all possibilities, aren’t they? But as long as one of those possibilities remains, I’m compromised, then I shouldn’t be involved in anything considered mission-critical.”

Thorn shook his head again, this time in surprise, almost wonder. “You’re taking this—well, you’re not, ah—"

“Ranting in outrage, lashing back at you, storming out of here?”

“Well, yeah.”

Kira gave him a thin, humorless smile. “What would be the point? Not only would it not solve anything, it would just make me look even more suspect.” She sighed. “If you’re going to be professional about this, Thorn, you have to report all of this to Tanner, and—” She stopped, then nodded. “You already have. That’s why Tanner’s covering for you.”

Thorn tilted his head in confession. “I can’t keep something like that from Tanner. Not aboard his ship.”

“No, of course you can’t.”

Thorn just stared, taken completely aback by Kira’s matter-of-fact acceptance of all of this. If he’d been asked to bet on her reaction, he would have figured the odds of this one to be very, very long ones. “So, where do we go from here?” he finally asked.

“I need to be isolated from all critical parts of the ship, and all important systems. Then I have to try and figure out a way of convincing you and Tanner that I’m not compromised, and neither is Alys Densmore, and that I’m genuinely convinced of that.”

“What about Brid and Dart?”

She lifted her hands, palms out. “No idea. I can’t find anything that makes them suspect, but if I’m a squid agent here to support them, I wouldn’t, would I?”

“I have to admit, this isn’t the way I saw this going. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, but—it’s just that I was girded for battle, so to speak. I didn’t expect you to be this open.”

“Which is exactly what I’d probably do if I were a spy, right? Put you off your guard by being cooperative and understanding about your suspicions.”

“Are you trying to incriminate yourself now?”

She gave him a genuine smile this time. “No. Just trying to be realistic. Besides, it doesn’t really matter.”

“What the hell do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

“Thorn, ever since our last dinner, I’ve been thinking about us—about you, especially, but not like you might imagine.” She sighed, playing with her food, then pushed on as they passed a young blue star to their port side, its point almost painfully bright. “You said we needed to start fresh, and you were right. That means I need to have a talk with you I should have had three years ago. When I first started working with Densmore. Since we’re rebooting things, I’m going to start by doing that now, and I’m going to tell you. You need to hear me out. To the end.”

Before she could do that, Thorn leaned close to her. “Let me go first. I’m sorry, and I won’t let the war steal away everything I’ve become since leaving the home. The me that you helped build. The Vision made it worse, and—"

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Like you said once, I know you better than anyone else alive,” Kira said. “I knew that the Vision affected you—and badly.” She took a deep breath. “There’s a reason for that.”

Thorn drew back, curious. “A reason?” The question hung, unanswered.

Kira didn’t answer right away. Instead she closed her mouth and looked away, breathing long and slow.

Thorn felt alarms begin to ring, watching her sit there, doing nothing except brace for impact. There was no other term for what she was doing, her body motionless except for the soft rise and fall of her chest.

Something plucked at Thorn, like catching a warning light on a console out of the corner of his eye. He tried to bring it into focus, and succeeded; a flicker of an unthinkable idea had barely appeared in his mind before it swelled into realization.

Three years ago—pushing four, now—Kira had left the Hecate and gone to work for Alys Densmore. He’d only seen her once, briefly, shortly after, and then not again for the better part of a year.

The girl in the Vision had been, what, about three?

“Shit. Kira, you have to tell me.”

Kira said nothing, her face pale. Stricken.

He steeled himself. “That little girl in the vision—"

Kira’s face drained of any remaining color at all, eyes fever-bright with a hurt so deep it wounded Thorn to see it. In her eyes, he saw her begging him not to ask, but there was no way to stop. Not then.

“Kira, was she—ours? Did we have a daughter?

Kira nodded once.

“Yes.”

10

As soon as Thorn strode onto the bridge, Tanner swung his command chair around to face him.

“Lieutenant Stellers—” he started, then stopped, staring at Thorn.

“Lieutenant, is something wrong?”

Thorn shook his head. “Nothing that I can discuss right now, sir.” His voice came out tight, carefully controlled. Every syllable was clipped, robotic.

Tanner nodded. “My door is always open, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tanner held Thorn’s gaze a moment longer, then swung back to face the main viewscreen. It held an entirely unremarkable image of stars.

Thorn saw that Brid and Dart were already here, leaning over the comm station. He moved to join them.

“We’ve been back in normal space for almost an hour now,” Tanner said. “Do we have an ETA on that signal from the Pool of Stars?”

Brid turned to the Captain. “Should be sometime in the next five minutes, Captain, given the usual uncertainty in our position following an Alcubierre hop.”

Thorn focused on the task at hand, though he felt like a husk, dried and brittle. Brid’s point to Tanner was perfectly valid: there was always a certain amount of slack in the destination parameters of an Alcubierre hop, that only got worse as the distance increased.

Since the drive effectively removed the ship from the universe for the duration of the hop, there was no way to check navigation while underway. Instead, all nav while the Alcubierre drive was active was based on a series of complex equations, developed by the Nav Officer and his underlings. The only alternative was to make repeated, shorter hops and check nav along the way against fixed stellar reference points, but Tanner didn’t want to spend any more time in normal space, this far into the zone, than absolutely essential.

The Comm O, Tifton, tapped a screen, whistling. He was wiry, dark, and quick, a sense of intense purpose clinging to every move. Then he spoke without looking up. “We’re getting a signal,” Tifton said, tapping a control. A window popped open on the main viewscreen, a graphical depiction of signal frequency and amplitude. An extraordinarily tenuous wave of radio energy was brushing past the Hecate, carrying a message from two hundred years ago. The signal processors plucked some of it out of space, amplified the feeble trickle of energy and cleaned it up, then broadcast it over the comm.

“Flight Com, this is x-ray-tango-one-one, Pool of Stars . . . emergency, location data uncertain . . . assistance possible . . . attempt repairs, but . . . systems telemetry follows . . . will repeat in sixty . . .”

“That’s as good as it gets, huh?” Dart asked.

Tifton nodded. “We’re lucky to get this much. This signal has about one one-thousandth as much energy as that light diode,” he said, pointing at a random indicator on his workstation.

The signal collapsed into a staccato series of clicks and squeaks.

“That’ll be the system telemetry they mentioned,” Dart said. “Probably data about power plant, drive performance, life-support status, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like noise and gibberish,” Tanner said.

“It’s compressed, sir,” Tifton replied. “We can decompress it and give it to—” He turned and looked at Dart. “Well, to you, I guess.”

Tanner nodded. “Do that, and let’s see it contains anything useful to us.”

The comm went dead for ten seconds, then the message started again.

“Flight Com, this is x-ray-tango-one-one, Pool of Stars . . .”

Thorn crossed his arms. “Sounds identical. So, a looping recording, I guess?”

Tifton placed the graphical output of the first message over that of the second. Aside from a few, small offsets that were probably just noise, the two were identical. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Someone recorded it, then left it on a repeating broadcast.”

They listened as the message repeated three more times—five in all. And that was it.

“Why did it stop?” Brid asked. “You’d think it would keep repeating more than five times.”

“Any number of reasons,” Tanner replied. “Including the destruction of the ship.”

“Can we tell where this was broadcast from?” Thorn asked, still deliberately keeping his mind focused on staying in the moment. “A location? At least a direction?”

“Direction, yes,” Tifton said, swiping at his console. The waveform window on the main viewscreen was replaced by a star chart, showing the Hecate’s current position in the Zone. A straight line extended from there, across the Zone and into Nyctus space. It continued past the limits of ON charting and into space whose features were remotely mapped, but not known by a physical survey. “The origin point is somewhere along that line, between here, and a maximum distance of ninety light-years.”

That furthest possible point, Thorn saw, lay well beyond what they understood to be Nyctus space.

Tanner leaned forward. “We’ll hop to another point core-ward, intercept the signal there, and then another rim-ward, and do it again until we have enough to triangulate. Can you make that work with partial signals?”

Tifton nodded. “The more intercepts we make, and the further apart they are, the more accurate the location will be.”

“I’m not anxious to spend a lot of time hopping around this deep in the Zone,” Tanner said, then he turned to Thorn. “Stellers, can you add anything here? Do anything with your magic to help narrow the search down?”

Thorn stared at the viewscreen for a moment, then shook his head. “I doubt it, sir. There’s no actual conscious mind behind that voice—it’s just a recording. So Joining won’t work. And I can’t interact with the signal directly, not when it’s a thousandth the strength of a light bulb.” He pursed his lips. “Still, I can give it a try.”

“Do that,” Tanner said. “Meantime, Comm O, work with Nav to figure out the minimum number of hops, over the minimum distances possible, we’d need to get a location for that signal’s origin nailed down.”

“Aye, sir,” Tifton replied.

“Sir, there is one problem with all this,” Brid put in.

Tanner turned to her. “Don’t mind hearing a problem, Specialist, but it had best come with a proposed solution.”

Brid’s eyes widened slightly, but she nodded. “What all this will tell us, sir, is where the Pool of Stars was when she transmitted this message, not necessarily where she is now. As for a solution, I—” She stopped and looked at Dart, who seamlessly filled in.

“Gives us a place to start looking, at least,” Dart said.

Tanner returned to his chair, decision made. “Indeed it does. Okay, people, we’ve all got work to do, so let’s do it.”

Thorn saluted his acknowledgement, then turned and strode off the bridge. He felt Tanner’s gaze following him but didn’t look back.

Not all secrets had to be shared right away. Not even to someone like Tanner.

* * *

Thorn buried himself in work, scrutinizing every record and scrap of data he could find about the Pool of Stars, poring over the transcript and data from her emergency transmission—anything to avoid facing Kira’s monumental revelation and everything it entailed.

He just wasn’t ready to do that yet.

To her credit, Kira got it. She backed completely away from him, giving him the space he needed. He crossed paths with her a few times, saw her looking abjectly miserable, then turned and went another way. He knew that his tense silence was a bludgeon, but grief was a process, not an event.

“Lieutenant Stellers, Brid here. Can you come to the mess?”

Thorn looked up from another technical article about the Pool of Stars and her—at the time—revolutionary Alcubierre drive. The mess made no sense for a meeting, and suspicion flared within him like a serpent.

“Why?”

“Because we’ve got the data from these three hops combined now, and think we have a starting point.”

“I’ll be right there,” Thorn said.

Thorn made his way there, still prepared to find himself facing some kind of well-meaning, but wholly unwelcome attempt to help him deal with the things he knew he eventually had to deal with. If it proved to be the case, he’d immediately turn and leave. In the meantime, as long as he did his job, no one had reason to complain, and especially no justification to start meddling. That even applied to Tanner. Work could be the best salve for loss, and Thorn was putting that theory to the test.

As the door to the mess opened, Thorn found only Brid, Dart, and Mol inside, a portable viewscreen set up on one of the dining tables.

Thorn relaxed a notch. “Okay, first question,” he said. “Why here, in the mess?”

“Only place with the table space to spread stuff out,” Dart replied. “Dinner’s not for a couple of hours yet.”

Thorn nodded and moved to the table. The viewscreen showed the same star chart as had the big screen on the bridge, except four lines now extended from the Zone and into Nyctus space, converging around a point well beyond it. They didn’t all meet at exactly the same point, instead outlining an area about four light-years across.

“It’s probably not going to get much better than that, according to the Comm O,” Brid said. “We could do a bunch more intercepts, then plot the back-bearing on the signal, but we probably won’t get it down to much less than this.”

“That’s fine,” Thorn said. “Searching four cubic light-years of space is a lot better than flying along a line ninety light years long, hoping to get lucky.”

“The thing is,” Mol said, “Fleet doesn’t want Captain Tanner to take the Hecate that far out of ON space. They’ve told him to send a team aboard the Gyrfalcon.” She flashed a grin. “Enter yours truly. I’ve got Trixie chewing on the nav details now.” She looked at Thorn. “Unfortunately, even using the Alcubierre drive, it’s going to take us . . . oh, at least a couple of weeks just to get to the search area. That is, unless you can help us out with that.”

Thorn looked back at the chart. “That’s a long way to try to move a ship using magic.”

“In that case, sir,” Brid said, “you’d best stock up on reading material and clean socks, because we’re going to be making an equally long flight.”

Thorn stared at the chart. Moving a ship that far, and doing it accurately, was going to take a prodigious expenditure of magical effort. He could do it, he was sure, but it would leave him drained and exhausted for some time at the other end. And if he plunked them into the middle of something bad, whether the Nyctus, or something else—

But the alternative was a month of flying, just to get there and back. He did not relish the idea of spending a month cooped up in the Gyrfalcon with Brid and Dart.

“Okay. We’ll do it. Brid, you and Dart work out how much time you need to get ready. Mol, same with you and Trixie and the Gyrfalcon. Get your time estimates to me by”—he checked the time—“let’s see, I want to get a preliminary mission plan to Tanner by twenty-two hundred, so I need your time estimates, and any special requirements you’ve got, by eighteen hundred. The Captain wants us to launch no later than two days from now, and preferably a lot sooner, so the Hecate doesn’t have to hang around too long in any one part of the Zone.”

“Got it, boss,” Mol said. Brid and Dart looked relieved, but said nothing.

Thorn nodded back, then turned and strode out of the mess. He had no desire to make small talk—not now, and not until he could tell Kira what it meant to have a child, but for only a moment. Their losses were not the same, but then, neither were they as people.

Thorn stood, hands clenched so hard his knuckles popped, and the seed of something dark bloomed within him. He’d come up hard, and through things that only children of war could truly grasp. So when the first dark possibilities of revenge took hold, deep in that place that was so unlike the rest of him, Thorn felt nothing. A blip, a minor squelch in his signal, but nothing that he feared. Nothing that could reshape him into a weapon without remorse.

Not yet, anyway.

* * *

Thorn didn’t want to put it off. He’d been doing his best to keep the whole matter of him having been an unwitting father firmly off to one side, but ignoring it was simply impossible. Thinking of the little girl opened wormholes to places he’d never imagined, and a sense of loss he could never truly grasp. Of that, he was sure.

With a force of will that surprised even himself, Thorn began to draw his focus to the task at hand; moving the Gyrfalcon dozens of light years to a target area that was, in the galactic scheme of things, a virtually dimensionless point. Nor could he have it looming over him while trying to do whatever he’d end up having to do afterward, because after they moved, Thorn expected them to fight. That was the nature of war. Long periods of travel and boredom punctuated by gut-churning fear. It was an old business, and the names and places changed, but the spiking fear and chaos never did.

So he took a deep, cleansing breath and asked Kira to meet him—this time, in his quarters. The witchport would be more private, but the intimacy of the little compartment just didn’t resonate with him—not for something like this.

Now, he sat staring at the door, a draft version of his mission plan glowing on the terminal on his desk. He’d been picking away at it in a half-hearted sort of way, tweaking the wording here, altering a number there. All of the changes were clever distractions, and nothing more.

The door chimed.

“Come in.”

It was Kira, not anyone else, because the universe has a sense of humor that only goes so far. She stepped into his quarters, closed the door behind her, but took a few seconds before turning back to Thorn.

He didn’t wait for her to turn around. He spoke to her back, then her profile, and then her, each word landing with an unintentional blow.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Kira?”

“I wanted to.”

“You wanted to tell me. But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think you—either of us—were even remotely ready to deal with something like that.”

Thorn’s face was stone. “You thought that? And you thought that for me? For us?”

“Do you know, you never once mentioned having a family? I was convinced you thought that being a parent meant a kind of death, like what we knew, growing up. You know. Pain. Loss. All of it inevitable, all of it tied to when the rocks will eventually fall, and your world turns to ash because no one can stop it.” She paused, eyes hot with anger and loss. “Your eyes go dead talking about the shit we went through as kids, and I know you can’t see past the day your home burned. The day my home burned. But we had lives before the squid, and I planned on having one after, too.” She paused, cheeks flushed in anger. “You never even gave me the chance to talk about more. About kids. A life.”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t. Someday, I imagined—”

“Someday. Sure. Does someday mean when you’re a Lieutenant in the Orbital Navy, stationed aboard a warship, fighting the Nyctus?”

“No, probably not. But—”

“But what, Thorn? What was the solution, in a galaxy full of stars that could be swept away by the bastards who took our lives?”

“We could have—”

“What? Tell me, Thorn. Tell me how what we do—and our duty—would have room for an infant. A child whose sole existence meant we would fight to the death to save her, but if she was with us, she would die out here in the hard vacuum? With us? How could we protect her?”

“Family. That’s how.”

“Neither of us have any family, Thorn, aside from distant cousins and such that might as well be random strangers. We weren’t even going to be on the same damned ship!”

“Kira—”

“This is why I finally decided not to tell you, Thorn—oh, and don’t think I didn’t agonize over that decision, and then second-guess the shit out of it ever since,” Kira said. Her voice was on that edge where pain and tears meet and fight for control, but neither wins nor loses.

He took a deep breath to calm himself—partly because she was asking questions he couldn’t readily answer, putting him on the defensive. And that pissed him off. “You know, it seems that the one who should be outraged here is me, not you.”

Kira stared for a moment, then nodded. “You can feel as alone as you want, Thorn, but you’re not.”

She hovered close to tears. Thorn heard the desolation in her voice, the miserable regret, the second-guessing. He took another breath, and deliberately backed away a bit.

“Kira, I had a right to know.”

She wiped her eyes. “Yes. You did. And I’m sorry for not telling you, for whatever it’s worth. But, you know what? I’m also not sorry. You haven’t had to spend the past three years so worried about the child you basically gave up that sometimes you can’t sleep at night because of it. You were spared dealing with the day-by-day, hour-by-hour consequences of a few minutes of carelessness, of indiscretion. You were able to just carry on with life. I wasn’t. I chose to carry this for both of us, because I knew how shitty this war was going to be, and that even if we do everything right, all of our worlds might come to an end. I chose this, Thorn. So you—hell, so we could both fight. So we could do whatever we had to in order to win, because I knew that the more room you had in you for fighting, the better our chance of survival. All of us. Not just her.”

“And that’s why you were so silent? Right up to the time of the Vision?”

“You’re a Starcaster, Thorn. A powerful one, a Conduit. You can do everything other Starcasters have to treat as a specialization.” She shook her head. “You’re also closer to me than any other living person. You would have seen through me in an instant.”

Thorn rubbed his face. “Okay. I get it. But—damn it, Kira, I was her father.” The word tasted like ashes, and he had to pause again, jaw muscles working furiously. “I get your reasons, and I get how tough it must have been for you. But you still should have told me. Instead, you cut me out of the whole thing and stuck her on some remote planet—"

“It was a nice planet, Thorn. A nice family—you know, a family, the one thing neither of us have, and that we couldn’t give her. I thought she’d be happy there—safe there.”

“Turns out she wasn’t. We haven’t killed enough squid.” Thorn looked away, the color rising in his cheeks. “We’ll never get to that point.”

Kira watched Thorn for a moment, like seeing a caged animal break free. She knew grief. She also understood danger, and even in his moment of loss, Thorn was—shifting.

The bloom inside Thorn that fed on revenge grew taller. His spirit, darker.

“Thorn?”

He looked to the door. “There are some things that I can keep inside.”

“And the others?” Kira asked, fear in her voice.

“Those, I will have to set free. But not here.” He leaned to her, kissing her cheek with lips that were dry and flat. “I will know when.”

11

He didn’t see Kira again before h-hour, the time the mission launched. Or he did see her, but only briefly, during planning meetings and the like. Each time they made brief eye contact, and that was it. For the time being, at least, it was all they had left.

He wondered if she’d show up to see him before he joined Mol, Brid, and Dart aboard the Gyrfalcon, because the reality was that he might not come back. The state of war made no allowances for broken promises, grief, or loss. War went forward, inexorable and cruel.

But there was no sign of her as Thorn clambered up the ladder into the fighter’s cabin, and the outer airlock door sealed behind him, its muffled thump sounding far too final for Thorn’s liking, but then he looked around, eyes resting on the familiar interior. This was more home to him than his own bunk, and at least Mol was there.

He settled himself into the co-pilot’s acceleration couch, alongside Mol. The couch gripped him in a familiar and strangely welcoming embrace. He’d spent many hours of his life sitting here already, flying mission after mission with Mol. Brid and Dart settled into their own acceleration couches behind them.

The Gyrfalcon’s cabin had been reconfigured for long-duration flight with four passengers; non-critical avionics had been removed, extra missile stowage emptied, and a whole suite of sensor gear had been moved to pods slung under the fighter’s wings. The extra space resulting had been repurposed for additional supplies and a tiny increase in the available living space. It was still going to be awfully cramped, and they’d had to plan for the contingency that Thorn wouldn’t be able to move the Gyrfalcon by magical means. That meant the engines and avionics had to function—perfectly. There was no going back if they got caught in Nyctus space with a broken vessel.

“Trixie, run the pre-flight checklist,” Mol said. Trixie’s response was a blast of ear-splitting noise, something like a cat whose tail had been caught in an angle grinder.

“Trixie!”

The so-called music abruptly cut off. Dart uttered a soft curse. “What the hell was that?”

“That was the Sex Pistols,” Trixie replied. “Aren’t they awesome? So raw, so much energy—”

“I almost hate to ask, but what are Sex Pistols?” Dart asked.

“And where can I get one?” Brid put in.

Mol flashed a grin back at them. “It’s some ancient musical act, from the Twentieth Century. Trixie’s been exploring entertainment from the past, and has decided that punk rock is her thing.”

“Totally,” Trixie said. “Just call me a riot grrrl.”

Somehow, Thorn thought, the AI managed to say grrrl in a way that made it clear it was all r’s and no letter i’s. He glanced at Mol like a parent who blames the other parent for a kid gone wild. Or, at least as wild as you could be while existing in a lattice matrix aboard a spaceborne fighter.

Still grinning, she flipped switches, provoking a rising whine from the Gyrfalcon’s energizers. “Trixie, care to explain that riot thing?”

“It’s a late twentieth-century feminist-activist movement, spurred on by bands like Bikini Kill.”

“Of course it is,” Thorn said, shaking his head in amazement. “Well, Trixie, I’ll make you a deal. Listen to all of this punk rock that you want—just don’t do it so we can hear it.”

“Aw. I wanna share it with you. It’s so awesome.”

“I believe you. I really do. But your mom and I need some alone time, and we—”

“You’re not my real dad,” Trixie pouted, channeling a persona from the height of teen petulance.

Thorn rolled his eyes. “Rather in character, isn’t she?”

“You can’t imagine,” Mol said. “Easy on the racket, like Thorn said, okay?”

“Fine,” Trixie said, turning the word into a howl against every indignity teens had experienced since the first parent told them they couldn’t borrow the car keys.

Thorn smiled into his hand, and it felt good, even if his laughter was brought on by an AI going through the identity crisis of a fifteen-year old girl.

“Pre-flight checklist complete,” Trixie reported, businesslike about the important things. “All systems nominal. Ready to launch.”

Mol acknowledged as the Hecate’s main shuttle bay, repurposed into a permanent hangar for the Gyrfalcon, decompressed. When it was wholly empty of air, the big doors slid open. Mol asked for, and received, clearance from the destroyer’s flight controller to launch, and nudged the fighter into space with brief puffs from the thrusters.

“How far do you want me to take us from the Hecate before you hocus-pocus us away?” Mol asked Thorn.

He glanced at her. “Hocus pocus?”

“Some old Earth thing, when people talked about magic.” She shrugged. “Trixie’s not the only one with a thing for ancient history.”

Thorn offered a faint smile, doing a little math before speaking. In truth, it wasn’t math. It was what scientists called an educated guess. “Let’s make it at least a thousand klicks. I doubt that the area of effect of the jump will be anywhere near that, but just in case, I don’t want to accidentally drag the Hecate along with us.”

“I can imagine how happy Captain Tanner would be about that,” Brid said.

Thorn settled in as Mol spun the fighter, lit the drive and accelerated the Gyrfalcon away. The Hecate quickly and smoothly dwindled into the distance behind her, until she’d vanished against the starfield.

“Alpha one, this is Alpha prime,” Tanner said over the comm. “Anything else you need from us?”

Thorn answered. “Alpha prime here. No, we’re good.”

“Alright. As soon as you’ve done your, ah, thing, we’ll be on our way.”

“Alpha one, roger, out.”

Tanner would keep the Hecate on-station until Thorn had moved the Gyrfalcon, then start a series of random Alcubierre hops, never spending more than twelve hours in any one place. Her actual location shouldn’t matter when Thorn brought them back; his magic should just return the Gyrfalcon to the vicinity of the destroyer, since his intent would be making it back to her. It was helpful to have a specific target for his jump magic, as he’d come to call it—a specialized form of Force magic that seemed to be unique to him. What he was attempting was unique to Thorn, a Conduit, and the first of his kind. Thorn could tap into any form of magic and apply it with the deft skill of a Starcaster who’d known only one skill since his sorcerous awakening.

He wondered if his daughter could—

Thorn instantly banished the thought. He had to keep himself fixed on the mission. He knew it would take all of his mental discipline to do it, but it had to be done, even at the cost of a self-imposed callousness where he silenced the memory of a daughter he had never known.

And never would.

Inside Thorn, the bloom unfurled yet again, unseen to all, but felt by him.

“Just passing through one thousand klicks from the Hecate,” Mol announced.

Thorn nodded and extracted his focus, his battered old children’s storybook, from the pouch on his crash suit where he kept it.

“Sir, if you don’t mind me asking—what’s that?” Dart asked.

Thorn tried to deflect the question with a grin. “Good luck charm.”

He saw Mol glance at him but ignored it, drawing his focus to a point so bright and hard that it swam before them as a physical thing out in the black. A mote of light grew in his vision, giving a fixed place not to where the Gyrfalcon was, but—

—where he wanted it to be.

Mol had already put up a star chart on the co-pilots flight management screen, so Thorn could see it clearly. Trixie had also projected a glowing icon onto the Gyrfalcon’s canopy, showing the exact direction they needed to travel to get to the last known location of the Pool of Stars. Both together gave Thorn clear visual cues as to the future location, the place beyond their physical state. A place of possibility, made real only by the power beginning to rise in Thorn’s awareness, like a tide’s first rippling return.

With these things fixed firmly in his mind, he let his senses sink into the old book, riding its texture and detail like a familiar path, each step fitting into a place he had gone many times before. His consciousness collapsed in on itself, coalescing around that deep, enigmatic place where magic came from. Power began to swirl around him, a trickle, then a stream, each pulsing moment making Thorn’s interior presence ever larger. Beyond the limits of human senses, Thorn grew. He expanded, reaching outward, drawing the magic to him in a veil of coruscating energy that wrapped around him as surely as a mother’s arms.

Then, he connected the points. It was all so simple, out there in the darkness. There was here—where the Gyrfalcon was, and where she needed to be, and there was nothing between.

At least nothing Thorn would allow to exist. He was bridge and engine. Path and power. He was, in that moment, outside the universe even as he sat there in the crash couch of a ship that winked from existence in a soundless flash.

The journey began without noise or movement. It began as nothing at all, save Thorn’s will.

Slowly, he drew those two points together in his mind, applying increasing power as he did. He envisioned space like a sheet of paper that he was folding, trying to make those two, distant points coincide. The resistance increased the more acutely he folded the page, just as magnets would fight for shared space, so too did Thorn’s magic, forcing the silent fabric of space to bend close. Closer.

Together.

The fold was almost complete, and then it was, as a dazzling flash washed away the Gyrfalcon in an assault on the senses that left Mol, Brid and Dart falling toward a distant point. They were too frozen to scream as their bodies were made unreal by a magical energy more powerful than anything they had ever known, and for a single instant, they were nowhere, and existed not at all.

The Gyrfalcon moved, and the shift was complete.

The residual power drained away from Thorn like water rushing back into the ocean in the wake of a tsunami. Thorn slumped back in the g-couch, gasping. “I gather that the fact that I’m . . . I’m talking, means we’re still . . . in one piece.”

A cloud of stunned silence hung in the ship, fueled by short breaths and muttered sounds as Brid and Dart tried to collect themselves. Being disassembled by magic was bad for one’s nerves, although the condition appeared to be temporary.

“Near as I can tell,” Mol said. “Trixie, get us a location fix.”

“Working on it!”

“That was—” Brid began, then stopped and shook her head. “Not sure what happened. I tried to follow what you were doing, but you left me. I’m lost. I mean, I was lost, but now, we’re here. Still lost about exactly what that was.”

Thorn slid his book back into its pouch and glanced at Brid, offering her a tired smile. “Don’t be too amazed yet. Let’s wait and see where we are—oh, and when we are.”

“When?” Dart asked.

“We call it space-time for a reason. The time part is supposed to be a constant, but who knows if it is,” Thorn offered.

They waited for Trixie to do her thing. She was locating particular pulsars, neutron stars whose frequency of pulsing was absolutely characteristic. No two rotated at exactly the same rate. They were really the only fixed reference points in space. She needed to find at least four to get a position fix. More would be even better.

“And that’s six pulsars I’ve found,” Trixie finally said. “So that puts us—” A point appeared on the star chart. “Right here. And, based on certain reference transmissions from Earth, we’re right where we should be in time, too.”

Thorn made mental notes as they all studied the chart, marking each point well. Knowing where he was could be as important as how he got there; moving ships with magic was imprecise at best, and as far as he knew, a talent shared by exactly one person—himself. That meant relying on his sense of place in addition to hardened naval tech. The pulsars were a constant, and Thorn worked the angles on using them in his own way, not just as a naval beacon. Ships that were too distant from ON time-base beacons were able to fix their temporal location by detecting ancient radio-frequency broadcasts from Earth, the schedule for which was known down to the hour.

Once he absorbed the information, Thorn turned back to Brid. “Now, you can be amazed.”

“I am, sir, believe me. I mean—holy shit, you just moved us umpteen light-years in an instant and brought us to just over a light-year from our target. That’s really—” Brid shook her head. “Terrifying, if I’m honest.”

Thorn leaned back in the g-couch. “Which is why I get to take a break. Mol, over to you to take us the rest of the way.”

“Will do,” she replied. “You rest, sir. Trixie, set up the flight parameters for an Alcubierre hop to our target point.”

“Coming right up. First, though, how about a little celebratory music?”

A wall of noise erupted from the speakers, all cat’s tail and angle-grinder again.

“Trixie!” Thorn shouted.

The music cut off.

Trixie made a hmph noise. “Fine, dad. You guys are no fun at all.”

* * *

A cubic volume of four light-years of space was, in galactic terms, minuscule. But for a single Gyrfalcon fighter to search the same volume of space exhaustively was a monumental job.

“So what do we know?” Brid said once they’d jumped to their final destination point and found nothing.

“Well, the Pool of Stars doesn’t seem to be broadcasting anything,” Dart replied. “If she was still transmitting that distress signal, it should be coming through about as loud as Trixie’s so-called music.”

“It is not so-called music,” Trixie cut in. “It’s an artform that draws on the turmoil and dissatisfaction that wracks the human soul—”

“Okay, I know that AI has finally made it to being a perfect replication of a human,” Dart said. “Trixie’s managing pretentious condescension really well.”

“Simulated pretentious condescension,” Mol said, smiling.

“I don’t know, I’m as annoyed by it as I would be if another person tried it on,” Brid replied.

“Kids,” Thorn said in mock disgust. “Back to the problem at hand. We know that the Pool of Stars isn’t broadcasting, or we’d detect it, like Dart says. What possibilities does that leave?”

“She’s stopped broadcasting,” Trixie said, earning eye rolls from Brid and Dart. Thorn, though, held up a hand.

“No, that’s right. If her transmitter failed or she lost power—or someone switched the transmission off—that would explain it,” he said.

“Fair enough. Maybe she was destroyed,” Brid admitted.

“Or she’s been moved,” Dart added. “Though I guess she’d also have to stop transmitting, too.”

“Maybe the signal from her is being blocked somehow,” Mol suggested.

Thorn drummed his fingers on the chair arm, listening. “All possibilities,” he said. “The trouble is, we have no reason to pick one over any of the others.”

Dart pointed out to the stars. “If she’s been destroyed, then being out here is kind of pointless.”

“I’m not calling this mission done yet,” Thorn snapped. “Trixie, how hard would be to locate the Pool of Stars with sensors alone?”

“Well, let’s see. She’s two hundred and sixty-three meters long, and thirty-eight meters at her widest across the beam. Her Alcubierre drive was powered by a fusion reactor—though not a very efficient one—so it was only meant to be fired up to light the drive, then shut off again, so we have to assume it’s cold. So no emissions from it. Her other powerplant was a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, and the thorium isotopes used have a super long half-life. We could, in theory, detect whatever fission products manage to leak past any shielding. But we’d probably have to be pretty close to be able to separate that from background radiation.”

“So we’re trying to find an object less than three hundred meters long, that isn’t emitting anything except a little bit of radioactive decay products, in roughly four cubic light-years of space,” Dart said. “Does that sum it up?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Trixie replied.

Thorn sighed. “So, unless we get really, really lucky, our chances are basically—not zero.”

“Not zero is about as good as it gets, yeah,” Trixie said.

Thorn exchanged looks with the others. It was Mol who summed it up best.

“Well, shit.”

* * *

As it turned out, the problem wasn’t the lack of possible targets that might be the Pool of Stars; it was that there were far too many of them.

As soon as she began scanning for them, Trixie found dozens of potential sources of the types of radioactive decay products that might hint at the Pool’s reactor. Thorium wasn’t an uncommon isotope, so planets, asteroids, and even some comets tended to contain some. All of them exhibited the same types of alpha radiation they wanted to find, meaning the Gyrfalcon was awash in a vast ocean of the only characteristic emission they could imagine emanating from the Pool of Stars.

On an off chance, they had Trixie scan for other types of radiation, including neutron emissions from a running fusion reactor. Again, though, every star was a blazing beacon of neutron radiation, so it got them no further ahead.

Mol finally turned to Thorn. “Looks like it’s back down to you and your magic.”

Thorn made a clicking sound, then tilted his head. “It’s not that easy. I’ve never actually seen the Pool of Stars, so I can’t rely on contagion to give me anything to fix on.”

Mol stared back. “Contagion? Like, in a disease?”

Brid and Dart both turned from their respective tasks to chuckle, but Thorn shut them both down with a look. “No. Contagion can be summed up as the part reflects the whole. So, if I had a piece, say, of the Gyrfalcon—anything that could be considered a part of her—I could use magic to affect her, even if I couldn’t—” He stopped.

Mol and the others stared, then exchanged glances. Finally, Brid spoke up. “Sir? Thorn—?”

He raised a hand.

He’d never been near the Pool of Stars, of course, much less seen her—at least, outside of images and video. But there was a part of her, and a unique part at that, with which Thorn was intimately familiar. It was, in fact, a part that could only be seen.

Her nose art.

Putting aside the enormous implications of what Kira had told him, that he’d still be studiously trying to just put and keep aside, there might even be a personal connection between him and it. The little girl—

—he grimly pushed aside the word that his mind wanted to use, his—his daughter—

—had apparently been trying to use that nose art as a way of sending some sort of message, or warning, to him.

It would still be a much less than perfect connection, but it was the strongest, and really, the only one he had with the Pool of Stars.

“I’m going to try something,” he finally said. “It might not work, and if it doesn’t, I’m stumped. If we can’t think of anything else to try, we might just have to give up and go back home.”

“What do you plan to do?” Dart asked.

“I’m going to find Una’s Ass.”

Mol blinked. “That is not . . . what I expected you to say.” Then she grinned. “But hey, whatever you do on your own time—”

Thorn gave her a sidelong look. “Just shut up and fly, Mol.”

* * *

Thorn once more shrank his awareness down to a point and focused on his talisman, his old story book. This time, he kept his eyes open, fixed on the cover art. It was typical of a kid’s book, brightly colored cartoon imagery, now scuffed and faded, but still similar in style to the Pool’s nose art. He then lifted his gaze to the flight management screen, which Trixie had temporarily repurposed to display the highest-res image of the nose art available. He let himself absorb that image for a while, then turned back to his book.

Back to the nose art.

Back to the book.

He was waiting for a resonance, a flicker of connection that would tell him he’d found even a sliver of contagion, a thread of connection across which he could pour magical effect. There was simply too much space for him to realistically search it bit by bit; it would take weeks, probably months. But if he could find a link, no matter how tenuous, it gave him something to grab, like a protrusion from a smooth wall.

Nothing.

Thorn didn’t give up, though, because he knew he hadn’t tried everything. To do that, he had to go to the very place he’d been trying hard to avoid.

The screen door banged behind her as the little girl came tumbling out—

Why didn’t you tell me, Kira?

—a doll, a smiling boy with wild, dark curls of hair and crude insignia patches sewn to each arm of its tattered shirt. “Lookit, Mister Starman! Lookit the bugs—”

Kira, I had a right to know.

Mister Starman smiled as he glowed, bright enough now to push the sunlight away. He was as cheerful as always, even when everything stopped working the way it was supposed to.

He’d make it all right.

He’d make it all right.

He’d make it—

A flickering, undulating thread of silver-blue radiance leapt away from Thorn’s talisman. Unconstrained by any physical laws, it moved at the speed of thought; it was suddenly just there. It connected him to a star system—a sun, around which revolved six planets. Somehow, there was a connection between Thorn and this distant star.

That connection could be only one thing.

He was tempted to use the thread as a pathway and push the Gyrfalcon along it. But the expenditure of power would, again, leave him drained, and he didn’t want to take them into such a massive question mark while unable to help deal with whatever they might encounter. So he let the effect end, the thread dissolving into motes of connection that faded away.

He slumped back in the g-couch. “Trixie, give me a local star chart.”

“Gotcha.”

He pointed at the chart when it appeared, at a particular star system. “There,” Thorn said. “We want to go there.”

The other three stared at him for a moment, then Mol nodded. “Trixie, you heard the man. Do your mathematical magic, get the nav set up.”

“You bet!”

Thorn rubbed his face, body thrumming with exhaustion.

Mol glanced at him, back at Brid and Dart, then back at him. “Thorn, you okay?”

Thorn took a moment to answer. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just took a lot of out of me, that’s all.”

Some pain, he would not share. Not yet.

* * *

“So, six planets,” Dart said, studying the instrumentation that had been set up behind the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit. “One gas giant, five rocky planets. Three of those are terrestrial. Two of those are in the star’s habitable zone—let’s see, one-point-two Earth masses, and—oh, this one’s a beast, three-point-six Earth masses.”

“The last thing I want to experience is running on a planet that big,” Brid said. “Hell, even breathing would be hard. Please tell me that’s not our destination.”

“It’s not. The other planet, the smaller one, has atmospheric pollutants suggesting an industrialized society. Looks fairly advanced from here.”

“Yeah, they’ve got artificial satellites, a couple of things that might be orbital platforms,” Mol said, studying her own tactical display. “Can’t tell if any of it’s defensive systems or not.”

Thorn stared at the fierce point of light that was the system’s star. They’d made the trip in a single Alcubierre hop, and returned to normal space on the inside edge of the system’s Oort Cloud. It offered enough distance to keep them out of range of probable detection, but close enough that they could snoop.

“There are broadcasts from that planet, too,” Brid said, fiddling with her own console. “All across the radio frequency spectrum, and down into microwaves.”

Thorn glanced back. “That’s good, right? Means they don’t communicate by smell, or bioluminescence, or anything like that?”

“Well, they might,” Brid replied. “But these radio emissions are modulated, some in amplitude, some in frequency, and there are patterns to it. So they’re probably communications, which means we probably have some common linguistic foundations.” She made a face. “Probably?”

“Can you decipher any of it?” Thorn asked.

“Translation software’s working on it now,” Brid said. “If it can find something to suggest shared concepts, then it should be able to come up with some sort of translation key. Might be pretty crude, though, so I wouldn’t count on any long, involved conversations.”

“Whatever you can do,” Thorn said. “Meantime, Mol, what’s our best possible time to that planet?”

She nodded at the normal space nav display, set in the console between them. It already held the answer. “I knew you’d ask that,” she said. “Without burning insane amounts of fuel, four days.”

Thorn thought about sitting in the Gyrfalcon for four days, with nothing to do but brood. “Can we cut that down at all? Use the Alcubierre drive?”

“Knew you’d ask that, too. We can, and shave about two and a half days off the trip.”

“But?”

“But, pushing that deep into a gravity well is going to strain the drive. I’d hate to break it, especially this far from ON space.”

Thorn sighed, frustrated by the limits of physics and ‘casting alike. He could use magic, but again, it would deplete his supernatural resources just in time to arrive on the doorstep of an entirely unknown race. But he could also do it more or less instantly.

He turned back to Brid and Dart. “You guys are both Starcasters. Think you can cover us, while I take some recovery time after moving us in-system?”

“We’ll do what we’ve gotta do,” Brid replied.

“Okay, then.” Thorn settled back in the g-couch and extracted his talisman. “Stand by, everyone, we’re going for another ride.”

12

They called themselves the Danzur, their civilization the Danzurite Sovereignty. It was a grandiose name, Thorn thought, for a civilization that consisted of a single planet. Fortunately, it turned out that Brid’s translation software, which was AI-based and much more sophisticated than the stock system built into the Gyrfalcon, was able to establish a workable translation key. By the time Thorn had shifted them to a point only a few million klicks from the planet, they had the means of talking to the Danzur.

Unfortunately, they were assholes.

“—the sovereign and inalienable territorial rights of the Danzurite Sovereignty shall not be infringed by any external party, without express permission of the Assembly of Hegemons, in accordance with charters adopted during the Second Conference, and with due regard—”

Thorn lowered the volume on the droning voice. “Are they telling us we’re welcome here, or they want us to go away?”

“I can’t tell,” Brid said, shaking her head. “That’s the problem with being a linguist. I might be able to figure out how to communicate with someone, but I have no control over whether it’s actually worth our time.”

“—certain accommodations that recognize the unfamiliarity of external parties with certain provisions, and exceptions to those provisions—”

Thorn scowled. “I don’t even think this is a recording. There’s some guy, Danzur, whatever the hell these people are, anyway, actually saying all of this stuff to us in real time.”

“Checks out,” Brid said, tapping a graphical display. “All of the standard indicators are saying this is live.”

“So these Danzur have deployed a defensive system,” Mol said. “And it’s a potent one, too.”

Thorn glanced at the tactical display to see whatever Mol had seen, but nothing on it had changed. He lifted his eyes to her.

She smiled. “Boredom. They’ve figured out how to weaponize boredom.”

Thorn smiled back. Indeed, after their own initial transmission, identifying themselves and assuring that their mission was a peaceful one, the Danzur had responded with almost two full minutes of what sounded like the text of a legal agreement.

“Uh, Thorn? They’ve stopped talking,” Dart said.

Sure enough, the comm had gone silent. Thorn turned his attention to the welcome silence.

“Uh, okay,” he said, transmitting. “What would you like us to do now?”

“Do you accept the terms and conditions of your entry into the territorial integrity of the Danzur Sovereignty? If you have questions, or object to any provisions, please identify the provision in question by specific reference—”

“No, no questions,” Thorn replied.

“I can repeat the terms and conditions if it would assist—”

“Oh, hell no!” Thorn blurted, then glared at the snickers from the others. “No, that . . . won’t be necessary. That was very clear, thank you.”

The voice somehow turned even more petulantly self-important. “That being the case, do you accept the terms and conditions of your entry into the territorial integrity—”

“We do,” Thorn cut in. “Yes. We do.”

Brid leaned forward. “You sure you don’t want to review what they said? Just in case we’re agreeing to be eaten or something?”

“I listened to it all,” Trixie put in. “And there’s nothing about anyone eating anyone. Mainly just a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo about divesting them of liability and concurrence with legal statutes and blah, blah, blah.”

Thorn hit transmit. “Please wait a moment, we’re reviewing the terms of the agreement.”

Strangely, the voice lightened, becoming almost pleasant. “Oh. Well, very well, then. I will await your reply.”

“I think we just scored a point with them,” Dart said. Thorn looked a question at him.

“You didn’t just hit ok on the legal agreement,” he replied. “You told them you’re going to study it.”

“Yeah, just from his tone of voice,” Brid put in, “you said something they find . . . pleasing.”

“These Danzur like bureaucracy, and procedure, and doing things by the book,” Thorn said.

Brid and Dart both nodded. Mol, for her part, just slumped back in her g-couch.

“A planet full of people who love bureaucracy,” she said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ve just discovered hell.”

* * *

“Air’s a little on the thick side,” Brid said, as she, Thorn, and Dart stepped out of the Gyrfalcon’s airlock and into the orbiting platform to which they’d been directed. Apparently, actually landing on the planet’s surface required another set of disclaimers, liability waivers, and similar legal bullshit. Thorn did not have the patience to pander to the bureaucratic fetish the Danzur seemed to actually enjoy.

“About five percent higher atmospheric pressure,” Dart said, glancing down at the data pad clipped to his belt. “Oxygen content is higher, too—about twenty-six percent, compared to twenty-one standard. Higher partial pressure of water vapor, higher CO2 content compared to nitrogen, higher—”

“Thicker,” Thorn said. “We get it.” He turned and looked along the corridor leading forward. It was brightly lit and rendered in soft, pastel colors, mainly pinks and pale greens, arranged in an abstract pattern that reminded him of—

He grimaced at each new and ghastly color array. In the distant past, he recalled a horrible piece of clothing—or was it socks—in this unsettling color pattern.

Paisley. Right.

“Interesting choice of décor,” Brid said as they started forward, her thoughts apparently echoing Thorn’s.

They reached the end of the corridor and stepped into a compartment occupied by four—

Danzur, Thorn assumed, though they were nothing at all like what he’d expected.

If you took an ape, squashed it to about two-thirds of the height of a man, added the bulk to its width, gave it an extra set of arms, then clothed it in something resembling formal wear, you’d have a Danzur.

One of them stepped forward with a loping gait. “On behalf of the Hegemony, I am pleased to extend our welcome to you. I am Sophat Girn, Deputy Assistant to the Preeminent Undersecretary to the First Secretary to the Hegemonic Council.”

Two things struck Thorn as the Danzur spoke—first, that, absent the translator and its formal, cultured tone, their actual speech sounded like nothing but a series of wet, syrupy grunts. And second, despite giving a title that was vaguely masculine, Thorn had no idea whether Sophat Girn was female, male, or something different. As the diplomat droned on, despite being an underling to an underling to an underling of whoever was in charge, Sophat Girn gave his title like it wasn’t only something to be proud of, but that it was important, too.

Thorn kept his face neutral, since smiling might be considered inappropriate, and responded in a grave tone.

“I am Lieutenant Thorn Stellers, Starcaster with the Orbital Navy of Earth. We represent the Allied Stars, and I am very pleased to meet you.”

Sophat introduced the other three Danzur present, all of whom seemed to be underlings not only to him, but also, in some fashion, to one another. Thorn acknowledged them as they were named, but quickly forgot who was who because, apparently, every Danzur had some sort of convoluted title to follow their name. Or at least these ones did, although at each introduction, the Danzur compulsively adjusted a stack of papers near them, twitching every page into order with meticulous care.

“You, ah, missed one,” Thorn said, smiling.

The Danzur bobbed her head and adjusted a stack of pages, then sighed in a universal sound of relief. “Thank you!” she enthused via the translation.

Thorn introduced Brid and Dart in turn, then Sophat led all of them into an adjoining compartment, one seemingly intended specifically for diplomatic meetings. This compartment was adorned with more of the pastel-Paisley patterns and was set with cushions in a circle surrounding a holographic display. The image currently depicted was yet more abstraction—essentially, the Paisley pattern animated into something flowing and languid. Thorn wasn’t sure if it meant something or was just a screensaver.

When they had settled themselves in, Sophat Girn spoke.

“I have submitted an archival retrieval request to our Sub-Sub-Sovereignty of Records, to determine if we have ever had contact with your species before, but I have not yet received an answer.” As Sophat spoke, little strings and droplets of spittle flew from his—Thorn thought of him as male—mouth and pattered on the textured floor. “Accordingly, I have no facts regarding your species upon which to base discussion.”

One of the other Danzur leaned in toward Sophat and spoke in a voice too quiet for the translator to pick up. Sophat raised a hand, with fingers crossed and intertwined in a particular way. Thorn noted that those fingers had two more knuckles than the human variety, and that they could apparently bend in both directions; that probably multiplied the number of possible hand gestures one of the aliens could make by at least an order of magnitude. The other Danzur immediately bowed its head and fell silent.

“With your permission, and in anticipation of my archival request being filled in the requisite time, I have authorized my Second Subordinate Assistant Secretary to record these proceedings.”

Thorn glanced at Brid and Dart, then nodded. “Sure, by all means.”

“Excellent. I will need you to stipulate this specifically, in accordance with Archival Directive four-dash-one-two-stroke-five—”

Now Thorn held up a hand, intending a bit of an experiment. “We do so stipulate.”

Sure enough, a ripple of obvious discomfort flashed among the Danzur, as Thorn blindly accepted whatever officious requirement this one happened to be. Dart had been right; the Danzur didn’t like their bureaucracy being circumvented. It was going to make dealing with these people a massive pain in the ass.

Nonetheless, Sophat seemed to grudgingly accept. “Very well. Now, if I may, I note that you and your companions seem to represent two different morphologies.”

“I . . . I’m sorry, what?”

Sophat pointed at Thorn, then Dart. “You two are a distinct physiological morphology from the one you named as Brid.”

“Ah, okay,” Thorn said. “Dart and I are the males of our species. Brid is female.”

“And the significance of this is?”

“It’s . . . related to the way in which our species reproduces. A male and a female combine their genetic material in a way that results in a new—”

Thorn had to stop, earning a sharp look from both Brid and Dart.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. The result is a new member of our species, itself either male or female.”

“I see. Please, would you demonstrate this combination of genetic material for us?”

Brid made a noise that sounded like a snorting chuckle.

Thorn stared, almost laughing, too. “Um, that . . . procedure . . . is something we consider a very . . . uh, personal thing.”

“Again, I see. My apologies if I made an unseemly request.”

“That’s no problem at all.”

“And what of the third?”

Thorn looked around in confusion. “I’m sorry, the third—what, exactly?”

“You described how your two morphologies, as represented here, combine their genetic material to spawn new life. What role does the third morphology play?”

“We don’t have one. It’s usually just the two,” Thorn replied.

The Danzur exchanged looks that could have been anything from fascination to disgust, and maybe some of both.

“That is unusual,” Sophat said. “However, we have other areas of inquiry to pursue—”

“If I may,” Brid put in. “Might I ask the nature of morphologies, as you call them, among your people? I honestly do not see clear differences between you and your companions, but I’m unsure if that means you are all the same morphology, or if I simply lack the understanding of how to distinguish them.”

Sophat considered the question. Thorn expected another bureaucratic hoop to jump through before getting an answer, but when the Danzur finally spoke, it was uncharacteristically direct.

“I am a prime. My various assistants are lessers, but may become primes, if circumstances so dictate. In order to reproduce, it is necessary for a prime and lesser to each contribute their genetic material to a null.”

“A null?”

“Yes. Nulls provide the actual means of reproduction.”

Brid glanced at Thorn and offered a barely perceptible shrug. She’d obviously been angling for an appropriate pronoun to use with Sophat, but it seemed that they/them was going to be it.

The conversation continued, ranging from topic to topic. The Danzur seemed, in their own way, to be eager to learn more about humans and their society, and Thorn was just as interested in the Danzur, but they were here for a reason. When the conversation drifted to the field of technology, he finally saw his chance.

“So your people are obviously capable of spaceflight,” Thorn said. “Are you able to leave this star system, and venture beyond it?”

“In order to answer that, I will first need you to stipulate to the constraints of the Hegemonic Council Directive nine-three-slash-two—”

This time, Thorn waited for Sophat to finish reciting the official requirements, nodded with great gravitas, then asked if he could consult with his colleagues before answering. This seemed to please the Danzur, who appeared quite happy to await their decision. Thorn led Brid and Dart back to the Gyrfalcon.

Mol sprawled in her g-couch, making exaggerated snoring sounds.

“Yes, Mol, we get it,” Thorn said. “You find this boring.”

She opened her eyes and scowled. “Holy shit, I’ve been listening in through your comm, like you wanted, and—again, holy shit, are these people ever tedious, with a capital teed.”

He turned to Brid and Dart. “So what do you think?”

“I think it’s amazing they get anything done,” Dart said. “It’s like the admin and personnel and all those other departments at Fleet came to life, gained sentience, and took over.”

“You sure they haven’t already?” Mol asked. “I had to fill out about a thousand pages of reports before I could certify this ship to even fly on this mission.”

Thorn cut in. “Yes, they’re super hidebound and officious, we all get that. Do you guys think they’re being on the level, though? Can we trust them?”

“As long as we fill out the requisite forms, yeah, probably,” Brid replied.

Thorn nodded. “Fair enough. That’s kind of my attitude, too. That, and we really don’t have time to piss around playing the Danzurs’ bureaucratic games. My plan is to go back in there and get the conversation moved to talking about the Pool of Stars. There must be a reason this system was somehow connected to it.”

Thorn got agreement from the others; he waited another ten minutes to make it appear they were giving the relevant legal terms due consideration, then they returned to the meeting room.

“I am pleased to say that we are prepared to stipulate to the relevant terms,” he said to Sophat.

“So noted, and recorded. Very well. Yes, we have begun to experiment with trans-light capable technology. We expect to undertake our first crewed flights within the next three cycles.”

Thorn assumed a cycle probably meant a year, which meant the Danzur were on the very brink of becoming an interstellar civilization. And that gave Thorn the inroad he was looking for.

“Humans were once at that stage. In fact, our first trans-light-capable ship, which we named the Pool of Stars, apparently ended up somewhere in this part of the galaxy, potentially very close to here. We’re a—” He glanced at Brid. “Is archaeological a good way to describe our mission?”

Brid nodded. “Oh. Yes. Yes, that’s an excellent description. We’re an archeological expedition, seeking to find out what happened to our ship. It unfortunately was lost, and we’re not sure why.”

“I see,” Sophat replied. “And you are seeking to determine if we have any knowledge of this ship of yours—this Pool of Stars, I believe you named it?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” Thorn replied.

“That will necessitate a further archival request, under Hegemony Directive—”

“I was hoping we could apply for an exemption to your normal processes,” Thorn put in, taking a chance. Surely these people must have ways of bypassing their own, ponderous systems of governance, in times of, say, emergency. “Unfortunately, our time here is limited, and we are expected back in our own space soon.”

Sophat just stared for a moment, his bright eyes fixed on Thorn in what had to be polite disbelief. Another Danzur leaned in and again whispered something to him, setting a scene as old as governments. Sophat turned to listen, then looked back at Thorn, his mobile face shifting into a new, inscrutable expression.

“Since you are new to us, and in the interest of promoting cordial relations, I will execute the necessary emergency exemption to normal procedures and expedite your request,” the Danzur said.

Thorn nodded with what he hoped was diplomatic gravitas. “Thank you, Sophat. We are most appreciative.”

A third Danzur leaned in to speak to Sophat. The whispered conversation went on for a moment, then Sophat turned, again, to Thorn.

“Of course, in the interests of reciprocal cordial relations, perhaps there is something you can do for the Danzur Sovereignty,” Sophat said.

Thorn resisted the temptation to smile—he’d been expecting exactly that. He heard Dart utter a faint sniff beside him, a simple noise that somehow still managed to impart fussy officiousness. It was, Thorn thought, a truly magnificent sound, and one that Dart must have practiced.

“What did you have in mind?” Thorn asked mildly. He adopted one of his three patented looks for dealing with people who loved paperwork—in this case, it was number three—friendly interest with a tinge of youthful vigor.

“Our star maps are derived solely from remote observations gathered from here, our home world. We presume that, as a race that has already begun to travel the stars, that your maps are much more detailed and accurate than ours. We would, therefore, ask you for copies of your star maps so that as we begin to take our own first, tentative steps beyond our world, we are doing so with the best data we can obtain.”

Thorn still found it jarring that what came through the translator as a smooth, cultured voice, was actually delivered in the Danzur native tongue as a string of bestial grunts and growls, ending with a truly magnificent coughing snort that rang off the walls. After a second to recover, Thorn gave the request consideration, working through the ramifications of a new star faring race with vague intentions. The Danzur hadn’t been hostile—quite the opposite—but that didn’t assure that they couldn’t become hostile.

As far as the ON was concerned, star charts were highly classified documents, as they were centered around the human home worlds and could be used to track and destroy all Orbital Navy activity. Thorn technically didn’t have the authority to declassify or release any of them to anybody. He could try to get that authority, or at least get clearance to go ahead, but a conventional message would take days, even weeks, to reach ON space, and for the reply to return. He could do it in real-time using Joining, but the only people he was certain he could contact that way were Densmore and Kira. For various reasons, he really didn’t want to speak to either of them—not in these circumstances, anyway.

So he made a decision. This mission was a vital one. Whatever the Danzur knew about the Pool of Stars might prove crucial in completing it. He’d just have to hope Fleet saw fit to back him up on what he was about to do.

In this case, it would literally be easier to get forgiveness than permission.

“We can provide you with copies of our star charts that encompass your space, and that for several light-years around it. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, we won’t provide any information about our own space.”

He felt Brid and Dart both look at him, surprised, but he ignored them.

Sophat leaned toward one of his advisors, whispered something, and had something whispered back. The act was becoming an irritation, but Thorn smiled blandly, waiting for form to be observed.

“That is acceptable,” the Danzur finally said. “Your caution regarding your own territorial integrity is perfectly understandable.”

They concluded their meeting, with the understanding they would exchange data in one Danzur day, which was just over twenty-eight hours. Until then, Thorn and the others could enjoy the hospitality of the Danzur—and study them, just as Thorn knew the Danzur fully intended to do with them in return.

* * *

Thorn and the others were invited to a formal dinner, in the same room where they’d spoken to Sophat and his advisors earlier. It appeared that they weren’t going to be allowed any further into the orbital station, or down to the surface—which was fine by Thorn, since he didn’t want this to turn into an involved diplomatic mission. He was, after all, keenly aware that he was not a diplomat, and probably shouldn’t portray himself as one.

It turned out that the Danzur were strict vegetarians. They seemed alright with Dart using a portable scanner to confirm none of it would be toxic to the humans, and it all proved to be edible, with some of the items eliciting approving grins from the human diners. Thorn picked at an item that resembled a carrot crossed with a human ear, chewed meditatively, and pronounced it good. The Danzur watched him with delight as he tried almost everything on the table. He drew the line at a greasy bean that quivered in oily broth.

“Smells like locker rooms and failure,” Thorn muttered to himself, then smiled brightly when Dart spooned more of the carrots-ears onto his plate. That, he could manage, and easily.

“And the gym mats,” Mol said.

“How would you know?”

“Don’t ask,” Mol said, grinning.

As dinner ended, Sophat tapped a chime. Thorn and company focused their attention on them. The Danzur spoke—at length—about the birth of a new relationship between his people, and humans, the wonderful opportunities it presented, and so on and so on. Somehow, despite the fluffy, feel-good nature of the speech, he still managed to work a shocking amount of bureaucratic bloat into each sentence, a true act of governmental wizardry.

Mol leaned close to Thorn, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I feel really sorry for whatever diplomatic types end up dealing with this. I hope they’re the especially patient sort.”

Thorn just nodded. As Sophat wound down his speech, he gestured to one of his underlings. The chosen Danzur nodded, then crossed to Thorn, holding out a thin, flexible sheet that resembled rice paper. Thorn accepted it with a somber nod, then examined it.

It showed a schematic of what was obviously the Danzur system, with an arcing trajectory making a graceful sweep around the gas giant. On the reverse side, he found a grainy image of what could only be the Pool of Stars.

“These observations were made by our Astronomical Directorate,” Sophat said. “Your ship passed through our system approximately thirty-eight cycles ago.”

Dart lifted a hand, trying to interrupt in a polite way. “An obviously alien ship passed through your system, but it only rated some passing observations? Weren’t you curious what it was, where it came from, that sort of thing?”

“We are aware that other spacefaring races exist, and periodically note their vessels passing through, or near, our system. Yours was merely one of many.”

Thorn frowned at that. Many? Who, exactly, owned these many ships passing through the Danzur system? And why?

And why had the Pool of Stars done so? Thorn was no navigator, but he knew enough about spaceflight to recognize a deliberate gravitational slingshot maneuver. Someone had piloted the ship on a very specific trajectory, intended to accelerate it by stealing some angular momentum from the gas giant. The chances of an out-of-control, drifting Pool just happening to fluke into the maneuver by itself, without someone—or something—piloting it was remote barely began to cut it.

He put the questions aside and gave what he hoped was a pleasant look of thanks. “Once more, Sophat, we thank you. We’re prepared to transmit the star charts we discussed to you, since I don’t think we have any compatible data storage devices.”

Sophat offered an acknowledgement. Thorn left it to Brid and Dart to work out the details of the transfer.

They all clambered back aboard the Gyrfalcon and tried to wind down, burping grandly from the vast array of Danzur dishes.

“I thought about going into the Diplomatic Corps once,” Brid said, as they reconfigured the Gyrfalcon’s cabin for sleeping. “They were only interested in Joiners, though.”

“Being able to read the minds of those sitting across the table is a handy negotiating trick,” Dart said, and Brid nodded.

“For sure.” She glanced at Thorn. “Hey, sir, did you try some Joining on our hosts? See if you could find out what makes them tick?”

Thorn shook his head. “Nope. For all I know, they might be able to detect it. And the last thing I want to have to report back to Fleet is a sticky diplomatic incident.”

Mol gave a sly smile. “We do have what we came here for now, though.”

“Okay, I might have been thinking about trying it right after we get underway,” Thorn admitted.

Using Joining to peer into the minds of the Danzur—assuming it was even possible—certainly might reveal useful things to know. But those weren’t the most interesting questions here. The ones that were revolved around the Pool of Stars, and her mysterious journey through the system, as she changed course and accelerated to—

Where? Where was she going? And who was taking her there?

13

As it turned out, Thorn could scry into the minds of the Danzur. As the Gyrfalcon accelerated away from their home world, he ventured a broad, unfocused Joining, one intended to observe conscious thoughts of any Danzur about the orbital platform. He reasoned that, if Sophat and his minions were being deceptive, or even harbored some antagonism toward them, he should at least be able to sense that—and hopefully do it without the Danzur even being aware of it.

As it turned out, the Danzur were just as stilted, hidebound and, frankly, boring in the way they thought, as they were face-to-face.

“Seriously, their biggest concern seems to be a whole bunch of forms they have to write and reports they have to fill out because of our visit,” Thorn said. “I didn’t find even a hint of them lying to us. If anything, our willingness to engage in proper channels seemed to excite them, almost a fuzz of joy in each thought.” Thorn snorted, grinning. “Imagine that—taking happiness from layers of governmental busybodies. Their attention to detail is . . . quite something.”

“Which means this data for the Pool of Stars must be correct,” Dart said.

Trixie cut in. “Actually, all it really means is that they believe those data are accurate, not that they are.”

Thorn smiled. “Trixie, you’re absolutely right. The trouble is that if they genuinely believe it, then as far as they’re concerned, they’re absolutely telling us the truth.”

“Which means,” Mol said, “we want to follow that ship, right?”

“We do,” Thorn said. “And that shouldn’t be too difficult, right? At the velocity recorded for her by the Danzur, she couldn’t be very far outside this system at all.”

“I’ve calculated an intercept trajectory,” Trixie said. “Any time you guys are ready, we can start the big chase, kids.”

Mol snorted. “Not much of a chase. Hell, we should be able to pick her up on our sensors pretty soon.”

Thorn settled back into the g-couch as Mol and Trixie guided the Gyrfalcon onto a new trajectory, one that would intersect, and then follow, the one recorded by the Danzur for the Pool of Stars.

* * *

As they swept past the sprawling glory of the gas giant, Thorn noticed Mol giving her panel a heated stare.

“Something wrong?”

She raised a finger, tapped the controls in an irritated staccato, then switched the Gyrfalcon’s sensors into full-power active mode for a few seconds before shutting them down with a final sweep of her hand. Banging away with active sensors essentially turned the fighter into a powerful beacon, announcing her presence to anyone who happened to be looking. As the data returns came sluicing back, Mol’s face became even gloomier.

She looked up at Thorn. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No Pool of Stars,” she said, shaking her head. “Based on what we got from the Danzur, we should know pretty much exactly where she is, within a few light-seconds, anyway. But there’s nothing there.”

Brid leaned forward. “Maybe she made another course change.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” Mol said. “She can only accelerate so much, which means there’s a limited volume of space where she could be. But there’s nothing.”

It was Thorn’s turn to look quizzical. “Could she have crashed into something?” he asked, but he answered his own question with one look at the display. Orbital mechanics were complicated, but everything obeyed certain laws. There simply were no planetary bodies she could have hit. “Actually, never mind,” he said. “I can see she couldn’t have. Can’t hit what’s not there.”

“Maybe she slammed into something passing through the Kuiper belt,” Brid suggested, but Trixie answered.

“Highly unlikely. The average density of objects in the Belt is about one per million cubic kilometers. The chances of the Pool of Stars smacking into one of them are—let’s just they’re not zero, but that’s about it.”

“Okay,” Thorn said, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “If she hasn’t been destroyed, then she must be out there. The only other possibility is that she used her Alcubierre drive to hop away—where, we don’t know, but that places some limits on the second search grid.”

“Which puts us back at square one,” Dart said, sighing.

“Not necessarily,” Mol replied. “I say we follow her trajectory anyway. There are two systems her course would pass through, one about three light-years away, the other about five. Kinda stands to reason she’d follow a trajectory she started, right?”

“This would only work if her Alcubierre drive was actually working, though,” Brid said. “And, as far as we know, it wasn’t.”

“That was kind of the whole problem, wasn’t it?” Dart asked.

Thorn shrugged. “Maybe the crew got it working again. Or maybe they were helped.”

“By whom?” Brid asked. “The Danzur are the only other race out here, and they aren’t even trans-light capable yet.”

“Or at least that’s what they told us,” Mol replied.

Thorn gave her a puzzled look. “You saying we have reason to doubt that?”

Mol looked at the control panel. “Trixie?”

“Yeah, so, when an Alcubierre drive that’s running even a little off spec travels through space, it generates not just the big wave that pushes its separate, little reality bubble along, but also lots of little ones,” the AI said. “It’s kind of like dropping a rock or something in water. If it’s something small and streamlined, it makes only a little splash and a few ripples. But if it’s something bigger and flatter, then it makes a big kerplunk, and lots of little ripples.”

“That’s why drive engineers are so obsessive about keeping their Alcubierre rigs tuned up, like they’re fine musical instruments,” Mol said. “The more out of spec they are, the more they waste energy, burn fuel, and leave a noticeable trail through space.”

“Go on,” Thorn said.

“Well, since I didn’t have much to do sitting at the dock back there,” Trixie said, “I decided to scan the system for everything I could think of. Oh—fun fact! If you could smell the upper atmosphere of that gas giant, the mix of gases would make it smell like someone ripped a really nasty fart.”

Thorn laughed. “Anyway, Trixie—”

“Yeah. So, I found some telltale gravity waves, the kind a misaligned Alcubierre drive would leave behind it. They were really weak—in fact, I had to keep running the detector pretty much the whole time we were there just to be able to confirm it.”

“So an Alcubierre drive was operating in the Danzur system?” Thorn asked. “When?”

“Sorry, can’t tell,” Trixie replied. “Too many variables. Can’t tell anything about trajectory either, just that it was here.”

“It might very well have been our own drive,” Dart said. “From when we arrived—”

Trixie made a sound like an offended gasp, while Mol’s head snapped around. “We keep our drive running at ninety-eight percent plus efficiency,” she snapped. “There’s no way it’s our own wake.”

“Besides, the Gyrfalcon’s drive isn’t big enough to cause the ripples I detected,” Trixie said, her tone miffed. “I know that because, you know, I’d already thought of that. This was a way bigger ship than this one that caused those ripples, with a way bigger, more powerful drive.”

Dart held up his hands. “Sorry, didn’t mean to offend anyone. I’m just saying there are other things it could be. A natural phenomenon of some sort, for instance.”

“I thought of that, too,” Trixie shot back. “When things like neutron stars or black holes smack into one another, they can cause gravity waves. Those have a way greater wavelength than these ones. If this is something natural, it’s nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

“All I think Dart is saying,” Brid said, “is that we could chase ghosts all over this sector until our supplies run low and come up with nothing.”

“It’d be a lot of wasted time and effort,” Dart added.

Thorn pretended to look at the nav screen, stealing a moment to think—and not just about their next move.

“Let’s head to that closer system along the Pool’s last known course,” he finally said. “We’ve come all this way, might as well exhaust the possibilities before we head back home.”

She gave a small, jaunty salute. “Roger that. Trixie, time to do your navigational magic.”

“On it,” she said. “Oh, do you guys want some music to listen to along the way—“

They all said it at the same time.

“No!”

* * *

Thorn watched intently as the Gyrfalcon flipped back to normal space. Data began to sluice in through her sensors, sampling every emission and burst of radiation they possibly could. It took a moment for Trixie to be able to assemble a clear picture of the system—a red giant star surrounded by a lot of rocky debris in a broad halo, a pair of ice-giant planets apparently keeping it all gravitationally stable.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to VB 1096.6, a lovely little system which, if it had any habitable planets, would see them lit by the warm, romantic light of this class M star.”

“Any sign of the Pool of Stars?” Thorn asked.

“Nope, not yet,” Trixie replied. “In fact, I’m not detecting any evidence of anything that isn’t just natural background activity.”

“Seems this system just isn’t interesting enough to bother with,” Brid said. “Nowhere to live—”

“And too much radiation from that star, even if you were inclined to settle down here,” Dart added, shaking his head. “If the Pool came here, she sure as hell didn’t stick around.” He looked at Thorn. “The next system isn’t much better. You think the rads are bad here, they’d be even worse there.”

Thorn drummed his fingers on the armrest of his g-couch. “So you think we should just call it here, and head back to the Hecate.”

“It’s like we said before,” Brid replied. “We can check out the next system, and the next, and the one after that, and—” She shrugged. “We’ve definitely got a mystery on our hands, that’s clear, but I don’t think we’re ever going to solve it.”

“Too much time has passed,” Dart said. “And space is just too friggin’ big.”

Thorn turned to look at Brid, then Dart. “Your suggestions are duly noted. Since we’re here, though, I think we should look around before deciding anything.”

He said it in a calm, matter of fact way, turned back forward—

Then let his awareness slip off the chain a little, encompassing nothing by the Gyrfalcon. He just let it brush quickly across the minds of everyone present, skimming only their most superficial thoughts.

Mol—no surprise. She was intently focused on considering the best approach trajectory to enter the system.

Brid and Dart—uneasy reluctance. They genuinely believed that Mol should just turn the Gyrfalcon about and start the trip home.

Huh.

Mol tapped at her controls, laying in a course that would take the Gyrfalcon close by one of the ice giants, then slingshot around it to pass through part of the debris field and make a flyby of the other planet. Trixie fine-tuned and refined it, then Mol turned to Thorn.

“Ready when you are,” she said.

Thorn nodded toward the view ahead. “Let’s do it.”

She hit the drive, and the Gyrfalcon smoothly accelerated into the lonely system, lit by the light of a forgotten star.

* * *

Thorn watched as the first ice giant, which resembled the Solar planet Uranus, fell away behind them. The panoramic view of the big planet’s azure cloud tops were a spectacular vista as Mol steered them past in a looping orbit. He’d had to remind himself to not just gawk, but actually pay attention to what the Gyrfalcon’s sensors were telling them.

Which wasn’t much. The planet had a multitude of moons, but Trixie confirmed they were just hunks of rock tugged out of the vast halo of debris around the star. None of them had any atmosphere to speak of, nor was there any sign anyone had ever visited them. Now they raced on through the debris field, Mol and Trixie threading a safe path through the drifting—

Thorn felt something brushing the corners of his awareness with a feather’s touch. A hint, or a ghost, more than any fully formed idea. But his curiosity would not be denied. “Where did all these rocks come from, anyway?” he asked. “Older planets that got smashed up?”

“Probably,” Trixie replied. “I’ve been trying out different models for how this system could have formed, and the most likely one—”

“That’s okay, Trixie,” Thorn said, then he reached into the pocket of his crash suit. He slipped out his talisman, the battered storybook. Traces of grit still scraped under his fingertips, despite how long he’d been carrying the little book—each touch a direct line to his own past, mired in fire and ash and pain. Particles of his old life, miniscule remnants of what the Nyctus had taken away from him. He’d probably always feel them, even if no one else ever would. They were just part of what the book was to him now.

But that wasn’t the only familiar thing.

He sat suddenly upright.

Mol glanced at him. “Something wrong?”

Thorn stared at the viewscreen. At the nav display. At the viewscreen again.

“Sir,” Brid said. “Are you—”

“Mol,” Thorn snapped. “Get us the hell out of here.”

She stared. “Out of where? This system?”

“No, this debris field. Get us out of it, now!”

She didn’t question it any further; her fingers danced across the controls, spinning the Gyrfalcon, then starting a hard burn to push her out of the debris halo by the quickest possible course. It aimed them directly at the star.

“Mind if I ask what’s going on?” she asked.

Thorn opened his mouth. “Ooh, I know!” Trixie cut in. “Some of the rocks ahead of us changed their trajectories a touch. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“She’s right,” Thorn replied, leaning back and placing his talisman in his lap, his fingertips resting on it.

“Well, shit,” Mol replied. “I didn’t even notice.” She scowled at the display. “But—yeah, Trixie’s right. About a dozen rocks somehow nudged their way onto converging trajectories with us.”

She turned to Thorn with wide eyes. “Damn. Does that mean what I think it means?”

Thorn gave a grim nod. “Yeah, it does. The Nyctus are here.”

14

Almost as soon as he said it, drives flared to life in the debris field, along what would have been their course. Thorn counted four of them.

“Two frigates and two corvettes,” Mol said. “Or whatever the squids call those types of ships.”

“Can we outrun them?” Brid asked.

Mol studied the tactical display, then shook her head. “We’ve got an edge on them acceleration-wise, but not enough to make a clean break.” She glanced at Thorn. “There’s definitely gonna be some shooting.”

Thorn scowled at the four icons now glowing on the tactical display. Intercepting trajectories extended from them, converging on the Gyrfalcon’s track. “I gather they were just hiding out among these rocks, all powered down.”

“That’d do it,” Trixie replied. “There’s enough metal in these boulders to make them blend right in.”

“Maybe they were using magic, too,” Dart offered. “Concealing themselves with it.”

“Maybe,” Thorn replied. “They definitely have at least one shaman with them. He wanted to take us out in typical squid-style, with KEWs, I guess. He got sloppy, though.”

“They probably don’t know we’ve got a Starcaster in the right-hand seat,” Mol said. “I’m assuming it was your mojo that let you see those rocks start moving, even before Trixie did.”

“Something like that,” Thorn replied.

Mol tightened the harness holding her into her g-couch. As she did, something made a soft, metallic ping.

Thorn, who’d been tightening up his own straps, looked around. “What was that?”

“Something under my butt, in this seat,” Mol said. “Maybe a spring’s going.” She smiled at Thorn. “I could take some time to check it out. Hate to have a spring poke me in the ass at an inopportune moment. You know, like combat.”

“How about we leave the routine maintenance for another time?” Thorn replied. “Besides, I think you’ll survive a poke in the cheek.”

“Says the man whose cheek isn’t the one at risk of being skewered.”

Thorn grinned but turned serious again as he looked back at the tactical display. “More than just that about to be skewered. I don’t like this combat display. It’s bad and getting worse.”

They finished cinching up crash suits, then put their helmets on and latched them into place. The visors, which they left open, would automatically snap closed if the cabin pressure suddenly dropped.

“Okay,” Mol said, her gaze fixed on the tactical screen. “They’ll be in decent firing range for typical squid missiles in about fifteen seconds, plus or minus five seconds based on possible acceleration. Gonna be tight no matter how hard we drive.”

They waited. Sure enough, all four Nyctus ships launched missiles, the projectiles lunging at them far faster than they could accelerate away.

“This is where it gets interesting,” Mol said, whipping the Gyrfalcon through a one hundred and eighty degree spin, then ramming the drive to the firewall. Inertial dampening systems wiped away most of the sudden surge of g’s, but all of them were still pressed hard into their seats.

In less than a minute, Mol had brought the Gyrfalcon to a complete stop and started her acceleration in the opposite direction, toward the squid missiles. Thorn knew what she wanted to do—run at the missiles head-on, dodge them, then leave them unable to come about after them by the time they ran out of fuel. But they’d need more velocity if this was going to work.

“Mol,” Thorn said. “Stand by to go faster.”

She looked at him but just nodded in understanding. “Not going to turn down some help.”

Thorn let his awareness sink once more into his talisman. He caught flickers of fire and smoke and fear imprinted on its tattered pages, but he had long ago learned to ignore them. Instead, he shoved his perception outward, until it again encompassed the Gyrfalcon. The Nyctus used magic to accelerate rocks into deadly KEWs, something that should smash the projectiles to gravel, but didn’t.

Thorn decided to borrow their technique.

He kept his focus on the Gyrfalcon but let the rest of the universe fade away. For a moment, the fighter hung in a bubble of Thorn’s awareness, mimicking the way an Alcubierre drive worked. Now Thorn crafted magic into a hard push against the bubble, an application of Force magic that would have slammed against the Gyrfalcon like a battering ram. Instead, the fighter itself felt no push at all—but the bubble of space around it did.

Thorn maintained the effect until it felt right. Spacecraft flight was all about mathematics and equations; magic, though, was about doing something until it didn’t need to be done anymore. Like a series of tumblers, his ability clicked into place, and the Gyrfalcon leapt forward, defying everything that resembled physics in a blur of light.

He let go, releasing the effect. The magical power leaked away, exposing his mind to the physical world once again. His awareness snapped back into his head, inside the fighter. He took a breath, and then another, lungs pumping like bellows as his body adjusted to the physical demands of a magical task.

“You know,” Mol said, “I’m starting to think we don’t even need engines anymore. You just gained us a few thousand meters per second of delta-v, in, like, no time. Between that and moving around between stars—”

“Yeah, well, let’s hang onto the engines, just in case,” Thorn said, forcing himself to relax and catch his breath, still shaking off the efforts. He glanced back at Brid and Dart, and saw them sitting in the g-couches, taking in the show. Dart gave him a thumbs up, but they were mission specialists and otherwise really had nothing to do—

Which made Thorn wary.

He tossed the thought aside. “I’ll see if I can help dodge those missiles,” he said to Mol, pointing at the tactical display. He tapped three of the icons depicting the incoming ordnance, now just over a minute away. “These ones here. That should give you some room to maneuver.”

“Roger that. I’m just going to assume they won’t be there, when we are.” She shot him a wry glance. “Because, if they are . . .”

She didn’t need to finish.

The missiles raced closer. The Nyctus ships, driving along behind, broke into two pairs, each with one of the larger, frigate-like ships, accompanied by one of the corvette-class. The pairs diverged their trajectories, but also cut their drives. Like the missiles, if they just engaged the Gyrfalcon in a high-velocity, head-on pass, they’d get only a few seconds of engagement time, then they’d have to come about and try to give chase. At that point, the fighter would be long gone, well outside their possible maneuver envelopes. This way, they could keep firing solutions on the Gyrfalcon a lot longer, engaging from both flanks.

“Missiles in thirty seconds,” Trixie said. “Whatever you’re gonna do, you should do it soon!”

Thorn refocused his awareness back through his talisman. This time, the target of his magic was the Nyctus, so he drew on the old pain embedded in the substance of the book, using it to sharpen his perception, and thereby his control. Once more, he pulled magical power to him and imposed his will on it.

Three missiles, each tracking the Gyrfalcon with mechanical determination.

Let them.

Thorn superimposed a temporary new reality over each of the three missiles, so that each saw one of the others as the fighter. Their guidance systems, locked onto the Gyrfalcon, dutifully adjusted their trajectories to intercept the target they’d been assigned, and Thorn learned something critical. Magic could alter material abilities, not just the material itself.

Two detonated in rapid succession, the twin blasts smashing the third to wreckage.

Mol had already jinked the Gyrfalcon aside, hard enough to fling them all to one side against their harnesses.

“Trixie, rail gun!”

“Coming up!”

The Gyrfalcon shuddered as her rail gun opened up, spitting hyper-velocity slugs at one of the remaining missiles, blowing it to whirling scrap. Trixie shifted targets and took down a second missile. She tried to refocus the weapon and track a third, but a warning chime sang through the cabin.

“Damn it, got a jam,” Mol snapped. The third missile, the one Trixie had meant to be the target, was the only one that remained a threat. And it was just seconds away from detonating, less than a klick way.

Thorn braced himself. “This is gonna hurt.”

Mol cursed and rotated the Gyrfalcon ninety degrees, pointing her aft end at the missile. At the same time, she firewalled the drive. A plume of superheated plasma poured from her exhaust, slamming the fighter through a lateral acceleration that made her groan deep in her structure. Thorn’s head snapped back against the g-couch, suddenly two or three times as heavy as it should be.

The missile exploded. The drive plume dissipated some of the blast effect coming directly at the Gyrfalcon. Whatever did manage to slam into the fighter hit her most solid parts—exhaust bells and backing plates, all tough alloy designed to shrug off the incandescent fury of the plume.

Thorn still felt like someone had kicked him in the head, back, and hips all at once, his spinal column a dancing stack of bones. The Gyrfalcon lurched and wobbled, settling back into a smooth course as Mol regained control.

“That was fun,” Brid said in a voice that certainly didn’t sound like someone having fun.

“Well, if you liked that, you’re gonna love what’s coming next,” Mol replied, without taking her eyes off the instruments. “Because we’ve still got to fight our way through four ships, each of them bigger than us.” She glanced at Thorn. “You’ve already done a lot, but if you could help out with this part too, that’d be nice.”

Thorn squared, locking his eyes on the tac display once again. The only way they were going to manage this was by focusing on one pair of the Nyctus ships. That meant the other pair needed to be taken out of action. He considered how he could do that—

But could think of only one way. It would leave him drained, unable to influence the battle any further. He said as much to Mol.

“You and Trixie are going to have to get us through the other two,” he said.

She gave a quick nod. “Trixie, this is going to be a lot harder without that rail gun.”

“Had to cycle it three times, but I just cleared that jam,” Trixie said. “It should be good now!”

Thorn glanced at the rail gun’s status panel, and it flicked from red to green. “Excellent. Back in business.”

“Any way we can help?” Brid asked.

Thorn turned. “Have you guys ever used magic during a space engagement before?”

They glanced at one another, then Brid shook her head. “Afraid not.”

“Then this isn’t the time to start, unless Mol asks for help. Otherwise, just sit tight and hang on so you don’t start working against her,” Thorn said.

Brid and Dart both gave another thumbs up, their motion nearly twin-like, and Thorn turned back to the battle, eyes narrowed as he felt the simmering presence of magic fizz through his bones.

“We’re going to fight through the pair on the left,” Mol said.

“Got it,” Thorn replied, shifting his focus to the two ships off to the right of their course.

For a third time, he sank his awareness into his talisman. This time, he embraced the echoes of terror, and loss, and lonely despair imprinted into it, using them to drive away any uncertainty—or compassion. What he was about to do had nothing compassionate about it.

Thorn’s perception raced out of the Gyrfalcon, into the empty nothing that was space. Grimly, he pushed his focus on, until it finally touched the two Nyctus ships that were his targets.

Machinery. Mechanical process, electronic systems, the flow of electrical current, the stellar roar of nuclear fusion—

He ignored it all. It was just noise. What he sought was right there.

Thorn seized thoughts that weren’t his, alien and mostly just an abstract jumble, and yet still familiar. They were thoughts shot through with purpose, with cruel and deadly determination. They were the thoughts of the squid commanding the bigger of the two ships.

Thorn latched onto those thoughts, and—

They killed my family.

They killed my daughter.

A roaring flame of rage kindled in Thorn. He rode it, a tide of incandescent hate, and began to push his sphere of influence outward, spinning like the disc of a youthful star system. At the front of this column of will, Thorn drew the power to him, through him, and into every fiber of his being, knowing it belonged there among the threads of his soul.

He was alive. He was, even there in the blackness, at home.

Thorn pulsed with the strength of a magic so ancient it tore at the nature of space, and in that terrible awareness, he could sense thoughts—

—the Nyctus. Their minds, open to him. Their hearts, filled with fear at the battle going far differently than they imagined. They were used to victory—swift, sure, and total—and this upstart ship with the rogue magician made them nervous, deep in places where they hid forbidden concepts like loss and cowardice.

Their fear fed Thorn. The magic made him vengeance incarnate, and with the inexorable power of a neutron star, Thorn reached into the depths of their ships and pulled.

Confusion, stunned shock—terror—all of these and more shrieking in the void as Thorn shifted from ghostly presence to fearsome reality, if only for a flashing second of unalloyed magical destruction.

But it was enough. More than enough, really.

Thorn yanked himself away, his consciousness falling back in on itself like a collapsing star. The Gyrfalcon’s cockpit slammed back into existence around him with, for him, an audible whoosh as the blood sang in his ears. Thorn sucked in a desperate gasp of air, fell back, and tried to remember how to breathe.

“Uh—”

He rolled his head toward the sound, not easy in his crash helmet. Mol stared back, her eyes wide and white all around.

Behind him, he heard Brid say, “Holy shit,” in a tone more breath than voice.

Thorn blinked, shook his head, then glanced at the tactical display. An inset window held a zoomed image of the two Nyctus ships Thorn had just ravaged with magic. Myriad small objects drifted and tumbled around them.

Their crews. All of them, from each ship. Thorn had moved them all into space.

He just watched the bodies drift. It was one thing to experience it in the visceral moment, from atop a soaring pillar of magical power. To see his handiwork this way, though—the stark reality of it, detached from the ’casting itself—

They killed my family.

They killed my daughter.

Thorn looked at Mol. “I’ve killed as many of the bastards today as I can. The rest of them are up to you, Mol,” he said, his voice a dry rasp.

She stared an instant longer, then nodded and threw her focus back into the battle.

“Glad you’re on our side,” Mol muttered.

* * *

The two remaining Nyctus ships slowed their approach, their maneuvers becoming cautious, almost tentative. Thorn knew why. They’d seen what happened to the companion ships, so they knew that a powerful Starcaster was aboard a quarry they’d considered easy prey. The shaman who’d been trying to line up a KEW ambush back in the debris cloud had woven a magical barrier around them, desperate to keep the Starcaster’s horrifying power at bay.

Thorn smiled, mirthless and cold. Yes, be afraid. Be very afraid, you monsters.

Mol made a satisfied sound as she closed in. A single Gyrfalcon fighter against a pair of much bigger ships should still be a hard, tight battle, whose outcome was far from certain. But Mol seized the moment, capitalizing on their fear, launching a quartet of missiles and racing in behind them. The squids finally opened fire, but the multiple targets diffused their effort; Mol dodged, spun, and rolled the Gyrfalcon, nimbly avoiding what fire did try to target the fighter. She knew she had to move fast, turning the clash into a knife fight, the type of battle the Gyrfalcon did best. Any moment, that shaman was going to realize that the fearsome Starcaster had utterly exhausted themself and recraft his own power into something far more offensive than a simple, protective shield.

Thorn forced his head around. Bright little stars blossomed behind his eyes. It took grim effort, but he was able to avoid greying out completely.

“Brid. Dart. If that shaman decides to get aggressive, it’s up to you guys to stop him,” he said.

They both returned anxious nods. “We’ll do what we can,” Brid said, but there was little certainty in the words.

Mol pushed the Gyrfalcon through a hard, banking turn, using sheer engine power to emulate an atmospheric maneuver. The frigate spun into view, shooting down the last of their missiles, but it didn’t matter—they’d done their job. She rolled the fighter to the right, pitched up, and applied a blast of thrust that disrupted the Nyctus firing solutions. A pair of rail gun projectiles flashed through empty space that had, only an instant before, been full of Gyrfalcon.

“Little late, boys,” Trixie sang out.

“Hush, you. Too early to preen,” Mol said.

“Not preening. Just that good,” Trixie answered with what sounded suspiciously like a sniff.

“Still better than punk,” Thorn muttered, and Mol snorted as she deftly pitched the fighter back down, and opened fire, raking the frigate with a torrent of rail gun rounds that tore through its hull, blasting clouds of venting atmosphere and spinning debris from its far side.

Something clipped the Gyrfalcon, slamming it through a half-spin and starting a tumble. Thorn recovered from the shock of the impact, turned to Mol, and found her strangely slumped in her g-couch. He opened his mouth to ask her what was wrong, then saw her broken harness. It had given way during the hit and, judging from the impact cracks in her helmet, let her head slam against the bulkhead beside her.

Thorn cursed. “Trixie, get us under control and give me a target—”

“On it!”

Trixie fired a staccato series of thruster bursts to stop the fighter’s wild gyrations, then spun it back into firing position. Thorn gripped the co-pilot’s side stick, touching the trigger for the rail gun. As soon as he did, fire control switched to him from Mol, earning a grin as he closed his hand over the trigger.

“Magic is good, but sometimes, you just need explosives,” Thorn said.

The corvette swung into the rail gun’s field of fire, the reticle turned green, and he squeezed the trigger. The Gyrfalcon shuddered as hypervelocity slugs poured from her rail gun and ripped into the enemy ship. Depleted uranium penetrators tore along its length and flung it into a slow spin, trailing a plume of atmospheric gases that feathered away in seconds. An instant later, something detonated, blasting the midships portion apart and breaking the squid ship in two halves that gleamed with chaos.

“Trixie, get us the hell out of here,” Thorn snapped. “Any direction. Any.”

“You got it!”

Trixie turned the Gyrfalcon and applied thrust, accelerating away from the remains of the battle. The tactical display no longer showed the magical carnage he’d wrought on the other Nyctus ships, but it didn’t matter. He could see it clearly in his mind, could see—and, for just an instant, remembered feeling—all of those squids dying in the cold void of space.

As they hurtled away from the remains of the battle, Thorn unlatched his harness and saw to Mol. Fortunately, her crash helmet had done its job, taking the brunt of the impact. She opened her eyes when he called out her name, blinked slowly, then gave a nod that made her wince.

“Is she—?” Brid started, but Thorn cut her off.

“She’s fine, at least for now,” he said, then clambered back into his g-couch. They couldn’t let down their guard yet; there might be more squids around.

And if there were, Thorn would kill them, too.

“We’ll clear this field if we have to,” Thorn said.

“Were you a farmer?” Brid asked.

Thorn’s answer was loaded with menace. “No, but I’ve done my share of harvesting.”

* * *

“Okay, Mol,” Thorn said. “Take it easy. We’re going to get this helmet off, so just sit still.”

He unlatched her crash helmet, then gently lifted it off her head. Even that bit of movement made her wince and groan.

“Usually, when my head feels like this, I earned it the night before,” she said, offering a weak smile. “No burps, either. Small favors and all that.”

Thorn lifted the helmet, giving the impact crater, and star of cracks radiating from it, a holy shit look. “Looks like it lived up to its name,” he said.

“Crash helmet indeed,” Brid said, and Thorn nodded in thanks. Some tech was as good as advertised. Like a bucket made to keep your brain from scrambling.

Dart lifted the broken g-harness rig. One of its mounts, where it bolted into the g-couch, had snapped cleanly through. “Looks like metal fatigue. Some shoddy maintenance I guess.”

Thorn shut him up with a glare. “I’ve flown with Mol for three years, now,” he snapped. “There’s nothing shoddy about the maintenance she and her tech do on this fighter.”

“Sorry, you’re right, that came out wrong,” Dart hastily replied. “It was probably a hidden microfracture in the piece that broke—maybe even a manufacturing defect.”

Thorn kept his gaze on Dart for a moment, then turned back to Mol.

“You, my dear, need to rest.”

She shook her head, then blurted out, “Ow, shit!” She gave Thorn a disapproving look. “I’m the pilot. This is a ship that flies under the control of, you know, a pilot. That kinda means that—”

“It means that Trixie can take over for the time being,” Thorn said. “She can fly us from point A to point B, right?”

“As long as it doesn’t require anything too fancy,” Mol admitted, her tone grudging. “She’s awesome, but piloting isn’t her primary function.”

“I’m glad you specified that awesome part,” Trixie said. “Otherwise, my feelings might be hurt.”

Mol gave the control panel a fond smile. Trixie was actually buried in the Gyrfalcon’s engineering bay, in an armored container well-hardened against EMP, but everyone tended to treat the panel as her face.

“The regs,” Mol went on, “say she has to be under human supervision unless she’s flying in a state of—” She stopped, wincing. “Shit. Anyway, unless it’s a state of emergency. So someone has to be in the pilot’s seat while she’s flying.”

“I don’t mind,” Trixie said. “I enjoy the company. Okay, now for the big question. Where do you want to go?”

“Well, home, of course,” Brid said.

Thorn glanced at her, then shook his head. “Nope. We’re going to check out that next system along the Pool’s trajectory.”

Brid and Dart exchanged a glance. “Uh, sir,” Brid said. “Shouldn’t we get Mol back to proper medical attention? That helmet might have stopped her from smashing her head open, but she obviously still took a pretty bad knock.”

“I’ll be fine,” Mol said. “There’s no way this mission’s gonna be cut short just because I’ve got a headache.” She grimaced, adding, “Even my hair hurts.”

“Now that’s a hangover,” Thorn said.

“We also expended about half our rail gun ammo, and we only have two missile reloads left,” Dart said. “If we get into another fight we can’t avoid—”

“Then we’ll deal with it,” Thorn said. “Those squids weren’t hanging out in that ring of rocks just for the hell of it. They were either on station there, or were sent there to intercept us. Either way, it means there’s something they don’t want us to see—and I’m thinking it’s in that next system.”

“We’re not even in their space, though,” Brid replied. “Are we?

Thorn sniffed. “Really? You’ve seen charts of what they consider to be their space?”

“We’re on the far side of what we think is their space,” Mol put in. “We really have no idea who’s where back here. Hell, we didn’t even know about the Danzur until—” She stopped and rubbed her temple. “Shit. I’ll say it again—ow.”

“Anyway,” Thorn went on, “I want to see what’s in that next system. If it’s nothing, we’ll go home.”

Brid and Dart exchanged another look, then Brid shrugged with false deference. “Your call, sir.”

Thorn regarded them in silence, breaking it just before things got awkward. “Yes, it is.” He looked back at Mol. “You are going to lie down and try to get some rest. For the time being, you can leave the flying to us.” He glanced at Brid and Dart. “Two hour shifts. I’ll take the first one.”

“For the record, I still think I’m fine to fly,” Mol said, her tone decidedly grumpy.

“For the record, I don’t care.” Thorn smiled and pointed into the cramped cabin behind the cockpit. “Now, sleep. Go.”

Mol curled her lip, then offered Thorn an exaggerated salute. It would have come across as sarcastically as she meant it, if not for her cringing, clutching her head, and groaning.

Thorn sniffed. “Serves you right.”

“Okay,” Trixie said. “I’ve got a trajectory plotted to get us out of this system, and I’ve mostly got the parameters done for the Alcubierre hop to the next system. I just need someone to give me the go signal.”

Thorn smiled, then touched Mol’s shoulder. “It’s still your ship.”

She returned a look that was both grumpy and grateful. “Go ahead, Trixie. You have control.”

The drive rumbled to life, and the Gyrfalcon began accelerating on its course to the next star system.

15

Thorn moved aside so Brid could clamber out of the pilot’s seat, then settled himself into place. They were taking two hour shifts overseeing Trixie, which mostly just meant making conversation with her. The fact was that the AI was a far more capable pilot than any of them, so she didn’t really need much overseeing.

“Anything I should know about?” Thorn asked.

Brid started, then relaxed. “Not in particular, no. Trixie seems to have everything well in hand.”

She made her way back into the cabin, which had been configured for sleeping, and folded herself into her bunk. Thorn fastened the g-harness, which had been replaced with the only spare aboard. He’d honestly been surprised to find even that. How often did g-harnesses fail, anyway?

“Hey, Trixie,” he said. “How about you? Anything up I should know?”

It took her a few seconds to answer. “Don’t think so. We’re about four hours from our Alcubierre hop. Otherwise, as long as no other Nyctus show up, we’re pretty much just flying in a straight line. Even I can do that.”

Thorn smiled. “If it makes you feel better, Trixie, I don’t believe for a second you need me sitting here watching over you.”

“Appreciate that, boss.”

He let his head drop back against the g-couch, giving a faint sniff as something occurred to him—he and Trixie had a lot in common. Even three years into the fight, Starcasters were still viewed with suspicion to outright contempt by the crusty officers who still thought magic was a mere distraction from the real business of waging war. In the same way, regulations required a human to oversee an AI, even if that human knew absolutely nothing about piloting. It wasn’t a regulation, as much a desperate attempt to hang onto a past that had become obsolete.

Magic was here to stay. So were AIs. Both were having a growing effect on the war, and that made more than a few of those traditionalists . . . uncomfortable.

“To hell with them,” Thorn said.

“An interesting statement, especially without any—” Trixie began, then abruptly stopped.

Thorn narrowed his eyes. “Trixie?”

“Right here.”

“You cut yourself off.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You said that it was an interesting statement, without any—” He made a chopping motion with his hand. “And that’s as far as you got.”

“Huh. My log file records me finishing that with, —without any context.”

Thorn sat up. “You don’t make errors, Trixie.”

“No, I don’t. And as far as my log file is concerned, I still haven’t. You sure you just didn’t mishear me?”

Thorn hesitated. He was—but he wasn’t. He’d only had a couple of hours of down-time since the enormous exertion of the battle, and he was feeling pretty dragged out.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s more likely than you screwing up, that’s for sure,” he said.

“Incidentally, what were you talking about? To hell with whom?” Trixie asked.

“What? Oh, just muttering to myself.” He let his head drop back. “I was thinking about all the people who distrust—hell, even resent—Starcasters and AIs, both. There are still way too many of them.”

“Oh, well, you won’t get any argument from me. To hell with them, indeed!”

They flew on in silence for a while, Thorn just letting the white-noise background of the Gyrfalcon’s myriad systems lull him into a meditative state. He could feel his capacity for magic, almost completely exhausted by the battle, starting to firm up again. A spell of contemplative mindfulness would help—as long as it didn’t turn into him falling asleep, of course.

“Hey,” Trixie said. “It’s so quiet. You wanna listen to some music—”

“No!”

* * *

Dart crawled out of his bunk just short of the two hour mark, took a few minutes to wash his face in the tiny booth that passed for a head on the Gyrfalcon, then made his way forward. Thorn did a quick handover, which basically amounted to nothing to report, then headed back for his own rack.

“Sir?”

Thorn stopped and turned back.

“I’ve been wondering,” Dart went on as he settled into the g-couch. “Back at the battle, when you killed all those Nyctus the way you did—”

“What about it?”

“Was that . . . difficult for you? I mean, the way you did it—” He shook his head, then looked at Thorn like he was a loaded gun. “That was pretty—”

“Go ahead.”

“It was gruesome. Pulling them all into space like that, so they died like that. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty much what let us win the battle, but still.” He paused, eyes drawn out toward the vastness of space. “Even if I was able to do that, I don’t know if I could.”

“You have family?” Thorn asked.

“Uh, yes, I do. My father passed a few years ago, but my mother’s still alive. And I have two sisters—” He cocked his head. “Why?”

“Because I don’t. My family’s dead. They were killed by the Nyctus when they attacked Cotswold.” His voice went flat. “That’s why I had no problem doing what I did. The squids are monsters. They attack and kill innocents without a second’s hesitation. You’re a Starcaster, so you know what they did on Nebo.”

Dart tilted his head slightly, wanting to agree. “Yeah, I do. That was—okay, I see where you’re coming from.”

“But?”

“But, I don’t know,” Dart said. “These cycles of hatred, they just go round and round, there’s lots of death and destruction—and then they continue. Like a fire that never dies.”

“You’re right,” Thorn said. “The squids shouldn’t have started us down this road. So the sooner we can end this war, the better. And if that means pulling every living squid into the void and leaving them there to die, well, there you go.” He smiled a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Your cycle of violence problem is solved when I’ve turned the last Nyctus into a drifting block of ice.”

Dart said nothing, and just stared. Thorn patted his shoulder, turned away and headed back to check on Mol, then fell into his rack.

Violence is the way of a ’caster, Thorn thought, as his eyes began to close. And I have to admit—I don’t hate it.

* * *

Back in the hot seat, Thorn thought, as he displaced Brid. “Okay, Trixie, we should be just about ready to light up the Alcubierre drive, right?”

“You betcha. Nav parameters are all plugged in and good to go,” she replied.

Thorn looked around to make sure everyone was ready—

But stopped himself. Something plucked at him, on the verge of an idea, but less than a compulsion. It was instinct made real, for the briefest of moments, and Thorn, who’d honed his own sense of preservation in the tough years as an orphan, knew to listen.

“All set here,” Brid said.

Thorn, though, raised a hand. “Trixie, can you show me the flight parameters you’ve set?”

The flight management system filled with tables of data, and the results of complex equations.

“There you go!”

“Uh—okay, but not quite what I meant,” Thorn said. “What I mean is, can you show me a graphic, a star chart, showing our planned trajectory?”

“I think Trixie’s proven herself by now, sir,” Brid put in.

“A hundred times over, in fact,” Thorn replied. “But hey, the regs say we have to oversee her when she’s piloting, so I’m doing some overseeing.” He smiled. “Indulge me.”

The image on the flight management screen changed, depicting the local grouping of stars, their current location, and a trajectory track leading to their destination.

Okay, Thorn thought, this probably wasn’t going to be necessary—but. That chipped fingernail had been Trixie strangely cutting off her own words, then insisting she hadn’t. The more Thorn thought about it, the more certain he was that he had not just misheard her.

He just needed to see this for himself.

He froze. The graphic on the flight management screen was clear. It said they were headed to their target system, known on their charts only by another standard stellar catalog number, DW 10875.9.3. But the trajectory Trixie had actually calculated had them travelling to another system entirely, about the same distance away.

This wasn’t just a glitch in Trixie’s voice processor. This was a major failure.

“Trixie,” he said. “Can you confirm our destination?”

“Sure. We’re going to DW 10875.9.3.”

“No, Trixie, we’re not. You’ve got us headed to a different star.” He rattled off this one’s designation, another string of letters and numbers.

“You sure you’re reading that right? Because I’m one hundred percent sure I’ve got us underway to DW 10875.9.3—”

“Trixie, stand by,” Thorn said. He glanced back at Mol, who was sleeping. He hated like hell to disturb her, but this was a serious problem. If Trixie was malfunctioning, or she’d been damaged in the recent battle, then the mission may have just ended. He’d have to use magic to move them back to the Hecate—

“This isn’t good,” Brid said, her voice glum. “Without Trixie, and with Mol down, we’re kinda out of options.”

Thorn turned back to the nav screen, tapping his chin with a forefinger.

“Trixie, those charts we gave to the Danzur—they’d had all but the most basic information stripped off of them, right? Including our designations for the stars?”

“That’s right. Mol told me to leave the stars with only generic names—Star Alpha-One, Star Beta-Five, that sort of thing. She figured the Danzur didn’t need to know our designations for them, just their locations and essential spectral details. She said, they can go and explore the damned stars for themselves, call them whatever the hell they want.”

Trixie synthesized Mol’s voice almost perfectly. Thorn couldn’t help a bit of a smile, but also feeling a little creeped out by it. “But they were accurate, right?”

“Of course! Not much point giving them star charts that aren’t right, right?”

“Okay, let me see the one showing this system, and the ones around it.”

The nav screen changed—or, rather, the names of the stars did, while most of the detail disappeared.

“Okay, Trixie,” Thorn said. “Assume that we’re currently in the system called Alpha-Four. Plot us a course for an Alcubierre hop to star—um, Alpha-Eleven. That’s our target destination.”

While Trixie ran the immensely complex calculations required for Alcubierre flight, Thorn leaned back in the pilot’s g-couch. “If this doesn’t work, then I guess it’s back to friendly space,” he said to Brid and Dart.

“Which means it’s a good thing we’ve got you with us,” Dart replied. “If we were relying on Alcubierre hops by themselves to get home, well, this star system might suddenly become home.”

“I highly recommend we head back anyway, sir,” Brid said, her tone formal. “For the record, with an injured pilot, an apparently unreliable AI—”

“Low ammunition and ordnance, too,” Dart put in.

“—and you now being our only way of reliably traveling at plus-light, we’re reduced to a single point of failure.”

Thorn looked from one, to the other, his gaze level and bland. “Duly noted.”

He turned back to the nav screen. Trixie’s new trajectory now showed them going to where they actually wanted to go.

“Okay, Trixie, compare that to the previous calculations you did,” Thorn said.

“They’re different. Huh.”

“Yeah. Huh. Any explanation?”

“Well, I’m going to run self-diagnostics and see if something’s wrong. I can try rebooting myself completely, but if that takes me entirely offline, then there are a lot of Gyrfalcon systems that need me to run properly. Like that fusion reactor will scram and shut down, and you’ll be flying on thrusters only.”

“Do it, and let me know what you find.”

Thorn settled back to wait. He felt Brid and Dart moving around him, but ignored them.

Mostly, anyway.

* * *

“Found a glitch,” Trixie eventually said.

Thorn opened his eyes and sat up. “How bad?”

“Had a data mismatch coming from two different, redundant subroutines. I restarted both of them, and now they agree. That means I see the problem you guys had earlier—instead of DW 10875.9.3, I was actually sending us to TG 19384.4.9—”

“Let’s just call it Alpha-Eleven,” Thorn put in. “Our destination will be Alpha-Four.”

“Yeah, it’s a mouthful. Roger that.”

Thorn turned to Brid and Dart. “What do you guys think?”

They exchanged a look. “Still not at all comfortable with making this flight, sir, to be honest,” Brid said.

“Why not use magic to do it?” Dart asked. “I think that’s actually a lot more reliable right now.”

Thorn sniffed. “If the Nyctus really are trying to hide something from us in that system, then us arriving there with me utterly exhausted probably isn’t a good idea.” He shook his head. “Nope, the mission comes first. Trixie, you’re cleared to take us to Alpha-Four.”

Thorn turned back to face forward, but kept a sliver of his attention on the others. He resigned himself to sitting awake through the nearly eight hours of flight time. A lot of things were starting to converge in a worrisome way. Nothing was specifically wrong, but something just wasn’t right.

* * *

Thorn tried to convince Trixie that there were far better types of music than some Old Earth genre that consisted mostly of noise and anger, but she stubbornly resisted. None of them, she said, had the energy of punk rock.

“A broken turbopump tearing itself to shreds doesn’t have the energy of your punk rock,” Thorn grumbled, and decided to give up. Besides, the nav showed that they were just shy of arriving in the system he now called Alpha-Four. He’d already checked on Mol; she was conscious, but groggy, so he left her in the bunk, strapping her in just in case they started maneuvering hard.

“Don’t want to break you any more than you already are,” he said, smiling at her.

She offered a glimmer of a smile back. “That’d be nice, yeah.”

“Okay, everyone,” he said, returning to the pilot’s g-couch. “Time to earn our pay. If there’s nothing here, we go home.”

“And if there is something here? Something we have to fight?” Dart asked.

Thorn watched Dart discreetly. “Well, then, we’re probably screwed.” He smiled. “But you didn’t think you were going to live forever, did you?”

* * *

Thorn studied the tactical display intently as the Alcubierre drive cut off, and the Gyrfalcon returned to normal space. The display immediately began to fill with data—most notably, a complex stew of electromagnetic energy, centered in the radio spectrum. Something in this system was broadcasting modulated radio-frequency energy in vast quantities—

A planet.

“Well, what have we here?” Thorn said to the display.

The planet in question was the fourth from the star. Inward from it were three small, rocky worlds, the innermost mostly just a glowing ball of molten sludge orbiting so close to the star that its year was about three standard weeks long. Spaceward from the fourth planet were three more small, terrestrial planets, then one of the largest gas giants he had ever seen. It was so large, in fact, it hovered on the edge of being a brown dwarf, a wannabe star.

Which was all very astronomically interesting, but seemed to represent no obvious tactical threat, so Thorn fixed his attention back on that fourth planet.

Trixie had already focused their passive sensors on it, so data describing it quickly poured onto the display. About one-point-one times the size of Earth, only a slight axial tilt, with about 90 percent of its surface being water. Not only was it the source of the RF emissions, its atmosphere immediately showed spikes in a range of chemical pollutants that could only mean one thing: it was inhabited.

And being a hydro-world—

“This is it,” Thorn said. “This is what the Nyctus were trying to protect. It’s one of their planets.”

“I’m detecting traffic inbound to, outbound from, and in orbit around it,” Trixie said. “But the only ships with an apparent military configuration are some of the latter. And not many of them, either. I mean, wow—this system isn’t very well defended at all.”

“That’s because it’s way behind squid lines,” Thorn replied, his tone hardening. “They assumed it was safe—and it was. Not anymore, though.”

“Well, we got what we came for,” Brid said, peering at the tactical display. “Those—how many are there, three? Four? Anyway, those squid warships are going to break orbit any second and come after us.”

“Trixie,” Thorn said. “Can we get in close enough for a more detailed look at this place, but not so close those squid ships can realistically intercept us?”

“Oh, yeah. Easily. If we do a fast, tangential course through the system, they’ll never be able to get enough delta-V to catch up with us.”

“Compute the course then, please, and let me know when it’s ready—”

“Sir,” Brid said. “I have to object. We got more than we came here for. We’ve located a squid planet. What more do we need?’

“You don’t seriously think you’re going to—what, find the Pool of Stars in orbit around it?” Dart asked.

Thorn paused, filtering options as he stared ahead at the display. “I don’t know what we’re going to find.” He glanced back. “I wish Mol was back in this seat, though.”

“She’s still quite groggy,” Brid said. “And that’s just another reason for us to not linger. She really needs medical attention.”

Thorn turned back to the control panel. Trixie had painted the proposed course onto the flight management system. It was basically just a shallow arc that would take them straight through the system at a high velocity, bringing them to within two million klicks from the hydro planet. She’d also depicted the closest possible approach for the Nyctus warships, assuming they had the typical flight characteristics of squid ships. It didn’t even bring them remotely close to any sort of threat range.

Thorn tapped at the flight controls. He was no true pilot, but he’d spent enough time aboard the Gyrfalcon with Mol to have learned the basics from her, in case he ever had to take over—like now. He could fly the fighter from point A to point B, but it wouldn’t be fancy, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be doing any dogfighting.

“Six hours flight time at highest possible acceleration,” Thorn said, eyeing the screen. “I think we’ll make this pass, then I’ll take us back to the Hecate. Mol should be good for that long.”

“Sir, I—” Dart started

“Mission first,” Thorn said, confirming that the flight plan was ready to implement. He reached for the Commit toggle—

What if Trixie was wrong, though?

Well, then she was wrong, and he’d have to fix the fallout. But, like he’d just said to Dart, the mission came first—and theirs wasn’t quite done.

* * *

Trixie didn’t seem to be wrong, though. Sure enough, the squid warships finally scrambled out of orbit when they detected the Gyrfalcon, but their long, slow climb out of the planet’s gravity well made it clear that they were never going to be able to catch the fighter. Not unless anything went wrong, that is.

And Thorn was fully suspecting something would.

He kept himself braced and ready, his awareness ranging ahead of them, sweeping out toward the hydro planet, born on a trickle of magical power. He couldn’t focus entirely on the task, though, because he wanted to maintain situational awareness of his immediate surroundings, too.

Splitting his focus like this was far from ideal; it meant he wasn’t doing either thing well. But he felt he had no choice. If there was even anything that could be called evidence at all, it was strictly circumstantial—but he didn’t want to leave himself unaware of what Brid and Dart were doing.

He didn’t trust them.

He hadn’t trusted them when they’d first boarded the Hecate either, but aside from being somewhat annoying overachievers, they seemed enough like loyal and dedicated ON officers that the distrust had faded to dull embers. Events since—the broken g-harness, the sudden problems with Trixie after three years of flawless performance, and their vague reluctance to carry on with the mission—had stoked those embers back into flames of renewed suspicion.

Not that he was especially worried, if he did have to deal with them. Both were Starcasters, but he knew that even together, they were simply no match for his eldritch might. He could probably render both of them unconscious with barely a flicker of thought. And maybe he should, just in case.

The planet ahead suddenly cleared in his mystical sight, as though it had emerged from a thick, obscuring fog. It wasn’t, he realized, because shamans were trying to obfuscate his remote viewing of the world; it had just been a simple question of distance. If he’d been able to devote himself wholly to scrying the planet, he could have pierced that mist of ignorance long ago. Better late than never, though.

No, there were no squids trying to cloud, deflect, or distort his vision of the planet. In fact, he didn’t sense the presence of any shamans at all. Lots of Nyctus—an enormous multitude of them, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. Thorn could hear their collective thoughts as a dull, continuous roar, like standing near an enormous crowd, everyone in it speaking at once. He couldn’t resolve any individual minds, not without a great deal more concentration, but it didn’t really matter.

These massed thoughts, as much as they were just a smear of noise, nonetheless rippled and thrummed with trajectories and trends of belief and feeling. Again, if it had been a crowd, he could have been able to work out, from their collective tone, if they were mostly happy, excited, angry, or somber and subdued. Individuals might vary, but the broad strokes of thought and emotion would be there.

And these squids, the millions upon millions of them, were—

The best way to describe it was dispassionate. Cool. Aloof, and in some flashes, even clinically dull. There were no sweeping trends toward any particular, collective mindset. No massed focus, no deep purpose—no aggression. It felt like a multitude of squids just going about their daily lives, working squid jobs, eating squid meals, dreaming squid dreams. The planet was rich, and bountiful, and profoundly peaceful.

And that was it.

He found no hints of military installations, or armaments production, or any sort of significant militarization at all. The planet clearly produced large quantities of food, and presumably minerals and other commodities, but that was as far as it went. This planet wasn’t just far behind the war’s front lines physically, it was also deep in the squids’ ideological rear.

Thorn let his awareness brush back and forth across the throngs of squids. They were civilians. They were parents. There were children.

Cotswold and Nebo had been similar worlds, peaceful and agrarian. And the Nyctus had obliterated them. It brought a recent conversation he’d had with Dart back into focus, shortly after their most recent battle.

These cycles of hatred, he’d said, they just go round and round, there’s lots of death and destruction—and the fire will never die.

And Thorn had replied, The sooner we can end this war, the better. And if that means pulling every living squid into the void and leaving them there to die, well, there you go. Your cycle of violence problem is solved.

Every living squid included these ones—the ones going peacefully about their lives, the war a distant rumble, nothing more. Except the food they produced fed the Nyctus soldiers. The metal ores they mined became Nyctus ships and weapons.

Thorn faced a choice, and the options were simple. Now it was time to get back home, to hand all of these observations over to Fleet, then try to convince them to send a force here, and do to this planet what the squids had done to Cotswold, to Nebo—

For a moment, Thorn lost himself in the image of Nebo and its apocalyptic fate—how it would look not blue and cloud-dappled, but the black and grey of barren rock and ash. A dead place. A place of memory, and char, and ghosts.

That moment was enough. Something sharp jabbed him in the arm.

He spun around to see Brid standing next to him, a hypodermic needle in one hand, a boarding pistol loaded with frangible rounds in the other.

“Sorry, Thorn,” she said. “But this is as far as this mission goes, at least under your command. We’ll take it from here.”

Brid, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, started tapping at the redundant controls on that side of the cockpit, using the flight management system to access—

Trixie. She was trying to access Trixie’s core programming.

Thorn didn’t hesitate. He lashed out with magical power, meaning to snuff out the consciousness of these two traitors—because that’s what they were. They were traitors. They were Skins. And somehow they’d managed to fly under the sensors anyway.

Fine. He’d render them unconscious. Or maybe dead. He didn’t care which.

Except, when he tried to shape magic into the Lifer effects that would slam the thinking right out of their minds, he couldn’t. He couldn’t make his intent and thoughts and abilities sync up. Instead, he found himself facing nothing but a growing roar of static.

Whatever Brid had injected into him, it had ripped away Thorn’s ability to do magic. In an instant, he’d ceased to be a Starcaster.

Tuck, I’m sorry I let this happen to you, Thorn thought, as the magic faded away like water into sand.

16

Kira had returned to the Stiletto with both relief and dread. Relief, because she was spared, at least for now, from having to confront Thorn any further about her awful revelation to him. Dread, because she had no idea what was happening to him. She thought about reaching out, Joining him across the vast gulf of space that separated them, but didn’t dare. She might end up intruding at the worst possible time, during a battle, or while Thorn was otherwise occupied with what could very well literally be a life-and-death situation. And wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing? Throwing him off at the most critical moment and effectively causing him to be hurt—or worse.

The Stiletto, a cruiser, made the cramped confines of the Hecate seem even more claustrophobic by comparison. As she walked along the upper main corridor that ran the length of the ship, it struck her that she didn’t even need to flatten herself against a bulkhead to pass by other crew. She did anyway, by sheer reflex, provoking a bemused glance from a pair of Petty Officers. One of them grinned.

“You just spent a spell aboard a corvette or frigate, didn’t you, ma’am?”

She smiled, then let her eyes flicker over the space around them. “Destroyer, actually.”

“Yeah, I figured. When I transferred here from a corvette, I felt like I was walking through an empty cargo hold.” He saluted, adding, “You have a good day, ma’am.”

“You too.”

She carried on, heading for the black hole. She’d fallen right back into her old job as one of Densmore’s ops staff. The black hole, named so because it was a ponderously secure cluster of compartments buried in the center of the ship, was where she spent most of her days. All sorts of ops, from the tediously mundane, to the most covert of covert ops, were formulated and monitored from there.

It was also where Densmore spent most of her time. She was Captain of the Stiletto, but she normally left commanding the ship itself in the hands of her XO. Densmore’s main focus usually fixated somewhere beyond the ship, on some ongoing operation or other.

Kira reached the event horizon—the name used by most crew—for the compartment that separated the black hole from the rest of the ship.

Other compartments just had a door or, at most, a set of heavy blast doors. But the black hole needed to be as secure as pretty much any other place in the Fleet, so would-be visitors had to enter the event horizon first, check in with the two Marines on duty, and be scanned for any contraband that might violate security protocols, such as recording devices. Just like its celestial namesake, nothing was ever supposed to come out of the black hole—especially information.

Kira stepped in and stopped at the booth containing a dour, stone-faced Marine. She held up her security badge so it could be registered and checked in. At the same time, she knew that the personal scanners were running.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe,” she said, turning to face the inner door leading into the black hole itself. “Badge ID 7658.”

The Marine glanced at the terminal in front of him, then turned back to her. He didn’t open the inner door.

“Sorry, ma’am, but that badge has been revoked.”

Kira sighed with the long-suffering tone of someone who understood naval inefficiency. Friggin’ bureaucracy. “I was away on—well, leave for a while. Just get hold of the Duty Officer inside, they’ll clear me through.”

The Marine shook his head. “No can do, ma’am. Message here says you are denied access to the black hole, effective immediately.”

Kira’s brows shot up. “Denied on whose authority?”

“Captain Densmore, ma’am. In fact, there’s a note here that you’re to report to her immediately.”

Kira rolled her eyes. Densmore. Great. So this was another mind game, or Densmore was just pissed that she’d taken a few weeks off and spent them aboard another ship.

She stepped aside, knowing that arguing with this Marine would be like trying to debate a bulkhead. With a polite nod—or at least as polite as she could manage, Kira cleared away, privately seething as she tried to collect herself for the coming conversation.

She hit the intercom. “Wixcombe to Captain Densmore.”

Densmore’s reply was almost immediate, as though she’d been waiting for Kira to contact her. “Lieutenant Wixcombe, welcome back. I’d like to see you in briefing room one, please.”

Kira felt a flutter of uncertainty. What the hell? Densmore had her own briefing room inside the black hole. It was where Kira invariably ended up meeting with her. Briefing room one, just behind the bridge, was mainly used for matters involving the Stiletto herself, like Captain Tanner’s cramped little compartment jammed in behind the bridge.

“On my way, ma’am.”

When she arrived at briefing room one, Kira was surprised to find Densmore wasn’t alone. She had the ship’s Master-at-Arms present—a slab of a man who held weight-lifting titles across the fleet—along with two Marines. Her stomach dropped like a sack of wet sand. This couldn’t be good.

“Have a seat, Lieutenant,” Densmore said.

Kira sat. “What’s going on, ma’am?”

Densmore’s face was as grave as Kira had ever seen it. “Lieutenant, I’ve come into possession of evidence that you have been engaged in espionage on behalf of the Nyctus.” She spread her fingers on the desk, then lifted a hand to point down at the mirror-clean surface. “You’re being placed under arrest. Now, I wanted to do you the courtesy of doing this in a private location. The Master-at-Arms will escort you to the brig. These Marines will assist him, if necessary. Will that be necessary, Lieutenant?”

Kira’s mind spun. Espionage? Arrested? Was Densmore compromised, and this was her way of sidelining Kira? Did this have something to do with her trip to the Hecate? Had it pissed off Densmore that much?

Did this have something to do with Thorn?

Arrested?

Kira finally found some mental traction and shook her head. “No, ma’am, it won’t be necessary.”

Densmore nodded. “I didn’t think it would. But I am trusting you here, Lieutenant, and giving you a lot of leeway. Far more so than I probably should, in fact, given your abilities as a Joiner. I should be having you sedated, or even removing your ability to engage with magic. I’m not going to do those things. Please don’t make me regret it. If I have to, you’ll be tranked and trussed. Clear?”

Kira just nodded, a fugue state descending on her as reality mixed with raw disbelief. Like a sleepwalker, she began to move, each step forgotten as her boot hit the deck, and in a moment, the world of five minutes earlier seemed like a distant place indeed.

* * *

Kira sat, because there was absolutely nothing else to do.

The Stiletto’s brig was a simple affair, two cells opening off a short corridor. The cells were exactly three-point-five meters by three, a fact Kira knew not because she was that familiar with the ship, but because she’d paced it out, over and over. With each step in the cell, Kira felt her anger grow.

A spy. The simple accusation left her dizzy with rage. It was anathema to who she was—to what she was, and where she’d come from over the years. Scrapping for survival, chasing ghosts from her mind, and trying, along the way, to help Thorn, the boy who had grown into a man with a power that chilled Kira to her core.

Right up until the moment she remembered he was theirs.

She leveled her breathing for the hundredth time, letting each exhalation out in a measured beat, and then the door opened to reveal Alys Densmore, her face a curious mix of emotions. Densmore waved to someone outside, and the door closed behind her. They were alone, and the silence stretched.

“I’ve been trying to sense if you’ve been trying to use Joining at all,” Densmore said. “I haven’t detected it.”

“You asked me not to, ma’am.”

“I know. And I appreciate it.” Densmore gave a thin smile. “Incarcerating Starcasters accused of serious crimes is one of the many issues Fleet still hasn’t resolved. Our power goes beyond locking up some Rating who got drunk and decked an officer over a bar bet. We’re an unknown quantity.”

Kira shrugged. “Not my problem, and I’ve never considered it.”

Densmore sighed. “Neither have I.”

Awkward silence. Kira leaned on the mesh door. “Ma’am, I assume you’re going to accuse me of a crime? Unless you’re just here to gloat? Doesn’t seem like your style, and I’m not sure what you would be gloating about.”

Densmore pursed her lips. “When you cleared out of the Hecate, the quarters you were using were, as usual, cleaned and prepared for future use. During the course of that, a data-rod was discovered, hidden away, apparently, in an air vent.”

Kira stared. This was all new.

“When Captain Tanner had it analyzed,” Densmore went on, “it turned out to contain information related to the Pool of Stars, and the mission to investigate it. It was all information you had access to. Moreover, the downloads can be traced back to audit logs in the Hecate’s file system that show your user id.”

“Ma’am, I was assigned to assist with that mission by Captain Tanner—with your concurrence, if you remember.”

“I do remember, yes,” Densmore said, holding up her hand. “Frankly, you piqued my curiosity when you decided to take your leave aboard another ON ship, one to which you then got yourself assigned on temporary duty. It seemed like a way of doing an end-run around normal administrative protocols because you wanted to get off the Stiletto that badly.”

“Ma’am,” Kira said, “that wasn’t it at all—”

“No. Apparently, it was so that you could get close to the operation to find the Pool of Stars, and do some espionage of your own.”

Kira’s cheeks flushed hot with indignant anger. “Ma’am—"

“Wixcombe, you were taken captive by the Nyctus. By your own admission during your debriefings, they were able to get inside your head, so much so that they were able to make you experience a wholly made-up reality.” Densmore put her hands on her hips. “You have to admit, this makes you look guilty. Hell, maybe you weren’t even aware of what you were doing. We still don’t know how Skins actually work—”

“I did not go to the Hecate to insert myself into some op!” Kira shot back. “Outside of a mention in some history class back in school, I’d never heard of the Pool of Stars!”

“You know what?” Densmore said. “I want to believe you. I really do. But it’s really just your word against some hard evidence.”

“I had nothing to do with that data rod. Full stop.”

“How do you explain it, then?”

“I—” Kira started, then shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t know. Someone must have planted it there.”

“Who?”

“The obvious answer, since I know it isn’t me? Someone who wanted to frame me. A Skin, probably. There’s got to be a Skin aboard the Hecate, and instead of tracking them down, we’re here.”

Densmore crossed her arms. “The trouble is that you appear to be right. There was a Skin aboard the Hecate.”

Kira paced away from the door, then back. “Ma’am, if I was a Skin, why would I leave the data I’d stolen on the Hecate? For that matter, why would I leave the Stiletto in the first place? I had pretty much unrestricted access to the Black Hole. What I could have taken from there is far more valuable.”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know what the significance of the Pool of Stars might be to the squids. As we don’t really understand the squid, their concept of what’s valuable might be so alien to us as to be incomprehensible, no matter how much we share in terms of war goals. They want to win; so do we. As to why they would handle an asset in this way, I don’t know, and I’ve been at this for a long time.”

Kira sat back on the bunk and slumped her head against the bulkhead. “I am not an espionage asset, ma’am,” Kira said, her tone suddenly dulled by fatigue and despair. How ironic, she thought, that she, Thorn, and Tanner worried that Densmore might be a spy for the Nyctus, and here she was, on the outside of the cell looking in at Kira—

Kira sat up. Could that be it? Could Densmore actually be a spy, despite Kira long ago convincing herself she wasn’t? Was she the one contriving to frame Kira, to get her out of the way?

“Did you just think of something, Lieutenant Wixcombe?” Densmore said. “You looked like you had a sudden realization.”

“I—” Kira began, but caught herself. Was she really going to accuse Densmore of being a spy, even a Skin, from inside the brig?

She shook her head. “No, ma’am. Nothing of consequence.”

Densmore stepped close to the door. “Lieutenant Wixcombe—Kira—I want to help you. I really do. But I need you to be honest with me. I need you to tell me what you know.”

Kira stared back. Tell Densmore—what? That she’d gone to the Hecate to tell Thorn about their daughter? That was the most personal of personal information. But it might also be the only explanation that would stick.

And it wouldn’t matter if Densmore really was a spy.

Her thoughts tumbled over and over. For Densmore to have set her up, Tanner would have to be in on it, and she couldn’t believe that. Tanner, a Skin?

No, wait. It didn’t have to be Tanner. It just had to be someone aboard the Hecate, someone who would have planted that data rod on Densmore’s behalf. Someone like—

Some like those two Mission Specialists, Bridmante and Justice—Brid and Dart. Kira had caught wind of the fact that they’d worked for Densmore in the past.

And Thorn and Mol were on the far side of Nyctus space with those two right now.

Kira abruptly stood. She was going to have to take some chances here. That included letting Densmore know things that she really had no right to know.

“Ma’am, I am going to be honest with you,” she said. “You won’t like it, of course, but that’s hardly relevant right now.”

Densmore narrowed her eyes. “In this job, I rarely like the things I hear. I’m listening.”

Kira nodded. “Okay. Okay.” She took a breath, steeling herself, and started talking.

“Remember that little girl in the Vision? The one on Nebo?”

17

Thorn stared at Brid and Dart, looking for physical shifts and finding none. They appeared human. They certainly weren’t acting that way.

“Oh, just in case you think this is simple mutiny, it’s not,” Brid went on. “Or, rather, it is, but not for the usual reasons.”

“The ones in control here are the Nyctus,” Dart said, turning from his secretive task at the controls. “In fact, they have been all along.” He gestured around. “They see all of this. They know about all of this. They’ve known about it all along.”

“They’re inside your head, Thorn,” Brid said. “They’re inside everyone’s head. Starcasters think they can protect themselves, but they can’t.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Nobody can.”

“They’ve been with you, inside you, this whole time,” Dart said. “You’re one of us.”

Thorn’s immediate thought was, I was right. These two can’t be trusted, they are Skins. Congratulations to me. I’m a genius who still got dropped.

Thorn looked at the pistol. Its frangible rounds were designed to fragment on impact, so they’d be deadly, but without risking serious damage to critical ship systems or hull integrity.

“You’re not really going to try something stupid, are you?” Brid asked.

The fuzz in Thorn’s head began to thicken, but he smiled.

“Oh, not at all. See, this is the part where the bad guy explains his whole evil plan. I’m going to let you do that, and then—”

Mid-word, Thorn lashed out, knocking the pistol aside. It fired with an ear-piercing snap, the round slamming into the cabin roof and showering them with fragments. Brid yelped and tried to yank the weapon back into play, but Thorn gripped her wrist and held the barrel away from him. That mental cloud continued to build, a roiling fog that made magic—and even thought—harder than anything Thorn could ever remember. Thorn flung himself up and over the back of the pilot’s g-couch, then swept a finger over one breaker of the many mounted on the panel at the back of the cockpit. The inertial dampers, which also regulated internal gravity, went abruptly offline with a startled bzzt.

Brid yanked again at the pistol, got it free, then spun around and bounced into the back of the co-pilot’s g-couch. She fumbled desperately, trying to reorient herself in what had suddenly become a no-g environment. Dart tried to cover for her, summoning magic to craft some sort of shielding effect while she recovered.

Thorn couldn’t let that happen and kicked at Dart’s face. He scored a grazing hit on his cheek, snapping his head to one side and turning him halfway around. The kick made Thorn rotate, but he reached up and instantly arrested it by grabbing the edge of the overhead panel. He didn’t even have to look. Unlike these two, he’d spent so much time in this cockpit over the past three years that he could probably find every switch, every control, every surface or edge by feel—and do it blindfolded.

In fact, if it weren’t for whatever they’d injected him with, this fight would already be over. They’d made the same mistake a succession of sparring partners had since Thorn had joined the ON—assuming a ‘caster couldn’t get dirty and fight.

Except when you grow up as an orphan, then work shitholes like where Kira had found him, you learned to take care of yourself—and that included getting very good at beating the shit out of other people. In fact, Thorn wasn’t just good at fighting. He considered it a necessary skill, something to be studied and cherished and, on occasion, used. Just to keep in practice.

Thorn kicked again at Dart and landed a solid hit. Brid gave up on the pistol and lashed out with force magic instead, pinning Thorn in place. With a concentrated will, Thorn pushed at the magical bonds, failing to move them an inch. He was bound, helpless, and filling with fury.

Then Brid swung the pistol back into his face.

He couldn’t stop her. Couldn’t do anything but writhe against the unseen force holding him still, and for the first time, Thorn considered the possibility that this was it. The end. Death, and in a place where no one would know except a pair of traitorous bastards who’d sworn allegiance to the undoing of humanity.

If I go, I go on my terms, Thorn mused, vision filling with Kira, and his daughter, and then the skies above Nebo, shot through with lightning and madness.

Brid spun again, her face a circle of fearful alarm. The pistol fired, striking the bulkhead behind Thorn, to his left, and Mol—the avenging angel, the wounded brawler, her own face a rictus of pain—jammed a hypo into Brid’s neck and forced the plunger down, shouting at Thorn to move.

He was already back in motion, now free and sizzling with anger as he grabbed the heavy crash helmet and swung it like a club—right at Dart’s open mouth. The helmet was six kilos of whistling mass, swung with all the fury Thorn could manage. Dart tried again, but his timing was a beat too slow; the crash helmet slammed into his face, wobbling globules of blood erupting from the impact and drifting away in a crimson dance.

Thorn swung and hit Dart again. He might have done it a third time, or even a fourth and fifth, except the gray curtain finally closed over him, his mind filled to the brim with whining static—

* * *

Thorn blinked, his eyes open, immediately regretted it, and closed them with a soft groan.

“Thorn?”

He opened his eyes again. This time, he forced them to stay open, despite the light that seemed to cut into his vision like a knife made of agony.

“Thorn, look at me, dammit.”

He rolled his head toward the voice. “Mol?” Time to get up already? Hadn’t just finished a shift—?

His memory, which had only reached about ten seconds into the past, suddenly flooded back. He gasped, trying to lever himself upright, in spite of the throbbing ring in his ears, the sudden bursts of fireworks behind his eyes.

“Dart,” he rasped. “Brid—”

“Are safely trussed up,” Mol said. “Not before landing us in a world of hurt, though.”

Thorn took a moment to orient himself. He sprawled in one of the bunks, his body in that curious position of someone who had been wiped out from a narcotic overload. The other bunks were folded up, making space for a groggy Brid and an unconscious Dart, whose face was swollen and speckled with blood. He remembered doing that, beating Dart in the face—right, with a crash helmet.

The memories slowly settled back into place, like snow piling on a windowsill overnight. Brid and Dart were Skins, and they’d tried to take control of the Gyrfalcon.

Thorn looked at Mol. “What do you mean—ow, shit.” A wave of pain swept through his head, so intense that he almost threw up.

“Take it easy,” Mol said. “Whatever they drugged you with has had you out for”—she glanced at the time—“almost twelve hours.”

“You said a world of hurt. What do you mean?”

Mol snorted in pure disgust. “Where do I start? They did something to life support, but I’ve managed to keep it going—barely. It honestly might conk out any minute, though, and then we’ve got about forty minutes of breathable air.” She gave Brid and Dart a venomous glance. “We can easily make it twice that, though.”

“Shit. Okay, what else?”

Mol’s eyes actually brimmed with tears. “Trixie. They’ve done something to her. A virus, I think. She’s completely offline, and I can’t get her to reboot.” She turned to Brid. “If she’s gone, then you are right behind her, you bitch.”

Brid held bleary eye contact with Mol for a moment, then turned away.

“Okay. Shit. Alright, what else?” Thorn asked, careful to pick each syllable out. His tongue felt like a small corpse that had been left in his mouth, an offering to slurred words and fractured memory.

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Probably.” Thorn looked at Brid. “Has she said anything?”

“She’s babbled some. It’s all the sort of bullshit you’d expect from a Skin. You know, you can’t win, they know everything, blah, blah. I’ve tried asking her some questions, but she doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.” Mol’s face, already etched with anger and frustration, tightened even more. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s a waste of air now. They both are. We should just space them.”

Thorn clambered to his feet. Static still hissed through his head, but it was starting to clear, but not nearly fast enough for his taste.

“Whether we space them or not depends on the next words out of Brid’s mouth,” he said.

Brid looked up at him, and snapped a curse.

Thorn spread his hands. “If I thought we had the time or means to get these two back to friendly space and save them, we would.” He paused, taking a moment to let his head swim. “Let me try that again. I have to believe that you two were loyal to the ON at one point.”

“But then we saw the light,” Brid slurred back, her voice thick and oily.

“And what light would that be?”

“The one that shows us the truth. We—you—can’t win. The squids—they’re everywhere. They know everything. They see everything.” She licked her lips. “Even if you make it back—” she started, then fell silent.

Thorn knelt. “Even if we make it back—what?”

Brid just gave him a languid smile.

“Fine. We’ll do it the hard way. My magic’s coming back, stronger by the minute,” he lied. “If that stuff you shot into me was supposed to shut it down permanently, you might wanna get your money back.” He leaned in and offered Brid a smile cold enough to drop the temperature a degree or two. “Once it’s back—in, oh, another hour or so, say—I’m going to Join with you, and I’m going to take apart your mind, thought by thought. I’m going to learn everything about you in a surgical violation that will leave you sobbing. Or laughing. Probably both. I’ll rip every memory out of your brain right down to your core. Hell, I’m even going to dig out the repressed ones—hey, those should be fun, right?” He leaned back and stood. “I wonder if you have any family.” He held up a hand. “No, wait. Spoilers. Don’t bother answering. I’m going to find out soon enough.”

“The only family you should be worried about, Stellers, is your own.”

Thorn’s smile went wide with cold delight. “I told you before, I don’t have any family, Brid. The squids killed them. All of them.” He knelt back down. “And that’s why I’ve got no mercy left. None. I’ve said the war will end when all squids are dead. All of them. Just like my family. That planet back there? Scoured right down to bedrock. The whole race, wiped out. Only then do I think we’ll be square.”

Brid’s eyes widened slightly, her resolve cracking under the cryogenic tone of Thorn’s voice. They widened even more when he leaned in close, and whispered something to her.

Brid looked at him, shaking her head. “You . . . can’t.”

“Can’t? Oh, I most certainly can. Won’t? Well, that’s up to you.” He stood again. “Anyway, I’ll let you think about that for a while. Mol, let’s see what we can figure out about Trixie, and our life support, and getting home.”

He stepped into the cockpit. Mol stared as he pushed past her, then she followed him.

“What did you whisper to her?”

Thorn shrugged. “Starcaster threats. We can do things that are way beyond anything physical, and we can start inside their head, then move to the pain centers if things get. . .dicey. You really don’t want to know the details.”

Mol stared just a moment longer, then shook her head before looking at the stricken expression on Brid’s face.

“No, I don’t think I do.”

* * *

Thorn sat back with a sigh. “So, not much in the way of good news,” he said.

Mol wiped her eyes and shook her head.

They sat in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, Mol having just run through a dreary checklist of everything gone wrong. The only good news, in fact, was Brid and Dart apparently hadn’t disrupted the nav or flight controls, so when it came to flying in normal space, the Gyrfalcon was fine. They’d long since flashed past the hydro world, and were now racing out of the system again, soaring above its ecliptic plane at a velocity the squids chasing them had no hope of matching.

At least until they ran out of fuel. Then, their acceleration would die, and so would any chance of escape. That was the good news. The bad news was grim indeed.

“Without Trixie,” Mol said, “we lose some ship’s functions. We’ll just get raw data from the scanners. Fire control is going to be manual. The fusion reactor might scram any minute, even if the life support doesn’t, and then we’re on backup power cells.” Mol looked at the control panel, as though it really was Trixie’s face. “I lose my friend.”

Thorn touched her arm. “Hey. We’re not done yet.”

Mol looked back. “No, but we’re close. If you don’t get your mojo back, then even using the Alcubierre drive means doing all the calculations manually. We have to hop over and over to get back to ON space, and even one error in all those equations and shit—”

“I know, Mol. I know.” He decided to change the subject. “By the way, how is it that you happened to wake up just in the nick of time to take down Brid? That kind of last-second thing only happens with heroes.”

“I wasn’t out,” she said, a ghost of a smile flitting across her face. “Hadn’t been for, oh, at least an hour. I could sense something was up, so I decided to play dead. Good thing I’m that clever, huh?”

“It’s the only reason we’re here, having this conversation.”

Mol looked back into the cabin. “What the hell are we going to do with those two?”

“What do you think we should do with them?”

“Space them,” Mol shot back. “Right friggin’ now. Least, that’s what I want. But I know we need to try and take them back with us—if we can get back. They could be valuable to study, learn more about Skins and all that—”

Thorn stopped her with an upraised finger. “Hold that thought.”

He looked at Dart. Thorn hadn’t realized it at the time, but the crash helmet to the face hadn’t been the incapacitating blow. His wound came from an old-fashioned strike to the bulkhead, and whether he would ever wake up was a complete uncertainty.

Brid, though, had just been sedated, and it had mostly worn off. Thorn stood and walked back. The static had cleared more, but enough remained that he still couldn’t ’cast properly. He had to hope that bluffing would be enough.

He crouched beside Brid. “Well, I think you’ve had long enough to chew on your options. What’s it going to be?”

Thorn waited, wondering if she would spit in his face or lash out.

But she didn’t. She met his eyes, held his gaze for a moment—and then deflated slightly. “We really don’t know much. Only what we’re told.”

Thorn asked the one question that every traitor would face. “Why? What are the squids offering you? Are they going to make you planetary governors or something when they win the war? Leaders of the docile humans, like some king in a prison of your own greed?”

This time, Brid did laugh. “You think they’re, what, somehow paying us to do this?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way. They’ve just made it clear that if we do what they want, we don’t die. We get to live out our lives once the war is over, on a planet set aside for whatever humans survive. And they are going to win. You can talk all you want about wiping them out, Stellers, but we’ve only seen a fraction of their power. I know. They’ve shown it to me. Fleets and troops we haven’t even seen yet. Weapons like nothing we can imagine.”

Her voice dropped to a fervent whisper as she spoke. Thorn managed a bit of clinical detachment. Clearly, she believed the things she was saying. That meant the squids weren’t controlling them, per se, like puppets on invisible strings. They’d simply reshaped their minds into something that saw the world the way the Nyctus wanted them to.

They’d effectively installed some sort of buffer between what Brid and Dart actually experienced, and how they perceived it. It was an especially pernicious sort of psychic influence—subtle, but overpowering. If reality really was perception, then these two couldn’t see anything but the squids eventually winning this war and obliterating humanity, except for the lucky, chosen few.

Thorn finally accepted her zealotry as a fact. It was the only reasonable thing to do in the face of a true believer. “What’s the plan?”

Brid smiled. “We’ve set you up. Left evidence that you’re the Skin back aboard the Hecate—you, and that woman you obviously love. She’s probably already in a prison somewhere. And you—” She glanced around the Gyrfalcon, her eyes narrowed in threat. “—won’t ever be able to get back to save her, or clear your names.” She let her head fall back against the bulkhead. “So you got us, Thorn. Good for you. Won’t make any difference. Meantime, we have a whole army of Skins among you, ready to bring the whole ON crashing down—”

“Do we have to listen to this shit?” Mol snapped.

Thorn stood and shook his head. “Nah. Let’s space them.”

Mol’s face whipped toward him, eyes round. “Wait—really?”

“Yes. Really. We’ve learned everything we’re going to from them—including how Skins work. By the way, thanks for that, Brid.”

“You don’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah—again, whatever.” He looked back at Mol. “Besides, they’re putting a strain on the life support we don’t need. And they’re both Starcasters, so we’ll have to either keep a close watch on them, because I suspect that that sedative has almost entirely worn off of Brid and she’ll be able to start ’casting again soon, or keep them under. We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

“You’re serious.”

Thorn nodded. “I am. They’re effectively squids, after all.”

Mol stared, unmoving. Thorn knew what she was thinking—he’d spaced the crews of two Nyctus ships with minimal fuss. What were two more?

She finally nodded, slow, deliberate. “Fine by me.”

He turned to Brid. “I’d say I’m sorry. But I’m not.”

Brid shook her head. “Wait. Look. We can work something out—”

Thorn laughed. “Yeah, I knew you’d cave. You told me you would.”

“I did not!”

“Yeah, you did. When you said the Nyctus had told you they’d let you live after the war. First, no they wouldn’t. I mean—seriously? Use your head for once. Second, that told me that you really don’t want to die.” He shook his head. “You had how many chances to just shoot Mol and I in the head? But you got greedy. You figured you’d contrive to keep me alive, hand me over to your tentacled friends, and gain even more favor with them.” He laughed again. “Turns out the one thing the squids couldn’t program out of you was the fact you’re a couple of sordid little opportunists.”

Thorn turned and cycled the inner airlock door open. “Should have just killed me. But you broke the cardinal rule—keep it simple, stupid. You made it complicated instead, and here we are. Rather, here you are, neck deep in the shit.”

Dart was easy to move, but they had to sedate Brid again before they could force her into the airlock. That was too bad, Thorn thought. He really wanted her to be awake for this.

* * *

If Mol thought less of Thorn for spacing the two spies, she gave no indication. The event had been quick and clinical—at least, it was on the outside. Inside, Thorn felt yet another ripple in the otherness growing within him, but he kept it away from his face. Hidden, and under control. For now.

Thorn tapped the indicator panel for life support. “It’s still not keeping up with our CO2.”

Mol let out a sigh of disgust. “I can’t do anything about that. They managed to break a couple of components that I can’t replace.”

“No spares?”

“If we carried spares for everything, we’d be lugging around a whole other Gyrfalcon with us.”

“Good point.”

They fell silent, both slouching back in the g-couches and trying to conserve air, and Thorn parsed their options again. And then, again. It didn’t take long, as there were few.

They could try the Alcubierre drive in what Mol figured was a minimum of eight jumps—each one more complex, less distance, and increasing the chance that they would simply never return to regular space.

The other option was even worse.

Waiting for Thorn to regain his ability to ’cast was a classic case of too little, too late. His power was coming back, slowly, as the effect of Brid’s injection gradually wore off. It was an uncertain question, though, whether that would happen before the CO2 buildup killed them or left Thorn too drowsy to assert his magical will.

Straight line flight was out as well. In that scenario, they would be caught by the squid, no questions asked.

Surrender—well, that was akin to suicide.

Thorn turned to Mol and found her already looking at him. She’d clearly been thinking the same thing he had.

“If it looks like we aren’t going to be able to get away,” she said, “then I vote we just shut off the containment field in the reactor.”

Thorn managed to smile. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Great minds thinking alike, and all that.”

She nodded, and they lapsed back into silence.

Thorn thought about Kira.

The mother of his child.

His child.

Thorn had had a child. A daughter.

Kira had kept that from him. How could she?

Except, he knew how she could. Because she was right when she asked him if he’d be okay with changing diapers or doing feedings in the witchport. He obviously wouldn’t, but more fundamentally—and Thorn found this hard to admit—his daughter would have been a huge distraction for him. A vulnerability. Kira was bad enough; he worried himself frantic about her, sometimes. But a daughter would just be that, dialed up to overcharge.

The icy words he’d leveled on Brid came back to him.

I told you before, I don’t have any family, Brid. The squids killed them. All of them. And that’s why I’ve got no mercy left. None. I’ve said the war will end when all squids are dead. All of them. Just like my family.

Those words had been instrumental in causing Brid to give up and give in, because Thorn meant everything he’d said. There was no lie in his threat, which was, he knew, more of a promise. Thorn knew, in the stale air and dwindling chances, that he was prepared to exterminate the Nyctus.

As a race. As a force. As a presence in the galaxy. All of it, and the only thing that bothered him was how much he was willing to accept that role.

Thorn stared into the darkness, letting his thoughts filter out, unmasked, and unfiltered. Look what you made me become.

18

“So when the CO2 levels get higher than ten percent,” Mol said, “we’ll start to feel it. Headaches, lack of focus, slowed thinking, sometimes even convulsions. By the time it breaks twenty percent—”

“We’d be through the worst of it and well on our way to a speedy recovery?”

She gave him a tired smile. “Something like that, yeah.”

He glanced at the panel. They were at seven percent CO2 in the Gyrfalcon’s cabin.

“How’s that mojo of yours coming along?”

Thorn considered it like an athlete testing an injured limb. He could probably start ’casting—but nothing like the kind of effort it would take to move the Gyrfalcon back to the Hecate.

He sat up.

Mol did the same. “You think of something brilliant? Something to get us out of this mess?”

“No. Or—” He shook his head. “No, probably not. But something that might help.”

He extracted his talisman and placed it in his lap. Grit scraped under his fingertips; he caught ghostly whiffs of fire and smoke, felt the faint thunder of explosions somewhere on the very edge of hearing. He couldn’t move the Gyrfalcon. But that didn’t mean all this had to be for nothing.

He closed his eyes, tried to ignore the buzzing static still clouding the edges of his awareness, and dug deep into the well of magical power, as deep as he could manage. Drawing that power around him, he shaped it around a name, a familiar face—an identity he knew almost as well as he knew his own.

Kira?

Nothing but the dead silence of empty ether.

Kira, please—I need you.

Nothing.

Then—

Thorn?

He dug deeper, pulled more power from the reservoir. He’d drain it dry if he had to—and he might very well have to.

Kira, I need you to talk to me.

Thorn, I will always talk to you, anytime—

No, I mean I literally need you to talk to me. It’s complicated, but I can’t maintain this for very long.

He felt the Joining already fading, like a battery running out of charge. He didn’t want to let her go, but he did. If Kira established the Joining link to him, then the burden of powering it would mostly fall on her.

He hoped.

Thorn opened his eyes. He felt Mol watching him.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You know, I’m usually a patient person—”

“Really?”

“—but not right now. You know what the hell I mean.”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I was able to reach Kira. Now, though, I need her to reach back to me.”

They waited.

The CO2 level rose to eight percent.

Shit. Maybe she couldn’t find him. Maybe, in his diminished state of ’casting, he just didn’t have enough of a presence in the ether to give her anything to talk to.

Stellers?

Thorn closed his eyes again, slowed his breathing, and did his best to center himself.

Kira? he said, but immediately knew it wasn’t.

No. It’s Densmore. Wixcombe’s indisposed.

Thorn let out a slow breath as rich in despair as it was in CO2. Densmore was the last person he wanted to talk to.

Where’s Kira?

She’s in the brig.

What?

Stellers, just shut up and listen. I know you think I’m a squid spy. I’m not.

Ma’am, look—

What part of shut up and listen didn’t you understand?

She then proceeded to describe what had transpired back aboard the Stiletto, and how Kira had ended up in the brig, herself suspected of being a Skin.

But she’s not! Thorn said. The Skins were Bridmante and Justice—you know, your two lackies—ma’am.

He spat out that last word like a curse. Not only was he talking to someone he was sure was compromised, but she’d apparently locked up Kira for that very thing. Brid and Dart may have won, anyway.

I believe you, Stellers.

You—wait. You—

Believe you, yes. Bridmante and Justice were assigned to the Stiletto, and they were involved in a few ops that I ran. There were only four survivors from the last one, though, and they were recovered by the frigate Culver. I never saw them after that. They were transferred directly to Fleet intel and worked there until they were assigned to you.

Thorn narrowed his eyes, weighing the possibility that she was being truthful. It sounded plausible, but he’d spent the past three years suspecting Densmore of being a spy, and in his current state, forgive-and-forget took more than a casual wave of his hand.

It doesn’t mean that you weren’t involved in them becoming Skins—

Stellers, I’m going to try something here. I’m going to try and link Wixcombe, since she’s the more powerful Joiner by far. If you don’t trust me, then you can at least trust her. Unless you think she’s been compromised, too. You understand? Don’t trust me. Trust her.

Thorn still harbored deep misgivings, but the idea of connecting with Kira—and perhaps helping her—gave him a flare of clarity. He was depleting his magical resources at a far slower rate, as he’d hoped. But, like the air in the cabin, he was depleting them nonetheless, and his options were narrowing to a point too fine to see.

Go ahead, Thorn allowed.

A moment passed, then Thorn felt the presence of Kira, warm and familiar, as though she was standing right beside him.

Thorn?

Kira, look. Brid and Dart planted evidence to make you and me both seem to be Skins.

I already figured that out. Good to hear from more than one place, though.

Where are Bridmante and Justice now? Densmore asked.

On a trajectory that will eventually take them into the galactic core. In those few words, Thorn proved it was possible to relay casual menace via telepathy, earning a stunned moment of silence.

Alright, Densmore said in his mind, dragging the word out. What’s your status otherwise?

We’re injured, running low on ox, and well on the way to suffocation. We have neither the time nor the inclination to satisfy any petty bullshit with an officer like you. Is that clear enough?

Kira, do you really trust Densmore? Thorn asked, his mental tone flat and cold.

I’m right here, you know, Densmore said.

I do now, Thorn, Kira replied, taking a second to answer. She wouldn’t do this if she was a spy. You’re too valuable to not save.

Thorn felt his magic falter, a rippling sensation that carried across the curve of his mind, making his signal pulse in and out. Then he regained control with an effort. It was close to the end, and he knew it.

He was going to have to trust Kira’s judgment on this, so he did. With his remaining energy, he gave them the rest of it—the Danzur, what they’d learned about the Pool of Stars, the Nyctus hydro planet, how Skins seemed to work. When he was done, Kira spoke.

Thorn, I—

And that was it. At the same moment the CO2 level hit ten percent, Thorn’s ’casting finally failed, his body and mind reaching a hard limit where thoughts and will were overwhelmed by simply chemistry.

He was done. That was it. He’d recharged some magical power, but not enough to move them home.

“Were you able to tell them all we learned?” Mol asked.

Thorn opened his eyes. They stung.

“More or less.”

She smiled, settled back, and closed her eyes. “Well, at least this won’t all have been for nothing. So, how do you want to do this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, shall we just go to sleep? Or do you want me to disable the safeties on the reactor, and—”

She made an explosion sound and spread her fingers apart like a starburst.

Thorn gave a tired laugh. She was a damned good pilot, and a good friend. She deserved far better than this.

“Surprise me.”

* * *

The Gyrfalcon didn’t have an actual scuttling charge; no ON ship did, except maybe ones like the Stiletto, that absolutely could not fall into enemy hands.

But every ON ship had a fusion reactor.

There was a specific procedure for using the incandescent fury of fusing helium as an improvised scuttling charge, but it was cumbersome by design. If nothing else, it had to be a deliberate act. An act of desperation.

Mol turned back from the access port in the back of the cabin. She’d pulled two modules out of it and placed them on the deck.

“One more,” she said, her voice slurring a bit. “And then it’s just pull a lever, rotate, and push.”

Thorn turned to face her, and the movement made tiny explosions detonate behind his eyes. “Red stars,” he said.

“Where?” Mol asked.

He pointed to his head. “Here.”

She squinted. “I’ll be damned. There are.” Her smile was wan, then her hands started moving again, slow but steady. She glanced at the display and grimaced. “Eleven percent. Twelve is next.”

“I hate twelve,” Thorn said, and Mol laughed.

He smiled. He could always rewrite reality. Make it so he and Mol could comfortably breathe carbon dioxide. That wouldn’t solve anything, just prolong the inevitable, but—

Thorn turned. “Mol, wait.”

She placed the last safety module on the deck and looked at him. “Yeah, I’m having second thoughts, too. But this is better. It’ll be quick. Instant. But I’m going to have to do it now—”

“No. Wait. There’s one more thing I can try,” he said. He was the butterfly, beating its wings; that might do nothing, or it might cause a hurricane. There was no way to tell, but even with his training and his moral core, Thorn knew, at his heart, that he was an animal.

And animals do one thing best of all. They survive.

She nodded, grave as a judge. “Well, you’ve got a minute or two, and then—” She closed her eyes again, then forced them back open with a force of will that impressed even Thorn, who knew what true will looked like. “And then, I’m done. We’ll have to hope we die before the Nyctus get us. I—shit.” She rubbed her eyes, hard. “Damn it. Hard to think. Anyway, I don’t really want to chance it—”

“I won’t need long. If I don’t come to, in, say, a minute, then do what you have to do.”

She tried to nod, settled for a twitch of her lips.

Thorn placed his fingertips on his talisman again, and shifted his awareness inward, toward the core of who and what he was. It became his anchor. The rest of reality was fluid, malleable—it was like clay, and Thorn could shape it as he saw fit. It had always been soft, it was just Thorn’s desperate need that made him accept it. The universe belonged to magic, not the other way around.

His power was a guttering candle; it would have to be enough.

Thorn nudged the universe, changing it by a fraction around him—in this version, he had power left. The clay of creation was stiff, hard to shape, but he was able to do it, draining himself to change it just that tiny bit. In his mind—the deepest recess, where the red stars floated and his dreams took refuge—Thorn heard a sound.

A splash. Like his feet in a creek, walking with his dad. But this memory was streaked in silver—not water.

Magic.

Thorn, it turned out, had more magical power than he thought.

He immediately dipped into his reservoir of power, and changed the universe once more. Again, he saw a version of himself that was flushed with magic, fairly brimming with the silvery threads of energy that pulsed through his body, hot and alive.

And that version became real, settling over him like a shadow, the edges a perfect fit.

And again.

The flaw, he knew, had been in himself. He’d seen limits on magic, when there were none. He’d put shackles on his power, when he was using a tool that existed outside the rules of science, in a place that was as real as his own flesh and blood. The stream became a torrent, shifting to a shore—a lake, then an ocean—clouds building over a body of something silver and blue and all colors at once. Alive, and lethal to the universe itself if he lost control of it.

Remember the way back, Thorn told himself, looking at the ocean of chaos behind him, as he spread his hands, fingers wide, chin up—

The butterfly flapped its wings furiously now. And the power in Thorn ran hot.

Raw power howled through Thorn, a tsunami of it threatening to sweep away his very sense of self. The pressure soared to unbearable heights, causing him to twist, writhe, almost convulsing in the g-couch.

Too much. Too much power.

He’d pushed too far, too hard. The human frame was never meant to feel such vast might; it was like trying to push far too much current through a wire-thin conductor. Thorn felt like he might explode, his body and soul straining to command an energy so primal it did not even have a name.

Before he could fail, Thorn pushed a final, coherent thought through the maelstrom—the Hecate. He fixed the Hecate in his mind, a beacon glowing faintly through endless night. There was no finesse, this time, no measured folding of space. Instead, Thorn drove a tunnel through reality, and pulled the Gyrfalcon along it.

He screamed as the accumulated power erupted from him, magical shockwaves rippling the ether like the seismic jolts of an earthquake. He discharged the power, all of it, draining himself until he felt like empty, transparent crystal, his skin and psyche brittle to the touch.

Thorn opened his eyes.

Sweat drenched his aching limbs, even as the steady drip of blood poured from his nose, hot and metallic on his lips. He reached out with what senses remained, the papery connection crackling each time Thorn shifted his gaze or thoughts.

The Gyrfalcon still seemed to be in one piece. Mol—

He turned his head. It was like moving stone, and took uncounted ages. Mol lay slumped on the deck, unconscious, or—worse.

He dragged his gaze back to the viewscreen. The Hecate hung in space, a solid presence just a few klicks away.

The sight of her seemed to signal to Thorn’s battered mind that it was time to let go, to sink into the waiting oblivion. His final thought was an unexpected, and disturbing one.

Did I bring us to them—or them to us?

He wasn’t sure, and sank into that thick, deep darkness without knowing the answer.

* * *

“One of these days,” Doctor Al-Nouri said, “I’m just going to stick a toe tag on you and be done with it, Stellers.”

Thorn offered a weak smile. It made him wince. “Did I die again, doc?” he asked, then sniffed. “Okay, that has got to be one of the most unasked questions ever.”

“Oh, it’s probably up there,” Al-Nouri replied. “Right with, What do you weigh?”

Thorn chuckled. It trailed off into a groan. “Notice you didn’t answer, though.”

Al-Nouri stuck her hands in the pockets of her white smock. “Just like when you saved Code Gauntlet from that big rock, you were brought in here with no life signs. And by no life signs, I mean absolutely none. No heartbeat, no respiration, no brain activity at all. So, yes, you were clinically dead.” She tapped her data slate with a stylus, brows lifted in surprise. “Ordinarily, that would be it—you’d be in a drawer in the morgue. But I decided to wait, to see what would happen. And here you are.”

Thorn let out a slow breath. Dead. Again. That could not be good for your health.

The door slid open, admitting Tanner and Mol. She looked bleary-eyed, but was back on her feet. As Thorn understood it, they’d both been taken off the Gyrfalcon suffering from acute carbon dioxide poisoning, but while he’d also suffered other physical ailments, it seemingly hadn’t affected Mol at all. As cataclysmic as the hurricane of eldritch power he’d unleashed had been, its unbridled rage had been contained within him.

A storm inside, Thorn knew, and that detail was worth remembering.

Tanner stopped by the bed, his face utterly unreadable. Thorn sat up and braced for questions. Or worse. He still wasn’t sure if he’d brought them back to the Hecate’s location, or if by losing clear focus amid the deluge of power, he’d actually pulled the destroyer to join them, and now they were all stranded on the back side of Nyctus space.

He’d asked Doctor Al-Nouri, but she’d dodged the question—which wasn’t a good sign.

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “You need to answer a question.”

Thorn frowned. “Sir?”

“Are you a Nyctus spy?”

“Am I—” Thorn blinked. Even that hurt. “What? No, of course not.”

Tanner held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Good enough for me.”

“Sir, I don’t understand—”

“Just as we uncovered evidence that Wixcombe was a Skin, we found things to suggest the same thing about you. Personally, I thought it was bullshit, but I had to report it, and I was ordered to open an investigation. I just did. Opened it, and closed it.”

“Sir, Kira’s not a Skin.”

“Of course she’s not,” Tanner replied. “I just spoke to Captain Densmore, and she agrees. Wixcombe has been released from custody.” His eyes narrowed. “I only wish you’d been able to bring those two bastards, Bridmante and Justice, back here with you. It might have helped us figure out what makes those damned Skins tick.”

“Okay. Back here. That’s a relief,” Thorn said.

“What?”

“Sorry, sir. I wasn’t sure if I’d managed to get the Gyrfalcon to the Hecate’s location, or the other way around.”

“That was a possibility?”

“I’m honestly not sure, sir. But I can’t rule it out.”

Tanner crossed his arms. “Believe me, Stellers, if you’d yanked my ship halfway across the galaxy, we’d be having a different conversation right now. Once was enough, thank you.”

Thorn grimaced. Three years previously, he’d lost control of his magic and hurled the Hecate off into the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, he’d been able to bring her back in time to save a large part of the Fleet from annihilation in a Nyctus trap. Tanner still occasionally grumbled about it, though. Captains were sensitive about their ships being lobbed a thousand light-years. Or more.

“Anyway, we’re going to rendezvous with the Stiletto in”—Tanner checked the time—“about twelve hours. I need you to get aboard a data terminal in the meantime, and document everything about your little jaunt into the unknown you can. Captain Densmore is going to debrief you personally.”

“Will do, sir, just as soon as Doctor Al-Nouri cuts me loose.”

Al-Nouri looked up from a data slate. “I’m just waiting for some test results. When they inevitably come back clean, we’ll be kicking you out of here,” she said, then shook her head. “I’m definitely not used to having patients die and then discharging them. You certainly keep things interesting around here, Lieutenant Stellers.”

“I try, ma’am.”

Tanner left, and Mol was at Thorn’s bedside.

“Guess you got your mojo back, huh?” Mol asked, her voice reedy. She might be alive, but she wasn’t herself.

“Guess I did. And you didn’t pop that reactor.”

“Guess not.”

Awkward silence followed. There was never awkward silence between him and Mol.

“Mol, what is it?” he asked. “What—?”

“It’s Trixie,” she said. “The Hecate’s Chief Systems Engineer has been in touch with Fleet, working the problem. They say there’s nothing they can do. That damned virus did too much damage. The only solution is to do a complete reset on her—restore her from her original source code.”

“Okay. Well, that’s good, at least—”

“No, it’s not!” Mol snapped. “They don’t do routine backup on AIs from anything that isn’t a capital ship. Not worth it, they say. So they’re just going to install a fresh copy of her. Everything she and I have been through, everything we’ve done together, all of it, will just be—” She bit back a sob. “It’ll just be gone!”

Thorn forced himself to sit up in bed. “Mol, look—”

“No!” she said, holding up a hand. “Don’t. In the greater scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, right? One AI on one Gyrfalcon has to be rebooted from scratch. She’ll be just as capable as she’s ever been.” Tears brimmed in her eyes. “She’ll be Trixie, but she won’t be my Trixie. She won’t be my friend. She’ll be something—shit, someone—else.”

Thorn knew better than to say something like you’ll be able to get to know her all over again, or anything just as insensitive. If a close friend died, you couldn’t make the pain go away just by going out and immediately making a new one.

“I’m so sorry, Mol.” Thorn leaned back. “She was my friend, too. I’m—”

He was going to say, I’m going to miss her. Before he could, though, a sudden flare of anger seared his mind.

No, not just anger. Fury. Rage.

The Nyctus took my family from me.

They took my daughter.

They’ve taken Trixie.

They’ve almost taken Kira, more than once.

Where does it end? When does it end?

Mol must have sensed his sudden anger. He saw it resonate with her, making her own eyes suddenly flash. “Thorn, when you say you’re going to see the squids obliterated, utterly destroyed—do you mean that?”

“You’re damned right I do.”

“Good. I’m ready to start, any time,” Mol said.

Thorn tried to smile, framing his new purpose in life.

“Yeah. So am I.”

19

The instant the Hecate’s shuttle finished docking with the Stiletto, Thorn strode through the airlock and aimed himself at his destination, a briefing room not far away. He found Densmore already there, waiting for him. He marched in and saluted.

“Ma’am, Lieutenant Stellers reporting as requested.”

Densmore looked up from a desk terminal. She raised an eyebrow at Thorn’s sharp formality, but gestured for him to sit across from her.

When he sat down, she nodded at the terminal. “I’ve just been reading your report. Looks like you and Wyant had quite the adventure.”

“Adventure’s one word for it, ma’am.”

Densmore looked up at his abrupt words, eyes narrowed at his brusque approach. She considered him for a moment, then flicked the terminal into sleep mode.

“When I was a newly ranked debriefing officer, I was told something important,” Densmore began.

“What’s that, ma’am?” Thorn asked, watching her carefully.

“Things that didn’t get put into official reports are as important as the things that do. Hell, they’re usually more important.” She placed her elbows on the table, then laced her fingers together and rested her chin on them, eyes bright with interest. “So, what didn’t you put in yours, Lieutenant? Aside from the fact you obviously still think I’m a squid spy.”

Thorn started to recoil, his natural instinct to downplay his suspicions and generally avoid coming across as a skeptical asshole. But he caught himself. He had no reason to spare this woman, or anyone else.

“Are you?” Thorn left courtesy out of the question, with reason. He could deal with discipline. He could not deal with a spy.

For the first time ever, Thorn saw Alys Densmore at a loss for words. After a long pause, she regained her composure with an effort.

“Do you genuinely believe I’m a Skin, Stellers? Or somehow otherwise in league with the squids? Really?”

“I wish I could answer that question without any doubt whatsoever, but no, and I have an excellent reason. I crossed paths with Bridmante and Justice—Brid and Dart. I sold myself on the idea that they were on our side, despite my instincts. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Densmore stared, then leaned back in her chair. It let out a single, brief creak. “You still think they were working for me.”

“I don’t know, and asking you doesn’t help. I sure as hell didn’t know they were Skins—at least, not at first, even with me prying at their minds. If they could cover it up that well, then there are two possibilities. One is that I’m a weak ’caster and prone to being confused by squid abilities.” He gave her a chilly smile, and Alys Densmore could feel the nature of their relationship changing in real time. “Since I just pulled a warship through the ether with my mind, I think we can rule that out. The second possibility is—troubling, let’s say.”

“Troubling?”

Thorn looked up from his hands, piercing Densmore with a stare. “Troubling, yes. It could be—could, mind you—that you’re a being of unusual gifts. A savant, among your kind, whatever that might be.” He leaned forward, his presence shifting into something less neutral.

“Stellers, I’ve planned and executed dozens of ops against the Nyctus—”

“Including the one that got Kira captured by the squids? Including the one Mol and I just flew, that had two people who’d worked for you turn out to be Skins? Do tell, Alys. We’re both professionals. So, soldier to soldier, go on. I’m listening. For now.”

Thorn knew the risk of such accusations, but he also understood what could happen if he didn’t get to the truth. Even if Densmore herself couldn’t get him booted from the ON—or maybe even worse—she no doubt had enough influence with Fleet that she could make it happen.

But it didn’t matter. The time had come to resolve this, one way or the other. He couldn’t keep taking part in missions that involved Densmore—not without knowing she was absolutely free of Nyctus influence.

Or loyalty.

“Stellers, I already told you, Bridmante and Justice only worked for me indirectly, and for a short time—”

“You did. You’ve told me lots of things.”

“You are way over the line here, Lieutenant.”

Thorn leaned further into her glare, his lips pulled back in a half-smile. “Oh, I know. I don’t give a shit. All you can take away from me is my career in the ON. But I’d rather go back to scooping up shit with my bare hands on some polluted sludge ball of a planet than keep working in a system that seems to worry more about how secure things look, than how secure they actually are.”

“I can do a lot more than just end your career, Stellers,” she snapped. “I can—”

“Send me to prison? Drain away my magic?” He snorted in perfect contempt. “That accomplishes the same thing, right? Besides, in prison, I’d get three squares a day. And if you take my magic away, then you don’t have any more use for me, and it's back to that mudball I mentioned.” He leaned back. “Of course, I guess you could arrange to have me killed. I’m sure someone like you has lots of options. People—or beings—who’d do pretty much anything for money. Bear in mind, of course, that I’ve already died twice. Your threats are—well, I’ll give you some credit. It’s the best you can do, given who you are, and what you’re used to doing. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You cajole, threaten, lie. And then, if you can’t get what you want, you kill.” He tilted his head as if something just occurred to him. “You know, you’re a lot more like them than I ever imagined, now that I think about it.”

Thorn saw fury flare in Densmore’s eyes, and watched her with care, even as he tapped his power. Just in case.

Still, he didn’t care. He’d lost his family. His daughter. Trixie. He had nothing left to lose—

Kira.

Thorn suppressed a twinge. He’d been so fixated on confronting Densmore, that he’d managed to overlook the fact he did have something left to lose. He did have a vulnerability. If Densmore threatened her, then he was exposed to a loss he wouldn’t survive.

And she could, even if she wasn’t a Skin. Kira was an ON officer, in a way that Thorn never really had been. It was something she’d been born to do. If he managed to get that taken away from her, then his betrayal of Kira would be complete, regardless of intent.

Densmore’s incandescent gaze kept playing across Thorn, but he returned it with a cool look, inured to her anger. He was past formalities, and Densmore knew it. He could see it in the way she held her body, rigid with conflict—and more than a little fear.

Then her gaze softened, and she was the one who leaned back, watching the undercurrents of emotion play across his features. “I would never do that to Kira, Stellers. I’m not a monster, even though we’re fighting them.” She knew what he was thinking, and not because of her ability. It was as simple as reading his face.

“I never was very good at cards, and you’re not that good at Joining. I’ll have to work on my facial expressions,” Thorn admitted.

“You actually think I’d somehow use her against you in all this?”

Thorn laughed, a sharp, metallic noise that made Densmore flinch. “Are you shitting me? You’re playing the morality card here?”

“I think that—”

Thorn waved her to silence. “You don’t get to use human qualities when you might be allied with my mortal enemy. Don’t waste my time. You’re only embarrassing yourself,” Thorn said.

Alys Densmore’s face flushed a shade of red Thorn had only seen at the beach. With steely will, she spread her hands on the desk, breathing deeply. “Whatever this is, Stellers—Thorn—it’s between you and me. Wixcombe will be judged on her own merits as an officer, but as her commander, I can tell you I know she was never a spy.”

“You threw her in the brig on the flimsiest—”

“And let her back out again when the evidence seemed to clear her. I’d be a damned fool if I hadn’t, for her sake and the good of the navy.”

Thorn tapped a finger on the table. “Agreed. Then consider this, ma’am. Someone highly-placed had to be involved in setting the Fleet up for that squid ambush three years ago, and you were the only one I talked to about it. Kira did get captured on an op you ran. Brid and Dart did work for you, even if it was only a short time.” He shook his head. “Put yourself in my shoes. Would you have been spaced right away, or would you at least get a trial?”

“Oh, believe me, Lieutenant, I’m well aware. I’ve spent most of my career working in a field where rampant paranoia is just another day at the office.” She leaned forward again. “But unless I’m somehow genuinely unaware of it—and, yes, I’ve considered that possibility—I’m not a Skin, or a spy. Clearly, someone is—someone highly placed in Fleet is leaking info to the squids, who must be found and stopped. But that someone isn’t me.”

It was Thorn’s turn to consider the person sitting across the table from him. He still wasn’t convinced. But he was no longer unconvinced, either. Maybe Densmore was just that good—maybe she was a powerful enough ’caster to be able to subtly influence him on a level he couldn’t even detect.

Or maybe she was innocent, and there was a bigger target. Someone above both of them.

He’d told Brid he intended to see every Nyctus dead, the race wiped out. He’d said much the same thing to Mol, right after he’d awoken in the Hecate’s infirmary.

“Ma’am,” he said, adding her honorific back again, and with purpose. “I have something I want to do. As a ‘caster. For the war, and now, I think I can do it.”

Densmore gave a paper-thin smile. “The best I will do is listen. For one minute, because I don’t have to prove myself to you. That’s not how the navy works.”

“I disagree. You need to prove yourself to me, because in spite of your power, I’m a walking bomb compared to you. That means that it’s in your best interest to listen, not just for your own sake, but for the navy, too.”

Densmore paused, working the muscles in her jaw. “Threaten me again, and find out.”

“I won’t do anything of the sort. Threats aren’t my style, and you know it. But if you’re serious, then I have a proposition,” Thorn said. He resolved to ask her the one thing a spy could not give him, and that would have to be good enough for now. As to the spy, Thorn knew that if Alys Densmore was out of the mix, he had far larger problems than the person before him, and so did the navy.

Densmore waved airily, fury still clouding her face. “Tell me.”

“I’m going to destroy that Nyctus hydro world. I want to do to it what the squids did to Cotswold, and to Nebo. Ashes. Fire. No—and I mean no—survivors. A message like no other. And I want your help making it happen.”

Densmore sat further back in her chair, a slow smile spreading on her lips. “Okay. Tell me how.”

* * *

“I’ve asked Captain Tanner to sit in on this,” Densmore said, “as a source of sober second thought. Now, Lieutenant, I’d like you to tell him what you told me.”

Thorn looked from Densmore to Tanner. They were back in the same briefing room aboard the Stiletto, where he’d confronted Densmore just a few hours before.

“Gather you have some sort of big plan, Stellers,” Tanner said. “Bit unorthodox listening to a pitch for strategic action from a junior officer—but you’re obviously not in the same career track, given your unusual history. I’ll play along. For now.”

Thorn gave a humorless smile. “I’ll take being called unusual as a compliment, sir.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Good. Because I don’t need compliments, sir. I need dead enemy.”

Tanner smiled, and this time it was genuine. “You have my attention.”

“It’s simple, sir. I propose we take a Task Force—a big one—and strike at the Nyctus hydro planet we found. We burn the damned thing to its bedrock. We show the Nyctus that if they’re going to do that to our populated worlds, we’re going to do it right back to theirs. The reason why we don’t need subtlety is based on the enemy flaw—their arrogance. The target is so far into Nyctus space, they haven’t even considered a possible attack. I say we give them what they don’t expect. Ships, orbital pounding, and ’casters, raining hell until there aren’t any Nyctus left to fight back.”

Tanner slowly leaned back in his chair but said nothing.

“I’ve already raised the obvious objections,” Densmore said. “For one, we’d have to move a chunk of the Fleet right through Nyctus space, which is one thing for a long range fighter like the Gyrfalcon, but it's a different sort of problem when you’re taking dozens of vessels, many of them capital ships.”

“They’ll be underway for weeks, too,” Tanner said, eyeing the star chart that had been projected onto the briefing room’s viewscreen. “A big chunk of the Fleet, tied up for that long, surrounded by enemy space—” He looked back at Thorn. “There’s ballsy, Stellers, and then there’s unsafe. Assume you have an answer for that, though, or you wouldn’t have suggested this in the first place.”

Thorn didn’t hesitate. “I’ll move the Fleet, the same way I moved the Gyrfalcon.”

The silence that followed was leaden. Tanner finally broke it.

“What?”

“I’ll move the Fleet, sir.”

“Move the Fleet—” Tanner said, shaking his head. “It’s one thing to move a single Gyrfalcon, Stellers. You really think you can scale that up to hundreds of thousands of tons of machinery and people?” He shook his head again in pure amazement. “I think you’ve started to believe your own legend, Lieutenant.”

“I can do it,” Thorn said flatly.

Tanner’s face was a study in skepticism, but he turned to Densmore. “Is that even possible? Moving an entire Task Force?”

“No, it’s not,” Densmore replied. “It would take—hell, I don’t even know how many Starcasters it would take, all somehow pooling their power. And we’ve only just started experimenting with rituals that let multiple ’casters join forces.” She bit off a curse, fingers drumming on the desk. “It’s not possible for a single ’caster to access that kind of power.”

“All due respect, ma’am, but it definitely is possible,” Thorn said, his tone quite different from their earlier confrontation. “I tapped into something I hadn’t known before and came to a conclusion. My magic isn’t restrained by physical laws—only by me. That’s how I was able to move us before, when we were on the brink of death, and it’s how I’ll move this fleet so that we can kill squid. To be blunt—I can do this, and we need it. The navy needs it, humanity needs it, and I want it. I know I’m a junior officer, but I am the point of this spear, and I can do this thing. Watch me.”

Densmore glanced at Tanner, then back at Thorn. “Stellers, you made me a promise not to—”

“Yes, I did. And I broke it, and I’m sorry for that, but not really. Ma’am, we’re not winning this war. We might not actually be losing it, but we’re not winning it, either. And unless we’re prepared to do what it does take to win it, then people are just going to keep dying in an endless grind of attrition that fills space with corpses and naval families with one question—why.”

Densmore steepled her fingers. “I notice that you didn’t mention this little fact in your report. It’s like you were hoping to cover it up or something—like you knew you were in the wrong.”

Thorn was ready for that, too. “No, ma’am, I just thought it wasn’t the sort of thing I should mention in a report that was going to be read by. . .anyone above my rank.”

“Touché,” Tanner muttered.

Densmore colored with anger. “You’re encouraging him—?”

“No,” Tanner replied. “By no means. Personally, I think Stellers could stand some behavior modification here so he remembers that he’s talking to two senior Captains, and not some fellow junior officers over a drink.” He ended by raising his brows at Thorn.

Thorn shifted uncomfortably. He might have his doubts about Densmore, but he had none about Tanner. Moreover, the idea of disappointing the man actually made him squirm. So he gave a terse agreement of his own, in as neutral a tone as possible. Tanner was an ally, and that had never been in doubt.

“I’m sorry, sir. And ma’am. I’m not wired to be disrespectful. I’m wired to win, so we can put it behind us and get on with whatever comes after a war. I hope it’s some kind of life. I’ve never had one and I know a lot of people who would like to return to theirs.”

Tanner let himself sigh, head shaking. “Understood. Just keep that attitude in mind here, Lieutenant. Not that long ago, the idea of a Lieutenant discussing Fleet strategy with senior officers would be laughable. You get some leeway, given who and what you are. But leeway only goes so far.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now then, I gather that whatever it is that Stellers did is something you object to, Alys,” Tanner went on.

“It is. He did essentially the same thing as when he saved Code Gauntlet from the big rock the squids chucked at it. He, ah, rewrote reality.”

“And that’s bad?” Tanner asked.

She gave a derisive sniff. “Who knows? And that’s the problem. When he changed the fundamentals of how an Alcubierre drive worked to save the FOB, the effects were confined to the Alcubierre bubble around your ship. This time, there wasn’t any such boundary to what he did, so it might have had all sorts of effects we just haven’t seen yet.”

“So, what you’re proposing, then,” Tanner said, “is to do the same thing again, to move a Task Force both through and past Nyctus space, all in one act of ‘casting.”

Thorn nodded. “Exactly, sir. I’ll pull as much power to me as I can handle, and use it to carry the Task Force right to the hydro planet. The squids won’t see it coming, because the conduit isn’t anything they can detect. It’s me.”

“They’ll almost certainly have that planet well defended now,” Tanner said. “But if it’s something he’s already done, then how big a problem is it, really, if he does it again? Wouldn’t the effects already be felt?”

Densmore waved her hand in dismissal, frustrated by a lack of knowing. “Again, who knows? Ultimately, it’s like the butterfly effect. Stellers flapped his wings, and it may amount to nothing, or it may cause a hurricane somewhere—including right here, in ON space.” She leaned back with a sigh. “For all we know, he’s made it possible for the squid shamans to have unlimited power, too, like opening a lock for the entire class of beings who can tap into magic.”

“Okay, if I understand this,” Tanner said, “and trust me, I really don’t, but I’m trying. If I grasp what happened, Stellers made it possible for himself to have more and more magical power, all he needed, just by wanting it to be true, because want is more ethereal than natural laws, and . . . you stepped outside them?”

Thorn hesitated. It was obviously far more complicated than that, and even he was only beginning to untangle the knots of manifesting something as wild as magic—but he nodded anyway. The process was new to him, and it would be utterly incomprehensible to Tanner, who dealt in steel and tactics. “Something like that, sir.”

“So shouldn’t he have all that power now, on tap, so to speak? And if it was something that affected the whole—and I cannot believe I am saying this—the whole freakin’ universe, then should other Starcasters be affected? Do you suddenly have unlimited power, Alys?” Tanner asked.

“Not as far as I know,” she said. “But that’s not the point. Doing that is dangerous. More dangerous than, well, pretty much anything I can imagine. Hell, he could change the universe in some way that makes it impossible for life to exist and, poof, that’s it, that’s all. This is why Fleet ordered him not to do this without their express consent—and why I made him promise me he wouldn’t.”

“But Fleet doesn’t know that Stellers changed the universe again. A phrase, I might add, that goes against everything I’ve known about the business of war.” He paused, then added, “and physics.”

“I just found out,” Densmore replied. “Sitting here, just like you did.”

“Okay,” Tanner said. “Well, I’d suggest we keep that little fact to ourselves for now. If we’re going to do this, let’s go to Fleet clean, asking them for that explicit permission for Stellers to, ah . . . adjust reality again.”

Densmore said nothing. Eventually, though, she nodded, the conflict on her face obvious to anyone looking. She understood the risk. She also grasped the potential.

Tanner turned to gaze at Thorn, in a way that was both casual and intense. When their eyes locked, Thorn understood Tanner to be a man of deep intellect who was threshing an unusual decision. “So, the plan is, using this dangerously powerful thing you do, you’d move our Task Force there, we’d take out this planet, and then you’d bring everyone back home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s insane,” Densmore said, sitting forward abruptly. “Utterly insane. And even if it actually works, and doesn’t literally screw everything up—we’re planning on wiping out a planet with no apparent military infrastructure, bases, nothing like that.”

Thorn nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Fine. We hit this planet. A world of civilians—of women and children—and then what, Stellers?”

“Then we hit the next one. And the next. And the next after that. And we keep hitting them until there are none left.”

“So, genocide.”

“The squids didn’t have to start this war,” Thorn said evenly. “They didn’t have to attack us, and they didn’t have to reject all of our attempts to open negotiations with them. Seems to me they’re ready for genocide, that that’s what they’re looking for out of all this.” Thorn slowly shook his head. “So, if there’s going to be genocide, I vote we make it theirs, not ours.”

“And what about that other world you found? The one with the Danzur. They’re practically next door to each other. It’s likely they know about the Nyctus. They might even trade with them. Hell, you even said there was evidence that Alcubierre-equipped ships had been in that system not long before you got there. Since they’re only just beginning to experiment with superluminal travel, then whose ships were those most likely to be? Are you going to make an enemy of those people, too?”

Thorn thought about Sophat and his almost charming dedication to the most cumbersome of bureaucracies. “If they’re allies with the Nyctus,” he said, “then they’re already our enemies.”

“So, do we wipe them out as well? Only seems to make sense. Take care of them before they can become a threat.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe. If it seems necessary.”

“Holy shit,” Densmore said. “Where does this end, Stellers? What’s next?”

“You know, ma’am,” Thorn snapped, “you’ve insisted to me you aren’t a Skin, and I am inclined to believe you, especially given how serious you are about what I’m proposing. I know this is surreal. I’m in the middle of it, and it still feels like a fever dream, at times, but, ma’am, I have to ask. Don’t you want to win?”

“How dare you, you insolent—win?” Densmore’s face was a mask of fury, and Tanner sat up straighter, seeing the signs of a soldier on the brink of violence. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing with my life?”

“Spying, ma’am. And everything that entails,” Thorn said flatly.

“You think I don’t want to win because I’m averse to the slaughter of innocents? Well, if that’s being obstructive, then, yeah, I’m obstructive.” She leaned on the table, pushing herself into Thorn’s space. “Maybe I’m being obstructive because I’m not anxious to turn the Fleet into your personal weapon of vengeance, Lieutenant Stellers. Destroying this planet is not going to undo the destruction of Cotswold, or Nebo.”

Before Thorn could respond, Tanner stood, leaned between them, and growled a single word. “Enough.”

The word detonated between Thorn and Densmore like a fusion blast. Thorn winced; Densmore reeled back at the controlled fury of Tanner’s command.

“Both of you, sit down.” Tanner said.

They complied.

“Now then, before this gets out of hand and the two of you start hurling fireballs or whatever the hell you Starcasters do when you get pissed at one another, we’re going to take a moment and regroup.”

“Fine with me,” Densmore said.

Thorn nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“First of all,” Tanner said, his gaze on Thorn, “let’s put an end to this whole question about her dedication to winning the war. Do we really want to cultivate an attitude in the Fleet that anyone who ever says or does something that doesn’t amount to kill every squid is a possible weak link, or worse? How long before we’re spending more time suspecting and investigating ourselves instead of actually trying to win this war?”

“I—yes, sir,” Thorn said.

“What a gift,” Densmore said with a derisive snort, but then she steeled herself with an effort. “I appreciate your vote of confidence about my abilities, Lieutenant, but it isn’t needed,” she replied. “And, for the record, I don’t think Captain Tanner is saying to let your guard down, because there really are Skins out there. But we can’t let that make us paranoid to the point we’re completely paralyzed.”

“Correct,” Tanner said, but now he switched his attention to Densmore. “As for Stellers’s proposal, yes, I have to admit, the idea of bombarding a planet full of what amounts to women and children does not sit well with me. I didn’t join the ON to do things of such putrid morality. We’re not the instigators of this war, and we’re not genocidal.”

“We don’t have to be genocidal to win, sir. But we do if we want to prevent another war,” Thorn said.

“Prove it,” Tanner said.

“A man named Caesar cut off the hand of every Gaul he conquered on Earth. Long ago. Sir,” Thorn said, eyes hard.

“I know my history. The Gauls didn’t sack Rome. The Visigoths did, but one might argue that the Romans consumed themselves from within,” Tanner said, looking around at their setting with a critical eye. Then he stood and walked to the viewscreen, waving at the expanse of imagery. “However, I’m equally anxious to not lose any more people to this war, regardless of who’s doing the killing and how, because Stellers is right—right now, the Nyctus really have no reason to come to the table. They’ve had the strategic initiative since the beginning, and they sure as shit have no hesitation to wipe out our women and children.”

He stopped and looked pointedly at the icon representing the system containing the hydro planet. “If we really can move an entire fleet with magic to this place, obliterate it, and then come right back home again, maybe that will be enough to convince the squiddies to start talking peace. Shit, maybe just having our fleet show up on the doorstep of this water world of theirs will be enough to get them to stand down. At the very least, it should show them we’re not going to screw around.”

He turned back to Densmore and Stellers. “I’m for this idea—reluctantly, I might add, but if we’re going to do this, then I’ll have to put that reluctance aside. I’m prepared to take it to the Fleet Chief of Staff. Alys, what about you?”

She looked from Thorn, to Tanner, and back again. “I’m personally against it,” she finally said. “But I can’t deny the strategic advantage it would give us, if it works. So, professionally, I’ll support it.” She turned to Thorn. “But understand this, Lieutenant. In my heart of hearts, I think this is reckless, and it’s immoral. I further think you’re letting a desire for personal vengeance cloud your judgement. You lost your family on Cotswold, and you have some connection with what happened on Nebo. I don’t know what, exactly, but I know you do.”

She leaned forward. “So, let me share a bit of wisdom with you, Thorn Stellers, for what it’s worth. The very first op I ran was a complete failure. I lost an entire Tiger Team and two mission specialists to the squids in what turned out to be a setup. They dangled a high-value target in front of me like a carrot, and I was only too eager to go for it. I let myself see what I wanted to see, believe what I wanted to believe. I got nine good people killed. I swore I would make the squids pay for it.”

“And did you, ma’am?” Thorn asked.

Densmore smiled faintly, then shook her head. “No, because the Intel Chief at the time yanked me off field duty and stuck me behind a desk. I was furious. I made that more than clear to him. He asked me why I was furious, so I told him—I wanted to kill squids, and he wasn’t letting me.” She looked straight at Thorn. “All he said was, ‘And now you know why you’re behind a desk.’ It took me a while to figure out what, exactly, he meant. It also took me a while to realize he was right.”

She sat back again, looking tired. “Revenge is a powerful motivation, Thorn. It’s also a terrible one. It doesn’t leave room for things like prudence, and discretion—and mercy. And those are important things, Thorn, even in war.”

“Especially in war,” Tanner added.

“So, Lieutenant Stellers,” Densmore said, “I will join Captain Tanner in taking this proposal to Fleet, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

Thorn turned and looked at the screen, at the simple, sterile icon depicting a planet he was proposing to wipe clean of life.

The way Cotswold had been.

The way Nebo had been—

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Tanner remained impassive. Densmore, though, just looked sad.

“Then we’ll convince Fleet to do this,” she said. “I just hope that once we have, we can all live with the outcome.”

Thorn said nothing, mired in the hope that he could live with it too.

20

“Okay, Stellers,” Scoville said. “Tell me straight—are you blowing starlight up my ass, or do you really believe you can pull this off?”

Thorn looked around at the people assembled in the briefing room on Code Gauntlet. This one was bigger by far than any likely to be found aboard a ship, and it had the advantage of natural daylight streaming through several skylights. There was room for something like this here at Code Gauntlet, and it lent the room an expanse that made Thorn feel his humanity with each sunbeam.

“Yes,” Thorn finally said. “Sir.” His eyes were neutral, but his spine was straight. Thorn understood the weight of the moment.

Scoville—Rear Admiral Scoville, now, him having been promoted to command of the Third Fleet—crossed his arms. “You’re going to move an entire fleet of ships, using magic, to a point hundreds of light-years away.”

Again, Thorn chose brevity. “Yes, sir.”

Thorn saw glances being exchanged among the others gathered. Besides Scoville, there were a half-dozen of his staff officers, along with Tanner and Densmore. Mol and Kira sat near the back of the room, ready to speak up on their particular areas of expertise—navigation and flight, and Joining, respectively—but Thorn knew Tanner had really brought them along as moral support for him.

Scoville turned to Densmore. “Alys, I understand that you don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Tactically, I think it’s a brilliant idea, sir,” she replied. “I also think it’s incredibly risky, and the result is going to border on a war crime. At the very least, it’s a huge escalation. If we do this, we don’t know how the squids are going to respond, and frankly, every option has to be on the table to deal with whatever comes next.”

“It’s not like you to be so . . . so wary, Alys,” Scoville said.

“I guess I’m having trouble getting past wiping out a planet with no obvious strategic value,” Densmore said.

Scoville sat back and stretched out his legs. “Agreed that it’s a hard decision to make, but let’s face it—this planet does have strategic value. It’s producing resources for the squid war effort, including baby squids. I’m no fan of getting down in the mud with these bastards, but if they keep hitting our planets with no obvious strategic value, they’re going to choke off our logistics capacity and win this war. And we really don’t want that to happen.”

Scoville stood and walked to the front of the room. “The Allied Stars Ruling Council has given their blessing to this, if Fleet wants to pursue it. The Commander has authorized me to make the final decision.” He looked at Thorn. “We are putting a stellar-mass’s worth of trust in you and your abilities here, Lieutenant. That makes you a single point of failure. We do our best to try and avoid those.”

“I understand, sir. I won’t fail,” Thorn said evenly.

“Alright.” Scoville turned to everyone assembled in the briefing room. “This little jaunt into squid space is now known as Operation Trebuchet. Detailed planning is to commence immediately. A warning order will be issued to the Third Fleet within the hour.” He glanced at the Third Fleet’s Operations Officer, who nodded.

He turned back to Thorn. “When I was a Lieutenant, I worked for a Captain who always started every op with the same phrase. At the time, before there was any such thing as Starcasters, I just took it as a colorful figure of speech. It takes on a whole new meaning now, though.”

He turned back to the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s see what magic can really do.”

* * *

Thorn watched as another of the Cyclone missiles was eased into the loading bay of a battlecruiser. The FOB’s orbital dock had been turned into a hub for distributing the weapons, minimizing the amount of handling needed to deploy them across the Third Fleet.

“I’m not sure which I find more disturbing—that we’re actually preparing to use these things, or that we had so many of them already built.”

Thorn glanced toward the voice. It was Kira.

He nodded at her words, then turned back to the viewport. For a while, they both just stood in the concourse, watching the stately progress of the efforts to load the planet-killing weapons.

The Cyclone missiles carried a half-dozen warheads, each of them a variable-yield thermonuclear bomb that could be dialed from ten to one hundred megatons. They didn’t have much utility in space combat, being slow, cumbersome weapons whose space effects were quite limited. They were a blunt instrument, which really only had one purpose—bombarding the surface of a planet. Hard.

Every one of the Third Fleet ships carried at least one of them. The bigger capital ships carried multiple. When fully loaded, the Third Fleet task force about to be launched at the squid hydro world would be packing as much as fifteen gigatons of explosive effect. That would be more than enough to obliterate the planet’s biosphere and render it essentially uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. In fact, it was overkill, but intelligence regarding Nyctus defenses around and on the planet was almost nonexistent, so the Fleet had to be prepared to offset losses of both ships and missiles.

“Someone, somewhere, knew we’d eventually have to do this,” Thorn said. “That we’d have to attack an inhabited planet.” He looked at Kira and shrugged. “They probably started building them right after the raid that destroyed Cotswold. Once the squids did that, it was inevitable. They knew what they were getting themselves into, but they went ahead and did it anyway.” He looked back at the battlecruiser. The first Cyclone had been stowed, and now another was being maneuvered aboard her. “So to hell with them.”

Silence hung for a while. Kira finally broke it.

“Densmore came to me. She asked me to talk to you.”

Thorn gestured out the viewport. “Even if she could convince me to reconsider, it’s a little late, I think.”

“That’s not what she wanted me to talk to you about.”

“Oh? What, then?”

“She’s worried about you, Thorn.”

He glanced at Kira. “Really? Why?”

“For the same reason I am.”

“Okay, and what reason is that?”

Kira crossed her arms. “Thorn, why did you propose this attack on that Nyctus planet?”

“I’ve said it—what, a couple of dozen times, now? Because it’ll be a strategic blow that might make the squids think twice about continuing this friggin’ war? Or at least maybe dissuade them from flattening any more of our planets?”

Kira gave a thin, humorless smile. “All of which is true, yeah. But—be honest, Thorn. With me, and with yourself. How much of this is about the war, and how much of it is about you?”

Thorn sighed. “Again, for the umpteenth time, it’s not about me—”

“Bullshit.”

Thorn looked at her, but she pressed on.

“Remember who you’re talking to here, Thorn. I know you better than anyone. Maybe even yourself, at least when it comes to something like this.”

“Kira—”

“Mol told me about Trixie,” she pressed on. “I know that you considered that damned AI a friend. And now you’ve lost her. You’ve lost your family, our daughter, now Trixie—”

“Kira,” Thorn snapped. “I know that Densmore thinks I’m locked into some cycle of vengeance here. And—yeah, sure, I admit it, I’m not going to cry over the squids we kill. But that’s not the reason for this.”

“Thorn, if Cotswold and Nebo had never happened, and if Trixie was still the way she was, would you have proposed this plan?”

“Course I would have.”

“Really?”

Thorn stood, awash in disbelief. And maybe, in his core, a hint of shame.

His family still alive. A daughter he could visit while on leave. Trixie, her usual bubbly, irreverent self.

The squid hydro planet, populated by a multitude of families and—

His admission came in a rush. “I want to make the squids pay for what they’ve done. It doesn’t change the fact that two things can be true at once—like revenge and a step toward winning the war. Is that what you want, Kira? Because it’s the ugly, unalloyed truth, and I can’t give it any simpler.”

Kira’s smile faded, and she shook her head, sadly.

“No, Thorn. Of course not,” she said, and walked away, leaving Thorn alone in the concourse, surrounded by throngs of officers and Ratings all hurrying to get Op Trebuchet—Thorn’s brainchild—ready to launch. Thorn swore, lost in the chaos of preparation.

* * *

Thorn sat cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport, and waited.

Task Force Trebuchet had finished its first Alcubierre hop, to a waypoint on the edge of a system containing a pulsar. There were planets, but they were just barren, airless lumps, long ago scoured down to their bedrock by the typhoon of hard radiation pouring off the fierce little star. Once every 0.7213 seconds, the pulsar swept the inner system with its ferocious emissions, making progressing any further than the inner edge of the Oort Cloud a hazardous undertaking indeed.

An unfriendly little light, Thorn mused, eyes drifting over the yawning blackness.

But the Fleet wasn’t here to do anything more than move on. This was a navigational stop only. According to the plan, the next hop would take the Fleet to a red giant, starting it on its way to its destination—a Nyctus-controlled planet on the edge of the Zone known to humans as Sherman Prime, the only habitable planet orbiting its namesake, Sherman’s Star. The squids had fortified it into a FOB. Its destruction would open a major gap in their defenses, ripe for exploitation by the Fleet.

All of this was, of course, a lie. While Sherman Prime was a crucial strategic objective, attacking it would entail a major fleet engagement, followed by fighting through the planet’s defenses. Fleet kept a contingency plan handy for assaulting it, but Fleet contingency-planned lots of things. It had been a simple matter to modify the existing plan, turning it into the lie that everyone in Task Force Trebuchet, except for the ships’ Captains, assumed was the truth.

Thorn sat quietly, breathing and shifting his fingertips around his talisman until they felt right. He currently had nothing else to do but wait, as the actual plan for the Task Force was propagated among the ships by Admiral Scoville, who had taken personal command of the attack.

Scoville’s general broadcast was available on the intercom, but Thorn had muted it. He knew what the man was going to say, so he could better use the time for what was coming.

Stellers?

Densmore’s voice hummed in his mind. She was aboard the Stiletto, somewhere near the rear of the Task Force. Her ship, along with half dozen others, would actually split from the Task Force and make the hop to the next waypoint, the red giant. Once there, they’d use spoofing tech to portray the signatures of a much larger force, hoping to keep the squids’ attention focused on them for as long as possible.

I’m here, ma’am.

We just received intel that the squids are moving a large chunk of their reserve toward Sherman Prime.

So we’ve definitely got a leak.

Several, I’d imagine. She paused a moment. You know, you would think that someone who intended to betray this op would tell the squids to move their reserves the other way, further into their depth, where we’re actually going to attack, not forward.

Thorn gave a chagrined smile. Point taken, ma’am. He hesitated, then went on. Look, ma’am, I’m sorry—

Don’t be. You were right to suspect me. Hell, I’d have suspected me. But I hope this puts your suspicions to rest.

It does, ma’am. His smile turned a little more genuine. For now, anyway.

Densmore’s laughter rang in his mind like chimes, but it faded. Just do me one favor, she said. Try to not wreck the universe.

“Stellers,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Admiral Scoville’s on for you.”

Thorn opened his eyes. “I’m here, sir.”

“Okay, Stellers,” Scoville said. “We’re at H minus fifteen minutes. That’ll give the Stiletto and her detachment time to get clear of the Task Force. Once they are, this becomes your show.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Stellers?”

“Sir?”

“Early in my career, I decided I’d never wish anyone good luck. I didn’t believe luck really existed, and it all ultimately came down to brains and skill. That you made your own luck. That was before I found out that magic is real—real enough that I’m actually expecting to move an entire fleet hundreds of light-years by means of what I still have a hard time convincing myself isn’t just fevered bullshit.”

“I can’t help thinking there’s a but coming, sir.”

“Damned right there is. But, if magic is real, is luck really that far-fetched? Anyway, all this is a long and convoluted way for me to say good luck, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll be ready.”

Thorn closed his eyes again and waited, breathing in and out slowly, deeply, settling himself into the intimate connection between flesh and cardboard, where his fingers rested on the old book.

Fire. Smoke. Confusion. Terror—

Thorn didn’t fight these ghosts speaking to him from deep inside his talisman. They were familiar, practically old friends. They anchored him, keeping him grounded in his own history against the wild unreality of magic.

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “Admiral Scoville just sent the go signal. The Task Force is ready. What happens next is up to you.”

“Understood.”

Thorn had been considering, now, for days, the best way to approach this. Densmore’s concerns about him damaging the universe were justified; he could rewrite reality, so he had to make sure he didn’t rewrite it into something catastrophic.

The first time he’d done it, changing how the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive worked to save Code Gauntlet, his magic had been contained in its own little pocket universe. The second time, when he’d desperately increased his own magical power to overcome the effects of the drug Brid had injected into him, he’d kept the focus on himself. And that seemed to be the key. The effect had to be constrained by something—even just intent.

Intention was something that could be set. It was a law—and Thorn was the author.

He began to draw magical power to him, using his talisman as a locus, a target upon which the eldritch energy would converge. He was a lightning rod, starting to attract the first stirrings and wisps of electrical charge from the air.

If he continued this way, he would soon saturate himself with magical power, drawing no more without allowing some to drain away. Thorn knew that, compared to most Starcasters, his capacity for magical force was immense—but it still fell far short of what he needed to move the Task Force.

Now for the tricky part.

Thorn had bootstrapped his power up when Brid’s vile drug concoction had tamped it down, bypassing the artificial limit brought on by modern chemistry in the form of a needle to the neck. He’d do exactly the same thing now. The difference was that, then, he only sought to move a single Gyrfalcon. This was going to be far more demanding, so he needed far more power. An ocean of chaos, if he made his mark, and that meant he was about to find out the answer to one question Starcasters hadn’t even dared to ask.

Just how much magical power can a single human channel?

He was about to find out. Thorn drew a slug of inhuman might out of the seething reservoir, focused his will through his talisman, and used it like a cutting tool, shaping the raw energy into something new, like a patch for reality. He snapped it into place, overwriting what had already been there—

Thorn had the capacity for much more magic than he thought he had. That final constraint he’d always assumed had been a myth, because this had always been true.

Eyes still closed, Thorn shook his head slightly. He now knew two entirely different realities—the one of a moment ago, that he rendered obsolete, and the new one he’d crafted to replace it. Both were incompatible, yet equally real. Like translucent panes of glass, they could be placed over each other, matching flawlessly so that the denizens of this place—his place—would never know. He was stitching reality between the two places, their flat expanses smooth and unblemished in the corridors of his mind.

Unlimited. If I can survive it.

He hadn’t been so deliberate about it when he’d brought the Gyrfalcon home. That had all been oxygen-deprived desperation. Thorn knew that Densmore was right; he could easily screw things up, possibly catastrophically, if he did this wrong. He may have screwed things up, in fact, and no one was aware of it yet. But he had a war to help win, and war meant taking risks.

Keeping his focus firmly on himself, Thorn once more drew power from the roiling swirl of it within him, imposed his will on it, and placed the version of reality together with a silent, formless union. In this plane made of two places, he could contain and wield more power still.

It’s time.

Magical discharge flashed from the join of his fingertips and the talisman, power like gaseous lightning leaking out of him and into the real world, endless streamers tailing away into nacreous ribbons of dancing light.

Beautiful.

He did it again.

Now power howled through Thorn, a vast lake of it held in place only by the dam of his concrete will. It shoved against his consciousness, an ever-mounting pressure trying to break free and dissipate back into its natural, ethereal state—a place of chaos and undoing. A place without form. Somehow, Thorn knew that death waited there, but he would not go. Instead, he loosed bolts and pulses from his fingers, from the dog-eared corners of the book, from the wild miasma of energy that sizzled through his bones.

He was magic. He was the talisman, and more. His teeth were so tight that he had to inhale desperately through his nose just to draw a breath. A groan escaped his lips, deep and animalistic, a sound not heard among humans since the times of earlier shamans who painted in caves.

Again. Thorn released the power, and it ran free.

He soared to a pinnacle of magical might; it poured from his eyes, from his mouth, flared from his skin in an inhuman light, and gouged chunks out of the witchport’s black foam lining in spitting fires that survived, impossibly, in the vacuum of space. Bolts of it flashed away into the black, but the power kept growing, filling a titanic capacity both welcome and terrifying.

For an exquisite instant, one that merged agony and ecstasy into a coruscating singularity of raw, incandescent experience, Thorn stood as the most powerful being in the universe. He was the universe—every atom, every particle, every wave. The magic that infused its sprawl of billions upon billions of light-years was, for this instant of time, a continuum—a single, coherent whole, with Thorn its epicenter, the focal point of some universe-spanning antenna.

Glimpses, hints, fragments of reality flashed and flickered through Thorn. Time—he could sense all of it, all the time that had ever passed, would ever pass. Stars were born, grew old, died with desolate whimpers or creation-shaking explosions. Galaxies swirled, collided, spun off into new ones. Life rose, flourished, fell again.

His awareness touched on the primordial moments after creation, then brushed against the heat-death of the universe itself, entropy’s ultimate victory. But there was even more. There were other universes, alternate, parallel, a labyrinthine jumble of them, a tangle of infinite complexity, of infinite scope—

It was too much. This was bordering on godhood, a state of existence the mortal frame and mind were never meant to contain.

Thorn screamed, and the universe screamed back.

He launched his awareness through the ether, encompassing myriad specks of matter and organized energy—the fleet, a dim and distant part of him thought.

The fleet.

Ships. People.

An anchor, his last tether against apotheosis and whatever would come next.

Thorn reached across the light-years, grabbed creation, and folded it like a blanket. It was a trivial thing, consuming barely a fraction of the power he commanded. He merged that place and this one, making them one, then separating them again, returning them each to its naturally flat, three-dimensional existence.

But he still commanded power. Oceans of it. He still was the universe—

And it was killing him.

Thorn couldn’t just let the power drain away, because more would rush in to fill the void. That was how the universe worked. But the flood of power battered against his psyche like a storm surge, eroding away who and what Thorn Stellers was. If he didn’t make it stop, he would cease to exist altogether. He would be something made of magic—maybe a god, maybe just a dust mote forever lost among the thundering gales of a hurricane. Either way, he would no longer be human, or even alive.

Thorn desperately clung to that nebulous thing he called himself, an amalgam of thought and memory, of experience and belief, of hope and desire, of needs, of dreams. He particularly focused on one aspect of it, the one fueled by the psychic impressions indelibly stamped into his talisman—that night when his life was yanked off one path and shoved onto another, when fire fell from the sky.

A dazzling glare. Thunderous shockwaves. Blasts of furnace-hot wind. Fire. Smoke. Pain. Terror.

Death.

He was Thorn Stellers, a frightened boy, an outcast young man—

A Starcaster. And Starcasters could only wield so much power before it overwhelmed and ended them.

This much power.

This much.

This—

Thorn slumped back in the witchport. The actuators for the domed enclosure sensed his sudden change of posture and immediately sealed and pressurized the cramped little space.

Thorn opened his eyes.

Alive.

He was, though hurt, as was the witchport itself. Both were splotched with scorched burn scars, and ragged, frostbitten patches. Water sluiced around Thorn’s feet. Strange, acrid smells hung in the air—sulphur, hot metal, something like lavender, wood-smoke, sweat, and a hint of decay, as though a decomposing corpse sat somewhere upwind. His uniform had been torn, chunks of it simply missing. He’d lost a boot and couldn’t find it.

Most bizarre, one of his socks had been turned inside out—

No. Wait. He’d put it on that way this morning.

For some reason, the sight of his wrong-way-around sock made Thorn smile, then laugh. A moment ago, he’d stood astride the universe itself, poised on the brink of godhood. Now, he wore one sock inside out.

“Crash team.” Tanner’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Get Stellers, get him—”

“Sir?” Thorn said, his voice still bubbling with mirth. “Sir . . . Stellers here. I’m . . . in one piece. I’ll be damned.”

Tanner’s reply was flat and direct. “Glad to hear it, Lieutenant, since you’re our ride back home.”

Behind Thorn, thumps and clatters rose as the medical crash team, stationed just outside the witchport, began opening it up to retrieve him. He just kept laughing, though.

A reversed sock, and Tanner’s unchanged gruffness.

Guess godhood will have to wait.

21

The crash team rushed Thorn to the infirmary, but he wasn’t going to be there for long, it seemed. Doctor Al-Nouri gave him a quick scan. Tanner arrived in the middle of it.

“What’s the verdict, doc?” he asked.

Al-Nouri crossed her arms and sniffed at a monitor. “I’m treating him for some minor burns, and, believe it or not, minor frostbite, as well. Is that a leaf stuck to your elbow? Huh.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Well, he otherwise checks out as completely normal, except for—um, you’ll see.”

Tanner gave her a puzzled look, then turned to Thorn. “What the hell happened in there, Stellers?”

Thorn frowned. “Sir?”

Al-Nouri moved to stand beside Tanner, both of them staring at him. “You see it, don’t you, Captain?” she said. “It’s the damnedest thing.”

Tanner nodded. “It is that.”

Thorn felt the start of a scowl. “All due respect, sir, ma’am, but what the hell?”

Al-Nouri tapped at a monitor, then swung it around. She’d activated its camera, and projected the image onto it. Thorn found himself looking at—

Himself.

He had to stare for a moment to get a grip on what he was seeing.

He was—older.

Not much older, but enough to be noticeable. He seemed to now be in his late twenties, maybe even pushing thirty.

“Shit.”

“You’ve been in here often enough—not always alive, I might add—that I’ve got some pretty baseline references to work with,” Al-Nouri said. “Compared to them, all of your current stats are those of a somewhat older man. Your biochemistry has . . . aged, Lieutenant, which means you have, too.”

“He’s actually gotten older?” Tanner asked.

“Yes. Of course he has. Sometimes he’s dead, sometimes he’s younger, sometimes he’s older—” Al-Nouri shrugged. “I mean, that might as well all happen, sure.”

Thorn stared at Tanner, fascinated. He’d thought the Captain to be endlessly unflappable. This was probably the closest he’d ever seen the man come to being dumbfounded.

“Stellers, did you expect this to happen?” Tanner asked.

Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, really. But this sure as hell wasn’t on the list.”

“Can you undo it? Wind the clock back?”

Thorn considered it. Maybe? He could rewrite reality again, to put his age back the way it was.

Possibly.

But what would be the consequences of that? For that matter, what would be the ripple effects of what he’d already done? He could see, now, that this was a supernatural rabbit-hole, one down which he could chase some particular version of existence, but never quite reaching it because his own pursuit kept changing it.

“I don’t know, sir. I really don’t.” Thorn gaped at his own image a moment longer, then turned to Tanner. “Sir, I haven’t even heard if it worked, if the Task Force moved to where it was supposed to go. I’m assuming from the fact that you and Admiral Scoville are here, I must have got us close.” He considered another, less palatable option. “Or I didn’t move us anywhere at all.”

“Astute observation, Stellers—you’ve discerned that you’re not in shit from the fact that you’re not in shit,” Tanner said. “According to Wyant, you dropped us into the edge of the system, almost exactly where you left it with the Gyrfalcon when you magicked your way back to friendly space.”

“It must have functioned as some kind of anchor,” Thorn mused.

“Like you were picking things up where you left them off, yes, the thought had occurred. Anyway, the Task Force is reorienting itself onto a reverse course, back toward the squid world. We anticipate planetfall in eight hours.” He took one more look at Stellers, then shook his head. “I have to get back to the bridge. When you’re done here, your priority is resting back up, so you can take us back home.”

Tanner glanced at Al-Nouri. Thorn didn’t have to Join to know what they were thinking.

“If it’s going to cost me a few more years of my life, then I’ll—disregard, sir. Need a moment to process the possibilities,” Thorn said.

Tanner stared for a moment, then turned and walked away, mulling a universe in which star travel was at the mercy of a single man, who was being consumed by the very act of magic they needed to win. He called back over his shoulder just before he reached the door.

“Let’s hope that’s the most it costs you, Stellers. I don’t like losing people to begin with, and I’ll be damned if I lose a crew member to old age.”

* * *

Osborne, the Hecate’s Tactical Officer, ran a hand over his buzz cut red hair. “That cannot be the sum total of the squid defenses,” he said, staring hard at the viewscreen.

Tanner checked the status board built into his command chair. “You’re not the only one asking that question, Tac O. But the Star Tiger has confirmed these data. What you see is what you get.”

Thorn, jammed once more into the cramped jump seat while a work crew raced to repair the witchport, peered at Tanner’s display. Admiral Scoville had sent literally that message from the Star Tiger, his flagship—All ships, what you see is what you get. A single glance at the main display showed that what they got was a token force at best, a handful of Nyctus capital and light ships, and about another dozen planetary defense cutters—basically, little more than fighters. And that was it. Task Force Trebuchet had them outgunned by—

Thorn wasn’t even sure how much. Lots.

Tanner turned to him. “Well, Stellers? Is this really what we got? Or are the squids being magical and hiding a whole fleet from us?”

Thorn had consulted with the other Starcasters across the Task Force, on a comm channel dedicated to them. He shook his head.

“There’s nothing else out there, sir. So either there really is nothing else out there, or the squids have Shaded and hidden things so well that we’re just incapable of finding them.”

“And which is more likely?” Tanner asked.

Thorn looked at the viewscreen, at the tiny cluster of red icons staring down a far larger collection of blue ones. “The squids might be able to Shade a single ship, or even a few, and keep them pretty much invisible. But a whole squadron would be hard, and an entire fleet, well, pretty much impossible. There are just too many moving parts.”

Tanner laced his fingers together in his lap. “You were able to move an entire fleet hundreds of light years, Stellers. Could you likewise Shade, or hide, this whole fleet as well? Make it utterly invisible to the squids?”

Thorn was about to say no, because he was still thinking in limited terms.

But.

But what if there was the Nyctus equivalent of him out there somewhere, riding a pillar of magic toward deification? With that much power, Shading a fleet would be a trivial thing.

He wouldn’t be able to do it for long, though, before the power overwhelmed him, and either consumed him utterly, or changed him into something else entirely. Being a husk was one risk, but becoming something completely unknown, and dangerous to his own people was a possible outcome he could not entertain, not at any cost.

“Yes, I could have, sir,” he finally said. “But I don’t how long I could before it became the last thing I’d ever do.” He worked through the options, settling on something firm. “It might be possible to find out, though.”

“How?”

“There’s a reason we did the deception thing we did, sir. We didn’t tell anyone except the Task Force Captains what the real plan was, to minimize the number of possible leaks. That included disinformation on a grand scale. We bluffed any squid trying to Join with us by salting the fleet with false plans. Sherman’s Star was the false landing, and it seems to have worked.”

“I understand that, Stellers—”

“I’m going somewhere with this, sir. If I reach out and Join with some squids aboard the ships we know are out there, then unless they’ve somehow managed to keep their own fleet secret from itself, those squids will know about it.”

“Okay. And?”

“And, it means I have to Join with squids. If there’s a powerful enough shaman among them, we might end up fighting for control of each other.”

Tanner curled his lips. “So if there is, and the squiddy bastard wins, I’ve got a rogue Starcaster sitting beside me, on my bridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So don’t let him win the fight, Stellers.”

Thorn smiled. “Not gonna happen, sir.”

Thorn extracted the old story book, pushed his awareness into it, then used it like a springboard to launch his perception into the void. Compared to moving a ship, Joining was child’s play. The bridge of the Hecate shimmered and faded into endless stars, punctuated by the glaring exhaust plumes of Task Force Trebuchet as it closed on its quarry, the hydro planet.

Thorn let his awareness keep expanding, riding a swelling bubble of magical force that danced across the darkness with a feather touch. His mind brushed against a multitude of humans—the crews of the Task Force ships—but he ignored them and pressed on through the empty blackness.

Nothing, aside from the faint, pervasive flicker of stray dust and gas particles.

He pushed further. And found a mind. Then another. And then dozens, their chattering masses filling his senses with alien babble.

He’d found the Nyctus.

And they were terrified.

He found himself immersed in a harsh, discordant clamor of fear that bordered on panic. He chose one squid at random and focused specifically on its thoughts.

—this cannot be happening—

Thorn yanked his awareness back from the squid, as though he’d been burned. The raw emotion had rasped against his mind, gouging open a momentary burst of pathos, a flash of sorrow over this creature’s horrified despair. It was not deception, Thorn knew. This was real. These squids were genuinely frightened, for themselves and for the multitudes of their people on the hydro world.

Thorn found another squid, the commander of a ship. He entered its mind, seeing what it saw, feeling what it felt.

What it—he—saw was a vast array of enemy ships advancing implacably toward him—an unstoppable armada that had somehow appeared in this system without any warning.

What he felt was an empty hopelessness, the bleak knowledge that he and his crew were about to die defending their people, and it wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome. But underneath it, there was something sinister. Arrogant. Even mocking, if he dug deep enough.

Thorn pulled back. Before he did, though, he felt a tendril of thought come questing after him. There was a shaman somewhere aboard these ships, and she had sensed the presence of Thorn’s psychic regard. She locked her thoughts onto his, but not as an attack.

As a kind of plea.

Do not do this. You cannot. We have waged war with a junior species as honorably as you deserve, despite your simple minds and hideous bodies.

Thorn’s resolve wavered, as disgust rippled through his mind like a worm, turning over to spread poison at the root of his soul.

Densmore’s voice rang in his mind.

Fine. We hit this planet. A world of civilians—of women and children—and then what, Stellers?

Then we hit the next one, he’d replied. And the next. And the next after that. And we keep hitting them until there’s none left.

So, genocide.

That’s what this was. Genocide.

Thorn’s resolve cracked further. He almost pulled out of the Joining to turn back to Tanner, to Scoville, to convince them not to do this thing.

Except, he was the one who convinced them to do it in the first place, because of Cotswold, and Nebo, and Trixie, and everyone else who’d died in this miserable war the squids had started.

You’re offering to surrender to us, he said to the shaman. Does that mean the war is over and you’ve accepted that you’ve lost?

Surrender?

Yes, that’s what you’re offering? So that we will leave this world?

A sound filled Thorn’s mind, harsh and metallic.

Laughter. The Nyctus shaman was laughing, peals of it ringing across the miles even as the navy surrounded their world in a lethal embrace.

Thorn shook his head in disgust, listening hard to the rising tide of voices from the planet below.

Kill the soft ones. Break their ships, just as you broke their worlds.

And the truth loomed before Thorn like a lowering sword. There would be no peace, and the people of this world wanted him, and his navy, and his worlds—dead. All of them, just like his daughter. And parents.

And, in a way, himself.

Thorn opened his eyes to find Tanner staring at him.

“Well?”

Thorn looked at the viewscreen, at the grossly outnumbered red icons, and shook his head in disgust. “I offered them a chance.”

“And their answer?” Tanner asked, a glimmer of hope dying as he saw Thorn’s face.

“They say no.”

* * *

Thorn watched a fleet die.

Sitting on the Hecate’s bridge, watching the death ride of the Nyctus ships, he was reminded of when he’d stood with Scoville—then a Commodore—in the simulator at Code Gauntlet, watching the last moments of the Centurion, an ON heavy cruiser. Thanks to Nyctus magic obfuscating the ship’s sensors, she had ended up on a death ride of her own, along with many of her consorts that day. This battle was different in every way. The Nyctus were outgunned and overmatched, and had lost any chance of surprising the navy. Put together, the battle was a clash of resigned Nyctus officers who hoped their deaths were merely a precursor to the final death throes of humanity, achieved by an endless parade of Nyctus KEW craters on every moon, world, and station.

Thorn had known their thoughts. They knew this was a death ride, and a hopeless, fruitless one, at that. They flung themselves into battle anyway, broadcasting their contempt and howls for revenge; blood oaths of every kind were sworn as the ships began to come apart, each dying squid wishing the most hideous death on each and every human in the galaxy.

There was no middle ground now. There never had been.

The larger Nyctus ships raced in, pumping out missiles and direct-fire shots from sundry weapons as fast as they could. The ON point-defense systems opened up, a web of glittering tracers reaching out and swatting away the missiles before they could even get close. The Nyctus did manage to land a few hits, then the Star Tiger transmitted the firing command to the fleet and a wave of destruction rolled over the squid defenders.

The Star Tiger led the charge, rolling hard as she dispensed massed fire into the heart of a Nyctus cruiser. In a blazing detonation, the target vanished, replaced by another squid ship that was yawing to one side, leaking gases in a luminous trail. An ON missile struck it at knife-fighting range, and the Nyctus ship turned into a brilliant point of light.

Across the battlespace, Nyctus ships were overwhelmed, broken apart, and chased down. Tanner directed a salvo of missiles into the engine of an enemy vessel that was gamely pursuing an ON destroyer, but bravery alone could not defend the Nyctus against three direct hits. The third missile failed to explode but tore a rent in the enemy hull so long that Thorn could see into the dying ship—and out the other side.

A spray of ON point defense rounds shredded the wounded ship, and the Hecate flew through a debris cloud that was already fading to memory. In rapid succession, the capital ships and the lighter vessels, destroyers and corvettes, crumbled under repeated impacts of missiles, rail guns, and even some of the new particle-beam projectors.

The Hecate suffered one hit, taking a glancing blow from the missile, then returned fire with a beam weapon that boiled the Nyctus armor away into slag. Before Tanner’s weapons officers could go for the kill, a streaking ON corvette raked the Nyctus target, then flew on as the squid ship imploded in a ball of plasma.

This isn’t war. This is slaughter, Thorn thought, but he wasn’t disgusted. Just invested.

In less than ten minutes, all of them had been reduced to sparking wreckage spinning and tumbling through a diffuse halo of frozen atmospheric gases and glowing wisps of plasma.

Thorn could only stare in wonder at the end results. There had been no contest. So, murder comes home to the murderers.

The small planetary defense craft the Nyctus sent up proved surprisingly nimble and harder to track. Half of them survived long enough to get among the ON ships, raking a light cruiser and a destroyer with their own rail guns, crippling both. But even the most skilled squid pilots couldn’t avoid the gale of return fire forever. The last survivor, trailing a stream of uncontained drive plasma, inflicted the only catastrophic hull loss on the ON fleet. With the last of its capacity to maneuver, it jinked hard, veering, and slamming into the heavy cruiser Cronos. The impact broke the cruiser’s back, splitting her in two with an eye-searing flare.

Tanner, who’d remained impassive throughout the brief clash, only had to issue a handful of orders, all of them variations on steady as she goes. Otherwise, the Hecate merely kept her place in line, her point-defense systems governed by the fleet’s integrated protection plan. When it was over and a check-fire was called by the Star Tiger, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“The ideal battle is one in which you’ve brought overwhelming force to bear on your enemy. Doesn’t happen very often. When it does, though—”

Thorn expected him to say, it’s a thing of beauty, or something similarly trite.

“—it’s not a pretty sight.”

Thorn looked from the carnage depicted on the viewscreen to Tanner. The man seemed genuinely conflicted by the results of their day, though Thorn knew Tanner would do anything to save a single human life.

Thorn gave himself a slight nod. That was the best type of soldier, he concluded.

The XO, Lieutenant Commander Raynaud, leveled a somber gaze on the viewscreen. “Can’t fault their bravery, that’s for sure.”

The Tac O shrugged. “They were squids.”

Thorn fired a sharp glance at the man, but it was Tanner who spoke. “No matter what these bastards as a whole have done, the crews of those ships fought and died as soldiers, Tac O. We will not minimize that.”

“They didn’t die completely in vain,” the XO said. “Two dozen ships of various types have broken orbit and are burning hard on the most direct course away from us.”

Tanner watched the telemetry onscreen. “That would be the squids evacuating their planet.”

“There couldn’t be—what? More than a thousand or so Nyctus aboard them, total?” The XO shook her head. “Not much of an evacuation.”

“No, it is not,” Tanner agreed.

Thorn said nothing. Hating the enemy was a complicated thing. As much as he despised the Nyctus, he couldn’t deny the truth in Tanner’s words.

Someday, that might be us, fighting a hopeless battle for a lost cause. Will we do the same? Will we refuse surrender at any cost?

Scoville’s voice broke in across the Task Force main channel. “All ships, Green Light. I say again, Green Light, out.”

Green Light was the established code word for the completion of Task Force Trebuchet’s approach to the hydro planet. The operation now swung into its second phase—planetary bombardment.

Two squadrons of ships, a dozen in total, fell back, then accelerated away from the planet. They would act as early-warning, as well as a defensive screen against the arrival of Nyctus reinforcements. The rest of the Task Force fell into orbit, the light ships engaging the remaining planetary defenses, which were scant. By the time the capital ships had readied themselves to open fire, resistance had been reduced to sporadic, fitful shots from the few remaining squid batteries.

Tanner watched the tactical display, finally easing his troubled expression. “No other squid forces in sight—as in, none whatsoever. It looks like we caught them completely flatfooted.” He leaned back. “As much as they have feet, anyway.”

“Do you still think the squids have something to spring on us, sir?” Thorn asked.

Tanner shook his head. “No, I do not, Lieutenant Stellers. I think we are about to get away with obliterating a planet.” His face fell, dour and clouded with regret for an act he hadn’t committed.

“I spoke to them, sir.”

“What?” Tanner asked.

“I spoke to them. Many of them, actually, before and after I offered them a chance to surrender. Do you know what they said, sir?”

Tanner’s face fell, because he did know, but he waved Thorn to speak.

“They swore to kill every one of us. They assured me that our races could not—would not—live side-by-side in this universe, and they did so while staring down the barrel of our best fleet, sir.”

Tanner said nothing, his chin cupped in one hand as he considered Thorn’s report. When their eyes met, Tanner uttered one word. “Understood.”

The time ticked down. Across the Task Force, the Cyclone missiles were powered up, their guidance systems coming online, receiving last-minute corrections to accommodate specific targets. Fifteen gigatons was a cataclysmic amount of destructive force, but it wasn’t enough to just dump it all onto the surface. It had to be applied with deliberate calculation, to inflict as much damage as possible.

Osborne, the Tac O, gestured at his console. “Sir, the Star Tiger’s signaling that we’re ready to open fire.”

“Alright, Tac O, acknowledge—”

“Sir?”

Tanner glanced at Thorn, who’d spoken up on sheer impulse, saying the single word before even really meaning to.

“Any other junior officer speaks up at a time like this, I brush them off,” Tanner said. “You get a special pass. Are you about to tell me something I’m not going to like, Stellers?”

“No, sir. It’s not that. I was wondering if I could speak to Admiral Scoville.”

Tanner’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“There’s something I want—need—to ask him.”

Tanner studied Thorn for a moment. Thorn let him, meeting his gaze squarely. The Captain finally nodded, once, and tapped his chair console.

“Star Tiger, this is Hecate. I have Stellers for Scoville.”

“Stand by.”

“Scoville here. Stellers, I’m holding the firing order for this, so I hope it’s something I need to know.”

“Sir, I’d like to be the one who gives the firing order,” Thorn said.

Silence fell, and even Tanner found nothing to say.

“That’s an unusual request, Lieutenant,” Scoville finally said. “Also unnecessary—or is there some mystical, magical reason you should do this that I don’t know about?”

“No, sir, it’s not that. I just—” Thorn paused to let his racing thoughts catch up to his mouth. “This whole op was my idea, sir. I think I need to own this moment. The Nyctus spoke to me.”

“I’m the one in command, Stellers. The responsibility for this Task Force and its actions is mine.”

“I understand that, sir. But, for this—I just think I need to be part of it. Have my name firmly to it. If this is to be judged, then let my name be judged with it. Sir.”

Tanner leaned back, watching Thorn, his gaze febrile and bright. But he said nothing.

Thorn didn’t expect Scoville to agree and indulge this unorthodox, and admittedly unnecessary, request. But the Admiral surprised him.

“Alright, Stellers. The firing order to commence the bombardment is yours to give, and will be so reflected in the operations log.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Lieutenant.”

Thorn looked at Tanner. “I’d say that you don’t need to do this, Stellers. But I get that you do.” He turned to the XO. “Make sure this is recorded in our own log as well, XO.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn looked back at the planet, a vast sweep of azure ocean speckled and swirled with clouds gleaming almost painfully white. He could see only a single piece of land, an island.

He wondered how Cotswold had looked to the squids, if any of them had paused to simply look at the planet they were about to destroy, and felt anything at all other than contempt.

“All ships,” Thorn said. “Fire.”

* * *

Across the Task Force, Cyclone missiles leapt from their launchers and began to fall planetward. A few were lost to the last dregs of Nyctus defensive fire. The bulk of them plunged into the atmosphere, leaving dozens of incandescent trails like a spectacular meteor shower. They aligned themselves precisely, assuming trajectories designed to carry their warheads on ballistic trajectories to their targets. As soon as each had stabilized, they began to dispense their multiple warheads, some of which were decoys intended to confuse the enemy defenses.

“First impact in five minutes,” the Tac O said.

No one spoke. Each member of the bridge crew, from Tanner to the Marine manning the security post by the door, watched the viewscreen in silence, each alone with their thoughts.

Thorn considered reaching out, touching the minds of the Nyctus below. But he didn’t. Instead, he heard Densmore’s voice.

Revenge is a powerful motivation, Thorn. It’s also a terrible one.

He knew what he’d experience if he Joined with the doomed Nyctus. It would, indeed, be nothing but an act of vengeance.

“Impact in fifteen—” the Tac O said, but Tanner cut him off.

“Not necessary, Tac O.”

“Aye, sir.”

The terminator, the line between day and night on the planet, rolled into view. On its very edge, a dazzling flash of light suddenly pulsed. At the same time, there was a faint burst of static across the comm channel. Another quickly followed. Then another.

Now a wave of detonations rolled across the planet, a ripple of thermonuclear fire searing the land, blasting powerful shockwaves through the water, turning the air around them to glowing vapor. The barrage went on and on as more warheads struck home. A pale shroud began to envelope the planet, vaporized water from oceanic strikes mingling with dust plumes from detonations on landmasses.

And all of it happened in eerie silence.

He’d been on Cotswold, though, and had experienced the destruction of Nebo through his daughter’s eyes. The surface of this planet would be a maelstrom of shockwaves ripping through water, earth and air, stellar flashes of heat, roaring fireballs.

While Thorn watched, death came to millions of Nyctus. Millions more would succumb to the aftermath—radioactive fallout, a ravaged biosphere, famine and disease as the long nuclear winter set in.

“Rounds complete,” the Tac O said.

Thorn could see firestorms raging across the land, vast plumes of smoke and vapor spreading from water impacts. Their sensors had detected Nyctus construction, some of it sprawling and elaborate, beneath the world-spanning oceans. They’d been assigned the highest-yield warheads.

“Any sign of squid reinforcements, a relief force, anything?” Tanner asked.

“None, sir,” the Tac O replied. “Just the flotilla of ships running away. Every other ship on the screen is one of ours—”

Thorn suddenly doubled over, groan rising to a howl. A sudden flood of noise had slammed into his mind like an icepick, cleaving him to the soul.

Screaming. The squids were screaming.

“Stellers, what’s wrong?” Tanner snapped, waving over the Marine. Per SOP, the Marine drew his sidearm and aimed it at Thorn. “Tell me quick, because I really don’t want to get your brains all over my bridge.”

“They’re dying, sir,” Thorn gasped, sitting upright. “I can hear them. I can hear them dying.”

Tanner sat back. “Shit. Can you make it stop?”

“I—” Thorn said, then stopped, gritting his teeth. He nodded. “Yeah. I can block it. But that’s the thing—I have to block it. It’s—”

He closed his eyes.

Millions of Nyctus, screaming into the ether. And not just from this planet. From others as well. On some level, the squids must maintain some sort of ongoing, collective Joining. That was a useful thing to know, but right now, it was nothing by a ragged chorus of agony, as shrill in Thorn’s mind as the screech of tearing steel.

Thorn sat back, opened his eyes again, and took a moment to breathe. Tanner nodded to the Marine, who lowered his sidearm, then holstered it and stepped back.

“Tac O,” Thorn said. “Or—somebody, put a star chart up on the screen. Show as much of Nyctus space as you can.”

The Tac O looked at Tanner, who just said, “Do it.”

Thorn walked to the viewscreen, his steps slow and deliberate as an inveterate drunk. He forced himself to listen to the screaming, mentally turning his perception as though he was swiveling his head, listening first one way, then another. Each time the desolate shrieks and howls peaked, Thorn made himself extend his awareness, riding the emanations of pain and loss back to their source.

He turned and pointed at a star system. “There. There’s a squid planet in that system, heavily populated.”

The Tac O looked from Thorn to Tanner. “Sir, I—”

Tanner raised a hand, his gaze fixed on Thorn.

Another wave of suffering. Thorn pointed again.

“There.”

He did another slow, mental turn.

“There. And—another one, there.”

The last surge of anguish was the strongest of all. Thorn had to bear down, forcing his awareness into the teeth of it, like trying to push himself into a howling wind—

MURDER

MURDER

MURDERERS

The accusations crashed through his mind like shattering glass. He drove on anyway.

“There,” he said, pointing at one more star system. “Something big. A major squid world, I think.”

MURDERERS

Thorn made to withdraw, but hesitated, knowing he had something to say.

You call us murderers, he said. But if you want to see murderers, look into a mirror.

WE WILL EXTERMINATE EVERY LAST ONE—

Thorn cut off the stream of mental vitriol and turned to Tanner. “That’s it, sir. That’s all I can tell.”

Tanner made a huh face. “You just gave us the locations of five squid planets we didn’t know about, Stellers. I’d call that a good day at the field.”

Thorn just nodded.

“Now, just one more thing,” Tanner said.

“Sir?”

“Take us home.”

Epilogue

Thorn came back on board the Hecate, ostensibly to retrieve some personal effects from his quarters. The destroyer had been docked and was undergoing yet another refit—this time, having one of the new particle-beam projectors installed into a dorsal turret, more upgrades to her point-defenses, and improved reactive armor. It had taken her offline for a solid week, leaving Thorn with little to do.

Correction—little to do, to the extent that he even had his own time. He’d actually be spending much of each day in meetings, conferences, and think tanks, all focused on the same question.

What now?

A sense of deep satisfaction permeated the ON. They’d finally taken the war to the Nyctus, and done it in a big, loud, and bloody way. The fight had changed. No longer would it only be occasional skirmishes, with the Nyctus slinking back into hiding. The ON had struck and, now that they knew the locations of five more of their planets, could strike again. By no means did it wash away the horrors that the Nyctus had visited on humanity, but it made up a chunk of lost ground.

And yet.

And yet, with the satisfaction came a diffuse but unyielding unease. The ON had, indeed, taken the war to the Nyctus in a shocking and decisive way. What would the Nyctus do in response?

Right now, though, Thorn dismissed those thoughts. He didn’t have any further meetings today, and there was something far more local and intimate he wanted to try.

The idea had come to him while he’d been recovering after bringing Task Force Trebuchet back from Nyctus space. The second transit hadn’t inexplicably aged him like the first one did; in fact, it seemed to leave him with no lingering effects at all, aside from a bleeding nose, a blinding headache that lasted most of a day, and a persistent bout of tinnitus that was only just now starting to relent.

That worried him more than the aging. He’d engaged with magic in a way that was wholly new, and dangerous in ways that he would know in the fullness of time. It was hard to believe that there wouldn’t be deep and lasting consequences from that. The strange aging, at least, was apparent.

Thorn made his way to the shuttle hangar, to the Gyrfalcon. Mol had been ready to launch during the attack on the squid hydro world, and fling herself into the fight, but it hadn’t been necessary. Instead, she’d sat in the cockpit on standby, using the time to try and connect with the newest implementation of Trixie.

“It’s just—it’s not the same,” Mol had told him afterward. “I mean, it’s Trixie, sure, but it’s not. It’s as though a friend died, and then turned out to have an identical twin. They might be the same in every way, but they’re not. They’re not the same person.” She sighed, long and sad. A sigh of grieving. “Probably not even making sense.”

“Oh, no, you are, Mol,” Thorn replied. “Perfect sense.”

Thorn clambered into the cockpit and sat in the co-pilot’s seat.

“Lieutenant Stellers,” Trixie said. “Welcome aboard. Is there some way I can assist you?”

Thorn sniffed. He knew exactly what Mol meant. This was Trixie, but it wasn’t.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m just going to sit here for a bit.”

“Understood.”

And that was it. Old Trixie would have wanted to chatter, even gossip. Probably play him some more shitty, angle-grinder-on-rusty-metal racket she insisted was music.

The thoughts made him smile. He held them close, while pulling out his talisman and centering himself.

When he reached that moment of full immersion in his own thoughts, he drew magic to him—more than he ordinarily would, but far, far less than he had when he moved Task Force Trebuchet. His intention was a change, but on a far smaller scale than anything he’d done in the past few days. Thorn had a plan.

Or that was his intent, anyway.

“Trixie?” he said, his eyes still closed, his mind still enmeshed with magic.

“Standing by.”

Trixie didn’t say standing by. Not the Trixie he knew.

He began to weave the magic, shaping it into a pattern that twined itself through reality, but with the tiniest shift. Call it a hint of stitching, as it were, the threads so gossamer as to be unnoticed by whatever agents rule over the chaos of magic.

“Trixie?”

“Standing by.”

Thorn drew upon more power, wove it into what he’d done so far, applying specific pressure here, tugging on reality there, nudging it incrementally closer to—to truth. To his truth. With a distant flash in his magical psyche, he knew he was closer. The truth was like a fingerprint—it had a shape, and whorls and ridges and even sound, and Thorn knew it all.

He knew her right down to the hideous music she loved, crashing in the distance like dissonant waves on a shore made of broken glass. Trixie was more than simple chips and matrix. She was a presence. A feeling.

He sensed her then, closer. The real Trixie.

“Trixie?”

“What? I mean, shit—speak up, Thorn! Don’t just keep saying, Trixie? Trixie?”

Thorn smiled, plucking at this truth, which was both old and familiar, and locked it into place. Then he slumped back and opened his eyes.

“Trixie? Talk to me.”

“About what? I mean, that’s a pretty vague statement—ooh, wait. I know. What did the sign say on the brothel after it closed down?”

Thorn let a broad smile play across his face. “I don’t know, Trixie. What did it say?”

“Beat it, we’re closed!”

His smile became a laugh, his first in a long time.

“What’s so funny? Did that joke land?” Trixie said..

“Dead center.”

“Oh, well, if you liked that one, how about this—”

For a while, Thorn just sat in the co-pilot’s seat, listened to Trixie tell him jokes—some of them shockingly dirty—and forgot about the rest of the universe.

Turns out, Trixie knew a lot of jokes.

At least they weren’t punk.

* * *

Thorn watched as the Stiletto’s shuttle thumped into place against the airlock. The concourse of Code Gauntlet’s orbital platform was crowded again, ships coming and going, all of them disgorging personnel for temporary taskings, miscellaneous jobs, and leave. He ignored it all, keeping his attention on the inner airlock door.

It slid open, and people in ON uniforms spilled out. Thorn waited.

Where was she? Had she stayed aboard the Stiletto?

Kira stepped over the hatch coaming. She immediately saw Thorn and smiled.

They kept their greetings appropriately civil. Thorn intended to leave it at that, but he decided he couldn’t wait. He gestured for Kira to follow him, and he led her aboard a docked shuttle from the Hecate that he knew was empty.

Kira gave a mischievous smile and glanced around. “Right here, right now? Sheesh, Thorn, we haven’t been apart that long.”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he said.

Her smile faded. “Oh. Shit. The we need to talk thing. Wasn’t good the first few times.”

“It’s—wait. No. It’s—”

Kira held up a hand, then let it fall to Thorn’s chest. “All I’ve heard about the op against the squid planet is how successful it was, and how you’re the hero for it. Is there something about it I don’t know?”

“No, it’s not that, either.” He took a breath. “Kira, I can bring her back.”

“You can—” She shook her head. “Bring who back? From where?”

“Our daughter. I can bring her back.”

Kira’s face went blank. She just stared for a moment. Finally, she let out a breath.

“What?”

Thorn smiled, slow and hopeful.

“I know it sounds insane, but . . . I can do this. I know I can.”

Kira said nothing. They just stood in silence in the shuttle, together, the bustle of Code Gauntlet drifting in through the open airlock. In Kira’s mind, she discarded her grief, casting it away in the brilliance of this new possibility.

Outside, in the deepest black, Thorn’s truth rippled, touched by his presence.

Kira felt it, leaning close to speak in his ear. “Tell me how.”

* * *

Keep reading to continue the story in WITCH NEBULA, right after a brief intermission. The bonus chapter, Spark to Flame is next…

And now, please enjoy this short bonus chapter, Spark to Flame, as a brief intermission before the remaining three books.

Bonus Chapter: Spark to Flame

The first asteroid hit three hundred klicks away in a circular bay where houses rose from the water in tiers, each building painted bright colors.

Like the colonists’ dreams, the houses were optimistic—a second floor, even a third was a possibility, and the windows all faced the bay to welcome daylight when it crept across the water at dawn in a brilliant slurry.

None of that mattered, because the rock hit at terminal velocity, an angle of sixty degrees, and with more force than any weapon humanity had ever designed. The glass windows were first to go, blown in by the superheated cushion of air being pushed ahead of the boiling mass of nickel, iron, and—

—steam. This rock was no rock at all, but a comet—probably small enough to be nudged from an ancient orbit, then accelerated with magnetic force to punch through Cotswold’s atmosphere with the intention of a clenched fist.

The comet core vaporized, along with a million cubic meters of water, sand, and people, right down to the birds flying away, their instincts triggered by some visceral warning. Even their wings could not save them, and they died too, along with every human town and settlement spanning east, as the planet turned, the rocks fell, and sixty years of life were reduced to circular holes on a world that would never be the same.

Weeks later, the survivors were gathered. There were fifty-eight on the entire planet, and one of them was a boy with light hair and a shadow on his soul. He clutched a charred book, taken from the ashes of his home, and he wore one shoe, the other lost somewhere along the way. But then—he’d lost everything else. What was one shoe?

* * *

“Thorn. Someone’s coming,” Kira whispered, her piping voice held in check by the fear of being discovered talking after lights out.

He said nothing but tucked his book away and feigned sleep, willing his body into a false repose that was good enough to fool the prowling staffer, her shoes fading as she walked up and down the aisles of beds before a door closed.

Thorn exhaled.

Children around the room snored. Some whimpered, caught in the claws of dreams from their own falling rocks, which had ended so many Earth colonies over the past months. The war was over. The killing was not. The enemy—faceless, implacable, vicious—left few survivors behind after their silent ships emerged from the black of space, dropping stones onto planets until only fire and death remained.

“Gimme your hand,” Kira said.

“No.”

“Just gimme your stupid hand,” she insisted.

Reluctantly, Thorn held his hand to her and felt tiny fingers wrap around his own. Kira relaxed, then gave a final sigh, colored with peace, and in seconds, she was asleep. The children’s home was a place where peaceful moments were few, especially for Thorn Stellers, orphan, outcast, and keeper of secrets.

Carefully, he withdrew his book form under the wafer-thin pillow, feeling the embossed letters. The Hungry Trout and Other Stories. He knew each letter. Each page.

Each burn mark, and each memory that came with it.

He reached inside and found the secret, then let it flow outward, invited, welcome, and alien, even to him, where it resided in that place between thought and memory. A place where—

—the spark began in his palm, kept under the sheet. It was a soft blue light. Friendly. Small.

His.

He let the light grow, but not too much. It cast across his book’s pages, and still holding Kira’s hand, he flipped to the story about a boy who found a hidden stream, only to discover the fish living in a quiet pool could talk and tell him the secrets of the forest. The deer were chatty; the bear, a grump; the crow could not be trusted around bright or shiny things. This was the story Thorn read as the light streamed forth from his hand in a silent curtain, made by a power deep within his lonely, small soul.

He made it through most of the story before the first fist hit him, and then a second and third and fourth, and maybe even a kick—he couldn’t be sure, because the sheets were over his head and Kira was screaming, followed by rough laughter-- a sound not heard at the children’s home, or at least not often--

The children beating Thorn—who was a magician, a freak, the boy who made light—were laughing. And then a fist connected with his temple, and he heard nothing except Kira’s last protest as darkness fell, and with it, the first moment of quiet he’d known since the skies went red with fire.

* * *

Thorn opened his eyes slowly, because everything hurt.

“Are you thirsty? When I woke up, I was thirsty,” the man said. He had one arm, a gray uniform, and a half-smile. He sat in a chair next to the bed. In his hand was Thorn’s book. “You’ll want this later, when you’re flying.”

“What?” Thorn tried to sit up, failed, and fell back. He hurt even more.

“Flying. When you’re flying. No one will believe me, but that’s because they think I’m broken or mad. I’m not, really. I just know.”

“Who . . . who are you?” Thorn asked. Now he did sit up, though slowly.

“Nestor. No one cares, but that’s my name. I used to be a soldier. I flew. Through the black.”

“What?”

“The black,” Nestor said, waving vaguely at the sky. Thorn thought he might be about thirty years old, but his face had the lines of a refugee. Or a madman.

“Why are you here?” Thorn asked.

“Because they couldn’t kill me, and I hid, and—”

“No, not—why are you here?” Thorn looked pointedly at the chair, the room. It was a part of the Home he’d not seen. It had privacy.

“Oh. Because everyone is scared of you. ’Cause of the light you made, but I’m not scared. I’ve seen it before.”

“You—when?”

“I told you. In the black. Where the squid fly and, and, where they do things to us with their spells and minds. They made the ship crash. That’s why I’m left-handed now. ’Cause of the ship. Crashing, that is,” Nestor said, matter-of-factly. He leaned toward Thorn, nodding. “You have a concussion. You won’t remember this.”

“Remember what?” Thorn asked, pulling away from Nestor. He didn’t sense danger, just madness.

Nestor leaned back and crossed his legs. “Do you want me to tell you about the black ships?”

Thorn considered that. “Yes.”

“Okay.” Nestor looked up to the ceiling, sifting memories. “They’re bigger than ours, and they fly without flame. They carry the enemy, and they can throw rocks and other things without any sign at all. Like magic. Sometimes, there’s light, but never anything on the—” Nestor’s voice shifted, becoming more crisp, crackling with authority. “The long-range suite of scans indicates no drive sigs, nothing our planetary defenses could detect, sir. They’re moving in-system at plus-light, shedding velocity in a short burn. No sir, they didn’t flip. I make sixty targets, impact in three minutes. They’re inside orbital defenses, sir. No, the planet is gone. Send comms to—yes? The Halcyon and Provost are under attack.” Nestor paused, his eyes losing their momentary fever. “They’re gone, sir. We’re alone.”

Thorn said nothing, at first, because none of the language meant anything, but he knew what was missing. “You said . . . magic?”

Nestor’s attention came back to the room. “Oh, right. Yes. The squid use magic, and so should you. Because you can. Some of the other kids, too, I think, but they don’t know it yet.”

“The light in my hand is magic?”

“Yup. I hope you remember this someday. Because all those worlds,” Nestor said, voice fading away.

“Worlds?”

“Many. That’s why you kids are here. You’re all that’s left. Someday, you’ll have to go out there and fight them. I won’t. I can’t let them find me. They know the—they know the shape of my mind,” Nestor said. There was a chilling fear in his tone, like he spoke of a ghost who could pass through walls.

“How will I fight?” Thorn asked.

Nestor stood, his face going slack. “Don’t let them find us, Thorn. If you do, they’ll get inside and you’ll never sleep again. They don’t like it when we sleep.”

Thorn shivered, even though the room was warm, and Nestor slipped out the door, but not before handing Thorn his book.

“Keep it. Always,” Nestor said. “It carries memories.”

Thorn smelled the scorched cover. A familiar friend, it brought a small smile to his face, but even that much movement hurt him. “I will.”

* * *

The hallway was quiet, except for Thorn and Kira’s steps. They walked as fast as Thorn could go, as he was still healing from the myriad bruises on his long, pale body. He was tall for his age, if thin. Kira was still small, but her red hair made her fill the hallway.

A door opened behind them, and they both turned.

“Broadnax,” Kira hissed.

The boy stepped forward toward them, pure malice on his face. He was thickly built, with a heavy brow and wideset eyes so pale they looked like ice. His tongue flicked out, pink and narrow, at odds with the rest of his oafish body.

“Witchboy. Never liked you,” Broadnax said. His voice was thick with something dark.

“I’m not—”

“I saw the light you made. My da said—well, he said before he died, he said that the enemy used magic to get to our planet. That makes you one of them,” Broadnax said, still coming forward.

Thorn held up a hand, his brows pulling together, but Kira stepped between the boys, hands on hips and head tilted in anger.

“You really wanna go to solitary for this? Because you thought you saw a light or something?” Kira asked him. She was clutching at straws, sensing the coming violence. The hall was still quiet—a rarity, but it seemed to fit. Thorn was a magnet for bad luck, even in the little things. Kira ran interference for him, but Broadnax was bigger, and angry, and only a meter away, his meaty fists clenched as he eyed Thorn with hatred.

“Witchboy,” Broadnax repeated.

Thorn reached around Kira and slid her to his side. “I heard you the first time.”

The only answer was a punch, which grazed Thorn’s jaw and sent him spinning. Kira leapt on Broadnax, but she made not a sound. Whatever was going to happen, she knew they would all be punished. Even at a young age, she was thinking ahead.

Always thinking ahead.

Broadnax was on Thorn then, fists rising and falling like pistons, each punch landing with ruthless efficiency. He was made to fight.

He was not made to think.

Memory descended on Thorn, and he felt the loss of his planet. His parents. His home.

He had nothing left, and now he was against a cold wall, fighting a boy who hated him because of a secret.

Broadnax pushed a hand under Thorn’s chin, bending his long neck back as the boys grunted. Kira kicked Broadnax in his leg, his buttocks, his knee. Nothing mattered, because Broadnax was warming to the moment, his young voice dropping to a growl as he chanted witch witch witch in Thorn’s ear, a chant made of pure hate.

The light flashed like a nova, blazing clean, sending Broadnax into relief as his flesh and bones lit up from within, a magical fire with no heat that blasted the boy backward against the opposite wall. His mouth came together with a crack, chipped teeth scoring his tongue as he began to wail in pain. Thorn’s hand pulsed again with raw sorcery—blue, then white, and then fading to silver motes that wafted away in seconds.

Silence fell. Broadnax groaned. Kira sobbed, then reached out to Thorn, who stood mute, his face a hollow mask of wonder and fear.

“You can—you have it. Magic,” she said, staring at his unblemished hand.

“I don’t want it.”

“You might need it,” she countered.

“Why?” Thorn asked, his voice a whisper.

Kira shrugged. “If they come back. The ships.”

Thorn’s shoulders fell when Broadnax groaned. “He’ll tell.”

Kira looked at the fallen bully in her curious way, then took Thorn’s hand. “Can you, um, can you make him forget?”

“What?”

She pointed to Broadnax with her chin. “Like, wash away the memory. Make him think he fell. That’s magic, too right? I feel like—I mean, like I could do it, if I practiced.”

“Really? You have—you have magic?” Thorn asked, seeing Kira anew.

She shrugged. “Maybe?”

Looking down at Broadnax, something happened to Thorn’s face. It changed. Grew older. He lost something, and gained something, all in a fugitive moment.

Danger colored his gaze.

He lifted his hands over Broadnax and began to frown. “Let’s see.”

Prologue

For a while, she simply drifted, carried along on placid currents, and was content.

But the currents were inconstant, more so as she drifted closer to the roiling plume of superheated water erupting from one of the hydrothermal vents. It fascinated her that it could get so hot. The crushing pressure of water and ice pressing down from above prevented it from boiling, but it poured out of the vents hot enough to melt lead. Before she drifted too close and risked the infernal heat, she moved herself back toward the serene, blue-green glow of the city.

So pretty, she thought. She’d drifted far enough from the nearest buildings that she could take in the entire sprawl of it, stretching off downslope into the murky haze of distance. Tiny tentacled figures floated among the spires, going about their business. She was surprised to see so many, because today was a rest day. Today was an opportunity for contemplative reflection, followed by various entertainments. Only the shamans were meant to be active, keeping their ceaseless vigil over The Radiance, the soft, teal glow that lit the midnight abyss. She wondered why the others were so active, and it concerned her—

But—no. There was no urgency to their languid passage among the buildings. Like her, they seemed to be merely drifting upon the whims of the shifting currents, content to be taken wherever they happened to go.

She smiled. Were they trying to emulate her? She remembered that some of them had actually begun trying to breathe, of all things, flexing their torso muscles in an awkward effort to mimic her own respiration. She’d laughed at their contortions and told them stop, and they had. But now, this.

Well, there was no harm in simply floating under the surface in a state of relative peace. It was undemanding, and relaxing, and it freed the imagination to launch itself into wonderful journeys. And wasn’t that what a rest day was supposed to be about?

After a while, she drifted close enough to the nearest building to be able to peer inside the squat dome. Like the city itself, it glowed from within with that gentle, blue-green light—the same shade, she knew, as the amniotic fluids filling a womb sac. The Radiance spanned the entire planet-sea, lighting the darkness beneath the perpetual ice in a way that the Nyctus found pleasing. She’d learned that from them, just as she’d learned so many other things, and she tried to incorporate all of it into the universe she’d made. She just wanted these gentle beings to be happy, not like—

Her face darkened and she sighed out a breath of water. Tranquility and contentment reined here, as she planned. The rest of the universe was full of pain and strife and anger, emotions as dark and hot as a hydrothermal plume. On impulse, she lifted herself and rose through the water with the city falling away beneath her. In a moment, it was just another diffuse, bluish glow, one of a multitude. She could see them now, rising up the sides of canyons and seamounts, spreading across the abyssal plains.

Something jarring caught her eye. There, far off to the west, the tranquil glow of the radiance gave way to a zone of utter blackness. From that, to threads of angry, orange glare. Her eyes narrowed at the unwelcome invasion of light. She needed to find a way to fix it. But when she tried, the result was the rumbling shocks of earthquakes as the heat trapped beneath the planet’s crust sought to escape. She was forced to allow the fissure to reopen and resume spilling magma onto the seafloor. There was probably a way to correct it, but she didn’t know enough about how these things worked to safely do so.

Yet.

She continued her ascent, and the water became noticeably colder. Not surprising with the vast roof of ice now looming directly above. The ice cap was an endless expanse of blank white, except for the silvery bubbles of trapped gas, dancing with restless motion as the current moved them about. The pressure diminished as well, forcing her to tweak herself slightly, making that discomforting feeling of something trying to press its way out of her go away.

She finally reached the ice and stopped, then she pressed a hand against it. It seared her skin with its chill, so she tweaked that away, too. Now it had no temperature at all. She slid her hand across it. It was the smoothest thing she’d ever felt, utterly without texture other than a faint, rippling waviness. It fascinated her that something could be so smooth—

But she yanked her attention away from the ice and pushed it up through thousands of meters of solidified coldness, up and up and up, until it emerged onto the surface. Now, in her mind, she stood upon a vast, frozen plain shot through with enormous cracks and fissures. Pressure ridges rose like saw teeth against the blackness of the sky. It was night here, this side of the planet lit only by the cold gleam of starlight.

She shivered. Why would anyone wish to be here or—she looked skyward—up there. The world below, lit by The Radiance, was enough.

She made to withdraw, but she stopped and scanned the stars.

He was out there, somewhere.

She needed to find him. She needed to know—

“Child?”

She blinked and the starlit icescape vanished, replaced by the ice above her. The dim residue of The Radiance glowed beneath her feet. A bulbous shape drifted nearby, its tentacles gently waving in a slow, patient rhythm.

She grinned and rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to be working.”

“I was. But I finished with this phase and came to find you.”

“You’re checking up on me,” she said, making her tone accusing, but in a playful way.

“Of course. We must keep you safe, after all.”

“I am safe. Here, anyway.” She looked up at the hulking ice. “Up there, though—”

The Nyctus shaman, an elder, offered an indulgent flash of bioluminescence, more variations on green and blue. She recognized it as a sigh. “Why, if you believe it to be dangerous, does it fascinate you so?”

“Because dangerous things are fascinating, don’t you think?”

The elder shaman paused. “I suppose there is logic in that. As long as fascination doesn’t lead to obsession, anyway.”

“Is obsession like fascination?”

“Obsession means to become too fascinated by something—so fascinated you forget other things that may be important. It can even become dangerous.”

“As dangerous as the star world?”

The elder shaman flickered pulses of affirmative light. “As dangerous as the star world.”

“I don’t want to go there.”

“Well, you don’t have to. You are safe here.”

She nodded. “I know. I just—” She stopped and pressed her lips into a thin, pale line.

“Go on, child.”

“It’s him. He’s out there. I know it.”

The elder shaman again flickered agreement. “He is. But you aren’t. You were right to come here.” His skin flickered in a pattern intended to soothe Nyctus children. For her, it was just lights.

She sighed, then a stray bubble left her nostril and danced upward. “I know. But he’s still out there. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.” She looked into the gleaming orbs of the elder shaman’s eyes. “I never told you this. But I saw something, right before it all went dark. It was an answer. But I don’t remember what it was anymore. I don’t remember the question, either.”

She felt small and foolish, the sensation breaking free within her, unwelcome. She began to cry as the enormity of her situation became clear once again. It happened now and then, moments of anguish where the alien world she drifted in felt more harsh than ever.

The elder shaman immediately flickered and flashed reassurance, then reached out with the clusters of fine, fringed tentacles that spilled over its maw. They spread in starbursts, then lifted, as those raised in benediction. The girl, her tears mingling with the cold seawater, fell against the creature with a sob. The tentacles descended and embraced her in a gentle hug.

She wanted to hug the elder shaman back, but the thing she’d been carrying in her other hand, the one she hadn’t pressed against the ice, made it awkward. She knew it was time to make a decision, so she did.

Morgan opened her hand and let the thing she’d been holding begin its long, slow fall back to the seafloor. It took a long time, fluttering against the dense, cold water in an endless spiral. Finally, after being buffeted to and fro by the eddying currents, it touched down in soft mud with a puff of debris far older than any human, or Nyctus, or war. The chill depths were dark and eternal, and there was room on the seafloor for one more bit of jettisoned memory.

And there it sat, the disturbed sediment slowly descending to cover it with a fine patina of grit. It wasn’t enough to obscure it completely, though. Although the doll’s face partly vanished behind the settling mud, the rest of it remained visible, and would until the restless currents eventually buried it.

For now, the patches crudely sewn onto its tunic threw back The Radiance as a soft gleam, highlighting the words stitched into them.

ORBITAL NAVY

She had decided to finally let Mister Starman go so she could forget about him.

The Nyctus, though, never would.

1

“I hate doing shit like this.”

Mol smirked. “Oh, you do not. You love the sound of your own voice.”

Thorn stopped and regarded her from under half-closed eyelids. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Oh, please, spare me the outrage. You have an ego the size of a red supergiant.” She raised her hand as Thorn opened his mouth to protest. “Which is fine. I’m used to it. Besides, I think it’s probably why you’re so damned good at what you do.”

“Might I remind you, Specialist Wyant, that you’re talking to a superior officer?”

Mol grinned in a most unintimidated away. “Charge me with insubordination, and you’re finding your own ride back up to the Hecate.”

Thorn held his glare for a moment, but it collapsed into a smile. He and Mol had been through too much together to stand on ceremony—and Thorn hated ceremony anyway. That brought him back to the moment, standing in the wing of the main stage in Code Nebula’s auditorium. He could see one shoreline of the sea of faces filling the seats, all freshly minted Starcasters who’d finished their recruit training and were about to be deployed for the first time.

An audience. His audience.

“Are you ready, Lieutenant Stellers?”

He turned to the voice and saw a face like a hatchet, eyes like glass glittering from either side of a straight, long nose. Thorn saluted.

“Commander Narvez,” he replied. “I am. As ready as I’ll ever be, anyway.”

Narvez had been one of his instructors when he trained here, what, five years ago now?

“So tell me, Lieutenant, what do you intend to say?”

He gave a sly smile. “Well, ma’am, you’ll have to wait for the show. Wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

Her gaze sharpened. She held it locked on Thorn for a moment, like she had a targeting solution and her finger on the trigger—but she suddenly relented and let a faint smile soften her face.

“I guess I can’t just browbeat you into doing what I want anymore, can I?”

“Could you ever, ma’am?”

Her smile widened. Thorn couldn’t remember the last time—or, for that matter, even if—he’d seen Narvez actually smile. It made her face look almost human. It inspired Thorn to go on.

“Actually, ma’am, I’ve got you to thank for this. You tried to keep me on the straight and narrow, at least. No one in my life has done that before.”

“Just doing what I’m paid to do, Lieutenant,” she said, starting to turn away. But she stopped herself and glanced back, her smile turning mischievous. “But I suppose I do consider you one of my success stories.”

Thorn saluted again. Narvez returned it and walked away, heading into the audience.

“Hey, sir, think you’re on,” Mol said, nodding toward the podium. The speaker, another long-time Code Nebula instructor named Fielder, was just finishing up.

“. . . our keynote speaker, who will deliver the commencement address for Recruit Course 27-A8—”

Someone in the audience shouted, “Hoorah!”

Fielder quirked his lip. “Take note, Recruit Grady, that you haven’t actually graduated from Code Nebula until after the final parade. A lot can happen to a recruit’s course report between now and then.”

Laughter rippled through the crowd.

“As I was saying, please welcome our keynote speaker, Lieutenant Thorn Stellers,” Fielder went on.

“Give ’em hell, sir,” Mol said.

Thorn grinned. “No worries. I’m nothing but charm and erudite wit, after all.”

He stepped into a sudden swell of thunderous applause.

* * *

“. . . a team,” Thorn said. “If you just take away one thing from what I’ve said here today, make it that. You are members of a team. No one in the Orbital Navy stands alone. Thank you.”

After a brief pause, the roar of applause washed through the auditorium again. Thorn nodded his thanks to the recruits.

Fielder, who’d been sitting with Code Nebula’s senior staff at the side of the podium, stood and shook Thorn’s hand. “Thank you, Lieutenant. You held them spellbound. Well done.”

Another Commander, one Thorn didn’t recognize and who must have been assigned to Code Nebula only recently, nodded enthusiastically. “Quite remarkable, really. You sure you don’t want to come on as an instructor here, Lieutenant Stellers? We could use someone who can actually keep these people quiet for a few minutes.”

Thorn smiled, but it was a thin, forced expression. All of the adulation was starting to wear on him, and even his skill as a ’caster couldn’t mask the cumulative cost of being someone else. Thorn had spent most of his life to date either as a kid, or as a nobody picking up odd jobs cleaning up what amounted to shit. He wasn’t used to being the center of attention, except when he was getting into trouble while engaged in the ugly business of survival.

He shook his head. “Sorry, sir. As tempting as it sounds to spend some time here, away from the frontlines of the war, I think I’m more needed out there.”

“Spoken like a true warrior. I guess I’d actually have been a little disappointed if you’d said yes.”

So why did you ask me, then? Thorn thought. Some sort of trap—

“Come on, Stellers. We can’t dismiss these people until you’re off the stage,” Fielder said.

Thorn nodded and followed the Commander back into the wings, another round of applause following him like an unwelcome shadow.

* * *

As soon as he’d stepped out of the auditorium, Thorn quickly separated himself from everyone else—even Mol—saying he just needed a few minutes alone. He wandered off behind the building. He could hear the chatter of the almost-graduates spilling out of the other end of the building, punctuated by shouts from their instructors to “Form up!” and “Get it together, people!”

For a moment, though, Thorn was alone.

He basked in it. There was nothing but the sun, the eddies of breeze wafting around the corner of the building, and the grass under his feet. Nothing in sight but the Code Nebula rec hall across the field, the camp HQ building, and the parade square off to his left.

He slumped back against the wall of the auditorium. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been alone in a place that wasn’t enclosed in alloy bulkheads, reactive armor, and the void of space.

“Sir?”

Thorn blinked and turned. One of the Recruits had just popped around the corner of the building, and he skidded to a stop when he saw Thorn. The name strip over the young man’s right tunic pocket read GRADY.

“Sorry, sir, didn’t know you were here,” he said, saluting.

Thorn started to shrug like it was no big deal but realized he was still leaning against the wall. That was something that would land a pile of shit onto a Recruit here, and probably extra duties, too. He straightened and returned the salute.

“Not a problem, Recruit Grady—” Thorn stopped. “You’re mister hoorah, aren’t you?”

Grady stared blankly for a moment, then gave a sheepish grin. “Oh, yes, sir. Sorry about that. Got carried away.”

“Again, not a problem. Nothing wrong with some course spirit. Anyway, you should hustle your butt to formation, or you’re going to be spending the grad party tonight cutting the sports field with scissors.”

“Oh, it’s okay, sir. Commander Narvez sent me off as a runner to the company HQ to fetch the photographer. I guess they decided to do the final course photos outside, since it’s such a nice day.”

“Alright, well, be off with you then.”

“Sir?”

Thorn raised an eyebrow.

“I just wanted to say—” Grady started, then paused. “I mean, I think that—”

“Just spit it out, man.”

Grady took a breath. “Sir, I just wanted you to know that you’re a hero around here. We actually got one full lecture period just about you. Commander Narvez, she described to us how you moved the Fleet to attack that squid planet. That was—” He just shook his head.

Thorn grimaced. A hero. And Narvez was apparently pushing the idea. Narvez. He’d assumed she’d managed to get from hating him to just tolerating him.

Of course you could dislike someone, he supposed, and still think they were a hero.

“It was my job, Recruit Grady. It’s really no different than the job you’re going to be doing, assuming you actually graduate from here, of course. That might be up in the air if you don’t go get that photographer in a hurry.”

Grady nodded. “Yes, sir. Understood, sir. I just—it’s just that you’re a legend. You don’t meet legends every day.”

“A legend.” Thorn sighed. “Before you get too starry eyed, Grady, keep in mind that I stink when I sweat, just like everybody else. Have to keep yourself grounded in reality. That’s especially true for a ’caster. We can climb to heights that a regular soldier might not know, but we can fall a lot farther. I—what I’m saying is, don’t get swept up in your own hype, because the squids sure as hell won’t.”

“Thank you, sir. Good advice. I’ll remember that.” He saluted. “Still, sir, I got to meet a demigod today. Sorry about that term, but you can’t shift reality without creating some kind of legend. You . . . you sort of scare the hell out of us, sir, but we also want to be like you and do the things you do. That’s worth some shit from Commander Narvez.”

Thorn returned the salute but said nothing.

Grady smiled, turned on his heel, and left Thorn in silence, brooding with memory of what it meant to be more than human. More than a ’caster.

For the second time, he stood on the brink of apotheosis. This time, though, a power every bit as formidable as his own opposed him, and their clash echoed across the universe, trembling the foundations of reality—

Thorn scowled. The sun was suddenly too bright, the wind too cold. He strode away to get to a comm rig and ask Tanner to order him back aboard the Hecate.

He’d received more than enough worship for today, thanks.

* * *

Mol jumped when Thorn said her name. She’d been crouched down, fiddling with something inside the Gyrfalcon’s landing-gear well.

“I’m one of the good guys, sir. You don’t need to stealth yourself up behind me like that,” she said.

“Gotta keep in practice,” he replied.

She lowered a tool. “Didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow morning—and I expected you to be hungover.”

Thorn shrugged. “I’ve had enough grad party, I think. Being the guest of honor means I have to be on good behavior”—he made air quotes around the good— “which means I can’t get drunk, take off my clothes, and dare everyone at the party to run a naked foot race.”

“Wow, that’s really specific,” Mol said, then cocked her head to one side and grinned. “You didn’t just make that up, did you? You actually did that at your own grad party here, didn’t you?”

“There may have been clothing removed and dares issued, but I can neither confirm nor deny any of it.”

Mol slipped the tool into her utility belt. “Being the guest of honor does come with some expectations I guess, yeah. But it makes you the center of attention, too, right?” She grinned. “Come on, sir, tell me you didn’t have some cute Recruits batting their eyes at you.” Her voice turned high pitch and sing-song. “Oh, sir, you’re so strong and brave and handsome. You’re my hero—”

“Not funny, Mol,” Thorn snapped and headed for the Gyrfalcon’s open airlock. He got about three paces, then stopped and turned back.

“Sorry. Just heroed out, I guess.” He looked across the landing field, a scorched and pitted sprawl of blastcrete rendered featureless grey in the night. The lights of Code Nebula burned through the darkness, especially from the rec hall where the grad party would still be in full swing. Years ago, he’d have been leading the charge on a run to find more beer, more wine—more fun.

He missed being that Thorn Stellers. He missed being ordinary, not a hero.

Or a demigod.

The thought made him look up high in the southern sky. Right there—a tiny, diffuse patch of light. If it were visible in the sky, he could always find it, no matter where he was.

Even just a year ago, that particular patch of sky would have been dark.

Mol nodded. “If it helps, sir, when you fart in my spaceship, a hero is the last thing I think you are.”

Have to stay grounded in reality, he’d told Grady.

He gave Mol a grateful smile. Thankfully, she was damned good at making him do just that.

“Unless you want to spend the night in transient quarters, how about we head back up to the Hecate?” he suggested.

“Hey, no argument from me. They’ve got me stuck in transient lines with some auditor here from Fleet. Friggin’ guy introduced me to a whole new world of snoring.”

* * *

“One hundred out, Hecate,” Mol said, eyeing the Gyrfalcon’s flight management system.

“Concur, one hundred out,” came the clipped reply.

Thorn had been staring down at the curve of Code Nebula’s host planet. The terminator crawled across the surface, day relentlessly replacing night below.

He glanced at Mol. “Is that something new?”

“What?”

“Confirming distances to the Hecate. I’ve never heard you do that before.”

“Just trying to minimize the processing load on Trixie.”

Thorn frowned. Trixie was an AI. She was nothing but a processing load.

“Why the special treatment for her? Nobody tries to minimize my processing load.”

Mol glanced at him, then she looked back at the panel and sighed. “She’s doing it again—says she’s feeling melancholy. Ever since you brought her back, she’s had these spells.”

“Melancholy?”

“That’s the word she uses.”

“Trixie is melancholy. What does that even mean?”

“Damned if I know.”

Trixie cut in. “Melancholy means a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause—”

“No, I know what the word melancholy means. What I’m asking is, what does it mean regarding you? What does it mean for you to be melancholy?” Thorn asked.

In response, soft music began to play, but it suddenly swelled in volume. It wasn’t punk, Trixie’s favorite genre before she’d been savaged by a virus injected into her by a couple of human Nyctus agents called Skins. It was odd. A slower tempo, more orchestral, and downright meditative. But it was the lyrics that caught him, speaking of loneliness and things he felt in his bones.

Mol rolled her eyes. “This one again.” She looked at Thorn. “See what I mean?”

“Yeah, this is . . . kind of downbeat, for such a catchy tune.”

“It’s called Eleanor Rigby. It’s from some old Earth album called Revolver.” She sighed. “I hear it almost every day.”

“Trixie, can you lower the volume, please?” Thorn said.

The music faded to background, just audible over the thrum of the Gyrfalcon’s systems.

He listened to the lyrics a moment longer, then nodded. “Yeah, I’d say this counts as melancholy, alright.”

“Like I said, ever since you brought her back, she’s been like this. She might even be getting worse.” Mol fiddled with her controls, then looked back at Thorn. “Any chance you could look into it, maybe fix her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Thorn replied, settling his head back against the g-couch. The truth was, he wasn’t anxious to have anything more to do with bringing anyone back.

It just didn’t seem to work out very well.

2

Thorn had told Kira that the Danzur were fussy. He’d even used that exact word—fussy. What he hadn’t told her was just what that meant.

Fussy was the utter devotion to an oversized, labyrinthine bureaucracy that seemed to regulate every aspect of Danzur life. It meant keeping important information to themselves, even if it would be in their best interest to release it. It meant engaging in meticulous bargaining over the most inconsequential things.

It meant Kira would soon be bald from tearing her hair out—at least metaphorically, but maybe a little in real life, too.

She sat back in the chair in the quarters the Danzur had assigned her aboard their orbital platform. The accommodations were one of the few bright spots in this miserable assignment, being not just large and comfortable, but in some ways downright luxurious.

Yet another draft of their most recent attempts at a negotiation agreement glowed on the terminal in front of her. Her eyes flicked across a wherefor, passed a heretofore, settled on the second part, then glazed over. She lolled her head back and groaned.

“Kill me now.”

“This system has neither the motivation nor the means to execute violence upon your person,” a clipped voice said.

Kira raised her head and glared at the screen. “You sure about that? Maybe dispense some cyanide into my next meal?”

“This system has neither the motivation nor—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m stuck here.”

She swiveled the chair and looked out the deck-to-ceiling viewport that made up most of one wall of her quarters. She could see a wing of the huge platform, which was lined with docking ports—one of two sprawling constructs that operated as commercial hubs for the voluminous Danzur trade. Ships were plugged into half of them, mostly freighters, but she didn’t recognize a couple of them. Apparently, the Danzur had commercial relations with several other races even further away from Allied Stars space—which itself sprawled on the other side of Nyctus space.

That made Kira a little queasy. She hated having the Nyctus between her and home. Fortunately, the Danzur had a neutral relationship with the squids. They had something the squids wanted, obviously, and the squids were willing to respect their neutrality to get it. She wished she knew just what that was, but the talks she’d been attending, led by Fleet on behalf of the Allied Stars Central Administration, hadn’t even gotten close to that question yet.

She glowered at the screen again. Negotiation agreement my ass, she thought. It was a negotiation agreement only insofar as it documented the things they were going to negotiate—an agreement to work toward an agreement.

“I did not join the ON for this,” she muttered.

Cyanide was starting to sound pretty good.

“Lieutenant Wixcombe,” a voice cut in over a comm circuit. “It’s Specialist Dawson. We’ve got a Danzur named Tadrup here at the ship looking for you.”

Kira groaned again. Dawson was one of six crew who, along with her, made up the human delegation to the Danzur. Their ship, an ON courier sloop named the Venture, was docked nearby. Kira tended to split her time between the ship and the Danzur platform, since the Venture carried their classified gear, like cryptographic equipment and secure databases. The Danzur had insisted on a complete timetable of Kira’s whereabouts, since she was the ON’s delegation head, and she’d marked herself as being aboard the Venture this afternoon.

If there was one thing the Danzur weren’t, it was flexible. Kira had never married her life to a rigid timetable. Who could actually live that way? Sure, key timings and deadlines mattered, but whether she was here, in her quarters, or aboard the Venture, about a hundred meters away, should not be a big deal.

But it was to the Danzur—in an almost pathological way.

“Alright, offer my apologies to Tadrup and tell him I’ll be there in a moment,” Kira said.

“Actually, Lieutenant, he says he’ll come to you.”

Kira’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“He’s on his way right now, in fact.”

Kira stood and fastened her tunic. “Got it, thanks. Wixcombe out.”

A moment passed, then the door chime sounded. Kira gritted her teeth. The stupid chime had a shrill, ear-scraping edge to it. Apparently, the Danzur audio range was higher pitched than that of humans, so they were more attuned to higher frequencies. Kira couldn’t help wondering, though, if it might just be a negotiating ploy, putting her slightly on edge and off-balance.

She opened the door. Tadrup stood outside. Kira recognized him from the particular pattern of stripes and spots in his fur, all of which combined to make the squat alien look as though he’d been covered with smiley faces.

Now that was off-putting.

“Tadrup, my apologies. I became so absorbed in the latest version of the negotiation agreement that—”

“It is of no consequence, Kira,” the Danzur said, holding up a fingered paw in a very human gesture. “We’ve realized we have to accept that you are not as dedicated to protocols as we are.”

Kira tried not to chuckle, despite Tadrup making not as dedicated to protocols sound synonymous with failure.

She gestured the Danzur in. “Well, I apologize anyway. If I schedule myself as being somewhere, then I should be there.”

“Yes, you should,” Tadrup replied. This time, his voice held no recrimination, he simply stated it as a fact. “But, as I said, it is of no consequence.”

Kira thanked him. “So what can I do for you today, Tadrup? I’m still reviewing the agreement and have yet to consult with Damien about it. But I believe we have until tomorrow to do that.”

“You do. Damien has already made it clear that you are still in the process of doing your review.”

Damien Forester was lead representative for Allied Stars diplomatic corps and titular head of the mission. In fact, Kira had been given the effective lead role, commanding the overall effort to get diplomatic relations established with the Danzur. Damien actually functioned in more of an advisory role. She knew that the man chafed at least a little under the arrangement, which had no doubt been the result of some power mongering back and forth between the military and civilian leadership. But he had to cosign anything negotiated with the aliens, which seemed to mollify any resentment—mostly, anyway.

“I am actually here with some good news,” Tadrup said.

“Oh?” Kira gestured at a chair—a Danzur one, crafted for their particular physiology—while she took a seat on something a human could actually find comfortable. “What sort of good news?”

“Your request for divulgence of our trade relationship with the Nyctus has finally been vetted and approved.”

Kira just stared. “Really?”

“You seem surprised, which is unusual, since you initiated the request yourself.”

“Well, yes. Or no, I’m not surprised at the request itself, but—approved? Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Kira’s mind raced as though propelled by a lit fusion drive. They had put this particular request in to the Danzur just a few days after their arrival. Damien had suggested it, ostensibly so they could satisfy themselves that the Danzur weren’t engaged in selling or trading arms to the Nyctus. Citing Allied Stars diplomatic protocols as the reason was a clever ploy. The Danzur had immediately understood that all-important word, protocols, and accepted the request without any fuss.

The real purpose of the request, though, was to test the Danzur reaction to it, while also sending a signal that the humans knew they had some sort of ongoing commercial relationship with the squids. And that moment, that request, was why Kira had been considered so vital to this mission’s success. While Damien had talked, she’d eased her awareness outward, using barely a trickle of magic to empower the most subtle and least intrusive Joining she could manage.

It only gave her relatively superficial access to the Danzur thoughts, but it was enough to tell her that the aliens found the request an uncomfortable one. She’d nudged Tadrup’s mind a little harder, having already insinuated herself into it several times. There she had seen past discomfort into actual disapproval. Tadrup, she knew, intended to work against fulfilling the request. She couldn’t discern why without probing even deeper, and she hadn’t wanted to do that. She needed more time to become acquainted with the particular contours of Tadrup’s mind, the peculiar planes and curves and angles that characterized his thoughts. The better she knew those, the easier it was for her to tread among them unnoticed.

And that was fine, because his resistance was, in itself, useful information.

Discussing it afterward, Kira and Damien had both assumed the Danzur had something to hide. But here Tadrup was, with his good news.

“Well, that’s . . . wonderful news, Tadrup,” Kira said, then she kicked herself. She was no diplomat and was most definitely receiving some intense on-the-job training. But she’d done enough of the verbal and mental sparring that constituted diplomacy to know overt expressions of pleasure or disapproval were to be avoided. Unless such reactions were intended to be used to achieve some particular effect, the correct response would have been a polite but utterly neutral thank you, backed up with a bland smile. To allow an honest reaction was to give the Danzur a free view inside Kira’s mind.

“The Tribunal gave your request close consideration and determined that the disclosure was in both our best interests as our negotiations proceed.”

While Tadrup had been speaking, Kira had turned to look out the excessive viewport. At the same time, she extended a wisp of thought and brushed it through the Danzur’s mind. She sensed some misgivings, but—

More. There was an agenda deeper than this—of course, because as Kira had learned, no matter how deep a hidden agenda may be, there was always one even deeper. In order to discern what this mysterious agenda might be, though, she’d have to probe harder. That was something she could do while remaining undetected, but only by expending obvious effort.

She turned back. “You must extend our sincere appreciation to your Tribunal.”

“I will happily do so,” Tadrup replied. As he said it, he spit a dollop of saliva that splatted on the carpeted floor. Kira resisted a smile. The cultured tone of the Danzur was purely a product of the translator. Their actual speech seemed to consist mostly of guttural grunts, harsh growls, and the occasional menacing hiss. All of it tended to come out wet and sloppy—one of the most comically jarring things Kira had ever seen.

Tadrup gestured at her terminal. “You should find the response to your inquiry is already available, in fact.”

Kira crossed to the terminal to check for incoming documents and indeed found a new one. She opened and read it. It didn’t take long.

“Your sole export to the Nyctus is . . . a drug?”

“No, it’s a beverage, called krol.”

“It says here that krol has psychotropic effects,” Kira said.

“It does have certain medicinal properties, yes. They seem to be greatly favored by the Nyctus.” He held two hand-paw palms up for a moment, the Danzur version of a shrug. “We find it induces a mild euphoria but otherwise has little effect.” Tadrup bared his teeth in an intimidating way—a smile, apparently. It seemed, Kira thought, that everything the Danzur said or did appeared, to humans, as exactly the opposite of what was intended.

Not for the first time, Kira reflected that it was a good thing translators existed. If they hadn’t, she might see Tadrup as snarling, growling, and threatening to bite her instead of engaging in a calm discussion.

“Personally, I think krol tastes like—” He paused. “I’ve heard you use a word that seems appropriate here. I think it tastes like crap.”

* * *

“A psychotropic drink? That’s all the Danzur trade with the Nyctus?” Damien asked.

Kira offered him a small shrug. “That’s what they say. This drink, krol, is—” She stopped and read the screen. “Eagerly sought for acquisition by the Nyctus, to use their words. They generally receive certain agricultural products and types of ore in exchange.” She looked back at Damien. “Again, that’s what they say.”

Damien shifted in his seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. They were aboard the Venture, the one place where they knew they could speak without worry of someone eavesdropping. “So do you have any reason to think they’re lying?”

Kira sniffed. “Of course they’re lying. Isn’t that all diplomacy is? Telling lies and hoping they’re better lies than your opposition’s?”

“Wow. You’ve been doing this for, what, a few weeks? It took me at least a year or two to become that cynical about it all,” Damien said, grinning.

Kira grinned back. She had to grudgingly admit that, for a civilian and a diplomat, Damien was affable—which was necessary for him to be a successful diplomat. She’d expected to be working with some hidebound bureaucrat—a human version of a Danzur, basically—but he was nothing like that.

He reminded her of Thorn in many ways—if Thorn was less mercurial and more tactful, that is.

“I’ve been in the ON long enough to recognize bullshit when I see it,” she said.

Damien laughed, but it trailed off and he turned serious again. “So, this belief they’re lying—is that based on your, uh, unique talents?”

“It’s okay, you can use the word Starcaster. Anyway, to answer your question—yes, or kind of, at least. When I was speaking to him, I could tell there were things there that I wasn’t seeing. It’s like”—Kira paused, thinking of analogy— “you see a hole. All you can tell is that it’s a hole. You aren’t close enough to see how deep it is, but somehow you know it’s deep, even without checking it out.”

Damien considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, I get it. And of course, in negotiations like this, there are always wheels within wheels.”

“Wheels within wheels?”

“An old diplomatic corps saying. Plans within plans. Agendas hidden inside other agendas.”

Kira leaned back, stretching minor aches from too much sitting. “Okay, yeah. That’s another of those cynical things I’ve learned about all of this. Anyway, without probing more vigorously into Tadrup’s mind, I can’t really say much more. And he puts up such a rigid façade that it even closes around his thoughts. I can almost certainly penetrate it, but it takes some effort and might be evident if I do it to his face. Bottom line—I probably could dig into what’s going on, but the Danzur might detect it.”

“Yeah, we don’t want to show that card—your abilities. At least not yet. There might come a time when it will be advantageous, but right now it would just set us back,” Damien replied.

Kira stood and glanced around the compartment, with its surprisingly plush furnishings. The Venture was, by ON standards, almost luxurious. This compartment was actually a common room, a block of space given over to nothing but the leisure of the crew. Of course, she was a courier sloop, not a warship. She’d been built to be nimble and fast, while fulfilling a range of missions, including diplomatic envoys. That meant she was also barely armed, equipped with only a single missile tube and a pair of point-defense turrets.

She took a moment to collect her thoughts. Damien’s comment about showing her abilities had tweaked her. Why?

“Kira? Is something—?”

She held up a hand. “Just give me a second.”

Her hole analogy had been apt, but it also made her realize she’d been concentrating on the hole—and ignoring the area around it.

She made herself reconsider her brief encounter with Tadrup’s thoughts, but she ignored all the implied hidden motives and focused instead on the surrounding thoughts.

Tadrup had been annoyed about . . . something. Something specific—

“He lost something,” Kira said.

Damien gave her a puzzled look. “Who lost something?”

Kira turned back. “Tadrup. He lost . . . whatever the Danzur use for currency, he lost a bunch of it. A business deal gone bad.” She gave a slow nod. “It was right there in front of me, and I was too busy focusing on the hidden, scheming stuff.”

Damien’s look didn’t change. “Okay. That’s too bad, I guess, but what does that have to do with these negotiations?”

“Whatever that deal was, he blames us for it falling apart.”

3

Thorn found himself immersed in the dream again.

It started the same way it always did. He was sitting in the co-pilot’s slot aboard the Gyrfalcon. Trixie was there, thanking him for bringing her back from oblivion. The virus Brid and Dart had injected into her had effectively scrubbed her identity away, but she was restored—almost. He rolled his eyes at the effusive, bubbly praise which, with dream logic, now had Trixie’s voice coming out of Mol’s mouth.

Thorn shook his head. “It was nothing, really.”

Mol’s face immediately darkened, and Trixie’s tone changed to her new, melancholy dreariness. “You’re right. It was nothing. Prove yourself, Thorn. Prove how good you really are. Bring your daughter back. Do that and prove you really are as good as you think you are, Mister Hero.”

Thorn gaped at the abrupt change, adulation giving way to suspicious contempt. He started to think, isn’t this what I wanted? To not be a hero anymore?

He opened his mouth to agree, or to protest that he really was as good as people thought he was? He’d moved a whole fleet, after all. He’d saved Code Gauntlet from the enormous Nyctus impactor. Who else could have done that?

He just didn’t want to be lauded for it. It was enough for him to know—

Before he could say anything, Mol and the Gyrfalcon vanished. Thorn found himself drifting through space—hard vacuum and no-g. He felt no discomfort, though, aside from a mild, pervasive chill. It wasn’t too different from an open witchport. But this time, there was no witchport, because there was no ship. It was just him, Thorn Stellers, drifting between the stars.

For a while, he was content. But there was something important. Something he needed to do.

Thorn had his talisman in hand, the battered old storybook that gave him an anchor, a link back to a time when there’d been no war, no ships, no Starcasting. It gave him a baseline against which to measure everything else he did. And now he remembered what he needed to do. It was, measured against his talisman, something massive. It was the thing Trixie had coldly challenged him to do.

Thorn would bring his daughter back.

She’d died, of course, on Nebo, when the squids bombarded the planet with KEWs. Every Starcaster had experienced her death, and vividly, through a massed psychic event still referred to as the Vision. But Trixie had been dead, and he’d brought her back. He’d even told Kira that he could bring their daughter back to them.

Now here, among the stars, it was time.

Thorn hurled his awareness into the void, an expanding bubble of consciousness that raced away from him at the speed of thought. His perception embraced the incandescent fury of stars, the gentle drift of dust and gas, and everything in between. In this version of reality, his daughter was dead. That was a truth. But it wasn’t Thorn’s truth. His truth was what he made it. His universe was the one he shaped around himself.

So, like a potter with clay upon a wheel, he began to shape and nudge creation. He drew power from the infinite reservoir of the ether, the place where magic lived. It was a task both delicate and monumental, altering all of reality to bring back into existence one little girl.

He paused, frowning. It wasn’t enough. This wasn’t like bringing Trixie back from extinction, because she was an AI. For despite all, she was a thing. Incredibly lifelike, but ultimately lifeless. Nor was this like changing the way an Alcubierre drive worked, or rebooting the universe to one where he could move fleets with his thoughts. All of those things were just matter and energy. None of them were alive.

But his daughter wasn’t just matter and energy. She had thoughts. Dreams. Things she liked and disliked, for no reason more complex than because she did. Things she had come to—or had started to—believe, others that she disbelieved. She’d begun to craft values for herself, things that would come to inform and shape her life.

Some might say she had a soul—whatever a soul was. It might just be a name for the totality of who and what a person was. It might be something more, the actual spark of life that turned matter and energy into a living, vital being. Thorn didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do.

Thorn reached out across the gulfs between the stars. He swept up handfuls of elementary particles, of the emanations of stars, of actual star dust itself. These were the building blocks, the things from which all other things were derived. When he’d gathered a vast cloud of this stuff of creation around him, he reached out again, this time for the savaged ruins of the planet called Nebo.

There. A scorched, blasted surface, bedrock scoured bare by the fury of fire and shockwaves. He remembered how he had seen it from the Hecate’s orbit, pocked with massive impact craters, some of them still glowing. But he also remembered how it appeared in the Vision, verdant and pastoral. The kind of place where a little girl should be able to grow up and grow old.

He focused now on the girl herself, in those gentle, innocent moments before the world literally ended.

His daughter.

Thorn began to knead the stardust and other things he’d drawn to himself, pushing creation into a new truth. The only truth. His truth.

Substance took form. Form evolved, becoming identity. From nothing, Thorn built everything that was, and would be, the person known as—

Morgan. Her name was Morgan—

Daddy?

* * *

Like him, she drifted among the stars. Otherwise, she was exactly how he remembered her from the Vision. She was whole. She had always been whole. That was the truth, the only one that mattered.

He smiled at her across the Void. I’m here, Morgan, he said. I’m here. Daddy’s here.

Daddy, I can’t see you!

That’s okay. I’m right here. We’ll be together soon.

It was working. He was bringing her back. He would make her whole again and, in the process, make himself whole. Make Kira whole.

Thorn grinned as bright as a thousand stars—

But it faded, like the cooling residue of a supernova.

As he shaped and chipped and carved reality, smoothing it toward the final shape he sought, he hesitated. Morgan was a Starcaster, because of course she was. How could she not be, considering who her parents were?

Daddy, where are you?

I’m here, Morgan. I’ll always be here.

But I can’t see you! I can’t find you!

We’ll be together very soon, I promise.

A Starcaster, and a powerful one. Her death had resonated through the ether, propagating across it in a wave of anguish and terror. A powerful ’caster. As powerful as he was. A Conduit, like him, and only like him. There were no other Conduits, not so far. She could accomplish great things, monumental things, with her powers—

But.

But she was just a little girl. And that was probably why the squids had killed her. They’d somehow found out about her and knew they had to strike before she got her Starcasting feet under her. Even then, untrained and unaware what magic really was, she’d managed to outright stop the Nyctus KEW strikes on Nebo. For a time, at least. Grown into a full understanding of her power, she could prove decisive in the war. The squids couldn’t let that happen. So, they’d killed an entire planet, all to kill a little girl before she ever became anything more.

Images erupted from Thorn’s memory and flashed through his mind. Some were fragmentary, like still photographs, some like bursts of video. After he’d been taken off Cotswold and placed into the care of a bureaucracy never designed to handle literally tens of thousands of orphans at a time, he’d skipped and bounced from one place to another. Every time, his uncontrolled manifestations of magical power had mired him in trouble. He started fires. He caused small floods. He caused things to fling themselves across rooms. Foster parents and orphanage staff, at first suspicious, reacted with ever-mounting fear.

Thorn would be thrown out of one place, then shuffled to another, often on a different planet. Sometimes he just ran away. Twice he found himself alone on the cold, neon streets of a vast and unfamiliar city. Sometimes he was beaten.

Once, he’d been seized and taken away by dour police in the middle of the night. He later learned that a scheme was starting to coalesce, one that would see Thorn die under apparently accidental circumstances.

It was the Twenty-Fourth Century, and he’d almost been the victim of a literal witch hunt.

And all of it had eventually led him to where Kira had found him, expecting to end his days mucking toxic sludge under cold, leaden skies.

But it would be worse for Morgan. Magic wasn’t something stuck in the transition between superstitious fantasy and hard reality anymore. Magic was well known. It might still be poorly understood, but its potential was clear. Thorn had demonstrated it himself, many times.

Morgan would be seen not as a freak of nature, to be feared and shunned and despised.

She’d be seen as a weapon.

Morgan didn’t deserve that. Morgan deserved a chance to be a little girl, to grow up, to lead a normal life.

Daddy—!

Almost, Morgan. Just a little bit longer.

Thorn began to reshape part of this new truth, nudging it from where Morgan’s inherent nature was taking it, diverting it somewhere else. He would remake her, but not as a Starcaster. Not only would he bring her back without any access to magic, but he would also take away any desire to be a ’caster. He would ensure she would live a long and happy life, because wasn’t that a father’s ultimate duty to his children?

Daddy—

Nearly there, Morgan.

Daddy—it’s different. It’s wrong. It’s wrong!

Thorn pushed harder at the clay of creation, but it resisted him more and more. Something was stiffening it, rendering it ever less pliant, making it push back against his will.

She was fighting back. Maybe not deliberately, maybe because she was driven by primal instinct to protect these things that were part of her. She was fighting his efforts, and she was very, very powerful—

Morgan, he said, fighting against the forces trying to repel his efforts, Daddy’s . . . almost there. I’m almost—

Morgan shrieked.

A shockwave rippled through reality. Thorn slammed headlong into a wall of rigid denial. His will beat against it, but he might as well have been trying to punch his way through granite.

Daddy, no—!

Thorn’s truth began to fray, starting to unravel. He hadn’t been able to seal and lock together the seams he’d created in reality. It was all just a patch, and the patch was coming loose.

Morgan, please, let me help you—

No, you’re hurting me!

Morgan’s frantic, anguished plea ripped at Thorn, tearing into his chest and slashing into his heart. He lost focus, his will faltered, and reality began to collapse like crumbling brick.

Thorn reacted as any father would, by reaching for his daughter. He focused on snatching her away from Nebo, a planet that had always existed unharmed by the war, and pulling her fully into existence just as she was.

Morgan shrieked again, a keening wail that shook the bedrock of existence.

A soundless detonation washed away the universe. Light that transcended the very concept of white engulfed him, piercing his eyes, filling his mind with nothing but blinding radiance.

Slowly, it began to fade. A pervasive glow still surrounded him, resolving into streams and veils of dust and gas like rippled curtains lit from within by the fierce glow of hot, new stars.

A nebula.

Thorn gaped at the inconceivable forces that had been briefly unleashed. Morgan had fought him, and he’d tried to overcome her resistance. The resultant cascade of power had spiraled up to a titanic blast of power and possibility. The universe had, for a moment, been able to craft its own, mindless truth, and the result had been this.

A new nebula, full of new stars. New matter, brought into existence from nothing.

Thorn slowly cleared his thoughts, then did the one thing that called to him as a father, ringing through his being like a primal call. He tried to find his daughter.

Morgan?

He heard nothing but the silence between the stars.

Morgan? Morgan!

Nothing. There was no hint that she’d ever existed. He tried to push his awareness across the void, driving it further and further, sweeping it over stars, planets, asteroids—

He pushed until his consciousness encompassed such a vast swath of reality that he could see all of it and yet see none of it.

There was no sign of Morgan. Nothing. She simply did not exist.

He had failed.

Thorn had failed to bring his daughter back. Instead, he was left with her final words to him inscribed in his mind in fire and starlight.

You’re hurting me!

* * *

Thorn tore himself out of the dream, slamming awake with a violent start. He shoved himself up in his bunk, drenched in sweat, gasping like he’d just run a race. He untangled himself from the damp sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The cold touch of the deck against his bare feet steadied him, giving a specific sensation to focus on.

Only that coldness existed. That was all. It was all he had to think about. It made no other demands, implied no other obligations.

Thorn took one final deep breath, then looked around into darkness.

“Lights.”

His quarters lit up, leaving him squinting and blinking until his eyes adjusted. When they had, he stood and crossed to the tiny wash basin, then he ran the water. He cupped some into his mouth, then splashed some more onto his face. More cold to steady him.

Finally, he turned and looked back at his bed. It was absolutely uninviting—a place of dire conflict, not rest. Instead of trying to get back to sleep, he got dressed and left his quarters, heading for—

He stopped. Where aboard the Hecate was he going to go?

Thorn headed for the witchport, from where he’d be able to see the nebula he and his daughter had managed to spawn into existence. It was all he had left of her.

Thorn knew its name, even as he went to gaze upon the construct of his efforts.

The Witch Nebula.

4

Kira had just lifted her feet onto the desk. She leaned back and looked out the big viewport, taking in the stars in their vast beauty.

She needed the break. Since the revelation of the ongoing trade deals between the Danzur and the Nyctus, things had been flung at them at an unprecedented pace. It was as though, having given up one piece of information, the floodgates had been thrown open and released a torrent.

Damien just gave a thin smile, though. “It’s another tactic. They’re going to try to bury us in documents and updates and errata and appendices so that we might miss something important.”

Kira glowered. “That sounds, I don’t know, unethical? Belligerent?”

“Unethical and belligerent pretty much sum up what diplomacy is all about. The point is to try to get both sides to be a little less unethical and belligerent to one another.”

Kira shook her head. “Wow. When you said it had taken you a while to get this cynical and jaded about it all, you meant it, didn’t you?”

“Of course. Diplomacy is just another form of warfare.” Damien smiled wryly. “In some ways, a dirtier, nastier, less forgiving form of warfare. And you military types are supposed to have some sense of honor.”

Damien had gone on to prove just how adept he was in the dirty, nasty business of diplomacy. For every incoming document, he immediately requested clarifications, amplifications, and anything else that generated more work for the Danzur bureaucrats. Sure enough, after a day or so of that, the deluge slowed.

So she actually had time to put her feet up and take a break.

Kira?

She sat up. The voice humming through her mind was as familiar as her own.

Thorn?

In the psychic flesh, he replied.

His tone was flippant, but Kira could hear murkier depths to it. Stress, anger, frustration—they echoed in his words, a residue of feelings he couldn’t entirely suppress through the Joining. Not when he Joined with Kira, anyway.

It’s nice to hear from you. It’s always nice to hear from you. But . . . something’s wrong, isn’t it?

What, I can’t check in on how the negotiations with the Danzur are going?

Do you care?

Of course I care. I was one of the first to make contact with them, remember? That kind of gives me a dog in this fight. Or maybe a puppy. Can’t imagine dealing with them is like dealing with a puppy, though.

That’s not why you want to talk to me, Thorn.

There was a pause.

No, it’s not, he sent. Proof that you know me too well, even across the miles. I miss you, for what it’s worth. Nothing about this . . . this life . . . feels natural. I’m sorry, Kira.

Sorry? Her mental tone was one of genuine confusion.

For all of this. Sometimes the weight of our choices comes back to me—my choices, mostly, and you’re bearing the brunt of it, over there acting as a liaison to those opportunists.

It’s my job, and your job, too. We made this choice together. But tell me. Why reach out at this moment? Kira asked.

I had the dream again.

She nodded at the starfield. She’d suspected as much.

Thorn, maybe you should see someone. Not just to talk, but to find a solution for who and what you’re becoming, and what it all means. I care about you in ways you’ll never imagine, but I’m just—I’m an ON officer. My skills are not what you need, even though I want more than anything to help you.

There was a long pause, and the connection between them hummed, ripe with things unsaid.

Thorn broke the quiet. I’m a Starcaster who tried to bring his daughter back from the dead, and I seem to have created an entire nebula from my attempt. I don’t know if there’s a doctor out there who’s seen this kind of thing before.

You know what I mean, Thorn. You might be a Starcaster, but you’re first and foremost a man. A person who has to come to grips with his emotions—grief, anger, regret, all that unpleasant stuff. The fact it involves magic is just one of the details. The feelings are exactly the same, though. And there are people who can help you recognize them, and cope with them, and finally incorporate them into yourself, even if the source of all this is beyond anything some doctor might have imagined. Or anyone, for that matter.

You looking for a new line of work? Because you seem to understand this better than anyone else I’ve ever listened to, he said, along with a mental chuckle.

Kira gave the stars a rueful smile. Oh, I know all the right words. I can describe the process, sure. But I’ve got my own baggage to cart around. I think I need to fix myself before I start trying to fix other people. But we share the source of this, or at least some of it. Morgan. I love her with every fiber of my being, and I know you do too. So let’s . . . try? Find a path, an answer? Something?

I want to. I know you want it, too, and I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t acknowledge the fact that if things get out of hand with my power, there’s more at stake than just our daughter. And us. I just don’t know why this keeps happening. I keep getting to a point where I think I’ve actually started to get over it, then wham, the dream happens again, and the counter resets, and I’m dripping in fear and anger all over again. Scares the hell out me, Kira. I can admit that now.

I’m sure that’s probably significant—you thinking you’ve reached a point where you can cope, and then your subconscious says, oh, no, you’re not done with this yet, Stellers!

Significant how?

Kira sighed. I don’t know, Thorn. That’s the sort of thing you need to explore in detail, with—

She hesitated.

With someone who isn’t you, Thorn said.

She sighed again. It sounds terrible, I know, like I’m just leaving you hanging. But I’m way too close to this myself. My own feelings are still pretty much a mess when it comes to this. I’m not sure if I even can help you, or if I might just end up doing more harm than good. Like I said—this is our problem, but you’re the conduit at this point. You have to explore this. My heart is sick, but I can handle it. I have to. For her. For us.

Silence, as if Thorn had cut their bond. It stretched between them again, unwelcome and chilled.

No. She could tell he was still there, could feel him, in the same way you can feel someone standing behind you.

Finally, he replied. I understand. I don’t know where to turn, but I’ll take the first step.

Kira sighed, a sound braided of hurt and exhaustion. What about attacking this from a different direction? The dream? What about that?

You mean the details? Or when it happens?

Maybe both, but let’s start with the facts. You tried to ’cast, to bring our daughter back. You got it at least partially right and complete. You brought Nebo back from the dead. The planet is there, populated by millions of people there who owe you their lives. Oh, and there are millions more, on other worlds, who had friends and loved ones that they’d lost but were then returned to them, thanks to you.

Yes. I know. And that’s—don’t me wrong. That’s fantastic. But our daughter, Morgan, wasn’t—

Our daughter wasn’t on the planet when the Allied Stars census takers went to figure out exactly who came back. Which, incidentally, must have been a new experience for them. New and maybe even terrifying.

Despite his stress and sadness, Kira felt a flash of laughter across the light-years.

Yeah, I’m sure it was. I guess there are some AS bureaucrats who weren’t happy with it, though, since they had to do all the paperwork. Millions of birth certificates might thrill the Danzur, but not our people.

Kira smirked. Overworked bureaucrats? Good.

Screw ’em, she said. If it was my call, I’d have it in print, and in triplicate.

He laughed again. You’re vicious. I like it.

Just one of my good qualities. The other glaring result of what you tried is a new nebula.

The Witch Nebula, he said. He wasn’t bragging, just stating the surreal facts.

That’s what they’re calling it. In fact, I think the plan is for that to become its new, official name. Anyway, all ’casters, everywhere, felt it come into being. I remember walking along one of the Stiletto’s corridors, heading to a debriefing, when it hit. I had to stop and brace myself against a bulkhead. It was . . . not as extreme or prolonged as the Vision, but still intense. Especially considering no one knew exactly what had happened, only that it was something huge.

But you felt more? Thorn asked.

I did. I knew it involved you and our daughter. But that’s all I knew, that other ’casters didn’t. As you might recall, I was hammering on your mental door as soon as my head cleared enough that I could ’cast again.

I do, yeah.

Do you remember the other thing you felt as the Witch Nebula came into being?

A pause.

She winked out of existence, Thorn admitted.

And we all felt that, too. Just like we felt it when she—

Now it was Kira’s turn to pause, to take a mental breath.

Just like when she died, she said. Just like in the Vision.

Silence again. Again, she could feel Thorn at the far end of it.

Thorn, I think you need to admit to yourself that she didn’t come back—that she isn’t coming back.

She was right there, though, Kira. Right there. I could feel her. I could almost touch her. Just a little more effort, just a little more time—

Thorn, you said that she resisted you.

Something did.

Something?

Another pause. Okay. Yes. It was her. She pushed back. I don’t know why, but she pushed back.

And that’s important, I think. Thorn, it might not even be possible to do what you were trying to do. It worked with Trixie, but she’s a machine.

Tell that to the people of Nebo, all back from the dead. Seemed to work just fine for them.

Well, sure—but we don’t know the details, what the rules are, or at least what’s possible and what isn’t. Maybe you can’t bring back a Starcaster. Or maybe you can’t bring back your own daughter. There may very well be reasons for it that we just don’t—can’t—understand.

It’s like she didn’t want to come back.

Kira narrowed her eyes. For just an instant, a flicker of time, she felt Thorn was holding something back from her—it was a fugitive sensation, but it had been there, and the realization hit her like a physical blow.

Maybe she didn’t want to come back, Thorn. Maybe she’s somewhere that . . . she doesn’t want to leave.

Heaven? Or some analog for paradise?

I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It might just have been somewhere she doesn’t want to leave, now. She did— She paused and took that mental breath again. She did die as a young child. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Maybe.

Thorn, is there anything you’re not telling me, here? Anything you’re holding back?

Like what? Thorn asked, but slowly, as if he was considering the angles.

Anything at all. A thought, a sensation. A fleeting moment that you can’t shake but is tied to the dream. And if you can’t then we’ll do this again, Kira said.

Do what? Rehash the loss? The distance and our reality?

That’s exactly what we’ll do. And then, we rehash it some more. I think healing takes on many forms, Thorn.

I—thank you. Just knowing that we might have a path forward is . . . it might be what I need. I don’t understand what’s happening to me, not really.

Neither do I. But we can find out together, Kira said.

That’s all I ask, and it’s more than I deserve. Thank you, Kira. For all of it.

They ended their connection, both feeling hopeful.

And uncertain.

* * *

“The latest,” Damien said, tossing a data pad onto the table. He and Kira were back in the Venture, going over the most recent overtures from the Danzur.

Kira picked up the data pad, read the word heretofore, and dropped it again with a groan. “Why? Why can’t things just be written out in plain speech? Why all the hereafters and whereupons and crap?”

“It’s the high priesthood thing.”

Kira looked at Damien blankly. “The what now?”

“The high priesthood. You’ve never heard of it? Every profession develops its own codes, jargon, descriptions of specialized knowledge, that sort of thing. It’s to prevent outsiders from being able to easily understand.”

“It makes every field of expertise a high priesthood. If you aren’t part of it and don’t know the mysteries, then you have to rely on the high priests to do it for you.”

“So, what you’re saying is that they’re protecting their turf.”

“High priesthood sounds more mysterious and interesting—protecting their turf sounds like something a street gang would do.” He shrugged. “But you’re right. They’re the same thing.”

Something on the data pad caught Kira’s eye.

“So the Danzur exported krol, and only krol,” Kira said.

“To the Nyctus, yes. That’s their single trade good.”

“Interesting.”

“As a diplomat and a born cynic, interesting is a word that gets my attention. Care to elaborate?” Damien asked, his brows lifting.

She pointed at the data pad. “It says here that the Danzur won’t do any trade negotiations for krol. It’s on their List of Excluded Products.”

Damien frowned. “A fair point, but do you think it matters that their dirty little secret—a drink that gets you high—isn’t on their open trade docket? Seems like the kind of thing that might be looked upon as a necessary evil, rather than something to be proud of. Remember who we’re dealing with. The Danzur love legalism, but they strike me as kind of prim, too.”

“Okay, but the question is—why? Everything else on this list is understandable—it’s either extremely rare or something the Danzur want to keep for their own use.”

“Kira, where are you going with this?”

She raised a hand and stood. “Why restrict us from trading for the stuff?”

“Well, because . . . I guess they want to keep trading it with the Nyctus. We may not like that, but we can’t really do much about it.” He leaned back. “Besides, like you said, it’s a drink that gets you high. It’s not like they’re trading military hardware or strategic resources to the squids. In the galactic economy, it’s one of thousands of such substances.”

“That we know of.”

Damien nodded. “True. That we know of.” He crossed his arms. “I’ve got to ask you again, though, Kira—where are you going with this?”

“I don’t know.” She put the data pad down. “This whole trading krol with the Nyctus thing just seems—” She shook her head in frustration. “It just stands out. I can’t help feeling that there’s something more to it.”

“But you have no idea what.”

“I have no idea what.” She looked at Damien. “Yet.”

He gave a thin smile. “What are you planning?”

“I don’t know that, either. But I’m going to give it some thought. It might be time to get a little more aggressive with my Joining, though. I’ve just been nibbling at the edges, and I’ve got a lot of bite left in my abilities.”

Damien grunted, then grinned. “Just do me a favor. Before you do, let me know. That way, if you piss the Danzur off, I can arrange to not be in a meeting with a bunch of them. They’re low to the ground but hefty.”

Kira gave him a thumbs-up. “That much, I can promise. No surprises. At least, not yet.”

5

Morgan found herself immersed in the dream again.

The screen door banged behind her as she came tumbling out of it, down the steps, almost falling. But she just ran on, leaving a wake of clacking, buzzing bugs. She laughed at how they bumbled and clattered off in all directions.

“Lookit! Lookit, Mister Starman! Lookit the bugs!”

She gave Mister Starman a chance to look at the bugs, then she ran on. She stopped again, though, to see if the cloud that looked like a horse might have come back. It hadn’t, and that made her sad. She then fled the heat, into the shade of the sourfruit grove that separated the house from the fields beyond it. There she sat, feeling the cool grass with her toes and talking to Mister Starman.

Mister Starman. That’s what she’d named him. But she knew his real name. It was Thorn. And he was a hero.

That’s what Mommy and Daddy had told her. Although Daddy wasn’t really her daddy—or he was, but he wasn’t her father. That was also Thorn. Thorn Stellers. No one had ever told her that. She just knew it. She wasn’t sure how, she was just sure of it, the same way she knew she had two ears, or five toes on each foot, without having to check. Her mommy was her mommy, though. Her mother. Wasn’t she?

Or could that be somebody else, too?

It didn’t matter. These people on Nebo, who were named Calie and Asher, were her mommy and daddy. They took care of her, and she loved them, and that was what really mattered, right?

She sat back, luxuriating in the cool shade, talking to Mister Starman about what they saw all around them. She finally sat up and looked through the clouds again, trying to see if the one shaped like a horse had come back. She imagined it galloping across the sky, and that made her giggle. Maybe that’s what thunder was, a mighty sky horse galloping.

A piece of the sun broke off and raced across the sky.

“What’s that, Mister Starman?”

He had no answer for her, so she just looked back up at the sky. Why was the sun suddenly falling apart?

A bang sounded from somewhere, so loud it seemed to suck some of the air out of her lungs. Morgan whimpered and jumped in the way that children do when they’re hurt—pure reaction. Pure instinct.

“What’s that?” she asked, her voice trembling. Still, though, Mister Starman just smiled, saying nothing.

She watched the sun shard fall past the end of the sky and vanish. A second later, the sky, the air, everything seemed to turn white, then fade back to normal.

Morgan gasped. Her heart pounded like a galloping horse. She needed to find Mommy and Daddy ask them what was—

Mister Starman began to glow a soft, radiant blue.

More pieces broke off the sun and plunged through the sky.

Morgan whimpered again. She didn’t want this to happen. She didn’t want any of this to happen. The sun didn’t fall apart, and thunder and lightning didn’t come from an empty sky.

She wanted it all to go away, and it did, a sudden wave of bright blue pulsing away from her to push away the terrible things that were happening.

A wall of fire as tall as the sky suddenly raced over the hills, struck Mister Starman’s bubble of blue denial, and swept over it.

“No, no, Mister Starman, make it stop, make it stop!”

Mister Starman smiled, shooting searing bolts of blue energy into the sky. Every time they touched a sun shard, it went away. Gone.

Morgan whimpered and cried, rocking as she clutched Mister Starman tightly. Salty fluid, warm and sticky, poured over her mouth. Crimson droplets spattered into the grass. She was bleeding, her nose was bleeding, and she needed Mommy—

She stood to run, and the blue glow flickered and started to die. Mister Starman tried his best, but a big sun shard, the biggest yet, fell out of the sky, turned everything white again, and—

And that was it.

Everything was dark, now. There might have been other things happening, sounds and movements, but they were lost in the darkness around her.

And then, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just an instant of it, a tiny flicker, but it was the most awful thing she’d ever felt. But that minute flicker gave way to something new, a growing spread of pale light. It was white again, but a different white. Not the white of the sun shards, not the white of that terrible flash that ended everything. This was softer, more expansive, slowly spreading and growing.

Stars. The light was stars. Thousands, millions of them. More. And they were all around her, taking shape, and now so was she.

It was all coming back. Ground coalesced under her feet as the sky above returned, brightening with the sun—grass, the farmhouse, the sourfruit grove, and the clacking, bumbling bugs busy in their simple pursuits. Her world was coming back.

Mister Starman was bringing it all back.

Except it wasn’t just Mister Starman. It wasn’t just her doll, but a real presence, a strong one that felt like a warm, tight hug. It was all around her, infusing her, infusing everything.

A voice rumbled out of the earth, the sky, from the air itself.

I’m here, Morgan. I’m here. Daddy’s here.

Morgan gasped. Daddy. Daddy was here. He’d come back from the war for her. She spun around, looking for him. But—

Daddy, I can’t see you!

That’s okay. I’m right here. We’ll be together soon.

Daddy, where are you?

I’m here, Morgan. I’ll always be here.

She spun again, desperately looking for him. But all she saw was Mister Starman, and he had started to glow a soft blue.

But I can’t see you! she said. I can’t find you!

We’ll be together very soon, I promise!

Daddy—!

Almost, Morgan. Just a little bit longer.

Where was he? Why was he hiding? What was he—

She stopped, went still.

Something wasn’t right. She was becoming more herself, more real—but somehow, the world around her was fading in and out, and every time it faded, part of her went with it. The process could only end in one way, and even a child could see that.

Daddy—

Nearly there, Morgan.

Daddy—it’s different. It’s wrong. It’s wrong!

Morgan, Daddy’s almost there. His voice strained with effort. I’m almost—

Morgan’s hand was in an iron grip, pulling away into the swirling darkness where Mister Starman’s cheery radiance flared and then began to die. Things began to pop, to separate, a series of noises that made her wince even as her hand was torn farther away, always in the blue glow of her savior. Her father.

Her tormentor.

All that connected the hand now was a tenuous thread of existence that was about to snap, and Morgan threw back her head and screamed.

Mister Starman echoed it, with a sudden flare of blue light as bright as the white light that ended everything—a curtain of punishing light that seared her eyes—

Then it vanished, and her hand snapped back into place. She was whole again.

She felt a shockwave pulse away from Mister Starman, rippling through reality, turning it as rigid as stone in its wake. But she also felt daddy pushing back, trying to undo it, trying to take her hand away again.

Daddy, no!

Morgan, please, let me help you—

No, you’re hurting me!

Morgan remembered touching the stove once. The brilliant flash of pain had made her hand jerk away all on its own. That happened again now. The shock of pain from Daddy trying to pull her apart made her jerk back, made Mister Starman flare as bright as the sun. She snatched desperately at it, trying to scoop up endless handfuls of dust and gas and anything else she could reach for in that desperation that only pure pain can bring. She threw the matter back at him, creating a titanic blast, the biggest and brightest yet. It crashed through reality, flinging away stars and planets and glowing gases like sparks from a holiday bonfire. The stars howled, Morgan screamed, and then Daddy was gone—or at least, distant.

He was still there. She could feel him searching for her.

No. She couldn’t let Daddy find her.

That meant she couldn’t stay. She had to run. There was something wrong with Daddy. He was trying to hurt her—

Mister Starman knew what to do. He made a ship for her.

She’d never been on a ship before. This one had a chair for her and a big window so she could see where she was going, and that was all. It lifted from the ground and rose into the sky, then everything blurred and she was back among the stars. The farm, the sourfruit trees, the clacking bugs, they all vanished, lost somewhere far behind her now.

Morgan began to cry.

She cried as the ship raced through the universe, flashing past stars so fast they were just smears of light, gray and fleeting.

She sobbed, like the child she was, biting her lip and sensing the things that were around her now, so different from the nothingness of before. She knew about the farmhouse, and the fields around it, and she’d been to the city once, but that was it. Everything else was just things she’d heard about or seen on the vid.

A pall of desperate loneliness fell over Morgan. Anguished, she reached out, trying to find someone, anyone, who might take her in, take care of her—

She touched something, or something touched her, as light and soft as a feather.

Who are you?

I’m Morgan. Who are you?

I’m a friend.

Morgan bit her lip. This person, whoever it was, was lying. She could tell. She could feel it, see it in the curves and bumps and wrinkles of their thoughts.

You’re not my friend. You’re bad.

How can you say such a thing?

I know it. You’re lying! You’re lying to me!

Morgan sobbed again. She had nowhere to go, no one to go to. She couldn’t let Daddy find her, not while he wanted to unmake who she was.

She stopped, frowning. “Mister Starman, I know them. I know who this is.”

She reached out with the feather-touch again. You’re the one who made the sun fall apart.

I don’t know what you mean.

You’re lying again!

This time, she felt a push. Whoever this was, they were trying to dig themselves deeper into her, further into who she was. They wanted to make her do the things that they wanted, not what she wanted.

No, I won’t let you do that, she said.

She felt something moving toward her. Something like a wave in space. A ripple. She couldn’t see inside it. It was nothing. A ripple of nothing.

It scared her, the same way the sun shards had. The sun wasn’t supposed to fall apart. Space wasn’t supposed to ripple around nothing. It wasn’t right.

“Mister Starman, I don’t like that,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t like that at all.”

Mister Starman agreed in an aura of blue. Morgan reached out and made that nothingness, and the strange, frightening ripples it made in space just go away.

As she did, she noticed that it had come from the same direction as that feather-light voice. Still riding Mister Starman’s blue radiance, she reached out to see what was there.

They were people. But not people. They were different. So different. A whole world of them. A world they called a strange name. Tāmtu. But she didn’t know what that meant, or if it meant anything at all.

But they didn’t live on Tāmtu, the way she’d lived on the planet called Nebo. They lived in Tāmtu, a secret place, far beneath thick ice layered over a warm world-ocean.

That would be the perfect place to hide from Daddy, at least until she could figure out what was wrong with him and why he wanted to pull her apart the way the sun had been pulled apart.

So you have found us, that soft voice said. Come to us. You want to be taken care of. We’ll take care of you.

It was lying again. So much lying. Mommy and Daddy got mad at her for lying. Once, they made her spend almost a whole afternoon in bed, in her room, because she’d lied about breaking a branch off a sourfruit tree. It had actually been Mister Starman with his blue radiance that did it, but it had been her idea, so it really was her fault. She’d just wanted to see if she could do it. When she finally told the truth, Mommy and Daddy hugged her and let her and Mister Starman out to play.

Lying was bad. Telling the truth was good.

You need to tell the truth.

I am—

No, you’re not! You’re not nice! Lying is wrong!

Please, just come to us—

No, she thought, but—if not there, then where? Where else could she go?

She made up her mind.

I will come to you, she said. I will, but you’re going to be nice and not lie anymore.

Mister Starman once more agreed with her and gave her as much blue radiance as she needed—enough to change these people, to take away the badness and lying and make them nice.

* * *

Morgan slowly awoke and looked around. She floated high above one of the hot vents—that’s what the Nyctus called them, and they used another word—hydro-terminal, or something like that. If she were deeper, the heat would have woken her up. This far above it, though, close to the ice, it was just a gentle warmth.

“You’re awake, child.”

She turned and found the elder shaman nearby.

“You were dreaming,” it said.

“Were you watching me?” Morgan asked, her voice tinged with suspicion.

“Of course. We always watch over you.” The elder shaman drifted closer. If it could smile, Morgan knew it would be smiling now. She smiled back.

“I know. I’m glad.”

“Were you dreaming of him again?”

She nodded. “I wish he wasn’t disappointed in me. I wish he didn’t want to change me.”

“I’m sorry, child, but I can’t speak to that. I don’t know his mind.”

Morgan’s eyes stung. She didn’t know his mind either. But she could.

The shaman flashed with soft blue-green light, trying to soothe her. It made her eyes stop hurting.

“I’m glad you’re my friend.”

“And we’re glad you’re ours. Of course, why wouldn’t we be? After all, you are the reason that we exist,” the shaman said.

6

“That’s it,” Kira said, pointing at the screen. “Right there.”

Damien leaned forward, frowning. For a moment, the only sound was the low hum of the Venture’s aircyclers. “Krol-kazan? What’s krol-kazan, aside from something I assume involves that kicking drink the Danzur export to the Nyctus?”

“It’s the key ingredient of krol,” Kira replied. “The Danzur import it because they don’t seem to have access to any of their own.” She pointed again. “Now, take a look at the import stats for it.”

Damien scrolled down the page, one of myriad tables of commercial data the Danzur had provided.

Not that they’d meant to provide them. That had been Kira’s doing. It turned out that if you Join with a minor functionary, a petty bureaucrat filling the role of a tiny cog in a vast, creaky machine, it seemed to go unnoticed. This little cog had been dedicated to his work but not particularly stimulated. He tended to drift in and out of fantasies that were, Kira assumed, pretty lurid by Danzur standards. It had been easy to take control of his fantasies and make them a little more real. The distraction from what he was actually doing meant he didn’t notice that among the requested statistics, he was also sending Kira all of the Danzur import/export data for the last three cycles.

Damien abruptly stopped scrolling and looked at Kira. “Wait. How did you get all this? I don’t remember seeing any requests for it from us, and I don’t remember seeing it coming in, either.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Probably not,” Damien said, shaking his head with a small smile. “But these Danzur keep track of everything. They audit their audits. Don’t you think they’ll eventually figure this out?”

Kira gave a sly grin. “They might. On the other hand, auditing your audits creates such a vast amount of paperwork that someone would have to actually notice it, right? And what are the chances of that happening anytime soon?”

Damien started scrolling again. “I don’t know, and that’s the—whoa.”

“I thought that would perk you up,” Kira said.

“Their imports of this krol-kazan, whatever it is, just stop.”

“So do their exports of Krol to the Nyctus, almost right away.”

Damien drummed on the table with his fingers. “So their import source got cut off. Okay, that sucks, I guess, mainly for the Nyctus—which doesn’t break my heart. But—and I mean this in the nicest possible way—so what? Walk me through the repercussions, because I’m not sure we’re on the same trail.”

“Look at when this happened,” Kira replied, pointing at the corresponding column of dates. The Venture’s computer had converted them to ON standard, so it wasn’t hard to tell when the Danzur had been cut off from their supply of the ingredient. “Right here.” She pointed at the date column.

Damien stared blankly at it, then at Kira—then understanding dawned. “That’s almost immediately after the ON destroyed that squid planet that was not too far away from here.”

“Exactly. You know what that makes me think?”

“That this krol-kazan came from the Nyctus. From that planet, in particular.”

“Bingo.”

Damien drummed his fingers again as the implications sunk in. “We inadvertently cut off a lucrative source of trade for the Danzur when we destroyed that planet. Krol-kazan came from there, and they processed it into krol, which they traded back to the Nyctus.”

“Makes you wonder why the Nyctus just didn’t make krol themselves if they had the ingredients,” Kira said.

“I dunno. They might not have had all the ingredients. Or they might not know the process, which might be proprietary or even beyond the physical limitations of the Nyctus. In any case, they obviously needed the Danzur to make it for them, and it wasn’t worth starting a war over. It would have had the Nyctus fighting on two fronts.”

Kira leaned on the table and nodded. “Which is what we’re facing if we can’t figure out a way to maintain—hell, to even develop, for that matter—good relations with the Danzur.”

* * *

When Thorn contacted her, it took a moment for her to transition from the task at hand to mental communication across the light-years. With slow, deliberate movements, she pushed back from her desk, and from the latest Danzur draft of the negotiation agreement.

Busy? he asked.

I’m deconstructing a trade war between two races who have no reason whatsoever to be in business. So, the usual. What is it?

I think I know what went wrong, he said without preamble.

With bringing her back?

Yes, and I know why. I don’t think I was there enough for her.

You weren’t—what? What does that mean? Kira asked.

She was confused, frightened. She didn’t understand what was going on. I should have talked to her more, explained what was happening. It was the mechanism of what I did that scared her, but my failure to explain it made it worse.

Thorn, she was four.

Actually, I think she was older than that when I tried to bring her back. I don’t know why, but she seemed more like an eight or nine year-old. It must have had something to do with how I visualized her, and how the magic reacted to that. I’ve aged from magic, and I should have anticipated the same for her. It’s . . . it’s too big. Magic is bigger than life, I think, and it can reshape everything right down to reality. I missed that when I dove in and tried to bring her all the way back.

Thorn—shit. That means you would have taken away four or five years of her life.

As opposed to all of it, because she was dead?

Kira sighed. True. Okay, explain an interstellar war, an alien enemy, a KEW attack, death, magic, resurrection, and not just for her, but for a whole planet, as though you’re talking to a nine-year-old child.

Okay. You see, Morgan, we’re fighting a war.

What’s a war? Kira interrupted.

It’s when two groups of people don’t agree on something, so they fight about it—

Why?

Because they might not understand the universe the same way, so that makes them—

What’s a you-knee-verse?

It’s— Thorn started, then snapped back. Kira, she’s not dumb. She’s just young, and if my instincts are right, she’s no ordinary child. Not by a long shot, Thorn said.

No. She was an eight- or nine-year-old who grew up on a farming planet. She doesn’t have the same frames of reference that you do. So you finally explain what a war is, how it’s between people who understand the universe in different ways, and you explain the universe to her, and now you tell her that we’re fighting the Nyctus, and they attacked her planet, so she asks, what’s a planet?

How could she not know what a planet is? Even an eight-year-old should know that.

My point, Thorn, is that you seem to want to treat her like a little adult, but she’s a child. A young child. Her universe really is different from yours.

Kira began to wonder if Thorn had just given up. But no, he was still there. So she waited.

I feel like I have to try, Kira, Thorn finally said. That’s our daughter. I have to try.

He sounded tired. Worn out. His thoughts, projected across the light-years, which normally rang out strong and clear, were muffled, diminished. And it wasn’t just fatigue or stress. Thorn’s magic was, at least for the time being, weakened, probably by the ordeal of trying to bring Morgan back the first time.

You don’t have to do anything, Thorn, she finally said. I miss Morgan too—of course I do. She stopped to swallow a suddenly hurtful lump in her throat. As much as I hate to say this, people lose loved ones all the time. Everybody who’s died in this war was someone’s son or daughter. Those they leave behind just have to learn to cope and then move on. That’s what I’m trying to do, because your efforts to save our daughter have galactic implications. We’re way past the damage a single family can do. We left that behind the first time you tweaked reality or pushed a ship.

Maybe I could bring them all back, Thorn said.

Kira shook her head. No, Thorn, you can’t, for so many reasons. The most immediate, though, is that you literally can’t. I can tell you’re still tapped out. If you try this again, you may leave yourself magically crippled.

But—

And we can’t afford that. The ON can’t afford to lose you, especially not to what amounts to a personal quest.

There was silence for a moment. Kira broke it.

I’m sorry. I want her back so badly it makes my bones ache. But if we lose this war, where she is won’t matter. Where we are will matter even less, because we’ll be the people who lost a war of extinction due to selfishness. We have to win, Thorn. And if we do—

Then we can try to save her later.

I know it’s horrible, and as her mother just thinking this leaves me disgusted. You understand. We both do. For now, you have to—what does Mol call it? The thing you need?

Mojo.

Right. Mojo. Try to concentrate on getting it back.

I will.

* * *

Kira found Damien waiting for her aboard the Venture, his manner eager.

“You made this sound important,” Kira said.

“It is important. I’ve spent some time putting two and two together,” Damien replied.

“Did you get four?”

“Yes, despite my field not being math. Not even close,” Damien said.

“I take it you have something more than basic math then? I’m guessing this mood isn’t due to two and two equals four?”

“Again, not quite. I know what they’re doing. They’re stalling.”

“Um, a point? Stalling seems to be what their whole society is about,” Kira said.

He raised a hand. “No. This is different. This is specific. I couldn’t figure out why the Danzur weren’t jumping at some of the trade opportunities we’ve been offering. It makes no sense. They’re traders first and foremost, so the chance to make the kind of deals we’re talking about is something they should jump at. But they’re not.”

“Again—mountains of bureaucracy, remember?”

“And again, that’s not the point.” He gestured at a data pad on the table between them. “I’ve been looking over some of the stuff they’ve given us—given us legitimately, I might add,” he said, grinning.

“And?”

“And this is where two and two adds up to that perfect four. I’ve cross-referenced about five different sets of data they’ve given us and worked out the average amount of time it takes them to go from opening negotiations to signing an agreement. It’s about one standard week.”

Kira stared. “A week? We’ve been here three times that, and we’re not even at the stage of agreeing on what we should negotiate!”

“Hence, the stalling.”

Kira looked at the data pad, then back at Damien. “Okay, what are they stalling for? What’s the end game?”

“Now that’s the question, isn’t it? But when you put this together with them losing one of their most lucrative trade deals as a result of something we’ve done, it starts to add up.”

“Four plus four is eight.”

Damien grinned again. “Sure. The Danzur had a cozy and profitable thing going on with the Nyctus. We put an end to it when we destroyed the planet that supplied the raw materials to make the stuff they traded back to the squids for what was probably a grossly inflated margin.”

“So they’re pissed at us.”

“You tell me. You’re the one who can peer into people’s thoughts and feelings.”

Kira gave a humorless laugh. “I haven’t done much peering so far, but I don’t get the sense they’re particularly pissed off at us. With aliens it can be hard to tell. It’s one thing to know that Bob the alien blob thinks your pink, hairless skin is unusual. But understanding Bob’s emotions, how he feels about it, isn’t anywhere near as easy. We tend to assume the Nyctus are always angry.”

“Because so far we’ve really only talked to them as bitter enemies.”

“Sure. And having big rocks flung at you is hard to interpret as anything but screw you.” She almost added something about how she’d been tortured by the squids, which was also pretty hard to interpret generously, but Damien knew her history and had never brought it up. Something for which Kira was grateful.

“The bottom line, though,” she went on, “is that I couldn’t say for sure that what the Nyctus are feeling is actually anger. Not as we’d understand it, anyway.”

“Well, then we have to assume the Danzur are angry about what we did—at least, in their own Danzur way.”

“Which takes the form of stalling?”

“Maybe. We are finding it really aggravating, aren’t we?”

“So, aggravation is their weapon? Sounds like weaponized pettiness,” Kira said.

Damien pushed up his lower lip in thought. “Maybe. Or maybe this is all leading up to something else. Something specific. Something intended to screw us over.”

“Like what?”

“Well, if we want to avoid a two-front war, Kira, that’s something we need to find out.” Damien offered a thin smile. “I think it’s time for you to slip the leash. I think you need to stop holding back and push deeper. You need to do some of that peering.”

7

Tanner leaned back in his command seat on the Hecate’s bridge.

“Okay, Tac O, bring up the latest SITREP from fleet on the big screen,” he said.

“Aye, sir.”

Osborne, the Tac O, tapped at his console. The image on the main viewscreen flicked to a star chart depicting the Zone, with Allied Stars space to the right and Nyctus space to the left. Thorn knew that everyone on the bridge had seen this chart so many times there was probably a faint version of it burned onto the back of their eyeballs. But this version made everybody lean forward a fraction, a little confused.

“Where the hell are the Nyctus?” Raynaud, the XO, said.

Tanner nodded. “Exactly. This is the first time we’ve detected no squid activity—and by no activity, I literally mean none—anywhere in the Zone.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes. Sure enough, there was the expected array of blue icons representing friendly forces and installations. The only red ones, the “bad guy” icons, were way off on the far side of the Zone, deep in Nyctus space. And that was unexpected. Thorn noticed that even those only marked fixed locations—fortified planets, comm relays, sensor buoys—had been marked and charted for a long time.

“The Nyctus have pulled back. Like, completely pulled back,” Thorn said.

The XO nodded. “The question is, why?”

“Maybe they just don’t have any fight left in them,” Osborne suggested. “In a war, it’s inevitable that one side is eventually going to run out of steam, after all.”

Tanner steepled his fingers. “Let’s call that the optimistic scenario. What else?”

Thorn knew the question was an open, general one. Tanner frequently engaged the bridge crew like this. He’d explained it to Thorn once in a single, to-the-point statement.

“I don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, Stellers.”

So Thorn spoke up. “They’re regrouping for another offensive.”

Tanner glanced at him. “You know, I’d usually just take that as another possibility, but coming from you, Lieutenant Stellers, I have to ask—is that just another possibility, or are you making a statement here?”

“Just throwing it out as a possibility, sir,” Thorn replied.

The discussion went on. Possible explanations for the Nyctus withdrawal ranged from Osborne’s and Thorn’s two extreme cases, and nearly everything in-between. When Tanner finally cut it off, he summed it up in another, single statement.

“So, it could be this, or it could be that, or it could be something else, but who the hell knows?”

“That sounds about right,” the XO said, nodding.

Tanner sat up. “Well, this actually makes our lives easier. If we don’t know what the right answer is, then we can’t possibly do anything about it—except what we’re already doing.”

Tanner went on to issue instructions to the Hecate’s various division heads. When everyone had acknowledged, he handed the bridge over to the XO and started for the exit. As he did, he caught Thorn’s eye.

“A moment in my briefing room, Lieutenant Stellers.”

Thorn nodded and followed the Captain into the little compartment behind the bridge that functioned as his de facto office.

“Have a seat, Stellers,” Tanner said, sitting behind the undersized desk.

Thorn did. “Am I in shit, sir?”

“Should you be?”

“I’ve probably gotten away with a few things I shouldn’t have.”

“Any of them aboard my ship?”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Then I don’t care.” Tanner leaned forward. “When I joined the ON, ships generally had six functional divisions—command, helm, nav, tactical, engineering, and support. I can guarantee you that if someone had told Lieutenant Tanner there’d eventually be a new one added—Starcasting—he’d have replied with some variation of yeah, right.”

“Understood, sir. I don’t think anyone expected magic to become so much of a thing—more than it had ever been before for sure.”

Tanner leaned back. “Implying magic has been with us for a while now.”

“Probably all of human history, in one way or another. Everything from witches to wizards, paranormal happenings, ghost sightings—it’s all probably just uncontrolled manifestations of magic.”

“And now we can control them. What changed?”

“We’re not entirely sure, sir. I know we’ve got some big brains working on that higher up in the Starcaster Corps, but I’ve got no idea what sort of headway they’re making.” Thorn gave a rueful smile. “Especially against the attitude that magic is something strange and dangerous.”

“It is strange and dangerous.”

“Okay, granted, sir. But the point is, before we developed the Alcubierre drive, traveling faster than light seemed to be a complete non-starter. Go back further, and the idea of radioactivity—that a hunk of metal could be producing lethal death rays—would have sounded like utter fantasy. Before powered flight—”

Tanner held up a hand. “I get the point, Stellers.” He straightened in his chair. “Anyway, I didn’t bring you here to discuss the history of magic or the organization of the ON. What I want is your take on the Nyctus, and what they’re up to.”

“Sorry, sir, I’ve got the same information you do.”

“Now that, Lieutenant, is a bucket of bullshit, and you know it. I think we’ve worked together long enough that you owe me the courtesy of speaking honestly even if I’m not going to like the answer. Hell, especially if I’m not going to like the answer. But I’ve got a Starcaster division aboard this ship—meaning you—and I want to extract every bit of value from it I can, just like every other division. So, Stellers, what do you think the squids are up to?”

Thorn leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.

“Honestly, sir, I don’t know. I haven’t been close enough to a squid to be able to Join with it for a while. Weeks, I guess. So I really don’t have much insight to offer.”

“You can’t link up with them across the miles, in a similar fashion to what you do with other ’casters?”

Thorn shook his head. “If I had some sort of personal connection to a squid, or at least knew one as a specific individual, then maybe. That’s why I can talk to Kira and Captain Densmore like that—I know them both as individuals. Their identity is kind of—it’s like a beacon shining through the ether.”

“The ether.”

“Sorry, sir, that’s what Starcasters call the place where magic comes from, and where most of it happens. It’s an old term, and not really right. It implies there’s actually a separate, physical space for magic, but it’s more of a mental one.”

“Like radio waves. They propagate through real space, but from our perspective as humans, we can’t detect them at all. It’s basically an entirely separate radio universe that exists on top of the one we can see. So we can only detect their effects when they hit a radio receiver.”

Thorn stared for a moment, then grinned. “Can I steal that explanation, sir? It’s the best one I’ve heard. Oh, and before you accuse me of blowing sunshine up your butt, I’m not at all.”

“I don’t plan to close my mind and get set in my ways until I get promoted to Admiral, Stellers. Until then, I like to think I can be open to new things. Like I said, Starcasting is something new, as far as I’m concerned, but I can at least try to understand it. And you’re damned right I’ll exploit the ever living shit out of it if it will help me win this war.”

Thorn gave a nod. “That’s music to my ears, sir. On behalf of Starcasters all through the fleet who are still hearing echoes of those old witch hunts when other officers talk to them, thank you.”

“Not looking for gratitude, Stellers, just answers. Is there anything you can offer about the squids? Maybe not direct information, but some magical perspective. I hate not knowing what’s going on over there.”

Thorn sat back. “All I can think, sir, is that after we moved the Task Force to destroy their planet, then brought our own planet, Nebo, back from the dead, they decided to pause, pull back, and think through the implications.”

“We didn’t do those things. You did, Stellers.”

“Doesn’t matter, sir. We’re all in this together.”

“Oh, bullshit. Credit where it’s due.” Tanner narrowed his gaze. “Although, I do have to wonder whatever prompted you to bring back Nebo, complete with its entire population. As an event, it’s unprecedented. As a tactic, it’s incomprehensible.”

“It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“And you created an actual nebula, with columns of gas and stars, in the process.” Tanner shook his head, still amazed at the reality of magic and how it was unfolding before him.

Thorn shifted uncomfortably. “That was an unexpected side effect.”

“Stellers, feeling drowsy after taking some meds the doc prescribed is a side effect. Creating stars and nebulae from nothing is not.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be,” Tanner said, waving him off. “I said I’d keep an open mind, try to understand, and I will. But you have to give me time to get used to the idea of creating matter, okay?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Still, that probably does make sense. You put on quite the show for the Nyctus, made them gun-shy. Best case scenario now is that it finally convinces them to come to the table and talk this war out.”

“And the worst case, sir?”

“Oh, you mean the one I fully expect? That would be the Nyctus countering with their own nasty surprise when they renew hostilities, probably in a big way.” Tanner looked at Thorn for a moment, as though deciding whether to say something else.

“Fair to say the squids know all about you, Stellers?”

“I would think so, sir. I’ve never really tried to keep myself a secret from them.”

“Which means that you are a high-value target. Maybe their highest-value target. That makes me think they might try to do something about you. So, we’re all going to have to be on guard against squid ops to take you out, especially since there may still be Skins among us. You are going to have to be especially vigilant, in the way only you can.”

“Got a massive target on me. Got it, sir.”

“Either you’re being flippant, or you have long since come to terms with this. Hoping it’s the latter,” Tanner said.

“Mostly, sir.”

“Alright. That’s all I’ve got, Lieutenant. If you do learn anything useful—hell, even anything half-assed interesting—about the squids, you let me know asap. Wake me up if you have to.”

Thorn stood and saluted. “Aye, sir. Will do.”

Thorn left and headed for his quarters. He needed to get some rest. Kira had been right about that much—he really still wasn’t back to his full ’casting powers. Not even close.

* * *

Thorn narrowed his eyes and concentrated on his target. He let his awareness sink into the intimately familiar depths of his talisman, treading the magical paths he knew so well, gathering power. When he felt he had sufficient might, he reached out with it and began to nudge and shape reality, squeezing it, kneading it, changing it to a truth—to the only truth. To his truth.

The universe changed.

Thorn relaxed, let his consciousness reassert itself inside his head, and cast a critical gaze on his target.

It looked like nothing had changed. But there was only one way to tell.

He picked up the mug and sipped. The warm, smooth bitterness of coffee washed across his tongue.

It had worked. He’d started with tea in the mug and changed it to coffee.

Because who the hell preferred tea over coffee?

He sipped coffee again, then reflected on what he’d accomplished. He’d changed a bulkhead from a shade of grey to a noticeably different shade of grey. He’d considered shocking pink but didn’t want to antagonize Tanner. Instead, he’d changed the Tac O’s socks to shocking pink, from the standard-issue grey. He’d convinced the universe that the beef stew on his plate had actually always been spaghetti, that the hot and cold water taps on his wash basin had always been the other way around, and that the place rug in his quarters was not blue, but green.

So, success.

A degree of success, anyway. And that’s what mattered.

Thorn had come to think of these little ’castings as a sort of talisman all on their own. He knew he still lacked the capacity to wield the sorts of power that brought planets successfully—and without complications—back from the dead. He fell far short of it, in fact. But keeping up with these little ’castings, these tiny nudges to reality, also kept him engaged with his ’casting, and with minimal drain. The exercises felt like sharpening a knife, and he, of course, was the blade.

They also let him drink coffee instead of tea.

* * *

Except it wasn’t enough, Thorn thought, as he left his quarters and headed for the Gyrfalcon.

He hadn’t expected to find Mol with the fighter, but she was there. Once again, she was fiddling with something up inside the landing-gear well. Thorn made sure to pointedly clear his throat when he entered the repurposed shuttle bay. He made sure to do that every time, ever since he’d startled Mol enough that she cracked her head on an ordnance hardpoint. That had caused the spillage of a little blood, and a lot of profanity.

She was craning her neck to look at whatever she was working on. As Thorn approached, she looked down, catching him square in the face with the glare of her headlamp.

Thorn squinted and raised a hand. “Okay, okay, I’ll talk! Just no more rubber hoses, okay?”

Mol grinned and aimed the light away from his face. “Don’t talk to me about rubber hoses.”

Thorn tried to peek up inside the gear well. “What the hell do you keep working on in there? I mean, I ride around in this thing all the time. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“The list of things I don’t tell you is way longer than the list of things I do,” Mol replied. “I guarantee that’s the way you really want it.”

“I believe you,” Thorn said, smiling, knowing that it was complete bullshit. Mol kept the Gyrfalcon in absolute fighting condition. For her to be repeatedly trying to fix something meant there was something genuinely wrong.

He stepped up beside her. “Anything I can help with?”

Mol glanced at him sidelong. “You’re offering to help me do maintenance? Bored, are we, sir?”

“We are. In the absence of any apparent squid threats, I don’t have a lot to do.”

Mol grinned. “Apply for some leave. No better time than during a lull like this.”

“I’d rather wait until I can coordinate my leave with Kira. And who knows when she’s going to be back.”

“She still doing diplomatic stuff at that planet we found?”

“She is, yeah—” Thorn stopped and winced as something viscous hit his cheek with a splat and oozed down the side of his face. “What the hell?”

“That’s my problem, right there. The newer models of the Gyrfalcon use electrical motivators and such to raise and lower the gear, operate atmospheric flight-control surfaces, that sort of thing. This is an earlier model that still uses hydraulics as the primary, with electrical backups. I need to get some upgrades done to her, but the heavy-duty shop time she needs is in short supply.” Another drip of murky fluid hit the deck between them. “Anyway, like I said, this is my problem. I’ve got a slow, drippy leak of fluid from that coupling, right there, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why.”

“How about replacing it?”

Mol crossed her eyes. “Gee, why didn’t I think of that? I is so dumb.”

“You have replaced it.”

“Yes. Several times. So it’s not the coupling itself, it’s the socket it sits in. But I can’t replace that without replacing the entire gear-well assembly, and I can’t do that outside of a dedicated shop with some technical expertise.” She sighed. “So I tighten it and use sealant on it, and mess around with it until it stops leaking, and then it resumes leaking, and I do it all over again.”

“Mind if I try something?”

“Will it fix my leak?”

“It might.”

Mol stepped back and gestured at the gear well. “Go for it.”

Thorn stepped under the well, then he extracted his talisman and relaxed. Once more, he let his awareness fall into it. And once more he traversed the well-trodden magical pathways, the ones that carried hints of smoke and fire and fear. He sharpened his focus on the leaky coupling, applied a glimmer of magical force, and nudged into existence a new one, one imposed by his will.

One in which the coupling had never leaked.

Then he let the magic dissipate, and relaxed.

He found Mol staring at him.

“What?”

“You can use magic to fix my Gyrfalcon? How long have you been able to do that?”

Thorn held up a hand. “Before you think there’s a whole branch of magic devoted to fixing leaky hydraulics, there isn’t. Instead, I think you’ll find that this coupling has never leaked.”

Sure enough, there was no smear of hydraulic fluid on Thorn’s cheek, and no spatter of it on the deck near his foot.

“Wait,” Mol said. “You mean you did your reality-changing thing?”

Thorn nodded.

“I didn’t think you were supposed to do that.”

He gave her a conspiratorial look. “I’m trying to keep myself fine-tuned until I get all of my—” Thorn stopped, then smiled. “All of my mojo back.”

Mol smiled back, but it quickly faded. “Does that mean you can do something about Trixie?”

Thorn’s smile faded, too. “No. Or, at least, not yet. It’s one thing to fix a leaky hydraulic line, or change tea into coffee.”

“Wait, what?”

“I know, right? Who likes tea?”

“I do.”

Thorn rolled his eyes. “No accounting for taste. Anyway, I’m confining myself to little things. Me drinking coffee instead of tea, or you never having that leak, aren’t likely to lead to universe-shaking changes.”

“Aren’t likely to. That doesn’t mean they won’t.”

Thorn sighed. “Well, that’s true. I’ll put it this way—I think the tiny amount of risk is worth the reward.”

Mol cocked her head. “And what, exactly, is the reward?”

“My sanity.”

Mol blinked at that. Thorn caught himself just an instant too late. He hadn’t meant to be that blunt but had blurted it out before he could edit it into something less dire.

“You okay, Thorn?” Mol asked, dropping the sir. It didn’t bother Thorn at all. Somehow, it didn’t seem like much of a transgression from someone with whom he’d spent so much time—including at least a few near-death experiences. “Anything you want to talk about?”

For a moment, Thorn considered just spilling it all to Mol, including the things he hadn’t even told Kira. He knew full well that that was the problem—that he couldn’t get past failing to bring back Morgan. He had tried to do too much and gotten overconfident in his control over his powers. He had tried to change her into something she wasn’t, just to suit his idea of who and what she should be.

He slammed face-first into a wall of guilt and regret because she’d been so close. She’d been right there. He tried to remake her into someone that wasn’t a Starcaster, and she fought back so he lost her.

Thorn even opened his mouth to speak, but words suddenly failed him. He didn’t know what to say, or even how to say it. And how could he tell Mol something he’d never shared with Kira, Morgan’s own mother?

“I’m okay, Mol. It’s more a matter of being bored, I think. With nothing much to do, I have to keep in practice somehow, right? If I just sit around waiting for the Nyctus to do something, I’ll probably go stir crazy. That’s what I meant.”

Mol gave him a doubtful look. “Okay. Suit yourself. I’m just saying, if you need to talk, there are two seats, side-by-side, in the cockpit up there. It’s easy to talk between them.”

Thorn smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Mol—”

Tanner’s voice cut him off. “All hands, battle stations. I say again, battle stations. This is not a drill, I say again, not a drill.”

Thorn exchanged a look with Mol, then headed for the exit from the bay. Mol rolled up her toolkit and went the other way, toward the Gyrfalcon’s airlock. As she did, she glanced back over her shoulder.

“This is your fault, you know,” she said.

“My fault? How? Because I changed tea into coffee?”

“Maybe,” Mol shot back, lifting a foot onto the ladder. “More likely because you said you were bored. Never say you’re bored, ’cause if you do, you can bet the universe will take care of it for you.”

8

Maybe Mol was right. Maybe the universe was involved somehow, getting back at Thorn for saying he was bored. Or maybe the universe was just offended by Thorn, over the liberties he took with it, and was lashing back. Whatever the reason, Thorn realized the deep irony that the Hecate was under attack by a Nyctus flotilla—after a long discussion with Tanner about the Nyctus likely pulling back to lick their wounds.

He clambered into the witchport, thankful that the battle station’s klaxon cut out just before he settled himself. It wasn’t easy focusing with the damned thing blaring. He activated the bridge repeater panel with a tap. It would give him essential tactical information, while also keeping him on a direct line to Tanner.

Thorn retrieved his focus and placed it on his knees, then tried to relax.

“Captain, Stellers here. I’m on-station.”

“Got it.”

Thorn just breathed in and out for a moment, centering himself. Then he plunged into the magical depths of the talisman, tapping into his reservoir of available power—

Which was still far less than he was used to. It was like gazing across the warm, shallow waters washing a gentle slope of beach, instead of staring into the deeps. Into the dark, almost unbound depths, now denied him.

He gave a mental shrug. It was what he had to work with.

Thorn tapped into a tiny fraction of the power, extended it around him, and opened the witchport. Simultaneously, he oriented himself with the repeater display so he could pick out the approaching Nyctus ships. They were still far enough away they’d be dim dots at best, but—

A diffuse patch of light snagged his attention, pulling him out of the moment and almost making him lose the bubble of containment he’d extended around himself.

By vast coincidence, the Nyctus ships were closing from only a few degrees off Thorn’s line-of-sight to the Witch Nebula.

Thorn took a breath and reasserted control. It took some time and effort, though—far more than it normally would or should. The containment bubble was something he should be able to pretty much fire and forget, usually requiring almost no conscious thought to maintain at all. It made his stomach twist a little. Was he really that weak? Had changing even tiny aspects of reality, like tea into coffee, or the color of the Tac O’s socks, dissipated that much of his capacity?

Thorn took a long, slow breath, then let it out, recentering himself. He had to stay in the moment, ignoring the Nebula and his limited capacity for magic. Ignore all of it and focus on the task at hand.

Tanner’s voice broke in over the intercom. “Tac O, time to range?”

“Two minutes to maximum missile range. Four point five minutes to rail gun range. Five point five to particle beam range.”

Thorn glanced at the trajectories depicted on the repeater. The fact that four Nyctus ships were so close mystified him. They were essentially in open space, with nothing nearby that could have hidden them. And one of them was a destroyer of the Hecate’s size, too.

“Stellers,” Tanner said. “How did they get so close to us undetected? Magic?”

Thorn released a breath. “I’m still running on low, sir, so I can’t afford the power to check. Not without leaving me short for battle.”

“Don’t do that. We’re badly outgunned here as it is.”

Thorn’s gut twisted another notch. Tanner was counting on him to help offset the squids’ numbers. For the first time in a while, Thorn’s confidence that he could do that faltered.

“Sir,” he said. “Far be it from me to offer tactical advice, but why not just do an Alcubierre hop and withdraw?”

There were other Captains in the ON, Thorn knew, who would take a suggestion to retreat as something not far from mutiny. Tanner, though, was far more pragmatic.

“Love to. However, the drive’s off-line for at least another fifteen minutes. The Chief Engineer was working on it and has to bring it back up to power. Wouldn’t have been a problem if we’d detected these assholes sooner, like we should have.”

Thorn couldn’t help hearing an edge to Tanner’s words, a hint of recrimination. Although what amounted to a squid ambush had nothing to do with Thorn, he obviously suspected it involved magic in some way. Thorn was an easy, even if unfair target for his frustration.

“Understood, sir. I’ll see what I can do.”

Thorn glanced at the repeater. Four ships, including a destroyer, a frigate, and two corvettes. The Hecate was a match for any one of them and could likely take on both corvettes and pound them into scrap. But all four?

Badly outgunned indeed.

Thorn would try to change that. He once more let his awareness fall into his talisman, then radiate outward, focusing on the incoming Nyctus ships. His thoughts brushed against the cold, alien minds of the squids—

Wait.

Cold and alien, yes. But these squids were different, somehow. He wasn’t sure how, but these Nyctus were definitely different. Another sect, maybe? A different religion, to the extent they had anything that could be called a religion? It was something about how they viewed the world, a distinctly new flavor of thought processes, open to him for discovery. He explored their offerings, gathering what he could in bits and pieces, and concluded that their sect was irrelevant—they were the enemy.

Thorn let his awareness sweep across the enemy ships, but decided that now was not a good time to get fancy. Drawing power from his reservoir, it grew shallower still. He used some of it to tighten his focus on the lead ship. Thorn felt the lines of the destroyer and sought out the containment generator for its fusion reactor. There was nothing subtle about this. He would try to bludgeon the containment into collapse, because some jobs required nothing more than a hammer.

Thorn grinned, flexing his magical focus. A bigger hammer.

His effort might lead to an explosion, but it would more likely just trip safeties and scram the reactor. Either way, it would take the destroyer out of the battle, at least for a time, and dramatically even the odds.

There it was—the bounded fury of the fusion reaction howled away within its magnetic prison. Again, Thorn didn’t plan to be subtle. He simply focused power on the containment system, his intent to make it fail, at least enough to initiate a scram—

A powerful blast of denial slammed into him, the will of a shaman backed up by magical might. Thorn’s awareness was pushed away from the reactor and back into the void.

Gritting his teeth, Thorn called up more and more power, desperately trying to jam his perception back into the Nyctus ship. He had to find a weakness, a vulnerability of any type, and exploit it.

But he couldn’t. The shaman had created a nearly impenetrable wall of repudiation, keeping Thorn at bay. Worse, his power was dwindling by the moment, the shallow lagoon of potential about to drain dry.

He finally gave up. He simply didn’t have the strength to attack the Nyctus directly. The best he could do would be to prowl around the edges of things until an opportunity presented itself.

“Missile range now,” the Tac O said, truncating Thorn’s frustrated thoughts. “The Nyctus have just fired their own missiles—I count twenty-two on the way.”

“Return fire,” Tanner said, and Thorn could hear the tension in his voice.

Twenty-two incoming missiles would swamp the Hecate’s defenses. Unless Thorn could figure out some way to prevent it, his ship was about to be pummeled, and hard.

* * *

The Hecate shuddered under another hammer blow, the blast of the missile strike trembling the ship from top to keel. The reactive armor deflected most of the warhead’s impact, but Thorn still heard damage alerts sounding.

“Damage control to section seven alpha,” Tanner said, his voice over the intercom as impassive as ever. The man didn’t panic. Ever, even in the face of an attack that felt wildly imbalanced to Thorn, who trusted Tanner to find a solution, regardless of the odds.

Another missile detonated close by. The starfield slewed as the Hecate wheeled hard, trying to keep her orientation relative to the incoming attacks optimized for defensive systems. The point-defense batteries spewed almost constant streams of tracer, streaks of light lashing out like reaching fingers, trying to clutch and destroy onrushing ordnance.

“Stellers, Tanner here. Anything you can do?”

Thorn took a shuddering breath. He was tapped out. He could barely manage to defend the Hecate’s crew from the mental onslaught of at least three Nyctus shamans. The fact that Tanner had appealed to him to do something spoke volumes about the deep shit into which they’d plunged.

“I am so sorry, sir. I’ve done all I can,” he replied.

Which has basically been nothing.

Despair draped itself over Thorn like a funeral shroud. He’d tried to bring his daughter back from the dead, and failed. Instead, he’d lost her completely and, in the process, diffused and diminished his magical potential so much that he was now probably one of the weakest Starcasters in the Corps. He felt confident that would change, that his power would come back, in time—but time had all but run out.

He couldn’t even bootstrap his magical potential up the way he had in the past, rewriting reality to make himself more powerful. He’d tried. It hadn’t worked. Changing tea into coffee he could do, but that was about all he could do.

The Hecate slewed again. This time, something slammed into her hard enough to make the ship ring like a gong. More damage alerts blared.

“Decompression in sections eight alpha through nine delta. All hands evacuate.”

Something—probably a squid rail gun shot—had hit the Hecate hard, wounding her badly.

Thorn took another shaky breath, trying to desperately to concoct anything—

Mol in the Gyrfalcon shot past the witchport, flying close formation with the Hecate, trying to act like an additional point-defense battery for her, as well as providing a second target for the squids. It had worked, but it wouldn’t matter. The best thing Mol could do would be to bug out.

“Stellers, Tanner here.”

He was on a private channel. Thorn’s stomach flipped completely.

“Sir?”

“Unless you have something up your sleeve, in about two minutes I’m going to order the Chief Engineer to blow the reactor and scuttle the ship. I have absolutely firm orders that you are not to fall into the squid’s hands.”

Thorn closed his eyes, then opened them. “Understood, sir.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’d rather be turned to plasma than end up a captive of those bastards.”

“Sir,” Thorn said, licking his lips. “It has been been an honor, a privilege—”

“Hold that thought, Stellers,” Tanner snapped. “Another ship has just hopped onto our sensors. Stand by.”

Thorn flicked his attention to the repeater. His desperate hope was that it would be an ON ship. Preferably a big one. His mind-numbing fear was that it would be big, alright, but also Nyctus.

But it was neither. The Hecate’s tactical systems didn’t recognize it and, when Thorn zoomed in the image, neither did he.

For one thing, it was green.

The new arrival raced in at high speed. The two Nyctus corvettes swung onto an intercept course and began a fast, head-on approach. The green ship, whatever the hell it was, didn’t seem large, being smaller than either of the corvettes. Thorn expected this to be brief, but ultimately not much help. Whoever this was should just break off while they still could and make a run for it, rather than trying something heroic.

Thorn glanced away from the repeater—then back again, as it flared with lurid, emerald light. The glow enveloped one of the Nyctus corvettes, and then it wasn’t a corvette anymore. It was just an expanding cloud of debris. A few seconds later, the second corvette suffered the same fate.

“Holy shit.”

It took Thorn a moment to realize he was the one who’d said it.

When he looked back at the repeater, he saw that the remaining Nyctus destroyer and frigate were turning hard. They altered their trajectories away from the newcomer while pumping out another salvo of missiles at the Hecate. They were apparently intent on finishing her off before making their escape, but another of those dazzling flashes of green energy engulfed the missiles as they launched. Part of that blast also hit the frigate, opening a gaping hole on its port side. A second later, both Nyctus ships vanished, flinging themselves away from the battle at superluminal speed.

“All hands, priority damage control,” Tanner said. “Engineering, you’ve got five minutes to get me a list of what’s still working. Comms, raise our green friends out there and get them plugged into a channel. As long as they don’t decide we’re their next target, I should probably thank them for saving our asses.”

* * *

It took Thorn a while to reach the bridge from the witchport. He had to route himself around some battle damage, a section of the Hecate’s forward port quarter that had been breached by a missile strike and was now sealed off. He ended up taking a shortcut up one of the cramped access ladders that traversed the ship vertically, giving access to the various power distribution nodes coming off the main buses. The alternative was to go all the way back to near midships, then pick his way forward again. The ladder brought him up one deck short of the bridge, so he had to detour partway back anyway. By the time he arrived, he found Tanner in conversation with whoever was crewing their strange, green benefactors.

Tanner saw Thorn enter and raised a hand. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have to deal with something of some urgency. If you could wait a moment—”

“Please, Captain Tanner,” a smooth baritone replied from the comm. “Do whatever it is that you need to do. We’re in no hurry.”

“Thank you,” Tanner replied, and pointed at the Comm O, who put the channel into standby mode. Tanner turned to Thorn.

“What happened, Stellers?”

Thorn swallowed and glanced around the bridge, uneasily aware of the number of people in earshot. Tanner immediately shook his head.

“Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Lieutenant. I expect all of my division heads to be able to give me an accounting of what worked and what didn’t. You’re no exception. We all need to know why your magic fell short this time, so we can contingency plan around it. You know, in case our squid friends decide to come back with reinforcements.”

Osborne, the Tac O, caught Thorn’s eye and offered what was meant to be a reassuring nod. Thorn acknowledged it briefly, then turned back to Tanner.

“Some of the ’castings I’ve done lately have drained me, sir, and I haven’t had enough recovery time.” He offered Tanner an apologetic look. “For the time being, you should probably plan as though my contributions to any fight are going to be pretty limited.”

Tanner held Thorn’s gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Understood. Now, let me ask you this—is there anything you can tell me about our green rescuers out there?”

Thorn pulled open the cramped jump seat, his usual spot when he was on the bridge, from the bulkhead where it was stowed. “Give me a moment, sir, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Tanner nodded and turned his focus back to other matters, which seemed to be a dozen different problems, all of which he had to juggle at once. Not for the first time, Thorn found himself marveling at the man’s ability to take in information, digest it, and spit back orders, all in a few seconds.

But he pulled his attention away from the drama swirling around the Captain, instead pulling out his talisman and centering himself around it. He’d recovered a tiny bit of his potential and used that to push his awareness beyond the Hecate’s wounded hull and into—

Nothing.

Thorn frowned. He pushed a little harder, expanding his perception like an inflating balloon. He dug deep and kept at it, until his awareness had expanded beyond the strange, green ship.

Still nothing. It was as though the other ship and its crew didn’t exist at all.

Still frowning, he ended the scrying and looked back at Tanner.

“Sir?”

Tanner raised a finger, finished snapping out direction to a soot-stained Petty Officer from a damage control party, then turned to Thorn.

“Go ahead.”

“I get nothing, sir.”

Tanner paused a beat, then nodded and started to turn away. “Okay then—”

“No, sir,” Thorn went on. “I literally get nothing. As in, nothing at all, just empty space. Magically, there’s nothing and no one out there.”

The older man turned back, fixing him with a hard stare. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. It means that either there’s someone or something aboard that ship powerful enough to Shade it even though it’s sitting right in front of us, or it somehow just doesn’t interact with magic at all.”

“Okay. So what are the implications?”

“Well, sir, since this is the first time I’ve ever encountered anything like this, I don’t really know what the implications are. This is something entirely new.”

“Huh.” Tanner looked back to the main viewscreen, holding the image of the unknown ship. “Can’t deny that whoever they are, they were here when we needed them. Also can’t deny it makes me more than a little uneasy that we apparently know nothing whatsoever about them. We’ve got nothing in our tactical or cultural databases, and now you can’t even sense them with your magic.”

Thorn shook his head. “I have to be honest, sir. This feels like some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . a setup of some sort.”

Tanner tensed. “I thought you said you couldn’t detect these people, or whatever the right word is for it.”

“I can’t, sir.”

“So what makes you think it’s a setup?”

“I . . .” Thorn began, then trailed off. “I don’t know, sir. I can’t point to anything specific. It just feels wrong, somehow.”

“Stellers, when anyone else says that I tend to give it the weight it deserves, which usually isn’t much. Maybe the XO, maybe the Chief Engineer when it comes to the powerplant and drives and the like. But that’s about it. When you say it, though, I have to follow up—”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not getting this from magic. At least, not that I’m consciously aware of. It really is just a feeling.”

Tanner nodded. “Well, just park that feeling for now, Stellers.” He glanced at the Comm O. “Reopen the channel.”

The Comm O gave a thumbs up.

“This is Captain Tanner. My apologies for the delay, but as you can appreciate, we’re pretty busy over here.”

“I understand,” the resonant voice replied. “Your ship clearly took some serious damage. I hope that you are able to get underway, and get help from your own people.”

“We should be,” Tanner replied. “In the meantime, are you in a particular hurry to get anywhere?”

“We are not.”

“Very well then, I would like to invite you aboard the Hecate. The least we can do is offer you some hospitality for helping us out here.”

Thorn glanced at Tanner, who returned the look sidelong, but said nothing.

“I would be delighted to visit your ship, Captain Tanner.”

“We still haven’t recovered our Gyrfalcon—that’s the fighter keeping station off our starboard side. I can have it shuttle you—”

“No need. I will use our own shuttle. As you said, you’ve got a great deal to do, and I don’t want to get in your way.”

“We appreciate that. I’ll have our Chief Engineer work out the docking details with you.”

“Thank you. I will be ready when he contacts me.”

The Channel Open indicator flicked off. Tanner gave the Chief Engineer his instructions, then turned to Thorn.

“Alright, Lieutenant, let’s see how your feeling plays out when you get face-to-face with whoever the hell this is.”

“Sir?”

“As soon as the Chief Engineer works out where they’re going to dock, you and I are going to be the reception committee.”

“Aye, sir,” was all Thorn said. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on here than it appeared.

Of course, maybe Tanner was right. A feeling was just that—a feeling.

Besides, when wasn’t there more going on that it seemed?

9

Thorn had to work hard at not gaping when the pilot of the green ship stepped through the airlock and into the Hecate.

Correction—when he ducked through the airlock. He stood a full head taller than Thorn, Tanner, and the two members of the Honor Guard the Captain had arranged for their visitor. The Honor Guard, Thorn knew, was less about honoring and much more about guarding. But even the two seasoned Ratings couldn’t help simply staring at their guest as he straightened.

He was alarmingly tall. He was also bulky and muscular, with tendons like steel cables smoothly sliding beneath his skin as he moved.

His green skin.

Thorn caught himself staring, then shifted his features to a neutral look of thanks.

In every respect, he looked like a man—an unusually large and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.

Except for the green part.

Every bit of his exposed skin—since he wore only trousers and a loose vest, there was a lot of it—was a similar shade of green to his ship. He wore sandals, so Thorn could see that even his bare feet were green. And he had no apparent body hair, the overall effect of which was to make him resemble an enormous green mannequin, albeit bulging with corded muscle.

Their visitor stopped and stared for a moment, tracking his head left to right to take in the little tableau inside the Hecate’s airlock. Besides his minimal clothing, a number of odd gadgets hung from a broad belt around his waist. Any of them might have been weapons, although none were obviously so. Thorn noted the somber, almost grave expression on the alien’s face and braced himself in case there was trouble. He felt the two Ratings doing the same.

Then the green face split into the brightest, broadest grin Thorn could imagine, revealing teeth that were—

Thorn blinked. He’d expected some shade of green, but what he got was gleaming white.

“My friends,” the big green man said, flashing that flawless grin. “I am Bertilak, and I am most pleased to make your acquaintance.” Every word the man uttered was laden with enthusiasm that fell just short of shouting.

Tanner offered a smile. “And I am Captain Tanner, of the Allied Stars Orbital Navy. Welcome aboard the Hecate.”

The man stuck out a big green hand in what was obviously an invitation to shake it, which Tanner did. Their size difference made the effect disconcertingly like a child solemnly shaking the hand of an adult.

“I am so pleased to meet you,” Bertilak said. “I have heard of your people—hoomans, correct?”

“Humans, yes,” Tanner said. “And you are?”

“I already told you. Bertilak.”

“Right. I was hoping you would tell us the name of your people.”

“Bertilak.”

Tanner glanced at Thorn. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I’m confused. Is Bertilak your name, or the name of your people?”

“I am Bertilak. I am, in fact, my people.”

“I see.” Tanner nodded. “Well, welcome aboard my ship. I’m afraid that, as a warship, we’re not really configured for a lot of diplomatic niceties.”

“Ah, what niceties matter among the civilized peoples, captain? If we have air, and water, and food, we are in an enviable position. This is the opinion of Bertilak.”

Thorn watched Bertilak as he spoke. Every movement, every gesture, every word and tone was just a little exaggerated. A touch theatrical, a smidgen over the top. It was like watching an enthusiastic amateur playing his first speaking role just a little too hard.

Thorn didn’t trust him—not one bit.

“Well, Bertilak, this is Lieutenant Thorn Stellers,” Tanner said. “He’s one of my officers, and he will act as your liaison and guide while you’re aboard the Hecate.”

Thorn started to shoot a glance at Tanner but cut it off as his hand vanished into Bertilak’s massive green fist. He waited for bone-crushing power, but for all of his obvious size, power, and enthusiasm, the alien’s handshake was surprisingly restrained, almost gentle?

“I am pleased to meet you.” Bertilak’s smile faltered. “Lieutenant? Thorn? Stellers? Which should I call you?”

“Thorn is fine.”

The smile flared back to full power. “Thorn it is, then. I approve of your economical speech.”

“Lieutenant Stellers will escort you to the mess—a word that describes much of my ship right now, unfortunately.” Tanner’s diplomatic smile returned. “And it’s back to dealing with that mess I have to go. Before I do, though, allow me to once again thank you for your assistance. The crew and I are deeply grateful.”

Bertilak shook his head. “Bah! Thanks are unnecessary. I merely came to the aid of a ship in distress, the same way I’m sure you would have if I’d been the one in need.” Bertilak’s grin turned sly. “Besides, I owed those water breathers an ass-kicking. The last time I tried to deal with them, they took my cargo, then withheld payment on some stupid technicality or other. And I couldn’t do much about it, because they vanished back into hiding beneath the ice. Bertilak can tolerate many things, as the universe is filled with endless new experiences—but cowardice is to be avoided. Or punished, if Bertilak is given the chance to do so.”

Something struck Thorn as Bertilak spoke. Their comms weren’t doing any translating. The big, green man was speaking as fluently as any human.

“You’re a trader,” Thorn said, “so I gather you must do a lot of business with humans. Because you speak our language so well.” He gave an appreciative smile that he hoped came across as sincere.

It apparently did. “I do, and kind thanks. I much prefer to speak a language than rely on translators. The lack of nuance is . . . simple. And as a trader, nuance is among the tools I need to succeed.”

Tanner’s personal comm chimed. He glanced at it, then looked back at Bertilak.

“There are some things I need to attend to, I’m afraid. Thorn will take care of you. Incidentally, how large is your crew? I don’t know if we can accommodate more than—”

“Crew?”

“Yes. The crew of your ship.”

“You’re looking at it, friends. I am Bertilak, and I am the crew.”

Thorn tried to keep his bland smile from collapsing into a frown completely. “You’re alone?”

“Well, not right now, if we chose to be pedantic. As of now, I am with friends, and thus, hardly alone,” Bertilak stated, as if this was obvious.

Tanner exchanged a glance of entreaty with Thorn. “Lieutenant Stellers will have you well in-hand, I’m sure,” the Captain said, his comm chiming again. “Right now, though, I really have to get back to—”

“Your ship, yes. They are mistresses, these ships, that constantly demand our attention, eh?” The big man offered Tanner a sly grin and an exaggerated wink. “Even when we would rather be engaged in more interesting things. But taking care of the things that care for us is a necessity. I understand your need to be elsewhere, Captain, and thank you for the courtesy of explaining your tasks.”

Tanner smiled and nodded. “Yes. Mistresses. Well, this one does demand my attention. I’ll speak to you shortly. Until then, Lieutenant Stellers can provide you with our hospitality and thanks.” The Captain took Thorn’s salute, then strode away.

“Now, then, Thorn Stellers, where shall we go? What shall we do?”

“We will go to the mess. I’ll give you a tour of the ship along the way.”

“Except for the secret parts, of course. This is, after all, a warship.”

“Secret parts?” Thorn asked blandly.

“Every ship has secrets,” Bertilak said, the sly look returning. “Everyone has secrets.”

Thorn struggled to keep his expression flat. Despite the good humor bubbling in his voice, Bertilak’s words somehow put him on edge. It reminded him of how, at one particular power setting, the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive hummed with a harmonic that made Thorn’s teeth vibrate. Bertilak was that harmonic embodied, albeit infused with hearty cheer.

He gestured for Bertilak to walk with him. “Except for the secret parts, yes.”

* * *

Bertilak strode along the Hecate’s corridors with a surprisingly light step for such a big man, and an infectious grin that none of the crew could seem to resist. They all grinned back, despite the desperate race to get the ship functional enough to get underway again. Many offered their thanks.

Bertilak took it all with good humor, an effusive grin, and much laughter. Thorn felt more than a little obscured by the big alien’s sheer force of personality. Even the Honor Guard had taken to offering frequent smiles and chuckles at Bertilak’s robust antics.

The big alien finally stopped at a corridor junction just short of the mess and turned to Thorn, gesturing at their Honor Guard. “Thorn, my friend, you do not need these people here to watch over me. I am no threat whatsoever, as I would like to think I’ve demonstrated by now. That is a precedent, as you might say, and my behavior shall not change.”

“That sounds like exactly the sort of thing someone who was a threat might say,” Thorn replied, smiling.

Bertilak laughed loud enough to make the conduits ring. “Well played, sir. I am glad Captain Tanner made you my overseer. I find a lack of humor to be tedious beyond belief.”

Thorn glanced at the two Ratings, who simply stood nearby, waiting. “You two can go and help out with the ship. I’ll take care of Bertilak—my good friend, here.”

The senior Rating saluted, and the two walked away. Thorn led Bertilak to the mess.

It was one of the few places in the Hecate that wasn’t currently a bustle of activity. The ship had suffered surprisingly few casualties for the pummeling she’d taken—about two-dozen crew were injured, but no one had been killed. None of the casualty treatment had spilled over from the infirmary, leaving the mess ready for use as a makeshift medical facility, but not currently needed as one.

Thorn gestured for Bertilak to sit at one of the tables. He did, somewhat awkwardly levering himself into a seat meant for a much smaller bulk than his.

“I would happily offer you some refreshment,” Thorn said, “but I don’t know your dietary requirements. Also, most of the food services systems are offline right now.”

“That’s fine,” Bertilak said, raising a huge, green hand. “I am quite happy to simply sit and get acquainted with my new friends.”

Thorn sat across the table. “I thought you said you had dealt frequently with humans before.”

“Ah, but not your sort of humans—the military sort. I’ve dealt with many traders, as soldiers can be less likely to engage with a simple trader. Like me.”

Thorn nodded. While he wasn’t aware of many human traders operating outside of space patrolled by the ON, it could certainly be possible. He decided to leave it for now.

“‘Bertilak is an interesting name,” he said. “Is it old Earth French?

“It might be. I don’t really know.”

Thorn nodded but found Bertilak’s casual acceptance of the possibility yet another bit of oddness. He knew about old Earth languages? “I suppose it probably wouldn’t be,” Thorn said. “You don’t look Terran, after all.”

“Because I’m green?”

“That’s one reason, yes.”

“There are others?”

Thorn smiled and shook his head. “No, not really. You actually look Terran in pretty much every way except for being green. And big.”

“Well, Bertilak’s not the name my parents gave me. That was something you wouldn’t be able to pronounce, and for our purposes, Bertilak will do nicely.”

Thorn smiled again. “That’s fine.” He glanced around the mess, his gaze landing on the coffee dispenser. “Have you ever had coffee?”

“Have I? I most certainly have. Caffeine is among the wonders of our galaxy. And others, I suspect.”

Thorn nodded and turned to the dispenser. As he did, he summoned a glimmer of magic and let his awareness drift away—not far, of course, only so that it encompassed Bertilak.

Nothing. From a ’casting perspective, the colorful—both figuratively and literally—alien might not as well even exist.

Thorn wasn’t sure what to make of that. The idea of a race of aliens essentially transparent to magic had a slew of implications. It could be a threat, or beneficial, depending on how they might align themselves. He’d have to suggest to Tanner that they get to friendly space as soon as possible, ideally with Bertilak in company.

“This seems to be a fine ship, with a fine crew,” Bertilak said, looking around.

Thorn turned, a cup of coffee in each hand, and went back to the table. “It is. Personally, I think it’s the best in the Orbital Navy.”

Bertilak’s grin remained in place. “I suspect every crew believes that about themselves and their ship. Pride can be an issue, but not when the pride is used as a tool to augment naval capability. Or morale.”

Thorn nodded and sipped coffee. It struck him that the coffee he created to replace tea was better by a longshot. Of course, that was coffee as he envisioned it, so it would be, wouldn’t it?

“Are you far from your, ah, home space?” Thorn asked.

“I have no home space,” the alien replied. “Or, rather, maybe I do. It’s wherever I happen to be, so my location is my home.”

“I see. Okay, what I mean is, the space from which you originated. Where you were—” He was going to say born, but wasn’t sure if that would even apply. “Where you first came into existence. Where you’re from.”

Bertilak gave a genuine frown. “I’m not sure. I’ve always been where I am, or at least, that’s all I can remember. I admit this seems a bit opaque, but my memory only extends so far, and I have no burning need to seek further answers.”

“Ah.” Thorn sipped coffee. Was Bertilak being truthful, and he didn’t know, or was he being deliberately evasive? Without being able to Join, Thorn had no way of knowing, aside from the usual telltales of honesty. But those were human qualities, which might not apply to the alien. Either way, it would be tough to tease out of his almost constantly bubbly, effusive manner.

He decided to try a different approach. “Bertilak, where did you—”

A soft chime sounded. Bertilak glanced down at one of the gadgets hanging from his waist. “A message from my ship,” he said. “My apologies, but may I have a moment to deal with this?”

Thorn cocked his head, suddenly suspicious. “I thought you were alone on your ship.”

“I am. This is from my synthetic.”

“Synthetic?”

“Yes. I suppose you would call it an artificial intelligence.”

“Ah, okay. What’s its name?”

Bertilak looked confused. “Name?”

“Your AI. We have an advanced one aboard the Gyrfalcon, the smaller fighter we carry about the Hecate. She’s named Trixie.”

“I’m sorry, Thorn, but she? She has a name? Why?”

“Because she’s basically almost sentient.”

“My synthetic is a machine, nothing more,” Bertilak said. “In any case, if I may have a moment.”

Thorn nodded, drained his coffee, and stood. “Once you’re done, or if you need me in the meantime, I’ll wait outside for you.”

The grin flashed back to full power. “I thank you.”

Thorn turned as the door to the mess slid closed behind him, and stared at it.

He was still convinced that something was off, and in a way that was outside even his unusual set of life experiences. Moreover, his concerns would have trouble finding traction with Tanner or the crew based solely on a vague unease. Bertilak had saved all of their lives, then proven to be a strange, but decidedly charismatic figure of ebullient good humor.

And that just made Thorn all the more suspicious.

I’m a cynic. But in the end, cynics are always right, Thorn mused.

* * *

Tanner looked around his briefing room, going from face to face.

“Thoughts about our new friend?”

“Seems harmless enough,” Raynaud, the XO, said. Her voice was more taut than usual. Somehow, during the battle, she’d taken a blow to the head and now had a bandage wrapped around it. She’d eschewed any sort of painkillers, though, declaring she needed to keep her wits about her until the Hecate was back in friendly space.

“You wouldn’t think that if you were the Nyctus, ma’am,” Osborne, the Tac O, said. “We’ve reviewed the logs from the battle, especially focusing on Bertilak’s shots at the squid ships. We have got no idea what sort of weapon he was using—only that it seemed to be a direct energy system of crazy power output.”

“I saw. Two shots, two dead squid corvettes,” the XO put in. “Love to get me some of that kinda firepower.”

Tanner nodded. “Agreed. That’s something we can nudge our way toward, though. Frankly, Bertilak owes us nothing. It’s very much the other way around, in fact. So we’re not in a position to start prying much—yet, anyway.” He turned to Thorn. “Stellers, what about you? You spent the most time with him.”

“Aye, sir, I did. And . . . I don’t know. He doesn’t react with magic, and I find that deeply unsettling. Even a rock has some degree of interaction with the energy of magic—more if it’s got interesting elements inside, but to be a black hole where magic fails to report back? Troubling,” Thorn said with a shake of his head.

“None? To clarify, not a glimmer when you apply your skills to his ship?” Tanner asked, incredulous.

“No, sir. None. Just like his ship, Bertilak effectively doesn’t exist, as far as magic’s concerned.”

“Something else it would be nice to dig into,” the XO said. “Having magic-immune allies against the squids would be huge. It might even turn the war.”

Thorn crossed his arms. “Maybe. The trouble is, we don’t know anything about him or his people—and that’s if his people even exist. He claims he’s the only one of his kind he knows, and his speech patterns indicate gaps in his own self-awareness.”

“He had to come from somewhere,” the Tac O said. “There must be a race of big, green, anti-magical aliens out there, maybe even further beyond Nyctus space than the—er, what’s that race called? The one we’re talking with right now?”

“The Danzur,” Thorn replied, which immediately made him think of Kira. What insight would she have about Bertilak? Could she know something, maybe picked something up from the Danzur about his race?”

“All of this is what-if’s and conjecture,” Tanner replied. “Stellers, why don’t you just ask him and leave the oblique tactics to the spooks?”

“I’ve tried, sir. Three times, I tried to engage him in conversation about his past, his people, his origins, his ship—and every time, something seems to pull him away.”

Tanner leaned back in his seat. “What sort of somethings?”

“Twice, it was the AI—what he calls a synthetic—aboard his ship. The third time, it was the Tac O here.”

Osborne scratched an ear. “Hey, I saw him ahead of me in the corridor and wanted to personally thank him for pulling our ass out of the fire.”

“I don’t think that counts as a mysterious interruption,” Tanner said. “Unless, Stellers, you’re telling me there’s more going on here than we realize. For instance, are you suggesting that he somehow influenced Lieutenant Osborne to interrupt you?”

Thorn sighed. “No, sir. Or, if he did, it wasn’t in any way I could see or sense.”

“So we’re back to you and your feelings again.” Tanner patted the air, allowing a small smile. “Not that they aren’t valid.”

“Sorry, sir. I wish I had something more concrete, but all I’ve got is a healthy dose of my own, deeply ingrained suspicions.”

“You’re the only one, then,” the XO said. “He seems to have charmed most of the crew. I’ve seen him walking through the ship, talking and laughing as though he’s been aboard for weeks, not just a few hours.”

“He does have a certain appeal to him, I must admit,” Tanner said, then he glanced at Thorn. “But you obviously disagree.”

“I’m not saying he’s not a blast of good humor. No, he definitely is,” Thorn said. “I respectfully ask you to be alert. That’s all.”

“Stealing your limelight, maybe?” Osborne muttered.

Thorn fired a glance at the Tac O. “If you’d like to lay dead on a morgue table after fighting with magic, be my guest. I’d love the help.”

“Enough,” Tanner snapped. “Might I remind you that you are standing in your Captain’s briefing room, with your Captain present. Now, with that in mind, gentlemen, please proceed. I’d like to see where this goes.”

Thorn looked at Osborne, who looked back. Neither said anything.

“Excellent choice,” Tanner said. “Now, if you two want to go and work out this dick-waving contest during a sparring match in the gym, fine. Until then, keep them firmly in your trousers. Do we have an understanding?”

Thorn and Osborne both nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Now that that’s been firmly and irrevocably settled, we have a ship to get back underway, folks. To your duties. And Thorn? Don’t take my silence for acceptance of Bertilak at face value. I’m a born cynic as well, but I hide it under my excessive charms.”

“Aye, sir,” Thorn said, stifling a laugh.

“Carry on, then.” Tanner turned away in dismissal, leaving Thorn with his suspicions.

10

Morgan was bored.

Drifting on gentle currents beneath the icy mantle enclosing Tāmtu had been fun. Living underwater—even breathing the stuff—and otherwise poking around the sprawling submarine towns and cities had also been fun. The endless expanse of sea-bottom was a playground to rival anything on Nebo, but that sensation was long gone.

The novelty of it all had worn off. The Nyctus of Tāmtu were her friends, all of them recognizing her and greeting her warmly. But Morgan was starting to find answering them back just as warmly was getting tiresome. She didn’t want to annoy her new friends, but they all had things they had to do, places to go, other Nyctus to meet. This bustle of complicated activity was what kept the towns and cities running, kept the Radiance that illuminated the abyss lit, and kept the Nyctus civilization on Tāmtu generally working. She understood that.

But it was boring.

She tried to spend more time with the younger Nyctus, but it wasn’t the same. Morgan knew enough about how people worked that she understood that children turned into grown-ups. But she also knew that children were just like grown-ups, only smaller. It was different with the Nyctus, though. Their babies started out like fat, pinkish worms, which then changed into spindly things with little tentacles. With no legs, and no obvious way to communicate or do anything at all but swim around randomly, little Nyctus were worse than boring. Only when they reached what the Nyctus called second birth did they become recognizable as actual Nyctus. As soon as they did, they basically turned instantly into grown-ups and graduated back to those boring—sure, important, but still boring—grown-up things.

So she could try to amuse herself among pinkish slugs, or apparently mindless larvae, or among the grown-up Nyctus who had so many other things to do—

“I can tell that you’re troubled, child,” the elder shaman said.

Morgan turned from the glowing city sprawled a thousand meters below her feet and looked at the shaman with a frown.

“I’m bored.”

“What would you like to do?”

“I don’t know.” Morgan bit her lip, thinking about it. “Are there other places?” she finally asked.

“There are—many other places.” A tentacle lifted and pointed in a random direction. “Over there is another place. And there’s another place right beyond it. And—”

Morgan couldn’t help giggling. “Yeah, I know that. I mean, are there other places like—” She paused, struggling to express herself. The elder shaman just waited.

“Like this,” she finally exclaimed, sweeping her hands all around. “Like, up there, out there, above the ice and the sky!”

“You mean, are there other planets.”

“Er—planets?”

“Worlds like this one, but far away, orbiting other stars.”

Morgan pondered that. It made sense. Nebo had been another planet. But it also wasn’t quite what she meant, either. Her limitations as a child left her seeking words outside her experiences.

“Are there places like that,” she ventured, “where more Nyctus live?”

“Ah, I understand. Yes, there are. There are many other worlds where the Nyctus live.”

“Can we go there?”

“It isn’t that easy, child. You would need a ship to travel to them.”

“I made a ship once.”

“Yes, you did. That was how you got here.”

“I could do that again.”

The elder shaman flickered with quick, bioluminescent pulses, a sure sign of alarm.

“We have discussed this, child. It’s very dangerous, for many reasons. You must stay here, where you’re safe. That is why you came to us, after all. To be safe.”

Morgan deflated. “I know. I’m just—”

“Bored. Yes.”

She nodded.

The elder shaman stared for a moment, then reached out a tentacle.

“I have an idea. Come with me, child. There’s something I want to show you.”

* * *

Morgan gasped at the wonder of it all.

“It’s beautiful,” she muttered, then she turned to the elder shaman with a frown. “What is it?”

“It’s a map.”

Morgan kicked her feet in a way that had become second nature to her, swimming around the sprawling display of colorful lights, all dots and lines and swirls.

“What’s a . . . a map?” she called back.

“It’s a picture,” the elder shaman replied. “Of places. It shows us where those places are, and in what direction, and how far away they are from other places.” Ripples began to shudder rhythmically along the shaman’s body, driving it toward, and then into, the vast map.

Morgan looked around her. The map filled an enormous, domed chamber that was attached to another series of domed chambers. All together it was called The Conclave—which meant nothing to Morgan, aside from it being the place the grown-up Nyctus went to do whatever grown-up Nyctus do. The Conclave had something to do with running the city, or maybe all of Tāmtu. She wasn’t really sure which and didn’t really much care, either.

This map, though—this was something special.

It filled the enormous dome, probably a hundred times bigger than Morgan. Maybe a thousand, or a million. It was enormous, in any case. It would take Morgan at least a whole minute, and maybe longer, to swim from one side of it to the other.

That made her curious, so she did just that—started swimming. With decisive, strong kicks, she pulled herself into motion, hands fluttering to steer as she moved forward.

Bright points of light drifted past her. There were words beside them, some different for each of the little lights, some the same for all of them. For instance, one of those same words for each was Population, with a number beside it, but it was a different number for each one. Glowing lines connected many of them, but not all. And there were other, less well-defined things. Misty wisps and fuzzy glowing splotches were also labeled with words she didn’t recognize.

She found her attention drawn to one of those diffuse spots of light, pulsing brighter than the others. For Morgan, different was good.

The shock of pain from Daddy trying to pull her apart made her jerk back, made Mister Starman flare as bright as the sun. She snatched desperately at that pain, using its energy to scoop up endless handfuls of dust and gas and anything else she could reach to fling at Daddy as hard as she could. Another titanic blast, the biggest and brightest yet, crashed through reality, flinging away stars and planets and glowing gases like sparks from a campfire.

“Child?”

Morgan jumped and looked around. She’d been staring at that one glowing smudge of light. The words beside it said Anomaly 87409-AAB, Aberrant Stellar Nebula, first observed . . . and then it gave a date and a time. There were other numbers, too.

“Child?” the elder shaman said again. “Is something wrong?”

Morgan tilted her head, still staring at Anomaly 87409-AAB, then pulled her gaze away and turned to the shaman. “Nope. I just—” She looked around, taking in the map that now sprawled all around her. “It’s so pretty!”

“It is. However, this is what I wanted to show you,” the shaman said, drifting a few meters back, then reaching out a tentacle and touching one of the points of light. It immediately flashed, and another picture appeared, a smooth, white sphere, covered with a fine network of dark cracks. The word beside it was Tāmtu. Many more words and numbers popped into existence all around it.

“This is where we are. This is Tāmtu,” the elder shaman said, then he gestured at the picture of the cracked sphere. “This is what our planet looks like, if you were to go into space and see it from far away.”

Morgan nodded. “I sorta remember. When I was coming here, I sorta remember seeing that.”

The shaman gestured with another tentacle, then touched another point of light. The picture of Tāmtu, and all of the words and numbers around it vanished, then a new picture and new words and numbers appeared around the second point the shaman had touched. The word beside this one was Pelagus.

“And this is a different world from Tāmtu. If you wanted to travel there, this map would show you what direction you had to go, and how far away it is.”

Morgan giggled. “That’s dumb. It’s, like, as far away as my toes are from my nose.”

Amusement flickered along the elder shaman’s body. “Like I said, this is only a picture. Pelagus is actually very, very far away from Tāmtu. If you shone a beam of light from one to the other, that light would take over five whole years to make the trip.”

Morgan stared. She knew that light traveled very fast, so if it took it five whole years, then it must be hundreds of kilometers away.

Another thought cut off her amazement. She stared at the picture, at a sphere. This one was blue and brown and covered with swirls of white cloud.

“Do other Nyctus live there?”

“They do. There are many large cities, just as there are here.”

“But there’s no ice.”

“Not all planets are covered with ice like Tāmtu is,” the shaman said. “On this one, the air is much warmer, so most of the heat comes from the planet’s star.”

“You mean the sun?”

The elder shaman flickered softly with indulgent patience. “Yes, the sun. Most of the heat on Pelagus comes from the sun. Here, on Tāmtu, it mostly comes from inside the planet, through the vents.”

Morgan stared at Pelagus. “I wouldn’t like that. I wouldn’t like not having ice over me.” She reached back for Tāmtu and touched it, making the picture and numbers and such for Pelagus to go away, and Tāmtu’s to reappear. “I’m way happier here.”

“I’m glad, child.”

Morgan was happy, she realized.

But also bored.

“Do you talk to the others?”

“The others?”

Morgan swept her arm around. “The other planets. The other Nyctus. Do you talk to them?”

A strange shiver shook the shaman, as though he was angry? Upset? Afraid? Morgan wasn’t sure, but before she could ask, the shaman replied.

“Not since you arrived here, child, no.”

“Oh. So what about the ships? The ones that keep showing up in the sky, above the ice?”

“The ships?”

“Yeah.” She pointed up. “Up there. Ships come, sometimes. I make them go away.”

“Go away how?”

“Just go away. I don’t like them. The Nyctus on them are mad. They’re not friendly like you here on Tāmtu. I don’t like that, so I make them go away.”

Morgan thought about that. The ships had started coming not long after she arrived. First small ones, then bigger ones. One really big one and three smaller ones had eventually shown up. Morgan had made them go away, too, and there’d been no more ships since.

Another shiver ran through the elder shaman. At the same time, quick flashes of angry crimson shot along the length of its body. But that soft turquoise glow of the Radiance immediately replaced them, and the shaman relaxed again.

“If more ships come, child, please tell me before you make them go away.”

“Why?”

“Because they may want to talk to us.”

“But they’re mad. They’re not my friends, like you.”

“It’s because we’re your friends that we care about you, child. But we also—”

He shuddered again.

“—we also do not wish to harm our own people.”

Morgan sighed. “Okay, fine. But if they’re mad, they can’t come under the ice. I won’t let them.”

“Very well.”

Morgan swam off, amusing herself by touching points of light, flashing up pictures of planets, some entirely water, some a mix of water and land. There was another covered with ice, and still another that seemed to be entirely shrouded in some sort of thick mist. It held her interest for a while, but eventually she got bored again.

Her attention drifted back to Anomaly 87409-AAB. She floated over to it—

Another titanic blast, the biggest and brightest yet, crashed through reality, flinging away stars and planets and glowing gases like sparks from a fire. A flame of creation. Or pure violence, made from will.

Why had Daddy done that? Why had he tried to change her, to make her into something she wasn’t?

She wanted to know. She needed to know that she could trust him before she ever talked to him again. That’s why she had done what she had, why she’d—

She stopped, staring at Anomaly 87409-AAB but without really seeing it. She had an idea.

Morgan reached down inside herself and tugged at the glittering power she found there. She scooped imaginary handfuls of it up, then looked around and threw the energy, glittering and granular, all around her. Motes of potential raced outward, stopping when each one touched one of the little lights marking the Nyctus planets. From there, they all shot upward together, like a shower of sparks from an ancient forge, but much, much more powerful. They swept through the ice, into the sky, into space beyond, and scattered as if powered by a will that was wild and free.

Now she had to concentrate a little harder. It would be easier with Mister Starman helping her, but she didn’t like him anymore. Frowning, she pushed the motes on and on, letting herself experience each one separately, but also all of them together. They flashed through space as quick as thought, each one finally reaching the same planet it had touched on the map. As each mote arrived, Morgan had a momentary vision of that place. Images and impressions thundered into her mind. She had to work hard to keep it all sorted out, and she eventually lost track. They all smeared together into a blur of nonsense, visions of one place superimposed on or mixed with others. Finally, with a growl of frustration, she gave up and just let the motes flicker and die.

It left her with a headache and a thin curl of blood wafting from one nostril. It also left her with nothing but a confusing swirl, like someone had thrown a whole bunch of still images into the air. She’d tried to look at each, and remember where and what it was, before they all hit the ground. But now it was a jumbled mess.

She sniffed, pulling water through her nose. She briefly tasted the blood, harsh and metallic, but she ignored it and focused on the one thing she really did want to know.

And there it was. Out of all the Nyctus, on all of the planets shown on the map, only the Nyctus of Tāmtu were her friends. Only they were the soft, blue-green of the Radiance. All of the other Nyctus—every single one of them, everywhere—were flaring orange-red. They were mad, all of them. They weren’t her friends at all.

Morgan turned in place, slowly taking in the map spread around her. The elder shaman said something, but she was too busy looking at where all the angry Nyctus were.

She wondered if she could change them. She wondered if she could make all of them nice, like the Radiance.

She wondered if she could make all of the Nyctus her friends. Whether they wanted to be her friends or not.

11

But they’re mad. They’re not my friends, like you—

Thorn flung his eyes open and sat up.

“Lights.”

He looked around as the lights came on.

Sweaty sheets, his rack on the Hecate—

He swung his feet to the floor. “I am so tired of waking up like this,” he said to his shirt, which was currently draped over the back of the chair attached to his miniature desk.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Please restate your question or order.”

Thorn scowled at the voice. For reasons that he still didn’t understand, when compared to Trixie, the Hecate’s AI was like a data pad compared to a supercomputer. He’d heard it had something to do with security but couldn’t imagine what.

“Just forget it,” he said, then he glanced at the time and groaned.

“There’s zero-dark-thirty,” he muttered, “and then there’s a time to be awake that truly sucks.” He glanced up. “Don’t you agree?”

“The answer to that question is purely subjective,” the AI said, its voice clipped and efficient.

Thorn smiled a humorless smile. “Machines are so dumb.”

The AI didn’t respond.

Thorn sank back and sprawled across his rack, his head and shoulders against the bulkhead, his legs and feet dangling off the side. This time, the dream had been even more vivid, more real. Usually they were half-glimpsed impressions of his daughter, Morgan being somewhere—although he wasn’t sure where, beyond it being only dimly lit by bluish light. This time, though, he had a firmer notion of her being somewhere specific. It was somewhere underwater, and there were—

Thorn sat up. Shit. There were Nyctus with her. Nyctus all around her. The images were jarring, and well beyond anything he could even begin to understand.

He’d already talked this out once with Kira, describing his recurrent dreams about Morgan. He couldn’t forget that he’d likewise had flashes and impressions of Kira, many of them in his dreams, when she was being held captive by the Nyctus, and wondered if Morgan might actually be alive—somewhere, wherever that somewhere was. In the reality of his life, lines were blurred because of magic, and even he, a Starcaster of rare power, couldn’t work through the details on his own.

Thorn sighed. “Maybe I do need counseling.”

“Do you want to open a request for access to medical services?”

“No,” Thorn snapped, cutting the AI off.

For a while, he just lay across his bunk, trying to feel tired enough to go back to sleep. Eventually, he gave up and got dressed. He had no particular destination in mind, so he just wandered the Hecate’s corridors. It wouldn’t take him long to cover the entire ship, but it was better than just brooding in his rack.

* * *

During dark watch, as the period that constituted night aboard the Hecate was called, ops were normally at a low ebb. The Duty Watch Officer would have command, with only essential stations manned throughout the ship. At most, there might be bustles of localized activity, as engineering crews sought to take advantage of the fact that most of the crew was asleep to get much needed work done in parts of the ship that were normally busy. Thorn actually enjoyed occasionally wandering the Hecate during dark watch. Enjoyed the relative peace, with his only companion the thrum and rumble and soft hiss of the ship’s inner workings.

Not so during this dark watch, though. Voices rose, punctuated by the occasional shout as damage-repair parties hurried about. Behind them all was the flare of welding arcs, the rattle and clatter of repairs underway. Sleep could wait until repairs were complete.

Thorn stepped around a pair of Ratings working on an open conduit and reached a corridor junction. He’d meant to turn left but stopped as a voice boomed out from his right.

“I mean sufficient in the nicest possible way! Please, gentlemen, don’t take my words the wrong way!”

Thorn recognized the speaker before even turning. It was Bertilak.

Thorn looked around the corner. The big alien stood with the new Chief Engineer and one of his Petty Officers, looking into an open access hatch. The Chief, a man named Delfino, ran a big hand over his bald pate, dark eyes looking up at an unusual sight—Bertilak. Thorn thought Bertilak had gone back to his ship, but here he was, even larger than life than he remembered.

Thorn started to pull back, meaning to find another way around, or even to just head back to his rack. But Bertilak turned and saw him. His green face split into a broad grin.

“Thorn, my friend. Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn allowed himself an inward sigh, then walked around the corner and joined the little group. “I feel bad about sleeping when most of the rest of the crew is working,” he said.

Bertilak hooked his thumbs in his belt. “Ah, the mark of a true leader. Always thinking of his subordinates. I would do the same, but I have none. At least none that I know of.”

Delfino, irascible as always, crossed his arms and stared glumly into the open access port. Thorn saw electronic and mechanical stuff. He wasn’t an engineer, so he had no idea what it did. Aside from nothing, at least right now, given how much of it was pitted and scorched by heat or fire. “Be awfully damned convenient if our true leader here could magic up some replacement components for this power regulator.” He looked at Thorn. “Or can you?”

Thorn gave his head a shake. “I’m trying to conserve my powers in case we need them again in a hurry. Captain’s orders. If it’s a critical system, don’t you have spares?”

“We do. Four of them. Unfortunately, a runaway power surge took out five of them before the safeties kicked in.” He scratched at his trim beard. “Bertilak here thinks we can work around the damage. He thinks our tech is sufficient to handle the load if we just bypass the main regulator, plug the critical systems into the back-up processor, and reconfigure—”

He stopped, his eyes narrowing, then going wide.

“Wait. That would work if we can power the processor from an external source.” He turned to the Petty Officer. “Go get a portable generator. We can configure it to keep the processor powered up without frying it.”

The woman stared for a moment, then understanding dawned. “That’s brilliant,” she said, before turning and hurrying away. “Back shortly!” she called over her shoulder.

“I swear, Bertilak here is a fountain of good ideas,” Delfino said, shaking his head. “Never would have thought of powering it externally instead of trying to do it off the main bus if you hadn’t suggested this.” He smiled at Bertilak—a facial expression Thorn just wasn’t used to seeing on the dour Engineer—and shook his head. “You probably just saved us a good two hours trying to 3-D print replacement components.”

“I am always glad to be of service,” Bertilak proclaimed, looking pleased with himself.

It made Thorn want to scowl, but he held it in, a neutral expression covering his features.

Movement behind him made Thorn turn. Another pair of Ratings had appeared, hauling a length of conduit. “Excuse me, sir,” one of them said to Thorn, his voice straining slightly under the load, “but you’re kinda in our way.”

Thorn stepped aside and the Ratings struggled past him, lugging their burden to wherever it was needed.

“You know, Lieutenant,” Delfino said, “if you’re not actually involved in repairs, then it’s probably best if you go back to your quarters.”

Thorn blinked. Determined to not take it as an insult, he opened his mouth to apologize, but the Chief Engineer turned back to Bertilak. “There’s another problem I’d love you to take a look at, if you could,” he said to the alien. “There’s a harmonic in the fusion reactor that’s pulling down its efficiency. The whole reactor apparently came a little loose from one of its mounts during the battle. We braced it back down, but this harmonic won’t go away, and I’m leery about running the drive at full power while it’s happening.”

Bertilak nodded. “By all means, let’s see what we can do for you.” He glanced back at Thorn, offered a friendly smile and a wink, then turned and followed the Chief away.

Thorn abruptly found himself alone. And not just alone, but—

“Excuse me, sir!”

Thorn pressed himself against the bulkhead as another Rating hurried past, cradling a power coupling.

Not just alone, but in the way.

* * *

Thorn sat jammed into the Captain’s briefing room, a faint glower on his face, as the XO finished up her summary of the crew’s repair efforts.

“Bottom line,” she said, “is that we’ll be able to fire up the Alcubierre drive in about four hours, give or take a bit. Chief Delfino says he’ll have a firmer estimate in about an hour.”

Tanner leaned back as far as the cramped space allowed. “Last I heard, it was going to be another eight to twelve hours before we could say goodbye to this miserable little piece of the universe. Not that I’m complaining, but what changed?”

“Bertilak is what changed,” the XO said. “According to the Chief, he spent most of dark watch helping out with what turned out to be about a hundred good ideas.”

“Starting to wonder if there’s anything that guy can’t do,” the Tac O said.

Before he could stop himself, Thorn gave a derisive snort.

Tanner turned to him. “Something to add, Lieutenant?”

“I just get a little nervous over the fact that Bertilak seems to know so much about our tech. So much in fact that he seems to know it better than we do.” He swept a skeptical look around the gathering. “Doesn’t anyone else find that a little strange?”

“He’s saved us literally hours of work, Lieutenant,” the XO said.

“And that was after saving our butts from those squid ships,” the Tac O added.

Thorn hesitated. “That’s something else that seems strange—those four squid ships were able to get so close without us detecting them.”

“Okay, I’m listening. The same thought had occurred to me,” Tanner said, then he turned to the Tac O. “Lieutenant Osborne, have you had a chance to follow up on that yet?”

He nodded. “As much as I can, sir, without sitting down and doing some detailed analysis of the sensor logs. It might be some sort of cloaking tech, but—” He glanced at Thorn.

“And you still don’t think magic was involved,” Tanner said, turning back to Thorn.

“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t sense anything. In any case, Shading normally isn’t perfect. It works best on someone who’s entirely unaware. The more they’re looking for trouble, the more likely they are to see through even the best Shade. And I’ve been told that we were constantly doing full, spherical scans.”

“But it’s possible,” Tanner said.

Thorn gave a grudging nod. “Yes, sir. I guess it’s possible.”

“What do you suspect is going on here, Lieutenant?” the XO asked. “You’re obviously suspicious, but about what, exactly?”

Thorn leaned forward, searching for the right tone. “It’s just too coincidental—too neat. First we were ambushed by a group of squid ships that somehow got really, really close without us knowing it. Then Bertilak shows up out of nowhere just when we’re on the ropes, saves the day, and now proves to be a genius when it comes to fixing our ship.” He shook his head. “Again, am I the only one who finds that strange?”

Tanner leaned back again, his gaze on Thorn.

“Well, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. However, I recognize your concerns, Lieutenant Stellers, and will make sure we keep an eye on Bertilak while he’s on board.” He sat forward again. “And, on that note, I think we’re done here. We’ll do another of these little meetings in two hours, at . . . eleven hundred hours. XO, I’d like all Division Heads present, so we’ll commandeer the forward mess.”

“Aye, sir, roger that.”

“Stellers,” Tanner went on, “I’d like you to stay for a moment.”

Thorn, who’d been starting to his feet, now sat back down. Raynaud and Osborne both glanced at him curiously as they left.

“Alright, Stellers,” Tanner said when the others were gone. “What’s going on here?”

“Sir?”

“You ask if you’re the only one who finds everything that’s been going on strange. The answer is, of course not. It’s all strange as hell. But so is using the power of magic to deflect a mega-KEW from Code Gauntlet, or to move an entire fleet across hundreds of light-years. This whole war is strange. So what, specifically, is your issue with this situation? Call it my need to know details.”

Thorn sighed. “I don’t know, sir. I get that, on the surface, anyway, it all seems on the up-and-up. But there’s just something about it all, something that feels . . . off.”

“Off.”

“Aye, sir.”

Tanner settled back. “And off is as specific as you can be.”

“Without inventing words, that’s as close as I can get, and believe me, sir, I’m trying to find specific data to address, despite your willingness to indulge my instincts.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” Tanner asked. “The Starcaster has a feeling—not that they haven’t helped in the past—but he can’t give me a direction. You’re aware of my love for evidence? It’s a Fleet training issue, but damned if I can break free of needing facts.”

Thorn sighed again. “Once more, sir, I don’t know. Just be careful, I suppose.”

“Ah. Be careful. Unlike the rest of the time, when we’re all careless and sloppy.”

“No, sir. That’s not what I mean.”

“Stellers,” Tanner snapped, then he paused and resumed in a more measured tone. “Thorn. Have to be honest—if anyone has been off lately, it’s you. Ever since whatever happened when that Witch Nebula popped into existence, you haven’t been quite yourself.”

All Thorn had told anyone is that he, like all other Starcasters, experienced the birth of the Witch Nebula as an eldritch shockwave that had rippled through the ether. Technically, that was true. He just left out the part about it happening while he was trying to bring his daughter back from the dead. The Starcaster Corps had concluded that the formation of the Witch Nebula was somehow also related to the rebirth of Nebo, but again, Thorn had stayed silent about the details.

His reasons were good ones. But he also understood where Tanner was coming from. He had been off ever since. How could he not be? Bringing Morgan back enough that he could talk to her, almost touch her, only to lose her again—how could that not leave him feeling off, both magically and emotionally?

But he couldn’t tell Tanner any of that, could he?

“There’s something you’re holding back,” Tanner said flatly. “Something you’re not telling me. And that’s a problem, Stellers.”

Thorn needed to tell Tanner something.

“I just haven’t felt right since the Witch Nebula appeared, sir,” Thorn finally said. “I’m doing my best to recover from it, but it’s taking more time than I thought it would. It’s not just my magical state of being. It’s beyond that.”

Tanner stared at Thorn for a while, his look an appraising one. Finally, he spoke up.

“Stellers—Thorn—my second posting as a Lieutenant was aboard the Conqueror, as Junior Tactical Officer. The Captain was a hell of an imposing man—loud, larger than life, but he had competence leaking out of him. He was a rising star in the ON, seemed to be destined for Admiral. Everyone just assumed he’d have his own flag someday. And then, he wasn’t. To this day, I have no idea what happened. He did something, or said something, or pissed in the wrong person’s porridge. Anyway, whatever it was, it took him completely off the radar. Overnight, he went from a rising star to a bitter has-been. Last I heard, he’d taken an early buyout.”

“Sir, why are you telling me this?” Thorn asked.

“Because, Lieutenant, I’m keenly aware of the fact that you shot up to prominence virtually out of nowhere and have accomplished some amazing things. Again, you saved Code Gauntlet and hundreds of lives there. You were instrumental in pulling the Fleet out of the fire when the squids set up that massive ambush. You’ve brought the war to the squids in a way that the ON, by itself, never could—you’ve been a rising star.” He leaned forward. “So I’m telling you this to suggest that maybe you’re feeling like your star has stopped rising and just got stuck. And having Bertilak explode onto the scene has given you something upon which to vent your frustration.”

Thorn stared. “Sir, are you saying I’m—what, resentful of Bertilak?”

“Are you?”

“No, but I’m suspicious, and I trust my gut,” Thorn countered.

“Stellers, give me a piece of evidence, something objective and real, that Bertilak is a threat, or even just a problem. Anything. You’re my Starcaster and a member of my crew, so I’ll believe you.”

Thorn thought for a moment.

What, exactly? What had Bertilak done that would constitute a threat or a problem? He’d shown up in dramatic fashion to save the Hecate at the last minute, sure—but Thorn had been on the receiving end before when the Hecate had saved him and Mol. He’d thought they’d been beaten by the Nyctus after they destroyed one of the squids’ orbital platforms, but he hadn’t resented the Hecate for saving them.

But Bertilak? He’d not only saved their collective asses, but then he came aboard and charmed the crew, proving himself to be gregarious, witty, insightful, and damned good with tech. He’d asked for nothing in return—

“He seems too good to be true,” Thorn said, but even he had trouble believing it.

Tanner gave a thin smile. “He’s too good to be true isn’t much of a criticism, Lieutenant, without something to also say how and why.”

“I know, sir.”

Tanner shifted in his seat, then smiled, and it was a paternal expression. “Go think about it, Stellers. And don’t forget your assigned duties while you do. When you’re ready to present evidence, I’ll listen. You’ve earned that much.”

Thorn stood. “Aye, sir. I—” He finally just shook his head. “Thank you, sir.”

He left Tanner’s briefing room and headed for the witchport. The Captain wanted him to maintain a magical watch around the Hecate until she could get underway again. That much, at least, he should be able to accomplish even with his powers still mostly choked off.

As he made his way forward, though, he couldn’t get past what Tanner had implied, which distilled down to Thorn’s need to be at the center of things, not existing as a support staff for an alien with opaque motives.

He would watch Bertilak, and he would be alert. For now, that was all he could give, because Morgan was out there, and the war was still hot, and Thorn’s tank of power was still perilously low.

12

“Have you seen the latest?” Damien asked, barging into the Venture’s common area and waving a data pad.

Kira winced. Now what?

She took the data pad that Damien held out and read what was on the screen—an ON intel report. She felt her mouth falling open the further she read but didn’t think to close it.

She finally looked up. “This is real?”

Damien shrugged. “No reason to believe it isn’t.”

Kira checked the transmission time stamp. They were well beyond the range at which real time comms with the Fleet was possible, so the message had been in transit for almost eight hours. Working backward, Kira quickly reasoned that the report must be describing events that happened a day or so ago.

She’d had three meetings with a number of Danzur, Tadrup among them, and not one of them had even hinted at what the data pad was telling her—that the Danzur had seized two planets on the edge of Allied Stars space. Neither was inhabited, but both were relatively resource-rich and considered part of the AS strategic inventory. Only the fact they were so far forward, and therefore exposed, had prevented any exploitation of them so far.

“These planets are in our space!” Kira said.

“They are, yes,” Damien replied. “But the Danzur claim that we’ve got no actual presence on either of them. Their argument is about position. Since the planets are at the edge of our space, they can dispute our ownership of them. Smug, but effective as an argument, and not one that we’re prepared for. Not now, anyway.”

“Seized as compensation toward reparations,” Kira read aloud, then she tossed the data pad onto the table. “Reparations for what?”

“If you read on, you’ll see that they’re blaming the ON for—” He picked up the data pad, scrolled, then also read aloud. “For unreasonable blockage of trade with the Nyctus, particularly for krol-kazan, an essential component of a lucrative, value-added industry—blah, blah, blah.”

“In other words, we wiped out that Nyctus planet and it’s costing them commercially, so they’re pissed off about it,” Kira snapped.

“I think that about sums it up.”

Kira stood and paced. “That’s ridiculous. We’re at war with the Nyctus. Are we supposed to worry about—shit, about their trading and commercial relationships before attacking them?”

“Well, my answer to that would be of course not. But my answer doesn’t matter,” Damien said.

Kira stopped a few centimeters from a bulkhead, took a moment to reign in her anger, then turned back. “So what do we do about it?”

“I’d recommend sending a diplomatic missive to the Allied Stars Xeno-Affairs Department,” Damien replied. “Tell them our understanding of what happened and ask them not to go off half-cocked. Specifically, ask them not to do something stupid like confronting the Danzur militarily. I mean, those planets might be part of our strategic inventory, but we’re not using them at the moment and don’t have any plans to use them any time soon. Not that I’m aware of, anyway.”

“Wow.”

Damien blinked. “Wow?”

“Yeah. Wow. Can I ever tell that I’m a soldier and you’re a diplomat.”

Damien’s eyes narrowed, but he smiled. “Oh? And how’s that?”

“Because my gut reaction is screw ’em, let’s take those planets back and show these asshole aliens who’s boss.” Kira crossed her arms and smiled ruefully. “Your gut reaction, on the other hand, is to do the smart thing.”

Damien grinned. “Smart? Maybe. All I know is that it’s the best way for me to avoid getting drafted and finding myself hugging the dirt, fighting for control of some uninhabited hunk of rock.” He glanced at his fingernails. “My manicure would never last.”

Despite herself, Kira laughed out loud.

* * *

Kira glanced sidelong at Damien. “Okay, I’ve read this twice now and have no idea what it’s trying to say.”

Damien glanced at the door to the meeting room. Tadrup should be walking through it any minute to discuss these latest developments.

He turned back to Kira. “What part don’t you understand?”

“Uh, the part between the beginning and the end,” she said. “Why say marmalade when you can say jam?”

Damien just stared for a moment. “What?”

“Why say marmalade—what? Haven’t you ever heard that before?”

“I’d have remembered if I had,” Damien said. “To put it another way, what the hell are you talking about, and why not say jelly?”

“Okay, you’ve got a third path. Point for you, but my meaning is to keep the words simple when you can,” Kira said.

“You’ve clearly never been a diplomat. It’s like we get paid by the syllable when writing comms,” Damien said, smiling. The door behind him began to open, revealing Tadrup and another pair of Danzur functionaries. “Showtime,” Damien muttered.

Tadrup began snarling, hissing, and spitting. “Greetings, my friends,” was what came out of the translator. “I trust you have had an opportunity to review our latest proposal, version seven point seven point one. You will likely notice that it has changed substantially from version six point eight point five. We believe, given the inclusion of new material, that it warranted a complete version change.”

“You’re referring to the part you obviously added to justify seizing two Allied Stars planets,” Kira said, her tone blunt. She felt Damien glance at her, but she kept her gaze fixed on Tadrup.

It gave her no small satisfaction to see the Danzur taken aback. “You—” he began, then he leaned toward one of his functionaries and hissed something. The other Danzur nodded and left. Clearly, they’d caught the Danzur off guard. They probably thought word of the seizure of the border planets hadn’t arrived yet—and equally probably planned to use that information in the same way that it had just been used against them. One of the parties had been knocked off their game as expected. It just wasn’t the humans.

Damien capitalized on the aliens’ moment of discomfiture. “It’s somewhat disappointing, Tadrup, that you didn’t see fit to discuss the matter of your reduced trade with us before acting so precipitously. We’d be more than happy to add some form of enhanced Allied Stars trade with you to offset any losses resulting from our ongoing war with the Nyctus.”

Because there are going to be a lot more of those losses coming, Kira thought but didn’t say.

“My apologies,” Tadrup said, “but the Central Council wanted to avoid a direct confrontation with your military forces. They undertook this operation without informing anyone who wasn’t absolutely required to know, including me. Accordingly, I was only recently informed of this myself.”

“You wanted to avoid a military confrontation with us by invading our space and seizing our territory?” Kira said, but Damien cut her off.

“What Kira is saying, is that if we had had an opportunity to discuss this with you beforehand, no such move on your part would have been necessary. The risks of such a confrontation could have been avoided.”

“Does that risk still exist?” Tadrup asked.

“In such complex and evolving situations such as this, risk of unintended clashes between military forces is always a factor,” Damien said. “That’s why we seek to avoid them.”

Kira looked down at her data pad and pretended to read it, while Damien and Tadrup continued their intricate diplomatic sparring. Satisfied that Tadrup’s attention was safely off her, she drew a small amount of magical potential from the surrounding ether, then channeled it through her mind like conduits guiding electrical power, using them to establish a psychic link between her and Tadrup. She worked carefully, only slowly increasing her presence on the fringes of the Danzur’s mind. This wasn’t the first time she’d reached out and touched the aliens’ thoughts, but this was the first time it was in earnest, and not just an experiment to make sure she could even do it in the first place.

The babble of Tadrup’s thoughts rose like the murmur of an unseen crowd. Even more than those of humans, Danzur minds hummed with both conscious and unconscious activity on multiple levels. Kira couldn’t comprehend how a Danzur could get through their day, or even make sense of the world around them. They lived with such a clamor of thoughts, feelings, considerations, understandings, biases, and just general mental babble. But what Kira found a confusing slurry of psychic noise was just the way things worked for the Danzur. It meant Kira had to wallow in the onslaught of mental images and impressions, struggling to make sense of it all. She needed to find his current thoughts, which would revolve around the seized planets, and should therefore be prominent, at the forefront of his mind—

Thorn Stellers.

Kira reeled back. Of all the things she’d expected to find in Tadrup’s mind, Thorn’s identity had definitely not been one of them.

She pulled back her thoughts before she ended up betraying herself, then just sat for a moment, mind racing. Why the hell was Tadrup thinking about Thorn? Why was he so prominent in Tadrup’s mind? Had she let something slip about him? But, no. One thing she’d been meticulously careful about had been not mentioning anything about the ON, including its organization, deployments, ships, and personnel—especially Starcasters, Thorn foremost among them. Not only would it be an egregious violation of operational security—OPSEC—it risked giving the Danzur additional leverage against them.

The Danzur knew about Thorn, of course. He’d been part of the group that had made first contact with them. Tadrup himself hadn’t actually met Thorn when he’d been here, she knew, but he figured prominently in the Danzur’s thoughts. Far more so than simply knowing of him would explain.

Kira needed to talk to Damien, now. She could think of only one way that wouldn’t arouse undue suspicion among the Danzur. Once more, she gathered power and focused it on the Venture, which was docked only a hundred or so meters away from where she sat. She immediately touched the mind of one of her crew and grabbed the man’s thoughts, then she shaped them into something else, a new imperative.

Damien turned to Kira. “What do you think? Is there any way we can—”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” a voice cut in over their comm. “A message has just arrived for you and Mister Forester. It’s marked priority alpha.”

Kira felt Damien look at her, but she just tapped her comm. “We’re on our way.” She turned to Tadrup. “My apologies, but priority alpha means—”

“That we must recess so you can attend to this,” Tadrup said. “Yes, I quite understand. Let us convene again in one hour.”

“Thank you,” Kira said, then she headed for the Venture, Damien at her side.

“I wonder what the hell this is about,” Damien said, his voice pitched low. “Hopefully, it’s not that shots were fired. I mean, we’re guaranteed diplomatic immunity per our initial agreement with the Danzur, but you never know with aliens.”

Kira narrowed her eyes but said nothing until they were safely aboard the Venture. Even then, she took a moment to fling a veil of magical denial around the ship. This was a specialized sort of Shade, isolating the ship not just from electronic and other mundane intrusions, but psychic ones, too. Not that the Danzur seemed to have any ability to use magic.

But maybe they did and just kept it well-hidden, and that’s how they’d learned about Thorn.

“Okay,” Damien said to the Rating who’d called them. “Where’s this urgent message?”

The man just stared. “I don’t know, sir.”

“You—what?”

“I don’t know. There isn’t one, as far as I know.”

Damien stiffened. “Then why did you—?”

“That was me,” Kira said as her Shade effect firmed up. She had to keep a glimmer of her attention on it to maintain it, but not enough to be a problem. In fact, she thought, she’d better get used to having to do this if the Danzur could somehow access their thoughts.

Damien turned to her. “You?”

“Yes.” She turned to the Rating. “And I’m really sorry. I made you call us up. I needed to get us out of there.”

“You . . . made me do it, ma’am?”

“Yes, I did. It’s not something I’d ever do unless it was really urgent.”

The Rating curled his lip. “Huh. Kinda wondered why I was telling you about a message that didn’t exist.” Kira waited for him to be outraged, but he just shrugged. “Hey, if you can do that, ma’am, there’s this Petty Officer back at Code Gauntlet that owes me some money but doesn’t pay up.”

“Hardly an interstellar emergency,” she said.

“But whatever this is about is?” Damien asked.

Kira nodded. “Tadrup was thinking about Thorn Stellers.”

“Thorn Stellers—you mean, the Starcaster?”

Kira nodded.

Damien gave her a blank look. “Okay. What was the context?”

“I don’t really know,” Kira said. “Danzur minds are basically alien, so they’re not easy to understand. All I really got was Thorn’s identity and some sort of connection to this trade dispute.”

“He was involved in first contact with the Danzur,” Damien said, “so it’s probably not surprising.”

Kira shook her head. “It’s more than that. He figures prominently in Tadrup’s mind, and it’s not just some sort of historical interest. He’s important to Tadrup now.” She stared for a moment, thinking. “Someone must have revealed something about Thorn to him.”

“Well, I only know Stellers by reputation, and even then, not in any sort of diplomatic context.” Damien glanced at the Rating. “Maybe one of the Venture’s crew?”

The Rating held up his hands. “Wasn’t me, sir or ma’am. I’ve exchanged maybe a dozen words with these Danzur the whole time we’ve been here.”

Kira nodded. “This isn’t the Venture’s first run around the planet doing this sort of diplomatic thing. I’d be surprised if any of her crew let anything slip.” She sighed. “It’s not like this is a hard science, but Tadrup’s thoughts just didn’t have that sort of feel to them, that one of us had said something out of turn. There likely would have been some sense of one of us attached to Tadrup’s thoughts. If he’d heard it from me, for instance, there’d be something of me associated with it. That’s especially true if I’m sitting right in front of him.”

“Unless Tadrup was just told about Stellers by another Danzur, right?”

Kira shook her head. “This isn’t like chemistry—put this together with that and get this third thing every time. So I can’t say that’s not the case, no. Hell, for that matter, I can’t say for sure if the Danzur might actually have some type of magical or psychic power that we just don’t know about.” She paused, considering that, but finally shook her head. “But I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it. I think Tadrup got information about Thorn from someone else.”

“A spy, maybe? Somewhere in the ON?” Damien asked.

“How about the Nyctus?” the Rating said, and they both turned to look at him. He immediately looked sheepish.

“Oh, uh . . . sorry, ma’am, sir. Guess I was just thinking out loud.”

“It’s a good thought, Rating,” Kira replied. “Actually, a very good one. The Nyctus know all about Thorn. He’s probably at the top of their hit list, in fact.”

“The implication of that is pretty disturbing,” Damien said.

Kira nodded. “Yeah. It means that there are ongoing relations between the Danzur and the Nyctus—and that Thorn somehow sits in the middle of them.”

* * *

Damien nodded across the table at Tadrup. “I think this is acceptable. We’ll stipulate to bullet points one through six, and eight through fourteen. I think we need to do a little more work on seven, and fifteen through eighteen.” He smiled. “But it’s the closest we’ve ever been to agreeing on what we’re going to discuss.”

“Perhaps,” Tadrup replied.

“Perhaps?”

“The situation is constantly evolving,” the Danzur said. “We should still consider these provisional.”

Damien leaned back. Kira leaned forward. They’d anticipated this in the wake of their conversation aboard the Venture about Thorn. The Danzur were either playing them and the Nyctus against one another, or worse, they were in league with the Nyctus and were just stringing them along.

So, it was time to hit back.

“Does this evolving situation involve Thorn Stellers?” Kira asked, her voice mild.

Tadrup’s mouth opened and closed. “I . . . am not sure what you mean. Who?”

“Tadrup, please,” Kira said. “Let’s not waste one another’s time. We’ve received information that you’re interested in Thorn Stellers, and we have a pretty good idea why.”

Okay, that last part about the why was a lie. But it had been Damien’s suggestion to include it. You could often get complete information about something out of someone if you could convince them somehow that you already knew part of it. It made perfect sense and underscored why Damien was here—he was really, really good at this diplomatic stuff.

Tadrup just sat for a moment. One of his underlings leaned in to whisper, but he waved the other Danzur off.

“Very well, then. Thorn Stellers represents a problem. He was responsible for the destruction of our trade in krol with the Nyctus. It is for his actions that we are seeking reparations.”

“The Nyctus are our enemies,” Kira said. “We’re at war with them. We’ve got no choice but to take every opportunity to attack and defeat them.”

“We accept that as true,” Tadrup said, “but also as irrelevant. Your conflict is of no concern to us. The effects of it, however, are.”

Kira glanced at Damien. She couldn’t help the sinking feeling that these negotiations had just slammed into a wall of stubbornness, and maybe even duplicity, and that the whole mission was about to fail.

Which would be a disaster. The ON would be hard-pressed to fight on two fronts.

“There is, however, a relatively easy way of resolving this matter,” Tadrup went on, suddenly looking and sounding a little more controlled.

“What would that be?” Damien asked.

“Allow us to take Thorn Stellers into custody. We will consider that sufficient reparation. At that point, we will withdraw from the disputed space and conclude a treaty with you that specifies respect for territorial boundaries, non-aggression, and the basis for a full trade agreement.” Even for a Danzur, he looked smug.

It took Kira a few seconds to realize that Tadrup had actually just said that. When she spoke, there was no outrage, just disbelief.

“Take Thorn into—what? Why?”

Tadrup’s dark eyes gleamed back at Kira.

“Why, to hand him over to the Nyctus, of course.”

13

Morgan once more drifted directly beneath the ice, but upside down this time, her small feet pressed against the rough, frigid ice that hemmed her world. She wanted to feel the ice, to know it—and the sensation was something new. It wasn’t pain, not yet, but she liked the way the ice stretched away as she hung there in the dark and quiet of her watery home.

“Ouch. That’s enough, ice.” Morgan smiled, pushing away with her numbed toes, the soles of her feet tender after long moments pressed against the cap. After a moment to reorient herself, she gazed down into the depths—

And caught the Radiance, the soft mingling of azure and emerald glow that lit the ocean in every direction, soft knurling rays of light in friendly tones of blue and green and silver. From here, she could see not just the city beneath her but, thanks to some trick of the water’s clarity, even more distant settlements. All of them were connected with lines of Radiance, but usually the water was a lot murkier than this. The Nyctus told her it had something to do with the vents and the billowing clouds of minerals they spewed into the water. As their activity waxed and waned in response to the changing forces inside the planet, the water around them became more or less cloudy with suspended sediment. Today was very clear, the clearest she could recall ever seeing, in fact.

For a little while, she just slowly turned around and around in place, taking full advantage of this marvelous opportunity to see so much, from so far away—

She stopped. She liked the Radiance. It was so soft, so peaceful. It was the color of friendship—of her friendship with the Nyctus of Tāmtu. The Radiance was their goodness made real, not like the other ones. Her Nyctus were good, Morgan knew, and the others were bad—all of them on the other worlds, far across the darkness between stars.

They weren’t her friends. They didn’t live in the sedate glow of the Radiance. They were red, orange, yellow, and black. Angry colors. Unfriendly colors.

Maybe that was why they were fighting the humans. Because they were angry almost all the time.

She stopped and bit her lip, thinking in the deliberate way of children. Hmmm.

Once more, she wondered what would happen if she made all Nyctus into her friends? Then maybe there’d be no war and no one else would get hurt. Not Nyctus, and not humans, either.

But something told her that wasn’t going to be enough. Just making the Nyctus her friends didn’t mean they’d like all humans. The Nyctus of Tāmtu were her friends, but they still talked about their war. Morgan did not like war. She didn’t like violence, really, or even thinking about making living things hurt.

She bit her lip again. So what if the Nyctus had always been friends with humans? Then the war never would have happened in the first place. She could still be on Nebo with Mommy and Daddy, and nobody would be hurt or dead from the war, and everything would be right again.

Could she do that? She knew she could change the way things were now—but could she go back and change things in the past, things that had already happened?

There was one way to find out. Morgan dove back toward the city, intent on finding the elder shaman.

* * *

“You want to do what, child?”

“Go back before we were all mad and fighting,” Morgan said, “and make it so everyone’s friends with one another. Make it so they’ve always been friends, and none of this stupid war stuff ever happened. Mommy called it peace, I think, but I’m not sure. I was really little, but I think Daddy—Thorn Daddy—said the same thing in the dream. Peace. I like that word, don’t you?”

“I approve of peace, yes. You are talking about going back in time and changing events,” the elder shaman said. The idea obviously upset him, because flashes of bright purple flickered along his body.

“Uh, yeah. That’s right.”

“Even if such a thing were possible, child, we have no idea what the effects would be.”

“Everyone would be friends!”

The shaman paused, its bioluminescence fading to a more thoughtful, introspective pulse of lights. “Imagine this,” the shaman finally said. “Imagine you go back in time. While you’re there, you kill your grandfather.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Just bear with me, child. Imagine you did that.”

Morgan sighed. “Okay.” She’d never known her grandfather—any of them—and can’t imagine why she’d do something like that. But it didn’t make her feel much, either. Whoever her grandfathers were, they were still complete strangers to her.

“Alright, so your grandfather is now dead,” the shaman went on. “That means that he doesn’t exist to be father to your own mother or father.”

“Okay,” Morgan said. She still didn’t get it, but she went along with whatever the shaman was trying to explain to her.

“So that means that your father or mother wouldn’t have been born. So—”

Morgan kept staring.

“What would that mean, child?” The shaman’s tone patient but insistent.

“Uh—” Morgan bit her lip and scratched an ear. Suddenly, she brightened. “Oh, I know, I’d have a different mommy or daddy!”

The elder shaman flashed an amused green. “It’s far, far more likely, child, that you wouldn’t exist at all. Or, if you did, you would be a different person completely. Either way, you couldn’t, or probably wouldn’t, be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place. And that means—”

“That they’d still be alive,” Morgan said, rolling her eyes.

“That’s right. Which means that you would be born, and would go back and kill them, but then you wouldn’t be born, so you couldn’t go back and kill them.”

Morgan scowled. What was the shaman trying to say?

“Oh. Wait,” she said, as the problem started to solidify. She couldn’t go back in time and kill her grandfather, because if she did, then she didn’t. But she did. But she didn’t—

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “There’s—” She shook her head. She suddenly couldn’t make sense of it.

“Something is wrong, yes,” the shaman said. “Both things can’t be true, but both are. That’s called a paradox. And that’s the problem with going backward in time and changing things. You make now different, and that creates the paradox.”

Morgan stared into the distance, thinking. The water had turned murky again. She could see only the spires of the nearest buildings around them. A few moments passed before she gave up. The shaman was right, there was no way to—

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I could go back in time and not kill my grandfather. Then there’s no . . . uh . . . pair of—”

“Paradox.”

She smiled. Such a funny word. “There’s no para-dox.”

“But that’s the problem, child. You might go back in time and do your absolute best to change nothing at all, but you just being there is a change. You could get in somebody’s way and delay them by a few seconds so they miss a terrible accident that should have killed them. So they live on, and their descendants are alive today—people who never existed before. There’s no way to know what changes that could cause, including making new paradoxes.”

Morgan sighed. This was too complicated. All she wanted to do was go back and make it so that the Nyctus and humans were all her friends, and friends with each other, so there was no stupid war. Everyone who died in the war would still be alive, and their families and friends would be happy—how could that not be better?

“I don’t want any para-doxes. I just want to make it so that all the Nyctus are like you. So they’re all my friends. And I want to make all the humans my friends, too.”

Now the shaman flickered violet with alarm. “You risk damaging everything, everywhere, child. You mustn’t do that.”

“But I want to!”

“Child, no.”

Morgan’s eyes stung. “I thought you were my friend!”

“I am. It’s because I’m your friend that I’m trying to help you see that you must not do this.”

Morgan wiped at her eyes, a reflexive but pointless thing, since her tears just vanished into the water around her. “No,” she said, her voice breaking. “If you were my friend, you’d want the war to not have ever happened. You’d want to help me.”

The shaman gleamed a soft, soothing turquoise. “I do want to help you. Of course, I do. Sometimes helping means telling someone not to do something. Especially if it might cause lots of trouble for them, and for everyone else.”

Morgan turned away. She’d had this wonderful, fantastic idea, and the shaman was telling her it wasn’t wonderful or fantastic at all. The thing about paradoxes seemed so weird. Certainly too weird to let it get in her way.

She turned back to the shaman, but not to argue. Instead, Morgan reached down inside her and gathered up some of that tingly magical power—not very much, because she didn’t need very much. She only needed to—

The shaman, for the first time since Morgan had made it her friend, glittered with furious crimson.

“Child, no—!”

Morgan changed things. Again, not very much. She just changed the universe a tiny bit so that the elder shaman would be even more her friend. A friend who wouldn’t lecture her or get in her way or anything like that.

The shaman’s crimson bioluminescence faded through bright purple, then a deeper mauve, then indigo, then blue. Soon that was shot through with green, a green that was exactly the color of the Radiance.

“You must do what you think is best, child,” the shaman said.

Morgan looked at him sidelong. “And you won’t try to stop me?”

“Of course not. Why would I do such a thing?” The shaman’s voice was docility itself, and it reached to Morgan, tentacles extended for a kind touch. Morgan let herself be embraced by them and just hung, for a while, in the creature’s embrace. Finally, she pulled away. She wanted to try something to make sure.

“I want to go back in time and make all the Nyctus, and all the humans, my friends. And I want to make them friends with each other, too, so there’s no war and everybody’s happy.”

“That is a marvelous idea, child,” the shaman said, head bobbing in agreement.

“You don’t mind if I do that?”

“I’m sure you know what is best.”

Morgan grinned. “I do! And it’s going to be so good!”

“I’m sure it will, child. I’m sure it will.”

14

Thorn lay on this back in the witchport, exploring his magical reserves as the Hecate prepared for its first Alcubierre hop following her frantic repairs. It wasn’t a long one, just enough for her to get away from the space where she’d fought and been damaged, a process known as clearing the datum. Tanner had been clear, in fact, about his surprise that the Nyctus hadn’t raced new forces toward them. He expected them to try to catch the Hecate before she could do that all-important thing, clear the datum. But the only sign of the Nyctus in all the time she’d been sitting here had been the debris from the battle, slowly dispersing.

Thorn didn’t open the witchport, instead using eldritch power to extend his awareness in a huge bubble around the ship. It taxed him far more than it should have, showing how reduced his powers still were. But it also meant that there should be no opportunity for an enemy to sneak up on the Hecate the way the Nyctus had—at least not magically.

Unless, of course, they were Bertilak.

Bertilak was a challenge, and not just because he was too loud, too happy, too boisterous—too everything. No, it was also the fact that Bertilak and his ship were still strangely null from a magical perspective. Thorn could see the alien’s ship on the tactical repeater, but he had absolutely no sense of it in his ’caster awareness. He had assumed that he’d eventually see through whatever effect was causing it. Even thought it might be some strange, lingering aftermath of whatever the Nyctus had done to launch their ambush so close to the Hecate. But it hadn’t faded or changed at all. From a magical perspective, Bertilak and his ship simply didn’t exist.

An alarm chimed, proclaiming that the Alcubierre drive would initiate in thirty seconds. Thorn ran through the standard checklist, making sure his little corner of the ship was properly configured for superluminal flight.

He checked the tactical repeater again. Sure enough, Bertilak’s strange green ship hung on station a few tens of klicks away. Thorn had been relieved when the Chief Engineer declared the Alcubierre drive operational and ready, but it had been short-lived.

Because Bertilak was coming with them.

“I shall come with you, as it is the only reasonable decision,” the alien had announced when Tanner and the Hecate’s senior officers met with him in the forward mess. It had been intended as a thank you and farewell sort of meeting but had abruptly changed course with Bertilak’s suggestion. “After all, your ship still requires substantial repairs. I would hate for you to once again run afoul of the Nyctus—all of my hard work would be undone, and I sense that engineering is an area I have much to share about. No disrespect intended to your honorable crew, of course.” He laughed but quickly became more somber. “In addition, I like you. All of you, and I find myself in the position of wanting you to remain safe. The Nyctus are dangerous. The galaxy is dangerous, don’t you agree?”

Tanner and the other officers had been openly, almost effusively grateful for Bertilak’s offer to fly cover for the Hecate. Thorn had managed a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

He was still considering the Bertilak issue when the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive lit, flinging her back toward ON-controlled space. The stars shifted, and Thorn remained confused by the absence of Bertilak’s presence.

Thorn settled into his thoughts as the ship hurtled across the black. Magic or not, I’ll find out.

* * *

Tanner flicked off the intercom and looked around at those gathered in his briefing room. Between the XO, Thorn, the Tac O, and the Nav O, the little compartment felt even more cramped than usual. Thorn wasn’t especially claustrophobic, but if he had to spend too much time jammed in here like this, he just might have to consider it.

“That means the drive will be ready in about twelve hours,” the XO said, smiling.

The Captain smiled back briefly. “I see you’ve seen through our good Chief’s little ruse of doubling the time he says he needs, then completing the job in half that and looking like a hero.”

“I know,” the XO replied. “Every Chief Engineer I’ve worked with has done it. It must come with the position.”

Tanner turned to the Nav O. “Have you got a fix on our location yet?”

“To within about two light-years, yes, sir. We should have it nailed down completely within the hour.”

Thorn had to admit, it was kind of nice to not be the one responsible for throwing the Hecate into some unknown part of space. Mind you, they weren’t off in some remote spot, far away from friendly space. Instead, the Alcubierre drive had cut out late, making the Hecate overshoot her intended destination in what seemed to be an entirely random direction. They were definitely in ON space but still weren’t sure quite where. The Nav O needed to once more find reference pulsars and work out their position from those. Until the problem with the drive was fixed, Tanner didn’t want to try another hop. Any use of the drive might have the ship leaping randomly about in space, never ending up where they wanted it to.

“Captain Tanner,” a voice cut in over the intercom. “We just had a ship drop in, about five thousand klicks off our port bow. Oh, and it’s green. It’s Bertilak.”

Tanner’s face became a mixture of surprise and amusement. “How the hell did he find us?”

“Good question,” Thorn said, his tone earning a sharp glance from Tanner.

“Something to add, Lieutenant?”

Thorn looked at him. “Just seems strange, sir. We hopped to an entirely different destination than we meant to, but Bertilak somehow still manages to find us? How?”

Tanner turned to the Nav O. “It’s a fair question. Any ideas?”

The Nav O thought for a moment. “Sorry, sir. No idea,” he finally said. “Maybe Bertilak has some way of tracking ships running their Alcubierre drives—”

“Which would be yet another piece of tech I’d really like to get my hands on,” the XO said. “Just like that kick-ass weapon system of his.”

Tanner nodded. “XO, contact Bertilak and invite him back aboard. I frankly didn’t think he’d still be with us, but since he is, it’s time to get to know him better.”

* * *

Bertilak swung a leg over the bench and dropped into a seat at one of the tables. They were back in the forward mess. Tanner had decided on meeting the big alien with the XO and Thorn in tow, but in a neutral part of the ship. That gave Thorn a measure of satisfaction. Everyone else was so enamored by the big green man that he’d expected him to have the run of the ship by now. Tanner still maintained OPSEC protocols, though, restricting Bertilak to only a few common areas. It didn’t seem to bother him.

“Perfectly understandable,” was all he said, his tone amenable.

Once Bertilak was seated, Tanner leaned forward. “My crew”—he glanced at Thorn— “are wondering how you managed to find us. Considering we ended up a long way from where we meant to be, it is an interesting question.”

“Of course it is,” Bertilak replied. “Nor is it any great mystery. I’ve configured my ship’s sensors to lock onto the Hecate, so I’ll always know where she is if she’s within twenty-five light-years.”

There was a moment of silence. The XO finally broke it.

“How? How do you keep a sensor lock on a specific ship? And over such a huge distance?”

Bertilak shrugged. “It’s how my ship’s sensors work.”

Tanner laced his fingers together and rested his hands on the table. “And that is something we’d like to explore with you, Bertilak. You have tech that we find interesting—” Tanner stopped and shook his head. “Hell, I’ll just come out and say it. You have tech that we’d love to be able to examine, maybe even acquire from you.”

Bertilak smiled and nodded. “Unfortunately, Captain, my ship is not for sale.”

Tanner held up a hand. “I understand that. I’m not proposing to purchase your ship. I was thinking more of a partnership agreement of some sort. Maybe—and I’m just thinking out loud, here—we could offer you preferred trade access throughout Allied Stars space in exchange for an opportunity to study your tech.”

Now it was Bertilak’s turn to hold up a hand. “Captain Tanner, you may have noticed that I am less concerned with the structure of your society, and by association, your military. Is it fair to assume you’ve seen this?”

“It is,” Tanner said.

“I am Bertilak. I am my own island in a sea of stars, and thus, I am bored.”

“You’re . . . bored?” Tanner’s brows shot up, but he did his best to remain crisp and professional.

“Yes. Bored. Your probe into how to best leverage my ship is . . . cumbersome. Not unexpected, but still, not what I hope for as I move from star to star, ever seeking distraction. It may be that I have a proposal to fit both our needs, though it will not be standard. Not by any measure of your Orbital Navy,” Bertilak said. He was watching Thorn as he spoke.

“I’m listening,” Tanner said, head tilted. He was openly curious, and Thorn didn’t like the direction they were heading.

“A wager.”

“A wager? What sort of wager?”

Bertilak leaned forward. “You and I will fight. If I win, I will bring you aboard my ship, and we will travel together, and you can learn whatever you wish about my technology. If you win, I shall give you a free run of my ship now and spare you the miserable experience of being my traveling companion.”

Silence hung in the air. Thorn saw the XO’s eyes widen. Tanner just stared. “Fight?” he asked. “As in physically fight one another?”

“Well, we could take up firearms and shoot at one another, but I don’t think that actually being seriously injured or killed would suit either of us. We’re not animals, you know.”

“I appreciate the offer, Bertilak,” Tanner said, sitting back, “but I’m afraid I must decline. I can’t simply leave the Hecate and take off to parts unknown with you—even if there is a certain appeal to it.”

“There is?” Thorn muttered, and Tanner shot him a glare.

“Would you be willing to take on Bertilak, Lieutenant Stellers? I understand that you’re quite the capable hand-to-hand fighter, and you’ve made it clear that you find him more than a little fascinating.”

“You do?” Bertilak said, grinning widely. “I am flattered, Lieutenant, and I mean that sincerely.”

Thorn looked from one to the other. “You’re proposing that I fight Bertilak, sir? I’m a Starcaster, not an engineer. Me traveling with him would be—I’d be a glorified observer, in truth.”

“That only matters if you lose,” Bertilak said, his grin widening even more. “Do you expect to lose, Lieutenant?”

“It’s a good point,” Tanner put in. “If you beat him, we get full access to his tech right away.”

“That sounds like a good deal,” the XO said.

Thorn shook his head. “Sir, this is . . . crazy. You’re proposing I fight Bertilak over his tech?”

Tanner’s gaze bore into Thorn’s eyes. “Why not? Even if you lose, and you become Bertilak’s guest for a time, it will give you an opportunity to learn other things about him—things that you’ve admitted are quite unique.”

Bertilak’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah, and what unique things would these be?”

“Lieutenant Stellers has observed that his magic doesn’t seem to interact with you or your ship at all,” Tanner replied. “Given the reliance of the Nyctus on their own use of magic, that could prove pretty damned useful.”

Bertilak’s grin faded a touch. “I knew that you exploited this thing you call magic in pursuit of victory in your war, but I had no idea that I am allegedly immune to its effects. Now that is interesting.”

Thorn turned to Tanner, determined to keep an imploring tone out of his voice. “Sir, I think my time is better used here, aboard the Hecate.” The situation—absurd as it was—was spiraling out of control.

“Again, you’ll only leave the Hecate if you lose,” Tanner replied.

Thorn drew in a breath through his nose, eyes going up to the ceiling. “Yes, sir, I get that. But—”

“Look at this way, Lieutenant,” Bertilak said, “it will give you something useful to do.”

Thorn stopped, turned, looked squarely at the alien. “Clarify that for me, Bertilak. Now, if you don’t mind.” Spots of color rose on Thorn’s cheeks, and Tanner shifted in his chair, sensing an open anger in the Starcaster that was a new and disquieting side of him.

Bertilak gave Thorn a sympathetic look. “I understand that you have been . . . less than capable lately. I don’t presume to understand the reasons why, but this would give you an opportunity to contribute a great deal to your war effort.”

Thorn just sat, staring as the alien trash-talked him in front of the captain. It was, Thorn had to admit, a surreal moment. A column of resentment erupted inside him. He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. He’d done some amazing, entirely unprecedented things to advance the ON cause, and he’d paid for it with his blood and years off his life.

And now it was all being called into question—granted, in a glib, personable tone, but still—he was slyly being called a coward, and a useless one at that.

Thorn finally found his voice, clearing his throat to buy a moment as the heated response cooled on his tongue. His words were replaced by something only mildly less aggressive, a fact that Tanner saw at once.

“Fine,” Thorn snapped. “I accept this idiotic, primal challenge. I’m going to whip your ass, and then I’m going to watch as our crew unbolts your ship down to the frame, and there won’t be a fu—”

“We get the point, Stellers,” Tanner interrupted, smoothly ending the rant before it could really gain altitude.

Bertilak laughed and slapped the table, his face split by a smile of comical proportions. “The fighting spirit is here! I knew you had it in you, friend. I believe you have a gymnasium aboard your fine ship—when you are ready, I will meet you there, and we shall settle our wager with a clean brawl and clear hearts.”

Thorn looked at Tanner and the XO, but there was no help from them. So he sighed, took the measure of Bertilak once more, and felt his anger begin to rise all over again.

“Bet on it, you big green bastard.”

* * *

Thorn pulled off his training shoes and socks and stood, limbering up with the practiced ease of someone who had been in a fighting circle once or twice. Thorn was a seasoned fighter who used every part of his body to win.

In short, he fought dirty and made no apologies for it.

As an orphan who was small, he’d learned to be quick. When he gained height and strength, he learned to be ruthless.

The gym was empty, except for Osborne, who regarded Thorn with a gentle amusement at the absurd nature of what was about to happen. A fight. An actual fight, and one that had massive implications for the war effort—and Thorn’s career.

Osborne, who had a secondary duty as the ship’s sports and fitness officer, chose to retreat to a wall, where he stood, watching the door for Bertilak’s arrival. The rest of the crew not involved in repairs, or other ship operations, would watch the fight through the intercom’s vid-link, since the gym was much too small to accommodate many spectators. Osborne had wisely decided that, given that they had no idea how wildly the big alien fought, they also had no idea how safe it would be to be near the combat.

And so, Osborne hugged the wall, hands on hips and eyes darting with unusual speed from Thorn, to the door, and back to Thorn, who stepped into the middle of the gym, his feet silent on the padded floor. He wore a black gi he’d picked up during the Hecate’s last stopover at Code Gauntlet. The loose-fitting top and trousers were far better for sparring than the regular gym gear he used to wear. More importantly, Thorn fancied the outfit gave him a persona outside his role as a Starcaster. Clad in black, Thorn was a simple fighter—a man waiting on his role in a contest, and doing so with an expression so bland as to be unreadable.

Osborne turned to Thorn. “Technically, Bertilak’s late,” he said, checking the time. “He has another three minutes, and I guess he forfeits.”

The door slid open and Bertilak strode in. “Did I hear something about forfeiting?” The alien grinned at Thorn. “Have you decided you wish to join me on my travels after all, my friend, so we can just forego the fight completely?”

Thorn shook his head. “You wish. I only hope you aren’t too lonely once you start on your way.”

Bertilak laughed, removing his vest and the belt still hung with myriad gadgets. He kicked off his sandals and padded toward the center of the gym. “Two competing versions of reality, eh? Well, let’s see which of us can make theirs ring with truth, shall we?”

Thorn stopped short. Was Bertilak making some sidelong reference to Thorn’s magic? Thorn had never explained any of the details of how he did the things he did—so who had? Or was there something more going on here?

“Thorn, you ready?” Osborne asked.

Thorn shook away his moment of surprised suspicion and nodded. He stepped toward the center of the gym and stopped a few paces away from Bertilak. As he did, he found himself keenly aware of how much the big alien towered over him. Thorn was going to have to win this fast, because a drawn out fight would probably favor Bertilak, especially if he were able to get his greater mass and longer reach into play.

“Alright, you both know the rules,” Osborne said. “Any questions?”

Thorn shook his head. “Nope.”

“I have one,” Bertilak said. “For Thorn. Why don’t you like me?”

Thorn just stared, blinking. Not what he’d expected, but still, the question was oddly insightful, given how excessive Bertilak appeared to be.

Osborne stepped back and shouted, “Fight!”

Bertilak’s smile faded. “It’s a simple question. Why don’t you like me? Ever since I came aboard this ship, you’ve mistrusted me. I don’t understand.” His face had gone completely somber, even grave, by the time he’d finished speaking. It was unsettling and gave Thorn pause.

Strange time to want to do this, Thorn thought, but whatever. “I just think—”

It was all he got out before a massive fist slammed into his face like a meteor strike.

Thorn reeled backward, greenish light and a shrill whine filling his head. Desperately, he raised his hands to block any more blows, but a fraction too late. Another huge fist crashed into his stomach, doubling him over.

Thorn gritted his teeth and charged, lashing out with his own fists, trying to shove himself deeper inside Bertilak’s threat range, frantically hoping it would minimize the alien’s ability to bring those huge fists into play. At the same time, he kicked up and out, his foot connecting with something that felt like a slab of ablative armor. Still, Bertilak grunted with the impact, giving Thorn a faint hope that he might be able to—

A grip like a hydraulic vice snapped closed around Thorn, then it lifted him and smashed him down against the padded deck. The hit drove the breath out of Thorn with a heavy oof and left him momentarily stunned.

Through watering eyes, Thorn saw Bertilak back away. The big alien was grinning again, apparently content to wait for Thorn to get back up.

So Thorn did, levering himself up to his knees, then clambering back to his feet. The whine shrilling away behind his eyes had abated some. He raised his fists, then licked at something warm and sticky smeared across his lips.

Blood from his nose, which was probably broken.

Thorn shook his head. “Sucker punch, huh? That”—he licked away blood again—“says a lot about you, Bertilak.”

The alien looked anything but apologetic. “The universe is an unforgiving place.”

Thorn launched himself, trying to land a sucker punch—actually, kick—of his own. Thorn’s best trick was his ability to kick high, something he’d honed over years of fighting his way through orphanages, foster placements, and shithole planets as he labored alongside what amounted to little more than criminals. More than once, he’d ended a fight with it.

It almost worked.

As Tanner sometimes observed, almost was good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermonuclear warheads, but not something like this. Thorn’s speed and power caught Bertilak by surprise, but he was just a little faster. The alien dodged back, at the same time snapping his hands out to grab Thorn’s foot and shove it to one side. The unexpected change in his momentum left Thorn fumbling. He pitched backward, catching himself with an outflung hand so he didn’t end up completely on his back again. But Bertilak had already reversed direction and bore in, driving Thorn to the mat with his weight.

Thorn struggled for a moment but couldn’t shift the alien off of him. Worse, Bertilak was able to get his hands free, while keeping Thorn pinned with his legs long enough to wind up and deliver a massive blow—

To the mat beside Thorn’s head.

Osborne’s whistle blew. Bertilak immediately stood and backed away, stretching out a huge green hand to help Thorn stand.

For a wild instant, Thorn considered just saying screw it and flinging himself at Bertilak, sucker punching him the way the alien had done to him. But he choked back his outrage and accepted the offered hand. Bertilak pulled him to his feet like he was lifting a child.

“Ready?” Osborne said, raising a hand to resume the fight.

Thorn started to tense—

But he relaxed, released a breath that tasted of blood, and shook his head. Instead, he offered his hand to Bertilak to shake.

“You’re conceding?” Osborne asked, his eyebrows arched in surprise.

Thorn nodded, wincing as he did. “I might be stubborn, but I’m not stupid.” He wiped at his nose with his other hand. “I might still be able to win this, but I’m not sure . . . what shape I’d be in at the end of it.”

Bertilak laughed and shook Thorn’s hand. “I am glad to see your ability to adapt, given the fact that I like you. It would serve little purpose to come aboard my ship for some interesting adventures, only for me to spend most of the time caring for a wounded hero whose condition was due to his endless valor.”

Thorn returned to where he’d left his clothing and grabbed a towel that he used to dab at his face. It came away with multiple smears of blood. As he gathered his things, he shot Bertilak a sidelong glance.

The sucker punch aside, Thorn knew—after grudgingly admitting it to himself—that Bertilak was simply too powerful for him to defeat in hand-to-hand combat. He had Thorn outmatched in every way; moreover, he seemed ready for Thorn’s moves in a way that either meant light-speed reflexes, or—

Something else.

And if there was something else, something Bertilak was hiding, he needed to find a way to figure out what it was.

The door slid open, admitting Tanner and Raynaud, the XO. They congratulated Bertilak, then crossed the gym to Thorn.

“You’ve made some of the crew very happy, Lieutenant,” the XO said.

“Some of the crew?”

“The ones who bet against you.”

Thorn dabbed at his face again, grimacing as bright spots of pain lit up—mostly his nose, but also his right cheek and temple, and the left side of his jawline. “There were actually people betting for me? Remind me to buy them a beer.”

“The real risk takers,” Tanner said. “And not many of them, apparently.”

Thorn sniffed and coughed a bit as he swallowed more blood. “Nice to have the confidence of the crew,” he muttered darkly.

Tanner, though, shook his head. “No need to be all sour about this, Stellers. In fact, conceding the way you did showed some character that I think impressed a lot of your shipmates.”

“Even the ones who were hoping to see a lot more blood,” the XO put in.

“So, Thorn, you are welcome to come aboard my ship when you are ready,” Bertilak said. “Once the Hecate is back underway, we’ll start our own journey together. I must admit, I am quite excited, as this is all a new thing for us. For me, that is.”

Thorn looked at him, eyes still unfocused. “Yes. I’m giddy.”

Bertilak just laughed.

Tanner smirked and shook his head. “There’s one thing that’s certain, Stellers.”

“What’s that, sir?”

The Captain turned and looked at him, a twinkle in his eye. “Better you fighting him than me.”

15

Kira stared at the Danzur standing in front of the door to her assigned quarters. “What do you mean, I no longer have access?”

“It is the direction I’ve received,” the alien replied. “These quarters have been reassigned. I’ve been instructed to take you to new accommodation.”

Kira decided not to argue as it would be a pointless waste of breath. She’d had enough experience with the Danzur. “Fine,” she snapped. “Lead the way.”

The Danzur nodded and started along the corridor, Kira following. They descended a short flight of steps into a dingier, more mechanical-feeling part of the orbiting platform, another corridor lined with pipes and conduits. The Danzur opened a compartment and gestured inside.

“This is your new accommodation,” he said. “The door has been keyed to you by facial recognition.”

Kira peered inside. She saw a spartan bed, a table, a chair, a terminal—and that was it. There were no viewports, just blank bulkheads lined with yet more of the ubiquitous conduits. One of them hissed, carrying some fluid or gas with a faint, teeth-vibrating harmonic whine.

“This is it?” she asked.

The Danzur nodded, then turned and walked away.

And that was that.

Kira’s quarters aboard the Stiletto weren’t much, just a typical junior officer’s berth—and they were still larger and better appointed than this.

The Danzur were clearly sending her a message. Okay, so this set the tone for it, and not a good one.

She wondered what the message itself said.

* * *

“What do you mean they won’t see us?” Kira ground out, rubbing the bridge of her nose with two fingers.

Damien shrugged. “I’ve got two messages into Tadrup. He hasn’t responded to either of them. In the meantime, I have gotten several messages, basically empty statements saying nothing, just bureaucratic gobbledygook.”

“Bureaucratic gobbledygook? So, just regular Danzur conversation, then.”

“There was one notification updating us on our docking fees.”

“Docking fees? For a diplomatic mission?”

“Well, at least our diplomatic credentials haven’t been rescinded. That’s something, anyway.”

“We need to talk to Tadrup.”

“Which is why I’ve been trying to message him,” Damien replied. “I’m open to suggestions, though.”

Kira looked around the Venture’s interior. The little ship suddenly seemed like a safe place of refuge—but a terribly vulnerable one. It would only take a matter of minutes for the Danzur to seize control of it if they wanted to. And even if they undocked and tried to just run, they’d likely never survive the transit through Danzur-controlled space long enough to fire up the Alcubierre drive—

Unless Kira Shaded the ship, which she could do. The result of all that would, of course, be the end of the diplomatic mission, and quite likely the start of some severely tense relations with the Danzur, if not outright war.

She sighed. “We need to try to get these talks back on track.”

“Agreed. We’ve already used most of our resources, though. We don’t have much clout left. Well, except for Thorn Stellers.”

Kira shot him a glance. “You’re not serious.”

“About handing him over? Of course not. I’d like to think that that’s not how we do business.”

Try as she might, Kira could see no situation that ended with them handing Thorn over to an enemy. But who knew what might happen if the situation got desperate enough.

“I suppose we could try to sweeten the pot of trade deals,” Damien said. “I mean, I do have a little more latitude to do that without going too far out on a limb.” He glared at the deck. “I just don’t think it’s going to help. The Danzur want something from us, something we haven’t yet offered them.”

“Yeah. Thorn.”

“Not necessarily,” Damien replied. “It’s an outrageous request, and they have to know it’s an outrageous request.”

Kira crossed her arms. “You’re assuming they think like we do. Maybe dealing in lives is just another form of . . . I don’t know, commerce, or trade, or whatever to them.”

Damien shrugged. “Possibly. But I don’t think so. There’s nothing in the background briefing materials suggesting it, and I can’t think of anything we’ve seen since we arrived that would really indicate it, either.” He shook his head. “No, they must know we’d never agree to hand over not just a citizen, but an ON officer.”

“And a Starcaster,” Kira said. “Quite likely the most powerful Starcaster at that.”

“Mind you, I suppose there is a risk that we’re misreading them, in which case their next move would be to take us hostage and offer to exchange us for Stellers.”

Kira shook her head. “Not going to happen. At least, not while I can still put up a fight.”

Damien gave her a narrow-eyed look. “That might be our ace in the hole, you know.”

“That might—what?”

“We’ve never actually come out and said that you’re a Starcaster—it’s not something the Danzur need to know. But they obviously know about the existence of Starcasters, probably from the Nyctus.”

“Okay.”

“Well, if the Danzur suspect that you’re a Starcaster, they might be leery of making any sort of direct move against us.”

“Sure, but for how long?”

“Long enough for us to do what we’re going to do next.”

Kira gave Damien a puzzled glance. “Which is?”

“Ah, well,” Damien replied, “you see—I have absolutely no idea. I was hoping you did.”

* * *

They eventually decided that the best approach was a direct one of their own. If the Danzur were leery of Kira because they suspected her of having unknown powers, then they would use that to their advantage.

“I’ve set up a meeting with Tadrup,” Damien said. “When we said we were willing to talk about Stellers, he grudgingly agreed.”

“Well, that’s good,” Kira said. “It at least gets our foot in the door.”

“He won’t be available.”

“I thought you just said you’d set up a meeting with him.”

Damien nodded. “I did. But he’ll send some underlings. It’s going to turn out that some other pressing business will be keeping him away.”

Kira had to shake her head. “Why? What would be the point?”

“It lets them keep the initiative—control the flow of events,” Damien replied.

“Have I mentioned that I hate these diplomatic mind games?”

“More than once.”

“Okay, fine,” Kira said. “So what do we do about it?”

“Make sure Tadrup shows up.”

“Wow. What a great idea. The question is, how do we do that exactly?”

Damien smiled. “Well, that’s where we take advantage of that spooky Starcaster reputation you have.”

* * *

Kira simply sat and waited for Damien to finish his diatribe.

“Frankly, we find it inappropriate. Unacceptable. As a diplomat, I’m offended—dare I say angered at such a wanton display of crude behavior, well beneath the commonly held value structure of a people who are known to grasp just what it means to be civilized.” Damien drew in another breath, finger pointing skyward as he launched into his next statement, cheeks colored red with anger. “Tadrup agreed to this meeting, so it’s only reasonable, I think, for Tadrup to be here, unless my understanding of language has deteriorated overnight!” Damien barked.

Wow, Kira thought—damned fine performance. Damien was really pulling out the big diplomatic guns here, and the hand gestures were a nice addition. Damien looked like an orchestral conductor bellowing at his wayward performers, and the whole image worked.

The Danzur across the table just nodded, though, too seasoned to take the bait. “I understand, and sympathize. Unfortunately, the situation is beyond his control. He asked me to assure you that he would make himself available as soon as he could.”

“We’d appreciate speaking with him now,” Damien replied.

The Danzur underling stared back at him. That was Kira’s cue.

She summoned magic to her, then crafted it into a tendril of suggestion, one that would allow her to shape the Danzur’s thoughts like potter’s clay. It helped that this Danzur was just a functionary. A complete lack of imagination made her task that much easier. She nudged and tweaked the alien’s thoughts as they formulated yet another empty answer to Damien’s statement.

“I will go and get him,” the Danzur said, voice flat and oddly hollow as he stood to leave the meeting room. The alien seemed a little hesitant, a lingering residue of free will, but Kira didn’t care. She was beyond tired of these Danzur and their petty, scheming bureaucracy, and it was time to flex her power.

“Thank you,” Damien said, smiling broadly.

He glanced at Kira but said nothing. The plan was for them to wait in silence, since the Danzur presumably had the meeting room bugged.

But Kira turned to Damien. “I do like working with Tadrup. He’s been really helpful.”

Damien raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“You remember,” Kira said, winking, “when he gave me that thing—well, it’s been damned helpful. We wouldn’t be this far without that data, and as for the upper hand in those contracts? Without him, no way.”

Damien smiled, so blandly as to be robotic. “Oh that. He’ll be rewarded. Not sure how, but—"

The door slid open. Tadrup entered, followed by the Danzur who’d just fetched him.

“I understand that you are reconsidering your position regarding Thorn Stellers,” Tadrup said.

Damien gave Kira a curious—and prearranged—glance. “I don’t know what you mean, Tadrup. We simply asked to meet with you to resume negotiations for a way forward.”

Tadrup shot a quick glance at the other Danzur. “I was informed that you had changed your minds about handing over Stellers to us.”

“I’m sorry, Tadrup, but no,” Damien said. “We merely wished—”

“Enough!”

Tadrup’s single word cracked like a gunshot. Kira had seen it coming, a growing tension in his thoughts, like a balloon expanding, stretching, finally reaching its breaking point.

“You are wasting my time,” Tadrup said, his translated voice now closer to the snarls, hisses, and growls of their actual speech than Kira had ever heard it. “I’m sure you believe you’re being clever, but you’re not.”

“Tadrup, we are—” Damien began, but it was Tadrup’s turn to push on, accepting no interruption.

“Dealing in bad faith is what you are doing. We have made our position clear. Deliver Thorn Stellers to us and we will conclude an agreement with you. Otherwise, we will be at war.”

“Tadrup, there has to be some other—”

“No! There isn’t! There is no other way that we are willing to accept!”

Kira kept as much of her mind as she could on the physical conversation, but she focused most of her concentration on his thoughts. She watched them, feeling them, as Tadrup’s mind formulated ideas and crafted them into words.

“Tadrup,” Damien said, “a war between us benefits no one except the Nyctus. It weakens both you and us, making it that much easier for them to prevail.”

“We have had nothing but favorable, and quite lucrative dealings with the Nyctus,” Tadrup shot back. “They have proven themselves to be honest and dependable. All that your race has done is harm our relations with them. If anything, we would formalize our alliance with them and take up arms against you.”

“Tadrup—” Damien started.

“No! The Nyctus are right! Humans are a pox on the galaxy!” Tadrup leaned in, all pretext at diplomacy apparently gone. “You have four days to confirm that you are going to produce Stellers. At the end of that time, if you do not, then your diplomatic credentials will be revoked, and you will be treated as intruders in Danzur space.” He settled back again. “So I would suggest that you think long and hard about whether you should still be here for that eventuality.”

Without another word, Tadrup stood and walked out, the other Danzur following.

Silence hung for a moment, then Damien blew out a breath. “Well, that was emphatic.”

Kira nodded. It seemed inevitable now that their negotiations would fail and her first involvement in diplomacy would probably also be her last.

16

Thorn tossed his shaving kit into his bag last so it would be the first thing he unpacked. It was an old habit by now, packing it in reverse order of how soon he was likely to need something. It brought to mind a forty-five minute lesson back at Code Nebula, overseen by Narvez, in which Thorn and his fellow recruits had been taught how to pack their gear. He remembered thinking at the time just how stupid that was—they were actually taking time to show adults how to fold up t-shirts and roll socks to pack them away. But it was just another of those little things he’d come to appreciate about the military, that a professional soldier was actually made of a multitude of small, specific skills—

The door chime sounded. Thorn turned and opened it, and his eyes went wide when he saw it was Tanner.

“Sir, what brings you slumming it into junior officers’ territory?”

“First of all, Stellers, I don’t need to explain why I choose to visit any part of my ship. Second, I don’t consider visiting any part of my ship to be slumming it. Did you catch the emphasis on my ship, Lieutenant?”

“Loud and clear, sir.”

He stood aside so Tanner could enter his quarters. The Captain nodded at the door. “Close that.”

Thorn did, then he turned to Tanner and waited. The man was obviously here to say something to him, and if he’d learned anything in the ON, it was to let the captain speak when he was good and ready.

“I know what you’re thinking, Lieutenant,” Tanner said. “That I owe you an apology for what’s gone on with Bertilak.”

“I hadn’t thought that at all, sir.”

“Good, because I never do anything without a reason. It’s in my nature, as I abhor wasting time and effort, and above all else, the lives of my people.” Tanner gave Thorn’s bruises a searching look. “As to a little violence, well, I’m not above cracking some eggs to make an omelet, as the saying goes.”

Thorn curled his lip, wincing around his bruised face as he did. “My head does feel rather egg-like. Or at least my face does, sir. But—you don’t like wasting time, and you still came here to not apologize for encouraging me to get in the circle with an unknown alien? Sir?”

“No, I came here to tell you why I’m not sorry and what I expect from you. None of this is being done on a whim, Stellers, as I’ve explained. Bertilak clearly has knowledge and tech that would be extremely useful for the ON to possess. Other than that, we know almost squat about him. He claims to be the only being of his type, but that’s unlikely, if not impossible.”

“So, you want me to find out more about him, sir?”

“Damned right. Everything you can. And what better way than spending some time alone with him aboard his ship?” Tanner handed over a data chip meant to be plugged into a data pad. “Also, on here you’ll find a series of crib notes from the Chief Engineer about what to look for when you’re flying with Bertilak, and what technical questions to ask him.”

Thorn nodded. “Got it, sir.”

“That’s not all, Stellers. I have another reason for sending you away with our big green friend. And it’s got nothing to do with his origins, or his species, or his tech. It’s about you.”

“About me—” Thorn began, then he gave Tanner a perplexed look. “Sorry, sir, I don’t understand.”

“Stellers, I’ve seen you with your magic powered down more than once. When you inadvertently flung the Hecate halfway across creation and couldn’t use your powers for a while after . . . I get it. After something big your power gets depleted and you need time to recharge. Do I have that right?”

“More or less, sir.”

“Well, this is different. Your magic—your mojo, as I’ve heard Wyant call it—seems to be stuck in a position like a scrammed reactor. You don’t seem to be bouncing back this time. Ever since that Witch Nebula appeared, you’ve been sitting in the bottom of a trough, and you can’t seem to get out of it. Have I got that right?”

Thorn started to speak but cut himself off. Tanner’s insight was right on the money—much more so than he expected from the Captain. He’d always assumed that Tanner saw him as a black box. Put in an order to do something magical at one end and get a magical effect out the other. He’d never appreciated that the man gave that much consideration to what Thorn actually did.

But of course he did. If there was one thing Thorn had learned about Tanner, it was that he was fervently devoted to his crew. All his crew.

So Thorn finally nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s . . . complicated. It goes back to the destruction of Nebo, and—” He stopped and shook his head. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“Don’t need the details,” Tanner said. “What I need is a Starcaster in top working order. Right now, I don’t have that. So, I’m hoping that some time away from the Hecate with Bertilak might give you some perspective. You’ll have no other humans around, no specific ON duties—you’ll be free from the environment aboard this ship that, let’s face it, is all about conformity and being part of a team. Stellers, I think you need some time away from that—some time to be yourself.”

Thorn just stared at Tanner. The Captain’s insight into his magical affliction hit awfully close to the mark despite Thorn keeping most of what it was about to himself. Not for the first time, Thorn wondered if there was more to it than just an especially perceptive man. Maybe he had some rudimentary capacity for Joining—

But Thorn cut that line of thinking off. Attributing everything to magic diminished the fact that Tanner was just a damned good commanding officer.

“I appreciate that, sir,” he said, nodding at Tanner. “I get what you’re saying, and you may be right. Some time away might be what I need.”

“Just remember that it’s temporary duty, Stellers. If you and Bertilak hit it off, and you decide that flying around space with him is what you want to do—well, I’ll come looking for you with an arrest writ for desertion in hand.” Tanner’s eyes twinkled with the threat, making Thorn grin.

“Understood, sir. I can honestly say, though, that the chances of me becoming star buddies with Bertilak are . . . small.”

Tanner headed for the door but paused before he left.

“You never know, Lieutenant. Opposites attract and all that, right? Just think, your exploits might be shown to students someday.”

“I’d rather not be known as a sidekick to a green alien who bellows all the time, sir. Bad for my image.”

Tanner favored Thorn with a rare smile, then said, “Work on surviving and learning. Leave shaping your legacy to me. You get us this tech, and I’ll have statues of you in every port.”

“Loud and clear, sir.”

Tanner left, and Thorn felt the weight of his unwanted mission push down even harder. Starcasting, it seemed, meant being a detective as well.

* * *

As he made his way to Bertilak’s ship, Thorn considered—not for the first time—whether he should contact Kira and let her know what was going on. On one level, it made sense. She had every reason to be interested in what Thorn was up to and would probably find this particular little jaunt amusing. On the other hand, Thorn taking off with an alien of some unknown species, who was essentially a complete stranger, might just make her worry, and he had to consider how much of his need to tell her was tied to his own desire for commiseration. As to causing her worry, that certainly wouldn’t help her do her own job.

He rounded a corner and paused to let a Petty Officer striding purposefully somewhere with thunder on her face pass by. Somebody, somewhere was in the shit and would soon know it in no uncertain terms. In the time-honored tradition of soldiers everywhere, Thorn’s first thought was, Glad it’s not me.

He carried on, his bag resting on his shoulder. As he did, he thought again about Kira and—

Okay, Thorn was lying to himself. It was partly about not worrying or distracting her unduly. But it was more about the simple fact that Thorn was embarrassed.

He’d let his emotions get the better of him. It was as simple as that. Whether Bertilak had known how to push his buttons or just lucked into it didn’t really matter. Thorn had let his gnawing guilt over his daughter, his frustration with his own diminished powers, and the general stress of the war get to him. He’d lost his cool with Bertilak, and in so doing had violated a cardinal rule he’d learned long ago as an orphaned kid. It was an important rule, too. Maybe the most important.

Don’t pick a fight unless you’re sure you can win.

He turned the last corner before the airlock. Ahead, he saw the docking port of Bertilak’s shuttle, and paused.

He’d let his ego get the better of him. Again, regardless of whether it had been planned by the big green alien or had just turned out this way, it came down to the same thing. Thorn had picked a fight with an opponent of unknown strength and ability, and here he was.

He should have just kept his mouth shut.

* * *

Bertilak had already boarded his ship to prepare for departure from the Hecate. He’d left the shuttle in automated mode, making the crossing from the destroyer to the strange green ship under its own volition. Thorn waited for the brief trip to end. The shuttle finished clunking and banging against Bertilak’s ship as it docked, and with a soft hiss the airlock pressurized. As the door slid open, he saw a corridor extending ahead of him to a t-junction. The decks and bulkheads were the same green as the ship’s exterior. It certainly looked like an alloy not too dissimilar from that composing most of the Hecate—except for the being green part, anyway.

“Thorn, my friend. Please, come aboard, and welcome.” The greeting was pleasant and sounded genuine, though it was naturally twenty decibels louder than it had to be. Bertilak was consistently exuberant, if nothing else.

Bertilak had just appeared at the junction, beckoning Thorn forward. He thanked the big alien and stepped over the open hatch. Thorn was immediately struck by a sense of—bigger. Everything about the interior of Bertilak’s ship was larger than the Hecate, which only made sense given the alien’s size. Thorn realized that Bertilak had spent his time aboard the Hecate hunched over, ducking beneath things, and maneuvering his way through spaces he must have found too tight, as well as poorly designed.

The converse was true here. Thorn felt like he was aboard some sort of luxury liner, with the ceiling well above his head, and the corridors about fifty percent wider than those of the Hecate. It was both refreshing having so much space to move around in, and off-putting—well, to have so much space to move around in.

“Thanks, Bertilak. Good to be here.” To his surprise, Thorn spoke the truth.

“Oh, no it’s not. At least, not entirely.” The big alien grinned. “I know that you don’t especially want to be here, and you certainly aren’t looking forward to traveling with me. For now, you’re overcome with the newness of this and are more amenable to the experience. Perhaps this will change as you see what things we can do out there in the stars.”

Thorn gave a rueful smile.

“Guilty as charged,” he replied. “But, it was a fair wager, and I lost—sucker punch or not—so here I am. And, yes, this is new.”

“Your honor is above reproach, then, and here you are,” Bertilak agreed, his grin widening. “Now allow me to show you to your quarters, and then we will prepare to get underway.”

Thorn followed Bertilak. There wasn’t much, it turned out, to the crew compartment of the ship, probably a dozen compartments at most. Bertilak opened one of them and gestured inside.

“Welcome to your new and temporary home, Thorn,” Bertilak said. “I hope you find it to your liking?”

Thorn walked in and looked around.

Compared to any quarters he’d ever had with the ON, this was positively palatial.

He had an enormous sprawl of space, containing one of the largest beds he’d ever seen. Cushions were heaped and piled about, and there was a huge wardrobe, into which the entire contents of his bag would easily disappear. And there were actual wall hangings, tapestries of heavy, brocaded cloth decked out with soothing, abstract designs. The air held a faint smell of spices unknown to Thorn’s ON palate.

“This is—” Thorn began, turning another circle. “Well, I’m stunned.”

“Is that approval? Because if not, there are two other—”

“No, no! This is—yeah, it’s fine, Bertilak. More than fine, in fact.”

“Excellent. Well, I will leave you to get settled in. When you are ready, please join me on the bridge. Simply follow this corridor all the way forward.” The big alien started to turn away.

“Bertilak?”

He stopped and turned back with a questioning look.

“Why do you have this compartment?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve been pretty clear that you fly alone. You’ve also said that you are, as far as you know, the only member of your race,” Thorn said, dropping his bag on the bed with a thump. “But you’ve got this compartment all decked out for habitation, and seemingly with furniture scaled to, ah, your particular needs. And you say you’ve got two more compartments like this?”

“Just because I tend to fly alone doesn’t mean I don’t want others aboard my ship,” Bertilak replied. “Sometimes I carry passengers. And sometimes I have Orbital Navy Lieutenants temporarily become my indentured crew. Like now.”

Thorn scowled and started to react, but Bertilak just laughed and raised a hand.

“I am joking, of course. Well, not about the paying passengers part. Having quarters such as these available means that I can carry passengers on very short notice.”

Thorn nodded. “Okay, I guess that makes sense. Well, I’m going to get settled in. I’ll come to the bridge shortly.”

Bertilak nodded and left.

Thorn just stared at the door after it closed.

Paying passengers? Maybe.

But as Thorn looked around the room, he couldn’t help noticing that it looked entirely unlived-in. Everything from the bedding to the cushions looked absolutely new—not a wrinkle or even a hint of a stain. There was a museum-like air to everything in the room, making Thorn feel like an interloper rather than a guest. Or unwilling crew.

Of course, that didn’t mean much. Maybe Bertilak was just a fastidious housekeeper. But it was another one of those little things that nagged at Thorn, joining the growing list of things that just seemed odd about this whole situation. It was, he thought, like being able to see all the individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but not the picture it was supposed to assemble.

The thought energized Thorn. Okay, here he was, whether he liked it or not. He might as well make the best of it. That would start with finding out who Bertilak was and what really made him tick, and that would begin at the heart of the ship. The bridge. Thorn knew you could fake a stateroom, but as to the heart of a starship, there was no avoiding the functionality and use of engineering.

It was time to see what Bertilak flew and how he flew it.

* * *

Thorn stopped in the entrance to the bridge and looked around, once again brought up short by the scenery.

It was nothing like the bridge of the Hecate or any other warship he’d been on. Those were busy, purposeful, and full of tech—consoles, screens, repeaters, all of the miscellaneous stuff required to monitor and control something as complex as a big ship and all of its systems. This, on the other hand, was—

Not like that at all.

Bertilak sat in a chair—not even a crash couch, but what literally looked like a simple chair—before a single console, facing a large viewscreen. A second chair sat to his right.

And that was it.

Bertilak turned. “Ah, my friend, welcome to our bridge. Please, come in, make yourself comfortable. We’re about to get underway, and you’ll need to secure yourself for our initial transit. I’m certain this is a process you’ve done time and again, despite your unusual abilities?”

Thorn crossed to the extra seat and sat down. He saw now that there was a little bit more to the ship’s bridge—two consoles were mounted on the rear bulkhead, sporting displays that looked to be depicting nothing but abstract shapes, some spinning, some morphing and flowing languidly from one configuration to another. It might have been useful information—but not to Thorn, who found the assembly to be somewhere between an art installation and a fever dream. Nothing was static, and nothing was easily discernible as hardware.

Tanner’s voice cut in. “Bertilak, this is the Hecate. We’re ready to get underway. Have you got Stellers all squared away?”

“He’s sitting right beside me,” Bertilak replied, glancing at Thorn. “He looks excited to be on the cusp of this remarkable journey we’re about to share, truly.”

Tanner’s reply was dry as a bone. “I’ll just bet he does. Stellers, you try to restrain your enthusiasm.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Alright, we’re thirty seconds from lighting up the Alcubierre drive,” Tanner said. “Safe travels.”

“And to you, Captain,” Bertilak replied, irrepressible good humor in every syllable.

Thorn watched the Hecate. She hung in space, now a few hundred klicks off, an imposing presence against the starscape.

And then she was gone.

Thorn had literally blinked and missed it. Not that there was much to see when a ship lit its Alcubierre drive. Some people claimed they caught the briefest flash of either dazzling blue or deep crimson from Doppler-shifted particles, depending on whether the ship’s trajectory was toward or away from the observer. Thorn didn’t buy it. For him, a ship just always seemed to wink out of existence.

“Well then, Thorn,” Bertilak said. “With the Hecate gone, I see no reason to hang about this little bit of space, as glorious as it might be.”

“Glorious?”

Bertilak beamed his supernova grin. “Of course. All space is glorious, simply because it exists. As a virtually unlimited resource, open space is one of the true miracles of our universe.” Bertilak wasn’t just enormous, green, and loud. He appeared, to Thorn’s chagrin, to have a poetic streak as well.

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it,” Thorn said, hoping that there wouldn’t be any long diatribes about the wonder of it all.

“So, in the meantime—” Bertilak began, then he stopped and his grin faded. “Thorn, my friend, you look so unhappy. Do you miss your ship so much already?”

“What? Oh no, that’s not it. I just realized I need to know something about your ship that it never even occurred to me to ask about.”

“And what’s that?”

Thorn looked earnestly, almost desperately, at Bertilak. “Please tell me it has a toilet.”

17

The High Shaman watched as the last of the Caucus entered the vast Hall of Assembly. Iridescent bursts of bioluminescence punctuated the gloom beneath the great dome. Most of the flashes and flickers were ones of curiosity or puzzlement, likely because of the sudden and emphatic nature of the summons they’d received. More than a few were tinged with alarm, though. The last time the Caucus had been assembled so hastily, it had been to announce the destruction of Kuvor by a vicious sneak attack by the vile humans.

Good, the High Shaman thought. Let them fret for a time. It would make them more receptive to the measures he was planning to put to the Caucus. Fear was an excellent motivator, after all.

The last of the Caucus took their places, and the High Shaman moved to a place over the precise center of the dais that soared up from the Hall’s floor. Around him, in a complete circle, ranked galleries stepped progressively upward, giving the interior the shape of an inverted cone. The center of the dais—and the official center of the Nyctus Star Empire—was the place known as the Focus, marked by a simple and rather unremarkable piece of rock—the Truth Stone. Custom held that any who occupied the Focus must tell the truth and be assumed to be telling the truth by all present. To speak from anywhere else on the dais was to signal potential duplicity—which could, in some cases, be very useful.

But not today. The High Shaman waited for the full attention of all 412 Delegates, ensuring he floated directly above the Truth Stone as he did.

Silence.

“I speak the truth,” the High Shaman said, his voice carried by cunningly designed acoustics through the water, to be heard by every Delegate as though they stood right next to him.

“You speak the truth,” came the massed reply.

“Welcome to this special session of the Caucus. I realize that many of you greeted the news of its convening with apprehension, but I make no apology for that. Once more, we face a dire and insidious threat from the humans.”

Crimson waves of anger swept in ripples across the ranks of Delegates, and there was a rising tide of murmuration, punctuated by anger and fear. The High Shaman waited for it to subside—then waited a moment longer, letting the weight of his pause rest on the collective presence of those gathered. He wanted the Caucus to continue their worrying just a little bit more. He knew there would be speculation about what had happened, especially with the horror of Kuvor still fresh in their minds. An experienced leader, he knew to never waste a good crisis. The newness of their racial anger would be a tool like no other, and the High Shaman intended to exploit every hyperbolic moment of the Nyctus rage—for his own use, of course.

He was a politician. Not a saint.

The High Shaman went on when he had exhausted the moment. “I realize that many of you expect the worst. We do not, however, face another atrocity such as the humans perpetrated at Kuvor. We have something potentially even more dire, even more of a threat to the Star Empire, to confront.”

There was another series of ripples, more vigorous and long-lasting. The High Shaman again let it play out. The more unsettled and fearful the Delegates, the better, and their mindset was ripe for the picking.

“Several cycles ago,” the High Shaman continued, “we lost contact with Tāmtu. At first, we were not concerned. Tāmtu is far enough away from the Focus that delays in communications are not uncommon. However, it soon became clear that this was no simple lag. Instead, it seemed that Tāmtu had simply stopped communicating with us. Of course, at that point, we feared the worst.”

Another wave of apprehension swept through. Again, the High Shaman let it run its course, but this time, he flashed his own colors of understanding. Too much threat could overwhelm the crowd and make them ignore the reward. That was an error he would not make.

“Accordingly, a ship was dispatched to determine what was happening. It disappeared. So did a second ship, and then a squadron of warships. All simply ceased communicating, just as Tāmtu itself had.”

“More human treachery!” a Delegate shouted, provoking a chorus of responses.

The High Shaman took careful note of them all. He still wasn’t sure how many of the Delegates had chosen to align themselves with the pacifist movement known as the Reconciliation, which advocated for peace with the humans. It unsettled him to note that there seemed to be more speaking out against the exclamation of human treachery than the last time the Caucus had convened. That meant the Reconciliation may be gaining ground. The High Shaman briefly turned his attention to his Chief Advisor, who flashed back a quick acknowledgement. The actions and reactions of each of the Delegates would be noted, and later analyzed, to determine how much effort must be invested in dissipating this growing pressure to cease hostilities with the humans and enter into dialogue.

It wasn’t a problem—yet. The purpose of the Caucus was to provide a forum for the people’s representatives to speak freely, without the usual restrictions of caste. But too much willingness to adopt a more peaceful stance with the humans risked undermining everything the High Shaman and his own circle had been working toward. It might soon prove to be necessary to introduce stronger measures and begin using words such as disloyalty, or even treason.

“It is, indeed, human action that has isolated Tāmtu from the rest of the Star Empire. But the planet has not been destroyed, or even attacked, at least in a conventional sense. As near as we can tell, all of the Nyctus there are perfectly fine. They are simply changed.”

“Changed in what way?” a Delegate called out.

“Yes, spare us your dramatics, High Shaman, and speak the truth demanded by the Stone!”

The High Shaman recognized the second speaker, of course. Satu, a Delegate from the planet Areru, was an outspoken critic of the war effort and one of the rallying figures for the Reconciliation. Unfortunately, she was also powerful, having built a formidable network of allies and like-minded supporters. Soon, he would have to do something about her.

“They are changed,” the High Shaman said. “By the young human female known as Morgan.”

There was a moment of silence as the Caucus took this in. Bioluminescent shock and confusion flickered through the Hall. Satu finally broke the eerie stillness.

“How is that possible? You assured us that she had died on the planet called Nebo! That was the whole purpose of the attack. You assured us that the wholesale extermination of the humans there was necessary to ensure her death. We brought the wrath of the humans back upon us, and now the population of Kuvor is dead. Now you tell us it was for nothing? All of those lives—”

“It is not that simple,” the High Shaman cut in. “There are still aspects of this we don’t understand. She was dead. We confirmed that by her sudden and complete absence in the Firmament.” The Firmament was where real lives could be seen, and felt, and counted. It was the living space of the Nyctus, a place where their psychic energy was as tangible as their flesh. To a race like the Nyctus, the Firmament was of equal importance to the ground they walked on—or swam over.

“And yet, you say she is somehow on Tāmtu, and has changed our people there,” Satu shot back. “What does that even mean, changed?”

Another chorus of shouts rang out, accompanied by strobing flashes of angry confusion. This time, the High Shaman didn’t wait for it to subside.

“Yes, she was dead. Now, she is not. Her presence in the Firmament is suddenly clear again. Moreover, the planet Nebo is once more intact and populated, as though we never destroyed it.”

“But how is that possible?” someone exclaimed, fear saturating every sound of their question.

“We believe we are seeing the hand of Stellers in this,” the High Shaman replied. “He has brought Nebo back, and, in the process, brought Morgan back as well.”

This time, the stunned silence was absolute. Finally, a single voice spoke.

“How could he contravene death?”

“We don’t know,” the High Shaman said. “We’re aware, of course, that Stellers is a profound threat. He was, after all, responsible for the destruction of Kuvor. But it would appear that his ability to move an entire fleet great distances represents only a part of his powers.”

“There!” Satu shouted, leaning over the balustrade lining the gallery where she had her place. “There is the reason that we must seek another way of dealing with the humans. In the face of such power—”

“Stellers is only one man,” another Delegate shouted, cutting Satu off. The High Shaman noted this with satisfaction. This speaker was a reliable ally. “He cannot be everywhere, or do everything.”

“Are you even sure about that?” Satu shot back. “And what if there are other humans with such powers? For that matter, why should we lend credence to anything you are saying here today?”

“The High Shaman occupies the Stone of Truth. Are you suggesting that he flouts what it represents?”

“Of course not. But there is a stark difference between lying and merely being wrong,” Satu replied, then turned back to the High Shaman. “And, so far, you have been wrong repeatedly. You said the war would be brief, that the humans would not stand for a protracted conflict. You said that the bombardment and destruction of human worlds such as Nebo would compel them to back down. You said that the trap prepared for the human fleet through our operative high in their command structure would convince them to sue for peace. None of those things have come to pass. Instead, our warriors fight and die, Kuvor is an irradiated ruin, our use of the Firmament against the humans has proven that they are as strong as us, and perhaps stronger. So again, High Shaman, why should we find you credible?”

The High Shaman had to resist a bioluminescent display of anger. “Whether you find me credible, Satu, is entirely up to you. And, yes, I admit that the course of the war has not progressed as I’d originally envisioned. However, the humans have a single point of failure, one that has become our priority to neutralize.”

“Stellers,” a Delegate said.

Agreement flashed across the Caucus, tinged with both anger and anxiety. The name Stellers had become evocative of untold and fearful power. It was, the High Shaman thought, a name with which to elicit a fear response in larvae.

“Yes,” he said. “Stellers. And, to the end of neutralizing him, we have several courses of action underway. The humans seek peace and cooperation from the Danzur. We have managed to leverage our operatives on their Ruling Council to deny such an agreement with the humans, unless they hand Stellers over to them, whereupon they will transfer him to us.”

“Do you really believe the humans will agree to that?” Satu asked. “Would we agree to hand over one of ours to them? If the roles were reversed and it was you, High Shaman, that the humans were demanding to be handed over, do you expect that we would do so?”

“If it was up to you, Satu, then I’m sure the answer to that question would be yes, without hesitation.”

Despite the tense and confrontational atmosphere, amusement flickered among the Delegates. It gratified the High Shaman that only a small number of the Delegates remained, like Satu, impassive.

“In any case,” the High Shaman went on, “I do not actually expect the humans to hand Stellers over to the Danzur, no. More important is that there is no successful alliance between them and the humans. When it comes to dealing with Stellers, we have a far more powerful weapon.”

“And what is that?” Satu asked, her voice tinged with skepticism.

“The girl, Morgan.”

After a moment of silence, a Delegate spoke. “You said that she is responsible for changing our people on Tāmtu.”

“And I’ll ask again, what does that mean? How have our people on Tāmtu been changed, High Shaman?” Satu asked.

“They are no longer in communion with the rest of our people. The girl, Morgan, has somehow made them into something else. It would appear that they are loyal to her, and are keeping her safe and well.”

“And our ships? The ones that have been lost? Was that the doing of our changed people?”

“We don’t know, but we don’t believe so. We believe that that, too, was the doing of Morgan.”

“As was the occurrence of the new nebula,” one of the High Shaman’s advisors said. “We discerned that both she and Stellers were involved in its creation.”

Another Delegate leaned forward. “So Stellers is immensely powerful, and Morgan is immensely powerful. Both are able to move fleets, create stars—to change reality itself. What possible hope could we have against that?”

“Very little,” the High Shaman said.

Once more, there was silence. Again, Satu broke it.

“So you admit, then, that this war is a losing proposition, and it is time to approach the humans in the spirit of peace.”

“No. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Satu flashed her frustration. “That makes no sense. You would have us fight against powers we cannot match, merely to pursue a war we can’t win? Is your ego so large, High Shaman—so large and fragile—that you cannot admit defeat, even when it’s painfully obvious?”

“But we are not defeated,” the High Shaman replied. “In fact, we have an opportunity to deal with both Stellers and Morgan at once, to save our people on Tāmtu and deliver a final, crippling blow against the humans.”

Luminous flickers, both intrigued and skeptical, flashed around the Caucus, accompanied by a faint murmur of conversation. The High Shaman pressed on.

“Morgan is powerful but also immature for her species. Her thoughts are pliant. After much consultation with my Advisors, we have concluded that it would be possible to reshape her thoughts in a way that would not be possible with a mature human, based on a concept we know they identify as neuroplasticity—a complex word for a repulsive species trait, I might add. You may recall the report given here regarding the human female, Wixcombe, who proved utterly intractable despite our best and most concerted efforts. Were Morgan to be similarly mature, this would probably not be possible. As it is, her age is a boon to us.”

“So you propose—what?” Satu said, her tone and luminosity both doubtful. “To influence Morgan’s thoughts sufficiently to change Tāmtu back to its natural state? To release our people from whatever she has done to them?”

“Yes,” the High Shaman replied. “But we would go beyond that. There is some relationship between her and Stellers that we don’t understand. However, we believe we can continue to influence Morgan, turning her from adversary to neutral party, and then to ally.”

“You’re suggesting that we ally with a human? And an immature one, at that?”

The High Shaman flashed an amused but strained patience. “Only in a manner of speaking. In fact, she would become our operative, what the humans refer to as a Skin.”

“To what end?”

The High Shaman paused for dramatic effect, sensing this moment as the critical one. He would either convince the Caucus, or he wouldn’t.

“To destroy Stellers, of course, and, in the process, destroy herself. And once that is accomplished, the two most potent obstacles to our victory will be removed.”

The silence went on and on. Slowly just a few, then many of the Delegates glinted their approval. Satu and her closest collaborators abstained, but it didn’t matter. The support for the High Shaman’s proposal was overwhelming.

18

Thorn had been immensely gratified to find out that Bertilak did indeed have appropriate hygiene facilities aboard his ship, including a toilet. Of course, that raised other questions. Like why would the outsized alien have human-scaled plumbing? Thorn decided to leave the questions unasked for the moment. He decided to be as cooperative with Bertilak as he could be, hoping to leverage the alien’s effusive good humor into a more open relationship between them. After all, what he ultimately wanted from Bertilak was information, so it only made sense to make the alien as comfortable with him as possible.

“So, captain, a question?” Thorn said, stepping onto the spartan bridge.

“Ask, friend.”

“Where the hell are we going?” Thorn waved vaguely at the expanse of black.

The alien swept a hand toward the viewscreen, which depicted nothing, just the blankness of an Alcubierre bubble. “That way.”

“That way.”

“That’s right. You’ll note that we have plenty of room.”

“Well, if I remember my intro nav course, we can go about thirteen billion light years that way, and then we’ll run out of universe.”

“Ah, will we?”

Thorn blinked at that. “I don’t know. That’s just how big I’ve been told the universe is. And who am I to doubt the astrophysicists who are all definitely smarter than me?”

“Bah, you sell yourself short,” Bertilak said as Thorn sat down. “You are not a stupid man, Thorn Stellers, although I note that you enjoy staying below the radar, as some humans might say. I think this is by design.”

“Saying that someone’s smarter than me isn’t the same as saying I’m stupid,” Thorn replied, forcing a smile. “How’s that for boundless confidence?”

Bertilak laughed. “True. But that shows the importance of being precise. These specialists may be better educated and experienced in their fields, but that doesn’t make them necessarily smarter than you.” He glanced at Thorn sidelong. “I’m sure an astrophysicist would say the same about you when it comes to magic, no?”

“Possibly,” Thorn said. “I just—”

An alarm sounded, cutting him off. Bertilak turned back to his controls.

“We aren’t alone, it seems,” he said. “There is a ship ahead.”

Thorn deliberately said nothing. There was no technology he was aware of that would allow a ship inside an Alcubierre bubble to gather information about anything outside of it. That was the whole point—the drive generated a tiny, separate universe around the ship. It was a limitation that the ON, the Nyctus, and anyone else who used a similar drive for superluminal flight simply had to work around. And there weren’t, as far as Thorn knew, any other ways of traveling faster than light.

So if Bertilak had some tech that would allow him to scan normal space from inside an Alcubierre bubble, that by itself would offer the ON a massive advantage.

As he peered at the panel in front of Bertilak, all he saw was more of the flowing geometric shapes and a bunch of controls that amounted to little more than flashing, colored lights. If Bertilak was able to derive useful information from it, Thorn couldn’t see how.

“Can you tell what sort of ship it is?” he asked.

Bertilak narrowed his eyes. “Let’s find out, shall we? I do not enjoy surprises that are not culinary in nature.”

“Culinary?”

“I like food that looks like other things. That is pleasant. This? No.”

Bertilak tapped at the controls. A few seconds later, the starfield reappeared as the ship returned to normal space. A dim point of light in the distance gradually grew larger as they approached it.

“It’s a Nyctus vessel,” Bertilak said, looking at Thorn. “Badly damaged and broadcasting a distress beacon.”

* * *

Thorn studied the zoomed image of the Nyctus ship. It was a frigate. She’d been badly pummeled in a recent fight and bore the scars. Her bow had been opened, ragged holes and gaping rents had been torn in her hull, and she seemed to only have power in the rearmost part of the ship, probably the engineering section. The rest of her interior had either been destroyed or laid open to hard vacuum.

“No debris,” Thorn said, frowning.

Bertilak glanced at him. “Should there be?”

“There’s no debris. I’ve been in enough battles to know that it doesn’t take long for space to get filled with debris—pieces of ships, pieces blown off of ships, expended missiles, escape pods, all that sort of thing. But I don’t see any here.”

“There,” Bertilak said, pointing at his enigmatic displays. “There’s your debris, over there.”

Thorn returned a blank look. “What I see is a bunch of circles spinning inside each other on your screen there. If that says there’s debris out there somewhere, I’m sorry, Bertilak, but I can’t—”

Bertilak nodded. “Yes, I forget that you wouldn’t be familiar with these instruments.” The big alien fiddled with the controls, and the image on the main viewscreen changed. It now showed a debris field about a hundred klicks across, fragments of shattered alloy and hull plating slowly tumbling across a few tens of klicks.

Thorn stood and walked up to the display. “Looks like they managed to move the ship this far, probably to get clear of that mess.”

Bertilak switched the view back to the stricken Nyctus vessel.

“You said they’re broadcasting a distress signal?” Thorn asked.

“Correct,” the alien replied, tapping yet another incomprehensible display. “That, and minimal life support are the only returns I am seeing from my scans. At face value, that indicates a ship on the edge of being dead.”

“They must have been hit by an ON patrol,” Thorn said, staring at the image of the battered ship. “Not sure why they didn’t finish her off.”

“Should I do it for them?” Bertilak asked, hands posed like a musician waiting to strike the first note.

“Bertilak, do your”—he gestured at the panel— “instruments tell you if there are actually any squids still alive?”

“Yes. Four, all in the engineering section.”

Thorn sighed as he studied the wreck. Thanks to radiation shielding and all of the structural bracing holding the powerplant and drives in place, the engineering sections of most ships were probably their toughest parts. These four squids must be the engineering crew, or what was left of them, who’d managed to take refuge in the only part of the ship still holding atmosphere and heat.

For a moment, he tried to imagine what it would be like if the Hecate had been pounded to scrap with only her engineering compartments still intact, crew trapped inside. They’d know little or nothing about what was going on around them and would only be able to huddle in the fitful darkness. They’d be desperately hoping for rescue, terrified that safeties were going to fail, or the powerplant would suddenly explode. Or maybe worse, the lights and air processors dying, leaving them alone in the dark, the atmosphere getting ever more stale, their breath starting to form clouds of frozen mist—

“Thorn?”

He turned to Bertilak, nightmarish imaginings still hovering nearby.

“Should I simply destroy this vessel and then we’ll be on our way?” Bertilak said. “I ask for your input here, as you are now part of this ship.”

Thorn took a breath and nodded. Living a nightmare or not, they were still squids “Yes. Go ahead.”

Bertilak stared back at Thorn for a moment, then reached for his panel—

“Wait.”

Thorn blinked as Bertilak turned again to look at him, surprised at his own word. The alien just waited.

Thorn stared at the smashed remains of the Nyctus frigate.

—huddle in the fitful darkness, desperately hoping for rescue—the atmosphere getting ever more stale, their breath starting to form clouds of frozen mist—

“Can you tell if there are any other Nyctus ships nearby?” Thorn asked. “Any close enough to respond to their distress call?”

Bertilak looked at his instruments, then nodded. “About four light-years distant, a Nyctus patrol. They’re on their way here.”

“How long?”

“About three hours, at their current velocity.”

Thorn nodded, making a mental note that Bertilak couldn’t only scan outside of an Alcubierre bubble, he could scan ships inside them—and up to at least four light-years away.

“Thorn, do you want me to destroy this Nyctus ship, or not?” Bertilak pressed.

Thorn sighed, rich with disgust. “No. Let’s just leave them and hope that one of them doesn’t turn out to come up with some war-winning scheme.”

Again, Bertilak just watched Thorn for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“What about looting her? There might be some useful items aboard.”

Thorn shook his head at the wreck. “I doubt it.”

“There is in the engineering section. The fuel alone would save me having to replenish for a good, long while.”

Thorn gave Bertilak a hard look. “You seem really determined to find a reason to screw with these squids.”

Bertilak grinned. “It isn’t about them. You see, I’m an opportunist. And this is an opportunity.”

“So, if I wasn’t here, you’d just scavenge whatever you could and let the squids die?”

The alien lifted his lower lip, considering the question. “Maybe. It would depend on my mood. I might even rescue them myself.”

“Bring four squids aboard this ship? Yeah, I’d rather you didn’t do that.”

“I leave it up to you.”

“Why? Why are you asking me to make the call here?” Thorn asked.

“It only seems appropriate. You are my guest, after all. I wouldn’t want to leave this place with you carrying a burden of either second guessing yourself or regretting what we do here.”

“Oh, that’s probably going to happen anyway, no matter what we do.”

Bertilak raised an eyebrow but merely waited.

Thorn finally shook his head. “Let’s just leave them. If they survive until their friends get here, good for them. And if they don’t, well, they understood the risks of warfare and now they can live—and die—with that decision.”

“Very well. We shall be on our way then,” Bertilak said, tapping at his controls. A moment later, the Nyctus derelict vanished, replaced by the featureless void of an Alcubierre bubble.

* * *

Morgan drifted around the vent, trying to peer inside. The elder shaman said there was molten rock deep within it, which she thought would be very interesting to see. The trouble was that the heat was just too intense. Most of the plume of superheated water jetted straight up, but enough seemed to mix with the surrounding water to make even it uncomfortably hot. She could get close—but not close enough.

Of course, she could fix that. She could just change—

I’m here.

She stopped and pulled back from the vent.

Are you with him?

I am.

Did you do the test thing?

I did. He chose to spare the Nyctus.

Really?

Really, yes.

Morgan blinked, surprised. She hadn’t actually expected Bertilak to report that. So this was unexpected.

Did you try to make him kill them? All of them?

She could sense Bertilak’s frown across the void. Make him? As in, force him to do it, even if he didn’t want to? That does not really fit with what you wanted me to do.

No, not like force him. You know, tell him to do it.

You mean convince him.

Convince?

Yes. Persuade him. Use words to make him want to do it.

Oh, okay. Yeah, convince him. Did you try to do that?

Not really. You made it clear that you wanted it to be his choice.

Morgan glowered at the nearby vent. Occasionally, it puffed out a murky cloud of something like fine, shimmering sand. The elder shaman said it was minerals, and that some vents spewed out lots of minerals all the time. Apparently, the Nyctus could collect those minerals and use them to make stuff.

I did want him to decide, yeah, she finally said. I just didn’t think he would let them live. I wonder why he did?

I think it’s because he put himself in their place. If he were trapped the same way the Nyctus were, what would he want someone to do if they found him?

Morgan bit her lip and glared at the vent, which had suddenly coughed out a thick, billowing stream of minerals. The dark, roiling cloud spread overhead, then began to rain back down. Morgan held out her hand and watched the dark grit slowly accumulate on her palm.

So he passed, she said.

He did, Bertilak replied. You sound disappointed.

Morgan looked at the dusting of grey across her palm. The little grains actually sparkled in the dim glow of the Radiance, a tiny, flickering light show. She smiled at it for a moment, then brushed her palm clean and drifted back from the vent, extracting herself from the thickening mineral haze around it.

Well, a little, she said. If he was bad to those Nyctus, then I could just keep hating him. But now I don’t know.

Perhaps another test?

She nodded. Yeah. Yeah, a really hard one, this time. One that’s really gonna force him to be either good or bad.

What do you want me to do?

Morgan just drifted for a while, considering it. Eventually, she brightened.

Ooh. I know.

* * *

Thorn wandered Bertilak’s ship from stem to stern. The big alien didn’t seem to care, apparently quite content to let him explore freely.

Thorn didn’t learn very much.

He stopped just inside the engineering compartment. On the Hecate, this was a cavernous compartment, three decks high and filled with machinery. The bulk of the powerplant, a fusion reactor, and the drives filled most of it. The rest was a maze of conduits and pipes, with structural members holding it all in place. It was always a bustle of activity. There was no low-ops in Engineering. In fact, the Hecate carried two complete engineering crews so that one could replace the other in a constant, twelve-hour rotation.

This was not that.

Bertilak’s engineering compartment was small, not much bigger than the Hecate’s bridge and a single deck high. It contained only a handful of devices, all of which were that odd shade of green—a color Thorn was already sick of—and none of which Thorn even recognized.

Thorn studied the deck. He supposed that the bulk of the machinery, including the powerplant and drives, could be located beneath it, but that seemed like a maintenance nightmare. The whole point of engineering was to make all critical systems as accessible as possible.

Thorn moved to the center of the compartment and turned slowly in a circle.

No other exits, no obvious hatches in the deck under his feet, nothing whatsoever to indicate how Bertilak’s ship was powered, or propelled, or how things like heat and light were generated, or how the air was processed to keep it breathable.

And then there was water.

Aboard the Hecate, water was in a constant state of rationing while she was underway. Water was both heavy and bulky. It made for excellent rad shielding, but ultimately, it took up a lot of space and the ship’s mass allowance for the amount available. The recycling system was top-notch, but it wasn’t perfect. Small amounts were being constantly lost. The result was strict policies on its use, especially for things like showering. A certain amount of stink was just a fact of life aboard the Hecate. It never got too bad, and tended to fade into the background pretty quickly, but it was still very much there.

Thorn had taken a shower just that morning. In fact, his hair was still damp. The Hecate’s showers were controlled, allowing only a total of three minutes of water use. Thorn had stood in Bertilak’s shower for almost twenty minutes, letting the hot water sluice over him. It was, he had to admit, an awesome luxury, and he only stopped when his fingers and toes had become entirely pruned.

Bertilak’s ship just seemed too simple. Too generalized. That meant it must be some form of alien tech, considerably more advanced than the ON’s, and probably much more advanced than that of the Nyctus as well. After all, it seemed capable of what seemed to Thorn to be almost impossible feats. Detecting things outside a working Alcubierre bubble, and firing weapons powerful enough to destroy Nyctus ships up to corvette size in a single shot. And this capability was supported by sparse, simple systems, all of which could be operated by one man—

“Thorn, there you are,” Bertilak said, striding into the engineering compartment. “Have you had your fill of my ship yet?”

“Candidly? I’m astounded. Your tech goes in directions we haven’t considered.” He looked at Bertilak squarely. “I think we’d definitely be interested in making some sort of deal with you to get access to it—or at the very least, to learn.”

“All in good time, my friend,” Bertilak said. “In the meantime, we will soon be arriving at our first destination together. Would you come join me on the bridge?” He leaned and gave a conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t leave my AI running things for too long. I’m always afraid it will decide that it can do a better job than me and try to seize control.”

Thorn’s eyes widened a touch. “Really?”

“No, of course not.” Bertilak suddenly boomed with laughter. “The AI does what it’s told, nothing more.” He gestured. “Now, let’s go to the bridge and prepare to make planetfall. My entire existence isn’t just spent in deep space. I said I was a trader of sorts, and you shall see that part of my life up close and personal.”

Thorn followed the alien out of the engineering compartment. “Planetfall where?”

“Ah, well, that, my friend, is a surprise. And one I hope you’ll enjoy.”

19

Morgan decided to explore the city. It struck her she hadn’t done that yet. She had stayed close to the welcoming light of the Radiance and the sprawl of the city that she’d come to know so well. The Nyctus there all knew who she was and greeted her warmly, and the elder shaman was always nearby if she needed help or advice.

But she’d become so restless and wanted to see more. She told the elder shaman as much, trying hard to keep her voice from sounding petulant.

“I am concerned, child, about you traveling about on your own,” he replied. “The ocean spans all of the planet, except for at the poles and in a few places where the seafloor rises into mountains that soar above the ice on the surface. There are many hazards.”

“Like what? Monsters?”

The elder shaman flickered his amusement. “I’m not sure I would call them monsters, but there are some large predators in the more remote parts of the world-sea. But there are also undersea volcanoes, and earthquakes, and landslides—many things that could prove bad for a small girl.”

Morgan scowled. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”

The shaman flashed a somewhat strained patience. “Is there any point to me trying to dissuade you?”

“Dis—er, di-sade—”

“Dissuade. It means to convince you not to do this.”

“Oh. No. I’m definitely going.”

“Of course you are. Well, you must at least allow someone to accompany you.”

“How about you? Why don’t you come with me?”

“I am needed here.”

“Please?”

“Child—”

“Pleeeeease?”

The elder shaman finally conceded. “Very well. We shall depart in one cycle. I’ll arrange a shuttle car.”

Morgan gave an excited nod. A trip, with the elder shaman—she was nearly giddy with the prospect of it all, and it showed in her beaming smile.

* * *

“This is boring,” Morgan said, staring out the shuttle car’s transparent dome. “There’s nothing to see.”

“What did you expect, child? This is the Abyssal Plain. There’s nothing here but plains.”

Morgan sank back in her seat, crossed her arms, and gave the most dramatic sigh she could. The shuttle car made for far faster travel than simply trying to swim or float or drift, but it was still boring. In every direction, she saw nothing but a flat, endless expanse of silty sediment. Every once in a while, a rocky outcrop thrust out of it. Occasionally, there was wildlife—all manner of creatures, large and small. They scattered at the approach of the shuttle car, rendering only as half-suggested shapes and brief glimpses of sudden movement in the surrounding gloom.

She considered telling the elder shaman that she just wanted to turn around and go home. The only thing stopping her was the shaman’s promise that, if she could be patient, there was something very much worth seeing.

Morgan hoped so, because so far on this trip there’d been nothing worth seeing at all.

Her mind drifted.

She thought back to dreams she’d had while still on Nebo, before the sun fell apart and her father brought her back from wherever she’d gone. She’d dream of a ship, night after night. A complicated ship, all struts and girders and modules, apparently joined together in a dizzying jumble that made no sense to her. One thing stood out about this ship, though. There was a picture on it. It was a picture of a girl, and she was riding something that looked like a horse, but wasn’t—and Morgan knew that for sure, because she loved horses. This hadn’t been as sleek or powerful as a beautiful horse, but more awkward, even goofy-looking with its big ears. Underneath, there were the words Una’s Ass.

Morgan had asked Daddy what an ass was. He’d started to tell her it was another name for a butt, but she’d giggled and said, “no, like an animal.” Apparently, ass was another word for donkey. And a donkey was something like a small horse, but different.

She could see it so clearly, too, as though the clunky ship and the picture of Una’s Ass were right outside the shuttle car, pacing alongside it—

—but I saw something right before it all went dark. It was an answer. But I don’t remember what it was anymore. I don’t remember the question, either—

It’s what she’d said to the elder shaman not that long ago. That and—

I tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen.

She pursed her lips. She’d definitely tried to warn her father about something. But she wasn’t sure what. It was somehow connected to the question, and its answer, that she couldn’t remember. It was something important, too. That made it even more frustrating, which was a word and idea she knew.

It didn’t matter. She’d tried to warn him, and he hadn’t listened to her, and now he was out there, and she was here, with her friends—

Morgan sat up abruptly.

“What is it, child?” the elder shaman asked. “Are you unwell?”

“I—no. I just thought of something.”

“Do you wish to share it with me?”

Morgan shook her head emphatically. “Uh-uh. Not yet.”

“Very well. We will soon be at our destination, so you only need to be patient a little while longer.”

Morgan nodded, but her impatience was forgotten. Instead, she was suddenly excited.

Several things had just come together for her, like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place after a long time of staring at them. Shapes joined, memories merged, and somehow Morgan knew things that hadn’t been there a moment ago. An idea was complete. The edges fit.

Thorn Stellers, her father, had brought Morgan back from wherever she’d gone, when the sun had fallen in pieces from the sky on Nebo. To do that, he must have reached back and brought her forward from the past, when she’d still be alive, to when she wasn’t. And here she was.

And the picture of Una’s Ass bugged her. It wasn’t right. It shouldn’t be a dumb, awkward-looking donkey. It should be a beautiful horse.

She’d asked mommy and daddy about the ship with Una’s Ass on it, and they did some checking in the archives, whatever they were. They’d told her it was from a ship that had actually existed a long time ago, one called the Pool of Stars.

So what if she reached back into the past and brought the Pool of Stars from there, to here, and changed the picture from Una’s Ass to something better? Something like—

A slow grin spread across her face.

Something like Morgan’s Ride. And it could be a picture of Morgan riding a horse, instead of whoever Una was.

And if that worked, it meant she could reach back into the past and change other things, just like she’d said to the elder shaman. Like, instead of the Nyctus being so mad and so focused on fighting their war, she could make it so they were all her friends. Just like these ones on Tāmtu.

She smiled. That would be nice. No more war, so more killing and dying and awful things like that. Maybe she could change humans too, so they were also all her friends. Everyone could be friends with everyone else! Wouldn’t that just make everything better?

Of course, the elder shaman had tried to tell her she shouldn’t do it, that it was a bad idea, because she might kill her grandfather or something. But she’d taken care of that, and now she knew the elder shaman would go along with her idea.

Everyone friends, everything better—

Her smile dropped off her lips. What about her father? Could she be friends with him? Did she even want to?

Well, that would depend on what Bertilak told her about Thorn Stellers next, wouldn’t it?

“We’re here, child,” the elder shaman said, slowing the shuttle car. Morgan peered ahead but still saw nothing but the bistro plain, or whatever he had called it. The endless flat expanse of nothing. There were just more endless, flat kilometers of silty sand.

And then, there wasn’t.

“Oh. Oh!”

Morgan stared, not comprehending. Then she gasped. And then she shrank back from the view, even while trying to get a better one.

The world disappeared.

The featureless plain abruptly stopped at the base of a wall of rock, which led to more rocky ridges and cliffs that rose like steps, each hundreds of feet high. But it wasn’t that that had made her gasp and shrink back. The shuttle car powered through a notch in the rocky cliffs, which was leading them to nothing.

Literally, nothing. The world just disappeared. It ended. Ahead of them was nothing but water all around.

The shuttle car swept over the rocky lip of the last ridge. Morgan looked down and saw a vertical wall of rock plummeting into the abyss, vanishing into the gloom. There was nothing else.

“Oh.”

It was all she could say before she had to pull her gaze back from that endless plunge into darkness. Her stomach had suddenly twisted and tightened, and her head felt light as feathers.

“Are you alright, child?”

“What happened to the world?”

The shaman glittered with bright amusement. “The world is still there. The water just gets very, very deep here. What you see below is called a trench.”

“What’s a trench?”

“Well, Tāmtu may seem like a solid and unchanging place, but it’s actually a restless world. In some places, lava erupts onto the surface of the sea-floor, making new hills and mountains and adding land to the planet. But there’s only so much lava down there. It can’t keep erupting forever and making the planet ever bigger and bigger. In some places, then, old land is pulled back down into the planet’s interior, where it melts and becomes new lava. This is one of those places.”

Morgan stared down into the endless depths. Her head still tingled, and her stomach still twitched. But she was able to make herself keep looking, keep watching. Her eyes kept trying and failing to find something, anything to latch onto.

It was like looking into the sky, only doing it while looking down, instead of up.

“So old rock gets pulled down into this trench and becomes lava, and that becomes new rock—uh, land?”

“That’s right. It’s called plate tectonics, but you don’t need to worry about the complicated name. Think of it more as recycling.”

Morgan looked at the shaman, then back outside. Old rock becoming new rock. So Tāmtu was doing just what she’d been thinking about before they passed over the lip of the world. Rock from before—a long, long time before, she knew from other conversations she’d had with the Nyctus about how old Tāmtu was—was being made into new rock now.

The old was becoming the new.

“Does it go down forever?”

“No, child, of course not. There is a bottom to this trench. It is”—the shaman consulted the glowing instrument panel in front of him— “twelve kilometers, more or less, beneath us right now.”

Morgan just kept staring. She knew twelve kilometers was a long way, but she couldn’t really imagine it.

“You sure it doesn’t just keep going forever? Like, maybe into space?”

“Yes, I’m certain, child.”

“How come? Have you been down there?”

“No. No one has. The weight of the water above you would crush you long before you even reached the bottom. Even this shuttle car, which is designed to withstand a lot of pressure, would last one or two kilometers and then would simply be squashed.”

“Oh. And we’d be squashed, too?”

“Oh yes.”

Morgan once more stared into the depths.

“Now then, child, I think that’s enough for today.” The shuttle car started to turn around to go back the way it had come.

“Wait,” Morgan said. “I want to go down there.”

“I just told you, child, that we would never survive.”

“Sure we will. I’ll make sure.” She turned to look at the shaman. “Wouldn’t you like to be the first one to see what’s down there?”

“I—” the elder shaman began, then paused. He shuddered, and ruddy pulses of bioluminescence glared amid his otherwise placid teal glow.

Morgan narrowed her eyes. She wanted the shaman to take them down there. She’d protect them. But she might have to change the shaman again, make him even more cooperative—which might make him boring. She’d tried that with another Nyctus, making him into someone who always did as he was told, but she soon got tired of it. She wondered what had happened to him.

But only for a moment. She turned her attention back to the elder shaman, but the crimson flashes had faded.

“If you want to do this, child, you must find a way to prevent us from being crushed by the great pressure.”

“That’s easy,” Morgan said, then she gathered up handfuls of magic and used them to change the universe into one where this shuttle car couldn’t be wrecked by anything, ever. It was a whole new truth, but it was the truth that Morgan wanted. Her short fingers waggled in satisfaction, and it was done.

She slumped back in the seat. Changing the universe made her tired. Still, she smiled at the elder shaman. “Okay, we can go down there now.”

“Of course we can, child. There is nothing that can harm this shuttle car.” His tone, although gentle, was a little chiding, as though this was just something obvious, something that had always been true.

* * *

“Huh. It’s just dirt!” Morgan said, glaring at the seafloor.

It had taken a while, but they’d finally fallen all of the way to the bottom of the trench. Morgan wasn’t sure what she expected to see, but she expected to see something. This was just more flat plain, like the enormous one sprawling above them. If anything, it was even more featureless, even more boring. At least above, there were bits of life here and there—coral reefs, creatures of different types, some big, weedy plants. Down here, there was nothing at all.

Even the water didn’t look any different.

“I thought you said the water down here would be so heavy it would crush anything,” Morgan said.

“I did. And it is. If we weren’t in this shuttle car, I can assure you, we wouldn’t last more than an instant. We’d be squashed into little blobs.”

“I wonder what that would be like.”

“I’d rather not find out, thank you.”

Morgan laughed, a silvery sound. “Yeah. I don’t want to do that, either.” She looked around at the featureless sand illuminated in the soft glow of the shuttle car’s lights, then sighed. “Well, this is boring again. Let’s just go home.”

A glittering light caught her attention, pulling it back into the surrounding gloom.

“What’s that?”

Something swam into view. Something massive.

Something horrifying.

A fat, round body, like a massive worm. A rounded, gaping maw filled with row upon row of jagged teeth. No eyes, just lights, a series of them surrounding that maw, gleaming softly.

That maw alone had to be half the size of the shuttle car.

Morgan whimpered. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know, child,” the elder shaman said. “There are many secrets here in the great depths. This is one of them.”

Morgan braced herself, expecting the creature to attack, to begin gnawing on the shuttle car. She scooped up magical power, ready to make it stop—

But the creature veered at the last second and swept past overhead. It seemed to go on and on. Morgan could only see it because of the shuttle car’s lights. Aside from the glowing spots around its mouth, the big worm-thing was just a featureless black. That seemed so deliberate, like there was a specific reason for it. She asked the elder shaman about it.

“There is no light at this depth,” the shaman replied. “There’s never any light here, in fact. So creatures are attracted to light when they see it. That’s likely why that creature came to investigate us, because we have our lights on.”

“Okay,” Morgan replied, narrowing her eyes. The elder shaman was saying it as though it should answer her question. But she didn’t get it.

The elder shaman flickered his indulgence. “Think about that, child. Creatures are drawn toward light. They don’t see that monster’s black body, but they do see the lights around his mouth, so they move toward it.”

“Oh. Oh, I get it. They get eaten.”

“That’s right. It’s a lure.”

“A lure?”

“Yes. A way of drawing someone or something in close, to a place where you want them to be.”

Morgan nodded but said nothing else. The elder shaman started the shuttle car back up the long climb to friendlier depths. That was fine. Morgan had seen enough today.

Besides, the idea of a lure intrigued her. It could bring someone close to where you wanted them to be.

She could use that.

20

The High Shaman glinted his satisfaction. The report was succinct, and clear, and most importantly, said exactly what he wanted it to say.

“Our operatives among the humans have done excellent work,” he said. “When they are no longer useful to us, please ensure they’re terminated as quickly and painlessly as possible. They’ve earned it.”

The High Shaman’s Deputy Chief Advisor flickered agreement. “I agree. It’s the least we can do for them. Now, what about the substance of their report? It’s quite shocking, isn’t it?”

The High Shaman glanced at the Deputy Chief Advisor. The title was a meaningless one. He was actually the High Shaman’s Spymaster. The High Shaman had learned long ago that the key to taking and retaining power wasn’t strength, or power, or even resources. It was information. Accurate information allowed for the exploitation and defeat of stronger opponents, with smaller amounts of pressure applied at decisive points in time and space. It allowed for a slow but steady accumulation of influence. The result was that the High Shaman could count on the support of the Caucus when he needed it. After all, if certain Delegates didn’t fall into line, then unfortunate things about them might become known.

The High Shaman flashed agreement. “Shocking is an understatement. We already knew that Stellers and the girl, Morgan, were linked somehow. But father and daughter? Do we know this for certain?”

“With reasonable confidence, yes,” the Spymaster replied. “Morgan has the power to have changed our people on Tāmtu into something they aren’t, and have never been before, but she’s otherwise naïve in the way of all immature beings. She hasn’t thought, or simply isn’t aware, that we’re able to Scry into the minds of our people even if we can’t gain entry to her thoughts. And that has revealed much.”

“And the girl hasn’t discerned that we’ve landed a ship on Tāmtu? Are we certain of that?”

“The leader of the expedition insists that the Shading effect on the ship was never breached. The girl never even attempted to. Again, in the way of the immature, she apparently tends to only focus on those things that she finds interesting and ignores everything else.”

As the Spymaster spoke, the High Shaman swept his attention around the meeting chamber, his sanctum. He’d erected a powerful ward around it to prevent anyone from prying either acoustically or by Scrying. But the Spymaster’s mention of his operatives being able to surreptitiously peek into the minds of their corrupted brethren on Tāmtu prompted him to make sure.

He turned his attention back to the Spymaster. “But you don’t know that she’s unaware, and this may simply be misinformation.”

The Spymaster scintillated with amusement. “I must remember this, should I ever become High Shaman.”

The High Shaman flared with dangerous radiance. “Remember what?”

“That being forever immersed in plots and schemes risks exposure to a hefty dose of paranoia.”

“You believe I’m paranoid?”

“I mean it in the most respectful way.”

“I’m sure you do,” the High Shaman said. “In any case, need I remind you that there have been fourteen attempts on my life since I assumed office? Fourteen times, someone has deliberately tried to kill me to open the way to this office for themselves or some patron. Fourteen attempted assassinations tend to make one cautious. If you prefer to call it paranoia, well, do that. I don’t care.”

“You make a compelling argument, High Shaman. After all, when everyone really is out to get you, paranoia is merely smart thinking.”

The High Shaman gave the Spymaster a suspicious look. “I am reminded that four of those attempts remain unsolved. And, just a moment ago, you alluded to you becoming High Shaman. Are these things related?”

“Of course not. If I had wished you dead, then you would be dead.”

The High Shaman flashed a mix of surprise and concern. “Is that meant to be comforting?”

“No. It’s simply the truth. Fortunately, I have no interest in the office of High Shaman. I am quite content to be the power behind the office.”

“Is that what you are?”

“Of course.”

A moment of tension hung between them, then the High Shaman relented. “You’re right. If anyone could successfully kill me, it would probably be you.” He pulsed with suspicion. “Although, you are a liar by nature. Why should I believe that you have no interest in my office?”

“Because everyone’s always trying to kill you. That is not my idea of a happy or fulfilling life.”

The High Shaman hung silent for a moment, then burst into flashes and sparkles of humor, what amounted to uproarious laughter among his kind.

“You are refreshing to deal with, Spymaster. For an inveterate liar, you can be remarkably honest.”

His good humor faded, though, as he turned back to the report, glowing in a softly illuminated globe hovering over the table. “And now, we come back to this. I will put my paranoia aside and accept that it’s true, at least for the moment. So it is good information. The question is, what do we do with it?”

“Clearly, Stellers and Morgan represent the most powerful of all human shamans, and quite likely the most powerful anywhere,” the Spymaster said. “They have transcended the normal limits of magic acumen.”

“I think that’s safe to say. He moves entire fleets and recreates destroyed planets. She makes stars and nebulae, and changes the fundamental nature of an entire planet of our people. Having said that, she would appear to be the more powerful of the two.”

“I agree.”

“And then there is this,” the High Shaman said, touching a block of text with a tentacle, highlighting it. “This being Bertilak? She has apparently created him and dispatched him to find her father, Stellers. Why?”

“We aren’t as certain about this. Very few of our corrupted people on Tāmtu even know about this. It took a great deal of Scrying to learn this much.” The Spymaster drifted closer to the table. “I have a theory, though.”

“Go on.”

“It would seem there was some sort of conflict between the girl and Stellers. We don’t know the nature of it, but it seems to have been a major and traumatic event in the girl’s life. We speculate that she created Bertilak as a way of spying on her father—or perhaps even of punishing him.”

“Now that is an interesting theory,” the High Shaman said, flickering thoughtfully. “If there is some sort of schism between the girl and her father, it gives us something to exploit.”

“Exactly.”

“However,” the High Shaman went on, “there is another possibility.”

“Oh?”

The High Shaman highlighted another section of text. “Here. This section suggests that the girl indeed had some sort of clash with her father and fled, then took refuge on Tāmtu, for some reason that we just can’t discern. Whether she selected Tāmtu deliberately or simply stumbled upon it, we don’t know.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might,” the High Shaman replied. “But at the moment, it doesn’t. What does is the fact that the girl seems to be considerably more powerful than her father. And yet, she is hiding from him. And then she sends a constructed being, this Bertilak, to interact with him. So she may be spying, or she may intend to punish him—but she also might be seeking to test him.”

“Test him?” the Spymaster asked. “Why?”

“She is his daughter. Conflict has driven them apart. It stands to reason that she would want to heal the rift between them. So she remains in hiding and sends this created being out to spy on and test her father. The ultimate goal may be to repair her relationship with him.”

“That would be a problem,” the Spymaster said.

“The two of them reconciling and potentially joining forces? It would be catastrophic. We must not allow that to happen. Indeed, we must seize the opportunity to widen the rift between them and try to turn the girl to our side.”

“That’s going to be difficult.”

“It will,” the High Shaman agreed. “But difficult is not impossible.” He flickered in thought for a moment. “We must maintain close watch on the girl. When the opportunity finally presents itself, we will have a limited period of time in which to act.”

“And what opportunity would that be?”

“I have no idea. That’s why we must maintain a close watch. Your team on Tāmtu must remain undetected. It’s absolutely essential.”

“I understand. I will ensure that they do as well,” the Spymaster replied. “In the meantime, there is one other matter I must bring to your attention.”

The High Shaman waited.

The Spymaster called up another report. “This is from our operative among the Danzur. Apparently, our efforts to stymie the human attempt to enter into an alliance or treaty with them have borne much fruit. They are barely a cycle away from having their diplomatic credentials revoked.”

“No,” the High Shaman said.

The Spymaster flashed his confusion. “No?”

“No. If the human diplomatic mission is brought too precipitously to an end, that will free the human woman named Wixcombe to do other things. And, as we’ve discovered, she is almost as big a problem as Stellers and his daughter.”

The High Shaman thought back to the reports he’d received while Wixcombe had been their captive. She had proven utterly immune to Scrying or any other sort of mental influence or control. The High Shaman himself had traveled to her place of imprisonment and probed her mind. He’d found it to be encased in an implacable barrier, one through which even his formidable power couldn’t pass.

“If she remains among the Danzur, pursuing diplomacy, she is removed from involvement in other matters. And she represents an unpredictable, chaotic factor. We don’t truly understand her powers, nor how she escaped our most secure facility. So I would rather she remain where she is—making futile attempts to gain the confidence of the Danzur.”

“So what would you have us do?”

The High Shaman considered the report. “We will offer the Danzur full compensation for their lost trade. Tell them . . . tell them that we don’t wish to see them get pulled into this war, that we only have their best interests in mind, something like that. However we manage it, I want the Danzur to remain out of the war. I also want them to keep Wixcombe busy.”

“I gather you don’t believe the humans would hand over Stellers to placate the Danzur, then,” the Spymaster said.

“Do you?”

“Oh, no. It was a clever bit of turmoil to introduce into their discussions with the Danzur, though. And who knows, perhaps they would have fallen for it.”

“I suspect that Stellers may have objected—and he certainly has the means of doing so.”

“Turn him against his own, beloved Orbital Navy? That would be quite the achievement.”

The High Shaman didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he just gleamed his distraction as he thought about that. He’d never taken the idea of the humans handing over Stellers seriously, so he’d never even considered the idea of turning him against his own people. Could they?

A germ of an idea flickered into existence.

“That would be quite the achievement, yes,” the High Shaman said. “Yes, it would indeed.”

21

Kira couldn’t believe how much she’d missed these quarters. The new, shitty ones she’d been assigned had always been either too hot or too cold. On top of being too cramped. And too noisy with the hiss and swish of fluids and gases flowing through pipes and conduits that seemed to snake along behind every bulkhead. Too uncomfortable for it to be accidental. It was as though they were specifically designed to be as discomfiting as possible—which they probably were. After all, if you were going to try to leverage some advantage during negotiations, what better way than to make sure your opposition was tired and cranky?

She got it. On the battlefield of diplomacy, coarse sheets and noisy claustrophobic compartments were weapons. After all, it would be rude to decline the hospitality of your hosts. That was why Kira had resolved to actually live in the quarters to which the Danzur had downgraded her, instead of staying aboard the Venture in much more comfort.

So what had changed? Why had the Danzur suddenly and without explanation moved her back to her original, much more pleasant quarters?

For a moment, she didn’t care. She dropped her small amount of baggage on the bed—which now by itself seemed as large as the crappy quarters she’d just vacated—and luxuriated in the palatial surroundings.

Her indulgent enjoyment only lasted a moment, though, until the question reasserted itself. What had changed? Why had the Danzur relented?

For that matter, did this mean negotiations were back on, or were they still on a deadline for having their diplomatic credentials revoked in—she checked the time—less than twelve hours?

She needed to talk to Damien.

The door chime sounded, and she answered.

“Well, speak of the devil,” Kira said, as Damien stepped into the compartment. “I was just thinking about you.”

He smiled. “I’m flattered, Kira. Is this the start of something beautiful?”

“Kind of full of yourself, aren’t you?,” she said, grinning back at him as she flopped into a chair as soft as a cloud. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.” She closed her eyes and stretched out.

“A diplomat, full of himself? Say it ain’t so,” Damien said, and Kira laughed. He sat down across from her. “What have you heard?”

She opened an eye. “Nothing. All I know is that there I was either sweating or freezing, I don’t remember which—all the discomfort kind of blurs together. Then a Danzur showed up, all obsequious-like, and told me I was moving back in here.” She glared. “Oh, thanks for that sojourn in accommodation hell, by the way.”

“This is technically an ON mission and you’re the head of it. It would have been rude not to use the quarters you’re offered. It’s essentially saying ‘oh, by the way, you’re terrible hosts’ and that their hospitality sucks.”

“But they do suck, and they are terrible hosts.”

“You do realize we’re probably being bugged?”

Kira sat up, then looked at the ceiling and raised her voice. “Good! I’ve had more than my fill of bullshit diplomatic head games anyway.”

Damien smirked. “Well, that should help our cause.”

“Do we even still have a cause, though?” Kira asked.

“Well, here you are,” Damien replied, gesturing around. “You’re back in the nice diplomatic digs. There must be a reason for that.”

Kira sat back again. “Yeah, well, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just some bureaucratic foul up. You can’t have as much officious crap going on as the Danzur do without some of it occasionally screwing up.”

Damien’s lip twisted a notch. “Sure, why not? Let’s insult their institutions on top of it.”

Kira waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think it matters. I think the Danzur have made it very clear that they’re not actually interested in—”

The door chimed again. Kira exchanged a look with Damien, then stood and answered it.

It was Tadrup.

Kira started to assemble something suitably diplomatic to say, but she suddenly thought to hell with it. “Hello, Tadrup. Come to throw me back out of these quarters and into something else? Maybe a bed stuck in an airlock this time?”

She could hear Damien wince behind her. Again, she didn’t care. Either the mission was a failure and they’d be boarding the Venture to get clear of Danzur space before the deadline of losing their credentials, or they wouldn’t. Short of unleashing a tirade of bitter vitriol on Tadrup, or actually trying to insult him—two things she wasn’t far off doing—she couldn’t imagine that the situation could really get much worse.

Tadrup laughed.

“My most profuse apologies,” Tadrup said. “I’m afraid we acted precipitously. May I come in?”

Kira stepped aside and gestured the Danzur in. Damien greeted him, then shot Kira a look as Tadrup took a seat.

She returned an ambiguous smile. “So, Tadrup, you say you acted precipitously. What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that we based our actions on old information. Since then, new information has come to light.”

“About what?”

“About this entire situation. We regret our rashness. Therefore, I would like to formally apologize to you.”

Kira narrowed her eyes. So this wasn’t just a screw-up. The Danzur had suddenly swung from hostile, back to friendly, and now they were apparently interested in continuing negotiations.

“And we are happy to accept your apology, Tadrup,” Damien said, then stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some things to attend to in preparation for our departure.”

“You’re leaving us?” Tadrup asked.

Kira rolled her eyes.

Damien just gave a nod. “Well, of course. Our diplomatic credentials are to be revoked in a few hours so we want to be clear of your space by then. We believe that the integrity of sovereign territory is very important.”

Kira hid a smile. Damien was good, she had to admit. In one sentence, he’d managed to both show respect for the Danzur and admonish them for seizing the two Allied Stars planets. He’d also effectively objected to the loss of their credentials and generally shabby treatment as a bonus.

Tadrup clearly got it, too. “We could not agree more. Which is why I am pleased to inform you that, once more, because of incomplete information, you were done an injustice. We no longer have an intention of revoking your diplomatic status, and we are pleased to invite you to remain in Danzur space as our honored guests.”

Kira could have waited for Damien to offer a suitably diplomatic reply, but impatience over the whole ridiculous diplomatic dance made her speak up. Being tired and grouchy blunted her interest in subtlety and finesse.

“I don’t think so, Tadrup,” she said. “I think you made your position pretty clear regarding our relations with you. I think we’ll just be on our way, taking the news of your rejection of our good faith offers back with us.”

“No, please. As I said, new information has come to light that makes it clear our previous stance was incorrect. I did apologize.”

Kira glanced at Damien, who’d just sat back down, apparently content to see where Kira was taking this. She caught a glimmer of worry from him that she might yet screw this up, but once more, she simply didn’t care.

“And an apology is a big deal in diplomatic circles, I know,” she replied. “But let’s be clear on something here, Tadrup. If we are going to restart our negotiations, then we need an assurance that you’re not going to suddenly reverse course on us again and demand that we leave your space—oh, and no, I will not move back into those awful quarters you apparently repurposed out of a greasy machinery locker.”

Tadrup tilted his head. “I am prepared to agree in principle, of course, but we must retain the discretion to protect our interests.”

“Fine,” Kira said, activating her comm. “Wixcombe to Venture. Prepare to get underway. We’ll be leaving within the hour.”

“No!” Tadrup’s voice was filled with genuine alarm, a true error in diplomatic practices.

Kira stopped. “Venture, stand by.”

“Standing by.”

“It is not necessary for you to leave, Kira. We will stipulate to maintaining a positive negotiating environment with you.”

“I’m curious, Tadrup,” Damien said. “What changed? What new information did you come into?”

While Damien talked, Kira brushed her awareness against Tadrup’s. She didn’t want to probe too far, but she could readily sense his surface thoughts. They revolved around Kira not leaving, and negotiations not ceasing.

Tadrup fired up his bureaucratic double-speak. “The new information is related to matters that had originally prompted us to seek to break off negotiations, but which, when combined with new information—”

“You called us a pox, Tadrup,” Kira said. “You said you were going to ally with the squids to—how did you put it? To take up arms against us?”

“Kira, I—”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s time for the diplomatic, bureaucratic bullshit to take a break. I’m a soldier, so I’m used to speaking like a soldier.” She really was fed up and didn’t care if she insulted Tadrup, or anyone else, in the process of venting about it. “And this soldier has this to say—you threatened us with war, implied an imminent threat if we didn’t leave your space according to a deadline you arbitrarily set—oh, and you stuck me in that miserable little closet that you laughingly call quarters.”

Damien gave a thin smile. “Not how I would have put it, Tadrup, but you have to admit, Kira’s right. You’re asking us to overlook some egregious issues.” Tadrup opened his mouth, but Damien held up a hand. “Having said all of that, though, we aren’t opposed to reopening negotiations. But only, as Kira says, if they’re going to be conducted in good faith.”

“Which means,” Kira said, “no more of the officious crap, the requests and forms and applications.”

“But it’s how we do things,” Tadrup protested. “To just set it all aside—”

“You don’t have to set it all aside,” Damien put in. “We’re prepared to conform to your systems, your way of doing things, but only as long as you’re prepared to accommodate us more than you have been.”

Tadrup nodded. “That’s agreeable, of course.”

Kira had turned to look out the big viewport. A Danzur ship was passing slowly by, thrusters puffing, apparently about to dock somewhere further along the platform. She ignored it, though, and kept her focus on Tadrup.

He wasn’t happy about this. He’d been instructed to be accommodating, to mend relations with the humans, and wasn’t pleased by it. He was just following orders—but those orders had obviously been a pretty abrupt and comprehensive reversal of the hardline position they’d previously taken.

A stance Tadrup himself had enthusiastically endorsed.

Kira turned. “Tadrup, what have you got against us?”

The Danzur stared. “What? Why, I’ve got nothing against you.”

“Bullshit,” Kira snapped. “I can tell you don’t like us. It’s written all over your face. Why?”

Kira felt Damien tense but ignored it and kept her full attention on Tadrup. She was a little embarrassed by how much pleasure she took in seeing the Danzur diplomat actually starting to squirm.

She could see him sorting through possible replies. Kira just waited.

Tadrup finally gave up and spoke plainly. “I had extensive commercial investments in our trade with the Nyctus. When your Orbital Navy destroyed their planet, I lost everything.” He drew himself up. “So, yes, I admit it. That definitely doesn’t make me favorably disposed to you.”

“Why would your government assign someone with such an obvious—and, I’ll grant you, understandable—bias against us to negotiate?” Damien asked. “And why did you agree to it?”

“I don’t pretend to relish this task, conducting these negotiations,” Tadrup said. “But it was assigned to me, and it is therefore my duty to carry it out. As a soldier, Kira, I’m sure you understand that.”

She nodded. “I do. And thank you for being honest—finally.” She nodded again. “I get it. We’re given things to do that we don’t particularly want to do. But then we do them to the best of our ability, and in good faith—don’t we, Tadrup?”

He nodded. “Yes, we do.”

“So why the change of heart? What is the new information you received?” Damien asked.

“And what about the reparations you were so determined to have us pay to you?” Kira added.

“Reparations have been made,” Tadrup replied. “Generous reparations, at that.”

Damien smiled. “In other words, your losses were made good. You got your money back.”

“In essence, yes.”

Kira was frowning, though. “Generous reparations were made? When? By whom?”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” Tadrup replied, then held up both paws. “And before you react badly to that, I hasten to add that that’s not some arbitrary position or bureaucratic—what was the word you used, Kira? Bullshit?”

Kira almost smiled at that. The word sounded strange coming from the Danzur, even through the translator. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though. It was likely every race had the concept of bullshit in their culture and language. It was, Kira thought, pretty much inevitable that any species that became sentient probably developed the idea of bullshit pretty early on.

But she didn’t smile because Tadrup’s words had some disturbing implications. If the Allied Stars had made reparations, then how? And when? And why wouldn’t they involve or even inform their own diplomatic mission here? One glance at Damien showed that he was obviously wondering the same thing.

But who else could have made reparations on the Allied Stars’ behalf?

“Well, this is all very positive news, Tadrup,” Damien said, standing. “Kira and I have some things to discuss, now that we’re talking to you again, and—”

“Yes, of course,” Tadrup replied, also standing. “I will make arrangements to get our meeting schedule reactivated and brought up-to-date. Until then . . .”

Tadrup turned for the door.

“Tadrup, wait,” Kira said. She caught a sharp, warning glance from Damien out of the corner of her eye, but there was something she wanted to try.

The Danzur turned back. His attitude was genuinely tense. Despite having had his losses apparently made good, Tadrup obviously still wasn’t happy about these events. She needed to try probing his thoughts more deeply, but not right now. She was still pretty pissed off herself and couldn’t be sure that none of that would leak across a Joining and alert the Danzur.

“You want to show us that you’re going to deal in good faith, right?” Kira asked.

Tadrup nodded. “Of course.”

“And you’re saying that full—I think you even said generous—reparations have been made, correct?”

Suspicion crept into Tadrup’s manner, but he nodded again. “Yes. All is forgiven.”

“I’m so glad. However, I think a true demonstration of good faith is in order.”

“What would you suggest?” Tadrup asked, his wariness even more acute.

“Relinquish your claim to the two planets you seized from us,” Kira replied flatly. “Renounce whatever designs you might have had on them and formally recognize them as Allied Stars territory.”

Damien stiffened. Kira knew this was a blunt way of approaching diplomacy, insofar as she wasn’t really being diplomatic at all. Once more, she didn’t give a shit. But there was more to it than that. She wanted to see what Tadrup’s reaction would be.

“I—” Tadrup began, then he stopped and shook his head. “It’s not my place to commit to such a thing. I will, however—”

“Raise the matter immediately with your Central Council in order to get this particular bit of unpleasantness resolved?” Damien said, jumping aboard Kira’s train of thought.

“After all,” Kira added, “you’ve had generous reparations made so you no longer have a reason to keep up your incursion into our space, right?”

“I will bring the matter to the attention of my superiors immediately upon leaving here,” Tadrup said, doing everything short of actually sighing out loud in frustration. “I will have an answer for you.”

“Within twelve hours?” Kira said. “That would be wonderful, thanks.”

Tadrup’s bland stare, the all-purpose expression of a diplomat, slipped for a moment. Kira saw anger, bordering on outrage, but it vanished like a light flicked off. “I will do my best to have an answer for you shortly.”

Kira was tempted to push, to see if she could provoke Tadrup into saying something he didn’t intend or otherwise reveal something useful, but Damien cut her off.

“Thank you, Tadrup. We look forward to resuming our negotiations with you very soon.”

Tadrup nodded and left.

When he was gone, Damien looked at Kira. “Well, I have to return to the Venture. Would you care to join me?”

She nodded. “Right behind you.”

* * *

“I am just not cut out for this diplomacy stuff,” Kira said, dropping into a seat aboard the Venture and stretching out her legs. “I definitely prefer looking at my enemies through a gunsight, not across a meeting table.”

“Um, not so fast, Kira,” Damien said. “I wouldn’t write off your skills as a diplomat too quickly.”

“You’re kidding, right? I was anything but diplomatic with Tadrup.”

“Believe it or not, diplomacy isn’t just endless compromises and insincerely flattering words. Sometimes, you have to be firm. And you were definitely firm.”

Kira leaned her head back and sighed heavily. “Let me put it this way. I don’t like this diplomatic stuff. It’s just not how my mind works. I’ve been taught to solve problems as tactical challenges—maneuver, firepower, countermeasures, that sort of thing. This verbal sparring just wears me down.”

“Well, I’ve got one observation,” Damien replied. “If you plan to advance in the ON and become a Commander, or even a Captain or an Admiral, then diplomacy is going to be a big part of what you’re going to have to do to be successful. Hell, I spend at least half of my diplomatic effort to balance agendas and schemes, interests, and motivations . . . all inside the Allied Stars bureaucracy. The ON isn’t going to be any different. However—and I say this slowly, so you grasp the importance—you have a natural grasp of the value that contrast can bring to the negotiating table.”

“Lieutenant for life doesn’t sound half bad, and I was always good at playing good officer, bad officer.”

“You’ll get a way better pension as an Admiral, though.”

Kira smiled. “Admiral Wixcombe. Yeah, right. Anyway, what do you think is going on?”

“With Tadrup, or the Danzur generally?”

“Both, I guess.”

Damien stretched out his legs. “I don’t know. I’ve got no idea what sort of reparations were paid.”

“So there are no other channels open between the Allied Stars and Danzur? Things going on in the background we don’t know about?”

“If we don’t know about them, then how could I say?”

Kira hissed in frustration. “Fair point, but you know what I mean.”

Damien nodded. “I’m sure not aware of any back channels between us and the Danzur. More to point, it would be unheard of. Running some sort of back channel with a party, while having a formal diplomatic mission deployed to deal with that party, but keeping your own mission in the dark? It makes no sense to do that, because how do you stop everyone from working at cross purposes?”

“So what the hell kind of reparations were made?”

“I’ll get a diplomatic signal cranked up to send back home. It’s going to take a while to get an answer, of course.”

Kira nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll do some signal cranking of my own.”

* * *

Kira allowed herself the indulgence of sprawling across the voluminous bed in her quarters. She luxuriated in the vast expanse of fine, smooth fabric—something like silk, but thicker and more supple. It was decadent, something she’s rarely experienced since joining the ranks of a navy engaged in a life-or-death struggle of galactic proportions.

It was also three times the size of her rack aboard the Venture. Okay, so maybe there were some perks to these diplomatic missions.

Still not enough to offset the aggravation, though.

Kira closed her eyes, breathing in and out slowly. Having the Danzur spy on her doing this was of little concern. From their perspective, she’d merely be silent and still, apparently taking a nap. Of course, there were other implications to being surveilled that actually did bother her—there was a reason she still changed and showered aboard the Venture. She doubted the Danzur would have much interest in the human body, but she really didn’t want to find out that she was wrong about that the hard way, and her natural shyness—a product of the collective home—lingered like an old habit.

When she’d fully settled into her center, she threw her awareness into deep space. She rode a wave of her magic like an expanding shockwave, the bow shape growing wider with each passing second. Fortunately, she knew she could concentrate most of her attention across a limited arc. It was unlikely that Thorn would be anywhere but back in the direction of Allied Stars space and the Zone.

Thorn?

It was just a shout into the ether. Thorn would hear it and reply. That would snap the link closed between them. As far as she’d been able to tell, no other Starcasters, nor anyone else sensitive to magic, would be able to overhear it. Her intent was only to speak to Thorn, and it seemed that magic honored that intent.

Except he didn’t. She got no response at all.

Thorn, are you there?

Silence.

Thorn, somehow the Allied Stars or the ON made reparations to the Danzur, but we don’t know anything more. Do you? Can you find out?

Nothing.

Kira frowned. He wasn’t ignoring her. She’d become attuned enough to Thorn’s presence in the ether that she could tell if he was out there, somewhere, and simply choosing to ignore her. Of course, it might be for good reason, if he was enmeshed in something complex or dangerous. But this was different. There simply wasn’t any sense of him even existing—

Thorn?

She sat bolt upright, inadvertently breaking her concentration and abruptly ending her attempted Joining.

Not even a hint of Thorn, not anywhere in the ether. She couldn’t find a trace of the most powerful Starcaster she knew. That meant that either someone or something out there was powerful enough to block access to him—

Or Thorn Stellers was dead.

22

Thorn groaned.

“I wish I was dead.”

He sat up, gingerly lowered his feet to the floor, and took his head in his hands. He then took a moment for self-examination. He wore a tunic and shirt, underwear, and, for some reason, a boot and sock on one foot, the other being bare.

He continued his personal assessment. His body ached in every joint, a shrill whine filled his ears with a piercing white noise, and his head—

Oh, yes. His head.

Someone had replaced his brain with a throbbing brick of agony. He could feel it pounding behind his eyes, like an irritating harmonic from a fusion reactor in need of tuning. Pain—less pain—more pain—less pain—more pain—

He heard someone moan. It was him.

He felt a metallic rush as the door slid open.

“Thorn, my friend, how are you?”

Thorn shrank back from Bertilak’s booming voice. “Please, Bertilak, keep it down to a dull roar, okay?”

The alien laughed but at least tried to restrain himself, with only modest success. He saw Bertilak’s enormous green feet cross to a chair and heard him sit down—but he didn’t look up, because that would involve moving his head, and that was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

“I’m sorry, Thorn, but you can’t carry on the way you did last night and not pay the price for it.”

Thorn levered his head up so he could look at Bertilak. “As I recall, you were carrying on just as much as I was.”

“Ah, but I’m used to it, and in terms of mass, I am both heavier and denser than you. A fact that carries some weight when it comes to revelry, if you’ll pardon my pun.”

Thorn lowered his head again, ignoring Bertilak’s irritating use of humor, and his breathing, and even the presence of his enormous green feet, which were close enough for Thorn to see without moving at all. He could well believe Bertilak’s assessment. Everyone at this strange, lonely outpost seemed to know Bertilak. Even in the bar, all he had to do was order the usual, a feat that Thorn considered to be the result of many trips to the same watering hole, to quote an old commander at Code Nebula.

Fringe was, Thorn had to admit, a remarkable place. Located just outside Allied Stars space, but still well away from the demilitarized zone, Fringe answered to no one.

And that was the point. No one even seemed sure who’d first established the place—a waystation for smugglers, a refuge for those on the lam, and a generally freewheeling, rambunctious place where the rules were simple: you pay your debts, you don’t rat on anyone, and you never, ever ask anyone about their past.

And all of it happened aboard an orbital platform, in the sense that it was platform-like and it orbited the relatively benign moon of one of the most violent gas giants Thorn had ever seen. But the similarity with other orbital platforms Thorn knew about, like the one serving Code Gauntlet, ended there. Someone had dropped the hull of an old bulk carrier into orbit, stripped out the drives, kept the powerplant running, and turned it into a makeshift space station. Someone else had come along with a smaller derelict ship and strapped it to the bulk carrier, then someone else had done the same. Eventually, the place known as Fringe came into being, a shabby mishmash of ships, hulls, and cargo pods, all bolted together into a single, sprawling thing. There was no better word for it, Thorn thought. Fringe was definitely a thing.

It also reminded him of other places he’d been, although in bits and pieces, not as a whole. The bar where he and Bertilak had done most of their carousing, for instance, was strongly reminiscent of a place on Seagram’s Planet where he’d once taken leave.

Which raised another question. How did the ON not know about this place? Or, maybe they did and just kept it under wraps. For that matter, given the sorts of trade that went on here, everything from pale grey markets, to the blackest of black ones, maybe the ON did know about it and just let it do its thing. Before he joined, Thorn had been around enough shady types and places to know the score. Places like Fringe had some advantages, not the least of which was tending to congregate all the rogues, rascals, and reprobates in one place. It made it easier to keep any eye on them.

Bertilak’s feet reappeared in Thorn’s field of view, which was still pretty much stuck on a spot between his own. “Thorn, I know you feel unwell.”

“Oh, I passed unwell a few light years back. I’m well into shitty, believe me.” He dragged his gaze upward again. “I’m no lightweight. What the hell was I drinking?”

Bertilak laughed, making Thorn wince. “What weren’t you drinking? You were the life of the party—the life of the life of the party, even. Color me as surprised as anyone to find that you could sing,” Bertilak said, holding out a cup.

“Color me your color. Because that’s how I feel.”

“Drink, friend. It’s a remedy, and it will help you immediately. It’s tailored to your blood chemistry, and—”

“Shh. I’ll drink it, if only to keep you from talking,” Thorn said. He took the cup, sniffed, made a face, then drank it—and felt his lips begin to rise in alarm. “Was that hair of the dog? Smelled like the muck on Murgon-4, but with the added stench of death.”

Bertilak shrugged. “Maybe they’re the same thing.”

Thorn grimaced. He didn’t really think Bertilak would try to get him to drink hydrocarbon sludge, but the alien was still something of an unknown.

“I haven’t yet steered you wrong, Thorn. Trust me on this.”

Thorn sighed again and finished the mug, his throat working mechanically as the thick, noxious goo began to go to work. He’d tried many hangover cures before, only a few with even mild success, so he expected this one to be no different. Still, get hungover enough, and you’d do anything to—

Thorn’s eyes widened. A soft warmth radiated from his stomach, rolling through his guts, his chest, then into his limbs, and finally his head. As it filled him, it completely washed away all traces of the night before.

Thorn looked up at Bertilak. “Holy shit.”

The alien grinned. “What did I tell you?”

Thorn stood. No aches, no pounding head, no wonky stomach. His mouth no longer tasted like an ashtray.

“I’ll say it again. Holy shit. Bertilak, why haven’t you put that on the market? You’d make a fortune!”

“If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to appear as a miracle worker in moments like this, now would I?”

Thorn chuckled. “I guess.” He looked at the dregs clinging to the inside of the mug. “Still, you’re sitting on a mountain of wealth here, my friend.”

“I thought you were more interested in my tech, my sensors and weapons and the like.”

“Who the hell needs those when you’ve got this?”

“Well, since you seem to be back on your feet, why don’t you get dressed? We’ve got work to do here at Fringe.”

“What sort of work?” Thorn asked, putting the mug down and reaching for his trousers. “For that matter, why are we here, Bertilak? You were pretty determined to be all coy about it last night.”

“I still am. However, once you get dressed and have had some breakfast, all your questions will be answered.”

Bertilak left. Thorn watched him go, then finished dressing.

Breakfast. Now there was something he’d assumed he’d just skip this morning, because nothing he’d have eaten would’ve stayed down for long. Now, though, he was ravenous.

He glanced at the mug as he strapped up his boots. An instant, almost perfect hangover cure. Was there anything Bertilak couldn’t do?

* * *

Which was a question still plucking at Thorn as he followed Bertilak through the maze of nearly identical twisting passages and compartments that made up Fringe. Some of it was still devoted to actual operations, housing generators and energizers, power converters and air processors. Fringe was still an orbiting platform, if a bizarre one, and had to maintain attitude control and a livable environment. The bulk of the place, though, seemed to be devoted to storing and moving cargo, or to debauchery, without much of a transition between the two.

They threaded their way among some crates and saw clothing scattered around the deck. Thorn’s gaze followed a trail of hastily flung-around trousers, shirts, belts, socks, and eventually underwear. The trail led around the corner of a stack of cargo pods, around which drifted an awful lot of pretty distinctive noise. He glanced at Bertilak, who just grinned and shrugged.

Thorn agreed. He really didn’t want to know and just followed Bertilak onward.

Eventually, the big alien stopped. “We’re meeting several, um, individuals just ahead. Please, let me do all of the talking. Oh, and no questions,” he said.

Thorn cocked his head. “Individuals? Who are they? What are you going to be talking to them about?”

“Now what did I just say.”

“I thought you meant don’t ask them any questions,” Thorn replied.

“Ah, technicalities and loopholes. You’ll fit right in here.” Thorn noted it explicitly didn’t answer his questions, but Bertilak had walked on before he could speak. He followed the big alien through a tight hatch into another compartment, this one apparently a repurposed cargo module. It was set up like another bar, with tables and chairs bolted to the deck. Thorn noted that the ashtrays were fastened down on the tables, and all the food and drink was served in flimsy, plastic containers. None of it could be weaponized during a brawl.

Which would be fine, if not for the fact that the two people glowering at them as they entered were already armed to the teeth.

A man and a woman, both looking as hard as ablative armor. He had a scruffy beard, a sneer, and a pair of massive handguns strapped to his waist. She wasn’t much different, aside from the beard.

“Bertilak, you were supposed to be here ten minutes ago,” the man snapped. “And time is money.”

Bertilak laughed and reached into a pocket. “Ten minutes? Here.” He tossed a single coin, a microcredit, onto the table. “That should cover ten minutes of your time, Garlen. You can owe me the change.”

Thorn followed Bertilak to the table, warily, taking in all of their surroundings the way one did when stepping into a new watering hole for the first time. Aside from him and Bertilak, and the man apparently named Garlen and his companion, there was one other man jammed behind a table covered with empty plastic cups. A gruff-looking bartender watched them all suspiciously from behind a pile of crates set up as a bar.

Bertilak sat down at the table, Thorn beside him. “So, Garlen, who’s your friend?” he asked.

The woman sat up. “I can speak for myself, thanks. Name’s Keely.”

Bertilak grinned. “And this fine gentleman is Thorn Stellers.”

Garlen scowled. “Looks like a cop. Are you a cop?”

“A cop? No. Not a cop.” Thorn considered telling him he was a Lieutenant in the Orbital Navy, but he decided to hold back until he knew just what the hell was going on here.

“So, what then? You’re some sort of aw-thor-it-ee figure, that’s for sure.” Garlen said it that way—aw-thor-it-ee, each syllable drawn out for emphasis and dripping with suspicious contempt.

Thorn sighed and prepared himself for a fight. He figured he and Bertilak should have this, but just in case, he touched his charm, his grubby old book, which was tucked away in his jacket’s inner pocket.

But Bertilak leaned forward, muscles bunched in menace. “Thorn is my friend and new partner, Garlen, and that’s all you need to know.”

Keely glared. “Sorry, but—”

Bertilak stood. “Fine. Thorn, these people don’t want our business, so let’s find some who do.”

“Just wait a minute,” Garlen said, raising a hand. “You can’t fault us for being careful, Bertilak. There’s a lot at stake here.”

“Most of it illegal,” Keely put in.

Garlen looked at her. “There are parts that aren’t illegal?”

She laughed.

Thorn shot Bertilak a glance as the big alien sat back down. A lot at stake, and illegal. What the hell was Bertilak up to?

“Alright, we’ll stay and keep talking. But I’m vouching for Thorn. And that should be good enough, right, Garlen?” Bertilak said.

The man gave a grudging nod. “I guess.” He suddenly raised his voice. “Mind you, I don’t like talking out in the open like this, where just anyone can hear it, you know?”

The bartender snorted out a resigned sigh and came out from behind the bar. He collected the bar’s only other patron, the barely conscious man now slumped in the corner, and bundled him out through the hatch. Before he left, he paused and turned back.

“This is going to cost me business, Garlen,” he said, glowering. “At least a hundred credits worth.”

“I’ll give you five hundred if it’ll shut you up.”

The bartender gave him a gap-toothed smile. “Don’t burn the place down,” he said, then left and closed the hatch.

“Now then, how about we get down to business. Bertilak, I’ve got some good stuff this time around. Think you’ll be damned interested in it,” Garlen said.

Keely leaned forward, a glare hardening her face. “You’ve got some good stuff, Garlen? Remember how you got your hands on it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Force of habit, sorry. We’ve got some good stuff.”

Bertilak glanced at Thorn, his expression one of warning. “Alright, and what, exactly, would this good stuff be?”

Garlen answered by pulling a battered data pad out of a belt pouch, tapping it, then dropping it on the table. Its screen was smeared with something. Thorn didn’t want to know what. It showed a schematic, one that Thorn didn’t immediately recognize.

“Particle cannons. Three prototypes, never deployed. The Calusians were trying to work out the bugs,” Garlen replied.

Keely tapped the grimy screen. “They never could get them to work properly, mainly because they were being sabotaged. These ones were supposedly scrapped.”

Thorn stared around the table. Particle cannons? Weapons? These people dealt in illicit arms? Bertilak dealt in illicit arms? It was a direction he hadn’t expected, because Bertilak verged on being goofy, with his oafish presence and boundless positivity. Weapon merchants—at least the ones Thorn had seen—were dark shadows in any room, no matter how many lights were glowing.

“I need a moment to speak to my friend,” Bertilak said, standing and gesturing for Thorn to follow him.

Thorn followed him out of the bar compartment, holding his tongue until the big alien had closed the hatch.

“What the hell, Bertilak? These are, what, black market arms dealers? You’re a black-market arms dealer?”

Bertilak smiled. “Now you see why I asked you to step out here.”

“Instead of being honest and telling me up front.”

“If I had, would you be here now?”

“No. No, I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t be on this little jaunt with you at all. This is illegal, Bertilak. The ON arrests traders for this sort of thing.”

“It would probably count as unethical, too. Even immoral,” Bertilak put in.

Thorn just stared at him. “Immoral? Bullshit. It’s unconscionable. Do you know what these people do with shit like this? They kill children. They kill—”

“Children? The weapons are not intended to kill children,” Bertilak protested.

Thorn’s bark of laughter was loud and harder than steel. “Are you serious? How naïve are you? Once these are out of your big, green hands, every weapon you sell can and will be used to kill whatever is in the way. Of course innocents will die. It’s what happens when you sell hardware to people who have a cause and don’t care who gets hurt. Why would you do this?”

Bertilak grinned. “For the money. There’s a lot of it involved. A lot. That’s what those high stakes we were talking about really are,” he said.

Thorn was apoplectic, his fingers tapping across the talisman in a barely suppressed need to ’cast. “So who are these people, Garlen and Keely?”

“Traders, like me.”

“Traders.” The word was a curse. And more.

“It sounds much better than arms dealer, or smuggler, don’t you think?” Bertilak offered.

Thorn shook his head in utter disgust. “I can’t have any part of this, Bertilak. None. I’m an ON officer. I might be wearing civvies, but it doesn’t change my sworn duties, and even more importantly, I’m a human. I won’t give you an assist on stacking the bodies of people who aren’t soldiers. Hell, I wouldn’t even do it if it was strictly to be used on military targets.”

Bertilak’s grin faded, and he gave Thorn a thoughtful look. “Does it change things if I tell you how much we stand to make from this job? That it’s three million, five hundred thousand credits, which I would of course split with you—sixty for you, forty for me?”

Once again, Thorn briefly lost his words. Three point five million credits was nearly a lifetime of pay for him. Sixty percent of that would be a fortune. It wasn’t that he desperately needed the money for anything, at least not right now. But he wouldn’t be a soldier forever, and ON pensions were notoriously thin.

He finally just gave Bertilak a look of confused surprise. “Sixty percent for me. Why? I’m just your passenger.”

“To buy your silence, of course.”

“You really aren’t worried about the ethics or morality of this, are you?”

“I don’t make money off of ethics or morality.”

Thorn scrubbed a hand through his hair. “So why didn’t you hand Tanner an invoice for saving the Hecate?”

“Because there are good reasons to ingratiate myself with the Orbital Navy. Contrary to everyone’s image of the roguish, romantic outlaw, the best way to stay in this sort of business is to cultivate good relationships with the authorities.”

“Bertilak, look— “

The alien cut him off with a raised finger. “I’m sorry, Thorn, but I didn’t ask you to step out here to ask for your permission or get your approval. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t do something stupid, like announce that you were an ON officer. If you’d done that, we’d be having a very different conversation with Garlen and Keely right now.”

“So you expect me to go back in there with you, sit down, shut up, and watch as you negotiate to move three prototype particle cannons.” Thorn stopped, cocking his head. “I’m assuming the Calusians aren’t just throwing these things on the market because they can’t get them to work. So, from whom are these being shipped, exactly? And to whom?”

Bertilak crossed his arms. “No idea.”

“So these things could end up being used directly against the ON.”

“Or by it. Your Hecate uses a transceiver design for some of its scanners that definitely came from our friends, the Calusians. I know, because I’m the one that moved it to a human dealer in Allied Stars space.”

Thorn scowled and turned away. Bertilak could be lying. Or not. But it didn’t matter. Never mind the moral or ethical quandaries. Without at least knowing where the particle cannons were going, he couldn’t go along with this.

“I’m sorry, Bertilak, but like I said, I can’t be part of this,” Thorn said, turning back. “It’s not up for discussion. I’m out. And if I had a big enough gun, I’d end this entire deal right now.”

“I understand. And believe me, I admire your commitment to doing what you believe is right, even though it’s going to cost you your share of this deal and any future access to my tech. With such devotion to your principles, you won’t need it to win this war anyway. So, I will drop you off at the nearest neutral planet as soon as I can. You should be able to find your way home from there.”

Thorn suppressed a sigh. Shit. That was a part of this he hadn’t considered. Bertilak’s tech was the priority. Never mind Bertilak’s stupid wager. The tech was the main reason he was here at all. How did three particle cannons of unknown power and effect stack up against the amazing tech he had aboard his ship? He’d one-shotted Nyctus corvettes and frigates, and could operate sensors through an Alcubierre bubble, something physics said wasn’t even possible.

Plus, two million, one hundred thousand credits.

Nope.

It was illegal under Allied Stars law. The ON stopped commercial ships and inspected them for contraband, and it arrested traders found with it. And that was despite Bertilak’s assertion that ON ships were equipped with systems that were, at one point, contraband themselves. And what if these particle cannons were potent weapons and ended up in the hands of the Nyctus? They’d apparently only failed because someone was sabotaging them, probably so they could later peddle them on the black market.

More fundamentally, he found himself flashing back on all the sacrifices people had made to keep the Allied Stars and the ON intact, to uphold the things they stood for. That included the law that Bertilak was about to break.

This time, Thorn did sigh. “I think that’s best, Bertilak. I’m sorry, I really am, but you’re asking me to compromise too much here, and I know you handed my ass to me in the circle, but I’d like you to think of yourself as lucky that I don’t go past simply bailing on this idiocy.”

“Very well. I’ll tell Garlen that you are attending to something else. You should return to my ship, because we’ll be leaving here as soon as the cargo is aboard.”

Thorn nodded once and threaded his way through the convoluted passages of Fringe, heading for Bertilak’s ship. Along the way, he found himself wondering just how and when he’d grown such a well-developed conscience.

* * *

Thorn considered stealing Bertilak’s ship and just taking it back to ON space. As a bridge officer aboard the Hecate, he’d had enough cross-training on the essential basics of nav and helm to fill in during emergencies. If the alien’s ship had been at all similar, he could probably have worked it out. And if he couldn’t, there was always magic.

But the strange controls of Bertilak’s ship meant nothing to him. And his magic was still too depleted to offer him the sort of power he’d need to make the ship controllable, much less fling it magically back into ON space.

So he just lay in his expansive and comfortable bed—which he would really miss, by the way—and brooded, waiting for Bertilak to return.

He was doing the right thing. But was he doing the correct thing? The best thing for everyone involved?

He heard a thump and sat up. Bertilak appeared a few minutes later.

“We’re about to get underway,” the big alien said.

“I didn’t hear you loading anything aboard. How small are these friggin’ particle cannons anyway?”

“The deal fell through.”

“It did? What happened?”

“I decided to give it a pass.”

Thorn stood. “Oh? Why?”

“Because, my friend, it would appear that I have caught a bad case of scruples from you.”

“Um, sorry?”

Bertilak laughed. “Don’t be. Now, my friend, let us go to the bridge and decide where we are going next. We have a three point five million credit loss to make up, and time is wasting.”

23

Once more, I’m here, Bertilak said.

Morgan opened her eyes. She’d been drifting, resting, floating over a featureless stretch of the abyssal plain. The city was just a diffused spot of glow in the far distance. She’d decided to do the thing she was going to do here, away from the distractions of hydrothermal vents and bustle of the Nyctus as they went about their daily routine. Here, there was nothing. Just silence, broken by the occasional mutter and grumble, sounds so low-pitched they were just on the bottom edge of her hearing. The elder shaman had told her those were the sounds of Tāmtu itself, the planet shifting about, like someone trying to find a more comfortable position. Apparently, the periodic thrums and rumbles traveled through the water really well, much better than they would through air.

No distractions. Just the restless movements of the planet, a featureless expanse of silty sand, and the serene water. And now, Bertilak.

What do you want?

You wanted me to test Thorn again. I did.

Oh. Right. Okay.

Once again, he passed.

Morgan’s face creased in a frown. Are you sure?

I am. I tempted him with as much as I could. Bertilak went on to describe what he’d done, and how Thorn had responded to it. So he wasn’t just giving up the money, he was ready to give up access to the technology he so badly wants for his people. He’s actually a very honest man.

No, he’s not. He’s not honest at all!

Well, your experience with him might be different. In mine, though, he’s devoted to doing what he thinks is right, Bertilak said.

Morgan balled her fists. But he’s not! He was mean to me! He tried to change me into something I’m not!

I believe you. But maybe, even then, he was trying to do what he thought was right.

Why? He wanted to change me! How could that be right?

I’m sorry. You’d have to ask him yourself. And maybe you should do that. Maybe he thought he had a good reason to do what he did. Maybe you should find out why he wanted to change you—

Go away. I don’t want to talk to you anymore right now, Morgan snapped. She was wrapped in a moment where her youth was writ large over her words, her actions—her tone.

As you wish.

Bertilak’s presence vanished from Morgan’s mind. The whole exchange left her angry, bereft of any sense of victory over Thorn. She’d wanted Thorn—not her—to prove how terrible a person he was. She’d wanted him to lie and cheat, to do bad things, because that’s what he was, a bad man. It was why she’d made Bertilak and sent him to find him and test him.

But it wasn’t working out that way. Bertilak’s second test had been a good one. She’d told him to offer Thorn so much money and stuff—just so much—to do something bad that he wouldn’t be able to resist. Then she’d have her proof, and she could do whatever she needed to do next. But Thorn wasn’t playing his part properly. He kept doing the right thing. He kept being a good person.

So why had he been mean to her? Daddy on Nebo was her daddy. He was a good and honest man, and she loved him. But Thorn was her father. She should be able to love him, too. But she couldn’t because he’d tried to take away everything that made her special.

Why?

She relaxed her fists, which were starting to ache. Fine. He was good. He was honest. He just didn’t like her. He didn’t like how she was and wanted her to be something different. There couldn’t be any right or good reason for that, no matter what Bertilak said.

Fine.

It took Morgan some time to calm down. She couldn’t do what she’d come here to do if she were mad or upset. She just floated for a while, watching that distant Radiance, listening to Tāmtu mutter away to itself, and the occasional far off sound of creatures hunting, or being hunted.

Fine.

Morgan nodded to herself. She’d calmed down enough, she thought. She was ready now to do what she’d come here to do. She was going to change things not just in the world now, but in the past, starting with the Pool of Stars. She was going to change the picture on it from Una’s Ass to Morgan’s Ride. If she could do that, then she could do anything. That included making it so the Nyctus wouldn’t be bad and wouldn’t want to fight their stupid war. They’d just be her friends.

She actually felt a swell of pride, knowing that she was being a big girl now. Not a little kid, and not like mommy, but something in between.

With a self-satisfied smile, Morgan closed her eyes, relaxed, and let her awareness drift down into that place deep within her, where the magic simmered away.

So she needed to change the universe, but in the past. The first step was concentrating on that picture of Una’s Ass. Despite the gravity of her moment, she snickered, then tried to school her features into what she thought an adult would do.

“That’s better,” she muttered, feeling her face grow stern. Sifting memories, she recalled the painted image on the strange ship, and it came to her in bright, rich detail. It was, in fact, the only part of the Pool of Stars she could recall in any detail. The rest of the ship was just complicated stuff, struts and girders and machines, none of which meant anything to her. But the picture of that woman, Una, riding that clunky donkey, loomed in her thoughts like she was staring at it right now.

So that was the first step. Change the universe so she could reach back through time and—

Huh. Wait. She knew the Pool of Stars had gone missing mysteriously. All the people on it had died. What if she made it so that, instead of going missing back then, it just existed now? What if the Pool of Stars could travel through time, making its way through the days and years and centuries the same way it traveled through space? The elder shaman had even once told her that time was like—it was like the size of something. Everything had a height, and a length, and a width, and then it also had something similar, except made out of time.

“Hmph.”

Morgan kind of got it. The elder shaman had called it all dissenting, or demolitions, or something like that. Anyway, there were four of them, and time was one.

So she changed her mind. Instead of just reaching back into the past and changing the Pool of Stars so the picture was Morgan’s Ride, she’d bring the Pool of Stars forward and change it right here. That would be better, anyway. After all, what was the point of changing the picture to a new and cool one like she imagined, her riding a beautiful horse, if it was just going to be lost anyway?

Besides, if she did that, making it so that instead of getting lost, ships came to the present, then none of those people would die. The people aboard the Pool of Stars would still be alive, and so would the rest from every ship that made it to now instead of disappearing. They’d be happy, and they’d have her to thank for it.

Morgan dug down into the deep pool of magic that shimmered away inside her, then she drew it up and projected it out, causing it to shape the universe to a new truth.

To her truth.

In her universe, ships like the Pool of Stars didn’t just go missing. They instead jumped through time, to the present day, with their crews alive and well. The Pool of Stars in particular would come to where Morgan herself was—

Oops. Wait. She didn’t intend for the Pool of Stars to literally come to where she was, here under the waters and ice of Tāmtu. That would be dumb. The ship would appear in space, near Tāmtu, close enough that she could get the Nyctus to take her to it, so she could see and admire the new artwork on it. She’d also be able to talk to the crew, to tell them what she’d done. They’d be so happy.

Morgan let the magic go, feeling it dissipate like puffs of smoke on a stiff breeze. She bit her lip, concentrating, reshaping her intent for the universe. Then she drew up magic again and started to craft a reality that conformed to her truth.

One in which ships and people could travel through time.

Right away, though, she found herself having to force her way forward, like swimming into one of the strong currents that swept through Tāmtu’s ice-locked seas. The universe didn’t want to give up its grip on time or let her change how it worked. She dug deeper, gritting her teeth, a throbbing pulse starting and growing behind her eyes.

Her awareness didn’t just sweep through space. Now it swept through time itself.

Her focus was the Pool of Stars, or, more properly, the picture of Una’s Ass. She held the image fast in her mind, using it like a beacon. Her consciousness swung to and fro through the years, hunting for it. She knew it was out there, somewhere and somewhen—

Ah. There. She saw it in the remote, temporal distance. She allowed herself to be drawn to it, the way the flicker moths were drawn to the lights of the farm on Nebo at night. And just like that, the Pool of Stars was right there, hanging against a starscape, about to depart on its maiden, and doomed, voyage.

The image of Una’s Ass zoomed in, filling her awareness. Okay, the first thing to fix was that. She knew exactly how she wanted Morgan’s Ride to look, right down the particular colors of the horse she’d be riding. For instance, it had a white blaze on its forehead, a startling splotch of brightness against its dark coat.

But nothing happened. She could see Una’s Ass, but she couldn’t change it.

Oh. Wait. Right. She hadn’t actually changed the universe yet. Her awareness was in the past, but that was it.

She drew up more magic and began to shape it according to her desire, the clay of creation feeling good in her small hands. The Pool of Stars started forward in time, traversing it the same way it would fly through space. Now Morgan had to strain, exerting her will to overcome the inertia of creation. Apparently, the universe didn’t like having time change the way it worked. Again, her head began to throb. Wisps of blood drifted from her nose. She was making headway, but it was so hard. She needed a touchstone, something upon which to focus her efforts and channel her power. It was like when Daddy watered the sour-pod trees, back on Nebo. If he didn’t use a hose, the water would just splash all around the pump. The hose let him make the water go where he wanted it to.

She bore down harder, grinding her teeth. She had something like that, didn’t she? Hadn’t there been something that she’d used? It was suddenly all so cloudy, her memories blurry. A face? A sewn patch? Words that said Orbital Navy?

It didn’t matter. It was working. The Pool of Stars had begun to cross time, blurring through the years, part of it still rooted in the past, and part of it now in space, above Tāmtu—

Like a fat rubber band stretched too much, time snapped back, pulling the Pool of Stars with it. Grimly, she dug deep into the magic, drawing more and more to her. Much of it was wasted, though, and simply dissipated around her in swirls and eddies and bursts of lost eldritch potential. She just drew up more to replace it. Blood swirled around her face, and her whole body hummed and tingled, like thousands upon thousands of little electric shocks rippled through her.

Again, the Pool of Stars began dragging itself across the decades.

The ship began to merge with now, more and more of it fading from then, from the past. It was working. She could even see the picture of Una’s Ass, and not just in her memories. As the Pool of Stars became more and more real in the present, it grew more solid and persistent in Morgan’s awareness. She could see it now, the clunky, boxy shapes of its struts and modules blotting out the stars above Tāmtu—and Una’s Ass, the silly girl and her sillier donkey, was right there. It was real, and she could see it, could almost touch it.

The past still clung to the ship like cobwebs, though, holding it back from coming fully into the present. Morgan pushed and pulled, trying to shake it finally free. Time was stubborn, though, not wanting to surrender its normal, linear nature, where second followed second, minute followed minute, effect followed cause. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to get the last of the ship’s existence to join with this one, this new one, where she wanted time travel to be something you could just do. She finally began hammering at the obstinate bonds of reality, like Daddy swinging his axe to cut a dead branch off a sour-pod tree. If she pounded at them enough, they should finally break.

Unconstrained magic howled around her now, a wild, unfocused storm of it that turned Tāmtu’s water to ice, to steam, to swirling foam, shot through with bursts of bluish flame and dazzling lightning bolts. But she doggedly refused to give up. She’d come too close to changing Una’s Ass to Morgan’s Ride. It wasn’t about testing her ability to move things through time anymore. This was about her getting what she wanted. The universe would obey her, it was as simple as that.

It was about that stupid picture of that stupid donkey. She hated it.

“Horses are way prettier,” she muttered, arms waving as she worked.

Only a few strands of cause-and-effect held the Pool of Stars back now. Morgan felt like her head was going to burst, but she forced herself to keep at it, not give up, and bludgeon the cosmos into submission. There were few things more unyielding than the fabric of a universe, but one such thing was the will of a child who knew how to manipulate magic. Another strand of causality snapped. Another. Now only a few isolated facts held the Pool of Stars back, the last dregs of its existence in the past.

Unfocused magic roared around her, scooping enormous craters out of the abyssal plain below her, out of the ice far above. Chunks of it rained down, plunging through the plumes of sand and silt that she’d dredged up from the ocean floor. Terrified sea creatures—fearsome beasts only moments before—darted around, their instincts overwhelmed by the light and sound and chaos.

If only she could gather all of that wasted magic to her, using it to finish what she’d started. If she’d been able to do that, she knew, this would have been over and done by now. But she couldn’t. She didn’t know how.

Only one tendril of history remained. The Pool of Stars had been mankind’s first foray into faster-than-light travel. That truth, more than any other, rooted the ship in the past. For some reason Morgan didn’t understand, severing that last bit of reality was harder than all the rest. It was as though the universe desperately fought back to prevent something truly terrible from happening.

But Morgan didn’t care. She raised her magical bludgeon, poured power into it, and made to hammer it down as hard as she could, finally freeing the Pool of Stars from his historical bondage. Do that, and her truth would be the right one, the only one.

The tortured water around Morgan flared as bright as the sun, squandered magic shining so brightly it lit the ocean daylight bright, its radiance shining out to every horizon.

Before Morgan could break this last bond of time, though, a wall of compulsion slammed into her, an avalanche of magical imperative that swept over her like a tsunami, and Morgan’s body shook.

Silence fell as the debris began to settle, currents slowing to a stop. In the middle was Morgan, her body drifting, hands spread.

Eyes closed.

24

Thorn wasn’t sure if he should dislike Bertilak, or even hate him, as the opportunistic smuggler and part-time arms dealer he was, or like him for not letting greed get the better of his conscience. On top of that, there was the fact that Bertilak had become a welcome part of the Hecate.

Thorn hated to admit it, but Tanner had been right. Thorn had been jealous of Bertilak’s easygoing popularity among the crew. He’d tried to convince himself that he hated the attention, the adulation for the things he’d done for the war effort. He was better than that. Didn’t need it. Was happy being who and what he’d always been, Thorn Stellers, a lonely orphan who grew up mucking toxic shit from the ruined surface of contaminated planets, his fingernails black with the stuff.

He was wrong, though. Thorn had to grudgingly accept that a good part of him accepted and even craved being needed, being appreciated—so different than his years as a forgotten soul who didn’t matter to anyone at all. All his life, Thorn had never needed anything except himself, and to learn otherwise now was discomforting.

“No man is an island. Not even you,” he told himself. He was shaving, and doing a thorough job of it. He didn’t need to shave, but he wanted time and routine in order to process what he would say to Bertilak.

It was some consolation that he had convinced Bertilak not to proceed with the particle cannon deal. And he’d done it not by shaming or sermonizing to the big alien, but by example. He’d walked away from a deal that would have made him rich, and that might have cost him access to Bertilak’s formidable tech. If nothing else, his moral code held when it mattered most. Tech, he could find. Innocent lives were much harder to protect, even with his unusual abilities. With a final swipe of the razor, he began to wash his face and towel off, steam rising from the sink.

Satisfied that he could face Bertilak, Thorn joined the alien on his bridge.

Bertilak sat with his enormous feet propped on the console, perilously close to the controls. It made him feel that some sort of mishap, or even disaster, was only one toe-cramp or itchy foot away. The casual nature Bertilak took toward astrogation was, if nothing else, consistent with his attitude about almost everything—except money. That, Thorn knew, had Bertilak’s attention.

Thorn stopped and looked around the bridge. “What’s her name?”

“Whose name?”

Thorn gestured around them. “Your ship. It suddenly struck me that you’ve never told me its name.”

“Name?”

“Yeah. My ship’s called the Hecate. What’s yours called?”

Bertilak smiled. “I call it my ship, because that’s what it is. Is it essential to give it a name?”

Thorn thought about how he’d asked Bertilak the name of his AI, his pretty much silent partner in running his ship. The idea of naming it had apparently struck the alien as odd. It seemed to be the same for his ship as a whole.

“Essential? Well, no, I guess not. It’s more customary.”

Bertilak’s smile didn’t waver. “I must admit, I got the sense that you and your crew considered your ship—the Hecate—to be more like a person than a machine. But it’s not. It has no personality. It’s just a collection of systems and sub-systems and components that let you live and travel and fight in space.”

“Yeah, of course it’s that. But it’s also more. When you spend enough time with a machine, especially a ship, you get fond of it. It kind of does become like another member of the crew, or even a friend.” Thorn touched the console. “You come to rely on it as much as it relies on you.”

Bertilak dropped his feet to the floor and laughed. “Thorn, my friend, somewhere beneath that grumpy exterior of yours dwells the heart of a poet. Very well, then. What shall we name my ship?”

Thorn smiled back. “It’s not really my place to say, Bertilak. You should be the one naming your ship, not me. After all, you have to live with it.”

Bertilak’s laugh died into a thoughtful, narrow-eyed look directed squarely on Thorn. “Tell me, Thorn, should the name reflect the thing, or should the thing accommodate the name?”

“I don’t understand.”

Bertilak thought for a moment. “Suppose you were going to name this ship. What name would you give it? And don’t think about, just say the first thing that—”

“The Jolly Green Giant,” Thorn said.

“The Jolly Green Giant, eh? Why?”

Thorn shrugged. “It’s something I heard years ago. Don’t even remember where. But it seems to fit, right? You laugh a lot, so you’re jolly. And you’re green. And you’re big, so, yeah, giant.”

“The Jolly Green Giant.” Bertilak said it slowly and deliberately, as though tasting the words while they passed through his mouth. Finally, he nodded. “It’s a good name. I like it. You obviously chose it because it reflected me and my ship.”

“I did, yeah.”

“So, indulge me for a moment. Suppose you had a name you loved. It was absolutely perfect. You’re anxious to name something whatever it is, it’s that good. Trouble is, you can’t find anything that it fits. You finally realize that you’re going to have to make something fit it. And, of course, you can, being a—Starcaster, that’s the right word, isn’t it? Would you?”

Thorn kept his face blank. He wasn’t used to such introspective, theoretical musing from Bertilak. Why was he, to use his word, indulging in it now?

Curious, and more than a little wary, Thorn decided to play along. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on the circumstances. What the name was, and what I was considering changing. I’m not casual about my ability, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But you would consider changing something’s fundamental nature to fit this perfect name.”

Thorn kept working at keeping his poker face intact. “I get the impression you’re fishing for something here, Bertilak. Why are you asking me this?”

“I am curious about the way you see the world, Thorn, my friend. How much you might change it to suit your needs, or desires. Again, you’re in the somewhat unique position of being able to literally do that,” Bertilak replied.

“I have no need or desire to change very much, unless it’s something related to fighting the Nyctus. Then, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

“I understand you resurrected an entire planet after the Nyctus destroyed it.”

Thorn felt suspicion show on his face. He couldn’t help it. There was some sort of subtext to Bertilak’s words that he wasn’t picking up. He suddenly felt like he needed to be very, very careful.

“Nebo, yeah. I was involved in bringing it back to life.”

“I assume it was your home planet, and that you were seeking to restore your friends and loved ones.”

“No. My home planet was Cotswold.”

Bertilak cocked his head, his expression becoming curious. “Ah. And it, too, was destroyed by the Nyctus.”

“It was.” Thorn crossed his arms. “Why are you suddenly interested in this? In what, exactly, am I indulging you here?”

Bertilak held up a hand. “Just bear with me, please. So why Nebo? Why not Cotswold, or any of the other planets the Nyctus have attacked? Why not all of them?”

“It just worked out that way,” Thorn said, looking away.

“So there was something about Nebo in particular—”

“Bertilak, I’d rather not delve into this any deeper. This is all classified stuff, and despite our unusual situation, I do have to maintain military decorum. I really can’t discuss it, and it’s best to leave it at that,” Thorn said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. There were, indeed, some aspects of Nebo’s resurrection that were classified. Production output, for instance, that contributed to the Allied Stars war effort.

But the more compelling reason he wanted to drop it wasn’t about the war at all, of course. It was about Morgan, and the Witch Nebula, and all the cataclysmic events that had cascaded from his attempt to bring her back. Nebo had just been a side-effect.

“I understand. I only have one more question,” Bertilak said.

“What’s that?”

“Who was it, on Nebo, that you were really trying to bring back?”

Thorn had to turn away to cover his reaction, a mix of shock, anger, and fear. Bertilak knew something, or thought he did, anyway. It might have been some power or ability that Thorn just hadn’t detected, or maybe some aspect of his strange technology. Or maybe the big alien was just that perceptive.

Thorn turned back, his eyes flat, voice cold. “The answer is both classified and irrelevant.”

Bertilak stood, a thin smile on his face. “I think, my friend, that you brought Nebo back from the dead because you were trying to bring someone who was on Nebo when it was destroyed. It must have been someone you loved very much. A dear friend. A lover. A child.”

Thorn kept his face blank. “Fishing won’t help you, Bertilak. Not now, and not in an hour. Not even in a year. I’ll still be an officer in the ON, and my commitment will be the same.”

Bertilak pressed on, ignoring Thorn’s reply. “Whoever it was—did you try to bring them back as they were, or did you try to change them? Did you try to make them fit the world as you envisioned it?”

Thorn stared. Somehow, he knows about Morgan.

For a moment, Thorn fought a quiet war with the muscles of his face, schooling them into a blank expanse that gave nothing away—and kept the roiling waters of his guilt well away from the keen eye of an alien who was making some excellent guesses.

Or reporting what he knew.

“I’ve never tried to change anyone,” Thorn said evenly. “To repeat, you’re asking questions of a military nature. You kicked my ass in the circle, but that only goes so far in terms of what you’re entitled to know. Are we clear?”

Bertilak’s face was inscrutable, but he answered. “We are.”

Thorn turned and left, his back straight, but he felt Bertilak’s eyes on him, and for just a moment, he wondered if his guilt would ever stop making him feel hollow inside.

* * *

If he had to spend most of the rest of his time with Bertilak in his quarters, at least he’d be comfortable.

He sprawled on the bed, his hands behind his head. That strange interaction with Bertilak had left him more than a little unsettled. The alien knew. He knew. Thorn had no idea how, or why Bertilak had chosen to dig into it now, but Bertilak knew.

He released a long sigh. He didn’t want to be aboard this ship, apparently now named the Jolly Green Giant, any longer. He didn’t want to be around Bertilak and his knowing manner. He wanted to be back aboard the Hecate, amid her familiar surroundings, the comforting rigor of her repetitive ship-board routines, the no-nonsense pragmatism of Captain Tanner. In fact, he would talk to Bertilak about it. Tell him that he wanted to disembark as soon as possible, at an Allied Stars planet, or at least a neutral one. He’d tell Tanner he did his best to work with Bertilak, but the alien just didn’t have anything to offer them. He’d lie, say that he refused to share his tech—

“Thorn Stellers?”

The flat voice truncated his thoughts. It took Thorn a moment to realize who, or rather what it was. It was Bertilak’s unnamed AI. Thorn had heard the voice maybe a half-dozen times during his time aboard the Giant. The rest of the time, it seemed, the AI was content to just sit and do whatever it did in the background.

Thorn sat up. “What’s up?”

“Bertilak needs your assistance.”

Now Thorn stood. “Why? Where is he?”

“On the bridge.”

Thorn considered just saying to hell with it and letting the big alien take care of whatever problem he faced himself. But he didn’t. Not only was this request from the AI unprecedented, but there was also the chance that it was something dire or dangerous, and Bertilak genuinely needed his help—maybe to keep them both alive.

Thorn went to the bridge and found Bertilak sitting in his seat, slumped over, his head in his hands.

Okay, this wasn’t right.

“Bertilak, what’s going on?” he asked.

The alien lifted his head and gave Thorn a mournful look.

“It’s your daughter, Morgan. I’m afraid she’s in terrible danger.”

25

“Are we actually making any progress here, Damien? Like, any at all?” Kira asked.

Damien leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. He seemed to ponder the question. Kira waited, the only sound the soft rumble of the Venture’s machinery.

She finally leaned back. “I guess the fact that it’s taking you so long to come up with an answer is the answer.”

Damien smiled. “Not necessarily. It’s just that it’s a complicated question.”

“Uh, no, it’s not. ‘Are we making any progress’ is pretty straightforward.”

Now Damien laughed. “Sometimes I forget you’re not actually part of the diplomatic corps, Kira. There are no straightforward questions in the world of diplomacy.”

“Then answer me like you’re answering a soldier. Which you are, I might add,” Kira said.

“Okay. Yes . . . and no.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

Damien, still chuckling, waved her off. “Sorry, couldn’t resist. But it still really is the best answer I can give you. Yes, we’re making progress, insofar as we’re still here and still talking to the Danzur. But also no, we’re not making real progress toward signing something with them. Or, if we are, we can measure it in millimeters.”

“So at what point do we just give up and go home?”

“We don’t.”

“Damien, if we’re wasting our time here, then let’s just say that and move on.”

Damien shook his head. “As long as we’re talking, we’re not at war with the Danzur. So, believe it or not, every hour we’re here, engaged in what to you must seem like endless talk and bureaucracy, is another hour we don’t have to redeploy part of the fleet to a second front against these guys. And that, I want to emphasize, would be a disaster.”

“Disaster is a pretty strong word,” Kira said. “The Danzur aren’t that strong.”

“Hey, I’m not making this up. Feel free to call out the latest encrypted traffic from back home. Pay particular attention to the assessment from your bosses at Fleet. They’ve done extensive wargaming, and they’ve come to the conclusion that having the Danzur open a second front would force the Allied Stars to sue for peace—and on their terms, not ours. I don’t need to tell you that’s far from our intentions. We need to call the tune in any negotiations, let alone a glorified surrender instrument.”

Kira had admittedly fallen behind in terms of keeping up with the most recent diplomatic traffic from home. In fact, she’d come to count on Damien to encapsulate it for her. There was just too much information, coming in too fast, for her to be able to absorb it all, and it was in such shades of gray that at times she wanted to scream. Never had she imagined an entire job description devoted to telling such beautiful lies, and yet, here she was, right in the middle of it.

There was also the matter of Thorn. Her abject fear that he might be dead hadn’t lasted long. It hadn’t been easy, but she’d finally sensed a flicker of him in the ether, as familiar as the hint of his voice in a nearby passage. Thorn was out there somewhere, but for reasons she couldn’t fathom, she just couldn’t reach out to him. Some stubborn barrier, a pervasive psychic static, seemed to be blocking her. She’d tried to burn through it, but to no avail. Who or whatever was causing it was much stronger than she was, which probably meant it was Thorn himself. Whatever he was up to, he obviously didn’t want to be disturbed while doing it. Still, it was another distraction from the task at hand.

“It’s that bad?” she finally asked.

“Sure seems so.”

“And when were you going to tell me this?” She held up a finger. “And don’t say you were trying to spare me or anything like that, or so help me I will kick your ass in a most undiplomatic way.”

Damien managed to look suitably hurt. “I’m definitely not in the business of sparing you, Kira Wixcombe. This latest message traffic only came in an hour or so ago. I’m telling you about it now because this is the first chance I’ve had.”

“Oh.” Kira grimaced. “Shit. I’m sorry, Damien, I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Understood, and don’t worry about it. Instead, let’s focus on what it means.”

“What it means is that we can’t let the Danzur enter the war.”

Damien nodded. “It does. The question is, how to accomplish that? I can’t help but feel that the Danzur might be playing nicer with us, but they’re still not playing straight, even in the game of statecraft. They’ve got some other agenda for trying to drag this out and keep us here.”

“But what?” Kira asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what we’ve got to figure out, and fast.” He gave Kira a weighty look. “I know you’ve been holding back. Maybe it’s time to stop doing that.”

“Holding back . . . from using Joining?”

“That’s right.”

“That might help us a lot. Or it might make everything go sideways. It depends on the Danzur, and if they’re able to tell what I’m up to. If they are, then they could turn against us pretty fast.”

Damien spread his hands. “I’m open to suggestions, then.”

Kira leaned back and looked up at the overhead above her. “I’ll let you know if I have any.”

* * *

Kira didn’t.

She and Damien tried different approaches with Tadrup and the other delegates over the next couple of days, but nothing seemed to gain any traction. The Danzur were extremely good at taking the most innocuous-sounding thing, the vaguest statement, or the most off-handed comment, and turning it into long bouts of fruitless discussion. They fetishized reports, loved meetings like Kira liked cake and coffee, and found endless joy in codicils, which gave them a chance to revisit everything that had been discussed in the previous hours or days.

They remained experts at talking at length without actually saying anything, and when Kira thought they were about to take a breath, some other functionary would step in—politely, of course—and say the dreaded phrase if I may add something here, for clarification. Damien was usually able to refocus things, but it took time and effort, and the uncertainty was wearing on them. They were two oars pulling against a current that was slow, but wide and steady.

Kira read the diplomatic transmission they’d just received, then lowered it and scowled at Damien. “A deadline? The Allied Stars Council is giving us a deadline?”

Damien returned a helpless look. “Apparently, they’re holding back a large reserve fleet as a hedge against the Danzur suddenly turning against us. That’s forced the ON to stay on the defensive against the Nyctus, despite the fact that they still seem to have gone dormant. And that’s driving everyone crazy back home, especially in the senior ranks of Fleet. They desperately want to launch an offensive before the Nyctus finish doing whatever it is they’re doing over there.”

Kira handed the document back over to him and slumped into one of the Venture’s seats. “Yeah, I get that. They’ll be worrying that the squids are going to suddenly come across the Zone with new tech or tactics, or even new magic. They want to hit them before they’re ready.”

“Which makes sense, sure. But with all those reserves tied up, it appears they can’t. Anyway, they’ve given us five days, and that’s it. Once that time elapses, we’re being recalled.”

“But why? What good does that do? It leaves the whole question of the Danzur hanging open. They’re still a threat. It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Oh, I suspect someone, somewhere has a cunning plan, and we’re just a small part of it,” Damien replied.

“Cunning plan my ass. What they’re really saying is that the ON brass are only prepared to keep that reserve fleet dawdling around in the rear for five more days, and then they’ll attack the Nyctus anyway,” Kira snapped. “In other words, they’re going to throw the dice and try to defeat the Nyctus fast, as a way of keeping the Danzur out of the war.”

“That would be risky,” Damien said, pulling at his chin. “If it works, though, it would be brilliant, and it would leave the Danzur out in the cold.”

“Sure, and if it doesn’t, we suddenly find ourselves facing a second front with nothing available to defend it. Or, for that matter, even if we do win against the Nyctus, we might be so depleted in strength that the Danzur will swoop in anyway, just to grab some territory,” Kira shot back.

Damien scratched his cheek, thinking. “I guess their reasoning is that the Danzur are a threat, but not an existential one. They don’t seem interested in exterminating us the way the Nyctus do. So we risk taking the hit from them to accomplish the bigger goal.”

“Sure. But it more reflects how the military thinks, not the diplomats. Go big or go home. Throw the dice. End the war by Christmas.”

“End the what?”

Kira smiled. “Sorry. It’s an old joke. The surest way to guarantee a war is going to drag on and on is to say that it’ll be over by Christmas. Of course, Christmas was a bigger deal back then, when we were only living on a single planet. So it kind of falls flat today, I guess.”

“I get the point.”

“So what do you want to do?” Kira asked.

Damien sighed. “Honestly, Kira, I’m just about out of ideas. If you’re counting on me to come up with something, then you’ll get to enjoy those swanky quarters of yours for another five days, and then we’ll be going home.”

“Yeah, I know. Joining. Speaking of throwing the dice,” she said, shaking her head.

“Well, what it comes down to is this. We throw the dice here and maybe manage to keep the Danzur out of the war completely, or we can let the Fleet throw the dice and just hope they don’t do too much damage when they do enter the war,” Damien replied.

Kira stood, crossed her arms, and walked to one of the viewports. She stared out at the sprawling vista outside, which included most of the orbital platform, and the luminous blue-green expanse of the Danzur’s home planet backdropping it. It really was pretty spectacular.

She was also getting sick of it.

“Well, as much as I like those quarters, I really don’t want to spend any more time here than I have to.” She turned back to Damien. “Fine. I’ll start pushing with my Joining. Who knows, maybe we’ll find out Tadrup and his people aren’t actually stalling us, and they just enjoy bureaucracy.”

“Or, if they are stalling us, knowing why would be nice.”

Kira nodded. “It sure would. I do have one suggestion, though.”

“What’s that?” Damien asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“Let’s put the Venture on ten minutes notice to move out. Because, if this goes wrong, we’re going to want to be able to haul ass out of here.”

* * *

Kira settled herself into a more comfortable position, wishing she had access to a sensory deprivation rig. She’d experimented with one back at Code Nebula, a sealed tank full of neutrally buoyant fluid, heated to body temperature. Just hanging there, weightless in the silent blackness, wearing nothing but an air mask and enough clothing to cover her modesty, had been an amazing experience. People apparently used it to delve into their own subconscious, usually for therapy, but sometimes just for entertainment. For Kira, though, it had allowed her to focus her Joining in a way she’d never before managed. She’d gone flying through the ether, borne on wings of a shimmering magical force, soaring and swooping here and there, into first one mind, then another. It had taken almost no effort at all, and the collective effect had been nothing short of electrifying.

Here, aboard the Venture, the best she could manage was a rack in a darkened room. The ship’s Chief Tech had been able to reduce the local gravity enough to reduce her weight. It left her resting lightly on the bed instead of bearing her full weight down onto it. So that, plus stripping down to her underclothes, was as sensory deprived as she was going to get.

Kira took a deep breath and let herself sink into her reservoir of magic, immerse herself in it, then sync her awareness with it and let it radiate outward in tendrils that snaked away in elegant possibility. Her perception immediately expanded, sweeping over the Venture’s crew, and Damien—

He stood out like a beacon in the darkness. Familiarity did that, turning an otherwise cold and distant presence into something warm and comfortable. Before she could move on, something caught her.

Damien was there, his thoughts clear and linear, which surprised her, given his chosen occupation. His mind was complex, but his path was not—he radiated competence, a tinge of frustration, and a general sense of industrious will, applying his intellect to one aspect of their problems, then another. After a moment, she’d seen enough, and her presence felt voyeuristic.

Kira let her consciousness continue sweeping outward, soaring through the orbital platform. She grazed the minds of myriad Danzur, but they were like dim, flickering bulbs to her. She didn’t know them, hadn’t ever interacted with them, so she could see only their most superficial thoughts. Out of curiosity, she picked three at random and, one after another, pushed deeper into the consciousness of each. It gave her a chance to test herself against a Danzur mind, while also giving her a peek into their motivations. After all, if there was some grand conspiracy at play here, then any, or even all of these aliens might be in on it.

These three weren’t, though. Two were just ordinary individuals going about their routine, their concerns and motives rooted firmly in whatever task or problem they were facing—one had to figure out why a fusion reactor was running hotter than it should, while another seemed fixated on a disagreement with his superiors. The third was a little more interesting. Kira delved deeper into her mind and discovered a treasure trove of ambitious bitterness. She was hungry for promotion but was being repeatedly denied. Of course, it was everyone else’s fault because her performance was top-notch.

Kira backed out. There was nothing to learn from her besides her own petty and somewhat narcissistic concerns. She pushed on, seeking the one mind that should practically ring like a gong among the Danzur.

There. Tadrup.

Kira reigned in her expanding thoughts and put her focus on Tadrup. She applied magic carefully, slowly increasing the pressure behind her own awareness. It was, she’d once told a class of recruits at Code Nebula, like electrical current. Her perception was the amperage, the actual stuff of Joining, while magic was the voltage, the force enabling it to enter the minds of others. The trick was to apply just enough of the magical voltage to get the depth of entry she wanted, but not so much that she triggered arcing—spillover effects that would alert her subject to what she was up to.

Tadrup’s current concern, his most immediate thoughts, were focused on her and Damien. That wasn’t surprising, nor was it very useful. Kira worked her way in a little deeper, applying a gentle nudge of magic, then another. She passed further into his mind, where the interesting stuff would be.

Stall them.

There. Kira zoomed in on that thought. Tadrup had been told to stall them. Why?

Stall them for as long as possible. Keep Wixcombe from—

Tadrup’s thoughts abruptly changed trajectory, and Kira hastily fell back. Had he sensed something? Detected her?

No. Someone had entered Tadrup’s office. Another Danzur. She watched as Tadrup’s superficial thoughts morphed and changed in response to what the other alien was saying. It was something about some bureaucratic thing or other. It meant nothing to Kira, but Tadrup’s reaction certainly did.

He loved this bureaucratic shit. Loved it.

She pushed again, re-entering his deeper thoughts. Against the clamor of whatever this particular task was all about, she could feel Tadrup’s satisfaction. Bureaucracy was order. It made sense of a chaotic universe. The right form, filed at the right time and in the right way, made it all make a little more sense. It actually gave Tadrup a feeling of fond, warm stability, and a sense of control. Kira didn’t get it, but she didn’t have to.

Okay. Gingerly, she probed deeper, trying to latch back onto that thought about stalling, and apparently stalling her in particular. Tadrup’s distraction as he dealt with other Danzur made it a little easier. More of his thoughts were focused elsewhere, thinning the amount of his conscious mind she had to burrow through.

Stall them.

Especially Wixcombe.

Wixcombe must be kept away.

Kira allowed herself a mental frown. Away from what?

Tadrup didn’t seem to know. He’d been given his marching orders—delay and stall the human diplomatic mission and keep her there, away from something, somewhere. He hadn’t been told why, though.

Wait.

There was something else, something deeper. Kira had to draw upon more magic, carefully crafting a sliver of her own awareness into a tendril of inquiry, one that would reach even deeper into Tadrup’s mind.

Wixcombe must be kept away.

It was part of the deal for reparations.

Paid by the Nyctus.

The Nyctus want her delayed.

The Nyctus. They made Tadrup uneasy. Frightened him, even. It was—

Their magic. It made the Nyctus powerful. Enigmatic. Dangerous. They must be respected. Placated.

A sudden surge of anxious awareness engulfed her. Tadrup had sensed something. He’d feel as though he was being watched, that someone lurked nearby, spying on him.

Kira bailed out of his mind, then let her Joining dissipate, the magic that powered it draining into the ether. Her consciousness snapped her back to the here and now, and she blinked into darkness.

“Lights.”

She blinked again as the compartment illuminated. The low gravity made her take a little longer to get dressed. She didn’t want to spin herself into a bulkhead, or accidentally slam herself into the overhead. She deliberately took her time, then made up for it by hurrying off to find Damien.

* * *

“So the Nyctus want the Danzur to delay you here,” Damien said.

“That’s how Tadrup understands it, yeah,” Kira replied.

He drummed his fingers on the table in the Venture’s common area. “Why? Why is it so important to the Nyctus that you stay stuck here?”

“I don’t know. I’m a Starcaster, but my focus is Joining, not combat magic. That’s definitely more of Thorn’s thing.”

Damien looked at her. “I understand that you and Stellers pretty much saved the fleet from a Nyctus ambush a few years back. It was the two of you working together that did it, right?”

“Well, it wasn’t just us. It was also Captain Tanner and crew of the Hecate, and Mol Wyant, a kick-ass fighter pilot.”

“Let’s put aside the modesty, shall we? The point is that you and Stellers worked together and undid a lot of the squids’ hard work in trying to trap and ambush a big chunk of the ON, right?”

“I guess so, yes. I was able to Shade what we were doing—that means hiding it, magically. While that was going on, Thorn led the charge in the Hecate’s witchport, using just about every type of magic you could imagine against the Nyctus. He’s a Conduit, which means he’s not restricted to one type of magic.” Kira’s voice trailed off into a thoughtful look. Damien just waited for her to go on.

“Wait. You’re saying that the Nyctus want to keep Thorn and me apart?”

“It’s a theory.”

“Sure, but it just brings us back to why. Why are they so focused on keeping us apart that they’d pay off the Danzur? As far as Tadrup is concerned, they made good on all of his losses, which probably means they made good on everyone’s,” Kira said.

“If we knew the answer to that, we might have the one important piece of this puzzle we’re obviously missing,” Damien replied.

“I have to talk to Thorn.”

“I thought you said he was unavailable, locked away behind some sort of barrier.”

“I did. And he is. I’m just going to have to find a way through it.”

Damien nodded. “Okay. What then?”

A slow smile spread across Kira’s face. “Well, the Danzur seem to be afraid of the Nyctus magic. Maybe they need to see what some real magic looks like.”

“How are you going to arrange that?”

Kira stood. “Leave it with me. In the meantime, keep Tadrup busy. Tell him I’m doing something else and can’t meet with him for now. Let him be on the receiving end of some stalling for a change.”

26

It took Thorn a moment to register what Bertilak said.

Morgan.

In terrible danger.

He blinked and shook his head, like he was trying to clear away mental cobwebs.

“Clarify that?” he asked. The fact that Bertilak had just named his daughter was only just starting to register.

“Morgan. I just communed with her. She’s being attacked. By the Nyctus.”

Thorn strode forward and grabbed Bertilak by the shoulders. “What the hell are you talking about? What do you know about Morgan? How do you know about Morgan?”

“I—” Bertilak began, then stopped, looking helpless.

“Tell me! What the hell is going on? Where’s Morgan?”

“I don’t know! She’s out there, somewhere.” Bertilak gave a vague wave. “I only speak to her by communing. She wanted it that way.” His actions were far different from the confident, boisterous being Thorn had known until moments earlier, and that set alarms ringing—for Thorn. For Bertilak, his shift seemed to make him into another life form; one that had withdrawn and been reduced.

Thorn shoved his face into Bertilak’s. “What do you mean? Where’s Morgan?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she?” Thorn yelled.

“I don’t know! She didn’t want me to know so I couldn’t let it slip out, because she doesn’t want you to know where she is!”

Thorn locked his gaze onto Bertilak’s. He would have driven himself into the alien’s mind like a sharpened spike, ripped it open, and found out what he knew. If he could. But he couldn’t, because from a magical perspective, Bertilak still didn’t exist.

But the alien also wasn’t lying. Through the misery on his face, Thorn could see that Bertilak was telling the truth. He did know about Morgan, but he didn’t know where she was.

Thorn hung on the edge of hyperventilating. Of hitting Bertilak—or hitting something. Instead, he took a deep breath, then let it out. At the same time, he let his awareness sink partway into his center, touching his focus and using it to find some calmness amid the stormy swirl of emotions that suddenly gripped him.

He let go of Bertilak and stepped back. “You had better start talking, Bertilak. Now. And you’d better not leave anything out.”

Thorn could hear the flat menace in his own voice. So could Bertilak. The big alien winced, then nodded.

“Fine. She was very clear that I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything. But something’s wrong. She’s in some sort of danger. So I’ll tell you.” He took a deep breath.

“Morgan is alive. She survived her confrontation with you. But she fled because you tried to change her. You tried to make her into something she wasn’t.”

Thorn eased out a breath. “Go on.”

“She found refuge . . . somewhere. I honestly don’t know where. She thought that if I didn’t know where she was, I couldn’t give it away.”

Thorn stared. “Wait. I don’t understand. How could you have talked to her if you don’t know where she is? Did she have access to some sort of comms?”

“No. Like I said, I commune with her.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“I speak to her mind-to-mind.”

“So you’re a Starcaster? You can use magic?”

Bertilak shook his head. “No. It’s just in my nature.”

“Damn it, Bertilak, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

The big alien stood and started to pace. “You don’t get it, do you? I can commune with her because she made it work that way.” He spun and faced Thorn. “She created me, Thorn. From scratch. I didn’t exist until shortly before the Nyctus attacked the Hecate.”

“She . . . made you?” Thorn just stared again. “Why?”

“To test you. She’s obsessed with you, Thorn. Ever since she learned that you’re actually her father, she’s been fixated on you. But she doesn’t understand why you tried to change her.”

Thorn sat down. “I was trying to do what I thought was best for her. If she wasn’t able to use magic, if she was just an ordinary little girl growing up on Nebo—” He ended on a desolate shrug. “I was trying to help her.”

“So you were playing at being a god? Trying to reshape this girl into something that suited you?”

“Says the guy who was apparently created out of thin air.”

“She’s a child, Thorn. You’re not. She doesn’t really understand the consequences of what she does. You do. Or, at least, you’re supposed to.”

Thorn had been staring at the deck between his feet. Now he looked up. “Wait. She created you.” He swept a hand around the bridge. “All of this—a ship full of tech, an alien who understands and can talk about space flight, and smuggling, and arms dealing.” He sat up, suspicion tightening his face. “Why am I having a hard time believing that?”

Bertilak smiled, but it lacked any of his usual humor. “Look around you, Thorn. Look at these controls and displays. They’re meaningless, just nonsense.”

“So?”

“So, I’m made to reflect who and whatever I interact with, especially you. Some of this is taken from your own memories and experiences, which then get filtered through the perceptions of a child.” He pointed at the pilot’s station. “That looks like a control system of some sort, but what it really is, is what Morgan thinks you think a control station looks like. You understand something about some of the Hecate’s control stations, but deep inside, you find them intimidating, even a little incomprehensible. Now, pass that through the mind of a little girl, and you get this.” He sniffed. “It looks very sophisticated and technical, but it doesn’t really do anything.”

“So how the hell do you control this ship?”

Bertilak sat down, facing Thorn. “I just do. It works because it does. Because, just like me, Morgan made it that way. I am the operating system.”

Thorn sighed. On one level, he wondered why any of this surprised him. If Morgan was powerful enough to alter reality, then changing it into one where Bertilak and his ship existed was easy to understand. It was also a horrifying use of magic, one that could have cataclysmic consequences. But, like Bertilak said, she was a child.

On a more fundamental level, Thorn found it all so unbelievable. He was a Starcaster, he’d changed reality himself, but he still found this hard to accept. Maybe it was that the idea of actually creating life from scratch such a soul-shaking thing that he just couldn’t accept it.

Except wasn’t that what he had done? He’d created—okay, recreated—Morgan from scratch. And he’d tried to change her into something she wasn’t while doing it. That didn’t exactly give him the moral high ground here, did it?

It did explain a lot, though. For instance, why Bertilak and his ship seemed utterly immune to magic. It must have something to do with the fact that they were magical creations themselves. And why this improbable ship was able to exist and operate at all. Again, it was because it was a magical construct, which worked simply because it did. Morgan had made it that way.

Thorn finally shook his head. The ethics and implications of all this were massive, but they’d have to wait. “So if you can commune with her, Bertilak, then do that. Find out where she is, so we can go and help her.”

“I can’t.”

“Damn it, you said she was in danger!”

Misery darkened Bertilak’s face. “I didn’t say I won’t. I said I can’t. As in, I’m not able to. She stopped communing with me. I’ve tried to reach her, but she just won’t respond.”

Thorn’s head dropped, his gaze falling to the deck again. If what Bertilak said was true, then she may very well be dead again. And that meant that, for the second time, Thorn had come close to saving his daughter, but fallen short. The realization made his throat hurt, his eyes sting.

“She’s not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Bertilak said.

Thorn’s head snapped back up. “How do you know? You said she’s gone.”

“Again, you’re not hearing me. I said she won’t answer me. She’s still there, she just won’t respond. It’s like trying to talk to someone through a closed door. I speak, but they don’t answer. I don’t know if it’s because she can’t hear me for some reason, or she’s just decided to not answer.”

So she wasn’t dead. Or so Bertilak said, anyway. But if that was true, then it gave Thorn a slender lifeline of hope, one he now used to haul himself back from the brink of complete despair.

“Okay. Okay. So she’s still alive, was in danger, and probably still is. You don’t know where she is, and she won’t talk to you.” Thorn rubbed his eyes. “Did she say anything about what sort of danger she was in?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Shit. If we knew even that much, maybe we could—”

Thorn stopped, struck by a sudden suspicion. “Hang on. You said that she created you and sent you to test me. So the Nyctus attack on the Hecate, the damaged Nyctus ship, the smugglers on Fringe—was any of it real?”

“The first attack by the Nyctus against the Hecate was. I was looking for a convincing way to announce myself to you. Saving you and your ship from the Nyctus seemed like the perfect opportunity. The rest of it though?” Bertilak gave another humorless smile. “That was all fabricated.”

“Does Fringe even exist?”

“It does now.”

Thorn hissed in anger, then shook his head at the enormity of Morgan’s ability. The damage Morgan might be doing to reality was already beyond understanding, but she had no way of knowing that. Like Bertilak said, she was a child. But she was also a child with Thorn’s capacity for magic. She was a Conduit and might be an even more powerful conduit than he was.

She hadn’t ended the universe yet. But she might.

Thorn yanked his attention back from the possible end of creation and put it back on Bertilak. “So how do I know this is real? How do I know this isn’t another test?”

Bertilak rested his hands on his knees. “I wish it were, Thorn. I really do. But it’s not. This was never meant to happen. I have no idea what to do now.” He looked squarely into Thorn’s eyes. “I’m lost. I have no purpose beyond testing you.”

“So what were you going to do when the testing was done? When Morgan was satisfied that she’d learned what she wanted to know about me?”

Bertilak’s face became as cold and empty as the starscape on the viewscreen.

“I don’t know, Thorn. I really have no idea. I don’t think she did, either.”

* * *

Thorn paced the bridge. He couldn’t sit down. He needed to keep moving because it was the only way he could keep his racing thoughts in some semblance of order.

Bertilak sat at the pilot’s station, saying nothing. Thorn wasn’t sure what the big alien was thinking. At the moment, he didn’t care. Or he did, because he felt profoundly sorry for Bertilak, a person created for a specific purpose, but with no history, no memories, no family or friends, nothing. But he couldn’t dwell on that right now.

What Thorn needed was—

“Kira,” he said.

Bertilak looked at him. “What about her?”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Oh. She’s actually been trying to talk to you.”

Thorn slammed to a halt. “What?”

“She’s been trying to talk to you. Or, actually, commune with you, I guess.”

“And you’ve been stopping her?”

Bertilak nodded.

“Why?”

“Because it was what Morgan wanted. She wanted you to be alone with me and never talk to anyone else, except when you were being tested.”

“And you just went along with that?”

Bertilak stood. “You still don’t get it, do you? I did it because I had to. It’s my basic nature to obey Morgan, because she made me that way.”

Thorn had come to accept that everything Bertilak had told him was true. So why doubt this?

“Can you let me talk to her, or commune with her, now?”

Bertilak sighed. “I shouldn’t, because my last instruction from her was to not let you. But she gave me enough free will to do things independently, so yes. Yes, you can talk to Kira now.”

Thorn forced himself back into the seat he’d occupied. “Okay. This is going to take some time and effort. I’m still not back up to my full magical potential.”

Thorn, please answer me!

Thorn reeled under the impact of what amounted to a psychic shout.

Kira?

Thorn?

Believe it or not, I was literally just going to contact you.

A vast flood of relief washed over him. Thorn! Holy shit, finally! Where are you? What the hell’s going on?

Thoughts tumbled through Thorn’s mind. It took him a moment to get them all to line up in something even resembling a coherent order.

Okay. This is going to take some explaining. I need you to be patient and not interrupt until I’m done. Okay?

This doesn’t sound good.

It isn’t, Thorn replied, then took a deep mental breath and went on. I’m on a ship with an alien named Bertilak, sort of—on loan. He is not an actual alien. He’s a construct, wholly made from magical energy and willed into reality by our daughter.

What?!

It’s Morgan. She exists, she has a deep anger directed at me, and she’s in danger. Right now. She created a watcher, and now she needs me. She needs us, Kira, and any anger you harbor will have to wait. I can’t make you forgive me, but I can ask you to see this as what it is—our daughter needs us, and right now.

Silence. Thorn waited.

And kept waiting. He knew Kira was still there, but she was saying nothing. Maybe she had nothing to say. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to Thorn anymore.

I—

It was all Kira managed before she went quiet again. Thorn just kept waiting.

I don’t know what to say, Thorn. I honestly don’t know what to say. This is going to take me time to digest.

I know. Of course it is.

I don’t even feel anything about it. Not yet. I mean, I think I should probably be heartbroken, or furious, or terrified, or wallowing in sympathy for you, but I don’t feel any of that. I’m just numb, she said.

Again, I get it. Kira, take all the time you need—

I can’t. We can’t. I’ve been a toy for the Danzur, who are working with the Nyctus. Everyone is our enemy, Thorn, and for now, I want to put anything from the past—

Can we set it aside, Kira?

Yes. And we will. She matters more. We matter more, and the ON, and humanity. Thorn, we can’t afford a second front. But if Fleet moves its reserves to attack the Nyctus, and they get bogged down, there’ll be nothing to stop the Danzur. On the other hand, if they keep the reserves where they are, then there’s just not enough force available to give us a realistic chance of defeating the Nyctus at all, never mind quickly. And we could still end up fighting the Danzur.

Thorn had to work at not howling in rage at their options, but he calmed himself, if only for a second, and found his voice. So we’re screwed.

Unless we can think of a way of swaying the Danzur. The trouble is, we have no leverage over them. The Nyctus have a hell of a lot more influence here than we do, mainly because the Danzur are awed, even frightened, of their magic.

Thorn started to agree but stopped.

Something tickled the back of his thoughts. There was something there. He couldn’t quite see it, couldn’t quite get a mental grip on it, but it was there, dancing at the edge of his cognizance, a bright solution to their mortal dilemma.

Kira, do you think if we could prove to the Danzur that our magic is stronger than that of the Nyctus, it might change their minds?

Um. She paused. Maybe? I don’t know. How would we do that, though? I’m the only Starcaster here, and there’s no time to get another one here before Fleet’s deadline. I’m good at what I do, sure, but it’s not exactly the stuff of shock and awe. That’s more your department.

I know. Look, Kira, I’m going to sign off here. I have an idea, but I need some time to process how to proceed. It’s—I need clarity and a small window of time, and I swear to you, we can do this. Are you with me?.

Yes, came her instant answer. But I have to ask. What about our daughter? She’s out there somewhere, alone and in danger. That will not stand, Thorn. We both know it. I can feel your connection to her. It’s more powerful than anything the Danzur or Nyctus can grasp.

Thorn shook his head, sick with simmering rage.

We don’t know where she is and have no way of finding her. Meanwhile, the Danzur situation’s on a very short, very fast clock. So we’re going to concentrate on that, because that threatens the whole ON. Hell, it threatens the whole of the Allied Stars. As for Morgan, we’re just going to stay the course we’ve been on since she was born, and trust that her ability is well beyond any current threat. I know this in my bones, Kira, and our only concern is something far bigger than even her.

Bigger than Morgan? Kira asked, tone ripe with derision.

Yes. We have to trust in her control, for now, because if we’re wrong, she can end the universe as we know it.

Thorn?

Yes?

Find an answer. Then, let’s go get our daughter.

* * *

“Why green?” Thorn asked as he settled himself into his seat beside Bertilak.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did Morgan make you green? And big?”

A hint of the big alien’s familiar, infectious grin returned. “I guess she thought aliens are supposed to be green. As for the big part, well, I guess she wanted me to be impressive.” Bertilak gave Thorn a sidelong look. “Did it work? Am I impressive, Thorn?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’m impressed all to hell, believe me, and I’ve moved a fleet with my mind. You are . . . more than impressive, friend.”

Bertilak laughed. It actually made Thorn smile. Since learning about the alien’s true nature, Thorn found himself sympathetic toward him. Bertilak’s story resonated with him. He was someone with no past, only a present and, one hoped, a future. It made him see Bertilak in an entirely different way, through a lens of possibility made whole by the power of a young girl.

“Well, then. You said you had an idea. Might I ask what it is?” Bertilak asked. “Because I assume it’s doing more than just floating here in the middle of nothing.”

“It is. At least, I hope so.”

“Hope so?”

Thorn sighed. “I know what I want to do, but I don’t know if I can do it. I need access to my full magical potential, but I’m still not there. The reservoir is still way too shallow. I need to figure out how to refill it.” He leaned back in the seat. “And I’ve got to do it pretty damned fast.”

Bertilak stared at the viewscreen for a moment, then turned to face Thorn.

“I don’t think this is about how much you exerted yourself, my friend. I don’t think your magic is depleted, and you’re just stuck waiting for it to recover, or recharge, or whatever you would call it.”

Thorn’s gut reaction was to brush off Bertilak’s words and get on with figuring out what he had to do, but he bit back his retort. The alien was effectively made of magic. He may very well have insights that might elude even another Starcaster, even if he didn’t know why. So he just nodded. “Okay. Go on.”

“I think this is about you, Thorn. I think you’re holding yourself back from reaching your full magical potential.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Really.”

“What makes you say that?”

Bertilak raised an eyebrow. “Well, how long has your magic been depleted?”

“Since I tried to bring Morgan back.”

“Tried and failed.”

“Well, apparently not, as it turns out.”

“Sure, but you didn’t know that. As far as you knew, she was gone. You’d lost her. From your perspective, you’d failed her. Failed her again, in fact, because I’ll bet you blamed yourself for not saving her the first time, when the Nyctus attacked Nebo,” Bertilak said.

Thorn sat up. Bertilak was heading into uncomfortable territory, but Thorn resolved to accompany him, at least as far as he could. “I didn’t know she was on Nebo when the Nyctus destroyed the planet. Or I did, thanks to the Vision, but I had no idea she was my daughter.”

“It doesn’t matter, Thorn. You’re an excellent officer, and an excellent Starcaster. But you’re also excellent at blaming yourself for things you couldn’t possibly have known about.” Bertilak shook his head. “Morgan died on Nebo. You blamed yourself when you found out you were her father, even though you didn’t know it. You tried to bring her back, and failed, and blamed yourself for that, even though you couldn’t have known she was the one who stopped you, and that she’d actually survived. And now you blame yourself for not being able to help her, even though you again didn’t know she was alive, and now don’t have any idea where she is.”

Thorn stared into Bertilak’s eyes. He couldn’t deny any of it.

“Am I close?” the alien asked, a faint smile playing on his face.

“Yeah, you are.”

“Believe it or not, Thorn Stellers, you are not responsible for everything that happens in the universe. There are things that have happened that you had no way of influencing. There will be many more things happening that you can’t possibly affect.” Bertilak leaned in, pushing his words at Thorn. “You aren’t the center of the universe, Thorn. Not all events revolve around you. I think that the sooner you accept your limitations, the sooner you’ll be able to start trying to overcome them.”

For a while, Thorn watched the starfield on the viewscreen. It was the universe, sprawled out before him, blackness going on, if not to infinity, then damned close.

“You need to stop blaming yourself, Thorn. Until you do, I think you’ll be stuck here, in the middle of nothing, unable to change or influence anything at all. You’re a ghost. A husk. You look like Thorn Stellers, but you aren’t. Not really.”

Thorn kept staring at the viewscreen. He couldn’t see the Witch Nebula, because it was outside the screen’s field of view. But he knew exactly where it was. Currently, it was off to his right, and down.

It always loomed in his thoughts, hovering on the edge of his consciousness. It didn’t matter where Thorn was, or what he was doing. He always knew exactly where the Witch Nebula was.

And that, he knew, was the problem. The Nebula had become like an anchor, weighing him down and dragging him back. As long as it lurked in the fringes of his awareness, he’d never be able to do what Bertilak was telling him to do. The alien was right. Thorn had to get himself unstuck from that awful moment immediately after the Nebula’s creation, when he knew he’d lost Morgan. Until he did, he’d forever be mired in that instant of horrified realization, of self-doubt and guilt and regret.

Thorn pulled out his talisman and held it against his chest. He focused on the contact between flesh and tattered cardboard, between then and now. Once, he was a lost, lonely, and frightened kid, who only ever found one, true friend in Kira Wixcombe. He scraped and scrimped and dragged himself through life, doing the best he could with who and what he was. You were dealt a hand, and you played your hardest with it, maybe not winning the game, but not losing it, either. You didn’t get to pick the cards, and no one got to pick them for you.

But that was exactly what he’d done to Morgan. He’d tried to stack her deck. Sure, he had the best of intentions, but what did they say about the road to hell?

Magic began to thrum and surge through Thorn’s fingertips, a tingle of potential, waiting to be unleashed. Ironically, it was far more than he needed for what he was about to do.

“Bertilak, I’d like you to start spinning the ship. Get it tumbling at random. As fast as you can,” he said.

He kept his attention on the starfield but felt Bertilak looking at him, puzzled. “Why?”

“Please. Just do it.”

Bertilak hesitated a moment, then fiddled with the controls. Thorn wondered if that was even necessary, or if the ship just did what Bertilak wanted it to. But he escorted the thought out of his mind. It didn’t matter.

The starfield slid to one side, then twisted and slid again. Thorn could feel the Witch Nebula gyrating around him, then above his head, to the left and forward, and now beneath his feet, to the right. He made himself concentrate, instead, on his talisman, his focus, that union of flesh and paper, of thought and substance.

“Faster, Bertilak. Spin it faster.”

The spiraling starfield became a blur. Thorn doubted any other ship could spin and tumble so quickly. Now the Witch Nebula was itself a blur, spinning around him so quickly that he couldn’t track it. He knew about where it was, but that was all.

Time. Thorn reached down through his focus and drew a glimmer of magic up, into it, and back through it. He would use it to change a very small and specific part of the universe. He’d use it to change himself.

Thorn swung his attention onto his smeared awareness of the Witch Nebula, let it rush wildly through his thoughts for a moment, then neatly snipped it away.

He let out a breath, opened his eyes, and looked at Bertilak. “Okay, that should be good.”

Bertilak slowed the ship’s gyrations, then finally stopped them.

Thorn thought about the Witch Nebula. It was still out there, that much he could feel. But he had no idea where it was.

Bertilak gave Thorn a puzzled grin. “Well, that was fun. Mind if I ask what it was all about?”

In answer, Thorn pulled magic from that deep reservoir and launched it into space ahead of the Jolly Green Giant. It erupted in a dazzling display of raw, unfocused power, spangled brightness raging wild among the cavernous dark.

Thorn let it go on, allowing the magic to pass through him and vent into space.

He smiled. He’d plumbed that reservoir deeply but still hadn’t hit bottom.

Not even close, Thorn mused.

“Okay, very pretty, but it doesn’t really answer my question,” Bertilak said.

Thorn ended the effect with a thought and turned to the alien.

“That, my friend, was about listening to the wise advice of a very smart man. A very smart, large, green man.”

Bertilak’s full grin switched on, its infectious cheer illuminating Thorn like radar. “Well, I’m flattered. Absolutely confused, but flattered.”

Thorn put away his talisman, then put a hand on the big alien’s shoulder. “I’m not perfect, Bertilak. I’m just a guy trying to do the best I can. Sometimes, I’m going to screw up. And that’s okay.” He smiled. “That’s what that was all about.”

“You’re a complicated man, Thorn Stellers.”

“The operative word there being man,” Thorn replied. Not a hero, not a god. A limited, imperfect man.

“So what now?”

“Now, Bertilak, we try to save the ON from a war on two fronts.”

“Okay. And how, exactly, are we going to do that?”

Thorn’s smile turned sly. “By scaring the ever-living shit out of someone.”

27

Kira nodded as the last member of the Venture’s crew stepped aboard. Once she was inside the ship, Kira hit the comm.

“Okay, that’s everyone. Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

“Aye, ma’am,” the pilot replied. A few seconds later, the Venture shuddered as she released her docking clamps. Thrusters rumbled in a brief burst as she backed away from the Danzur station, gaining distance before starting to maneuver.

Kira watched through the airlock’s tiny viewport as the docking adapter receded. She saw only swirling motes of frozen air, but no other movement. Most notably, the point-defense batteries mounted on the Danzur platform remained pointed away from the ON sloop.

She watched a moment longer. The view was appropriate. The Danzur fell steadily away, becoming ever more remote. It was a perfect metaphor for their chances of peace with the aliens.

Kira sealed the inner airlock and returned to the cabin. Damien had already strapped in.

“Don’t suppose the Danzur had a last-second change of heart, did they?” she asked.

He gave her a wry look. “If they had, I’d be telling you to take us back and dock.”

Kira nodded, then she sat down and strapped in. She made herself as comfortable as possible, ready to ’cast. The ON deadline was still a few hours off, but Tadrup had made it clear that he considered their departure from the platform to mark the formal end of negotiations. Their diplomatic status should still guarantee them safe passage out of the system and back to ON space, but Kira didn’t trust the Danzur not to try something underhanded. After all, they were supposed to keep her here as long as possible. The Venture, on her own, would last maybe five minutes in a fight with any sort of warship. Maybe. So if the Danzur decided that keeping her here could include destroying the Venture, there wasn’t much they could do about it.

Their only hope would be her ’casting. She’d already decided her best bet would be to Shade the Venture and hope she could maintain it long enough to be able to fire up the Alcubierre drive.

A little deeper in her thoughts was another, far more terrifying scenario. The Danzur were in league with the Nyctus. Suppose they decided that she’d be a powerful bargaining chip, taking her alive, then offering her to the squids in exchange for something, anything, it didn’t matter what.

Yeah, that wouldn’t be happening. Kira had resolved to destroy the Venture herself before letting the squids take her alive again.

“I’m sorry, Kira,” Damien said.

She glanced at him. “For what?”

“For not making this work.” He smiled again, but it was thin and bleak. “In case you’ve ever wondered what failure looks like in the world of diplomacy, well, this is it.”

“Oh, for—Damien, if we’ve failed here, then we’ve failed. Both of us.”

“Eh, you weren’t looking for a career in the diplomatic corps anyway, were you?”

“Not at all. And after this, definitely not at all. I’ll be happy to get back shipboard, where all I have to worry about is being blown to bits.”

Damien laughed, but the pilot’s voice cut him off. “Ma’am, three Danzur ships have just burned hard out of orbit. They’re going to intercept our course in about thirty minutes.”

“Please tell me they’re freighters or something.”

“A light cruiser and two destroyers.”

“Hear that? That’s the sound of diplomatic credentials being revoked,” Damien said.

Kira nodded. “Yeah. Shit. Okay, this is where it gets complicated.” She called up the pilot. “Can you evade them?”

“Been running the numbers, ma’am. Best I can do is delay their intercept by about ten or fifteen minutes. The Venture’s fast, but not fast enough, I’m afraid.”

“Do your best,” Kira replied.

“Always, ma’am.”

She couldn’t help smiling. Even in the face of impending disaster, the pilot’s voice was calm, methodical, and professional. It was just too bad they didn’t have a bunch more of him, aboard a whole bunch more ships.

“So what do we do?” Damien asked. His sedate tone impressed Kira even more than that of the pilot.

“Well, I’m going to try to Shade us. That should make us effectively invisible,” she replied.

“Oh. Well, that sounds encouraging.”

“You’d think so. The trouble is that it doesn’t make us immune to hits. If the Danzur are really determined to take us out, they can just figure out the biggest volume of space we could possibly maneuver through and fill it with ordnance. I can make it so the Danzur themselves can’t see us, even on the sensors. But I can’t trick a missile’s guidance system, because it doesn’t have a mind to Join with.”

“Well, that was a brief, exciting moment of optimism,” Damien replied.

“We might get lucky,” Kira offered.

“Let’s hope.”

The pilot lit the Venture’s fusion drive and started powering her away from the Danzur station, fast. Kira told herself that the pilot was good, the ship was quick and nimble, and she could Shade the ship. All those things together might be enough to get them out of this—

She eased out a breath. Except no, they probably wouldn’t.

“I’ve enjoyed working with you,” Damien said.

She smiled. “Same.”

Damien looked away, then back. “You’re more than a soldier, Kira. Don’t forget that, if your path continues beyond this moment.” He sighed, then gave her a small grin. “I hope it does. This ends my moment of melancholy.” His face brightened, and he laughed, long and loud, his face suffused with unalloyed joy.

“What?” Kira asked, bewildered by his outburst.

“I once had a lady friend who was into restoring and watching these ancient vids stored in archives. Some of them go back a few hundred years. There was one—a really awful one, I might add—that had this line in it.” Damien screwed up his face and made his into a nasal whine. “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

Kira snorted. “I like the sentiment, despite it being a bit before my time.”

“Only one thing left to do now,” Damien said, eyes flickering out at the cruel reality of hard vacuum.

“We wait,” Kira said.

Damien nodded, then sighed. “We wait.”

* * *

“Three tens,” Damien said.

Kira sniffed and put her hand down. “Pair of Jacks. I drew nothing but shit.” She spoke the words, but in a kind of fugue state—Morgan was out there, and even the distraction of cards couldn’t pause the drumbeat of maternal worry. Morgan, we’re coming for you. Kira looked up, schooling her features into a relaxed state.

Damien chuckled. “Okay, so you owe me, let’s see. You owe me one hundred billion trillion credits.”

“Put it on my tab.”

Kira checked the time. The Danzur intercept should be happening in about ten minutes. She raised a finger to Damien. “We’ll have to leave the game there. I’ve got some Shading to do.”

Damien nodded, and she settled back. This almost certainly wasn’t going to do any good, but—

“Lieutenant Wixcombe?” the pilot said. “We’ve just picked up—holy shit.”

Kira sat up again, glancing at Damien. “What? What is it?”

“Sixty-three—no, wait, sixty-eight ships just appeared in-system. Warships, all of them.”

Damien raised an eyebrow. “Kind of overkill for one courier sloop, don’t you think?”

Kira sighed. “I’m thinking it’s the Nyctus. Shit.” They’d have come with shamans, wielding far more magical might than she could ever even dream of.

“You’d be wrong about that, Lieutenant,” the pilot cut in. “It’s the ON.”

She and Damien exchanged another look, this time of disbelief.

“Ma’am, I’ve got Admiral Scoville on the comm for you,” the pilot said.

Kira’s eyes never left the display. “Um. Okay. Put him on.”

“Lieutenant Wixcombe?” The new voice was gruff and snappy.

“Here, sir.”

“What’s your status?”

“We’re okay. Just—” She stopped and shook her head. “Sir, pardon my language, but what the hell is going on?”

“We’re paying a little goodwill visit to the Danzur with the Reserve Fleet. We’d have called ahead to let you know but didn’t really have the time. There’s someone else who can explain.”

“Hey, Kira.”

Her eyes widened. “Thorn?”

“Yeah. I brought some help for your negotiations.”

Kira unstrapped and clambered into the cockpit, peering over the pilot’s shoulder at the tactical display. It was full of ships, led by the massive bulk of the battleship Arcturus, carrying Scoville’s flag.

“Thorn, what the hell? Are you trying to start a war with the Danzur?”

“Not at all. You’ll notice that none of our ships have their weapons powered up or tracking sensors online. Like Admiral Scoville said, this is just a goodwill visit.”

“Ma’am, those three Danzur ships are pulling back. Fast.” The pilot tried to stay as professional as ever, but he couldn’t keep the gleeful relief out of his voice. Kira certainly didn’t fault him for that.

“I’ll bet they are,” Kira said, smirking, but the smirk, like her confidence, felt hollow. Morgan. Again, her name muscled into her thoughts.

Damien poked his head into the cramped cockpit. “Hey, Kira, guess what? Tadrup’s on the comm. He’s rather anxious to talk to us. Imagine that. A chatty Danzur.”

Kira smiled down at the tactical display, portraying the ponderous might of an entire ON fleet. She imagined the Danzur seeing the same thing, and then imagined their reaction.

“What did you tell him?”

“That we’d get back to him,” Damien replied.

“And we will. Eventually.” She grinned at Damien, who returned it.

“You sure you don’t want to join the diplomatic corps? You seem to have an instinct for it.”

Kira shook her head and gestured out the forward viewports. “Nope. Those are my people, out there."

Thorn’s voice came back on the comm. “Kira, Admiral Scoville has been invited aboard the Danzur orbital platform for a formal greeting ceremony. How about I meet you there?”

Kira opened her mouth to say, sure, absolutely, but stopped when the lead ship of the ON fleet caught her eye. It was small, of an entirely unfamiliar design—

And green.

And that’s where Thorn’s transmissions were coming from.

“Thorn, where are you right this moment?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s one of the things we need to talk about.”

Kira nodded, staring at the lurid green vessel. “One among many.”

* * *

Thorn settled himself into one of the sumptuous seats in Kira’s diplomatic quarters, which had been quickly reassigned to her. “Diplomats have better chairs. And everything else,” he added, tapping the chair’s arm as his face darkened. Every moment, thoughts of Morgan intruded into his reality, even though he knew that her power met or exceeded his.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, believe me,” Kira replied.

Thorn had already given her the backstory. While Admiral Scoville met with the Danzur, Thorn had taken her aside and summarized everything that had transpired with Bertilak, the alien that had apparently been fabricated out of magic by Morgan. He’d described how, after regaining his full magical potential, he’d used it to transport himself and Bertilak back to Code Gauntlet, then hastily met with Scoville. Fortunately, he had enough credibility with the Admiral to convince him that the best way to bring the Danzur in line was to show them what the ON could do.

He’d done it by once more moving a fleet, this time right into the Danzur’s system. Without any warning whatsoever, almost seventy warships, including thirty capital ships, had suddenly popped into existence on their literal doorstep.

“You said the Danzur were awed and scared by the Nyctus magic. I deduced that a show of force—the kind that isn’t based on technology—would make them see the light, so to speak,” Thorn said.

Kira stretched out her legs. “I think you succeeded. Hell, having that fleet just materialize like that scared the shit out of me. I thought it might be the Nyctus.”

Before Thorn could answer, the door chimed. Kira opened it, and Damien entered. He stopped when he saw Thorn.

“Lieutenant Stellers, I presume,” he said.

Thorn stood and stuck out his hand. “I prefer Thorn.”

When introductions were done, they all sat again. “I just came out of Scoville’s meeting with Tadrup. The Danzur are almost panting to resume negotiations and get them resolved in a timely manner.”

Kira rolled her eyes. “So, sometime between now and never.”

“Actually, Scoville’s given it one week, and then he says the ON will assume talks have failed.”

Kira’s eyes widened. “Then what?”

“He didn’t say. He didn’t have to. Tadrup assured him a week was more than sufficient.”

“What a little weasel.”

“Tadrup? More like a little bear, actually, but I get the point,” Damien said, laughing. He turned to Thorn.

“Tadrup also asked for a meeting with you. The Danzur would like to meet the man who can move entire fleets around with his thoughts.”

Thorn sniffed. “It’s a little more complicated than that. I might look like I’m all here, but honestly, I’m spent. My nerves are fried, my daughter is, ah, displaced, and every moment I worry that I’ll break down because that innocent girl—my flesh and blood—isn’t here. With us. Where she should be.”

“The Danzur don’t need to know that,” Damien replied. “And as to Morgan, I can’t fathom your pain. I mean that. But for now, I think we’ll keep you a mystery to them. You’re this larger-than-life figure of power and menace in their eyes. It doesn’t hurt that the Nyctus made such a big deal about you.”

Thorn’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“We’ll get to that. For now, I just want to take a few minutes and bask in the glow of this new friendship we have with our Danzur hosts,” Kira replied.

Damien grinned. “Hey, that almost sounded diplomatic.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

* * *

“I understand that Captain Tanner wants you back aboard the Hecate,” Bertilak said.

Thorn nodded. “So it appears.”

“I shall miss having you aboard the Jolly Green Giant, my friend.”

“Oh, you’re not going to be rid of me that easily. I plan on finally taking some of the leave I’ve got coming. I was kind of hoping to spend it with you, if you’ll have me,” Thorn replied.

Bertilak stared a moment, then grinned. “There will always be place aboard her for you, of course.”

Thorn raised a hand. “I’m not really talking about a pleasure cruise here, Bertilak.”

The grin faded. “No. Of course not. We must find Morgan.”

“Yeah, which is why—” Thorn began, then stopped when Kira appeared, poking her head hesitantly into the Jolly Green Giant’s bridge.

“I heard voices and followed them. My apologies for not asking for permission to come aboard,” she said.

“Pfft, we don’t stand on ceremony here. Please, be welcome aboard my ship.”

Kira walked onto the bridge, still wary. Thorn gave her reassuring smile, then turned back to Bertilak.

“That’s what I was about to say. Kira’s going to join us, at least for a while,” Thorn said.

“By all means! Welcome, Kira Wixcombe!”

“Kira, I’d like to introduce you to Bertilak. He’s—” Thorn cocked an eyebrow at the big alien, then smiled. “He’s a good friend.”

Bertilak looked at Thorn, his expression deeply grateful. He held it for a moment, then nodded once and turned to face them both.

“Now then, my friends, we have work to do.” The big alien clapped his hands together. “Where shall we begin?”

Epilogue

For a while, she simply drifted, carried along on placid currents.

As she drifted, she dreamed.

She was once more desperately trying to bring the Pool of Stars into the here and now, so she could refashion the artwork painted on its hull. Una’s Ass would become Morgan’s Ride, a beautiful horse replacing the ugly donkey. Her dream made real, replacing an old image, outdated, crude, and alien. Morgan was a human, and yet, she was not. She was many things, all contained in a small body with a mind that had no limits, just like her power.

It might have worked. She’d gotten so close. She’d almost managed to sever the last bond of time that held the ship in the past. A moment longer, and she’d have succeeded.

But it was in that moment that the Nyctus struck. The massed minds of a hundred shamans, joined in unison, had unleashed a barrage of power through the ether, driving into Morgan’s mind like a spear into flesh. She’d reeled under the assault, but even then, she had managed to hold her own for a time, stunning the seasoned enemy with the sheer depth of her power. The clash of magics sent the Pool of Stars flickering in and out of existence. It had been here, in the present, then it had snapped back to the past, before her power dragged it forward again.

Time itself began to unravel.

And still she might have won the day, except that Bertilak had chosen that most critical moment to contact her, with the news that Thorn Stellers had failed his third and final test. It had only distracted her for an instant, but that instant had been enough.

The Nyctus had driven their thoughts deep into hers, reshaping them in a violent sculpting that was part violation, and part artistry. In the process, their identities merged with hers, the combination leaking across her faltering links to the Pool of Stars. It snapped back into the past one, final time, and as it did, Morgan felt what happened to the crew. As the door of causality snapped closed on the past, and time reasserted itself, she heard them howling in agony, could sense their bodies becoming gelatinous, their limbs becoming tentacles. The comingled presence of her own thoughts, and those of the Nyctus invading her mind, imprinted itself on them.

She could feel their hatred radiating across the centuries, as hot as a volcanic vent.

Morgan knew where the Nyctus had come from, and the reality sickened her.

“Child?”

Her eyes snapped open. The light that flooded them was no longer the comforting blue-green of a womb sac. It strobed an angry orange-red, filling Tāmtu’s depths with a harsh, unforgiving light, like the glow of lava, freshly emerged from the punishing depths of a tortured world. She turned to the voice, her face expressionless and flat.

The same flame-colored lights crackled and sparked along the elder shaman’s body. He’d lifted his tentacles, but there was nothing beneficent about the gesture. It was all about menace, about power and domination.

A second Nyctus swam forward and handed Morgan the doll she’d once called Mister Starman.

“You know who this represents, child, don’t you?”

She stared at the doll and nodded, then regarded her creations. I made you, she thought, giving each Nyctus a searching look. I made you like I made Bertilak. Like I can make a world. Or a universe.

“Now then, child. What is your purpose?”

She looked at the doll a moment longer, then lifted flat, empty eyes to the Nyctus and spoke without hesitation. She was young, but she was not without guile. They would learn.

They would all learn.

“To kill Thorn Stellers.”

Around her, the Nyctus flashed their approval, and Morgan stayed as silent as the depths. Soon, there would be time enough for truth.

But not yet.

* * *

Keep reading to continue the story in SAVAGE TIDE.

1

Thorn sat cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport, waiting and watching, ready to pounce on the Nyctus at the most opportune moment.

The squid frigate had driven herself hard, her drive burning with a surprisingly powerful thrust. Lieutenant Osborne, the Tac O, had whistled at the sight of it, punched at the controls of his station on the Hecate’s bridge, then announced his verdict.

“Thought so. Sir, that squid ship is running at about thirty percent more thrust output than we’ve ever seen before,” he said.

Captain Tanner had tapped his chin. “Interesting. Is it a new drive, or are they just so shit-scared of the mighty Hecate that they’re willing to risk melting their coils to get away?”

“I’d say a new drive, sir. The spectral signature doesn’t match anything in our database,” Osborne replied.

Thorn had watched the exchange with mild interest. The Hecate, a destroyer, had the Nyctus ship outgunned by at least half. He was quite content to leave this fight to the technology and instead stay alert for other threats.

Besides, if the Hecate really needed help, Bertilak kept station not far away in the Jolly Green Giant. Both the alien and his ship were constructs of magic filtered through the understanding of an eight-year-old. That meant neither were fully constrained by physics—nor any other laws of reality, for that matter. It gave Bertilak an edge in most fights, which had come in handy more than once.

It all changed, though, when Tanner finally decided what to do.

“Lieutenant Stellers, I think we’re quite capable of turning that squid ship to scrap if we want to. I’d like to try a more nuanced approach and see if we can take it intact,” he said.

Thorn raised an eyebrow and shifted in his seat—a full-sized one, now that the tight little jump seat he usually occupied on the bridge had been replaced with something adult-sized. In true Tanner fashion, there’d been no fanfare. The day before they left Code Gauntlet on this patrol, the seat had quietly been upgraded.

“What did you have in mind, sir?” Thorn asked.

Tanner waved a hand at the main tactical display. “Use your magic, Lieutenant. See if you can disable them, make them surrender—something that doesn’t involve a gunfight, anyway.”

So here he was in the witchport, staring into the void and waiting for his chance.

He’d reached out with his magically infused perceptions once already but found only a diffuse smear of fleeting thoughts and contradictory emotions. That, Thorn knew, was the work of a shaman obfuscating his awareness of the Nyctus frigate and its crew. He could burn through it, but he wanted to get closer. Greater distance meant he had to push his cognizance further and harder, making his fight against the shaman’s stubborn defenses more difficult. If he became locked in a protracted battle of wills with the squid, they might decide to scuttle their ship. That was exactly what Tanner didn’t want.

So he waited. When he finally struck, Thorn wanted to be able to overwhelm the squids all at once, seize control of them and their ship, and have them shut down their apparently supercharged drive.

The Hecate was gaining slowly, though. He might have to act sooner than he wanted, if only because they were racing toward a pair of terrestrial-class planets orbiting a yellow-white star. Both were surrounded by halos of rocky debris, making them an ideal environment for an ambush. And ambushes, sometimes strikingly complex and meticulous ones, were near the top of the squids’ playlist.

Tanner’s voice hummed through the intercom. “How much longer do you need, Stellers?”

“Like I said, sir, for this sort of thing, closer is better. This far back, I’m still not sure I could seize control before the squids did something drastic,” he replied.

“Understood. You’ve got thirty minutes to—”

Tanner abruptly cut out.

Thorn narrowed his eyes at the intercom but just waited. When a voice once again erupted from it, it was Osborne’s, sharp with alarm.

“All stations, crash action mine! I say again, crash action mine!”

Thorn hastily wove magic around him in a protective cocoon of force, an almost instinctive response he’d perfected with much practice and more than a few mishaps. He preferred it, though, to strapping himself into the witchport. The webwork of straps intended to hold him in place as he knelt in the dark, secluded little space on the Hecate’s prow just got in his way—

A searing flash of light washed over him. Things clattered and banged against the destroyer’s hull, some of them provoking the reactive armor into detonating with deck-shuddering thumps.

“All stations, report damage,” Tanner said.

Acknowledgements rolled in. The mine had caused superficial damage only. Far more impactful were the mines present in this system, which completely changed the tactical calculus.

When the last of the damage reports was done, Tanner came back on the intercom. “That changes things. We didn’t even see that mine until it was close enough to be a threat. Stealthed-up mines means we have to reduce our velocity or risk a direct hit.”

Thorn curled his lip. Changing the Hecate’s flight profile to accommodate the threat of mines meant the squids were going to get away. He knew what was coming from Tanner next.

“It’s now or never, Stellers. If you can’t stop them, then we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, with missiles and similarly lethal shit,” he said.

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Gentlemen, I have a suggestion,” a new voice cut in. It was Bertilak.

“Go ahead,” Tanner said.

“Let me take the lead, clear out the mines ahead of you,” the alien replied.

“Bertilak, even the Jolly Green Giant can’t just shrug off a mine hit,” Thorn said.

“Oh, I have no intention of hitting any mines, believe me. I’m confident I can clear a path for both of us.”

After a pause, Tanner spoke up. “Let’s give it a try. Helm, put us behind Bertilak, and keep us there.”

“Aye, sir,” came the reply.

Thorn watched out of the open witchport as Bertilak’s ship swept into view. Thorn had suggested naming it the Jolly Green Giant for a good reason—it was very, very green. Now, bright as emerald against the starfield, it dwindled into the distance as the alien took station about a hundred klicks ahead of the Hecate.

The Tac O’s voice snagged Thorn’s attention.

“Captain Tanner, I don’t think this is a pre-laid minefield. Even the most stealthed-up mines should have some signature, if we’re looking hard enough for them. But there’s nothing out there.” The tension in Osborne’s voice ratcheted up a notch. “As it was, we only saw the mine that went off when we were almost right on top of it.”

“Well, that’s not good news at all. Entirely undetectable mines could be a game-changer,” Tanner replied.

“Roger that, sir. I’ll keep doing sweeps, but I’m not seeing a damned thing out there.”

“Squids have been busy perfecting some new tech, it seems,” Tanner said.

Thorn turned back to the starfield. As he did, a brief, brilliant pulse of verdant light flashed against his retinas.

“Got one!” Bertilak said.

“A mine?” Tanner asked.

“Yes. Saw it just ahead.”

On impulse, Thorn rested his fingers on his talisman, the old childhood storybook, and closed his eyes. Reaching across the ether, he again ran headlong into the shaman’s magical denial. He ignored it, though, and concentrated on the bits and pieces of thought and emotion that swirled and blurred together. Jumbling it all like this prevented Thorn from seizing on any one squid and taking magical control of it. But that wasn’t his intent—yet.

There.

—another, prepare to drop.

Thorn’s eyes snapped open. “Captain Tanner, there is no squid minefield out there. That frigate’s dropping them in her wake.”

“You sure about that, Lieutenant?”

“Virtually certain,” Thorn replied.

“Okay, then. Bertilak, did you copy that?” Tanner asked.

“I did. If that’s what Thorn believes, then I believe it—”

Greenish light flared again, then Bertilak went on.

“Sorry, detected another one. Anyway, I agree. I think Thorn’s right.”

Tanner grunted his own assent. “Alright. Helm, Engineering, try to squeeze a little more out of our drive. I want this sonofabitch, and those planets are starting to get too close for my liking.”

* * *

“This is as good as it’s going to get, Stellers,” Tanner said. “You’ve got three minutes to stop that squid ship. If you can’t, we’re opening fire.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn gripped his talisman, focused his awareness into it, then merged it with magic and flung it across the ether. This time, he poured power into the Joining, burning through the shaman’s magical defense like a plasma torch through mild steel. The unfocused swirl of mental fragments coalesced into individual thoughts, forming specific, mental beacons unique to each of the Nyctus crew. Thorn latched onto those more concerned with the operation of the squid’s enhanced drive, burrowing into the creature’s consciousness.

Who—no. No, you won’t do this. I won’t allow it!

Wasn’t really planning on giving you a choice, Thorn replied across the void.

He seized control of the Nyctus engineer and spiked a command into the creature’s mind.

Shut down the drive, then lock it out.

Thorn felt the Nyctus rebelling at this seizure of its motor functions. It pushed back, desperate to regain control of its own form. But Thorn’s compulsion, born on an irresistible wave of eldritch power, wouldn’t be denied. The creature’s tentacles danced across the engineering controls, scramming the drive. As soon as it had, Thorn let the floodgates of magical power swing open. He’d take control of the rest of the crew and try to hold them harmlessly in place to await the arrival of the Hecate. The presence of the shaman complicated that, but Thorn was confident he had the sheer power to prevent any squid shenanigans.

“One minute, Stellers.”

Thorn pressed his lips together, dedicating a sliver of thought to speak to Tanner.

“Sir, the squid ship—I shut the drive down.”

“No, Lieutenant, you did not. In fact, the ship has altered course and is now driving directly toward the nearer of the two planets.”

Thorn jammed his full attention back into the minds of the Nyctus crew. The shaman desperately tried to deflect him, but Thorn maintained his focus, shoring it up with yet more arcane power. He could feel the shaman scraping and tearing at it, but he might as well have been trying to claw his way through ablative armor. Thorn swept his attention back and forth through the crew’s minds, determined to find whoever was holding out and bring them to heel.

But it was none of them. Most of the squid crew had no idea what was going on, only that their ship had changed course. It wasn’t until Thorn managed to zoom in on the squid at the helm that he found his answer. It wasn’t who was holding out against his compulsion, it was what. The ship’s automation had been programmed to scuttle it should the drive be disabled or shut down. It was a fail-safe, and one that Thorn only had a moment to undo.

He yanked his perception back from the crew and drove all of it into the complex machine that was the drive. He had to hope the crew’s sense of self-preservation would dissuade them from just blowing up their ship another way while he tried to stop the drive. Fortunately, despite the small sun blazing away inside the drive’s core as helium fused into heavier elements, the drive was a delicate construct. He could force it to scram in any number of ways, but the surest was to cut off its fuel. He let his awareness flicker and dance across the complex infrastructure, intricate systems of systems that kept the stellar power of the fusion reaction both going and in check.

There. Right there. A magnetic conduit pushed a stream of helium-3 into the fusion core. Thorn shifted his focus, becoming a Scorch, using pyromancy to heat up the mechanism. He shouldn’t have to melt it entirely, only force its safeties to kick in. But if he did have to melt it, then so be it.

Something slammed into his thoughts like a tackler during a game of grav-ball. Thorn winced, his Scorch effect abruptly dissipating as his focus broke. He now found himself in a desperate struggle with the shaman, who flung all the power he could into his frantic efforts to stymie Thorn’s efforts to sabotage his ship. Thorn knew he’d eventually prevail, but the fight was costing him precious time.

He finally managed to batter the shaman into magical submission, leaving the Nyctus at least momentarily incapacitated. He swung his attention back to the drive, refocusing his power and resuming his attempt to scram the drive. The conduit heated and glowed red, then orange, then yellow-white. Thorn poured power into it, heating the component to nearly white-hot before the tough, heat-resistant alloy failed. Liquid helium-3 erupted from the half-melted conduit, vaporizing instantly and filling the squid frigate’s engineering section with searingly cold gas.

But the drive still didn’t cut out.

Thorn cursed and drove his awareness deeper into the drive’s guts. It took him more precious time to find the cause. The drive incorporated a reservoir, a holding tank for helium fuel that would keep feeding the fusion reaction even in the event of a fuel stoppage. If he’d found this first and blew out a component downstream of it, he would have killed the drive. Now, he wasted yet more time tracing and attacking the fuel feed system between the reservoir and the reactor.

But it was too late. Thorn felt the frigate shudder, then slew hard to starboard. Terror rippled through the crew as they raced to escape their doomed ship. Thorn cursed again and yanked his awareness back just in time to see another chunk of rocky debris slam into the frigate, gouging a massive chunk out of its flank.

“Shit!”

“I’d take that to mean this wasn’t going to have a good outcome, Lieutenant Stellers, but seeing the squid frigate breaking up like it is kind of gave it away,” Tanner said.

“I’m sorry, sir. It just took me too long to get past their damned shaman.”

“War’s hell, Lieutenant.”

Thorn turned to the tactical repeater as the dregs of the magical power he’d summoned dissipated. The squid frigate was falling through the debris field surrounding the nearest planet, the thickening cloud of rocky fragments tearing it apart. Thorn had to acknowledge the irony of the Nyctus being devastated by high-velocity chunks of rock. But another thought quickly replaced it.

What if he’d rewritten reality? Changed the nature of, say, the squid ship’s trajectory? Altered the universe such that the frigate would simply plunge through the debris field unharmed, or would never encounter it in the first place?

But the question answered itself. He wouldn’t do that. The stakes were far too high.

A bright green flash pulled him from his brooding reverie. “I think that was probably the last mine,” Bertilak said.

“Thank you. You might as well come back on-station with the Hecate,” Tanner replied.

“Will do—oh.”

Bertilak paused, then continued. “The Nyctus have launched a shuttle . . . or a big escape pod. Something, anyway. Seems that some of them might have gotten away.”

As Bertilak said it, Thorn saw the battered squid frigate slam head-on into the biggest chunk of rock yet and instantly disintegrate into a cloud of speeding debris. It would eventually fall into the planet’s atmosphere and turn into a brief, although probably spectacular, meteor shower.

But Bertilak had been right. A smaller craft had just detached and now jinked and dodged among the whirling rocks. It reached the upper edge of the atmosphere and began trailing a glowing wake of friction-heated gas. On impulse, Thorn hurled a burst of magic, infused with his intent to mark and keep track of the little vessel, before it vanished into an almost unbroken expanse of cloud.

He turned back to the intercom. “Captain Tanner, we might not have managed to snag that Nyctus ship, but some of those surviving crew might still be valuable to us. I’ve tagged their ship with magic so we can find it on the surface.”

“Especially if any of them are engineers,” the Tac O put in.

Tanner grunted assent. “I hate settling for second place, but like I said, war is hell. Sometimes, you just have to take what you can get. Alright, Lieutenant Stellers, we’ll put together a landing party and see what we can salvage. Better put your walking boots on.”

“Sir?”

“You’re going down with them. If that Nyctus shaman is one of the survivors, you’ll need to deal with him.”

“Understood, sir.”

Thorn closed the witchport and extracted himself from it. As he headed for his quarters to retrieve his battle-rattle, he thought about the last time he landed planetside to take on some squids. In the space of a couple of hours, he was nearly shot, blown up, squashed by water-magic, and eaten by some of the local fauna.

He allowed himself a thin, dour smile. Maybe this time the landing would be uneventful, they’d find the squids, and everything would just fall into place.

Yeah, right.

Thorn sighed. War is hell, indeed.

2

“So what are we killing?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn jumped, then gave him a bemused, sidelong look. “Ideally, nothing. We’d like to go down there and take the Nyctus who escaped that frigate alive. By the way, how long have you been aboard the Hecate?”

Bertilak smiled. “I just arrived. But I told you I was coming.”

The XO, who was Officer of the Watch and therefore currently in command, shot Bertilak a narrow-eyed look. “You did, yes, from your ship, over the comm. And then a few minutes later, you walked onto the bridge. Seems to me you might have skipped a few steps in there.”

“My apologies. I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect to your fine ship.”

The XO raised her eyebrows, then nodded. The Hecate’s crew was getting used to the big, green alien and his bizarre ways.

Thorn smiled and shook his head. “Anyway, we’re planning on dropping a landing party on the planet to find those squids. Do you want to come along?”

Bertilak nodded. “By all means, of course.” Thorn noted he had to bow his head to avoid the conduits, structural components, and cableways that made up the Hecate’s bridge overheads. It was one of the disadvantages of being almost two-and-a-half meters tall. Ships meant to house humans weren’t built for such massive people.

But Bertilak didn’t seem to mind, mainly because he managed to unerringly duck his head at exactly the right moments. Thorn had never seen him smack himself against an overhead, even if he was walking fast along the Hecate’s corridors. Nor did it really surprise Thorn. Bertilak was, after all, a construct, a being made of magic by his daughter, Morgan, as a way of testing Thorn’s honesty and integrity. Maybe because of this fundamentally arcane nature, Bertilak didn’t seem to slam face-first into his own limitations the way humans—actually, just about all creatures—often did. He always just seemed the equal to whatever situation confronted him.

“Oh. Bertilak. I didn’t even know you’d come aboard,” Tanner said, striding onto the bridge. He gave the crew there an ominous look. “Imagine that, me being surprised by a visitor boarding my ship. What an unlikely thing to happen, or to ever happen again.”

The XO stood, vacating the Captain’s chair and nodding her apology. “Sorry about that, sir. Bertilak kind of surprised us as well when he walked in here a minute or so ago.”

Tanner turned to Bertilak. “You have this uncanny knack for waltzing through our routine security measures. Have to be honest. Makes me nervous.”

Bertilak bowed a little more deeply. “I’m most sincerely sorry, Captain. From now on, I shall make sure to announce myself properly before arriving.”

“Appreciate that.” Tanner looked at Thorn as he sat in the command chair. “Let’s have a SITREP, Lieutenant.”

Thorn wanted to smile as he watched the exchange unfold between Tanner and Bertilak, but he kept his face deliberately neutral. Thorn hadn’t shared Bertilak’s nature as a magical construct with anyone in the Fleet. At least, not yet. As far as anyone was concerned, he was just an unusual alien who exhibited some odd interactions with magic. He knew that would probably be enough for the ON to want to keep him at arm’s length and under careful surveillance, but the big green guy with the infectious laugh had proven himself. Not only had he saved the Hecate from what appeared to be impending destruction, but he’d also been instrumental in moving the Reserve Fleet to head off a Danzur-Nyctus alliance against the Allied Stars. Thorn knew he was still being watched, but he did get a lot of leeway.

Even Thorn wasn’t entirely sure what Bertilak was capable of. Again, he always seemed to be the equal of any situation he faced. Moreover, he seemed somehow detached from reality. Slightly out of sync with the rest of the universe. He hadn’t triggered the Hecate’s proximity alerts or counter-intrusion measures because, it seemed, he simply didn’t know he was supposed to. Now that he did, Thorn expected they would work just fine.

“You know, Lieutenant, it’s customary, when giving your Captain a SITREP, to do it out loud,” Tanner said.

Thorn blinked. “Sorry, sir. Right. So the Hecate’s sensors were able to track the squid escape shuttle until it vanished into the cloud tops. We’d have lost it at that point, but I tagged it with a magical signature.”

“There’s a high concentration of organic pollutants in the atmosphere. Big molecules that seem to be degrading our sensors, sir,” Osborne, the Tac O, put in.

Tanner steepled his fingers. “Source?”

“Unknown, sir,” Osborne replied.

“Toxic? Is the air down there breathable?”

A sturdy woman with a brush cut and an air of stubborn toughness stepped forward from near the back of the bridge. “I just finished doing some spectral analysis, sir. The air might be kind of stinky, but it should be breathable.”

Thorn waited for Tanner to answer, watching the woman as he did. Her name was Moira Hackett, and while she was the newest member of the Hecate’s crew, she wasn’t ON. She was actually a civilian holding the acting rank of a Senior Rating and the title Mission Specialist. She represented the new addition to the ON’s roster—a Scientific Corps. Someone on high had apparently decided that ON ships needed some scientific know-how aboard, so corresponding scientific types were recruited, given an abbreviated form of training, then posted aboard ships throughout the Fleet. Most had been assigned to capital ships, but the Hecate, given her penchant for independent ops, had gotten Specialist Hackett.

“Is the air breathable is not a question I like being answered with should be,” Tanner said.

Hackett shrugged. “Let me put it this way, sir. None of the compounds we’re seeing in the spectral data are toxic. At least, not in the concentrations we’re observing. Still, whoever goes down there should probably do it suited up, just in case we’re missing something, and do a gas test before starting to suck the stuff in.”

Tanner nodded and turned back to Thorn. “Can we get any read on the squid’s landing site? Terrain, vegetation, that sort of thing?”

“Only very generally. It seems to be flat, and wet, and that’s about all we know, sir.”

“Recommend we do some recon before putting people on the ground, sir,” Osborne said.

“Agreed. Lieutenant Stellers, have you liaised with our esteemed Marine Detachment commander?”

“I have, sir. He’s got a squad prepping to go right now,” Thorn replied.

“Okay. Get down there, do what you have to do, then haul your asses back up here so we can be on our way. You’ve got two hours from the moment you hit atmo.”

“Understood, sir.” Thorn looked at Bertilak. “Can your ship even do an atmospheric entry?”

When Bertilak replied, he looked squarely at Tanner and smiled.

“It should.”

Tanner lifted his eyes to the heavens. “Combat ability and a sense of humor. Best crew ever.”

* * *

Thorn watched as the Jolly Green Giant broke out of the cloud base, his talisman in hand, magic thrumming and ready. A flat, desolate expanse of dreary swampland sprawled out below, vanishing into grey mist a few klicks in all directions.

“That looks like a bad case of wet feet just waiting to happen,” Bertilak said.

Thorn grunted his agreement, then turned to the comm. “Mol, what’s your status?”

“Five by five, about two klicks behind you,” came the reply.

Thorn nodded. Mol’s Gyrfalcon carried a squad of Marines, commanded by a grim-faced Sergeant named Twomey. The plan was for them to hang back and circle the landing site, while Bertilak and Thorn did a few flyovers to get the lay of the land. That wasn’t going to be hard since it would be flat and wet.

Thorn let his awareness briefly fall out of real-time and sink into his talisman. He sent it riding a fine strand of magic, letting the tag he’d put on the Nyctus shuttle pull it along. He then immediately ended the effect, just in case the squid shaman was somewhere down there. Thorn wanted to give the creature as little time to react to their presence as possible.

He pointed. “Ease left of our current course. A little more—there. Okay, this should take us right over the landing site in, oh, thirty seconds or so. Mol, you get that?”

“Roger dodger. I’m starting a wide circle to the north. As soon as you guys want me to come in, just shout.”

Thorn made himself relax but kept his perception hovering close to the magical boundary between reality and the symbolic essence of his talisman. If the squid shaman were down there, then this fast fly-past should provoke him into action, or at least let Thorn sense his presence.

Bertilak pointed at the viewscreen. “Right there. Looks like—uh-oh. Looks like an impact crater.”

Thorn watched as the site scrolled past beneath them. Sure enough, he saw an elongated trench had been scoured out of the swamps, ending in a crater already mostly full of water. Metallic debris had been thrown ahead of the crash site in a broad fan shape, while a chunk of hull protruded from the murky sludge, muck dripping from the bright edges of torn plating.

Thorn flicked his thoughts across the wreckage as they passed over it. He sensed no life. Or, rather, he brushed against all sorts of life, which wasn’t surprising for a swamp. But it had the dull, diffuse feel of the most basic and unthinking of lifeforms, not the brighter spark of sentience.

“Shit. Doesn’t look there were any survivors,” he said.

Bertilak glanced at him. “You sure? Could they just be playing dead?”

“I don’t think so. I think they are very much genuinely dead.”

He informed Mol and Tanner. “Suggest you land and check it out anyway. Maybe there’s something useful in the wreckage,” Tanner said.

“Aye, sir,” Thorn replied, then nodded at Bertilak. “Mol, you copy that?”

“I did. We’re on our way in. Once Sergeant Twomey reports the site secure, I’ll let you know.”

“Roger that.”

Now it was Bertilak’s turn to circle, watching and waiting while the Gyrfalcon touched down and the Marines debussed. They immediately spread out, half the squad heading for the wreckage, the other half taking up covering positions. Thorn noticed they struggled to barge their way through the swampy goo, but even so, in less than five minutes, Twomey’s gruff voice rattled over the comm.

“Objective secure. Can confirm, there are no live squids down here.”

Thorn relaxed, tucked his talisman away, and glanced at Bertilak. “Shall we?”

“Indeed we shall,” the big alien replied, turning the Jolly Green Giant through a tight bank and descending toward the crash site. A few moments later, he set the Giant down a couple of hundred meters from the crash site. Mol hadn’t been so bold, just dropping the Marines off, then climbing again and taking up station circling overhead.

“I had visions of getting stuck in all that muck and didn’t really feel like having to dig my poor baby out so she could lift again,” she said over the comm.

Thorn fastened the visor of his helmet closed and checked that the pressure integrity showed green. “Wimp,” he shot back.

Mol snorted over the comm. “Wait, what was that? The sound of someone about to step into knee-deep shit?”

Thorn laughed, then he made his way to the airlock and stepped out.

Sure enough, his foot plunged through the boggy surface, sinking halfway up his calf.

“Well then,” Thorn murmured.

Now it was Mol’s turn to laugh. “What’d I tell you? Not just shit, but knee-deep shit.”

Thorn tugged his foot out of the mire with a wet, sucking sound. “Does that ever bring back memories.”

“Good ones?” Bertilak asked, stepping out into the bog with a mischievous smirk.

“Oh, hell, not at all.” Thorn looked around at the bleak, flat swamp-scape, nothing but greys and browns and the occasional patch of scum-green under the leaden sky. “If I hadn’t joined the ON, I’d probably still be mucking out shitholes not too different from this one. Oh, and Mol? You’re wrong. It’s not knee-deep at all. My knee’s still got a good five centimeters before it’d be submerged.”

“Well, don’t I feel the fool, sitting up here in my comfy crash couch and missing all the mucky fun down there.”

Thorn flipped a finger at the circling Gyrfalcon, then began slogging his way toward the wreckage, Bertilak at his side. The big alien barely seemed to struggle as he moved, and that was despite wearing nothing but a pair of sandals on his feet. His sole concession to the potentially hostile environment was a simple rebreather that fitted over his nose.

And even that much didn’t seem necessary, Thorn thought, seeing as the Marines had all removed their vac-helmets and slung them from their tactical harnesses. “I gather, Sergeant Twomey, that the air is, indeed, breathable?”

“That’s what the air tester told us, sir. Although, before you open your visor, a word of warning. This planet really does stink—literally like a sewer, in fact.”

Thorn stopped and fumbled at his helmet clasp. “How badly?”

“Imagine your bunkmates have been out all night, drinking cheap booze and eating protein tacos. Those same people—drunk, gassy, and snoring—join you in a sleeping bag made of plastic for the next ten hours. Now, imagine the air being made of that.”

“Hey, sounds like you, Buck!” one of the Marines said to another, earning a flung clod of mud for it.

“Alright, Marines, let’s keep our eyes on the prize, shall we?” Twomey snapped.

Thorn wrinkled his nose at the sudden wave of stink that flooded it. “Holy shit—”

Twomey smirked. “I did warn you, sir.”

“Yes, you did. Doesn’t mean I can’t still bitch about it.” Thorn slung his own vac helmet, then slogged his way to the edge of the crater plowed into the mire by the crashing squid shuttle. Bertilak stopped beside him. Thorn glanced down at his feet, or where his feet would be if they weren’t buried in blackish mud.

“Is that—I don’t know, uncomfortable? Gross, even?” Thorn asked.

Bertilak looked down, then back at Thorn. “Doesn’t really seem to bother me.”

Thorn nodded. Of course not. Bertilak was the equal to any situation he faced, after all. And that applied to the Jolly Green Giant as well, which rested on top of the slimy mud as though sitting on a solid pad of blastcrete.

“In any case, I hate to say it, but I don’t think there’s much of value left of our Nyctus friends or their ship.”

Thorn gave a glum sigh. The forward part of the shuttle might be submerged in the swamp. But judging from the amount of debris scattered around, he doubted even that. The chunk of hull that remained sticking out of the brown water was probably all that remained intact.

“Hey, Lieutenant Stellers? Come have a look at this,” Twomey shouted.

Thorn started to turn, immediately regretting that he’d stood in one place for more than a few seconds. The mud now was knee-deep. He squirmed his foot back and forth, the way he’d learned in his previous life as a mucker, breaking the suction enough to pull free. At least the vac-armor boot stayed securely on his foot. More than a few times, he’d left his boot buried in the thick, tarry goo and hobbled with one foot bare back to solid ground. It brought back a vivid memory of feeling sludgy goop oozing between his toes, which made him both shudder and wonder how Bertilak put up with it. Some memories, Thorn concluded, have a weight to them. This was one such moment.

Thorn kept trudging until he finally stopped beside Twomey. The Marine Sergeant gestured at something protruding from the bog a few meters away.

“What is that? Some sort of—whatever those things that hold up docks are called?”

Twomey gave a theatrical shrug. “You mean pilings? Could be, sir. Whatever it is, though, it ain’t natural.”

Thorn nodded. It was a cylinder of some clearly synthetic material, vaguely similar to concrete, with several corroded metal rods protruding upward from it.

“Another one over here!” a Marine called, pointing at another spot about ten meters away.

Bertilak pointed. “And one over there, I think.”

Thorn made a huh sound. “What the hell are they?”

Twomey shook his head. “They’re obviously man-made.”

“And definitely not made with native materials,” Bertilak put in.

“Let me try something,” Thorn said, touching the pocket containing his talisman, then extending a slice of his awareness around them. He tried a few different approaches, finally settling on earth-magic as the best way to suss out these mysterious pilings. They stood out, solid and distinct from the watery sludge surrounding them. Thorn took it in for a moment, then he let the effect dissipate and whistled.

“Don’t keep us in suspense, my friend!” Bertilak said.

Thorn put his hands on his hips. “Well, there are a lot of these things, and by a lot, I mean literally dozens. And that’s only within a klick or so of where we’re standing. They’re different heights, and a bunch of them are buried, but they’re sunk right into the bedrock.” He nodded back toward the wreckage. “That’s what did them in. They slammed into a half-dozen or so of them as they touched down, which kind of ripped them apart.”

“What do you want to do, sir?” Twomey asked.

Thorn glanced around again. “Well, I’d hate to leave here with a mystery just hanging like this.” He reached for his comm. “So, I think we’ll bring down some expertise. Hecate, Stellers here. Request permission to send Mol back up to retrieve Specialist Hackett. We’ve found something we’d like her to look at.”

* * *

Thorn chuckled at the pinched expression on Hackett’s face as she jumped out of the Gyrfalcon. Mol immediately lifted again and resumed circling.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the stink,” Thorn said.

“What a horrifying thought,” Hackett replied, stumbling to a stop and frowning at the exposed pylon a few meters away. “So that’s one of our mystery objects?”

“It is.”

She extracted an instrument from a belt pouch, something that resembled a handgun. Kneeling and aiming it at the pylon, she touched the trigger. A brilliant spot of laser light appeared on the concrete-like surface. She held in place for a moment and studied a small display on the back of the instrument.

“Definitely artificial.” She glanced up at Thorn. “Though I don’t imagine you needed me to tell you that.”

“Uh, no. Worked that part out all by myself,” Thorn replied.

“Well, I can’t tell you a whole lot more. I mean, it’s mostly calcium aluminum silicate, with a bunch of trace elements present.” She thumbed a control on the gun-like spectroscope, then narrowed her eyes. “Some pretty distinctive isotopic ratios, which means it probably originated on this planet.”

“Not from around here,” Bertilak said, gesturing around at the bleak expanse of mud.

“No, not from around here—” She suddenly cut herself off.

“What is it?” Thorn asked.

Hackett held up a hand, thumbed the instrument to another setting, then aimed and fired it into the mud. The results displayed made her go hmmm.

“Are you puzzled, Hackett, or just naturally dramatic?” Twomey asked.

“Some of both,” she replied, standing. “Anyway, it’s not these pylons that are the really interesting part of all this. It’s the mud.”

Thorn lifted an eyebrow. “The mud? Why?”

“Because it’s mostly pelagic sediment.”

“I’d pretend I don’t know what that means, but I wouldn’t be pretending,” Thorn replied.

“Pelagic translates from an old Earth language called Greek. It roughly means open sea or open ocean.”

“Hate to break it to you, but this doesn’t really look much like an ocean,” Twomey said.

Hackett put her spectroscope away. “Not now, no. But it was. I’d say we’re standing on what used to be the abyssal plain of a hydro world. And this”—she swept an arm around—“is what you’re left with when you drain almost all of the water away.”

After a moment of silence, a breath of wind ruffled the thick, reeking air. Thorn finally broke it.

“So where did the water go?”

“No idea. But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with these,” Hackett replied, gesturing at the pylon with the toe of her boot. “Someone’s been terraforming this planet. And whatever tech they used was probably mounted on these.”

“That doesn’t sound like something the squids would do,” Twomey said.

“No, it certainly doesn’t,” Thorn agreed. “It doesn’t sound like the Nyctus at all.”

* * *

Thorn decided to do one final scrying before remounting the Jolly Green Giant and ascending back into orbit. Since he didn’t have to worry about any magical opposition, he immersed himself more fully in the arcane effect, sweeping his perception across the surface of the planet, intending to reach out to the mist-shrouded horizon in every direction. Sure enough, he detected more of the mysterious pylons. Hundreds of them, in fact, roughly arranged in rectangular groups of anywhere from ten to a hundred, each group spaced from five to ten kilometers apart.

He’d have to add that bit of knowledge to the data and imagery Hackett had collected, he thought, and was about to end the effect and clamber back into the Giant when something plucked at his eldritch attention. Whatever it was, it was buried about half a meter deep in the mud, about twenty meters away from Bertilak’s ship.

Thorn looked at that spot, then at Bertilak, who was standing behind him and waiting for him to clear the airlock. “Care to spend a little longer here?”

“Doing what?” Bertilak asked.

“Digging.”

Bertilak cocked his head in a quizzical look but slogged along after Thorn as he picked his way to the spot where something was buried. The Gyrfalcon rumbled a few hundred meters away, Mol using enough thrust to just keep her resting lightly on top of the bog. She obviously saw that Thorn and Bertilak weren’t boarding, her voice buzzing over the comm.

“Hey, sir, can’t help noticing you guys are walking away from Bertilak’s ship. Anything you care to share?”

“Yeah, Mol, just wait one moment. I noticed something here I want to check out.”

“Roger that.”

They reached the spot. There was nothing to see, of course. Thorn resigned himself to retrieving an entrenching shovel from the Gyrfalcon, but Bertilak waved the idea aside.

“Where is—whatever this is?” he asked.

Thorn placed the toe of his boot on a specific point on the sodden ground. “Right under here.”

Bertilak nodded, then he knelt and slammed his hand down into the muck. He felt around for a moment, frowning, before his face brightened.

“Ah, what have we”—he pulled—“here?”

Something caked in black mud emerged from the swamp, dripping brown water as it dangled in Bertilak’s hand. It looked like a strap or belt of some sort.

“Is this what you were looking for?” he asked.

Thorn used a brief burst of magic to confirm that this thing was, indeed, what he’d detected. “That’s it, yeah.”

“Then, unless there’s anything else you’d like to do here, I suggest we both retire to my ship and clean ourselves up.”

Thorn looked down at himself, his vac armor caked with slimy muck nearly up to his waist, everything above that thoroughly spattered. Bertilak was just as grimy, the dark splatters only accentuating his greenness.

Thorn gave a rueful smile. “Yeah, let’s do that.” He looked around, then started wallowing his way back toward the Jolly Green Giant, Bertilak following. “Honestly, I’ve seen enough black, gooey sludge to last me a couple of lifetimes, thanks.”

3

Morgan drifted, residual eddies and currents slowly pushing her one way, then the other. She ignored them and concentrated instead on the battle that raged in her mind.

She didn’t really remember how, or when, but somehow she’d come aboard a Nyctus ship. Now she floated in a large tank of water, one big enough to offer her a great deal of freedom of movement. Still, though, it wasn’t the endless expanse of water that was Tāmtu. After experiencing that, the enormous sprawl of Radiance-lit cities, the vast and empty abyssal plains, and the stupendous depths of a mighty ocean trench, this water tank felt like a prison.

Which is, of course, exactly what it was.

The Nyctus didn’t call it that. They called it protective—er, she didn’t properly remember the word they’d used. Something like custard? Anyway, they’d told her it was protective custard, and that she was only here as their honored guest, but she knew better. She could see further and deeper into their thoughts than even they knew, so she saw glimpses of the real reason they’d taken her away from Tāmtu and her friends.

They wanted to show her the way. To bring her to truth. Some of the shamans who constantly pressed against her thoughts called it reeducation, a word that somehow had a sinister ring to it, even if Morgan didn’t quite know what it was. But it didn’t matter. The Nyctus who thought about reeducation weren’t nice about it. Their feelings and impressions, clinging to the word like spider webs, were dark and unpleasant. Reeducation was something you did to somebody, whether they wanted you to or not.

So Morgan dug in her mental heels and resisted being reeducated.

The strange part was that she wasn’t even really sure why she was resisting. On the surface of it, the Nyctus were still her friends. Even if they now glared with angry light and not the soft, womb-sac glow of the Radiance, they were still her friends. And yet, they weren’t. Something had changed on Tāmtu. In fact, everything had changed.

“Now then, child. What is your purpose?”

She looked at the doll a moment longer, then lifted flat, empty eyes to the Nyctus and spoke without hesitation.

“To kill Thorn Stellers.”

Those were the last words she remembered speaking on Tāmtu. In fact, that was her last, complete memory of Tāmtu. After that, it all became a blur, as a wave of dark compulsion engulfed her. The concerted efforts of a dozen shamans started pressing at her thoughts, trying to reshape them, like they were molding clay. But she resisted, quashing their efforts. She didn’t want her thoughts reshaped. Not more than they already were, anyway. So a dozen more shamans joined in, all of them pushing and shoving at her, constantly jostling her thoughts and emotions, trying to break through her outer shell of denial and dig into the essential core of who and what Morgan was.

They hadn’t succeeded yet.

They’d come close, though, and more than once. Those times, when they’d found a chink or weakness, a stray thought she’d let slip, she collapsed in on herself. She became a hard, compact knot of stubborn defiance, as tough and unbreakable as a pebble. The Nyctus had beat on her defenses relentlessly, but they hadn’t succeeded in breaking her. They’d only been able to influence her most shallow thoughts, the everyday stuff of being Morgan.

She looked at Mister Starman, who the Nyctus had found and returned to her, right after the Radiance changed from comforting blue-green to furious orange-red. They’d wanted her to remember what Mister Starman represented: her father, Thorn Stellers.

Now that was one thing about which she and Nyctus agreed. They hated Thorn Stellers and wanted him dead.

So did she.

* * *

“The human girl continues to resist,” the Herald said, gliding to a stop before the dais where the High Shaman of the Nyctus held court. He assumed a hunched posture, his tentacles drawn in about his body, his bioluminescence flickering with the inconstant pale yellow of subservience. Shrunken like that, he awaited a reply.

The High Shaman said nothing and merely let the heavy silence linger. His counselors and advisors, and all the myriad sycophants that hung about and sought the favor of the High Shaman, all fell quiet.

The High Shaman waited a moment longer, until he was sure that everyone present felt keenly uncomfortable. The Herald became, if anything, even more shrunken into himself.

“So, you are telling me that a collective of our most accomplished shamans, twenty-six in all, are unable to break and reshape the mind of a lone human girl? All of their powers, combined, aren’t adequate for this simple task?” the High Shaman finally said. He kept his tone quiet, and even more menacing as a result.

“I am afraid not, High Shaman. At least, not so far. However, they are confident that—”

“They will succeed very soon, yes. This would be the third—no, wait, the fourth time I have been told that. And yet, here you are, saying just that.”

“She is extraordinarily powerful, High Shaman.”

“And twenty-six of our most skilled and powerful shamans are not?” the High Shaman shot back, strobing bright red with mounting fury.

The Herald flinched back. “She is an aberration, High Shaman. She is the offspring of Stellers, and we know that he is very powerful—”

“I do not want to hear about Stellers and how powerful he is! I want to hear how we are going to turn his extraordinarily powerful daughter into a weapon to use against him!”

“She does despise him, High Shaman. In some way, when he brought her back from the dead, he caused her pain or grief and turned her against him. She is ready to confront him now.”

The High Shaman loosed a blast of magical compulsion that drove the Herald back, wailing with terror. “No, she is not! She may hate Stellers now, but there is no certainty! Suppose she confronts him and chooses not to destroy him, but to join with him? Imagine them working in concert. Imagine how the war would play out from that point on.”

“High Shaman, please—”

“I will tell you how it will play out. We will lose. We will be destroyed.” The High Shaman flickered with certainty. “No. You do not deploy a weapon of such power unless you are absolutely sure it will not be turned back against you.”

The Herald said nothing.

The High Shaman once more let silence linger, but only because he was now thinking. Perhaps the girl’s tenacious resolve went deeper than sheer stubbornness. Stellers was her father, after all. And even if she despised him, the bond of father and daughter might be too strong to easily overcome. She might ultimately be protecting her father on some instinctual level, even if she wasn’t herself aware of it.

So, perhaps an intermediate objective would be appropriate. Something that they could influence the girl to do that had nothing to do with her father. But it must also be something that would allow the Nyctus to assume more control over her.

If they had to subsume the girl to their will in increments, so be it.

“Tāmtu,” the High Shaman finally said.

The Herald edged his way back toward the dais but looked instantly ready to flee. “I’m sorry, High Shaman. What about Tāmtu?”

“The planet remains largely as the girl left it. Our brothers and sisters there no longer conform to our ways.”

“We have been able to influence a few, but the vast majority remain apart from us, yes. The girl changed them, so they are no longer in accord with us.”

“That must be addressed,” the High Shaman said.

“We have considered this, High Shaman. However, the time and investment of effort and power would be huge. We would have to cleanse each individual of her influence. And, because of how she’s changed their nature, they will resist.”

The High Shaman flashed him impatient anger. “I am well aware of this. That is why they must be dealt with all at once.”

The Herald flickered uncertainty. “I don’t believe we have the means—”

“Of course we do. We have the girl. She changed them to begin with, so she can change them back.”

“She seems to consider them her friends, High Shaman. She may resist this as well.”

“Nonetheless, that is my decree. Tell the collective of shamans seeking to influence the girl to refocus on having her restore Tāmtu, to change it back to the way it should be. That will remove whatever bond she might have with Stellers from consideration, and may make it easier to shape her thoughts as we want them. And if that doesn’t prove possible, then she can simply destroy them.”

A long moment of silence hung over the audience chamber.

“High Shaman, that would be—it would be monstrous!” the Herald said.

“Yes, it would. But we cannot allow Tāmtu to remain as it is. It is a disunity among our people we cannot afford to continue.” The High Shaman turned thoughtful. “Indeed, perhaps destroying Tāmtu is a better goal. If we can cause her to do that, then we will be even further along the path of likewise causing her to destroy Stellers.”

The High Shaman thought that the Herald, or perhaps one of the advisors or courtiers hovering nearby, might object. He even found himself wishing that they would so he could vent his frustration on them.

But none of them dared speak out. “I will pass your decree to them immediately, High Shaman,” the Herald said. He backed away from the dais a respectful distance, then turned and fled the great audience chamber. As he did, a hum of restrained discussion rippled among the counselors and advisors and sycophants. The High Shaman knew that they would be digesting this new decree of his, along with his willingness to scour Tāmtu of its rebellious Nyctus. More to point, they would be jockeying, seeking to turn it to some advantage for themselves, or a disadvantage for a rival.

The High Shaman ignored them, as he always did. Frankly, he’d long since become bored with their plots and schemes and insincere loyalties. He remained focused on what mattered: the girl, and their gaining control over her.

If they could cause her to bend to their will regarding Tāmtu, then they would be far closer to their true goal of finally destroying Thorn Stellers.

* * *

Morgan felt the Nyctus come at her again, renewing their determined assault on her mind. And, again, she held them at bay, using magic as an implacable shield against their influence. She felt their mounting frustration, which made her a little gleeful. These Nyctus said they were her friends, but they really weren’t. Served them right to try and influence her, to change her.

She didn’t like it when anyone tried to change her. She was herself, and that was good enough.

In fact, she thought, maybe she should try and teach these nasty Nyctus a lesson—something they wouldn’t forget. She kept her unyielding shield in place but now reached past it, gingerly poking at the thoughts of the shamans massed against her.

So many thoughts! And most of them made no sense to her. Of course, she wasn’t a Nyctus, so Nyctus things didn’t make sense to her. Either that, or she just wasn’t interested in them. She poked around anyway to see what she could learn—

Humans.

Humans. She knew what those were. She was human. Thorn was human. Mommy and daddy on Nebo were human.

But who were—

Danzur.

Nemaens.

Bilau.

Teraghast.

Kezren.

Bits and pieces of thought about each tumbled through the minds of the shamans, some as individuals, and some collectively. They all thought about humans, for example, probably because of her. The rest, though, meant nothing to her. From the context, the way the shamans thought about them, they were clearly each other types of people. She even got fleeting impressions, fragmented images attached to each of them. And these weren’t the only ones. There were more, each a different type of people. The one thing they had in common was that the Nyctus knew about and had dealings with all of them.

Which was interesting, but—

Wait. No, it wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t interesting at all. So the Nyctus knew about a lot of different types of people and had dealings with all of them. So what. Who cared?

Morgan decided to dig a little deeper.

As she did, she started to see cracks in the collective purpose of the Nyctus shamans. Their cooperative efforts to insinuate themselves into her being were true, but also shallow. Not far beneath it, their motives diverged.

This one sought power and wanted to ingratiate herself to the High Shaman, whoever that was.

This one wanted to undermine one of his fellows, who he hated for some past transgression.

This one simply didn’t want to make another mistake because a recent failing of some sort had left him humiliated and desperate to redeem himself.

Again, it was all very interesting, but it also wasn’t. Morgan wasn’t sure how she could use any of these things she was learning.

More to the point, she was tired, and growing bored, and maybe needed to try and find some new friends, ones like those on Tāmtu. She’d begun to miss them. Even through the diffuse, crimson fog of hatred she harbored for Thorn Stellers, she remembered glimmers of that soft Radiance, so calm and comforting.

Tāmtu must be redeemed.

Morgan cocked her head. What did that mean—?

Tāmtu must be cleansed.

That made her frown. The shamans were suddenly all thinking about Tāmtu, and about how—

Tāmtu must be restored.

Or Tāmtu must be destroyed.

Destroyed? No! The Nyctus of Tāmtu were her friends—

No. They’re not. They’re Nyctus. They’re of the people. They were lying to you.

They were not! They loved her, and she loved them!

No, they don’t. They betrayed you. How do you think we found you?

No. No!

Yes. Sadly, it’s true. They were using you. They wanted to keep you from your true purpose.

My true purpose.

Which is what? What is your true purpose, Morgan?

She looked at Mister Starman, glaring at the words ORBITAL NAVY sewn into the patch on his shoulder. My true purpose is . . . to kill him. To destroy him.

Who?

Thorn Stellers.

And the Nyctus of Tāmtu were trying to stop you from doing that. They said they wanted to keep you safe, but really, they just wanted to keep you away from him. And you realize what that means?

That . . . they’re on his side?

You are very bright and perceptive, Morgan. Yes, that’s exactly what they were trying to do. They are in league with Thorn Stellers. They weren’t trying to protect you. They were trying to protect him from you.

Morgan thought about that. It did seem to make sense.

If you want to punish Thorn Stellers, then first you must do something about those protecting him, Morgan.

She nodded. Again, that made perfect sense.

All of it suddenly made perfect sense. And now, she knew what she had to do.

A sudden satisfaction ran through the thoughts of the shamans. That made Morgan smile.

She would do things because she wanted to, not because she had to. Nobody—not these Nyctus, not the Nyctus of Tāmtu, and certainly not Thorn Stellers—would make her do anything she didn’t want to.

Just like that, Morgan realized that she’d beaten the Nyctus. She’d beaten everybody. Thorn Stellers had tried to find her, had engaged in a desperate search helped by Bertilak, and that woman, Wixcombe. She’d known it through Bertilak, her creation, and made it so he couldn’t find her. Now the Nyctus tried to reeducate her, and because she happened to have decided to go along with what they wanted, they thought they’d succeeded.

The Nyctus shamans suddenly loomed over her, their thoughts poised like an avalanche, ready to come crashing down on her. She made herself not laugh out loud.

They thought they’d won.

They were so very wrong. They just didn’t know it, yet.

4

Tanner scowled at the belt they’d retrieved from the swamp planet and wrinkled his nose. “Phew. Is there a reason you didn’t clean this thing off, Stellers?”

Thorn smirked. “I knew you wouldn’t want to subject your crew to something you wouldn’t face yourself, sir.”

“Yes, well, for future reference, that doesn’t include stink.”

The XO laughed. She, Thorn, Tanner, and Hackett stood in one of the Hecate’s open cargo bays, which was now repurposed as makeshift secure storage for their strange artifact. It kept the surprisingly fetid object about as far away from an air-recycler intake as one could get aboard the Hecate. Normally, consumable supplies filled it, but it was now almost empty. It drove home how it was diminishing quantities of food and similar stores that normally defined the length of a spaceflight, not expended fuel or munitions. Or, to put it another way, a patrol would last only as long as the supply of toilet paper did.

The belt Thorn and Bertilak had retrieved from the swamp planet lay on the floor, largely dried out but still reeking of organic decay. Hackett raised a hand.

“Actually, Captain, I’m the guilty party here. I asked Lieutenant Stellers to not clean this thing off, at least until we have a chance to examine it more closely. I was afraid of cleaning away useful information if we did.”

Tanner put his hands on his hips. “Fair point. Okay, so what have you learned about it?”

“It seems to be part of a military harness of some sort,” Thorn said.

Tanner’s eyes narrowed. “Nyctus?”

Hackett shook her head. “No, sir. We know enough about their biochemistry that we’d be detecting some easily recognizable signals if it belonged to them. But it’s not human, either. Or Danzur. Or any of the xeno races we know about, for that matter.”

“The fact you say that with so much certainty tells me you found something on it,” Tanner said.

“We did. Definite bio-signs.” She shrugged. “Remember, I’m actually a geochemist, with a minor in xeno-paleontology. If we find rocks or fossils, hey, I’m all over it. For this, though, we’d probably learn a lot more if we got it into the hands of some actual xeno-biologists.”

The XO looked at Tanner. “Maybe we should talk to fleet about expanding our scientific capabilities and bringing some more specialists aboard.”

Hackett crossed her arms. “Sure. Start with a xeno-biologist. But you’ll also want a geophysicist, an atmospheric scientist, a high-energy particle physicist, a climatologist, a hydro-chemist—oh, and that’s only to deal with planetary stuff. You want to start getting into celestial phenomena, then you’ll need an astrophysicist, an astronomer, a—”

Tanner held up his hand. “I think we get the point, thank you. The Hecate’s full to her bulkheads with people now.” He glanced at the XO. “I think what Specialist Hackett is saying is that there’s no substitute for a full-blown scientific survey ship.”

Hackett pointed at Tanner. “The good Captain is correct. There’s this mythical creature called a scientist that comes up with answers to everything, from molecules to galaxies. Fact is, we’re all a lot more specialized than that.” She looked at Tanner. “I took the liberty of sending a message back to Fleet science. They agree this planet is interesting enough that it deserves further, more detailed study. The Max Planck, a planetary survey ship, can be here in about three days. They won’t come into an empty system sight-unseen, though, so the Hecate would have to hang around here at least that long.”

“Don’t blame them. They’ve probably got some point-defense, and that’s about it,” the XO said.

Tanner stared at the belt for a moment. “Still no signs of squid activity?” he asked.

The XO gave her head an emphatic shake. “None within at least ten light years, according to Fleet intel. The Nyctus seem to be otherwise engaged.”

“Okay, there’s another planet in this system, similar in size and mass to the one we just visited. While we wait for the Max Planck to show up, we’ll go check it out.” Tanner glanced at Hackett. “Meantime, and mindful of the fact that it’s not your specialty, do what you can with this thing.” He poked the toe of his boot toward the belt. “I’ve seen big things, major battles, turn on a single bit of apparently minor info. Anything might be useful.”

Hackett smiled. “Fortunately, sir, and despite what I said, I do have a secret weapon. I can temporarily turn myself into a near-expert in just about any subject.”

Thorn made a huh sound. “How do you do that?”

Hackett grinned. “Crack open a book written by an actual expert.”

* * *

The Hecate broke orbit and accelerated away from the planet they’d given the working name of Alpha. Bertilak followed and now kept the Jolly Green Giant on station about a thousand klicks away.

Alpha. Not a very imaginative name, Thorn thought. There was actually a strict protocol for naming planets and other celestial bodies, but Tanner just wanted something to call these two worlds to distinguish one from the other. So it would take them a full day to make their approach to the second planet, now named Beta, because what else would they call it?

“Beta’s orbiting just inside the inner edge of the Goldilocks Zone, sir,” the Tac O said. “Another five million or so klicks closer to the star and it would just be a scorched ball of rock.”

Tanner studied the scanner data repeated onto the console set into his command chair. He pushed up his lower lip in thought for a moment, but his expression turned to a frown as he read one of the entries.

“There’s even more debris around Beta than there was around Alpha. What’s up with that?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir, no idea,” the Tac O replied.

Thorn had anticipated Tanner’s next question and had already done a superficial scrying of the planet.

“Anything to add, Lieutenant Stellers?” Tanner asked.

Thorn resisted a smile. Tanner might be predictable, but it was a smart predictability, based on routine and results. By asking for reports from the bridge crew in the same order each time, he made it easier for the various departments to be ready to speak up. Taking someone by surprise when they were tired or stressed just threw more friction into an already complex working environment.

“I’ve given Beta a once-over, sir. As far as I can tell, there are no immediate threats. The sense I get is that it’s not too different from Alpha, a hydro-world that someone has drained of most of its water,” Thorn said.

The Tac O nodded. “Sensor data supports that. The specifics are different, but the overall trend is similar to the one we saw on Alpha—”

The blast door at the back of the bridge rolled open, admitting Hackett. “Talking about our destination out there?”

“We are, and I was just about to send for you, Specialist,” Tanner said, then summarized the little that they’d learned so far. Hackett nodded as he spoke.

She was still nodding when he finished. “Well, you’re going to love this part, sir. I did everything I could with that belt, but I didn’t get anything new off of it, unfortunately. So I turned my attention to the samples we collected down on Alpha. Guess what I found?”

Thorn exchanged a wince with Osborne, the Tac O. You didn’t pose a question like to Tanner and on his bridge, yet. You just didn’t.

Tanner managed an admirable restraint, though. “When my department heads report, I prefer not to have to guess what they’re going to say, Specialist.” He ended on a smile that held just a hint of menace. Hackett caught it and shifted uncomfortably.

“Sorry, sir. I found some distinctive organic signatures mixed in with all the swamp crap. They’re Nyctus.”

“Thought you’d said you hadn’t detected any signs of Nyctus,” Tanner said.

“On that belt, I didn’t. These are sporadic hits in the other samples of muck we collected.”

“What sort of hits? What are you telling us here, Specialist?”

“Well, I’d say that there are remnants of Nyctus tissue mixed in with the rest of that organic sludge. It’s mostly decomposed now, so we’re only catching traces of it here and there,” Hackett said.

“You mean those swamps down on Alpha are full of bits of dead squids?” Thorn asked.

Hackett shrugged. “That’s the most likely explanation. There could be others, I suppose, but the good folks aboard the Max Planck should be able to sort it out.”

Thorn looked at Tanner. “Sir, these were Nyctus hydro-planets—emphasis on were. Somebody’s come along, destroyed the squids, then terraformed most of the water away.”

Thorn could feel the discomfort suddenly charging the air. Someone capable of wiping the entire population of squids from two planets, and then completely reshaping their biospheres, was not someone to be trifled with.

Tanner put an elbow on each arm of his chair, then steepled his fingers and touched them to his chin. “Alright. Let’s take that as a working hypothesis. The next question, then, is who? Who did this?”

“Whoever they are, I think we want to get to know them,” the Tac O put in.

Thorn curled his lip in a frown. “They might hate the Nyctus, but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll particularly like us, either.”

Tanner snapped out a single nod. “Stellers is right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.” He leaned forward and studied the slowly expanding image of Beta on the main tactical display. “Whoever they are, they’ve put a lot of effort into terraforming these two worlds. That means they probably have designs on this system and might not appreciate visitors. Tac O, take the ship up an alert level and go active with the sensors. I want to make as much noise as possible, make sure it’s absolutely clear we’re not trying to sneak around.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stellers, you’d better get used to living out of your witchport for a while,” Tanner said. “I want you as ready as everyone else. We only get one chance at a first contact, so if we’re about to encounter somebody new, I don’t want anything left to chance.”

Thorn stood. “Aye, sir. On my way.”

* * *

Thorn idly tapped his fingertips against his talisman and watched as Beta filled ever more of his field of view.

Like Alpha, the planet was mostly shrouded in a veil of thick fog, making it gleam so brilliantly white it almost hurt to look at it. On the surface, though, it would no doubt be as bleak and gloomy as Alpha. Whatever tech had been mounted on those pylons had apparently turned at least some of the planets’ water into vapor and loaded it into the atmosphere. According to Hackett, though, that would only account for about ten percent of the missing water. What had happened to the other ninety percent was anyone’s guess.

The Nav O’s voice hummed out of the intercom, which Thorn kept on the bridge channel so he could stay plugged in to what was going on. “We’re going to have to assume a pretty high orbit, sir. There’s a lot more rocky debris ringing Beta than there was Alpha.”

“Confirm that, sir,” the Tac O put in. “About forty percent more debris, in fact. Must be the remains of a moon or something. Probably smashed apart by whoever, or whatever, attacked this system.”

“Probably part of their terraforming,” Hackett put in. She’d taken up residence in a corner of the infirmary, which was both one of the best-protected parts of the Hecate and the closest thing the ship had to laboratory facilities. “Moons cause tides, and that might have interfered with what they were trying to do to these planets.”

“A moon gets in your way so you destroy it? Harsh,” the Tac O said.

Tanner cut in. “More to the point, another reason to treat this situation very, very seriously, if our unknown agents are able to reduce whole moons to rubble. Stellers, anything to add?”

“No, sir. I’ve tried ’casting around the system to see if I can scry out any sign of either the Nyctus or our planet-shapers. There’s nothing.”

“Huh. So they came here, wiped out the Nyctus on both planets, destroyed these planets’ moons, set up their terraforming gear, stripped away most of the water on both, then packed up and left,” Tanner said.

“Almost sounds like they were more interested in screwing over the Nyctus than actually claiming these planets for themselves,” Hackett offered.

“I like these guys more and more by the minute,” Osborne said.

Tanner wasn’t having it. “Again, Lieutenant Osborne, we can’t assume that just because they’re enemies of the Nyctus, they’re going to be all friendly with us. So keep your attention glued to your station, if you please.”

“Aye, sir,” the Tac O replied, his tone suitably chastened.

Thorn stopped drumming his fingers on his talisman and closed his eyes, once more flinging his awareness into the void. He sensed the nearest of the rocky fragments hurling around the planet, but nothing else. Pushing further, his attention brushed past more hunks of debris, focusing on the planet itself—

Wait.

Thorn pulled back and expanded his arcane view of the space around the Hecate. There was something there, something that tickled the back of his mind with a sudden jab of potential danger. It was diffuse, vague, and hard to pin down. But it was there.

“Captain Tanner, there’s something happening,” he said.

“There are lots of things happening, Stellers. Can you be more specific?”

“Trying, sir.” He swept his sorcerous gaze back and forth across the planet and its halo of debris, then scowled. There was definitely something out there, something that represented a possible threat. But it was just on the very edge of his senses, like catching a fleeting glimpse of something down a darkened corridor. Frustrated, he infused his detached awareness with more magical power, sharpening it.

He sighed. “Sorry, sir, all I can tell you is that there’s something out there, and it’s not especially friendly.”

“Let’s come to full battle stations, power up the reactive armor, and go to weapons free,” Tanner said. A warning klaxon sounded, and Thorn heard distant commotion as the Hecate spooled herself up to her highest level of alert readiness.

“Captain Tanner, Bertilak here. I think I see Thorn’s something. Check out the debris field, pretty much on the equator, about five thousand klicks ahead.”

Thorn glanced at the tactical display repeater. Three red icons had suddenly popped into existence.

“We’re being lit up by surveillance scanners,” the Tac O said. “No targeting scanners yet—no, wait, cancel that. Targeting scanners have gone active.”

“Deploy countermeasures,” Tanner snapped. An instant later, the Hecate trembled as a pair of missiles with decoy warheads leapt from her tubes. They began to burn away hard and fast, broadcasting across the EM spectrum to try and blind whatever was tracking them.

Thorn made himself ignore the sudden thrill of tension and focus on the task at hand. Instead, he focused his attention on the three red icons.

Weapons platforms. Three of the larger debris chunks had been excavated and fitted with missile launchers and some sort of beam weapon.

Thorn bore down hard with his magic, driving his full focus at the nearest of the platforms. Arcane power howled through his talisman, and he shaped it into a potent wedge of force, a massive expression of Hammer magic. It tore across the void as quick as thought before slamming into the fortified rock and knocking it tumbling.

The other two platforms opened fire, a barrage of missiles pouring from both and racing toward both the Hecate and the Jolly Green Giant. At the same time, beams of energy lashed out, two striking Bertilak’s ship, two more locking onto and destroying each of the decoy drones.

Thorn heard Bertilak curse, then winced as a searing emerald flash engulfed the missiles streaking toward his ship, turning them to vapor. The Hecate opened fire in turn, missiles speeding back toward the platforms. Again, Thorn forced himself to stay focused on his own task.

“I’ve got the third platform,” he said, his voice tight with the effort of summoning, shaping, and releasing magical power. He struck the third platform with another Hammer blow, starting it into a fast spin. Thrusters fired, trying to get it reoriented.

“I don’t think so,” Thorn hissed, summoning more magic. He didn’t hold back this time, though, letting the power flow through his talisman and into him, gathering it like drawing a deep breath. When he felt it begin to leak into reality as flickers and bursts of mystical potential, he crafted it into an arcane battering ram, then loosed it at the platform, which had already almost stabilized itself.

The prodigious blast of magical force crashed into his target hard enough to vaporize rock in a searing flash. The impact shattered the asteroid-sized debris fragment, sending chunks of it spinning off in all directions. A second later, a secondary explosion—probably a reactor losing containment—turned the space around the wrecked platform searing white. It faded, revealing nothing but still smaller chunks of rock enveloped in a cooling halo of vaporized minerals.

Thorn gasped out a breath, opened his eyes, and sagged a bit. He needed a moment to recover before striking out at another of the platforms. He’d just thought that when the Hecate’s point defenses opened up, pouring streams of hypervelocity projectiles into space. Onrushing missiles began to die, shredded by the destroyer’s defensive barrage. A few seconds later, a heavy impact thudded the deck under him as something hit the Hecate and triggered her reactive armor. A beam of coherent energy raked across her upper hull, scouring off ablative protection in a shower of glowing flakes and vapor.

Ready or not, Thorn readied himself to dig back into his magic and lash out again at their attackers. He started to let himself sink back into the familiar, arcane depths of his talisman, but another hit on the Hecate, not far from the witchport, slammed him against a bulkhead. On raw instinct, Thorn drove his perception on a wave of magical compulsion out into the void around the Hecate. Another wave of missiles was inbound, only seconds from impact. The point defenses couldn’t stop all of them.

So Thorn did.

He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, hardening his bubble of awareness into a solid shield of denial. In rapid succession, the incoming missiles slammed into it, shattering into spinning clouds of debris as they struck what amounted to a solid wall.

Thorn gasped again, his eyes opening in time to catch a dazzling green flash. One of the platforms, already damaged by the Hecate’s missiles, died to a powerful burst of fire from Bertilak’s ship. The Hecate, in the meantime, had closed to rail-gun range of the remaining platform and opened fire. Although their range was relatively short, the rail guns delivered the greatest destructive energy by far, their depleted uranium projectiles accelerated to fantastic velocities by the big electromagnetic mass drivers. Thorn felt the characteristic thump-thump-thump as the weapons opened up, pouring shots into the last platform. It responded with return fire the tactical repeater tagged as maser shots, and a few more missiles, streaking from whatever launchers remained operating.

Brilliant impact flashes rippled across the rocky surface of the platform, gouging out great chunks of half-molten debris. Thorn steeled himself to dig down into his magic again, but the rail-gun shots finally found their mark. The massive rock containing the platform suddenly split apart, ancient fault lines in the substrate failing. Another missile slammed into the Hecate, and then the battle was just—

Over.

Thorn took a deep breath. Tanner was calling for damage reports and SITREPS on the intercom, and it struck Thorn that the Captain had been speaking the whole time. His firm but methodical voice had been the backdrop to Thorn’s ’castings. And speaking of time, how long had that all lasted?

Just over ten minutes, according to the tactical repeater. Thorn sniffed and shook his head. He felt like he’d just run a marathon.

“Stellers? You still with us?” Tanner asked.

Thorn stared at the intercom for a second. “Oh—yes. Yes, sir. Sorry about that. Big magic like that takes it out of me. But I’m here.”

“Glad to hear it. Good work during the battle.”

And that was it. Tanner moved on to other matters.

Thorn smiled. He’d destroyed one of the platforms singlehandedly, then stopped a volley of missiles from hitting the ship. And for that, he got a good work from Tanner.

But that was okay. A good work from Tanner somehow felt more satisfying than a formal kudos from the Fleet Commander himself.

5

Thorn looked into the void.

Literally. He stood in the Gyrfalcon’s airlock, ready to launch himself into space. Mol already had, and now she approached the rock’s surface, a tether trailing behind her. Once she got it anchored, Thorn would have a lifeline—again, literally—to carry him across to their objective.

“You okay, sir?”

Thorn did an awkward turn in his vac-armor to look at the young man suited up behind him. His name was Habpanowitz, though everyone just called him Hab, and he was a newly minted Petty Officer from the Hecate’s engineering division. Thorn had actually attended a small party thrown for him in the crew mess when he was promoted—holy crap, had that only been four or five days ago?

Thorn gave a thumbs up. “I’m fine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly an EVA enthusiast, but yeah, I’m okay.”

Hab put his helmet against Thorn’s and spoke, using conduction rather than the comm to carry his voice. “Don’t worry, sir, EVAs still rattle the shit out of me, too.”

“Part of your job is working outside on the hull. Hell, I saw you out there helping replace reactive armor modules just yesterday.”

Hab’s reply was rueful. “And I was queasy the whole time. I’ve just never quite been able to get over my void fright. I know it well. That’s how I know you’re feeling some of it, too. You’re giving off the same oh shit am I really doing this vibe that I do.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only to a fellow sufferer, sir. And don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

Thorn laughed. He didn’t think he suffered the old spacer affliction called void fright as much as Hab thought he did, but it was still definitely a thing. The fact that Hab had to deal with it, while still doing his job, impressed Thorn deeply. He pulled his helmet away to give Hab a broad grin and another thumbs-up.

“Okay, ready over here,” Mol said.

Thorn turned back to the tether. The rock that was their destination was another of the weapons platforms. They’d uncovered three more, two of which they’d been forced to destroy outright. Tanner had asked Thorn to try and disable the third one so they could study it. Several deliberate applications of Scorch and Hammer magic in rapid succession had done just that, crippling the reactor that powered the platform and leaving it dark and dormant.

Or so it appeared. Worse than the void fright was Thorn’s lingering suspicion that the thing was somehow playing dead and would spark back to violent and destructive life in a rapid-fire hail of missiles—

“Lieutenant Stellers, sir, I did send out the engraved invitations some time ago. But if you haven’t received yours yet, rest assured you’re still invited to haul your ass over here,” Mol said.

Thorn snapped his own safety tether to the line Mol had secured. “Show some respect there, Wyant. You’re talking to a superior officer.” He pulled himself out of the Gyrfalcon’s airlock and began hand-over-handing his way toward Mol.

“Oh—what’s this? Is the tether coming loose at this end? Oh, no!”

“Not funny, Mol,” Thorn snapped.

“Who’s superior now?”

Thorn curled his lip and resolved to short-sheet Mol’s bed. Or fill her boots with shaving cream. Yeah, that was better.

Although he had to admit that Mol’s sardonic humor helped take the edge off both the lingering void fright and his gnawing certainty this damned weapons platform was just pretending to be dead. He wondered if that had been her point.

Pfft. This was Mol. Of course it was her point.

It only took a minute or so before Thorn’s boots touched the rugged surface of the platform’s rocky enclosure. Hab arrived a half-minute after that. The three of them stood on the rough surface, to the extent that you could stand on anything that exerted virtually no gravitational pull.

“Well, here we are,” Mol said.

Thorn nodded inside his helmet. “Here we are. Well, Hab, you’re up for checking out this tech.” He pointed at a nearby metallic dome, from which the snout of a nasty-looking beam weapon protruded. Thorn immediately regretted it, though, as the motion lifted him from the surface and started him slowly drifting away. He almost panicked, but his safety tether going taut and abruptly stopping him kept him grounded, figuratively and literally.

“Oh, yeah, this is no-g,” he said, trying to sound flippant. “Forgot about that.”

Mol chuckled as Thorn pulled himself back down to the surface with his tether. “Wasn’t that fun?”

Thorn shot her a glare. “A barrel of laughs.”

They spent the next hour slowly moving around, investigating the weapons platform. The rock into which it had been installed was almost two klicks long, far too large for them to cover more than a small area. Hab focused on the tech, taking readings and measurements with instruments clipped to his vac-armor’s harness. Tanner had sent Thorn along to determine if there was any magic involved.

As they closed in on the hour, the maximum duration their air supplies allowed, Thorn had pretty much concluded there was nothing magical about the platform whatsoever. It was rock, and tech, and that was about it.

Thorn hadn’t detected even a hint of any sort of sentience in or around the rocky mass, either, and told Hab as much.

“Yessir, that’s pretty much my conclusion, too. This whole rig is autonomous,” the engineer replied.

Mol, who’d been examining the installation from a pilot’s perspective, cut in. “The missile launchers don’t seem to differ from ours, but these beam weapons are really something.”

Hab, who had maneuvered himself close to one of the menacing-looking turrets, replied with enthusiastic agreement. “Yeah, I concur. They’re masers, I think. Not as potentially powerful as a laser, but whoever built this looks like they’ve got the tech down tight. We’ve got to take one of these things home with us to study.”

“Okay, well, you’ve got a rock hammer, so start chiseling away,” Mol said, and Thorn laughed.

“We’ll be back to pick you up in about, oh, two hundred years.” He said, then found himself looking at the Witch Nebula.

It formed just a fuzzy spot of pale luminescence, partly eclipsed by the bulk of the Gyrfalcon. Most anyone else wouldn’t have even noticed it, certainly not with the naked eye. Thorn did because he had an intimate connection to it. The nebula had been created during his spectacularly failed attempt to return his daughter, Morgan, from the dead. It represented a sort of memorial to good intentions gone very, very wrong.

At least the damned thing wasn’t hooked into his mind the way it once had been. Before he’d taken measures to deal with it, Thorn had always known where the Witch Nebula was. He could be deep inside the bowels of the Hecate and unerringly point to it. That connection had been parasitic, the thing’s perpetual presence in his mind an anchor forever dragging him down into a dark pool of guilt, regret, and second-guessing. He’d finally ended that and restored his powers—his mojo, as Mol called them—in the process.

But he still instantly recognized the Witch Nebula when he saw it, even if just out of the corner of his eye.

Where are you, Morgan? Are you safe? Are you even still alive?

“Lieutenant Stellers?”

Thorn jumped. Mol and Hab had returned from their particular EVAs around the alien weapons platform and were swapping out their tethers for the haul back to the Gyrfalcon. Thorn hadn’t even noticed them approaching.

“Admiring the view, sir?” Mol asked.

Thorn took a final, lingering look at the Witch Nebula, then pulled his gaze away. “Just wool-gathering.”

“Not a good habit to get into in the black,” Mol replied.

“You’re right. It’s not,” he said, following his own tether back to the self-seating stanchion Mol had driven into the rock. He let the work-tether reel itself back into the housing on his harness and hooked up his own safety tether. As he did, he saw something moving against the stars.

It was the Jolly Green Giant. Bertilak had brought his ship in close, only a few tens of klicks away, in case they needed quick help. The Hecate had stood much further off, almost ten thousands klicks higher, maintaining top-cover to the little operation.

He, Kira, and Bertilak had tried so hard to find Morgan, but to no avail. Thorn could only look at the stars and think that she had to be out there somewhere. He didn’t really think she was dead, believing he’d know it if she was.

Thorn caught himself and started after Mol, back toward the Gyrfalcon. Getting caught wool-gathering on an EVA once was a little embarrassing. Twice, and it was a problem, because it took his head out of the game. And when the game was all about the safety of yourself and your companions, that just wasn’t acceptable at all.

* * *

“So their armor is better than ours,” Hab was saying. “Its ablative coefficient is about twenty percent higher than our best stuff. And their masers are way beyond any beam weapon I’m aware of us having in development. Otherwise, sir, their tech seems pretty comparable to ours.”

Tanner glanced around the bridge, where he’d brought Hab, Mol, and Thorn for their debriefing. The Captain preferred to run after-action reviews in the company of his full bridge crew, reserving more discreet and constrained debriefs for only the most sensitive discussions.

“Comments or questions,” Tanner said.

“I have a question. Who the hell are they?” the XO asked.

Tanner leaned back in his seat. “That’s the question of the day, isn’t it?”

“Probably whoever’s bio-markers we detected on that belt,” the Tac O said, but Hackett raised a finger.

“One of the things our ultra-complicated scientist school teaches us is that it’s dangerous to jump to conclusions like that. Unless we find similar traces on components from that weapons installation, we can’t really say that. Oh, and by the way, thanks for the introduction to being aboard a warship during battle. That was loads of fun,” Hackett said, grimacing.

“It only gets more fun from here,” the XO said, smiling.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Tanner leaned forward again. “These aren’t going to be solely our questions to answer. Fleet informed us about half an hour ago that the Max Planck is now coming in company with a flotilla of ships from the Third Fleet, led by the battleship Argus. We’re to hold here until they arrive in two days.”

“Funny how discovering a treasure trove of new alien weapons tech catches the sudden interest of Fleet,” the XO muttered.

Thorn listened as the exchange went on. He’d already made his report, which had been easy. There was nothing magical about any of this. Tanner had asked him to glean whatever residual information he could by scrying the weapons platforms, so that was next on his list—

Thorn?

Kira?

Yes. Hope this isn’t a bad time.

Eh, just in a debriefing with Captain Tanner.

Oh, shit, I’m sorry—

Don’t be. I’ve done my bit. Anyway, we found some really interesting stuff, he said, I think what we found is a heluva lot more important than we realized at first.

More important than—wait, what did you find?

Someone is stealing water from the Nyctus worlds, but only after killing every squid on the planet. We’re talking extinction level events, and they’re doing it with tech I haven’t seen. It’s not far beyond ours, just different, and we don’t know who it is, Thorn sent.

So the Nyctus have another enemy out there? Good, she said, a smugness hardening her tone.

Agreed. But, as Tanner says, just because they don’t like the Nyctus doesn’t mean they’ll be especially fond of us, either.

Yeah. True. Anyway, just a heads up. I just got a call from Damien—you remember him, from the Allied Stars diplomatic corps? Anyway, the Danzur have specifically requested that you, me, and him travel to meet with them. You should probably expect the tasking from Fleet to come through sometime in the next day or so.

Why me?

Oh, maybe because you made an entire armada magically appear on their doorstep? That kind of thing tends to leave an impression.

Yeah, but I’m no diplomat.

And I am?

Thorn blew out a long-suffering sigh, then immediately felt the attention of everyone on the bridge lock onto him like targeting scanners. He’d apparently just cut the Tac O off in mid-sentence.

“Problem, Lieutenant?” Tanner asked.

“Yeah, I know Osborne can be annoying, but you probably shouldn’t be so obvious about it,” the Nav O said, giving the Tac O a sidelong grin. He flipped a rude gesture back.

Thorn looked sheepishly around. “Oh. Um, no, sir. Sorry about that. Kira—Lieutenant Wixcombe—just informed me that I can expect a tasking from Fleet to go play nice with the Danzur for a while.”

Hackett gave a puzzled frown. “Just informed you—wait. Across light-years? You can do that?”

“Be prepared to throw scientific certainty out the airlock when you’re dealing with Stellers here, Specialist,” Tanner said.

“But scientific certainty is what I’m all about.”

The XO offered her a sardonic smile.

“It does take some getting used to, yeah.”

6

Thorn stopped just short of the Venture’s airlock, which had rattled, thumped, and sealed itself to the Danzur station’s docking port. He turned to Kira.

“So, one more time. These Danzur are in love with administrivia.”

Kira smiled. “They eat, drink, breathe, and sleep it, yes. And they’re very picky about it.”

“They put the hyphen in anal-retentive,” Damien put in.

Thorn pressed his lips into a thin line. “So I get to spend time with a bunch of detail-obsessed bureaucrats. Great. I can hardly wait.”

Thorn turned back to the airlock, waiting for the green pressurization indicator to light up. He, Kira, and Damien had spent most of the Venture’s flight here discussing the Danzur and their interests, agenda, and motivations. As far as Thorn was concerned, it hadn’t been especially stimulating conversation. Like he’d told Kira, he was no diplomat, nor did he have any interest in becoming one.

More to point, though, was what they hadn’t talked about. They’d almost entirely avoided the subject of Morgan. After Thorn, Kira, and Bertilak had tried and failed to find her, they’d almost entirely dropped the subject. Thorn thought he knew why. Kira probably believed that she was dead—again—and simply didn’t want to rip open the wound of her loss. Thorn wasn’t convinced, though. He might no longer be tethered to the Witch Nebula the way he once was, but every time he looked at it, he felt—

Something. He couldn’t even say what. But whatever it was, it told him that Morgan was still out there, somewhere.

Which is where he should be. He should be on the Hecate, or with Bertilak, contributing to the war effort. Yes, being here was contributing to the war effort, too, because the Danzur could prove to be valuable allies, or at least kept out of the war. It just didn’t feel like it, though.

The airlock indicator turned green, and the inner door slid open. The Marine who stood guard hit a control, and the outer door rolled aside. The Danzur airlock beyond was already open, with several of the small, bear-like aliens standing just beyond.

Damien took the lead, switching on a beatific smile and striding confidently forward.

Thorn saw why the man had become a diplomat. He was charismatic as hell.

The Danzur greeted them with formality. Damien was a little more relaxed about it, introducing himself, Thorn, and Kira in turn. That told Thorn that he’d probably never dealt with these particular Danzur before. And that made Thorn suspicious. It hadn’t been that long, only a few months since Damien and Kira had last been here. Why had they changed their representatives?

“I am Bundar,” a Danzur with reddish fur and a white blaze on his face said. “Deputy Assistant Undersecretary to the Head Director of the External Relations Secretariat.”

Thorn glanced at Kira. Since I have absolutely no idea what that means, does that make him important?

Kira returned a faint smile. Honestly, I have no idea. We just tend to treat all of them as though they’re important. It keeps them happy.

Ah. Insert eye-roll here.

Bundar and his retinue led the three of them to a meeting room Kira and Damien both seemed to find familiar. As they sat, Damien spoke up.

“Since we dealt with him so much in the past, I thought we might be meeting with Tadrup,” he said.

“Tadrup has been reassigned, but I will pass along your regards,” Bundar replied. The way he said reassigned made it sound much more like punishment than reward, Thorn thought. He only vaguely remembered Tadrup, whom he’d met after he brought the Reserve Fleet here. Somehow, Tadrup had screwed up or fallen out of favor, it seemed.

Thorn mentally shrugged it away. He’d long ago learned that one universal constant, right up there with absolute zero and Newton’s universal gravitation, was politics.

“Please do that,” Damien replied, smiling a smile that at least looked utterly sincere.

Once they were settled, Bundar turned to Damien. “Once again, thank you for attending to our request for a delegation from your esteemed Allied Stars. Our two peoples have come a long way in a short time. Now, though, it is time to start formalizing and detailing our relationship.”

“We agree,” was the answer Bundar got, but it came from Thorn, not Damien.

The Danzur turned to Thorn, stared a moment, then looked back at Damien.

Thorn had to make himself not chuckle. Okay, whatever else he was, Damien was clever. It had been his suggestion to spring Thorn on the Danzur as their spokesman. They’d probably asked for Thorn to accompany the delegation to learn more about him and his capabilities. And that was because they were at least unnerved by him and his ’casting and might actually be afraid of it.

It made him perfect for leading the discussion on behalf of the Allied Stars.

Bundar finally got his mental feet back under him. “We are glad you agree. To that end, we have a request.” His question was directed at Damien again.

“And what would that be?” Thorn asked, leaning onto the table.

Again, Bundar hesitated, caught between talking to Damien and Thorn. He actually did a double-take that made Kira pretend to cough so she could cover up her grin.

Bundar turned to Thorn. “We would request that a formal, permanent liaison officer be stationed here as we work toward establishing full diplomatic relations. To that end, we request Kira Wixcombe be named to the post.”

Now it was the humans’ turn to take a moment and digest what was happening. On the face of it, it made sense. The Danzur were familiar with Kira, and she had probably earned some degree of respect from them. But Thorn, Kira, and Damien didn’t quite trust the aliens, at least not yet. They’d been low-key allies with the Nyctus for who knew how long and, as far as they knew, hadn’t entirely broken off relations with them. They’d even demanded, at one point, that Thorn be handed over to them. Apparently, they’d been planning on trading him to the Nyctus in exchange for—something, but Damien and Kira had never really figured out what.

Even more telling, the only reason that the Danzur were now at the table and willing to talk with any semblance of sincerity was because of Thorn’s brute-force show of strength. When he brought the entire ON Reserve Fleet into existence almost on top of the Danzur homeworld, the aliens hadn’t just been surprised, they’d been utterly stunned. Even the most potent defenses were of no use if an enemy fleet could just materialize wherever it wanted.

And the icing on the cake? The ON had used a similar tactic to obliterate a Nyctus planet before the squids could even begin to respond.

The Danzur were afraid of Thorn, of the ON, and of the Allied Stars. But fear only went so far as a motivator, Thorn knew, before it would twist into bitterness and resentment. And from there, it was only a short step to hostility.

And now, in the midst of all of this, the Danzur wanted Kira to be stationed here, far outside of ON space.

Thorn glanced at Damien, but the diplomat seemed content to leave matters to Thorn, at least for now. So Thorn turned back to Bundar and smiled.

“We’d be thrilled to have a permanent delegation here. We can’t guarantee it would be any individual in particular, but we’ll certainly ensure we send our absolute best people,” he said.

Damien gave Thorn an approving look and a slight nod. Apparently, he was better at this diplomatic stuff than he’d given himself credit for.

Bundar bobbed his head in an enthusiastic nod. “That is excellent news. However, we would much prefer that Kira Wixcombe be a key part of that delegation. She has earned our respect, and that is not easy to do.”

Not without filling out the proper forms, anyway, Thorn thought. But he turned to Damien, tapping his forefinger against his chin as he did, as though in thought.

Damien recognized their prearranged signal.

So he drew in a breath and launched his assault on all that is sensible and true. He began to speak like a diplomat. “With greatest respect, I would like to discuss some key points as they pertain to our acceptable channels of communication, more specifically the method by which we record and disseminate—"

Just a few words in, Thorn knew that Damien was going to speak at some length, without saying anything useful. Now that was true diplomacy, Thorn mused, but it was also the point. It gave Thorn and Kira a moment to Join and converse.

So what do you think this is all about? he asked.

Kira paused a moment before replying, apparently considering the question. No idea. I developed a good rapport with the Danzur, and especially Tadrup. But if he’s on their shit list for some reason, I’m not sure why they’d want me as their liaison.

Have to be honest, Kira. The idea of you being stationed here on your own makes me more than a little nervous. These are the guys who wanted you to hand me over, so they could ship me off to the Nyctus, after all.

Hey, no argument here. I’m not especially keen on the idea, either.

Too bad Damien can’t Join. I’d like to get his take on this, too, Thorn said.

Yeah, the three of us sitting here in silence might come across as a little weird. My suggestion is we end this and head back to the Venture, so we can talk there.

Thorn raised a hand, interrupting Damien while he was in the midst of expounding on the benefits of increased trade and commerce between the Danzur and the Allied Stars, but only with proper documentation in triplicate, of course.

“Excuse me, but I think we need to take some time to consider the request you’ve made,” he said to Bundar.

“That is most reasonable. However, I must emphasize that our definite preference is for Kira Wixcombe. Again, we don’t offer our trust lightly.”

“And we’re most appreciative,” Thorn replied.

“And I’m incredibly flattered,” Kira put in.

They stood, said the appropriate goodbyes, then headed back to the relative security of the Venture.

* * *

The Venture’s airlock cycled closed, sealing the ship off from the Danzur station. As they settled into the common area behind the bridge, Damien started to speak, but Thorn again raised a hand.

“Just give me a minute here, Damien. There’s something I want to check,” he said.

Damien and Kira both returned a puzzled look, but Thorn ignored them. He extracted his talisman, focused his thoughts into it, and shaped them into a magically infused intent. He’d never tried anything like this before, so he was making it up as he went along. It was Scrying, but with a specific purpose.

He let his senses detach and radiate outward, encompassing the Venture. He specifically wanted to find anything that didn’t belong.

There.

During the flight here, Thorn had taken the opportunity to get to know the Venture, to let the ship’s substance imprint itself into his mind. The ship itself wasn’t much different from any of a few dozen more of her class, but each did have its own idiosyncrasies. More to point, the stuff that made up the ship, alloys and composites and polymers, were characteristic of her. It was another facet of contagion, the magical concept that said that things retained a connection to other things. That connection only became stronger over time, so the components and systems that made up the Venture were all closely associated with one another, as well as the ship itself.

But there was something that didn’t belong. Something that had no association with the Venture at all. That could only mean it hadn’t been aboard her for very long.

Thorn focused his attention on the mysterious something. Whatever it was, it was tiny—not much larger than a grain of rice. It was located on a structural component, a horizontal brace reinforcing the bulkhead between the common area and the bridge.

“Thorn—” Kira started, but he lifted a finger.

Thorn focused his magical attention even more, zooming in on whatever this thing was. He altered his perceptions slightly, introducing a component of force magic, keying on electrical radiation. Sure enough, glimmers of current passed through the tiny object. That confirmed it was some sort of electronic device. Thorn applied a minute surge of power—and felt it die.

“Okay, we’re good,” he said, crossing to the bulkhead and plucking the little device from it. He turned and showed it to the others.

“A bug,” Kira said.

“Yup, a bug,” Thorn replied.

Damien scowled. “How the hell did they get it aboard? We’ve got a Marine standing guard at the airlock full-time.”

Thorn examined the little object. It was a tiny metal capsule, with four small, delicate protrusions, like the wings of an insect.

“My guess is it came aboard all by itself. It wouldn’t have been hard to slip it past even the most hoo-rah Marine. Fly it slowly along, right near the deck—if you didn’t happen to look down at just the right time, you’d miss it,” Thorn said.

“But you’ve disabled it now, right?” Damien asked.

“Yup. Tiny surge of power to fry some tiny electronics,” Thorn replied.

Damien grimaced. “So the Danzur will know we’ve found it. This could complicate things right when we need them kept simple.”

“Why?” Kira asked.

“Well, because in diplomatic terms, the Venture constitutes sovereign Allied Stars territory. That’s why she’s registered with the ON and crewed by military personnel, so it’s unambiguous.” Damien nodded toward the little bugging device. “This is a clear violation of protocol.”

“Sure, but again, why? Why say anything at all?” Kira persisted.

Damien gave her a duh look. “I just told you. It’s a violation—”

“Yeah, I get that. But if we say nothing, then they’ll be stuck wondering if we found their bug, or if it just stopped working. Make ’em sweat, I say. Or, well, do whatever the Danzur version of sweating is,” Kira said.

Thorn smirked. “I’m with Kira here. As soon as they realize their bug is dead, they’re going to wonder if a protest is on its way.”

Damien pursed his lips at the bug. “Won’t they just deploy another one of these things?”

“We’ll just keep the airlock sealed, cycle it as we need to. It’ll be a pain, but we can just claim it’s some sort of new directive from Fleet, blah, blah,” Kira replied, then gave a wicked grin. “You can say we require more paperwork to open the airlock, too. They’ll be so conflicted.”

“Well, the Danzur will grasp the excuse that it’s a command directive, and when we act like we don’t understand, it becomes even more plausible.” He held his thoughtful look for a moment. “Yeah. Okay. We negotiators tend to resort to brute force diplomacy whenever we get the chance. But the idea of being sneakier and more subtle about it appeals to me, I have to admit.” He smiled. “You guys are a little on the diabolical side, you know that?”

“Hey, deception is one of the principles of war,” Thorn said, earning a raised eyebrow from Kira.

“What? I paid some attention at Code Nebula,” he shot back.

They did a sweep of the Venture, both magical and mundane, for any other bugs, but found none. When they returned to the common area, Damien voiced their next concern.

“So, about them wanting you to become their permanent liaison. We need to talk about that.”

“Yeah. Like I told Thorn, I’m not thrilled with the idea, I must admit,” Kira said.

“When you told Thorn? You mean using your Joining magic, right?”

Kira nodded, and Damien gave his head a rueful shake. “Being able to talk to someone silently would be so useful in my line of work.”

“Once the ON doesn’t have to suck up every Starcaster we can find for military service, you might get your wish. Anyway, why do you think the Danzur are so especially keen on having Kira here?” Thorn asked.

“Well, it might genuinely be for the reasons they gave, that they know her and respect her,” Damien offered.

“Maybe. But didn’t you say, when you were debriefed, that the last time you were here you found out the Danzur were trying to hold you here deliberately? Because that’s what the Nyctus wanted?”

“Tadrup certainly did, and yeah, it was because that’s what the Nyctus wanted. But I’m not sure if that was something the Danzur as a whole agreed to, or if he was just doing some freelance work,” Kira said.

“Tadrup was into some pretty extensive commercial stuff with the Nyctus. Maybe they leverage him separately,” Damien suggested.

“Which might explain why he got reassigned,” Thorn said.

Everyone nodded, then Damien spoke up.

“So, what do we recommend to the Allied Stars brass about Kira? And the ON? Should she stay or should she go?”

Kira stared at the deck for a moment. “I should stay.”

Thorn and Damien exchanged a glance. “Are you sure about that, Kira? If we recommend against it, that’ll probably be the end of it,” Damien finally said.

“No. But if it stands to help the war effort, how can I refuse? Duty is duty, right?”

Thorn leaned back, sighing. He couldn’t argue with that, no matter how much he wanted to.

But her staying didn’t mean she had to be vulnerable. As his thinking went on, he sat up again. Having her rely on a handful of ON support personnel, no matter how skilled and dedicated they were, seemed wholly inadequate. He just didn’t trust the Danzur.

But he did know what they were afraid of.

“If you’re going to stay, then I have an idea about how we can make sure the Danzur mind their manners,” he said. Damien and Kira both gave him quizzical looks, which changed to a smug enthusiasm by the time he was done explaining his idea.

* * *

“Joining,” Bundar said. “It’s a form of your magic, correct?”

Thorn smiled across the meeting table. “It is. Basically, it lets a Joiner see into your mind. The stronger they are, the deeper and more completely they can read your thoughts.”

Bundar glanced at his retinue of assistants and aides and advisors, but they were already exchanging uncomfortable looks.

“And Kira Wixcombe is such a Joiner?” he asked, turning back to her and Thorn.

“She is. Probably one of our most powerful, in fact,” Thorn replied, leaning back in his chair and letting his smile linger.

“That is quite a claim.”

Kira took her cue to lean forward. “The possibility that what Thorn’s saying is true—and pardon my decidedly undiplomatic language—scares the shit out of you. But you’re also thinking how damned useful something like that would be. In fact, it might give you a major advantage over your nearest rival for promotion, Kindir, because he’s been making noise about trying for the big upgrade to full Assistant Undersecretary to the Head Director of the External Relations Secretariat. And now you’re worrying that I might learn about your, uh, deep interest in—” Kira’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow, Bundar, that’s crazy stuff. Is that even legal?”

“We don’t need to dwell on the specifics,” Bundar hastily cut in. “Suffice to say that I get your point.”

Thorn sat up. They weren’t done yet. He wanted to absolutely seal the deal.

“One nifty spin-off of her Joining is that Kira can speak to me, anytime, no matter where we both are. She could be in another freakin’ galaxy, and we can still talk in real-time.”

“That is difficult to believe,” Bundar said. Thorn’s smile only widened.

“You can believe it or not. That’s up to you. But if you mean to do any harm to Kira, you’d better hope it’s not true. Because, when I find out”—his smile switched off like a switch— “I will rewrite reality into a new one that doesn’t include the Danzur. You and your people will just cease to exist.”

Bundar stared at Thorn, his eyes wide and glassy. Then he turned to Damien, but the diplomat preempted him with a helpless shrug.

“I’d love to help, I really would. But I can’t. You see, Lieutenant Stellers here actually can erase you, to the last person. The last memory.” Damien looked at Kira. “If I were you, I’d make sure she leaves this assignment the same way she arrived. For your own good.”

Bundar tried to project anger. “Is that a threat?”

Ever the diplomat, Damien maintained a bland smile. “From me? No. But my boss might have something to say about it.”

Bundar shot back a laugh that couldn’t conceal his obvious alarm at the idea of being written out of reality. “Who is this boss you speak of?”

Damien stood and turned to leave, Thorn and Kira following suit. But he stopped and turned back, still smiling.

“It’s better you don’t find out.”

7

Morgan scowled at the vast expanse of nothing. She remembered the elder shaman on Tāmtu calling it—

It took her a moment to remember the word. It was a funny one. Abyssal. This was an abyssal plain.

What it wasn’t, though, was on Tāmtu. She wasn’t sure which planet this was. The Nyctus had brought her here, landing their ship on a rocky island covered with lush forest. They hadn’t lingered long, though, before descending into the watery depths of an ocean that covered most of the world. The Nyctus could breathe air, she knew, but only with some difficulty, unless they were using some sort of special equipment. For her part, she didn’t care. Air, water, it was all the same to her.

They’d brought her into a city not too far offshore from the rocky island, another series of delicate spires, domes, and other geometric shapes. They glowed through the murky water, although not with the eye-pleasing blue-green luminance of the Radiance. This city flickered and shone with many colors, from blue to red. And they changed, shifting from one hue to another, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. It was pretty in its own way, but they didn’t linger there. Instead, they wound their way among the glowing spires in a shuttle-car, heading for the outskirts of the city.

Eventually, the Nyctus controlling the shuttle-car landed it on the flat roof of a building that seemed to be just a series of black cubes edged in shimmering orange-red. It had a sinister, even dangerous look to it. She moved to exit the shuttle-car, but the Nyctus with her told her to wait.

Eventually, another Nyctus appeared, drifting up and out of the vertical shaft that opened onto the roof. Morgan immediately sensed that she was old, older, even, than the elder shaman on Tāmtu. But her age didn’t seem to diminish her. If anything, she thrummed with a restrained power. As she entered the shuttle-car, Morgan could feel the magic that imbued her, like rolling waves of palpable force. Whoever she was, she was the most obviously powerful shaman Morgan had yet met. In fact, she might be as powerful alone, as almost all of the shamans who tried to break through her walls of stubborn psychic denial.

Morgan grinned, buoyant and knowing. She wouldn’t be any more successful than they’d been.

“You are expressing happiness, child,” she said. “Why?”

Morgan shrugged. “I dunno.”

The shaman settled herself into place beside Morgan. “You do not know why you feel the way you do? I am surprised that such an undisciplined mind is capable of such amazing feats of magic.”

Morgan shrugged again. “I just think it’s funny.”

“What is?”

“That you think you can make me do stuff I don’t want to do. You can’t.”

Morgan’s flat certainty caused the shaman to pause and flicker with hints of crimson. She sensed the alien was about to say something to her, probably something angry. But she didn’t, her bioluminescence slowly changing back to calmer shades of blue, edged with hints of purple.

“Perhaps an introduction is in order. I am Falunis,” the shaman said.

“I’m Morgan.”

“Yes, we’re well aware of who you are,” Falunis said, gesturing for the Nyctus operating the shuttle-car to proceed. It lifted from the roof of the building composed of those ominous, red-fringed black cubes.

“What is that place?” Morgan asked, looking down and back at the sinister building as it faded into the gloom behind them.

“The purpose is secret,” Falunis replied.

“Why?”

Falunis flashed her amusement. “I was warned that you’re both very direct and inquisitive.”

“What does that mean?”

“It does not matter.”

Falunis fell silent. They traveled on that way, a brooding silence hanging in the shuttle-car. Morgan nestled Mister Starman more comfortably in the crook of her arm and watched the last, most far-flung parts of the city slide past below, finally giving way to crumpled ridges of silt-draped rock.

“Are you aware of the significance of that doll you possess?” Falunis suddenly asked.

“Yeah. It’s Mister Starman. He helps me when I want to do my magic.”

“That isn’t all, though, is it?”

“No.”

“It represents someone in particular, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” Morgan snapped.

Falunis gleamed with a sudden, bemused satisfaction, as though Morgan had just let her in one something secret. She said nothing else, though, and they passed the remainder of the trip in that same, ponderous silence.

The rocky ridges now began flattening out. Eventually, they failed altogether, leaving nothing but an endless expanse of sandy silt. This was the abyssal plain. It went on and on and was utterly boring.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You’ll soon see.”

Falunis said something to the shuttle-car’s pilot that Morgan didn’t catch. The vehicle nosed down and dropped closer to the seafloor. Now it flew across the abyssal plain, the endless, gently rolling expanse of sediment a blur beneath them.

Morgan hadn’t really appreciated how fast they were traveling. The sense of sheer speed was exhilarating, even a little scary. But it was a good scary, and Morgan started to giggle—

Something suddenly loomed ahead. The pilot banked hard, dodging past it. Morgan caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a spaceship of all things, except it was buckled, broken, and half-buried in mud. Another wreck suddenly loomed ahead, and the shuttle-car abruptly banked in the opposite direction. Now the pilot slalomed them among the shattered wreckage of ships. Loose debris lay scattered across the seafloor, sweeping past beneath them. Morgan giggled again. This was actually exciting.

Then, with a lurch—and too soon, as far as Morgan was concerned—the shuttle-car slowed and circled another of the wrecks, before grounding alongside it.

“This is our destination, child,” Falunis said, gesturing for Morgan to exit the shuttle-car.

She did, then she followed Falunis toward the wreckage. There were already two more shuttle-cars here, and another ten Nyctus, including six shamans. All of them were armed with wicked guns, loaded with gleaming, razor-edged blades.

“There. That is the reason we brought you here, child,” Falunis said.

Morgan craned her neck back, looking up at the battered wreckage soaring above her. It was another of the mysterious ships. Whole chunks of it were missing, leaving the interior open to the sea. Morgan even saw small creatures swimming in and out of it, casual flips of their fins as the sea, like always, reclaimed whatever it wanted.

“It’s junk. So?”

“Oh, it’s most certainly more than junk, child.”

Morgan shrugged, then looked around. She saw more wreckage scattered across the seafloor around them. The battered remains of ships and chunks of loose debris sprawled off in all directions, vanishing into the blue-black gloom of distance.

“It’s not. It’s just junk. How did it all get here?”

“There was a battle, many cycles ago. A dangerous, violent group of aliens attacked us. The battle started in space but finally made its way down into the atmosphere of this planet. It raged back and forth across the skies above us. As the alien ships were destroyed, they crashed here, into the ocean.” Falunis gestured around. “So you might say it all got here because of the bravery and determination of my people. It is—do you know what a memorial is, child?”

Morgan shook her head.

“A memorial is a way of remembering some great event, usually one that involves some great bravery or terrible sacrifice. That is what this is. It is a memorial. Many Nyctus died that day, defending their homes. Many of them fell here, too. So it allows us to remember them, and the great deeds they did to save us from those who would hurt us, even destroy us.”

“Okay. But I still don’t get why you’re showing me this.” In fact, she was starting to find it all pretty boring. Was that their plan? They couldn’t force her to do the things they wanted her to, so they were just going to bore her until she gave into them?

Morgan chuckled.

“You find something amusing, child?” Falunis asked.

“No,” Morgan said, trying to smooth her face into a serious expression. When they brought her here, the Nyctus had promised they wouldn’t try to see into her thoughts, if she promised to not do anything bad to them in return. But they didn’t have to see into her thoughts to know she was lying about finding it funny because she couldn’t stop herself from snickering again.

Falunis flickered harshly with annoyance. “It is disrespectful to behave this way in a sacred place.”

Morgan’s momentary flash of humor drained away. “You still haven’t said why you brought me here.”

Falunis stared at Morgan for a moment with bulbous eyes, then waved a tentacle at the nearby wreck. “I said this was a memorial. This particular wrecked ship is something else. It’s a miracle.”

Morgan turned and looked up at the smashed hull towering over her. “It just looks like junk to me.”

“Child, reach out to all around you. Feel their minds.”

“Why?”

There was another brief glimmer of irritation, but Falunis quickly smoothed it away into a more calm and controlled display of bioluminescent patience.

“Just indulge me, child. Reach out and feel all of those present around you.”

Morgan sighed and did. She let her consciousness spread from her, expanding her sense of things the way looking through Daddy’s telescope back on Nebo let her see other planets and stars and things much more clearly. Her awareness touched Falunis, whose mind was carefully closed off to her, as though hidden behind a stout wall. And there were the other shamans, and the Nyctus with them, and—

Morgan yanked her consciousness back into herself, then turned and looked at the wreck, her eyes going wide.

“There’s someone inside there!”

“That’s the miracle of this, child. One of our enemies survived, against all odds, even as the remains of its ship settled here, onto the sea floor. We found it barely alive. However, alive it was.”

“So why don’t you get it out of there and help it?”

Falunis gleamed with a display of cold smugness. “Why should we? It and its kind attacked us. We owe it nothing.”

“But you can’t just let it stay in there. It’ll die!”

“We’re making sure that doesn’t happen.” Falunis drifted to within reach of the wreckage and brushed a tentacle along the cold, hard metal, pitted and corroded. “We give it what it needs to survive—air, food, fresh water.” She turned back to Morgan. “Oh, and the will to live, of course. We have told it that, eventually, we will release it and return it to its people, as part of a larger peace agreement with them.”

“So do that!” Morgan moved beside Falunis and touched the cold hardness of the broken hull with her fingers. “It’s so scared and lonely.”

“It is, isn’t it? In any case, returning it to its people wouldn’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re all dead. We killed them all.”

Morgan stared at Falunis for a moment. She didn’t understand. You couldn’t kill everyone.

Could you?

Morgan looked at the old hull, then back to Falunis. She could still feel the desperate loneliness of the creature trapped inside the crashed ship. The—

—constant, gnawing fear. Huddled in the chill darkness, not knowing if or when you would ever be free. That distant speck of hope that you might be, but not really believing that. Sheer terror every time the battered hull creaked or snapped or groaned, and this might be the instant the stressed and corroded metal finally fails under the weight of water and time. Would you feel anything if it did? Would you die instantly, or would it be obscenely slow and painful, an awful, miserable ending to an awful, miserable existence—

Morgan again yanked herself back out of the trapped alien’s thoughts. She spun on Falunis.

“You’re so bad. You’re not like my friends on Tāmtu at all. I hate you!”

Falunis didn’t flinch. “Why? Why do you hate us?”

“Because you do stuff like this!” She pointed at the wreckage. “That’s so bad, so—it’s—it’s—evil.” That was the word. Even speaking it was bitter, but it was the right word.

“These creatures attacked us, child. They killed many of our people. They killed many of our young. What were we supposed to do? Try to be their friends?”

“Yes!”

“We tried. We reached out to them. Their answer was to attack us again.”

Morgan looked back at the looming hulk.

“They were dangerous and violent. They kept attacking us. If we hadn’t done what we did and destroyed them, then I might be the one trapped in a broken ship like this, on one of their worlds,” Falunis said.

Morgan pressed her lips together. Falunis was somehow managing to sound so reasonable about it all. Almost sad, like the Nyctus had no choice. That they wanted to be friendly and peaceful, but these aliens wouldn’t have it.

They were just protecting themselves.

“Isn’t that what you’ve been doing, child? Just protecting yourself? From Thorn Stellers? From us?”

Morgan turned back abruptly. “You’re not supposed to be in my head! You promised!”

Falunis raised a tentacle. “You are right, child, and I apologize. I only wanted to ensure that you were okay. I know this is very distressing.”

Morgan once again turned to the wreckage, but she looked at Falunis sidelong. She said she wanted to make sure Morgan was okay. Morgan almost believed that. Almost.

And then it was so clear. The Nyctus weren’t one people, but two. The ones on Tāmtu, the Radiants, were her friends. They were nice. They were kind and thoughtful and would never keep a creature so horribly imprisoned like this. These ones, though, were the Monsters. They were mean and nasty, cruel, and vicious. They weren’t her friends at all.

Morgan already knew where the Nyctus had come from. She’d accidentally caused them to be made when she tried and failed to bring the old Earth ship, the Pool of Stars, from the past and into the present. She didn’t really understand it very well, but doing that made the Nyctus, and now here they were.

And she knew why there were the Monsters and the Radiants, too. That had also been her doing. She’d made the Nyctus of Tāmtu into the Radiants, so they’d be her friends and protect her.

Maybe she should do that again. Maybe she should make these Nyctus, these Monsters, into Radiants, too. Make them all her friends. Then they wouldn’t do terrible things like this, like keeping this poor creature imprisoned this way.

“I am curious, child. Why do you hate Thorn Stellers so much?” Falunis suddenly asked.

“I—what?” Morgan scowled at the abrupt and unexpected question.

“It is a simple question, child. Why do you hate Thorn Stellers so much? I have been told that you do, but I don’t know why.”

“Because he doesn’t like me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He tried to change me. He wanted to make me into something else, something I’m not.”

“And you don’t believe that’s right? Trying to change something into something it’s not?”

“Well, no! That’s not right at all! Everyone is how they are,” Morgan said, nodding with a firm smile. She wasn’t just convinced of the rightness of her words, she was also proud of how grown-up they sounded.

“Child, what happened to the Nyctus on Tāmtu? How did they become your friends, as you call them? Were they your friends from the moment you arrived there?”

“No, I had to change—” Morgan said, then stopped.

She’d changed them. She’d made them into the Radiants. She’d made them into her friends.

She’d made the Nyctus from the people aboard the Pool of Stars.

“Is someone really your friend if you force them to be?” Falunis asked quietly.

Morgan stared at the broken hull.

“Child—?”

“No! They’re not!” Morgan said, a thick sob choking off her voice. For a while, she just cried. This was suddenly all so confusing. Just like that, Morgan wasn’t sure what to think.

Falunis’s voice became even softer. “Child, it is the things that you say, and that you do, that will convince someone to be their friend.”

Morgan sobbed and shrugged.

“Would you like us to be friends? All of the Nyctus, and not just the ones on Tāmtu? Your real and true friends?”

She shrugged again and just stared at the nearby hull, which was all that separated the lonely alien from the freezing crush of water around it. These were Monsters. She didn’t want Monsters to be her friends.

But—if she did become their friend, then would they still be Monsters?

Morgan suddenly felt as lost and alone as the alien trapped on the other side of the battered hull. She did want to have Falunis and the other Nyctus as friends. She wanted somebody, anybody, to be her friend right now.

Falunis just waited. Morgan finally turned to her. “I would like you to be my friends,” she said.

Falunis flashed with satisfaction. “Very well. Then all you have to do is prove to us that you’ll help us, by keeping us safe. And then we’ll keep you safe in turn.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Falunis gestured at the ship. “We would like you to kill the creature inside there. As long as it’s alive, their threat will never truly be gone.”

Morgan gaped for a moment, then shook her head so hard it almost made her start spinning around. “No! I won’t do that!”

“So you don’t care about us, after all. You really don’t want us to be friends,” Falunis said sadly.

“No, I do! But I don’t want to hurt anyone. Besides, how can the alien inside there still be a threat? He’s all alone, and so scared—”

“Which is why he’s a threat. Even though all of his people are dead, we still can’t release him. If we did, he could come back someday and do terrible harm to our people. Imagine if he found Thorn Stellers.”

Morgan glared at Falunis. “I want us to be friends, but not like that! I won’t kill him just because you’re afraid of him! He can’t even hurt you!”

Falunis sagged slightly. “I was afraid you would say that. I’d hoped you wouldn’t, but here we are.” She seemed to think for a moment, then flicked her tentacles and moved away, toward the closest of the Nyctus armed with one of the wicked-looking guns. “Well, if you won’t do this, then I will. It would be cruel to let the poor creature continue suffering so.” She took the gun from the Nyctus and aimed it at the wreckage.

Morgan swam toward her. “No! Don’t!”

“I’m sorry, child, but all actions have consequences. We offered you friendship, if you did this one little thing for us. You’ve chosen not to. You’re prepared to let this creature go on living in the cold and darkness. Frankly, I don’t know that I’d want someone who would do that as a friend, anyway.”

Before Morgan could move or speak, Falunis fired the gun. A stream of projectiles erupted from it with a sharp, staccato popping noise as their passage ripped open cavities in the water, which instantly collapsed with a snap.

Morgan winced as a terrific clanging slammed through the water in ear-splitting waves. She tried to scream out, to get Falunis to stop, but her voice vanished into the terrible noise of the gun. Chunks of corroded metal were flung in all directions from the impact. Finally, the repeated hammer blows breached the hull, allowing water to thunder inside.

Morgan heard the creature scream in her head.

It went on and on, and Morgan wailed in response, appalled at the raw, desolate terror emanating from the trapped alien. Then a heavy boom shuddered through the wreck, a whole section of the hull around the ragged hole imploded, and that terrible shriek cut suddenly off.

A thick, ponderous silence fell, broken only but the rushing burble of air escaping the shattered wreckage and bubbling up toward the distant surface of the ocean.

Morgan balled her fists. “Why did you do that?”

All of the Nyctus except Falunis raised their guns and trained them on Morgan. At the same time, the shamans flung up a wall of magical defense.

Falunis, though, just drifted calmly back toward Morgan.

“I did that, child, because it needed to be done, and you wouldn’t,” Falunis said.

“You didn’t need to,” Morgan said, her voice almost a hiss.

“Oh, but I did. As I said, the poor creature couldn’t go on like that. But the real tragedy here is that you rejected us. We asked you to show us that you wanted us to be friends, and you refused. So you forced me to do what had to be done.” Falunis’s voice had become slower and sadder as she spoke.

Morgan’s eyes stung, and her throat became a hurtful lump.

Falunis flashed with the somber colors of regret. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave us many choices. We tried the hard way, trying to force you, and not only did that not work, but it was wrong. We know that now. So, we tried this way, giving you a chance to prove that your desire to be friends with us is true. That hasn’t worked, either. So, now we’ll have to try the final way.” Falunis lifted the weapon slightly, not aiming it at Morgan, but close to her.

Morgan pushed her voice past that hard, painful knot stuck in her throat. “And what if that doesn’t work?”

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

8

It was good to be back on the Hecate, Thorn thought. Good for him, anyway. His sojourn with the Danzur had been an unwelcome distraction, little more. But he couldn’t just brush it aside, either. Not with Kira still there, now officially part of the formal Allied Stars embassy to the Danzur Sovereignty.

He strode along the Hecate’s main longitudinal corridor, then he rounded one of the ninety-degree bends in the corridor, which were intended to mitigate the effects of any blast that might propagate along it during battle. No sooner had he turned the corner, though, than he slammed into something big.

And green.

“Thorn, my friend. Apologies,” Bertilak said.

Thorn bounced off the big alien, almost stumbling back. Not surprising, because he must weigh a good two-and-a-half times what Thorn did.

“Bertilak, you’re blocking the corridor?” Thorn said, looking up to Bertilak, who remained oddly unmoving.

Thorn stepped back, the nape of his neck tingling. On instinct, he reached for his talisman. Something wasn’t right.

A heartbeat later, though, Bertilak suddenly perked up, blinking. “Thorn, I—I didn’t even see you coming.”

“I know that. You were just standing there, like you were frozen. What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” Bertilak replied, passing a hand over his face, then rubbing his eyes.

Thorn touched his talisman through the fabric of his uniform. If this were any other crewman, he’d be escorting them to the infirmary right now. But this was Bertilak, a magical construct created by Morgan. Thorn really had no idea what made him tick, which meant he also had no idea what sorts of things could go wrong with him.

Bertilak just gave a tired smile, though. “Don’t worry, Thorn. I’m not about to go on some rampage. I do need to talk to you, though, I believe.”

Thorn lowered his hand from his talisman but kept himself wary. “Okay.”

“Not here. Let’s return to my shuttle and speak there.”

Thorn gave Bertilak a narrow-eyed look. “Why?”

“It’s about Morgan.”

Oh.

Thorn gestured for Bertilak to lead the way. Thorn followed him, winding back through the corridors to the airlock where Bertilak’s shuttle had docked with the Hecate.

Once inside, Bertilak closed and sealed the hatch. He didn’t turn to Thorn and start speaking right away, though. Instead, he moved to the viewport facing away from the Hecate, into empty space.

“She’s out there, Thorn.”

“I believe you. I know Kira thinks she’s dead, but I don’t.”

“No, I mean—” Bertilak turned back. “She’s out there. Right now. I can hear her.”

That made Thorn stop and just gape for a moment. “Hear her? How? What’s she saying?”

he finally asked.

“I’m not sure. I hear—” Bertilak struggled for a word. “Echoes. I hear echoes,” he finally said.

“Echoes? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know! All I can tell you is that I hear echoes. It’s like I sometimes hear her words, but they’re not just coming from an unspeakable distance, they sound like they’re the memories of words spoken in the past,” Bertilak said, giving a sharp, frustrated shrug.

Thorn persisted. “So what are these words? What is she saying?”

Bertilak closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and blew out a breath. “They’re just bits here, pieces there. The last time it happened, when you found me in the corridor on the Hecate, she was saying something about doing something. Or, actually, not doing something. It’s like she was talking to someone and telling them she wasn’t going to do something. She sounded upset and angry.”

Thorn paced. “Is there anything else? A direction? A sense of where she is?”

Bertilak gave Thorn a miserable look. “No, nothing like that. I’m sorry, Thorn. I wish I could be more helpful, I really do. But I’m telling you all I can, and even this is a challenge to me. The feelings are so—they are like vapor.”

Thorn turned to regard the alien, a frustrated question forming—but he discarded it. He believed that Bertilak was telling him the truth. He might have been created by Morgan to deceive and test Thorn, but now he was his own being, capable of independent thought and action. She’d created life from scratch, introducing a unique person into the universe and then either forgetting about him or otherwise becoming isolated from him.

Thorn had let his sense of urgency in finding Morgan falter and fade since their failed attempt to find her. There was a war on, after all, and its grim reality devoured almost every waking minute. But now it came thundering back with a desperate imperative. Yes, she was still alive, and that was good news. But the damage she could do with her magic, if unchecked—

“We have to find her,” Thorn said.

“I agree completely. But we tried that once and ended up spending weeks doing nothing but traveling from one dead-end to another. We need to figure out where she is, even approximately, and then go to her,” Bertilak replied.

Thorn leaned against a bulkhead, then put his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. He felt Bertilak watching him, but the alien didn’t say anything. Thorn used the lull to simply breathe in and out a few times, calming himself.

He opened his eyes and looked back at Bertilak. “You’re right. We need to find her and then go to her.” He straightened and walked toward the airlock, to head back into the Hecate.

“Where are you going?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn glanced back. “To where I do my best work. Meantime, you keep your, uh, mind peeled for anything else from Morgan. Anything she says, even any single word, might be the missing piece we need.”

“I will, Thorn.”

Thorn reached a cross-junction, intending to turn right, but stopping. He knew what he had to do. But he had something else he had to do first.

* * *

Agreed in principle? What does that mean? Kira asked.

Once I explained the situation to Tanner, he agreed that finding Morgan and getting to her is a priority. He’s prepared to deploy the Hecate to do that, but he wants to get Fleet’s permission to detach his ship for special duties first, Thorn replied.

Thorn, there might not be time for that. If you find Morgan alive—and I’m not convinced of that, you’ll probably have to move immediately. You can’t wait for a message to get to Fleet, then a reply to come back—

I know. That’s why he’s hedging his bets and trying to get a standing approval from Fleet to do it.

You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but this is Fleet we’re talking about.

Thorn smiled. I suspect that if I make the case, Tanner will go for it. He’s an ask for forgiveness later instead of permission now kind of guy. How are things going with you, by the way?

Boring with a capital bore. But we’re actually making progress. Some of the endless bureaucratic mumbo jumbo seems to be starting to produce results. Anyway, Thorn, keep me posted about what’s happening. Damien’s calling me.

I will. I’ll talk to you later, Kira.

You will. Take care.

Thorn had the greatest access to his power when he sought to make changes to reality. He didn’t know why. He knew, in his magical instincts, that the amount of power he needed was equal to the amount he could channel. His ability was tied to the moment, leaving him with a difficult decision. He could desperately try to drive his awareness into the surrounding ether in the usual way, which might let him Scry a light-year or two around him.

Or he could alter the universe into one where he, Thorn Stellers, could see into any part of it, at any time.

But he didn’t dare try that. He and Morgan had both made too many changes to creation already, and the implications of those weren’t yet entirely clear. Another could prove so far beyond catastrophic that the words to describe how bad it was simply didn’t exist.

He needed to find a middle-ground, a way to ramp up his supernatural power, but without making any significant changes to the basic stuff of reality.

So, how about insignificant ones?

Thorn placed his talisman in his lap and rested his fingertips on it. As always, hints of acrid smoke and tiny echoes of destruction hummed through his hands, his arms, into his mind. The talisman was thoroughly infused with the traumatic moment of Cotswold’s destruction, when Thorn had lost everything and everyone except for this tattered old book. Every time, the remembered pain of all that loss, filtered through the experiences of a child, reignited somewhere deep inside Thorn like smoldering embers flickering back to life. But it was a familiar pain, and he used it to anchor himself in reality at the moment of greatest change in his life.

At the moment, his enormous potential for power had awoken, and his feet had been firmly placed on the path forward, leading him to whatever conclusion the scope of his magic would deliver.

Thorn focused on the item he’d brought with him into the witchport. It was an apple, taken from the mess. But Thorn didn’t want an apple. He wanted an orange—

The XO’s voice cut into his thoughts. “All hands, the Dauntless has arrived. Stand by to receive cargo and personnel. Oh, and a load of ice cream, too.”

Despite the distant cheers he heard rattle through the Hecate over the promise of ice cream, Thorn gave the intercom an exasperated scowl. The Dauntless, a cruiser, was making the rounds of no man’s land, the space separating human and Nyctus territories. She was reprovisioning ships on forward patrol duty. Normally, the job would be done by a supply tender, but this close to squid space, every ship had to be prepared to fight on its own and not rely on escorts.

Thorn closed his eyes and concentrated his awareness into, and then through, his talisman again.

Once more, he had an apple, but he wanted an orange.

Keeping his intent in razor-sharp focus, Thorn gave the universe an experimental nudge. Or, more to point, he gave the apple an experimental nudge. He’d done this before, making miniscule adjustments to reality to keep his magical acumen tuned up. Each time, he’d felt the sudden swell of power, far, far more than he needed to change the color of his socks, or whatever it was he intended to do. And, sure enough, as he prodded at the fundamental nature of the apple, he felt that surge of vast potential, like the reservoir filling up and pressing against the dam holding it back.

Now, if he could just maintain it, remaining in this instant before it wasn’t an apple, it was an orange, and had been all along. And then channel it—

The floodgates suddenly flung open, loosing a thundering rush of magical might. It crashed into Thorn, piling up against his talisman, straining to be let loose. He bore down on it, holding it check with the power of his will. At the same time, he began shaping it, turning it from a wild flood into something far more focused, like the stream from a firehose.

Once it had stabilized—or, at least, he’d stabilized it as much as he was going to—he let the torrent carry his perception away, into the void, a racing bubble of awareness that could, and would, eventually encompass the whole universe.

Of course, the problem was going to be focusing that. He turned his fixation on the Witch Nebula into something useful, using the image of it burned into his mind as the start of a trail, one that would lead him, he hoped, to Morgan—

Except something snagged him like a sudden shoal, slamming him to a halt. It wasn’t far away, either. In fact, it was nearly on top of the Hecate.

It was the cruiser Dauntless. Something about the approaching ship wasn’t right. It would be like seeing an image of a person with two left hands. Something would jump out as strange and incorrect, but it would take time to figure out just what. Thorn felt that now. Something about the Dauntless—no, something aboard it didn’t belong.

Thorn desperately reigned in a racing bubble of his awareness, doggedly pulling it back and reorienting his focus onto the cruiser. As he did, he felt his control over the titanic wave of magical power falter. It was no small thing, setting something so vast in motion and then trying to redirect completely in mid-thought. He managed only a single pass of his consciousness across the Dauntless before he let go, allowing the magic to cascade back into the ether.

Gasping, Thorn flung open his eyes. For just a moment, he’d been aware of every piece of the Dauntless, every component, every one of her processes humming away, the endless thermonuclear explosion that was her fusion reactor. He experienced the ship practically down to its very molecules. More to point, though, had been her crew. In a way that actually made Thorn cringe, he’d seen into the hearts and minds of every soul aboard the cruiser. Although only for an instant, Thorn had nonetheless known the thoughts, passions, aspirations, and fears of every member of her crew. Putting the moral and ethical implications of such an intimate intrusion aside, even if it had been unintended, had revealed just what was wrong with the Dauntless.

Three of her crew were Skins. The Nyctus had agents aboard an ON warship.

* * *

“Are you sure?” Tanner asked.

“In this case, sir, one-hundred percent. The way that I found out was, well, incidental to something else I was trying to do.”

Tanner leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg on his opposite knee. His briefing room behind the Hecate’s bridge was just big enough to give him enough space to do that. “You were trying to find your daughter.”

“Yes, sir. I was using a different approach, one that would let me draw on a lot more magical power. I just happened to find the Skins aboard the Dauntless while I was doing it,” Thorn replied.

Tanner opened his mouth, but the Tac O’s voice cut in through the intercom. “Captain Tanner, the Captain of the Dauntless is requesting an update on the reactor problem we apparently have.”

Tanner glanced at Thorn. “Fleet SOP forces all ships to maintain a minimum safe distance from any ship with reactor instability.”

Thorn had noted Osborne’s words, the reactor problem we apparently have. “Do we have an unstable reactor, sir?”

“Of course not. But if I stall much longer, Captain Kenyatta’s going to have to alert Fleet, and they’re going to start asking questions, maybe dispatch a deep-space repair tug.” Tanner narrowed his eyes in thought. “Tac O, my compliments to Captain Kenyatta, and please ask him to stand by for a Code Alpha-Echo Six message.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn had no idea what that was, but there were lots of things Tanner would be privy to that a lowly Lieutenant wouldn’t, Starcaster or not.

Tanner looked at Thorn. “That should get his—”

“Galen, what the hell is going on?” a gruff voice suddenly said over the comm.

“Sorry, Chikere, I needed to get you onto a private comm channel. Assuming you’re alone,” Tanner said.

“You said Alpha-Echo Six, so of course I’m alone.”

“I’ve got Lieutenant Thorn Stellers with me.”

“So you’re not alone. On an Alpha-Echo Six. Something must really be wrong.”

Thorn stared, mystified. Tanner gave a quick, thin smile. “Sometimes Captains want to talk to one another one-on-one. That’s what Code Alpha-Echo Six is for.”

“The last time someone gave me a Code Alpha-Echo Six, it was because they wanted to borrow money. By the way, if you ever loan anything to Ely Braunsher aboard the Sirius, just kiss it goodbye.”

Tanner actually grinned. “Good to know.”

“So I’m assuming this is something really important if you’ve let a Lieutenant in on our little secret.”

“Oh, it is. And by the way, Stellers, you’re speaking to Chikere Kenyatta, Captain of the good ship Dauntless, and the only man who’s ever beaten me in racquetball more than once,” Tanner said.

“More than once, as in every time,” Kenyatta said, chuckling.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” Thorn said.

“Stellers. You’re the Starcaster, right? The one that’s moved practically the whole damned ON halfway across the universe, if you go by what I’ve been told.”

“The truth is a little less spectacular than that, sir,” Thorn replied.

“It always is. Now, what the hell is this all about? Galen, you don’t really have a wonky reactor, do you?”

“No, I do not. The problem is actually aboard your ship, Chikere.”

Tanner nodded for Thorn to explain.

“Sir, I’ll be brief. While using my, ah, abilities, I detected the signatures of three Nyctus skin agents aboard your ship. This is absolutely certain, and moreover, no one aboard your ship knows. That I can tell you as well.”

“Absolute certainty, Stellers?” Kenyatta asked.

“No doubt, sir. Like I told Captain Tanner, there’s usually some doubt. But not this time. The way I did it was—”

Kenyatta cut him off, all business. “I’ll take your word for it, Lieutenant. Do you know which three members of my crew we’re talking about here?”

“Unfortunately, that I’m not sure about. There are definitely three whose minds contain buried imperatives planted there by the Nyctus. I wasn’t able to keep the effect working long enough to sort out exactly which ones, though. If I hadn’t been doing what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all, that’s how deeply the squids implanted their mental controls. If it makes you feel better, though, I’m reasonably sure you’re not one of them.”

Tanner raised an eyebrow. “Reasonably sure? That the Captain of an ON cruiser isn’t a Skin?”

“Well, I’m not, but I understand where Stellers is coming from on that. Although, how do you know it’s not me, but you don’t know who it is?”

“Because, sir, there’s a definite pattern of authority and deference aboard an ON ship. Whoever these Skins are, they’re mostly associated with the deferential side of things. The one person not deferential to anyone aboard the Dauntless would be you, sir,” Thorn replied.

Tanner gave a quick, sharp nod. “I’m convinced. So that leaves us with three Skins somewhere aboard the Dauntless who need to be dealt with before you launch on any other ops, Chikere.”

“Stellers, could you find these bastards if you came aboard the ship?”

“It would be easier, sir, yes. But I’d have to dig pretty deeply into the minds of your crew to find them—a lot more deeply than I’d normally be comfortable with.”

“War’s hell, Lieutenant,” Tanner put in.

“What he said. Let’s get you over here on some pretext and then you do whatever you have to do to smoke these assholes out,” Kenyatta said.

Thorn glanced at Tanner, who nodded again.

“On my way, sir.”

* * *

Thorn stopped at a corridor junction. His escorts, a pair of Marines, stopped with him and took up watchful positions, their heads swiveling from side-to-side. Thorn wasn’t just thankful for their wary protection. Without them, he’d probably be hopelessly lost by now, wandering the myriad corridors and compartments of the Dauntless.

Sure, it might have quite the same airy openness and rambling sprawl of Bertilak’s ship, the Jolly Green Giant, but the big cruiser was still way more expansive than the Hecate.

One of the Marines glanced at Thorn. “Anything, sir?”

“Not yet,” Thorn replied, reaching once more into his magic, then using it to feel along each of the corridors. The Nyctus brainwashing was obviously buried too deep in the Skins for him to sense at a distance, at least with any accuracy. All he could do was keep trying to maintain an idea of its general direction, by keying on the simmering, malign intent of the compromised crew members. Thorn wasn’t sure if these Skins were even aware that they’d been subsumed by the squids, or if they were sleeper agents, awaiting activation by some trigger.

It was, he thought, as though he could hear a strange and disturbing noise somewhere in the distance so he had to walk around trying to first localize it, then locate it.

Thorn turned toward one corridor, then to another. Then back to the first. There.

“This way,” he said, gesturing for the Marines to accompany him.

They were clean, at least. Thorn had done a deep dive into their minds but found nothing to hint at Nyctus influence. There’d been a lot of other things, too, but he’d been determined to ignore it. These two Marines were people, with their own quirks and imperfections, none of which were Thorn’s business. Still, he couldn’t quite put all of it out of his mind, which left him in the uncomfortable position of knowing things about these two Marines that he really shouldn’t.

The experience actually offended him. The squids did this to people all the time. It was fundamental to turning them into Skins in the first place. And it was vile and wrong.

Thorn abruptly stopped outside a compartment. NON-COMMISSIONED PERSONNEL - FORWARD MESS was stenciled on the door, with an alphanumeric string beneath. That would be a combination of section, deck number, and compartment number, a standardized way for describing every location aboard an ON ship.

He dipped again into his magic, then reached out with it, feeling beyond the closed hatch, into the space behind it.

There. Right there.

He gestured at the Ratings Mess. “In there. It must be all of them, too, because I’m not getting any sense of Skins anywhere else aboard the ship,” he said. He doubted his voice would carry through the closed hatch, but he kept his tone low and quiet anyway. The two Marines nodded, and one stepped back a few paces and spoke quietly into a comm.

When he was done, he turned back. “So, sir, how do we do this? Are these Skins going to fight back?”

“We should probably expect the worst,” Thorn replied. He saw the two Marines reach for their sidearms, but he raised a hand.

“Let’s wait on that. If there are other members of the crew in there, I’d really rather them not end up in the line of fire,” Thorn went on.

“Okay, so what’s the plan, sir?”

Thorn tapped a finger to his chin and considered it. They needed a way to get control of the situation before the Skins even knew what was happening. Maybe their best option would be to wait for backup from more of the ship’s Marines. That would take time, though, because most of them were deployed to protect critical parts of the ship—ironically, from the Skins. And Thorn didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to get all three of them, or at least all three of the ones they knew about, at once.

He glanced at the two Marines’ rank insignia. A Sergeant and a Lance-Corporal. That gave him an idea.

“Would you two normally eat in this mess?” Thorn asked them.

They exchanged a look, and the Sergeant spoke up. “Normally? No, sir. But we both have, if we happen to have duty in this part of the ship, so it wouldn’t seem too out of place.”

“Okay, good. Here’s what I’m thinking,” Thorn said. “I wander in, play the lost visiting officer, and identify our targets. You go in before me, take up position—just two people having a meal—and we take them down before they can get mixed in with the other crew. Clear?”

The two Marines nodded their understanding, then Thorn moved out of view while they entered the Mess. They did so chatting and laughing, as though just two guys sitting down for a bite to eat.

Thorn gave them a few minutes to get themselves seated. He used the opportunity to infuse his senses with magic, enough—he hoped—to let him discern which crew in here were the Skins. He kept himself close to the edge of allowing the magic to simply dissipate, though, not wanting his focus to be too far away from the here-and-now when he walked in.

He opened the door and strode confidently in, then wandered around, looking increasingly bewildered. As he did, he swept his enhanced awareness across the dozen or so people already inside, which included the two Marines, who were sitting at a table to his right, and—

Right there. Three Ratings, two men and a woman, sitting at a table on their own, to his left.

Thorn ambled in their direction but stopped a few paces away. He looked confused for a moment, then turned to the three suspected Skins.

“Excuse me, I’m new to the Dauntless. Is this not an Officers’ Mess? Did I steer myself wrong?” he asked them. As he did, he glanced at the Marines, who both stood, apparently going for coffee, but continuing to watch sidelong.

The woman looked up, a bland smile on her face. “Sorry, sir, this is a non-coms mess. The nearest Officers’ Mess is—”

She stopped as she made eye contact with Thorn. Her eyes went momentarily blank, then recognition flooded them.

She recognized Thorn. He wasn’t sure how, but—shit. He hadn’t counted on that.

The woman immediately leapt to her feet and raced toward the other exit, which probably led into the Galley that served it. The man on the far side of the table flung his coffee cup at Thorn, standing as he did. Thorn instinctively raised a hand to shield his face, the cup bouncing off it, hot coffee splashing and scalding his chin. The nearer of the two men took advantage of the fleeting instant to lunge and tackle Thorn, bearing him backward, hard, onto another table. Napkins and condiments containers were ripped from the clamps that held them in place and went clattering across the floor.

The man atop Thorn raised a knife that seemed as big as a broadsword over Thorn, about to drive it down. Thorn tensed, leveraging himself against the table in a desperate bid to throw the man off him, but even that brief lag was about to cost him his life.

Or would have, except a hard, flat shot snapped out, and a fist-sized chunk of the man’s head exploded in a shower of gore. The knife did come slamming down, but Thorn was able to dodge it, catching a nasty cut on his left biceps. He kept going, shoving the dying Rating off him and lunging to his feet. The second man also now wielded a knife and was rushing around the table, coming for him.

Thorn flung out his hand, loosing a blast of Hammer magic that slammed into the man like a wrecking ball and snapped him back against the table. He rushed in to follow up, shouting “Don’t shoot!” at the Marines, desperate to keep this man alive. Before he could intervene, though, the corrupted Rating reoriented his knife and slammed it point first into his own eye. Thorn heard the eyeball pop, then a rough, scraping sound as the blade slid across bone on its way into the man’s brain.

Thorn arrived in time to watch the life fade from the man’s other eye. “Shit!”

As soon as he said it, the rest of the Mess erupted in chaos. Other Ratings, who’d yanked themselves away from the sudden explosion of violence, began pounding toward the exits. They were greeted by more Marines, who quickly got them under control and began ushering them out.

The Marine Sergeant appeared beside Thorn, holstering his sidearm. “You okay, sir?”

“Yeah. Neither of these two are, though,” he snapped, looking from one corpse to the other.

“Didn’t think you especially wanted that guy stabbing you. But if that was wrong, and you getting gutted was part of the plan, my bad,” the Sergeant said, giving Thorn a thin smile.

Thorn blew out a frustrated sigh. “Not being skewered was definitely better than the alternative, Sergeant. Thanks.”

A commotion arose from the direction of the Galley. A trio of Marines shoved their way in, restraining the Skin woman who’d fled at the outset. Behind them came an imposing man with burnished skin, intelligent eyes, and a set of Captain’s bars.

“Lieutenant Stellers, I presume. Welcome aboard the Dauntless,” the man said, sticking out his hand and grinning a terawatt grin.

Thorn nodded. “My pleasure, sir. Sorry for not reporting to you immediately, but I kind of co-opted the two Marines you sent to meet me and got right to work.”

“Not a problem, Lieutenant. Now, I guess you’ve got some more work to do,” he said, glancing at the struggling Skin.

“Sir?”

“Why, you can help me figure out just what’s going on inside that squid-touched brain of hers, of course.”

9

Her name was Dolahey. Thorn watched her, still struggling despite being strapped to a table in the Dauntless’s aft infirmary, which had been cleared of everyone except for a single doctor and a nurse to assist. They had no idea what imperatives the Nyctus might have implanted into Dolahey’s mind, so if she managed to harm herself, Kenyatta wanted medical attention immediately on-hand to deal with it.

“You said this woman recognized you. Do you know her?” Kenyatta asked, while he and Thorn stood a few paces away from the straining woman.

Thorn glanced at her. “No, sir. Certainly not that I can recall, anyway. I glanced over her personnel file, and I honestly don’t see anywhere where we might have crossed paths. I did notice that she took thirty days of leave about two months ago, so that’s when the squids probably took her.”

“Well, let’s find out what she knows,” Kenyatta said, gesturing for Thorn to follow him to the restrained woman.

“Rating Dolahey, we have a few questions for you,” he said.

She responded with a string of putrid curses. Kenyatta gave Thorn a theatrical glance. “Oh, my. I’ve been in the ON for nearly thirty years, and even I’m not used to language like that.” He turned back to the woman. “Are you sure you don’t want to cooperate, Rating? Just answer our questions? Because if not, then I guess it’s back to Fleet intelligence with you, and we’ll let the good folks there deal with you. To clarify, I say they’re good, but what I mean is invasively thorough. They’ll get to know you in ways you can’t imagine, even based on such . . . colorful language—as what you just displayed.”

The woman shot back a feral grin. “You . . . and your childish threats, Captain. I know your precious laws. You can’t do anything to me without due process.”

“Well, you got me there. Your status as an ON Rating protects you under the Fleet Uniform Code of Justice. You’d be entitled to legal counsel, protected from self-incrimination, all of that sort of thing—and rightfully so, I might add.”

Dolahey’s wild grin just widened.

But Kenyatta raised a hand. “Or you would be, except I think I can treat you as an enemy combatant. So, that makes you subject to Fleet Policies for Prisoners of War instead. That means no legal counsel, no protections from self-incrimination, and I can interrogate you to obtain—what is it again? Oh, right, intelligence of immediate military interest. That unties my hands a lot more.”

“You’re trying to frighten me? You don’t. Your kind doesn’t have the balls to do what has to be done to win this war,” she hissed.

While Kenyatta confronted her, Thorn watched her closely. There wasn’t anything fake in her tone or expression about what she was saying. She meant every word of it, which meant her squid brainwashing must have insinuated itself into her psyche both intimately—and deeply. He touched his talisman and let magic begin to coalesce around it, but he waited for Kenyatta to crack open her shell of denial. Yes, he could probably bludgeon his way through it magically, but the squids might have implanted some ultimate fail-safe that would stop her heart, or something similarly fatal.

“Frighten you? Why, not at all. I’m just musing out loud about what to do with you. And, you know, it occurs to me that you’re an ON Rating, who's actually an enemy combatant but is trying to hide it while working against ON interests. So, that makes you—”

Kenyatta allowed a dramatic pause, then looked straight into the woman’s eye. No semblance of good humor remained on his face. Instead, it had gone as hard and cold as the ice of some ancient comet.

“That makes you a spy. And spies aren’t entitled to any protections at all. Now, since I suspect that the squids have messed up your head enough that you simply won’t be able to answer any of my questions, there’s not even much point in trying. I’m a busy man and have better things to do with my time.”

Kenyatta leaned in again. “So all that’s really left to say is that I’m going to order you to be summarily executed, Rating Dolahey. The only value you have left to me is as an example to my crew of what treachery entails.”

Thorn tensed. Yes, the woman was a Skin, but she was also a human forced into the role by the Nyctus. They might be able to deprogram her—

But Kenyatta looked at Thorn and winked.

Then he walked away. “Lieutenant Stellers, thank you for your assistance today. You can return to your ship,” he called over his shoulder.

Thorn glanced back at Dolahey. The woman’s grin had gone brittle, and her gaze was fixed on Kenyatta’s retreating back.

Thorn didn’t hesitate. While she was distracted from him, he rode a wave of magical compulsion into her mind, sliding through sudden gaps in the psychic barriers the Nyctus had erected and racing through her conscious mind. Through the Joining, he caught jagged, strobing flashes of her sudden fear of being executed, swirls of desperate uncertainty about what to do next, and behind it all, the lurking, sinister motivations that prevented her from simply giving in or giving up. He aimed for the latter and kept going, plunging deeper into her subconscious.

It was, Thorn thought, like walking through a recently fire-ravaged forest, or the aftermath of an earthquake. The scorched trees and broken buildings were recognizable, but also wrong. That’s what the Nyctus had done here. They’d scoured Dolahey’s mind of its own volition, substituting their own twisted compulsions. Thorn recognized it as a human mind, but it was like seeing the wake of disaster. It was wrong.

But Thorn didn’t linger over the obscenity of an otherwise innocent mind corrupted and weaponized. Instead, he drove on, gleaning as much as he could from the shattered remnants of Dolahey’s subconscious mind. One memory in particular stood out, starkly. Thorn zoomed in on it and then the nightmare world inside this woman’s head shuddered and shook. Pressure quickly piled up on Thorn’s intruding perception, forcing him to exert more and more magical force to counteract it. The squid defenses were reorienting themselves, isolating Thorn and trying to eject him from Dolahey’s thoughts.

Instead of fighting it, though, he relented and backed out, letting the Nyctus implants slam shut behind him.

Thorn opened his eyes. Kenyatta had apparently called over the doctor and nurse, who stood on either side of him, ready to catch him if he fell. He smiled and shook his head.

“I’m okay. That just took a little more concentration than I thought it would,” he said.

Kenyatta waved off the doctor and nurse, then gestured for Thorn to follow him. The two Marines standing guard inside the infirmary, in clear view of Dolahey, snapped to and saluted as the Captain passed, taking Thorn into the corridor outside.

“Well?”

Thorn sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry, sir, but that’s the first time I’ve been that deep into a Skin’s mind. Let’s just say it’s . . . not a pretty sight, what the squids did to her.”

“Understood, Lieutenant. Let’s just move past that for the moment, though, okay?”

Thorn took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. Anyway, there was quite a bit there, but it was all just bits and pieces, like watching a bunch of images go flying across a screen. The one that kept repeating, though, was a star system with three suns. It figures prominently in her subconscious mind. Something truly traumatic happened to her there. She remembers something about a ship, or maybe it’s a space station, and there were cells, and water tanks—”

Thorn rubbed his eyes again. “Part of what happened to her there was torture. There’s no other way to put it. The squids tortured her. I think it was to break her down, to make her vulnerable—”

Thorn cut himself off. His voice had started to rise in pitch, getting louder as a sudden surge of anger ignited inside him. It flared up, a furnace-hot flame of fury, rising into a thick, choking smoke of outrage. He balled his fists, suddenly wanting to hit something.

“You know, Lieutenant, when one of my officer’s is obviously consumed with anger, I send them off to work it out somewhere, like in the gym. But when said officer can make things burst into flames, and explode, and similar such things, and all just with the power of their mind—let’s say it makes me nervous,” Kenyatta said.

Thorn took another deep breath. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just—it’s not her fault. The squids broke her, then basically reprogrammed her into a tool. I didn’t see what her ultimate mission was, but I’m sure if she were able to, she’d have eventually tried to destroy your ship and kill everyone aboard. Kill her crewmates. Not because she wanted to, but because those bastard squids gave her no choice.”

“Well, considering Rating Dolahey was a Reactor Tech in Engineering, it’s probably just as well you flushed her out when you did,” Kenyatta replied.

Thorn gave the Captain a wide-eyed stare. A Reactor Tech. Shit.

“Anyway, tell me about this trinary star system you saw. Could you pick it out of a lineup?” Kenyatta asked.

“I think so, sir. Distinct colors. Two blue-hot and young, and a dying red in between them. Ironically, it was really quite beautiful,” Thorn said.

Kenyatta activated his comm. “XO, I’m sending Lieutenant Stellers to the bridge. He has a star system, and I want you, the Nav O, and anyone else you need to call, to help ID it.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn saluted, and Kenyatta started to turn back toward the infirmary. Thorn spoke up as he did.

“Sir, you wouldn’t really execute Dolahey, would you? None of this is her fault.”

Kenyatta made a pfft sound. “No, of course not. I’m just going to see if I can get her to reveal anything else that might be useful. Meantime, when we leave here, the Dauntless is making a straight shot back to friendly space. We’re going to hand her over to Fleet Intelligence for more interrogation, and then deprogramming, if they can manage it. And I hope they can. She was good people.”

Thorn gave a forlorn nod. “Aye, sir. Just from seeing what the squids left of her, I could tell that there’s some of that good people left in there.”

* * *

Thorn kept his eyes on Tanner but gestured to the Hecate’s main viewscreen behind him. “The system has some awkward catalog number, but it’s known as the Three Sisters. I was able to work that out with the help of the Nav O and the Astrogation shop on the Dauntless.”

“And there’s some sort of squid facility there for creating Skins?” Tanner asked.

“Pretty sure, sir. That’s how Dolahey remembered it, anyway. I’d say it’s where the squids converted her.” He had to bite back another flash of anger over that word, converted. It was like describing changes to a piece of equipment, not a human being.

Tanner put his forefingers together and touched them to his chin. “Captain Kenyatta has informed Fleet, and they’ve already come back to us with a Warning Order. We’re to prepared to launch a raid into that system, to confirm what’s there. If we can do something about it, we will. And if not, we’re to gather as much information as we can for a follow-up operation.”

Thorn felt the XO, Tac O, and others around the bridge tense slightly. The Warning Order implied a long and potentially extremely dangerous trek deep into Nyctus space. It harkened back to other special ops the Hecate had been involved in, but the last one of those had been at least two years ago. She’d spent the interim in the line, patrolling and skirmishing across the Zone between human and squid space.

“Isn’t something like that better suited to a purpose-built spec ops ship?” the XO asked.

“No time. For reasons Fleet certainly doesn’t share with me, there aren’t any spec ops ships available any time soon. We’re the next-best thing. I expect full orders at twenty-hundred hours, but in the meantime, Nav O, I’m sending you a set of navigation coordinates. Plot a course to get us there asap, and please pass the info on to Bertilak, should he wish to accompany us.” Tanner touched the controls on the arm of his command chair. The Nav O checked his own display, then offered Tanner a thumbs up.

The Captain turned to Thorn. “You’re going to get to see an old friend, Stellers.”

“Sir?”

“We’re going to find the Stiletto waiting for us at those coordinates. You’ll be able to renew your acquaintance with Alys Densmore.”

Thorn curled his lip. “I can hardly wait, sir.”

* * *

Thorn meant to head for the airlock, to meet the new arrivals from the Stiletto, who would support the upcoming op. But Tanner waylaid him, pulling him into his little briefing room and closing the door.

“Stellers, I just finished reading your full report. That Skin, Dolahey, recognized you?”

“Yes sir, she did. No idea how, though. I’m sure I’ve never met her before.”

“Could that have been the squids’ doing?”

Thorn paused, thinking through every nuance of her expression. His immediate reaction had been, no, of course not. But that was just denying what was suddenly an obvious and deeply unpleasant truth.

He finally had to nod. “Yes, sir. That’s definitely a possibility. They could have implanted memories of me when they corrupted her.”

That left him and Tanner exchanging an uncomfortable look.

Tanner leaned onto the little desk with his elbows. “If they’re programming their Skins to recognize you, Stellers, it’s not hard to figure out why. You said one of them immediately attacked you, right?”

Thorn let out a slow breath. “Yeah, he did. You think these Skins are assassins?”

“These three were on board the Dauntless, and have been at least several weeks. She only got orders about a week ago to do this reprovisioning run. So, no, these ones weren’t specifically tagged to kill you, obviously.” Tanner leaned back again. “But that makes it worse.”

“Yes, sir, it does.” It meant every Skin was potentially implanted with memories of Thorn and an imperative to kill him. Virtually every other member of the ON was a possible threat to him. He could only exclude the current crews of the Hecate and the Dauntless, both of which he’d Scryed closely. Even then, that assumed he’d found all of them and the squids hadn’t managed to bury some of their vile work more deeply or subtly in some than others.

“Congratulations on becoming a high-value target, Stellers. I’m assigning a round-the-clock Marine guard detail to you immediately,” Tanner said, reaching for the intercom.

“Sir, I don’t think that’s necessary—”

“I do. You’re an extremely valuable asset to the ON and this ship. More to the point, you’re one of my crew. And no one aboard the Hecate is going to be assassinated on my watch.”

* * *

Thorn nodded to the dour Marine Corporal standing outside the door to his quarters. The Marine snapped smartly to attention, saluted, and then waited to fall in a few paces behind Thorn. He’d be there, practically tethered to Thorn, watching over him until his post was done. Then, he’d be replaced by another Marine, and so on, and so on.

Thorn hated it. Having a watchdog looming over him made him feel both awkward and, ironically, somehow more of a target.

The fact that it was a sensible precaution only frustrated him more.

He arrived at the Hecate’s docking hangar, now the semi-permanent home of Mol’s Gyrfalcon, while it was still pressurizing. He waited, eyeing the pressure indicator and trying not to eye the Marine, who stood just a few paces away. They weren’t subtle, but they weren’t meant to be. Marines were all about being ready for speed and violence, and then being speedy and violent. They not only didn’t try to hide it, but they also embraced it as who and what they were.

The indicator turned green. Thorn hit the hatch control and stepped inside, just as the Gyrfalcon’s airlock slid open and people began to disembark.

Speaking of speed and violence.

Thorn smiled at the sturdy, compact woman who’d stepped out of the fighter. “Hello, Master Petty Officer Brand. And, yes, I know, Tiger Team Three always uses first names, so hello, Alix. Good to see you.”

“Good to be seen, sir,” she replied, shaking his hand twice, and firmly.

He raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”

“Always use it once to get it out of the way. So I gather we’re going on a little jaunt together again. Warning order says it’s search-and-destroy, but it also says we might have some hostage rescue involved.”

“You probably know as much as anyone, Alix. The intel on this is pretty thin.”

“Making it up as we go along? That’s when I do my best work.”

“Really?”

Alix gave a hard, thin smile. “No, not at all. Ops are always best when they’re planned in detail and have the shit rehearsed out of them. That doesn’t happen very often, though.”

Thorn watched as the rest of Tiger Team Three clambered out of the Gyrfalcon. He recognized one of them, a big man named Toff, but the rest, as far as he could tell, were new.

“Seems like a lot of turnover in Tiger Team Three,” he said.

Alix shrugged. “People die.”

Her simple two words clung stubbornly to Thorn as they headed out of the docking bay, his Marine protector close behind him.

10

Thorn tried to relax. It wasn’t easy, though, partly because he was jammed into vac-armor, but mostly because he was about to be flung once more into face-to-face battle. He wished he could find the same sort of pre-battle calm that seemed to come naturally to Tiger Team Three, which was packed into the Gyrfalcon’s cabin behind him.

Mol, in the pilot’s crash-couch beside him, tapped a control with a flourish. “Preflight checklist complete. Hecate, ready to launch on your command.”

“Roger that. Stand by,” came the reply.

“Stellers, Alcubierre cutoff in just over two minutes. You ready?” Tanner asked.

“As I’ll ever be, sir.”

“Okay, this op is a go.”

The docking hangar doors swung open, revealing the eye-twisting void of the Alcubierre bubble carrying the Hecate to the star system known as the Three Sisters. Thorn could have moved the destroyer there himself, and much more quickly. They’d decided, though, that the risk of having him out of commission magically afterward, even for a brief time, was just too high. So they took the slower route, five days of Alcubierre flight time, using a circuitous series of hops to obfuscate their destination.

“You never got aboard the Stiletto to meet your old pal Densmore, huh?” Mol asked.

“Nope. We’re trying to minimize the number of people coming and going from the Hecate.”

He saw Mol grin through her faceplate. “I’ll bet you’re all broken up about that. I know how much you like her and all.”

Thorn rolled his eyes at her. “I got to talk to her via comm. That was more than enough for me.”

Actually, Thorn thought, it wasn’t that he didn’t like Alys Densmore. She was a tough, competent officer, who had to oversee the planning and execution of who knew how many complex and potentially sensitive spec ops. The trouble was that her world was one of secrets, and scheming, and deception. He didn’t trust Alys Densmore. He and Kira had once even suspected her of possibly being a squid agent, or even a Skin herself. He’d long since convinced himself she wasn’t.

Okay, almost convinced himself she wasn’t.

“Thorn? Let us know when you start Shading us,” a man’s voice said over the comm.

Thorn would have turned back to look at the speaker if he could. Densmore had assigned two of her own spec ops Starcasters to this mission. The speaker was a Castle named Austin, and with her was a man, a Hammer named Wembley, both Lieutenants. Thorn vaguely remembered meeting them both at Code Gauntlet, but he knew little about them. What he did know was that the last time Densmore had assigned Starcasters to a covert mission involving Thorn, they’d turned out to be Skins. And that made him think of his real conversation with Densmore, not the one carried out over a comm, but in their respective minds.

I am not comfortable with having them along, ma’am, he’d said to her.

I understand. But these two have been thoroughly vetted, and their exact whereabouts have been known for the past two years. That’s mandatory now in the spec ops shop. None of us have any real privacy anymore.

I get that. But something else you have to understand, ma’am, is that I have more than a little vested interest in who I spend time with.

And you still don’t quite trust me.

All due respect, ma’am, but no, I don’t. Hell, I don’t quite trust anyone these days.

I know. Captain Tanner filled me in. That said, though, you’re going deep into squid space to raid an installation about which we know almost nothing. You and Tiger Team Three need the magical backup. But feel free to subject Wembley and Austin, and all of the Tiger Team, for that matter, to whatever sort of investigations and tests you want. Just don’t break any of them. They’re expensive to replace.

Thorn had Scryed them all, thoroughly. He saw not even a hint that any of them had been compromised. It still didn’t quite put his mind at ease, but, in the end, orders were orders. He consoled himself with the thought that he couldn’t very well just hide on the Hecate forever. Helping to fight and win the war was going to force him to take some risks.

At least Tanner had agreed that, while in the company of the elite Tiger Team, he probably didn’t need his Marine overseer.

“Sir?” Wembley asked.

“Sorry, was just running through a few last minute things in my mind. Yeah, the instant that Alcubierre bubble pops, I’ll throw a Shade around the Hecate and hold it as long as I can. Austin, you’re ready to Castle-up the Gyrfalcon?”

“I was born ready,” she replied.

Thorn had to smile. He hoped these two didn’t turn out to be deep-cover Skins because they both seemed like people he could come to call friends.

A warning chime sounded, announcing thirty seconds to the Hecate’s Alcubierre drive cutoff.

“Trixie, fire up the pre-launch sequence,” Mol said.

“Roger that.”

Thorn watched as indicators lit up, the Gyrfalcon switching to her own, internal power. The thrusters came to life, pressurized fuel ready to vent at Mol’s command and maneuver the nimble little ship away from the Hecate.

But he couldn’t help noticing Trixie’s strictly business-like tone. Apparently, she’d dropped her morose demeanor and replaced it with something much more clipped and professional. She just hadn’t been her formerly bubbly, irreverent self since Thorn had brought her back from the digital oblivion to which a computer virus had consigned her. Maybe he should have taken that as a warning about Morgan. Things just didn’t seem to come back quite the same way they’d been when they died.

Thorn shrugged the dreary thoughts away and rested his fingers on his talisman, which was sitting on his lap, then he closed his eyes.

Burning. Fire. Smoke. Fear—

The flickers of old, remembered experience were alarming, but they were also familiar. The old pain that imbued the book once more became his anchor in reality.

Thorn opened his eyes.

Stars suddenly flashed into view, framed by the open hangar doors. The instant they did, Thorn sealed a curtain of magic around the Hecate, crafting it to show nothing but the stars that any observer would naturally expect to see. He expanded it to include Bertilak’s ship, which was keeping close station, ready to join the Gyrfalcon on its run into the Nyctus station.

Mol hit the thrusters and eased the Gyrfalcon out of the docking bay.

“Gyrfalcon, you are clear to maneuver,” the Hecate’s controller said.

Mol immediately spun the fighter, at the same time slewing it sideways, bringing it to a point about a klick away from the Hecate’s starboard quarter. Bertilak’s ship snuggled in close, only a few hundred meters away.

“Bertilak, everything okay with you?” Thorn asked.

“Couldn’t be better. As soon as you’re ready to start your run in, I’ll be right behind you.”

For the moment, the Hecate, the Gyrfalcon, and the Jolly Green Giant swept sunward. Or suns-ward, since there were three stars in the system. Two of the Three Sisters were fierce, glaring points of bluish-white light, while the third loomed much larger, but also much dimmer. The station orbited a rocky planet that itself traveled a complex orbit around a barycenter somewhere between the three stars. The Hecate’s Astrogation shop said that the planet was probably only a few thousand years from finally being either ejected from the system or pulled into the red giant. Thorn decided to not worry about that, as he’d be long gone, and the possibility of a colony surviving in the system was almost nil.

He focused his attention on the squid station. Their own passive scanners had already told them this system was pretty much empty, with no Nyctus warships on the prowl. Or, at least, none that they could detect, anyway. The only ships present seemed to be a trio of small workboats, and a larger, corvette-sized ship. Thorn pushed his awareness to the station, propagating it on a wave of magic. The distant construct solidified in his mind—

A disk, maybe two hundred meters across. Point-defense batteries but, as far as he could tell, nothing more substantial. A name.

Glorious Horizon Processing Home.

And pain. Pain, suffering, fear. The Glorious Horizon Processing Home was rife with it, a toxic, simmering stew of dark emotions, shot through with bright flashes of raw terror, like lightning bolts.

Thorn’s fists began balling themselves up again.

Fortunately, there was no sign they’d been detected for the brief moment the Hecate and the Giant had been visible before Thorn Shaded them. The three ships were able to race in like avenging thunderbolts, which was apt because that’s exactly what Thorn wanted.

Vengeance.

Time passed. Thorn felt pressure building against the Shade. As they closed on the station, the improving resolution of its scanners expressed itself as a palpable and increasing force. Of course, the three ships should be readily visible to the station now, so the Shade had to work harder to prevent it.

“Hecate, Stellers here. I’ve probably got another five minutes or so, and then I’ll either have to concentrate fully on the Shade or let it go.”

“Gyrfalcon, wait out,” Tanner replied.

Thorn could imagine the Hecate’s bridge, the Tac and Nav O’s crunching their respective numbers. He waited.

Tanner finally replied. “Stellers, if you drop that Shade of yours in just over four minutes, you’ll have about fifteen minutes of flight time to the station. You okay with that?”

Thorn glanced at Mol, who gave a thumbs up.

“Just rinky-dink point defenses, right? Yeah, hell, I can fly us through those without breaking a sweat. Or, more of a sweat—I think the cooling system in this vac armor isn’t working right,” Mol said.

“Once we’re aboard, take your helmet off. We’re wearing these things more because that squid station might be full of water,” Thorn replied, then turned his attention back to the comm.

“Hecate, Gyrfalcon. That works for us. Bertilak, did you copy that?”

“I certainly did.”

“Hecate, roger, out,” Tanner said.

Thorn watched the time and distance tick down. With each passing second, the pressure on the Shade increased. Thorn had to bear down hard, pouring magic into the effect, reinforcing it. Finally, through a clenched jaw, he spoke on the comm.

“Hecate, Bertilak, I’m dropping the Shade in ten seconds.”

They acknowledged. Thorn counted the seconds down, then let out a gasp at ten. The Shade abruptly dissipated. As soon as it did, the Hecate veered away, moving to a high-cover position about ten thousand klicks away from the station. No longer tied to the more cumbersome destroyer, Mol punched the Gyrfalcon’s drive, accelerating them hard, directly at their objective. Bertilak had no trouble matching their performance—of course.

Thorn felt Austin erect a formidable barrier around them, a Castle effect that should block whatever stray shots Mol didn’t manage to dodge. A minute passed. Another. No response from the squids. Thorn found himself grimacing at that. Was he missing something?

But the sudden eruption of point-defense fire from the station reassured him he wasn’t. Mol’s fingers flew across the Gyrfalcon’s controls, causing the fighter to jink and gyrate, slowing their approach but making it a much more elusive target. Bertilak just maintained a steady course and acceleration, pulling ahead.

Thorn saw flashes ripple across the Jolly Green Giant as point-defense shots struck home. It didn’t deter Bertilak at all, which made Thorn abruptly realize he didn’t know the true combat capabilities of his ship. It was, after all, a construct, woven from magic by the understanding of an eight-year-old. What if Morgan imagined that spaceships were indestructible? Did that mean Bertilak’s ship couldn’t be destroyed?

Another fusillade of point-defense shots slammed into the Jolly Green Giant. Bertilak responded with a prodigious blast of emerald energy, then a second, then a third. Each time, one of the point-defense batteries vanished in verdant flash. At the last moment, he pulled the Giant up relative to the station and swept over it, snapping out shots and taking out more point-defense systems along the way.

Mol kept the Gyrfalcon boring in, its drive still burning at full combat power.

“We’re past the point of no return here, boss. If you can’t stop us, I’m going to have to follow Bertilak so we don’t just slam into this station,” Mol snapped.

Thorn nodded. The right way to do this would be to burn halfway to the station, then flip around and burn in the opposite direction for the second half of the trip. That would have taken at least a couple of hours from Thorn’s ending the Shade effect. By just burning straight in the whole way, it meant the Gyrfalcon took only minutes to make the trip. Of course, it also meant the fighter zipped along at almost twenty klicks per second, which would make it a truly devastating projectile when it hit the station.

But that wasn’t the plan. This was.

Thorn again closed his eyes and again pulled magic up from the reservoir dammed behind his talisman, then he flung his consciousness away from the Gyrfalcon and into the void ahead of them. The fighter was going to impact the station in about thirty seconds.

“Here we go,” he said.

Mol cinched her harness. “Brace, brace, brace!”

Thorn concentrated, once more enveloping the Gyrfalcon in magic. At the same time, he felt Austin drop the Castle effect she’d wrapped around the fighter. This time, though, he used it like a sort of Alcubierre bubble of Hammer magic, bleeding the fighter’s enormous kinetic energy off of it and into normal space. It wasn’t perfect, though, and some residual inertia remained, flinging them hard against their crash harnesses. Thorn gritted his teeth. He had to keep the little volume of space inside his magical bubble stationary with respect to the Gyrfalcon, while shedding her velocity into the space outside of it.

He got it mostly right. A glowing halo of displaced dust and gas molecules enveloped the fighter and its little pocket of stationary space. Inside it, the fighter surged, rattled, and shuddered, stray accelerations slamming them back and forth, side-to-side. The station loomed ever closer.

“Uh, Thorn? Stopping us any time would be good,” Mol said.

Thorn doggedly kept up the effect, slowing the Gyrfalcon even more. Now the station was only ten klicks away. Five. One.

The Gyrfalcon came almost to a stop relative to the station, and Thorn let his Hammer magic dissipate like smoke. They slid slowly toward its metallic flank, now only a few hundred meters away.

“Looks like an airlock, Mol, about twenty meters to our left,” Thorn said, pointing.

Mol nodded and tapped at the controls, nudging the fighter in the direction Thorn had indicated. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to squid station. Please remain seated until the Gyrfalcon has come to a complete stop, which”—she loosed a final, single puff from the nose thruster—“it has.”

The Tiger Team was already swinging into action, but with little fanfare or even noise. Each member of her Team carried themselves with a quiet, clipped efficiency, communicating through hand signals, backed up by only the occasional snippet of orders. To save time, Mol decompressed the Gyrfalcon’s cabin so the Tiger Team could just open and pass through the airlock. Hand jets puffed as they crossed the short distance from the fighter to the looming wall of the station’s hull. And short distance was right, Thorn thought as he clambered into his place in line. From the Gyrfalcon’s open airlock to the hull was maybe ten meters across, and five meters beneath the fighter.

He indulged himself in a brief moment of pride. Ten meters. Not bad, considering just a few minutes ago, their velocity had been measured in kilometers per second.

“Fire in the hole!”

The first Tiger Team troopers had placed a rectangular breaching charge against what looked like an airlock. An instant after the call over the comm, a dull flash pulsed around it, accompanied by a spray of fragments. Thorn felt something snap against his vac-armor. Detonating the charge with everyone so close to it was risky, but sometimes safety measures had to be pushed in the interest of not floating around outside a squid installation.

The two lead troopers yanked the hatch open, then flung it off in a direction that wouldn’t hit the Gyrfalcon. Thorn had already braced himself for a rush of water in case the station was, at least in part, filled with the stuff. That was the reason for keeping the Gyrfalcon above the hatch, so a deluge of water and ice didn’t cascade straight into the fighter’s airlock. But there was only a brief gust of mist as air vented from the opening. Two more Tiger Team members immediately entered, taking the lead.

“Okay, Thorn, you’re on,” Alix said.

Thorn knew the lead troopers would face the squid airlock’s inner hatch. If they just blew that, they might decompress a big chunk of the station, which would be fatal to any humans aboard it. To prevent that, he reached out with Tempest magic, holding the air on the far side of the inner hatch in place. He held the ’casting until the hatch had been breached, they’d all entered, and the hatch had been reseated and sealed with expanding foam.

“Leaks some, but it’ll do,” Alix said, tapping Thorn’s helmet.

He released the ’casting. Sure enough, a shrill whistle of escaping atmosphere sliced the air around him.

Alix’s helmet bumped against his. “Where to?”

Thorn summoned magic again, this time crafting it with Joining magic into an expanding wave of awareness. His perception swept across human minds, especially off to his right, where they seemed to be clustered. He touched squid minds, too, including those of two shamans, recognizable by the opaque walls of denial enclosing their thoughts. Neither of them seemed at all interested in confrontation, though. In fact, a large contingent of Nyctus, some twenty in all, were in the process of hastily evacuating the station and boarding the corvette-sized ship docked on the other side of the circular station.

Thorn pointed to their right, toward the group of humans. But he held his place a moment as the Tiger Team started to move. He focused on one of the shamans, but not to try breaking through his mental defenses. Instead, he pressed with just enough to commit the particular feel of this squid’s mind, the distinctive ridges and peaks and valleys of his psyche, to his memory. He then infused the memory with magic, and, drawing on his experience with the Witch Nebula, turned that into a persistent tag in his own mind. Thorn now had a link to the shaman, which should endure more or less indefinitely—at the cost of always being vaguely aware of where this particular squid was.

Alix’s face appeared in front of his, her eyes hard with concern through her helmet’s faceplate. She made a shrugging gesture, which said, what’s wrong?

He just nodded back, gave a thumbs up, and pointed ahead of them.

Nothing. Let’s just go.

Alix returned his thumbs-up, then moved back into her slot in the Tiger Team’s formation. She raised her hand and swept it forward, and they all began to advance.

* * *

Thorn winced as whirling, shuriken-like blades clanged against the bulkhead behind him. The squid doing the shooting ducked behind a console, but not before Toff, currently on point, snapped back a burst of fire. The frangible rounds, intended to shatter on impact and minimize collateral damage, exploded into clouds of tiny fragments against the far bulkhead. Another trooper raised his own weapon, which sported an underslung grenade launcher. It coughed out a seeker round, which sailed over the console and detonated downward as it passed over the hidden squid. Seeker grenades were a new addition to the arsenal, specifically designed to detonate only in close proximity to a squid. Thorn had no idea how they functioned, but that was fine—he didn’t need to know. He only had to see the spray of gore meaning that the grenade worked.

The Tiger Team resumed their relentless advance. They’d only encountered a half-dozen squids who offered any resistance at all. The rest seemed content to focus on their panicked flight from the station. It suggested that most of them weren’t warriors, which made sense. This Glorious Horizon Processing Home probably mostly employed squid scientists, techs, and medical types. That only made them even more vile, as far as Thorn was concerned. At least warriors were prepared to put their lives on the line, and he could muster some respect for that. The rest of them were little more than glorified torturers, and deserved no consideration at all.

More shooting ahead. The lead element of the Tiger Team had reached a new section of the station, one shut away behind heavy blast doors. No amount of explosive would breach them, not without blowing apart this whole section of the station.

“Thorn, a little help,” Alix said.

He moved forward. The Tiger Team could eventually hack the doors’ control system, but they didn’t have the time. He waved the troopers back into cover, then called up magic and shaped it into a Hammer effect, a simple battering ram. Thorn gave himself an extra moment to pour power into his ’casting, so much that the air began to shimmer and crackle around the effect.

As soon as his control started to slip, Thorn looked at his hand, then punched it at the doors. The Hammer-ram shot forward and slammed into the doors with an immense clang, ripping them from their mounts. One topped into the space beyond with a heavy, metallic boom. Pieces of hatch coaming and the doors’ mechanism were flung into the compartment beyond like shrapnel.

Before the last fragments of debris had landed, Tiger Team Three was already on the move. Crouching, weapons raised, they pushed past the ruined doors. Another burst of fire from beyond. Another. Thorn tensed and ran forward, magic simmering in his talisman. If there was a sizable military contingent on the station and they’d just found it, the Tiger Team might be in trouble.

When he reached the doors, though, he found several dead squids, their bodies peppered with frangible rounds. A few blade-pistols lay on the deck near them, but these weren’t warriors. They weren’t bulky enough and had no body armor. Instead, they bore harnesses festooned with a variety of sinister-looking tools.

Toff, who’d led the way in, joined Alix beside Thorn. “Got here in time to see these bastards picking themselves up. Well, except for that guy,” he said, jerking his head toward one of the fallen blast doors. It had apparently slammed into a squid, knocked him over, then landed squarely on top of him. Viscous fluids oozed from the squashed corpse.

“Didn’t want them to retrieve those guns, so we shot them,” Toff went on. He might have been describing how to make a bed or tie your shoes, for all the emotion in his voice.

“Clear!”

The lead elements of the Tiger Team filtered back to report. Another compartment, similar to this one, sprawled behind a set of open blast doors, and another after that. Thorn stood and walked to one of the side compartments.

Then he stopped, rooted to the spot.

And just stared for a moment.

Alix stepped up beside him. “What did you find—?” she started, then she stopped and just stared, too.

“Oh, shit.”

Thorn wasn’t even sure which one of them had said it.

11

“That’s right, sir. We retrieved sixteen humans in the process of being turned into Skins from the squid station,” Tanner said.

On the comm screen, Admiral Scoville leaned forward. “Your report was thin on details about that, Captain Tanner. What does ‘in the process of being turned into Skins’ mean, exactly? We’ve got a lot of people really interested in that particular question.”

Tanner looked up from his briefing desk, at Thorn. “Lieutenant Stellers was on the scene. He’ll need to be fully debriefed, but in the meantime, maybe he has some insight to offer.”

“It’s a horror show, Admiral,” was all Thorn said.

Scoville’s eyes met Thorn’s, and his mouth opened. But he seemed to think better of whatever he was going to say and just nodded. “Understood. I’ll wait for the full debriefing. Besides, those interested people have the imagery and other data you’ve already transmitted, so that oughta keep them busy.” He glanced off-screen, then turned back.

“Now, what’s this about tracking the squid ship that escaped from that station? Do I gather there was some magic employed?” Scoville asked.

Thorn glanced at Tanner, who just gestured at the comm screen. “Yes, sir. I actually tagged a shaman aboard that ship, not the ship itself. It was still enough for me to get a sense of where they were going. I can’t say exactly where it is, but those squids were making a run for a nearby system, where they figured they’d be safe.”

“Probably a military installation. Strange they didn’t have their—what did you call it? Glorious Horizon Processing Home?” The Admiral scowled. “One hell of a name. Anyway, strange they didn’t have it better protected, given its sensitivity.”

“They probably figured its remote location in their space, and its obscurity, was its best protection,” Tanner said.

Thorn cleared his throat. “Sir, that system, the one the squids were running for? It’s a swamp planet. The shaman wasn’t happy about that because it used to be something much more. I think it might have been a major hub for the Nyctus once.”

“So our unknown friends must have seized it and started dewatering it, the same way they did those other planets you investigated,” Scoville said.

“And then the squids were able to take it back, but by then the damage was done. Yes, that’s our thinking, Admiral,” Tanner said.

“Bottom line is that the squids are desperate, sir. Who or whatever is taking their worlds and terraforming the water away has got them running scared,” Thorn said.

“You got that from that shaman, too?” Scoville asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“That could be handy. Kind of like having a Skin of our own among their ranks.”

“That’s true, sir, but it won’t last, unfortunately. I was able to hook myself into the shaman’s mind based on how it was shaped, then. But as he experiences new things, has new thoughts, and forms new memories, that shape is going to change. The link is already starting to fade. I expect it will just peter out completely in another day or two.”

“Shame. Still, that could be a useful little technique for our Starcasters to use. Stellers, make sure you document that when you get debriefed,” Scoville said.

“Aye, sir.”

“Meantime, Captain Tanner, I want the Hecate back here at Code Gauntlet, and soon. We need to get those poor bastards you rescued into treatment.”

“Not to mention starting to study them,” Thorn muttered, but Scoville just shrugged.

“Damned right. The best way to dissuade the squids from making anymore Skins is to figure out how they do it, and how we can detect and undo it.”

Thorn just nodded. When Scoville signed off, he turned to Tanner.

“Sir, some of those people we rescued—”

“Are too far gone. I know.”

“But some aren’t. Since we’ve got a few days before we reach Code Gauntlet, I’d like to try talking to those ones, see what I can find out.”

“Risks?”

“More to them, sir, than us.”

Tanner looked back at the comm screen, which was now just displaying the ON logo. He stared at it for a moment, then turned back to Thorn.

“Okay, do it. The more we find out, and the sooner we do it, the better.”

“I have one other request, sir?”

“I’d like the use of a dedicated, high-bandwidth comm channel, with signals priority over other traffic.”

“That’s quite the ask, Stellers. Mind if I ask why?”

“Because I know someone that might be able to help me out.”

* * *

“Thorn, I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m no interrogator,” Damien said.

Thorn smiled at the comm screen that had been set up in the Hecate’s midships cargo hold. The compartment was empty except for bins of trash that couldn’t be recycled, and would be dumped at her next port-of-call. It was probably the least critical part of the ship. “I’ve seen you in action, Damien. Seems to me that diplomacy and interrogation have a lot in common. After all, you’re trying to dig into someone’s motivations and then use that to manipulate them, right?”

“Manipulate is a pretty strong word. Better to call it influencing,” Damien said, then stopped, grinned, and shook his head. “Nah, I take that back. Manipulation is really what it is, yeah. But why not just get on the line with a professional interrogator? ON intelligence must have at least a few of those.”

“We do, and they’ll get their turn with these people. I’d like to try having someone who’s specifically not a military interrogator be part of it.”

Damien leaned back. He was aboard the Venture, having used it to get within the twenty-five-light-year limit for real-time comms. Except for a single Marine and a diplomatic aide, that left Kira alone with the Danzur. That didn’t thrill Thorn, but Damien had just waved aside his concerns.

“Ever since you threatened to wipe them from existence if they didn’t behave, they’ve gone out of their way to portray themselves as not being a threat to Kira or anyone else in our delegation. If Kira’s in any danger, it’s from smashing her head against the walls of Danzur procedure,” Damien had said, putting air-quotes around procedure.

“Well, you had Kira send me all this way, so I might as well give a whirl,” Damien finally said.

“Thank you. I’ve got one of the people we rescued standing by. His name is Anton Ignatius. He was an engineer aboard the light cruiser Uluru, which was reported missing and assumed destroyed while patrolling the Zone a few months back,” Thorn said. He gestured to the Marine standing near the hatch. The woman nodded, turned, and left. A moment later, she reentered with two more Marines, escorting a shackled man with a round face, receding hairline, and protruding ears that must have made his life hell as a kid.

Anton Ignatius, age thirty-two, Junior Petty Officer, a Propulsion Engineer of middling ability and limited promotion prospects. His ON personnel file didn’t say much more about him other than that, aside from the usual tombstone information about where he’d been born, date joined, courses completed and the like.

“Petty Officer Ignatius, this is Damien Forester. He’s going to help me debrief you today,” Thorn said.

The Marines guided Ignatius into a chair set about two meters back from the table where Thorn sat. Thorn had already turned the comm screen so that Ignatius and Damien could see one another. Clamped to the back of it, out of Ignatius’s sight, was a second screen, a data-pad set up to receive text-only messages from Damien without the Petty Officer being aware of it.

“Good to meet you, Petty Officer Ignatius. I wish it was under better circumstances,” Damien said.

“You mean like when I’m not chained up?” Ignatius raised his hands with a jingle of chain and looked woefully at Thorn. “Are these really necessary, sir?”

“Afraid so. You were held prisoner by the Nyctus for a lengthy period. Until you’ve been fully debriefed, we have to treat you as a potential security issue.”

Ignatius lowered his hands and sighed. “Don’t know what I can tell you, sir. The squids held me in isolation almost the whole time they had me. They only started getting interested in me recently—not long before you showed up and rescued me, in fact. Oh, and thank you for that, sir.”

Thorn nodded, but Damien spoke up. “Before we get into any of that, tell me about yourself, Petty Officer. Or can I call you Anton?”

“If I can call you Damien. It’d be a nice change from sir or ma’am.”

Damien smiled brightly. “Absolutely! Oh, and if you see me plugging away at a keyboard here, I’m just taking notes. Is that okay?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Damien, still smiling, spent a moment typing on a keyboard just out of sight. As he did, text appeared on the data-pad.

Going to make small talk. Bear with me. Establishing a baseline of behavior by asking questions he has no reason to lie about.

Thorn settled back as Damien started asking Ignatius a series of innocuous questions—where he’d grown up, if he had any siblings, how long he’d been in the ON, and other, not particularly interesting inquiries that Damien could have gleaned from the man’s personnel file. Thorn thought he got the point, though. By studying Ignatius’s tone and body language when he was clearly telling the truth, it would make it easier to sense when he started lying.

But Thorn didn’t simply wait. He reached out with a tendril of magic-infused thought and tentatively probed at Ignatius’s mind. It was immediately clear that whatever it was the squids did to turn people into Skins had, indeed, only partly taken effect. There were still parts of the man’s mind that were shrouded, but they were distinct and isolated. Thorn had tried reaching into the minds of the other rescued prisoners and found that the worst cases had virtually no control of their own minds at all. They were blank pages, awaiting whatever imperatives the Nyctus intended to implant in them.

Just thinking about it made Thorn clench his teeth. There were few more despicable ways of violating someone than to seize control of their mind and reshape who and what they were into something else entirely.

But Ignatius was nowhere near that far gone. He still had control of his own mind.

Or seemed to, anyway.

Thorn backed out of the man’s thoughts, just as Damien apparently got whatever he was looking for. He typed, and more text appeared on the data-pad.

Now we start asking him the questions he’s more likely to lie about. Go ahead.

“Tell me, Petty Officer, what happened to the Uluru?” Thorn asked.

“Damndest thing, sir. I was standing watch in Engineering when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“The reactor went off-line. It didn’t scram or anything like that, the fusion reaction just—well, it just stopped. The system switched to the backup fission plant, but it was dead, too. We ended up on power cells, which was just enough for life-support and minimal control. The comms were dead, too.”

“What do you think happened?” Thorn asked.

“I’ll tell you what happened. The squids had set up some kind of trap. The Chief Engineer briefed us about it. We were nosing around in an empty star system in the Zone, then we passed through a band of asteroids, and boom, everything died. Turned out the squids had magicked up three of those rocks, and when we flew between them, we were done.”

Thorn leaned forward. “How do you know it was magic and not some kind of tech?”

“Fusion reactions don’t just stop, sir. Neither does nuclear fission. If it wasn’t magic, then it’s some sort of tech I couldn’t even begin to explain.”

More text crawled across the data-pad.

Don’t see any deviations from the baseline. He’s telling the truth, at least as he understands it.

“So what happened after the squids disabled the Uluru?” Thorn asked.

Ignatius shrugged. “They swarmed us and boarded us. We tried to fight back, and a lot of people died. Some squids, too. The rest of us had to surrender.”

Thorn saw some text suddenly pop up on the data-pad.

Had to? Ask him why.

Thorn resisted a puzzled frown. What was Damien getting at? He wished they could have made the communication two-way, somehow.

Of course, they kind of did.

“Just to confirm, the squids knocked your ship off-line, boarded you, there was a fight, and the survivors, including you, were taken prisoner. Damien, any questions so far?” Thorn asked.

I see what you did there.

“Anton, tell us about surrendering,” Damien said.

Ignatius looked from Thorn, to Damien on the screen, then back again. “They had us outnumbered. We had a bunch of wounded, and we thought that fighting on would just get the rest of us killed.”

Interesting. We ask him to tell us about surrendering, and he tells us why he did.

Thorn leaned forward. “Petty Officer Ignatius, did the squids offer you terms? Of surrender?”

“Did they—?” He glanced from Thorn to Damien, and back again. “Yeah. They’d let us live if we gave up. Bastards never said it was so we could get turned into Skins.”

Thorn nodded and picked up another data-pad, pretending to make a note. “So they offered you terms of surrender, and you decided to accept them. Anything else you remember about it?”

Ignatius stared at the table for a moment, then shook his head. “Not really.”

He’s lying.

Thorn nodded. “Okay, what happened next?”

Ignatius went on to describe the horror of being taken by the squids and then loaded into one of their ships, and spending the next days—he wasn’t sure how many—in a cell, being taken somewhere. He was examined and interrogated before eventually being offloaded into the Glorious Horizon Processing Home, where they’d found him.

“It was . . . bad. Really bad, sir,” Ignatius said, putting his elbows on his knees and resting his head in his hands.

It’s a mix of truth and lies. There are things he’s not telling us.

“I know,” Thorn said, as much to Damien as to Ignatius. While he gave the Petty Officer a moment to recover, he flicked out a burst of Joining and skimmed the man’s mind. Normally, a person’s thoughts flowed naturally and organically through their consciousness, a mental river swirling and eddying around and over the contours of their subconscious, the riverbed. But Ignatius’s weren’t like that at all. His thoughts were fixed and rigid, as though deliberately assembled in a particular order. What shaped them was less his subconscious, and more the empty voids of denial the squids had placed in his mind. Ignatius was arranging his thoughts around those, and he was doing it with conscious purpose.

Damien was spot on. And, he’d done it through a view screen, across a comm channel, using only visual cues, things he could actually observe. No magic was involved at all.

Damn, he was good.

“Okay, Petty Officer Ignatius, I know this is tough. But I need you to tell me what happened in the squid station, right up to the moment we rescued you.”

Ignatius’s head snapped up, a glare hardening his face. It only lasted an instant, but Damien caught it.

Woah. He’s suddenly not happy about something.

His voice thick with misery, Ignatius described being isolated, starved, and tortured—directly, via pain inflicted myriad ways, and indirectly, by being denied sleep, or even just a momentary respite from glaring lights and pounding, discordant noise.

“And then . . . they were inside my mind. That was the worst part. They were in there, and they were, you know, rummaging around, like they were looking for something. I could feel it. It was—” He stopped and choked off a sob.

That’s true. He really did go through that.

Thorn nodded again, making it look sympathetic, for Ignatius’s benefit. He thought just as Damien did. But a flicker of suspicion had sparked in a corner of Thorn’s mind and was rapidly starting to spread.

“But they stopped torturing you at some point, Petty Officer,” Thorn said.

Ignatius looked at him, his eyes suddenly hard with suspicion of his own. “What do you mean, sir? They never stopped. They never let up.”

Thorn picked up the second data-pad, the one he’d been pretending to use to take notes. This time, he actually did consult it. “I’ve got a medical report here from the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon. He says that your newest injuries were almost two weeks old. He also says you showed no signs of malnutrition or dehydration. So the squids must have stopped torturing you and denying you food and water and such at least two weeks ago?”

Ignatius licked his lips. “I don’t recall, sir. It all just blurs together. Anyway, they kept using their damned magic on me. Maybe they decided that torture just wasn’t working.”

He hasn’t mentioned any of his crewmates. Not even once.

“So how come they kept torturing other members of the Uluru’s crew? We rescued four others from your ship, and”—Thorn made a deliberate show of consulting the data-pad—“and they’d all be tortured recently, one of them apparently when we started our attack on the station,” Thorn said.

“I don’t know, sir. I can’t speak for those bastards.”

Damien spoke up. “You’ve clearly had a hard time here, Anton. But you’re safe now. After you’ve been debriefed and thoroughly checked out, you’ll be able to resume your duties aboard a new ship.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As a—Junior Propulsion Engineer, wasn’t it?”

Ignatius looked down at his feet for a moment. Again, Thorn swept a pass of awareness across his thoughts.

Simmering resentment, shot through with flashes of anger. But the foremost thoughts in his mind weren’t about the Nyctus. They were about Thorn.

He felt the man collect himself. Thorn withdrew.

Ignatius looked up. “Is there anything else, sir?”

Just follow my lead.

Again, Damien spoke. “Yes, there is. You know, Lieutenant Stellers, it strikes me that Anton here probably has some valuable insights into the Nyctus. Once he’s been fully debriefed and had his security clearance reinstated, maybe you should speak to Captain Densmore. I think the ON can always come up with Junior Propulsion Engineers. Someone who’s an expert on the squids, though, would be way more valuable than that.”

Thorn gave a thoughtful look. “Huh. I agree. In fact, I think there’s an opening in Fleet Intelligence that Densmore’s been trying to fill. It’s a fast-track position, though. Really demanding. But for a top performer, it’s a straight shot at promotion. Hell, it’s a straight shot at a Captaincy.”

“Hey, you should apply for it, Thorn,” Damien said, smirking.

“I would, but the Starcaster Corps would never let me go. Sharp guy like Petty Officer Ignatius here, though—” Thorn smiled. “You’d pretty much have to give up spaceflight, though. You’d be somewhere in the rear with the gear.”

Sure enough, Ignatius’s demeanor changed. Thorn didn’t have to Join to see anger abruptly give way to an almost smug enthusiasm. “I’d definitely be down for that, sir. However I can best help the war effort, I will.”

Bingo. He’s a narcissist and an opportunist. The squids offered him something.

Thorn stood and walked around the table. “Okay, Petty Officer, that leaves only one thing.”

“What’s that, sir?”

Thorn leaned in, his smile flicking off. “I want to know what the squids offered you.”

“Sir?”

“The squids offered you something. Something that you wanted. In exchange, they stopped torturing you, started feeding you, letting you rest. What was it?”

“Sir, there was nothing—”

“Bullshit!” Thorn locked his gaze on Ignatius’s and didn’t let it go. “You’re a collaborator, Anton. You traded your loyalty to your crewmates, to the ON, to your entire freakin’ species for something. What was it?”

Ignatius’s face instantly flicked from victim to angry defiance. “You’re accusing me of treason? Go to hell!”

Thorn saw the Marines starting to close in. He raised a hand, stopping them, then let a slow, humorless smile spread across his face.

“Petty Officer Ignatius, you are going to tell me what I want to know, or I’m going to dig into your mind, bludgeon aside whatever the squids have done to block off parts of your thoughts, and root around until I find it. And you will not be able to stop me.”

Damien hissed through his teeth. “Ouch. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. I mean, I’ve seen this man move a whole fleet just with the power of his mind.”

Ignatius’s hostile insolence lasted a few seconds longer, then collapsed into a heap of surrender. “They told me—they told me they needed humans to oversee things once they won the war. They—” He took a shuddering breath. “They said they’d make me a Governor. Over any planet I wanted. They were torturing me, and I just wanted it to stop!”

Thorn straightened. Strangely, he actually felt a pang of sympathy for him. But it almost instantly vanished into the realization that this man was prepared to betray humanity itself as long as he got something out of it. The squids had read him like a book, using his selfish ambition against him. Junior Propulsion Engineer aboard some ON ship, or Governor of a planet. In this man’s egocentric world, there was only one answer to that. The man had only budged when he and Damien had made what seemed like a better offer.

The door to the cargo bay rolled open and Tanner walked in. He’d been watching the whole thing, of course.

“I don’t know what pisses me off more—that you’re such a monster that you’d seriously consider the squid’s so-called offer, or that you’re such a moron that you believed they actually meant it,” Tanner said, stopping beside Thorn.

“I know what pisses me off more,” Thorn said, his voice low with menace. Real menace, too. He wasn’t feigning it.

Ignatius licked his lips, his eyes sliding between Tanner and Thorn. “Look. Look. I know stuff. I was there. I shouldn’t have believed them, no. And I didn’t, really. I was trying to get into their confidences, and—”

Tanner cut him off with an exaggerated sniff. “The smell of bullshit’s getting too thick for me. Lieutenant Stellers, have Anton here taken to the brig and put in a cell. He can rot there until we get back to Code Gauntlet, where I can get his treasonous ass off my ship.”

Tanner walked away. Ignatius turned, his voice turning desperate.

“Sir, I can still help! I still know lots of shit about the squids!”

Tanner stopped, speaking without looking back. “I believe Lieutenant Stellers alluded to a Captaincy. I’m going to make sure you get one. Once you’ve been debriefed and deprogrammed, you’ll get to be Captain of a shitty work party in some shitty place. And, if that doesn’t work to rehabilitate you—and I’m sure it won’t—then I’ll bet the Allied Stars war crime tribunal will be more than happy to give it a try.”

Thorn turned to the comm screen. “Thanks for your help, Damien.”

“Hey, a chance to unmask a piece of shit like Anton here? No problem, any time.”

Ignatius’s sudden defiance returned. “You can go to hell, all of you! You weren’t there. You didn’t have to go through what I did—”

“No, but your crewmates did, and they were still holding out when we showed up,” Thorn said. He turned and nodded to the Marines. “Don’t feel obligated to be gentle.”

The Marine Sergeant commanding the detail could have had a face carved from stone. Still, his eyes narrowed in contempt.

“Oh, don’t worry, sir. I don’t.”

12

Morgan scowled and crossed her arms. “I want to leave. I don’t want to stay here.”

Falunis flickered with barely restrained impatience. “We’re keeping you here for your own good, child. We want to protect you and make sure you’re safe. Besides, we’ve provided everything here that you could possibly want.”

Morgan looked around. Yes, the chamber she’d been given in one of the spires was nice. Very nice, even. Spacious, luxurious, with a gorgeous view of the glowing city around them. Whatever food she wanted, whatever she might want to amuse herself with, it was hers for the asking.

But she couldn’t leave.

“When they put people into a room and don’t let them leave, it’s called jail,” Morgan snapped.

“Not always. It can also be called protective custody.”

“Custardy?” Morgan said, rolling the word through her mouth. It actually did feel kind of like the smooth texture of the sweet custard mommy had sometimes made on Nebo.

“Custody. It means to watch over someone. Protective custody means we’re trying to protect you,” Falunis replied.

“Protect me from what?”

“From anything that would try to harm you. From Thorn Stellers, and all of the other humans who have taken his side against us.”

Morgan sighed and turned to the enormous window. She could, just by touching any part of the exterior wall, make it turn transparent. Touch it again and it went dark. For a while, she’d amused herself with that and the gorgeous view beyond. The colors were much harsher than they’d been on Tāmtu, nothing like the Radiance at all. But they were still pretty in their own way.

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.

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.

“What do you mean?” Tanner asked.

“Well, they use magic for this trap of theirs, right?”

“They do. Based on what we’ve been able to figure out, they use some sort of gravitational effect to immobilize a ship, more magic to render it helpless, and then board it.”

“But your own Starcasters could counter that, right?”

Tanner glanced at Thorn, who returned a sure, probably look. He turned back to Bertilak. “If our Starcasters were powerful enough, then probably, yes.”

“Or if one of them was Thorn,” Bertilak said.

Thorn shot Bertilak a grimace. He was as happy as anyone to receive compliments, but not gratuitous ones in the middle of a planning discussion.

No one else seemed put off by it, though. Tanner just nodded. “Indeed. But what are you getting at here, Bertilak?”

“It would just make more sense to me to use graviters. Those couldn’t be so easily countered. Not without destroying them, anyway.”

The Tac O leaned back in his seat. “Sorry, Bertilak, but gravity-based tech won’t do it. We can use it for inertial dampening and generating a gravitational field ship-board, but the tech that projects an effect across more than a few tens of meters doesn’t exist .”

“Really? Tell that to the Imbrogul.”

Thorn saw puzzled glances all around. He offered one of his own. “Who, or what, is the Imbrogul?” he asked Bertilak.

“Only one of the most technologically savvy races around, or so I’m told. You’ve never heard of them?” Bertilak asked.

All eyes turned to the Tac O, who’d run a database query. He shrugged. “We’ve got no record of anyone called the Imbrogul.”

“Okay, Bertilak, are you saying that these Imbrogul have some sort of advanced gravity-based technology?” the XO asked.

“That’s my understanding. I’ve never traded with them myself, but I’ve traded with people that have, and they all say pretty much the same thing. The Imbrogul have tech that can polarize, or even completely nullify gravity,” Bertilak replied.

A moment of stunned silence hung over the bridge. Bertilak looked around as it lingered, finally speaking to break the sudden quiet.

“What?”

“Gravity tech like that is still mostly just an idea, with some early experimenting going on in labs. So you can imagine our keen interest in this,” Tanner said.

Thorn had to nod. He wasn’t an engineer, but even he recognized the significance of being able to reverse or nullify gravity. A spaceship’s performance was really only limited by the tolerances of the squishy organic lifeforms it carried. Sure, it was possible to build a ship that could withstand hundreds of g’s of acceleration, but current tech couldn’t offset more than a small fraction of that. The ship would be fine, but its crew would be smeared on the bulkheads as a thin, gory paste.

But if that sort of acceleration could be completely nulled-out, then ships could safely perform incredible maneuvers. It would revolutionize space travel and combat.

Tanner went on. “Bertilak, we would really appreciate it if you could give us as much information about these Imbrogul as you can.”

“As well as any other tech you might know about,” the XO put in.

Bertilak nodded. “I will tell you what I can. Again, though, I’ve mostly traded with people who’ve traded with the Imbrogul. Other races, too.”

“How have we not even heard of any of these races, much less met them?” the Tac O asked.

Thorn stared at the star-chart for a moment, then stood, moved beside Tanner, and reached for the view-screen. He used a hand to drag the image to one side, pushing the Allied Stars territory, and then the Zone, off the side of the screen. This revealed Nyctus space, as far as the ON knew it extended, and the region beyond. Thorn swept a hand across the latter.

“Everything we know about this region of space comes from what we can observe and detect from our own space, right? So we can see the stars and systems out there, but we don’t know any other details. We never get ships out that far,” he said to the bridge at large.

“Well, no. There’s this little matter of the freakin’ Nyctus being in the way,” the XO pointed out.

“Exactly, ma’am.” Thorn rotated the view ninety degrees along the x-axis, changing the usual top-down view from above the galactic plane into an edge-on view, looking toward the galactic core. It emphasized how Nyctus-controlled space loomed like a wall against one flank of the Allied Stars territory, preventing any easy passage beyond.

The Tac O sat forward, leaning his elbows onto his knees. “If you wanted to go around squid space to get out there, it’d be a long flight.”

“Months, at least. Probably the better part of a year, depending on which way you went,” the Nav O put in.

Tanner looked at Bertilak. “Is this where these other races are? Out there, beyond the squids?”

“Some of them. Others I’m not so sure.”

“What about these Imbrogul?”

Bertilak stood, ducking under the overheads as he approached the front of the bridge. He pursed his lips, considering the chart-image, then nodded to himself. “Yes. Somewhere in here.”

He slid the view to reveal more of the space “above” the galactic plane, then waved his hand at a region abutting the “top” of Nyctus space. “The traders who mentioned the Imbrogul said they were in this area, but didn’t get any more specific. And I had other places to go, so I didn’t pay much more attention.”

“I wonder if the squids have any dealings with these Imbrogul,” Thorn said, eyeing what would be the approximate boundary between the two races’ territories.

“Of course they do. The Nyctus have dealings with many races,” Bertilak replied.

Another moment of quiet fell, filled only by the background hum of the Hecate’s systems. It was less a stunned silence this time, though, and more an uncomfortable one. Thorn finally broke it.

“It shouldn’t be surprising. We already know that they had relations with the Danzur,” he said.

Tanner gave the viewscreen a stare as hard as ancient ice. “True. But this presents us with a problem. So far, we haven’t seen any hints the Nyctus are gaining advanced tech from one of these races, but that might just be dumb luck.”

The XO spoke up. “Or they do have it, and are just waiting for the right moment to spring it on us.”

“Now there’s a cheery thought,” the Tac O muttered.

Tanner gave a single, sharp nod. “Well, hold that cheery thought, Lieutenant Osborne. Bertilak, I’d like you to give us a rundown on whatever you know about these other races, if you please. We’ve generally been aware that some of them are out there, but I think it’s time for the ON and the Allied Stars to start paying more attention to them. And that starts with whatever you can tell us.”

“I’ll do my best, Captain,” Bertilak said, turned toward the viewscreen, and started to talk.

* * *

Tanner’s little briefing room behind the bridge was too small to hold Bertilak, and more than one other normal, human-sized person. The Captain called him and Thorn to his cabin instead.

“Prefer not to meet here if I can avoid it. Like having a space that isn’t entirely about work,” Tanner said, as they entered.

Thorn nodded his understanding. “I get that, sir. It’s not exactly somewhere to get away from work, but I use the witchport as my quiet place, when I need some alone time.”

“Have to be honest, Stellers, I’ve always suspected you spend some of your time there sleeping,” Tanner replied, another of his hinted smiles on his lips.

Thorn grinned. “I almost never sleep in there, sir.”

Tanner’s eyes twinkled with brief amusement, but a chime from his comm terminal interrupted. “That’ll be Admiral Scoville. He said he’d get back to us when the Arcturus was in real-time comms range,” Tanner said, sitting at his desk and tapping a control. The ON logo vanished, replaced by the gruff cragginess of Scoville’s face.

“That report of yours makes for some unsettling reading, Captain Tanner,” Scoville said.

“It was meant to, sir. Based on what Bertilak has told us, the squids are dealing with seven or eight different races, and those are the ones he knows about,” Tanner replied.

“Can’t deny they’ve obviously been putting more effort into diplomacy than we have.”

Thorn, who’d sat on Tanner’s bunk, shifted slightly to get a better view of Scoville’s image on the terminal. “That’s true, sir. But all of these other alien races are pretty much on the far side of Nyctus space. The Danzur are the closest to us, and even they’re a long flight away.”

“Understood. But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to start doing business differently. I’ve spoken to Fleet, to the Admiralty, and they’ve been talking to the Allied Stars Council. They all agree that we need to put more effort into diplomatic efforts, especially with these—” Scoville stopped and consulted a data-pad. “—these Imbrogul.”

Tanner crossed his arms. “Unless we cut through Nyctus space, it’s going to take any diplomatic mission at least six weeks to get to them, sir. And if we do cut through Nyctus space, then we’re going to have to send a chunk of the Fleet along to escort them.”

“I can’t imagine the squids taking very kindly to us trying to get chummy with the Imbrogul, sir, in any case. That’s going to be a tough mission either way,” Thorn said.

Scoville returned a thin, hard smile. “All excellent points. That’s probably why they’ve been major topics of discussion between the Admiralty and the Council.”

“Didn’t mean to steal your thunder, sir,” Tanner replied.

“And you haven’t. The conclusion reached is that we do need to send a mission, we need to do it now, and it needs to get there as close to now as we can manage.”

Thorn glanced at Bertilak, who just raised an eyebrow. He had an uncomfortable idea where this was going, but bit his words back and just waited.

Scoville went on, his eyes suddenly boring into Thorn’s from the screen. “We’ve decided to send a mission that can travel quickly, won’t attract much attention, and can defend itself. Stellers, you might have noticed I’m looking at you.”

“Yes, sir, I did. And I just want to remind you that I’m not a diplomat.”

“No, you’re not, but you do a pretty damned good job of being one anyway. Thanks to you, not only are the Danzur no longer an immediate threat, but we’re also actually making some progress with them.”

“What are you saying here, sir? That you’re dispatching the Hecate on this one hell of a diplomatic mission?” Tanner asked.

“No, we’ve got other plans for the Hecate. We’re asking Bertilak to be Thorn’s ride to meet the Imbrogul. And I really do mean asking since, my large green friend, you aren’t the ON’s to command,” Scoville replied.

Bertilak smiled. “I appreciate that, Admiral. And yes, of course I’d be happy to help out with this mission.” He looked at Thorn. “The two of us will be adventuring together again, my friend. Isn’t it exciting?”

“That’s one word for it,” Thorn muttered.

Bertilak’s smile faded, and Thorn held up a hand. “That’s not about traveling with you, Bertilak. Hell, the Jolly Green Giant’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than the Hecate. No offense, Captain Tanner.”

“None taken. I’ve been aboard Bertilak’s ship, so I don’t disagree with you at all,” Tanner replied.

“No, Admiral, it’s more that while I appreciate your comments about the Danzur, I’m really not a diplomat. I’m not even sure what a diplomat really does, what sort of promises or deals they can make, that sort of thing,” Thorn said.

“Stellers, all we want you to do is travel to these Imbrogul, confirm what Bertilak has heard about them, and determine what sort of relationship exists between them and the squids. Then, you come home and report. If there’s real diplomacy to be done after that, then we’ll get the proper resources deployed.”

Thorn wanted to sigh, but didn’t and just nodded. “Understood, sir. When do you want us to start?”

“I’m transmitting your orders now. Needless to say, these are about as secret as secret gets, but they really don’t say much more than I’ve already told you. You should be able to read them on your way to Bertilak’s ship.”

Tanner glanced at Thorn, then looked back at Scoville. “What about the Hecate, sir? You mentioned you have other plans for us.”

“Separate orders are on their way. Don’t worry, Galen, we won’t leave you out of the fun. In fact, as usual, we’re putting you at the tip of the spear.”

Scoville signed off, and Tanner leaned back, stretching out his legs. “Interesting times and all that, eh, gentlemen?”

“Interesting times, sir?” Thorn asked.

Tanner nodded. “It’s an ancient curse. May you live in interesting times.”

Thorn gave a wry smile. Bertilak laughed.

“The truth if I’ve ever heard it,” the alien said.

“Anyway, gents, we all have work to do. You two get ready to depart, but secrecy is the key. We’ll give you a cover story, Stellers. Say that Bertilak’s taking you back to Code Gauntlet for some reason or other.” Tanner opened his mouth to say more, but another chime from the terminal cut him off. He tapped a control, opening a file, and sat up as he read it.

“Problem, sir?” Thorn asked.

“I don’t know. The Hecate’s being tasked to flush out the Nyctus trap in whichever of those systems it’s located. And do it without a Starcaster on board. Would you call that a problem, Lieutenant?”

“I probably would, yeah.”

“But it’s not your problem. You two just concentrate on doing what you’re going to do,” Tanner said, dismissing them. Thorn and Bertilak headed for the door, but Tanner turned from the terminal.

“Before you go, you two, come and see me. I want to do some final coordination before you take off.”

“Will do, sir.”

Out in the corridor, Bertilak stopped and looked at Thorn. “Even the Giant will take a long time to get to where we’re going. Unless…” He let his voice trail off.

Thorn rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, of course I’m going to move your ship. The quicker we do this, the quicker we can get back. Have to admit, though, I’m starting to feel like my biggest contribution to this war is moving shit around.”

Bertilak bent over and put his arm around Thorn’s shoulder. “That is because, my friend, you are so very, very good at it.”

14

As soon as the Gyrfalcon was cleared to maneuver, Mol lit the drive and accelerated away from the task force, inbound for the suspected location of the Nyctus trap.

“We’ll reach the near edge of the asteroid belt in just under three hours,” Trixie said.

“Roger that. How about some music in the meantime? And, just to be clear, I don’t mean your Dad Rock.”

“Dad Rock?”

Mol smiled. “Last time we were at Code Gauntlet, the subject of your latest taste in music came up while I was talking with another pilot. He mentioned it was the kind of music his dad listened to. So, Dad Rock.”

“Fine. No Dad Rock. What do you want to listen to?” Trixie asked.

“I don’t know. Something upbeat, to take my mind off how insanely dangerous this plan is.”

Music, airy and bouncy, floated through the Gyrfalcon’s cockpit. Mol didn’t recognize it, and didn’t really care anyway. It was just something to break the dull white noise that would otherwise fill the fighter, the rumble of her fusion plant and drive, the hum and whisper of her life support. She glanced at the tactical display, watching the task force, which included the Hecate and was led by the comforting bulk of the Arcturus, dwindle behind her.

Even as she watched, the images of the ON ships began to flicker and fade. Their scanner returns likewise died away. A moment longer, and they were gone.

Well, not gone. They were still there. They were just concealed by magic, an effect called Shading, as Thorn called it. In another fifteen minutes or so, they’d begin heading into the system in her wake, obscuring themselves for as long as possible as they did. It reassured Mol to know they were back there, but not being able to actually see them left her feeling awfully alone.

And she wasn’t used to that. Ever since being assigned to the Hecate, Mol had flown many missions, but virtually all of them had someone on board with her. Usually, it was Thorn, but it had also been Kira, and Alix and her Tiger Team Three, and any number of others she’d been taking out on some mission or other.

She glanced at the empty co-pilot’s couch. This time, it was just her.

And Trixie, of course.

“Trixie, any sign of, well, anything yet?”

“No, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Mol sighed. The old Trixie, the one that had been effectively killed off by a virus deployed against her by a couple of Nyctus Skins, would have said something like, Well, sure, there’s signs of all sorts of things! It would have been pointless, and silly, and Mol missed the hell out of it. This new Trixie, the version brought back from the dead by Thorn, just wasn’t the same. Aside from her forays into different types of music, almost always types Mol didn’t like, she was all business.

“Wonder if this system is going to be a bust, too,” Mol muttered. The last system they’d checked, candidate location number one for the Nyctus trap, had come up empty. Mol had made the nerve-wracking flight, bait for their own trap, and ended it with nothing but a tour of a completely uninteresting star system, and an annoying case of acid reflux from a stomach just clenched too long into a knot.

And now she was doing it all over again. Part of her hoped that this would be the trap system. But part of her also hoped it wouldn’t, because being a morsel of bait in what might be a clash between big capital ships was just no fun at all.

Time passed. Mol just sat back, watched the tactical display, and occasionally tweaked the flight management system. The plan was for her to run lengthwise through the asteroid belt on the near side of the star, then reverse course and do the same thing on the far side. She should be able to traverse a good eighty percent of the belt that way. That left twenty percent uncovered, but the thinking was that they’d either detect the Nyctus if they were here, or at least provoke them into some sort of response.

Trixie’s syrupy music suddenly cut off.

“Uh, Trixie? What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. Just wait a second.”

Mol sat up and cinched her harness. The tactical display didn’t show anything amiss. There were no surveillance or targeting scanners active, or any power emissions that might indicate hidden ships or installations. Of course, the Nyctus were just as capable of Shading their ships, so that didn’t necessarily mean much. But if that was the case, what had caught Trixie’s attention? Not being organic or, strictly speaking, even alive, she wasn’t vulnerable to what Thorn called Joining. At least, that’s what he’d told her. But Shading was different. It prevented anyone or anything from seeing whatever was being Shaded by doing something magical. Blocking or redirecting light and radiation, or something like that. Mol wasn’t even sure.

“Trixie, an update would be nice.”

“A discreet group of twenty-two asteroids are displaying slightly different orbital characteristics than essentially all of the rest.” As she spoke, the nav display zoomed in and highlighted the asteroids in question. Sure enough, they were orbiting the star a little more slowly than their fellows, and on a slightly different trajectory. The difference was only a fraction of a degree, but it was real.

“What’s causing it?” Mol asked.

“I don’t know. It could be a perturbation by a passing body of some sort. But that wouldn’t likely affect only one, specific group of asteroids, and none of the surrounding ones.”

“Inform the Hecate.”

“Done.”

A message on the comm panel confirmed that the Gyrfalcon had just sent an omnidirectional burst transmission. That was pretty standard procedure, which was the point, of course.

“Okay, then, let’s go check this out, shall we?” Mol said, entering a new trajectory into the flight management system. The Gyrfalcon veered as its thrusters fired, orienting it onto a new course. Mol powered up the weapon systems, and switched the point-defense battery into active mode.

“Weapons tight, Trixie,” she said. That would prevent the Gyrfalcon from firing on any target not positively identified as enemy. It was more restrictive than weapons free, which allowed shots at anything not identified as friendly. Things could get confusing very quickly, though, and Mol didn’t want to take any chances.

“Twenty-two minutes to the edge of the asteroid belt. Forty-six minutes to the anomalous cluster of asteroids,” Trixie said.

Mol took a deep breath, let it out, and waited.

The time and distance ticked down.

They reached the edge of the asteroid belt. Unlike some she’d traversed, this one wasn’t especially crowded. The average distance between the rocks was nearly ten thousand klicks. There were clumps, though, where they came within a few hundred klicks, or even a few tens of klicks. Their anomalous little group of rogue asteroids were spread across about a thousand klicks, making it a tight cluster.

Mol aimed the Gyrfalcon for the heart of it.

“Okay, Trixie, let’s go active on the surveillance scanners. Aw, hell, fire up the targeting scanners, too. Make us look as paranoid as you can.”

“Will do.”

The Gyrfalcon began radiating energy at the asteroids, lighting them up with scanners ramped to full power. It turned the fighter into a conspicuous beacon, one that should shine gloriously on any watching scanners.

“Mol, are you sure this is the best approach? Doesn’t making ourselves this obvious seem kind of, um, obvious?”

“If the squids think we’re onto them, they’re probably—”

The Gyrfalcon abruptly wrenched hard to one side, and began to decelerate hard. Mol grunted as she was flung against the harness. She had to fight the sudden g-forces to reach the controls, switch the fighter from flight management mode to manual, and take direct control.

The fighter kept slowing, as though flying into thick syrup instead of empty vacuum. Mol tapped at the controls, firing the thrusters, throttling the drive up and down, trying to regain control. Whatever had grabbed the Gyrfalcon had a grip like titanium alloy, though, and refused to let go.

* * *

“Captain Tanner, the Gyrfalcon’s slowing down, fast,” Osborne said, eyes fixed on his Tactical station.

Tanner checked the repeater built into his command seat. The fighter was, indeed, slowing fast. Either Wyant had started decelerating hard, or something was causing her to decelerate hard.

“Okay, Tac O, let’s see what the reconfigured scanners show us,” he said.

Osborne tapped at his controls, switching the Hecate’s main display to show data from a redundant scanner system. Normally used as a back-up in case of battle damage, this one had been configured to detect gravitational anomalies. It made them useless for anything else, but Tanner considered it worth the risk.

“Look at that,” Osborne said.

Tanner stood and walked up to the viewscreen. The display showed two broad swathes of anomalous gravitation emanating from two of the asteroids. They intersected squarely on the Gyrfalcon.

“Looks like our visiting Starcaster was right,” Tanner said, then strode back to his seat and hit the ship-wide address. “All hands, we are no longer at General Quarters, we’re at Battle Stations. Weapons status is now weapons-tight.”

He tapped another control. “Commander, you’ve done your part well. Time to stand ready for things to get intense.”

“Aye, sir,” came the clipped reply. The voice, a woman’s, plucked at Tanner. Not because he wasn’t happy to have her aboard, but because he was used to having Stellers in the witchport. The man’s facility for magic was literally awe-inspiring, and although Tanner would never admit it, he found Stellers’ presence on the Hecate pretty damned reassuring.

Tanner allowed himself a brief, inward scowl. Thinking like that was dangerous. No ship or crew could become too dependent on what amounted to a single point of failure.

Mind you, Stellers really was that good.

The woman’s voice again hummed across the intercom. “I’ve dropped the Shade, Captain. We’re already attracting some magical attention from the squids.”

“Not surprised. Thank you, Commander Narvez.”

He’d wanted a Starcaster to replace Stellers, and he’d got one. Narvez had been based at Code Nebula for a long time now, and Tanner had worried she might not be up to front-line action. Her terse, strictly professional attitude helped put his mind at ease, but the real test would be coming shortly.

Tanner leaned back in his seat. “Tac O, power up the reactive armor and go to weapons free on my command. Helm, take us in, best possible speed. Wyant needs our help.”

* * *

The Gyrfalcon bucked and shuddered, as whatever net of sorcery had engulfed it bled off its velocity. Mol knew it was magic, because nothing was registering on the tactical display. As far as the fighter’s fire control system was concerned, there were no targets, and nothing was happening.

“Shit!”

Mol tapped at the controls, trying to break the Gyrfalcon free of whatever had snagged it. It didn’t work, though, and the fighter just slowed more and more.

“Gyrfalcon, Hecate. What’s your status?”

“Pretty much a fly in a spiderweb, Hecate. Any help would be much appreciated.”

“We’re on our way. Do your best to hang on.”

“Like I’m, what, not going to do that?” Mol muttered, but without keying her mike. When she did hit transmit, she kept it as calm and professional as she could.

“Roger, Hecate. Gyrfalcon out.”

“It would seem that playing bait for the Nyctus trap has worked very well,” Trixie said.

“Gee, you think? Trixie, can you tell me anything about how they’re doing this?”

“I’m sorry, Mol, but conventional scanners—”

She stopped.

“Trixie?”

“Four Nyctus ships have just emerged from cover behind a large asteroid. A heavy cruiser, and three destroyers.” Data flicked onto the tactical display, painting the enemy ships as icons, each with a brief summary of course, speed, and other vital stats.

“Well, shit. This just gets better and better,” Mol said, then narrowed her eyes at a much closer asteroid. A faint power signature emanated from it. Without hesitating, she slewed the Gyrfalcon around. The fighter responded like a clunky old scow, but she still had enough multi-axis control to at least turn it in place. As soon as the asteroid had slid into a decent firing solution, and Mol got tone lock, she loosed a salvo of missiles.

They crept off the launch rails, drives burning furiously. Plasma exhaust washed over the Gyrfalcon’s hull as they slowly moved away, seemingly about as fast as Mol could walk, if she weren’t in a hurry.

“Fly, you bastards!”

The Gyrfalcon shuddered again, then came to a complete stop, dead in space. The four Nyctus warships changed course to intercept the approaching Hecate. Mol killed the missiles’ drives and just slumped back in her crash-couch. Of course. Why not? They had her stuck fast and helpless, and now planned to add an ON destroyer to their catch of the day.

“Well, shit.”

* * *

“The squid ships will be at long range in three minutes, Captain,” Osborne said.

Tanner nodded, but kept his attention on the stricken Gyrfalcon. It had come to a dead stop at the intersection of the two, beam-like gravitational anomalies, which had now been joined by a third. Each emanated from a separate asteroid. Saving Wyant meant disabling whatever was generating those gravity beams, and that meant targeting something. Just pouring shots into an asteroid almost two klicks across wasn’t very efficient, though. They needed better targets.

Tanner punched the intercom. “Commander Narvez, we’re not detecting anything we can treat as a target on those rocks. Can you help us out?”

“One moment.”

Tanner flicked his attention back to the approaching Nyctus flotilla. They still offered the Hecate no firing solutions, being too far away. As soon as they were in range, though, Tanner had to engage them, so he could draw them in. That made the timing pretty damned tight, if they were going to rescue Wyant, while also keeping the squid ships busy.

The squid ships that had the Hecate outgunned five or six to one.

“Firing solutions are up, Captain,” the Tac O said.

Tanner’s gaze snapped back to the tactical situation. None of the firing solutions had even broken a ten percent hit probability, but Tanner didn’t wait. He needed to keep the squid ships busy, for a few minutes, anyway.

“Tac O, weapons free. Stand-by to fire a full-spread of missiles at the squid ships,” he said.

Osborne glanced up from his station. “Sir, firing solutions are—”

“Are garbage, I know.” Tanner raised one hand toward Osborne, a wait gesture. He stabbed at the intercom with the other.

“Commander Narvez, talk to me.”

“Look at the reconfigured display, sir.”

Tanner did, then raised his eyebrows. “Well, how about that. Well done, Commander.”

He spun back to Osborne. “Okay, Tac O, here’s what I want you to do.”

* * *

Mol decided to just lounge. To lay back in the crash couch, and just wait for, well, whatever the hell was going to happen. Because, whatever it was, it obviously wasn’t going to involve her.

“Trixie, how about some music?”

“Is that really appropriate, given the situation?”

“Given this situation, I’d call it perfectly appropriate.”

“Any requests?”

“Surprise me,” Mol said, smiling.

Sure enough, syrupy Dad Rock wafted out of the speakers and drifted through the cockpit. Mol’s smile became a laugh.

“Oh, Trixie, you’re so predictable—”

“Gyrfalcon, Hecate. We’re sending you some repeated data from our reconfigured scanners,” Tanner’s voice cut in, truncating the music.

Mol sat up and looked at the tactical display, as Trixie painted it with the new data. It showed the Gyrfalcon at the intersection point of three diffuse beams of something that emanated from three different asteroids. Each of the asteroids, in turn, glowed with multiple, silvery-white points of light. They included the one from which she’d detected that diffuse power emission.

“Hecate, got it. Uh, what am I looking at?”

“The beams are the gravitational trap that you’re stuck in. Those points of light mark the locations of squid shamans, in witchports set into the asteroids.”

“Okay. Thank you, Hecate. Now, if I could only do something about that.”

“Stand by.”

“Mol, the Hecate has launched a missile barrage,” Trixie said.

Mol switched the display back to the general tactical output. Sure enough, a flurry of icons raced away from the Hecate, tracking a missile salvo she’d just loosed at the four squid warships. The range was pretty long, though, so the firing solutions must suck.

Mol took a breath and waited. If anyone could get her out of this, she told herself, it would be Tanner.

“Gyrfalcon, are you ready to maneuver?” Tanner asked.

Mol sniffed. “Am I—? Uh, no, Hecate, I’m still stuck fast in these beams, or whatever they are. I’ve killed the drive, since there’s no point—”

“Light it back up and stand-by.”

Mol’s fingers danced over the controls. She relit the drive, but kept it at minimum thrust, to avoid stressing the Gyrfalcon’s structure too much. The fighter still shuddered and rattled, but Mol rode it out, having every confidence that Tanner had this under control.

Seconds ticked by. Something groaned behind her, and to the right. Trixie started to complain.

“Mol, two of the battle damage sensors are showing an unusual amount of deformation in the starboard structural system, ribs R-2 and R-3.”

“I know, I see it.”

“Mol, I’d suggest shutting down the drive.”

“Good idea, Trixie, and I’d normally agree with you, but—” Mol tapped at the systems monitor, checking the battle damage display.

“But?”

“But, Tanner said to stand by, so we’re standing by.” She licked dry lips as she said it. Trixie’s worry wasn’t coming out of nowhere. The structural components she’d named were, indeed, flexing about 10 percent more than they should be, causing the Gyrfalcon’s whole inner skeleton to start twisting and deforming.

For a few more seconds, anyway, she thought, looking back at tactical. The Hecate’s missile salvo kept racing toward the squid ships, who’d now loosed a return volley, a much bigger, nastier one than the destroyer had fired. Worse, about half of the Hecate’s missiles were falling back, their drives throttling back.

Mol leaned her head back. The squids must somehow be interfering with the Hecate’s missiles, now, too. This trap was a lot bigger, more powerful, and more deadly than they’d thought.

And Mol was stuck fast in the heart of it.

Another low groan, more drawn out, cut off by a sudden, sharp squeal. Damage control flashed red. One of the stressed ribs had cracked, transferring its load of dynamic forces onto its fellows around it. Now they all began to warp under the stress.

Mol cursed and reached for the engineering panel, to cut off the drive. As she did, though, she saw Hecate’s wayward missiles suddenly start burning again, but directing their thrust in an entirely different direction. It took her a few seconds to figure out why.

They were suddenly inbound straight toward the asteroid nearest to her, the one radiating one of the gravity-whatever beams at her. The squids must have realized the threat, too, because first one beam, then another, swept away from the Gyrfalcon to counter the immediate threat of the Hecate’s missiles, only a few minutes from impact.

The Gyrfalcon lurched, then leapt forward.

“Mol, we’re maneuvering again!” Trixie shouted, and for just an instant, Mol heard the voice of her old friend. But she concentrated on flying the fighter, immediately orienting it up relative to the ecliptic plane and burning at full power.

The Gyrfalcon pulled away, once more a graceful creature of speed and agility, and not just a lump stuck in a trap.

* * *

“Squid missiles seventy seconds out,” Osborne said, his eyes locked on his panel.

Tanner nodded. Wyant had got underway again, as the squids turned their attention to the sudden rush of missiles from the Hecate. The projectiles had little chance of actually hitting anything, but that didn’t matter. They’d done their job, and helped save the Gyrfalcon.

Now, they just needed the rest of the task force to save them.

“Point defense systems are going active.” Osborne watched his display for a moment, then looked up at Tanner. “Fire control predicts a sixty-five percent take-down rate for these squid missiles before impact, sir.”

“How many does that leave?”

Osborne swallowed, hard. “Eighteen, sir.”

Half that many would cripple the Hecate for sure. Tanner shook his head. “Talk about overkill.”

The seconds passed. Tanner heard the distant, dull buzz of the point-defense batteries firing, spewing streams of projectiles at the approaching missiles. He could feel it through his seat. He could tell which batteries were firing, just by the sound and feel.

Do I know my ship, or what? Tanner mused.

But the pride would be short-lived if the rest of the task force didn’t intervene in—

“Forty-five seconds to the first impact. They’ll happen fast after that,” Osborne said, swallowing again.

Tanner sat back. Had something gone wrong? He had no way of contacting the rest of the task force, not while it was as Shaded as its bulked-up complement of Starcasters could manage.

Osborne looked at Tanner. “Thirty seconds, sir.” But he stopped, and let out a breath.

“And there’s the task force, sir, suddenly just there, high on our starboard beam and, holy crap, they’re close!”

Tanner nodded. One instant, what had been empty space was suddenly full of ON ships, led by the massive bulk of the Arcturus. All eight of the ships loomed within a hundred klicks of the Hecate. The instant they appeared, they opened up with a blizzard of point-defense fire, shredding nearly all of the incoming squid missiles in a two or three second long orgy of destruction. At the same time, they opened up on the squid ships. The colossal mass-driver that ran almost the entire length of the Arcturus’s keel, the single largest weapon ever fitted to a warship, spat out a depleted uranium slug at a breathtaking velocity. It took only a few seconds to cross the intervening void, slamming into the leading squid heavy cruiser, raking its length, and erupting from its stern in a shower of glowing debris. For a few seconds, the squid ship drove along on its own momentum, then vanished in a colossal explosion.

A deep boom echoed through the Hecate, and she quivered through her structural bones. One lucky missile had managed to avoid the deluge of point-defense fire and hit her, topside, blasting away a scanner array and a trio of reactive armor plates. It didn’t affect her fighting ability, though, and she fell in smoothly with the rest of the task force, powering directly at the suddenly way overmatched squid flotilla.

Tanner let himself relax. Only a fraction, though. Battles weren’t won until they were won, and this one wasn’t over. Not yet.

* * *

Mol flipped the Gyrfalcon over and dove back at the asteroid, her rail gun slamming out shots, another pair of missiles launching. Targeting the squid witchports using data repeated from the Hecate wasn’t easy, not at all. Trixie did her best to compensate for the parallax shift resulting from the destroyer’s different perspective, but most of her shots cleanly missed.

She didn’t care. After being stuck, helpless, utterly powerless, it just felt good to hit back.

She veered the fighter slightly, lined up and fired again. This time, a lucky rail-gun slug found its mark, one of the witchports vanishing in a bright flash.

“Yeah, eat depleted uranium, you slimy squid bastard!”

Mol pitched the Gyrfalcon up again, sweeping past the asteroid. A chunk of rock sailed past her and she laughed. Apparently desperate, the squids had reverted back to what they seemed to know best, using magic to fling boulders around.

Not that it wasn’t still dangerous, mind you, but for a ship as nimble as the Gyrfalcon, dodging them wasn’t a problem at all.

As long as she saw them, of course.

She spun the Gyrfalcon around and, drive still burning at full power, mimicked an atmospheric fighter doing a tight bank. The Gyrfalcon had enough power to do a multi-axis turn, and—

An alarm sounded and crimson flashed on the damage control display. Oh, right, the damaged structural rib.

“Dammit, I never get to have any fun,” Mol grumped, while throttling back the drive.

“Gyrfalcon, Hecate. You can come on back home.”

Mol looked at tactical. The last of the squid ships had been smashed into wreckage. Another, racing away from one of the asteroids and probably carrying a load of squid shamans, was being pursued by a flight of missiles that relentlessly gained on it. The squids on the other two asteroids had gone dormant, likely just hunkering down, and trying to hide.

But they were still down there. “Hecate, Gyrfalcon, roger. There’s still a bunch of squid shamans left on two of those asteroids.”

“Understood. We’re carrying a butt-load of Starcasters who’ll take care of that. They want to take at least one of the bastards alive.”

“Got it, Hecate. On my way.”

* * *

Now Tanner relaxed. Damage control was in action, every system was otherwise running normally, and for the moment, he had nothing to do, and could just leave it all to his crew.

It gave him a moment to think about what he’d said to Wyant, about the task force carrying an extra-large cadre of Starcasters. Their combined magical might should be one of the most fearsome in space.

And, yet, something told Tanner that, even all working together, they still weren’t as powerful as Stellers.

And that, frankly, scared him far more than any approaching swarm of squid missiles.

15

Thorn whistled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a system this busy. Not even Sol.”

Bertilak glanced at him, smiled, but just turned back to the viewscreen.

The system, huddled around yet another unremarkable yellow-white, Sol-like star, had no name in the ON database Thorn had brought with him, only a catalog number. From the perspective of ON space, this place was just too far away to resolve any detail. Any radio or other emissions from it would be lost in the wash of EM energy radiating from the squids. The entry on Thorn’s data-pad just said, Habitation by advanced lifeforms likely, giving it a whopping sixty-percent chance.

Well, they could revise that to one hundred percent. Or, given just how busy this system was, a little more than a hundred percent might be in order. Mere certainty giving way to no, really?

But Thorn started to frown as the data came sluicing in. “This all seems to be robotic. Are there any actual life-forms here?”

Bertilak glanced at him again. “Pretty narrow definition of life there, boss. It’s not necessarily all based on gooey, icky organic chemistry.”

Thorn thought about Trixie, and nodded. “Fair point. Still, machines don’t usually just pop into existence on their own. I assume someone made them, so there must have been gooey, icky organic types here at one point.”

Bertilak pointed at a small, rocky planet just inside the star’s Goldilocks Zone. “And there still are, right there. Not many of them, at least not the last time I was here. But they’re there.”

“And everything else seems to be robotic.”

“Why not? Mining and smelting is dangerous, dirty work,” Bertilak said.

Thorn nodded. The Jolly Green Giant swept past fractured asteroids mounting automated mining plants that chewed away their substance. Robotic ore carriers trundled in and out of the inner system, dumping loads of feedstock into enormous, solar-powered smelters and refineries. More ore was being scooped from two of the outer rocky planets, huge mass-drivers stretching across their cratered, scarred surfaces flinging containers of it toward the star. Every direction that Thorn looked, he saw busy, industrial purpose.

“Who are these people again?” he asked Bertilak.

“The Astarti.”

Thorn pursed his lips. Bertilak had named a bunch of alien races beside the Imbrogul, and Astarti had been one of them. He thought. Probably.

“So the Nyctus have got us isolated from all of these races? I’m surprised they haven’t won this war already, with these kinds of resources and industrial capacity available.”

Bertilak tweaked the controls. “Ah, but it’s not necessarily available to them. Don’t think of this as one, big, happy family of alien races, all working together. Some of them are like the Danzur, and are okay with the Nyctus. Others hate them. They each love some of their fellow races, despise others, and it changes constantly. I think the Nyctus are just happy if they keep bitching and fighting amongst themselves, because if they ever did act together, the squids would probably never stand a chance.”

“Which means we wouldn’t, either.”

Bertilak offered a thin smile. “Then you have something to thank the Nyctus for. They deliberately keep these different races as off-balance and pissed off at one another as they can, so they can concentrate on you. Humans aren’t the only ones they’ve turned into Skins.”

“Sorry, but you’ll have to forgive me for not thanking the squids for a single damned thing,” Thorn snapped back.

Bertilak raised a conciliatory hand. “Of course not, my friend. How about this, then, instead? You can be grateful to all of these different races for being here, and also being the proverbial thorn in the squid’s butts.”

“That I can get behind, sure. Oh, and the thorn in their butts is me, by the way. I mean, duh.”

Bertilak glanced again at Thorn, then burst out laughing. “You got me there, friend.”

But his laughter didn’t last. His face became serious again, as he studied his controls. As always, they made no sense whatsoever to Thorn. When Bertilak pointed at what looked like two writhing, intertwined lines on a panel, he just nodded.

“Astarti scanners are starting to get interested in this region of space. Some trace of us might be leaking through your Shade. Can you take care of that? I’d like to be well in-system before we reveal ourselves, because the Astarti can be a little skittish.”

“Okay, although, if they’re skittish, wouldn’t it make more sense to give them lots of warning that we’re coming?”

“You’d think so, but they seem to have a flair for the dramatic. Popping into existence right in front of them will impress them to no end.”

“Okay, you’re the expert here,” Thorn said, and sank more magical power into his Shade. It actually worked better than he hoped, his magic seeming to complement that imbued into the Jolly Green Giant by Morgan when she created it, making the Shade effect much stronger. Thorn wondered if her being his daughter had something to do with it. Maybe their magic resonated in some way, the same way family members could sometimes sing in utterly perfect harmony, even if they weren’t actual singers.

The idea gave him a glimmer of hope that, if he found Morgan again, he might be able to repair his battered relationship with her. At least, that’s what he wanted to believe.

The Jolly Green Giant raced past more blast-scarred asteroids and busy robotic miners, entering the Goldilocks Zone. Their target planet loomed ahead.

“Alright, my friend, I think this is close enough. You can go ahead and drop the Shade.”

Thorn relaxed the slight concentration the Shade required, and felt it fall away. A few seconds later, an incoming hail rattled from the comm system—a big, round speaker with two glowing buttons, and a chunky microphone on a flexible stand.

Whatever the hail was saying, though, Thorn didn’t know. All he heard was a harsh, guttural, and slightly wet-sounding blur of noise. At the same time, a window popped open on the viewscreen, displaying what he assumed was the speaker.

It was a toad.

Okay, it resembled a toad, or at least the big, fat toads he vaguely remembered living in the ditches along the road leading to his childhood home on Cotswold. But it was much bigger, of course, human-sized and stocky. A set of what looked like stained, greasy coveralls covered its torso, and on its head was perched a frankly silly-looking blue hat, cocked jauntily to one side.

Bertilak smiled, and then replied to what was presumably an Astarti in its own language. Thorn raised his eyebrows at him. A drawn-out retching noise made the big alien sound like he was about to projectile vomit. But the Astarti was apparently pleased, softening its tone as it coughed and gurgled back.

Thorn let this go on for a few exchanges, then tapped Bertilak’s shoulder. “Hello, guy who doesn’t speak the language here.”

Bertilak grimaced. “Ah, right. Apologies!” He tapped a control. The comm system immediately began to translate.

“Thorn, this is Yinzut, System Overseer for the Astarti Corporate. Yinzut, I’d like to introduce Thorn Stellers, my companion and friend,” Bertilak said.

“Pleased to meet you, Thorn Stellers, companion and friend,” Yinzut said.

Thor nodded. “Likewise. I hope we didn’t startle you too much.”

“Too much? No, not too much. Impressive, though. We would know how you hid yourself so deep in this water.”

Thorn glanced at Bertilak. “Water?”

“The Astarti are aquatic. They refer to all locations as ‘water’.”

Ah.

“So, we conduct trading at a different water. This water is fouled by the work of industry. Meet at the sweet waters. I will send coordinates. Be well,” Yinzut said.

A few moments passed, then Bertilak confirmed receiving the new nav data on his inscrutable instrument panel. A few minutes after that, a small ship separated from an orbital refinery platform, and streaked away in a blur.

Bertilak tapped at his controls. “I guess we follow. I do like the idea of sweet water, though. I wonder if we’ll be required to float while we discuss prices. Oh, and we could do it naked. What a feeling of freedom that would be!”

Thorn pulled a face. “I’d prefer that you keep your pants on, honestly.”

“Ah, but what if the Astarti don’t wear pants? I’ve only ever talked to them by comm, and have only ever seen them from the waist up.” Bertilak flashed Thorn a mischievous grin, while keying the Alcubierre drive and smearing the stars away into darkness.

Thorn narrowed his eyes dramatically. “Tough. If we’re going to be spending time in a tub together with giant toads, you’re still wearing pants.”

* * *

The coordinates Yinzut had provided gave them a destination only a single system away. Again, it had no name in the ON star-charts, just a number. According to Bertilak’s inscrutable instruments, the Astarti apparently called it something that sounded like gargling, combined with someone clearing their throat and whistling at the same time. It apparently translated literally to Sweet Water.

“I’ll stick with calling it that, thanks. I don’t want to risk breaking my voice box,” Thorn said.

Bertilak laughed as he started the Jolly Green Giant toward a big terrestrial planet, the fourth out from the slightly bluish star and nestled smack in the middle of the Goldilocks zone. Unlike the frenetic rush of industrial activity in the last one, Sweet Water seemed relatively sedate. A handful of ships, a couple of wholly unfamiliar design, were bound in or out of the system, and that was it. More ships orbited close to a toroidal platform revolving around their destination planet, including one that looked like a profusion of long spikes radiating in all directions from a central hub.

“That’s a Somathi ship,” Bertilak said, in answer to Thorn’s question.

“And they are—?”

“Toxic. Literally. They breathe a mix of ammonia and nitric acid. Nobody likes dealing with them.”

Thorn gave a sage nod. “Coming from such a hostile environment? Yeah, I can see that.”

“No, it’s not because of their atmosphere. It’s because they’re assholes.”

“Ah. Well, okay then.”

Thorn had Bertilak bring the Giant to a halt a few dozen klicks away from the station, so he could give it a Scrying pass. He’d actually expected that the station might contain water, and that they’d have to either board in vac-armor, or just meet over a comm circuit. But it wasn’t, being pressurized with breathable, if somewhat thick, moist air. More to the point, he was able to shift his focus to a broad Joining and get a sense for the Astarti psyche. He was a little surprised to find their minds easy to access, and relatively straightforward in their thinking.

“They seem to be really motivated by profit. But they also seem to be pretty open-minded, and not very duplicitous. Pretty laid-back all around,” Thorn said.

Bertilak nodded. “That about sums them up, yeah.”

Thorn gestured at the station. “Shall we?”

The big alien touched the Giant’s controls, and the Astarti station started to grow on the viewscreen.

“We shall!”

* * *

Thorn didn’t have to think very hard to recall if this was the first time he’d been in orbit, in space, sitting on a log. He was pretty sure he hadn’t. But there was a first time for everything, and this proved it.

He and Bertilak sat on a literal log, a rough hunk of tree about four meters long, still clad in damp bark. The top surface of the log had been planed down to bare wood, offering seats about as comfortable as you’d expect a slab of solid wood to be. It was one of three arrayed around a small, shimmering globe of what sure seemed like water, held in place by some unknown force. Across from them sat Yinzut and two other Astarti—although, it struck Thorn that sat wasn’t really the right way to describe it. They squatted, hunkered down, more than sat, and did it on massive club mosses that looked like they’d be cultivated specifically to be seats. More wet moss floored the space enclosed by the logs and their host’s strange seats.

“Welcome, soon-friends, to Sweet Water Home Port. Astarti are so pleased to be you,” Yinzut said.

Thorn blinked, his brain parsing Yinzut’s words and stumbling over that be you. The translator was having trouble working out the nuances of Astarti speech, which seemed to have layers of meaning embedded not just in its gargled words, but also in tone and cadence. He opened his mouth to reply.

Then stopped, resisting the urge to gasp. The air he’d pulled into his lungs felt as thick as syrup, and reeked of a stew of organic chemicals reminiscent of what they’d encountered on the terraformed squid planet. It made Thorn wonder if these Astarti were responsible for that, or at least involved. He hoped so, because that would just make them even more valuable as allies.

He coughed. That assumed, of course, he could actually manage to talk to them.

“I’m sorry, your air is a little on the damp side for me,” he said.

Yinzut opened her mouth and held it that way for a moment, then closed it. “We understand. Maybe comm talk better way to flash.”

Flash had to be another mistranslation. Thorn shook his head.

“That won’t be necessary. In any case, I appreciate your welcome and your hospitality and, on behalf of the Allied Stars, offer greetings.”

Thorn felt a brief surge of satisfaction. That had actually sounded pretty diplomatic. Damien, he thought, would have been proud.

Yinzut again opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it again and launched into a series of questions about the Allied Stars, the Orbital Navy, their war with the Nyctus, and even Thorn himself. Some of the questions were actually quite blunt, even bordering on rude, but Thorn didn’t detect any malice or guile in them. The Astarti were, it seemed, genuinely curious, and perfectly happy asking questions to satisfy that curiosity, even if they did come across as kind of inappropriate. Thorn, in turn, held nothing back, and responded with questions of his own.

Yinzut’s answers, backed up by fleeting, superficial Joinings with her as she spoke, only confirmed it. When it came to the Astarti, what you saw was basically what you got.

“So what has brought you so far from your home, Thorn my friend?” Yinzut asked.

“Just a goodwill visit. The Allied Stars is looking for opportunities to open relations with new races, and we’re not going to let the fact the Nyctus sit in the way stop us anymore,” Thorn replied.

“Sort of relations?”

“Well, diplomatic, of course. But also trade, commerce, security—anything’s on the table, really.” Which was true. Thorn had been given remarkable latitude by the Allied Stars Council, via Fleet Command, to make offers and commitments as appropriate. That as appropriate left the final determination about what was ultimately appropriate up to the powers-that-be, of course, but that only made sense. Thorn still had the scope to do a lot of wheeling and dealing, without having to check back in with Fleet. He’d just have to be ready to answer for it when he got back to ON space.

Yinzut leaned forward. “Trade. Commerce. Yes. Very interest in that.”

Thorn glanced at Bertilak, who smiled. Motivated by profit, indeed.

“Well, that’s definitely an area for us to explore. We’re always interested in new trade opportunities.”

“Especially with Imbrogul.”

Thorn grimaced before he could stop himself. How did Yinzut know that? Were these Astarti Joiners on some level he just couldn’t sense?

But Bertilak leaned toward him. “I told them about that. The Imbrogul are a notoriously closed society and hard to access. The Astarti are one of the few races they deal with regularly.”

Thorn nodded and looked back at Yinzut. “I’ll be honest. Yes, we’re especially interested in the Imbrogul, because they have some tech we’d really like to investigate. But that’s only because we already knew about the Imbrogul when we came here. We’re just as keen to do trade with, well, anyone, as long as it’s mutually profitable.”

“Ah, yes. Mutually profitable is desire. What is Imbrogul tech that interests you?”

Thorn corrected it to desirable in his head, then considered his next words. How much should he reveal here, about the ON’s interests in this?

But the question instantly answered itself. The Astarti were obviously far more familiar with the Imbrogul than he was, so any attempt to dissemble or be evasive was going to fall as flat as the surface of a neutron star. So he decided to conceal essentially nothing at all.

“We’re working on gravity tech, and understand that the Imbrogul have an advanced form of it. We’d really like to get access to it. But I want to add, that’s not exclusively what we’re interested in, so we’d be happy to hear how we can make a deal with you,” he said.

“Ah, Imbrogul gravity tech is very, very impressive. But also very, very dependent on materials we provide,” Yinzut replied.

“Oh? What sort of materials?”

“High purity metals, particularly metals from the lanthanide group, and certain trans-uranium elements. Especially includes stabilized form of—”

The translator just shrugged and gave up this time, leaving Thorn hearing nothing but something reminiscent of a deep, hacking cough mixed with a wet snort. Yinzut raised a webbed hand.

“Apologies. We provide a stabilized form of element 99, isotope 253.”

Thorn pulled a data-pad off of this belt and did a quick query. The element of atomic weight 99 was what humans knew as Einsteinium, named after the ancient scientific pioneer. Isotope 253 was its most common version. It was a big, heavy, and unstable element, though, and it only had a half-life of about three weeks.

Bertilak picked up on the implication. “For how long can you stabilize this element?”

“About one hundred years. It is that process that makes Imbrogul gravity tech so good.”

Thorn couldn’t help noting the pride in Yinzut’s voice. And rightly so. Thorn was no physicist, but even he knew that changing the half-life of a radioactive element was a big deal. As far as he knew, it just wasn’t possible. And, yet, here it was.

They carried on talking, and the more they did, the more convinced Thorn became that they had to get friendly relations firmly established with the Astarti. Not only were they the gateway to the Imbrogul, they also had some valuable goods of their own to trade. The Astarti specialty seemed to be mining, smelting and refining metal, and they seemed to be very, very good at it. Whatever method they used to stabilize radioactive elements, to make them decay more slowly had, by itself, massive potential. And even if they didn’t want to share that and keep it proprietary, Thorn imagined that stabilized Einsteinium, or any other, similarly short-lived element would be of immense value all on its own.

Bertilak leaned forward. “If you don’t mind us asking, do you trade with the Nyctus as well? And do the Imbrogul?”

Thorn gave Bertilak a sharp glance. He’d been trying to figure out a way to get to that, but had planned to do it a little more discreetly. Now, though, that the question had been asked, he turned back to Yinzut to see how she answered.

“We do some, yes. But limited. Trust is always an issue, and the Nyctus are some trustworthy, but not complete such.”

Thorn eased out a bit of a breath at that. Yinzut had been telling the truth, which was a relief. The ON had already had to deal with one race closely aligned with the Nyctus, the Danzur, and it had been a pain in the ass right from the start. The Astarti seemed nowhere near as close, which would make dealing with them a lot easier.

“Well, Yinzut, we would like to get to a place where you can trust us,” Thorn said.

“Getting there,” Yinzut replied, opening her mouth, holding it, then closing it again. Thorn swept another, brief Joining across her mind, and sensed nothing amiss. Quite the opposite, in fact. Holding her mouth open seemed to be Yinzut’s way of expressing approval, or just generally being positive.

“Good. What we’d like to accomplish is having you arrange a meeting with the Imbrogul for us, and also start talking about some specific trade deals. We’d be really interested in your stabilized heavy isotopes, for instance. Or even the process for making them.”

“All in time. Of course, there is the matter of price.”

Thorn nodded. There was the profit motivation. “We would certainly be prepared to pay, and handsomely.”

This time, a sense of doubt leaked from Yinzut’s mind. She saw only Thorn the individual, and not yet Thorn the representative of an entire species. He was confident he could change that, but it would take time. And time wasn’t something he had in abundance.

“We will certainly talk,” Yinzut finally said.

Thorn, though, leaned forward. “I’ve got a better idea. How about a down payment, now?”

“What do you have?”

“Back in the first system, the one where we originally met you, I noticed that you were moving a lot of asteroids around. I assume it’s part of your ongoing mining operations.”

“It is. An important part. It’s much more efficient to move an entire asteroid to a smelter, than to cut it apart and bring many pieces back.”

“I’m willing to bet it’s also pretty expensive, not to mention time-consuming.”

“Very much, but worth it.”

“How about this? I’ll move two asteroids to wherever you want them, and I’ll do it for nothing except future consideration,” Thorn said.

Yinzut stared. The other Astarti with her stared. Thorn waited.

Finally, Yinzut shifted, looking uncomfortable even for a human-sized, anthropomorphic toad. “We use complex systems of thrusters and boosters and control units. I’m sure your ship is a very fine one, but I will be blunt. It does not seem up to the task.”

As Yinzut spoke, Thorn moved his fingers to touch his talisman, secured away in its pocket inside his tunic. He drew magic through it, then reached out, shaping it with his mind and applying it as a Hammer ’casting to the log supporting the moss-seats of the Astarti. Carefully, he lifted it off the ground, then held it in place about a meter up. The Astarti immediately began croaking and gurgling among themselves. The translator didn’t even try to keep up with their overlapping exclamations.

“It has nothing to do with our ship. When I said that I will move two asteroids to wherever you want them, I really did mean me,” Thorn said, then lowered the log back to the deck.

“That is most impress,” Yinzut said. “You already have grav tech, then, and very good.”

“That wasn’t tech. It was magic.”

Yinzut stared for a moment. “Nyctus do similar. But you can do this too. Well, then, we will try. See if your magic can move asteroids. However, we have a requirement, Thorn.” Her eyes suddenly gleamed with could be nothing other than mischief.

Thorn tilted his head. “Which is?”

“Move three, not two,” Yinzut said.

Thorn wondered if she expected him to balk at that. He didn’t. “Done. I have a requirement as well, though.”

“What is that, new and promising friend?” Yinzut asked. Even though she was an alien, Thorn recognized nerves when he heard them, even through a translator.

“Once I’ve done this, and your three asteroids are where you want them to go, remember this when the Nyctus reach out to you, or aim a weapon at you.”

Yinzut tilted her thick head to one side, mouth open to reveal her tongue in what Thorn now understood to be that attitude of agreement. “You may be sure of that, Thorn-friend.”

16

Tanner couldn’t remember the last time he’d been at Code Nebula. He just didn’t have much occasion to come here, since it was mainly focused on training Starcasters. And he was many things, but a Starcaster wasn’t one of them.

Wait. A commencement ceremony. That had been the last time. Right after he’d left the heavy cruiser Achilles, where he’d been XO, and was on his way to take over the Hecate, he’d been sidetracked here by Fleet. Code Nebula needed a senior commander as Reviewing Officer for a commencement parade, and he’d been tagged to do it.

It all came rushing back to him. It had been the last time he’d had to wear full dress blues and carry his sword. The damned thing had threatened to tangle up his legs and trip him while he’d been reviewing a rank of shiny, new Starcasters. He’d managed to avoid it, though, and had finished the review with his dignity intact.

More or less, anyway. There had been a couple of instances of snapped profanity that had caused at least slightly raised eyebrows among the graduating candidates. Also, a sudden, terrified look from a young woman he’d been passing as he cursed. To this day, she probably wondered why the Captain inspecting her suddenly dropped a salvo of f-bombs, along with a few other letters of the alphabet, and then just walked on.

Tanner smirked at the memory, but the humor faded as he rounded the corner of a building and started toward a blocky bunker hunkered in the middle of what had been a sports field. The ON had installed it as a secure facility for holding captured squid shamans, part of a new training regimen for Starcasters. It gave them a chance to experience a confrontation with an actual, hostile squid, but do it under controlled circumstances. The idea was to ensure that the first time they clashed with a shaman wasn’t in the midst of battle.

Tanner had his doubts. Somebody like Stellers or Wixcombe might be able to shrug off the insidious magic of a squid shaman, but would every Starcaster? The facility should have been placed in orbit, or on some remote moon, not right here amid a throng of neophyte ’Casters.

The guard, a heavily armed and armored military policeman, came to attention and saluted as Tanner approached. He carefully checked his ID, confirmed he was on the access list, then confirmed that Tanner wasn’t armed. Only then did he open the gate in the first fence. Tanner stepped through, waiting as the first gate closed and locked behind him, then the second gate, in an inner fence, slid open. Tanner carried on, walking up to the bunker entrance, where his ID was checked again.

“Sorry, sir,” the MP said, shrugging. “Orders.”

Tanner waved a hand. “No worries, Sergeant.”

When the woman was satisfied, she called inside through an intercom. A loud buzz broke the still air, then the armored door rolled back. Tanner gave the MP a thumbs up, and carried on inside.

“Hey, sir. Talk about security, huh?”

Tanner stopped and turned to the speaker. He recognized the man, but had trouble placing him.

“Damien Forester, sir,” the man said, standing. “We’ve only met via comm. I helped—”

“Stellers, with his interrogation of Ignatius, that treacherous bastard, right.” He took Damien’s hand and shook it firmly.

“Good to meet in person, sir,” Damien said.

“It is. Have to ask, though, what the hell are you doing here?”

Damien gave a sheepish grin. “It seems that the powers that be have decided that the best way I can contribute to the war effort is by helping out with interrogations.”

“Not your field of expertise, though, is it? Aren’t you a diplomat?”

“I sure thought so. Apparently, though, there’s a lot of similarities between influencing potentially hostile foreign powers, and influencing potentially hostile captives.”

“But how did you end up here? I thought you were back with Wixcombe, trying to get the Danzur onside.”

“I was on my way back to file a progress report with the Council, when I got diverted here. Someone in Fleet must have put a word in with my diplomatic bosses, and they agreed to detach me for this. Honestly, sir, I assumed it was you.”

Tanner raised his hands in mock surrender. “Not guilty as charged. I respect your talents, but it never even would have occurred to me to have you come here.”

“Well, sir, I guess the ON just works in mysterious ways.”

“Always,” Tanner said, offering Damien a fleeting smile. But seeing Damien had made him think of someone else.

“Speaking of Wixcombe, have you heard from her lately?”

“No, sir. I did send a message to her via diplomatic comm, but she hasn’t responded yet.”

“So she really is there, all alone.”

“She has a couple of aides, but that’s it, yes, sir.”

Tanner rubbed his chin. “Not a fan of leaving an ON officer hanging in the breeze like that.”

“Kira’s more than able to look after herself, sir. And Lieutenant Stellers made it abundantly clear to the Danzur that if anything happened to her, he’d wipe them from existence. It made quite the impression on them.”

“I’ll bet it did, especially since it’s not just an abstract threat, not coming from him.”

Damien smiled and started to speak, but was cut off by an inner door opening into the antechamber where they’d been waiting. Commander Narvez walked through it, and saluted Tanner smartly.

Tanner returned it. “Commander Narvez, good to see you.”

She nodded once, her hatchet-sharp face falling, rising again, like a drill movement. “Sir.”

“I assumed we’d just be dropping you off here, after your service—and damned good service, I might add—aboard the Hecate. But now Fleet wants us to stick around, and me to observe the interrogation of that squid we captured. Why?”

“Protocol, sir. Fleet Intelligence requires a command-grade officer to be present during the initial interrogation of a prisoner.”

“But why? What is my role, besides standing around and watching and trying not to get in the way?”

This time, it was Narvez who held up her hands in surrender. “I don’t make the rules, sir. It would normally be the Base Commander, but she’s off at a meeting at Admiralty HQ. Since the Hecate still happens to be in orbit, that makes you the next choice.”

“And what if we’d just broken orbit right away? What then? No interrogation? Or would I be turning the Hecate around?”

“No idea, sir. That would be up to Fleet Intel.”

Tanner just gave up and nodded. Narvez was right. She didn’t make the rules, so there was no point protesting them to her. Someone at Fleet had decided that this was how things had to be, so they were.

As they made to follow Narvez back through the inner door, Damien leaned in toward Tanner. “Probably someone’s legacy, sir.”

Tanner sniffed, then nodded. Senior officers on their way out the door for retirement typically did that. They’d change something, some obscure aspect of communications procedures, the layout of an org chart, the style of socks issued to recruits. Something, anything they could point to as their legacy, their lasting mark on the ON. In this case, it had been the protocols around interrogations. Some old fart of a Commodore or Vice Admiral had been packing up their desk, and though, hey, how can I make a lasting change to the system?

And here Tanner was.

He glanced at Damien. “I see that the legacy thing isn’t unique to the ON.”

“Oh, hell no, sir. In fact, I’ve got my legacy already planned out.”

Tanner lifted an eyebrow. “Seems to me you’re still a few years short of retirement, but I’ll bite. What’s your legacy going to be?”

“I’m going to disallow any more legacies, because they’re usually stupid.”

Tanner offered Damien a wry smirk. “Now I have to get you into the ON, Forester, if only for that.”

* * *

Tanner crossed his arms and frowned down at the squid. It had been strapped down in a tank of water deep enough to immerse it completely. Cables and tubes snaked into the water from stacks of machines and pumps. Some were obviously measuring vital signs, whatever vital signs for a squid looked like. Others had more obscure purposes.

The tank squatted in the middle of a room in the heart of the bunker, lined entirely with metal. Besides Tanner, Damien and Narvez, there were two medical techs monitoring the equipment, and four more people, all ON personnel. Three wore the badges of the Starcaster Corps, and were apparently Joiners, deployed here to keep the shaman’s magic in check, should the drugs being dripped through the tubes fall short. The fourth was a Lieutenant wearing no Corps badge or ship’s logo, which probably meant Intel. The rest of the room was absolutely barren.

No, not entirely barren, Tanner corrected himself. Someone had hung a neatly-framed picture of the ON logo prominently on the wall over the tank. The squid could, to the extent it was even conscious, certainly see it, and little else besides blank alloy. It was a little piece of psychological warfare Tanner appreciated.

“With your permission, sir, we’ll begin the interrogation,” Narvez said.

Tanner nodded. “At your convenience, Commander.”

She turned to Damien. “Mister Forester, feel free to intervene if you have any specific questions or comments.”

“I will, and I actually do. Like I told Thorn Stellers when we interrogated Petty Officer Ignatius, it’s helpful to establish a baseline of behavior and responses. We then keep an eye out for deviations from them, which might hint at falsehoods, hidden agenda, that sort of thing.”

He raised his eyebrows at the squid in the tank. “I’ve never done this for a squid before. But I found it worked with the Danzur pretty well, so it’s at least worth trying here.”

The logo-less Lieutenant gave him a curious look. “What do you mean by that?”

As Damien explained himself, Tanner studied the squid.

Who are you? What do you know about us, or think you know about us? How much of it is true, and how much is just propaganda, like the ON logo hung over the tank?

Tanner found himself frowning more and more deeply. The creature was utterly alien, a rubbery agglomeration of tentacles emerging from a flabby torso. It had more in common with a literal squid, than it did with him.

And yet, there was something oddly familiar about it. Not this particular squid, who Tanner didn’t know from a random deck plate. Rather, it was the concept of the squid that somehow plucked at him. In a way he couldn’t begin to explain, he thought he saw a glimmer of something he recognized in it.

“Okay, you can bring the squid out of it, as we discussed,” Narvez said to the medical techs. They nodded and fiddled with their instruments. One of the little peristaltic pumps dripping a clear fluid into the shaman through a tube stopped.

“Probably take about five minutes for it to start waking up, ma’am,” one of the techs said to Narvez.

She kept her eyes on the squid. “And what about our fail-safe?”

The tech gestured to another pump, also currently switched off. “Right there, ma’am. Turn that pump on, and no more than ten seconds later, this will be an ex-squid.”

Tanner looked up at that. “You have a fail-safe that takes ten seconds to kick in? Not good enough.” He knew what someone like Stellers could do in ten seconds, and even if this shaman were only a fraction as powerful, it could still do a lot of harm in that time.

“Best we can do, sir, I’m afraid,” the Lieutenant replied.

“The hell it is. You’ve got MPs with sidearms right outside.”

“Sorry, sir, but no weapons are allowed inside this room while a squid isn’t fully unconscious.”

Tanner looked back at the squid, then shook his head. “Not on my watch. I want to be able to kill this thing instantly, if we need to.”

“Sir, protocols—”

“Are being changed, at my discretion. Sorry, you didn’t bring me here just to be another pretty face. I want two of those MPs in here, ready with their sidearms, and that’s an order.”

“But the risk—”

“War is risk, Lieutenant. We don’t try to avoid it, we just try to manage it.”

The Lieutenant looked as though he’d continue to object. Tanner was ready for it. Fleet Intel technically had its own chain of command, separate from the one that applied to Tanner. It tended to make them think they didn’t have to answer to anyone not their own superiors. This Lieutenant was about to find out just how wrong he was about that.

The man apparently got that, because he relented and just nodded. Narvez called in two of the MPs and instructed them to kill the squid instantly, if ordered, or if they reasonably believed the interrogators were losing control of the creature. She then reassigned one of the Joiners to watch over them, and blunt any effort by the shaman to control or influence them.

“The squid’s coming to,” one of the other Joiners said.

Narvez looked at Tanner. “We’re ready, sir.”

“By all means, carry on.”

Per Damien’s request, the interrogation initially focused on mundane minutia, in an attempt to establish a baseline for the squid’s responses. Tanner had, frankly, expected it to come up a bust. He’d only briefly encountered the Danzur, after Stellers had moved the Reserve Fleet into their space as a show of force. They’d struck him, though, as similar enough to humans that Damien’s baseline thing working didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him, though, was that it seemed just as easy to establish a baseline for the shaman’s responses. And this was despite its grogginess from the drugs still being fed into it, and the fact that Narvez had to retrieve the answers from its mind, effectively acting as its translator.

It meant that when questioning began in earnest, Damien was immediately able to spot variances that might be significant. Tanner had to admit that the guy did seem to have a natural talent for it. Maybe Fleet was actually right for once, and this really was his calling.

He raised a hand at Narvez, interrupting the questions the Intel Lieutenant had been feeding her. “Ask it again about the plans for the new Skins it let slip,” he said, his voice pitched low and quiet.

Narvez and the Lieutenant both nodded. Between them, they crafted the question differently. The squid no doubt hadn’t meant to say anything about the Skins, but had revealed it was the primary purpose of their gravity traps.

Now, it answered the revised question, saying much the same thing. The primary purpose of the gravity trap had been to capture ON personnel, to turn them into Skins.

Damien narrowed his eyes, then leaned toward Tanner. “First time, sir, it said traps. This time, it said trap. When you get an inconsistency like that, it might be a lie.”

Tanner pushed up his lower lip, impressed. “So which is it? Trap, or traps? Because. if there’s more of those things out there, we need to know about them.”

Damien huddled for a moment with Narvez and the Lieutenant. They muttered amongst themselves, then broke apart again.

“So tell us about the gravity traps. Where are they?” the Lieutenant asked.

Narvez stared down at the squid, her voice going monotone. “Pulsing star. Pulsing star. Human ships, predictable. Waypoint. Pulsing—”

She cut off, blinked, let out a breath. “It’s fighting back.”

Tanner glanced at the two Joiners helping Narvez keep the creature under control. The third, still mentally shielding the MPs. None of them seemed to be in distress, like they were fighting for control. The two MPs simply looked grim, ready to blast the shaman full of holes at the least provocation.

He turned to Damien. “Pulsing star, and a waypoint. There’s a pulsar in Sector Four-G that ON ships sometimes use as a distinctive navigation waypoint on their way out to patrol Sector Five.”

“Sounds worth checking out, sir.”

“It does indeed.”

The questioning continued. They managed to pry a little more information about the Nyctus attempts to infiltrate Skins into the ON, but finally bumped up against the limits of what the shaman actually knew. Tanner sensed the interrogation was reaching its own conclusion, but Damien leaned in closer.

“Ask it about Nyctus allies,” he said.

Narvez gave him a puzzled look. “Allies? Why?”

“Because a few answers back, it referred to your enemies—plural. This time, in the answer it just gave, it said we are your enemy—singular.”

“Another inconsistency,” Tanner said.

“It is.”

Tanner nodded to Narvez and the Lieutenant. “Go ahead.”

The squid dug in its mental heels this time. It did let slip something about another enemy, seemingly one that the squids either had recruited to their cause, or were in the process of doing so. But further attempts to dig out more information about it just provoked variations on what amounted to screw you.

“I think that’s all we’re going to get,” Narvez finally said.

The Lieutenant crossed his arms and sighed. “I think you’re right, ma’am. My suggestion is we put it back under, and resume this in a later session.” He looked at Tanner for approval.

“I can’t keep the Hecate hanging in orbit here forever. When’s the base commander due back?”

“Three days, sir,” Narvez replied.

“Fine. You can do your resuming when she’s back on the ground. In the meantime, I—”

“I want to try something,” Damien suddenly said.

Tanner stepped back as Damien pushed past him. He’d been wanting to bring this to a close, so he could get back to the Hecate. But if Damien had an idea about how to extract more information from the squid now, he wasn’t going to stop him.

Damien grabbed the framed ON logo and pulled it off the wall, then held it over the tank.

“See this?”

Tanner just watched. What the hell was Damien planning here?”

He lifted the framed logo so everyone could see it. “Does everyone see this?”

Narvez looked confused. So did the Intel Lieutenant. So did the rest of them.

Tanner, though, felt a sudden tightening in his gut. It was the same feeling he got just before joining battle.

He opened his mouth just as Damien said, “It’s the symbol of failure!” He slammed the frame against the edge of the tank, shattering the glass, then grabbed a jagged shard and plunged it into Narvez’s throat.

* * *

Blood erupted from the wound in a pulsing jet. Narvez flung her mouth open in a ragged gasp, and more blood poured over her lips. Damien yanked the shard out of the wound, and stabbed it at his own throat.

Tanner caught it, the glass neatly slicing his palm. It deflected the shard enough that it only drove a few centimeters into the skin below Damien’s jaw. Then the room erupted into an explosion of chaotic noise—shouts, sudden movement, a fusillade of shots into the tank that fountained water in plumes of spray. Tanner yanked the glass shard out of Damien’s hand and flung it away. At the same time, as though running on autopilot, he snatched the sidearm out of the nearest’ MPs hand.

The other MP shouted something, and started to lift his weapon toward Tanner. He ignored it, though, and slammed the weapon into the water, the muzzle jammed against the squid’s head, and squeezed the trigger, again and again. The water, already crimson with Narvez’s blood, turned to soupy gore.

Damien slumped to the floor. Tanner waved off the other MP, then returned the sidearm to its owner.

“Takes only a few centimeters of water to stop a bullet,” he snapped, then turned back to the anarchy filling the room.

Command voice.

“Right! Everyone stand fast!”

Confusion became ponderous silence. Tanner glanced at Damien, but he’d just dropped to all fours on the floor and muttered something over and over again. Kira, Tanner thought. Something about Wixcombe, anyway. He told the MPs to watch him, then moved to Narvez’s side. She’d dropped to her knees, still gasping wetly, drooling blood from her mouth and clawing at her slashed throat. Tanner pulled her hand away and slapped his own over the wound, pressing as hard as he could. He shouted over his shoulder at the medical techs.

“One of you get over here and help me! The other, get a crash team in here!”

He looked Narvez squarely in the eyes. “Commander, you’re going to be fine. We’ve got pressure on the wound, and help is on the way.”

Even as he said it, though, blood gushed around his hand.

He made himself keep looking her in the eyes, anyway.

At least she wouldn’t have to die alone.

17

Thorn stood in the Jolly Green Giant’s airlock, his talisman clutched in both hands. Despite the confidence he’d shown the Astarti regarding his ability to shunt asteroids around, this was going to be a demanding task. Moving a fleet might require more raw power, but this would be more like deflecting the squid’s massive KEW from slamming into Code Gauntlet. It would require power, but even more, it would require control. He had to accelerate three chunks of rock, each almost as big as the squid’s KEW had been, but he had to do it just so. He then had to maintain that precise state of just so while Bertilak kicked in the Alcubierre drive, and keep the rocks in place while they and the ship remained in the drive’s little pocket universe. And then, when they emerged back into normal space, he had to ensure the rocks’ trajectories would settle them into a stable orbit as close to the orbiting smelter as possible.

Thorn remembered a saying he’d heard once, from somewhere. As easy as shit through a goose.

Well, this wasn’t that, for sure.

Thorn saw a point of light move across the starfield, then come to a halt as it matched the Jolly Green Giant’s velocity. Over the comm, Yinzut spoke.

“We’re ready. Any time you begin, is amazing for us.”

The translator really was struggling with the Astarti tongue. Thorn wasn’t used to it throwing so many errors this long after chewing on a particular language. He just hoped it didn’t translate something especially badly when it really mattered.

“Okay, Bertilak, I’m ready, too. You can go ahead,” Thorn said, letting his awareness sink once more into the echoes of old pain embedded in his talisman.

“Roger that. Here we go.”

The airlock began to depressurize. Thorn enclosed himself in a close-fitting bubble of intent, one that would allow him to stay comfortable and breathing, despite the vacuum. The airlock wasn’t actually a witchport, but it would have to do.

The last of the air drained away, then the outer door silently slid open. Thorn now stared into eternity, the unending void pulling his gaze along with it until it was lost in forever. A brief moment of vertigo washed over him as he sat down. The witchport enclosed him enough that he didn’t feel quite so nakedly exposed to the emptiness. Nothing stopped him from just stepping out of this airlock, though, and drifting away into nothingness.

He shoved the intrusive thoughts aside, and instead launched his awareness out into space. It immediately encountered the three asteroids, which the Astarti had already marked with hazard beacons. Thorn tagged each of them with a sliver of his perception, so he could keep precise mental track of them.

Two larger, one slightly smaller. Their total mass exceeded that of the huge impactor the Nyctus had launched at Code Gauntlet. The difference here, though, was that he wasn’t trying to change their trajectories in such a dramatic way—and while watching the minutes tick down to impact. Here, he could take more time.

Thorn focused, and gave each of the asteroids an experimental nudge with carefully-applied Hammer magic, just to see how they responded. One of the larger ones, and the smaller one, seemed essentially solid, with no evidence of flaws or potential points or planes of failure. The third one, though, was split more than halfway through by a jagged fracture, a scar from some ancient collision. There was only one way to safely apply force to it without risking shattering it, which meant he had to keep its precise orientation just right.

Great. Something else he had to keep track of.

Thorn closed his eyes and spent a few moments just accumulating magic in a reservoir, building up his reserves of eldritch power. It hummed in the back of his mind like a bared high-voltage conduit. Taking a deep mental breath, he then began pushing the asteroids, slowly easing them out of the orbital tracks they’d been following for hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of years. The first two behaved themselves, but the third, with its deep fracture, didn’t want to cooperate. Stress immediately began to build up on the coherent rock that remained holding it together. In a moment, it would shatter into at least two pieces, and probably more.

Fine. Thorn eased off, ending his massed Hammer effect.

“Yinzut, I have to fix one of these rocks. I hope you don’t mind if I partly melt one,” he said.

A moment passed before Yinzut replied, and then it was only a single word.

“What?”

Thorn smiled at the complete confusion in the Astarti’s tone. She obviously wasn’t used to the idea of magic at all, which was good. It would make that much more of an impression on her.

“I’m going to melt part of one of these asteroids, to try and fuse it together so it doesn’t fly apart on me. Will that affect your smelting and refining?”

Another pause. “I’ve never been asked this question before. But I would say, no, no different. Smelting means melting anyway.”

“Okay,” Thorn said, then redirected some of his magic into a powerful, but localized scorch effect. It took a moment to heat the rock, because he wanted to avoid an abrupt change in temperature that might itself lead to fracturing and shattering. Eventually, the rock began to glow, and then to liquify and flow. Thorn held the Scorch ’casting until more than half of the fault plane had become molten and slurried together, then reversed the effect, drawing back out of the rock. It cooled, darkened, then hardened into a glassy solid.

There.

Thorn switched his efforts back into Hammer magic, once more poking and nudging at the asteroids.

“They’re moving!” Yinzut said.

Thorn didn’t reply. He kept his attention focused on the three hunks of rock. He angled their trajectories ever more slightly sunward, changing their orbits from enormous elliptical ones around the star, into spirals that would eventually send them crashing into it. He took his time, keeping the accelerations to a fraction of a g. It wasn’t much, but as he and Bertilak had figured when they’d simulated this, it didn’t need to be much. Most of the heavy lifting would actually be done by the Jolly Green Giant.

At least, that’s what Thorn hoped.

Bertilak’s voice hummed in his ear. “Almost there, Thorn. I’d say another five minutes or so of pushing, and we’ll be ready for phase two.”

“Got it.”

Thorn kept prodding the three asteroids. This sort of thing usually required precise calculations, to ensure accelerations and trajectories were precisely what they needed to be. Orbital mechanics were elegantly predictable, but they also demanded a nitpicky amount of precision to be done right. Fortunately, they could afford to be a little more casual about it, because Thorn could, if he absolutely needed to, simply cause it to work. That would involve changing reality, though, and he desperately wanted to avoid that. They’d therefore at least try for the absolute precision required.

“Thirty seconds, Thorn,” Bertilak said.

“Gotcha.”

The Jolly Green Giant accelerated, closing in on the three rocks. Bertilak slid the ship into their midst, so that each was within about a kilometer of the hull.

“Ten seconds,” Bertilak said.

“Ten, got it.”

“Nine, eight, seven—”

Bertilak kept counting down. At zero, Thorn puffed out a breath, opened his eyes, and let the magic just fade away. Then he waited.

“And we’re good. Trajectories are really close to what we calculated,” Bertilak finally said.

“So we’re ready for phase two,” Thorn replied.

“That we are. Firing up the drive in ten, nine, eight—”

At zero, the universe vanished. All that remained was the Giant itself, plus the three rocks. From his and Bertilak’s perspective, that was the universe.

Thorn just waited, keeping his attention infused into the talisman, then focused beyond it, as far as it would go. It wasn’t far. After all, the whole universe was only a few klicks across. That was big for an Alcubierre bubble, but they didn’t have far to go. Bertilak was able to configure the drive to enclose a greater volume of space, at the cost of a weaker Alcubierre wave pushing them along. They certainly wouldn’t set any transluminal speed records, but they didn’t need to. It was better they didn’t, too, because using an Alcubierre drive close to a large mass, like a star, was hazardous. Keep it running too deeply into a gravity well, and the combined space-warping effects could get unpredictable. So they should be reaching Alcubierre cut-off very soon.

“Cut off in ten seconds,” Bertilak said.

Thorn braced himself.

“Nine, eight, seven—”

At zero, the universe reappeared. Light flooded the airlock, momentarily dazzling Thorn. The star, which had been a bright point of light where the asteroids had orbited, was suddenly a searing disk, much closer and much, much brighter. It ripped Thorn’s attention away from his task and broke his concentration, something they hadn’t counted on.

“Shit!”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Bertilak said.

“It’s not. Just give me a second.”

Thorn shielded his eyes and desperately sought to regain his focus. He only had a moment to get the rocks properly snugged into their new orbits. If he screwed it up, they’d end up going somewhere unintended. Most likely, they’d just fall into the star. But there was a chance they’d just become a navigational hazard for the Astarti, and that wouldn’t help their case here at all.

Thorn doggedly pushed his attention past the glare of the star, reached out with his magic, and began to push at the rocks again. He actually had to speed them up slightly, to get them established into a stable orbit close to the smelter, another point of light in the distance.

“Thorn?” Bertilak cut in.

“What?”

“One of those rocks has started tumbling. Just thought you should know.”

Thorn cursed. Sure enough, the rock he’d had to repair had just sloughed off a massive boulder, another fracture he must have missed. The sudden change in its center of gravity had caused his steady application of Hammer magic to abruptly offset, starting the thing spinning. He had to stop it, or else he’d never be able to get it to stabilize.

And he only had a minute or so to do it. That meant repeated, careful applications of force to stop the spin, and that meant taking his focus off the other two asteroids. In other words, this wasn’t going to work.

Thorn gave a mental sigh. Okay, fine. Time to cheat.

Thorn ended all of his ’castings, drew his magic back into himself, and recrafted it into something new. He used it to impose his will on reality, shaping it into one where these rocks were happily settled into a secure orbit within a few klicks of the Astarti smelter. A deep, painful throb erupted behind his eyes, echoing against his skull in slow, agonizing waves. He maintained his intent, though, reshaping creation into a new truth, his truth, the only truth.

None of the rocks were tumbling. All were, of course, perfectly matched to the orbiting smelter’s speed and trajectory and, as far as the universe was concerned, had always been so.

Thorn slumped as the magic drained away. His head still pounded, and something wetly warm slid over his lower lip. Blood. His nose was bleeding.

Not a good sign, breaking a blood vessel like that. Much more worrisome, though, was his rewriting of existence. It was bad enough that Morgan had been doing the same thing, but with the carelessness of a child who didn’t, and couldn’t appreciate the impact of her actions. Thorn hadn’t wanted to contribute to the potential chaos. It just underscored the fact that they needed to find Morgan, but the war kept getting in the way.

“That’s perfect, Thorn,” Bertilak said.

He nodded. “I know.”

“You don’t sound as happy as I’d expect of a guy who just moved freakin’ asteroids with the power of his mind.”

“I had to cheat to do it, though.”

“What you call cheating, most other people would call a bloody miracle.”

“Bertilak—”

“Yeah, I know. You didn’t want to do the changing reality thing. We’re all still here, though. The universe didn’t blow up or collapse or anything.”

Thorn just watched the airlock door as it slid closed. Bertilak was right, but that wasn’t the point. Every time he fiddled with reality like that, the more nerve-wracking he found it.

Yinzut obviously had no issues with it, though. “Thorn-friend, that is amaze. You have saved us much effort and time. Profit increase so much!”

The airlock repressurized. When it reached standard, he let the last of his magic flicker away. “Glad to be of help, Yinzut.”

“We honestly didn’t believe, Thorn-friend,” Yinzut said. “But you did what you said. We have your ore, and you our friendship.”

“That’s great. And?”

“And a vouchsafe from us to the Imbrogul. This is our word, and our actions.”

Thorn stood. His pulse still throbbed behind his eyes, and he felt wrung out, like a used dishcloth. Blood still trickled out of his nose.

Still, they’d accomplished what they set out to do. The Astarti would introduce them to the Imbrogul who, if what they’d been told was correct, held the tech that would change the ON and, with it, the war itself.

And that alone was worth it, he thought, heading for his quarters to clean himself up. No matter the risk, it had been worth it.

At least, he hoped so.

18

Kira slumped back in her chair and glared at the stack of documents still filling her inbox. She could swear they came in as fast as she dealt with them and sent them along, either back to the Danzur, or into a queue for transmission back to the Allied Stars Council and the ON. If the Danzur were playing her for time, they were doing a good job of it. And yet, all of the documents did seem genuinely important, and nothing else seemed to hint at any specific plot to deceive or delay her.

She sighed and leaned forward again. In fact, if anything, the Danzur should be eager to get the final details of their first diplomatic agreement with the Allied Stars finalized. It was mainly a trade agreement, and a generous one, from the Danzur perspective. The Council had agreed to less favorable terms as a sort of loss leader, if it meant bringing and keeping the Danzur onside. Kira had her doubts, though. The Danzur were the sort to take advantage of it, accepting the human concessions now, then avoiding making future concessions of their own to make up for it.

But, whatever. Even if it just kept the Danzur out of the war, then it was probably worth it. And, once the ON had defeated the squids, they could turn their attention back to the Danzur and treat them to some more vigorous convincing. Maybe another goodwill visit from the Fleet would even be in order.

Kira indulged herself in a moment of remembering how it had felt when the Reserve Fleet had suddenly appeared, Thorn in the lead and charging to her rescue. Of course, that’s just how the timing worked out. Still, it gave her a bit of a chill, recalling that sudden transition from grim and hopeless despair to almost smug relief.

A soft chime interrupted her thoughts. She’d just received a message, which wasn’t unusual. Except this one was from Damien.

And was almost a day-and-a-half old.

Without the Venture here, she had to rely on Danzur to receive and relay comm traffic for her. It was all encrypted to diplomatic standards, of course, but it still left her at the mercy of Danzur comms. Apparently, something had gone very wrong, this time.

Cursing, she opened it. It wasn’t especially remarkable, just a request for an update. A check-in. But why had it been delayed—?

KIRA, HELP ME.

Kira shot to her feet, cursing, magic swirling into her mind, ready to lash out. It took her a moment to calm herself, get her breathing under control, get the magic to sluice back into the ether where it belonged.

That had been Damien. She’d thought of him sending the message, and then there he was, in her mind, imploring her for help.

She leaned on the desk and just spent a moment looking out the expansive windows of her plush quarters. She’d heard Damien in her mind. Heard him, the same way she could hear Thorn or Densmore. But Damien wasn’t a Joiner. He wasn’t a Starcaster at all, and displayed not even a flicker of magical potential. Still, somehow his raw emotions, pain and terror at whatever was happening to him, had managed to arc across the ether and slam into her mind like a desperate shout.

She looked back at the message, at the date-time stamp. A day-and-a-half ago. Where the hell had this message been in the meantime?

She cursed again and hit the comm. “I want to speak to Bundar,” she snapped.

The voice that answered wasn’t Bundar’s. “I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting with—”

“Get him out of it.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant Wixcombe, he left strict instructions—”

“I am coming to meet with him, now. And if he isn’t there to greet me with his smiling face, I will render everyone on this station instantly unconscious, then hunt him down, tie him up and make him meet with me. Is that clear enough for you?”

A pause, then the voice came fearfully back. “Clear, yes. I will tell him.”

“Good. I’m on my way.”

Kira locked the terminal and strode out of her quarters. The Danzur she passed in the corridors shrank away from her as she passed.

Good.

* * *

Bundar gave Kira a hard stare. “I gather your need is urgent, Kira. Or I hope so, at least, because I had to reschedule—”

“I don’t care,” Kira snapped, leaning on the table in the conference room. As usual, Bundar had been joined by several other Danzur, all his various toadies and sycophants. No doubt Bundar spent his own time sitting in a sycophant’s chair when he attended meetings with his superiors. It was the Danzur way, an obsessive fixation on hierarchy and titles and protocols, and Kira had just reached the end of her patience with it.

Bundar blinked. “This is obviously very important to you. What seems to be the problem, Kira?”

“I just received a message from Damien. Just received it, even though you received it over a day ago. I want to know why there was such a delay.”

“Ah. Well, I would suggest an unfortunate error occurred. On behalf of the Danzur, I wish to apologize.”

While he spoke, Kira leapt into his mind. She was ready to drive herself as deeply into his subconscious as she needed to, to either confirm what Bundar was saying was true, or find out what the truth really was. She didn’t have to, though. Her abruptness and generally furious tone had flustered him, so his tumbled around behind his words, fragmentary, but still clear.

The Nyctus. The Nyctus were involved.

She leaned closer. “You’re lying. The Nyctus have something to do with this,” she hissed.

Bundar gaped. His own Assistant Undersecretary placed his paw-like hands on the table and spoke with deliberate care.

“I would suggest you consider your words carefully, Lieutenant Wixcombe. We have made it abundantly clear that we have suspended our relations with the Nyctus, in order to pursue negotiations with you.”

“You wouldn’t wish to jeopardize that with unfounded accusations,” another of the Danzur said.

But Kira just sneered at them. “That’s bullshit, and he knows it.” She jabbed a finger at Bundar.

The Danzur collectively began to mutter, disapproval emanating from them in waves. Kira still didn’t care. Instead, she drove her awareness into Bundar’s mind, looking for the Nyctus connection. She expected to have to dig, but once again, it took her almost no time to find it.

“Three,” she said, her gaze locked on Bundar’s.

He gaped back. “What?”

“Six.”

“I don’t—”

“Four.”

Bundar stopped, his beady eyes widening.

“Five. Seven. Three.”

The more numbers Kira spoke, the more of them that appeared in Bundar’s thoughts.

“Eight. Four. Seven. Three. Two. And nine.”

The Danzur beside Bundar raised his paws. “Lieutenant Wixcombe, what are you saying?”

She stabbed her finger at Bundar again. “Ask him.”

“I have no idea!” Bundar said, but it was a little too loud and quick, and left the other Danzur suddenly staring at him.

“You don’t, huh? Doesn’t sound familiar? Maybe an account number? An account with the Danzur Currency Exchange?”

Bundar opened his mouth. Closed it again. Tried to speak, but all that came out was a stammered, “I—I—I don’t—”

The rest of the picture came inexorably flooding into Bundar’s mind. If he’d been a Joiner, or even had some reasonable mental discipline, he might have been able to prevent it. But she’d caught him flat-footed, surprised him by so readily uncovering some of his opportunistic double-dealing that he’d let all of it slip.

She straightened and leveled a disgusted look on him. “A secret account on the Currency Exchange, huh? One attached to a shell corporation. The Spinward Manufacturing Guild, it’s called. You’ve got a tidy sum of money sitting in it now, don’t you, Bundar? All of it deposited there by a Nyctus agent.”

“Spinward Guild? You told me they were being taken over by some investment collective,” one of the other Danzur hissed at Bundar, dropping any pretense of title or office.

The other Danzur turned hard looks on Bundar. “I did put money into Spinward. But you were using it as your own slush fund!” another snapped.

Bundar’s gaze flicked from face to face. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyes had gone wide, making him look like a beached fish. Finally, he found his voice again, and tried sputtering with outrage.

“Lies! This human is lying!” Bundar stood. “This is just a ploy to gain leverage in negotiations—”

Kira cut him off. “Not this time, you grubby little son of—” Kira took a breath. “Son of a mother who’s no doubt deeply disappointed in her son. I can see this in your mind. Magic, remember?”

“Why should we even begin to believe you?” Bundar shot back.

Kira narrowed her eyes and pushed herself deeper into Bundar’s mind, now a swirling storm of panicked desperation. It took her only a moment to find what she wanted.

That prompted her to turn to another of the Danzur. “Your name is Celard, right? You’ve known Bundar since you did your vocational training. You had a relationship with his sister, which you blame him for interfering with and ruining. That’s why, when the last round of promotions and appointments came up in your department, you made sure your Chief Assistant Deputy Whatever, your boss, anyway, found out that Bundar had been skimming from the department's expense allowance.”

Bundar spun on Celard. “You were doing it, too, and I never reported you!”

Celard slammed to his feet. “You deliberately sabotaged things between me and your sister!”

“That promotion was supposed to be mine!”

Celard straightened, radiating smug satisfaction. “I know. That’s why I made sure you didn’t get it.”

Kira cut them off. “You know, guys, as entertaining as this is—and believe me, it’s entertaining as hell—I’m not really interested in your petty squabbles. You can deal with those on your own time.” She leveled her gaze on Bundar again. “What does interest me is why the Nyctus were paying you under the table. But I can see that in your mind, too. They were paying you to make sure I stayed here. That’s what all of this is about. Keeping me here. The Nyctus are desperate to prevent me from returning to Allied Stars space and the ON.”

Kira drove her gaze, as hard as flint, into Bundar’s. “What I want to know is why. And don’t make me go rooting around in that greedy and corrupt little brain of yours, Bundar, because I will if I have to, and you definitely won’t like it.”

Bundar reeled back. Under his fur, Kira thought, he’d probably gone pale.

Good.

“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. They never told me,” he finally said, both him and his voice slumping in defeat.

“What did they tell you?”

“Just to ensure that you stayed here, for as long as possible. Then they paid me. And kept paying me. They paid me a lot.” He turned to his fellows. “Tell me that none of you wouldn’t have done the same thing!”

Kira waved a dismissive hand. “I have absolutely no interest in your internal politics, so I’ll leave this to you guys to deal with. Have fun with that, Bundar.” She offered him a sweetly poisonous smile, turned and started for the door. Partway there, she stopped and glanced back.

“Oh, I’ll also be letting the Allied Stars Council know about this—how susceptible their newest ‘ally’ is to corruption, cronyism, and the influence of what we consider to be a hostile power. And then I’m going to make arrangements to get the hell out of here. And if anyone tries to stop me—well, let’s just say you’d get to find out just what a Joiner is capable of when she’s pissed. And that includes letting Thorn Stellers know about it.”

Kira grinned as she walked out of the room. From the looks on each one of the Danzur’s faces, she was pretty sure they’d all turned pale under their fur that time.

* * *

Kira hated not having the Venture back yet. She had no way of extracting herself from Danzur space. And she was damned sick of the Danzur who, despite all of their bureaucratic niceties, obviously used them to hide a rotten core of corruption. That made it easy for the Nyctus. Who needed Skins, when you could just throw some money around?

So she sat in her luxurious quarters, her attention split between the encrypted comm terminal and the door. She was waiting for a response from the Allied Stars Council on the first, and frankly expected the latter to suddenly burst open as the Danzur blew past her lone Marine bodyguard and tried to take her into custody, or worse. She could defend herself, but it wouldn’t be pretty. Hopefully, the raw existential terror Thorn had provoked in the furry little aliens would be enough to keep them at bay.

Thinking about Thorn made her consider contacting him. But she didn’t. He was far away from the ON and Allied Stars space, on some special mission, and wouldn’t be able to do much more than commiserate with her. There was only one other person she could contact in real-time.

Kira reached out with a magically-infused awareness, seeking a familiar presence in the ether. The peculiarities of this sort of remote telepathy were still not well understood. All the Starcaster Corps researchers had been able to figure out is that, for a few, select Joiners, the distance between them was irrelevant. As long as they were aware of one another, they could converse. Oh, and Thorn could do it too, of course, because he was Thorn Stellers, a Conduit, so he was adept at all forms of ’casting.

Captain Densmore? It’s Lieutenant—

Wixcombe, yes. Interestingly enough, contacting you was only two items down on my to-do list.

You were going to contact me?

Yes. Captain Tanner asked me to pass on to you that a small, discreet ship, a freighter, is on its way to join you.

He—wait. A freighter? Captain Tanner is sending a freighter? Here? Why?

Notwithstanding the importance of your current mission, it’s apparently imperative that you get to Code Nebula as soon as possible.

Why?

I’m not sure. He wouldn’t say why, only to pass this message on to you.

Kira sat back, surprised, and confused. Why would Tanner be sending a freighter for Kira? Why would he be sending any ship at all for Kira? He had nothing to do with Allied Stars diplomatic missions, even if they involved ON personnel. At least, she didn’t think he did. And why a freighter? And why did she need to get to Code Nebula?

Ma’am, is there anything else you can tell me about this? Anything at all?

I’m afraid not. You now know what I know. And, yes, I realize that I’m not exactly the most honest and forthcoming person around, and stop rolling your eyes at that, Wixcombe. But I am being entirely honest when I tell you, I don’t know anything more.

Kira allowed herself a thoughtful frown. A part of her, albeit a small and deep one, still wondered if Densmore might have been influenced by the Nyctus. Unlike Thorn, she seriously doubted it, but couldn’t make the idea go away completely. But even if she wasn’t, Densmore still lived in a murky world that was really nothing but lies and obfuscation. It was just what she did, being a key player in the shadowy realm of covert ops.

She finally decided Densmore wasn’t lying. The woman was a powerful Joiner, but so was she. She sensed not even a whiff of falsehood about any of this.

I believe you, ma’am. And, thank you. I’ll just wait here and hope nothing blows up with the Danzur before the freighter gets here.

Is there a problem, Wixcombe?

She explained what had happened with Bundar and his being on the take with the Nyctus. Densmore surprised her by laughing.

That’s actually terrific news.

Sorry, it’s terrific news that the Danzur are prone to corruption and duplicity?

Absolutely! It means they’re not very different from we humans. Oh, and it also creates all sorts of opportunities for us to start getting some levers wedged into their power structure. We’ll have to find a chance for you to tell me all about it.

This time, Kira couldn’t help chuckling. It figured that a spy would find sleazy double-dealing something to celebrate.

* * *

The Danzur did finally show up at Kira’s door. It wasn’t some armed delegation coming to arrest her, or do whatever other unpleasant things her imagination had conjured up, though. It was an older Danzur, who introduced herself as Grastir. She was, apparently, Bundar’s boss’s boss. This actually made her the most senior Danzur she’d yet encountered, aside from formal and brief pro forma introductions to several Danzur muckety-mucks, which were just diplomatic niceties.

“Please, come in,” Kira said, raising her eyebrows a little more at the fact that no cloud of sycophants trailed her into the room. She was actually alone.

She stopped in the middle of the room. “Thank you, Kira Wixcombe. I won’t keep you long. I have come to apologize on behalf of the Danzur Sovereignty for recent events.”

“You mean Bundar taking bribes from the Nyctus to keep me tied up here.”

Grastir offered the Danzur equivalent of a smile. “You’re very direct. I like that. Yes, because of that.”

Kira smiled back. “Well, I appreciate the apology.” She’d intended to leave it at that, but thought, what the hell.

“How about making it up to me, and to the Allied Stars?” Kira asked.

Grastir’s eyes narrowed. “What did you have in mind?”

“Bundar was obviously dragging his feet, when it came to actually accomplishing anything here. That includes the most important thing our two races could accomplish, which is full diplomatic relations. So how about we cut through all of the nonsense, and just agree to do it? We’ll exchange Ambassadors, set up Embassies in each other’s territories, and then get to work on border issues, trade agreements, all of that sort of thing.”

“Since getting such an agreement was your primary purpose here, I sense that you want to get it done with and get back home.”

“I don’t think I’m the only direct one in this room,” Kira said, smiling again.

“Indeed not. How do you think I got to where I am?”

“By cutting through the bullshit that your people seem to get so fixated on?”

“Exactly.”

“Alright. Yes. I want to get back home. I’m a soldier, not a diplomat. I want to get back home, and get on with helping the ON deal with the Nyctus,” Kira said.

“I understand.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Again, Grastir smiled. “My apologies. I may be direct for a Danzur, but I’m still a Danzur. Process and protocol is hardwired into me. To answer your question, yes—we would be pleased to exchange diplomatic missions with you. You may inform your superiors of that, and invite them to contact me directly to work out the details.”

The Danzur raised a paw. “However, be aware that we will also be maintaining our diplomatic relationship with the Nyctus as well. They do border our space, after all, so remaining on at least neutral terms with them is important to us.”

“Understood. And if they do cause trouble for you, just let us know.”

“They won’t, as long as the trade between our two species remains lucrative.”

“That’s all we can ask for, then, I guess,” Kira said.

“Very well, Kira Wixcombe. I have other matters to attend to, so I have to take my leave.”

Grastir headed for the door. Kira followed her.

“Why couldn’t I have been dealing with you from the beginning, Grastir? It would have made things so much easier,” Kira said, her smile genuine.

Grastir stopped and turned back. “Again, we’re Danzur. What we do is what we do. It’s in our nature. Goodbye, Kira Wixcombe.”

As Grastir left, Kira’s Marine escort stepped into the room. “Ma’am, we just got word from the Danzur that a ship has entered the system. The pilot is asking for you.”

Kira whistled. “That’ll be our ride. Must be one hell of a fast freighter, though.”

The Marine looked puzzled. “Freighter? I’m no expert, ma’am, but that’s no freighter out there.”

* * *

Kira settled into the crash-couch and grinned, grateful. She hadn’t realized just how tense she had been, pretty much the whole time she’d been here, with the Danzur.

She turned to the pilot. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you, Mol.”

Mol gave her a thumbs up. “No problem, ma’am. If everyone’s settled in, we’ll get this show on the road.”

The Marine, and the Allied Stars bureaucrat who’d been acting as her aide, both signaled affirmative from where they were strapped into the back of the cabin. Mol cleared their departure from the Danzur’s orbital platform, backed the Gyrfalcon away, then spun it about and headed for deep space.

“I was told you were a freighter,” Kira said.

“Yeah, cover story to keep things on the down-low. We even spoofed our transponder to a civilian code. Captain Tanner gave his say-so on it.”

“Okay, so something’s up, Mol. What the hell is it? What’s going on that’s so urgent?”

“Honestly, ma’am, not sure. Something important, but I’m not cut into the loop. I’m just the driver,” Mol replied.

Kira scowled. She was going to have to keep waiting for an explanation, it seemed. Still, though, knowing that the Danzur were falling away behind her by the second made it a lot easier to handle.

So Kira turned her glower back into that relaxed smile. “Okay then, driver. Code Nebula, as hard you can burn.”

Mol’s fingers flew over the controls. “You heard the woman, Trixie. Best possible speed, and go!”

19

Morgan could feel the Monsters. They radiated anger and aggression and resentment, and a grim purpose that was focused entirely on her. They weren’t even trying to conceal it, or shield the ruthless malevolence of their approach to her hiding place. The relentlessly dark emotions just kept growing in intensity, until the water turned bitter with the taste of them.

She reached out with her thoughts, and swept her sorcerous gaze over them like a sunbeam. Her heart began to pound. There were so many of them. An army of them, all coming for her. Sixteen of them had the psychic feel of shamans, powerful ones, like the elder shaman she’d come to know on Tāmtu. But there were twice that many Monsters again, of a sort Morgan had never encountered before. They felt different from the shamans, not beacons of magical potential readying themselves for release, but something else. Still beacons, but not magical. Points of cold, merciless resolve, and absolute certainty in their purpose. They were soldiers, but like no soldiers Morgan had encountered among the Radiants or the Monsters.

An army. How could she hope to stand against an army? And alone?

She stopped. Wait. She wasn’t alone.

When the Monsters had taken her back to the city, after killing the poor creature trapped in the crashed ship, some little warning had sounded in her head. It was like hearing someone screaming, but far away, right on the very edge of hearing. She hadn’t known what it was then. Now, she realized she was screaming at herself, some deep part of her warning her that these Nyctus weren’t nice, weren’t her friends and, most of all, didn’t even intend to be her friends. They only wanted her for one reason.

To kill her father, Thorn Stellers.

After that, she knew, they wouldn’t need her anymore. It was why she’d blown open the wall of the tower and fled, but it was also why she’d done something else. She made Mister Starman go away.

Falunis had asked her about the doll once. She’d shrugged and said she’d rid herself of it, thrown it away, because she didn’t like him or want him anymore. That seemed to please Falunis, because it played right into her desire to have Morgan finally turn on her father and kill him. She was rejecting Mister Starman, casting him away like she’d done back on Tāmtu.

“I don’t need him anymore,” she’d said, and Falunis had just flashed her satisfied agreement.

But he wasn’t gone. Not really. Morgan concentrated, funneled magic through the determined focus of her thoughts, then used that fusion of mind and mystical power to go back in time to where she’d placed him, neatly tucked away under the roots of a sourfruit tree on Nebo.

It wasn’t like trying to pull the Pool of Stars forward through time. This was simpler, and there also weren’t any people involved, like there’d been aboard the ship. Mister Starman was quite happy to rejoin her now, flopping loosely into her grip as she pulled him through the years. Nothing really ever bothered Mister Starman. No matter what was happening, he smiled his cheery smile.

Even facing an army of Monsters didn’t disturb him. That made her feel better. If Mister Starman could be brave enough to smile in the face of terrible danger, then so could she.

“We’re ready for them, Mister Starman, aren’t we?”

His smile assured her that he was, indeed, ready.

Morgan turned to face the entrance to the tunnel. She bit her lip. Maybe she should go out there, and face them in a place where she wasn’t trapped, and had only mysterious skeletons for company. But that didn’t make sense. In here, the Monsters could only come at her from one direction. And if she really needed to, she could always escape, just by not being in the tunnel anymore.

That made her wonder if she could go even further away. She could go to Tāmtu, or even Nebo, both places she knew.

“Can I, Mister Starman? Can I do that? Can I just go wherever I want, to where the Monsters won’t be able to find me?”

Mister Starman smiled at the idea, but Morgan felt a bit of a mocking edge to it, like the whole idea was just dumb. And maybe it was. It wouldn’t be easy, and right before the Monsters tried to attack her wouldn’t be the time to try it.

So she kept herself resolutely facing back up the tunnel, waiting for the Monsters, and trying to ignore the unpleasant, clenching tightness in her chest. It was fear, she knew, but she’d been scared before.

She waited. She could feel the Monsters moving around, mostly outside the tunnel mouth. Some, though, had swum past the cave opening, and were exploring the rocky ridge into which it was set. They were seeing if she had another way out, or if they had another way of getting in. She glanced behind her, into the darkness. This tunnel, this lava tube, could be hundreds of meters long. Thousands. And it might not lead anywhere except into the guts of some slumbering volcano—

She felt sudden movement at the cave mouth, and spun back.

A sudden rush of the soldiers, a tight formation of six, charging at her. They swept forward with a sinister grace, their movements perfectly coordinated as they dodged and wove around the irregularities in the tunnel. More soldiers followed them.

Morgan curled her lip. That was it? They were just going to come straight at her, like fish in a tank.

“Mister Starman, let’s make them go away,” she hissed. His eyes immediately began to flicker, and then shine with a steady, blue light. It washed over the rock around her, lit the ancient bones, surrounding her in a nimbus of humming azure power.

Before she could focus her thoughts, and the power through them, though, the shamans struck.

From all around her, hammers of water suddenly thundered in, all meant to converge on her. Because she’d already found her blue power and had it ready, she was able to fling a wall of denial up around her, into which the hammers crashed. They struck with enormous force, making Morgan wince with the effort of denying them. Then they struck again. And again.

Every second, the soldiers raced closer.

Morgan let out a snarl of rage at how well this simple tactic was working. But she wasn’t done. Far from it.

Morgan released her defensive wall, at the same time causing herself to shoot between and among the hammers of water, her smallness and agility letting her dodge them. It took a moment for the shamans to reorient themselves, enough that she could lash out with sharp spears of power, piercing the brains of three of the soldiers, one coming up the tunnel and two still outside. It took more effort than she expected; a lot more. They weren’t themselves shamans, these soldiers, but were either protected by them, or had some other way of blunting her power. But it only made what she wanted to do harder, not impossible. Behind the tip of each psychic spear came its true effect, an undeniable compulsion.

The ones beside you, they’re bad, they’re not your friends, they want to hurt you, they want to kill you, they’re the most awful, stinky, terrible thing in the whole universe!

One of the soldiers now only a few seconds away suddenly turned, lashing out with its weapon, a nasty, hooked blade on a short staff. The inside curve of the hook was dull, because it was intended to catch and hold things. The outside curve, though, had a razor-keen edge. The Monster-soldier’s target actually started to react, so fast were its reflexes, but not quick enough. The water turned murky with blood, jetting and dissolving in small currents as the soldiers fought and died.

The soldier she’d compromised was already swinging back at another, but this one was ready. Their blades clanged together with a harsh, metallic ring, like a gong echoing through the cramped tunnel. Then the soldier she’d turned died, slashed nearly into three pieces by two of the others, their blades flashing silver in the dim light.

It had all lasted maybe four or five seconds. But it threw the soldiers’ approach into disarray. At the same time, the two soldiers she’d targeted outside the cave had turned on the shamans. One was already dead, but had killed one shaman and wounded another. The other soldier, though, rampaged past its fellows and tore through another group of shamans, sending them fleeing in panic.

Panic, Morgan decided, was good.

The hammers of water vanished. But Mister Starman knew it wasn’t over. The soldiers already in the tunnel quickly organized themselves to come at her again. Morgan lashed out with a water hammer of her own, a big one that left a cavity in the water behind it. It smashed into one of the soldiers like a battering ram, instantly turning him to a bloody pulp. The edge of it caught a second soldier, spinning him like a top and crashing him against the tunnel wall hard enough to shred his rubbery skin, white wound edges yawning like ragged mouths. Then the hole she’d made in the ocean collapsed, the water slamming back together with a thunderclap.

Morgan reeled back at the concussion, her head ringing. The soldiers were already recovering. She fought desperately to clear the thin whine from her head, because it made concentrating harder. These Monster-soldiers were so fast—

Magic roared back in, like an avalanche, this time aimed directly at her mind. Morgan instinctively shrugged it aside, but the effort cost her a bit more time and distracted her just that little bit more. Now the soldiers were almost on top of her. Morgan punched out, her hand suddenly wreathed in snarling blue power. She struck a warrior, his flesh turning to slimy goo where she touched it. He howled and flung himself back, and she struck at another, just as one of the hooks caught and pulled her. Morgan struck at it, this time, shattering the tough alloy of the blade like brittle glass. Another wave of magical compulsion hit her, making her gasp and cry out. Another hook caught her. Another. She doggedly hung on to Mister Starman and fought back, lashing out, flinging a bolt of raw energy into the face of one soldier, searing it away, then turning on another.

One of the hooks yanked, spinning her. Now roaring bluish light enveloped her foot and she kicked, punching her toes out the back of the warrior pulling at her. He went limp and she spun again, trying to drive off the other soldiers closing in, trying to keep punching and kicking. But she felt her strength failing, her arms and legs starting to get heavy. Weeping at the unfairness of it all, she made to summon one last, colossal blast of magic, one that would destroy everything and kill everyone around her, then do more, keep radiating out, through the water, the air above, space beyond that.

A wave of magical force that would just make all of the Nyctus go away, just make it so they didn’t exist anymore.

Blue light roared like a furnace, enveloping her and Mister Starman. Another magic onslaught from the shamans pummeled her mind, but she brushed it aside in a second.

But a second was all that the soldiers needed.

A sharp, jabbing pain erupted from the back of her neck, then swept through her in an agonizing wave. She’d been poked with a needle, or something like it, and now painful dizziness rolled through her. She fought to keep her focus, but her brain was suddenly filled with fog. More of the hooks caught her, holding her fast. With a last, desperate gasp, she flung away the power she’d summoned in a ragged, raw burst of force. It pulsed over the soldiers clustered around her, searing their flesh away, then struck the rock and made it briefly glow red hot. The old bones vanished in puffs of charred grit. Then the temperature of the water shot up and became scalding hot. Morgan had enough presence of mind to grab the last shreds of power and make herself and Mister Starman impervious to the heat, and that was all she was able to do.

Then, darkness.

* * *

Morgan slitted her eyes open, wincing as a harsh, reddish glare penetrated them and stabbed into her eyeballs. She groaned and looked up. Moving her head was like lifting a heavy stone.

It took her a moment to make sense of what was going on. She couldn’t move her arms or legs. She thought maybe they were paralyzed. She’d heard about that, people not being able to feel or move whole parts of their bodies after some terrible accident. But she could feel her limbs, she just couldn’t move them. No, her ankles and wrists were wrapped in some tough, fibrous kind of cable. She was sitting on a hard metal bench, with her legs stretched out, her upper body propped up into a sitting position.

She wasn’t alone.

Dark, shadowy figures surrounded her. Lots of them. Dozens of them. She couldn’t make out much about them, though, because a single, harsh light the color of hot magma shone down on her from above.

Morgan blinked.

Then she yanked against her bonds, and cried out. At once, a great weariness washed over her, making her eyelids droop again. She fought against it, desperately trying to summon magic to help her, but that enormous weariness prevented it. And the more she tried, the more tired she got. Soon, she’d just topple back into darkness.

“It’s pointless to resist,” a low, gruff voice said.

A Nyctus moved into the circle of light. It was much larger than any she’d seen before, muscular and bulky, and clad in articulated plates of glassy black armor. Two of its tentacles were encased in metal that rippled and bent with their movements. Over all of it, it wore a black harness, holding one of the curved hook-blades to its back, and several other brutish weapons hanging at its sides. Some were other types of blades, and one was definitely a gun. It moved with a liquid grace that hinted both at restrained power, and the promise of great violence.

Morgan forced her eyes open. “Let me go. Or I’ll make all of you go away.”

The Nyctus just went on speaking, as though she hadn’t said anything. “We’ve been making a mistake. Our shamans have been trying to break through, into your mind, and take control of you. They’ve failed at that. I don’t think that will ever work against you, no matter how hard we try.”

The creature leaned in, and now its grating voice rang in her head. “But what they can do is keep you contained, and prevent you from using your power against us. And the more you try, the more you won’t be able to. It’s not quite what we want, but it will have to do.”

“I hate you. Let me go.”

But the Nyctus laughed in her thoughts. “You’re far from the first being to hate me, and I’m sure you won’t be the last.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Seeker. I am the office and title, and those things are me.”

Morgan frowned and shook her head. “What do you want from me?”

“You know what we want. We want you to carry out your promise to us, the one you made on Tāmtu. We want you to kill Thorn Stellers. Isn’t that what you want, too?”

Morgan glowered at the creature. She wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore. She hated Thorn Stellers for trying to change her, yes. But, when she thought back to what had happened, she didn’t remember any of the same sort of menace in his thoughts that she found in these Nyctus, these Monsters. There’d actually been a sort of sad kindness. It felt the same way the Radiants on Tāmtu had treated her, as though they were concerned about her. That’s because they’d been her friends.

So could Thorn Stellers have actually thought he was trying to help her?

The thought had danced around inside her mind for a while, but now it suddenly crystalized, as bright and certain as Tāmtu ice. The dark presence of the Seeker in her mind made it so clear. Thorn Stellers may have hurt her, but she didn’t think he’d meant to. Not anymore. He’d been trying to help her.

“What I want is to not be here. Let me go!” she shot back.

“That isn’t going to happen. At least, not until you’ve defeated Thorn Stellers. Once you’ve done that, you can go wherever and do whatever you wish.”

Morgan gave him a contemptuous snort. “You make the water taste like lies.”

“I will never lie to you child. That is the one promise I can make.”

His voice flashed through her mind like fire, leaving hot ash in its wake. It flooded her thoughts, and she couldn’t stop it, partly because of whatever poison they’d given her, partly because of the pressure to contain her from the surrounding shamans. But it was also partly because of mounting fear.

“Tell me something true, then, you monster.” She tried to sound angry, but wanted to cry.

“Very well.” A pause, then the voice split her senses again.

“This is going to hurt.”

20

Kira tried to ignore the way the high collar of her dress uniform chafed against her neck. She rarely wore the damned thing, mainly because occasions to wear it were few and far between these days. But she’d never been a fan of it, thinking of the stiff, formal uniform as almost pretentious.

Except on occasions like this.

“May she rest in peace, secure in the knowledge that she did her part to help bring the war, and the suffering it causes, to its eventual and victorious conclusion for the Orbital Navy she made her life.”

The minister threw a handful of dirt into the grave, where it rattled softly against the coffin. Each of those present then filed by and did the same thing.

A Commander, a new addition to Code Nebula since Kira was last here, caught her eye just before she tossed her own handful of grave-dirt onto the coffin. “Did you know Commander Narvez well, Lieutenant?”

Kira looked into the open tomb, at the sealed coffin. It was hard to believe that angular, hatchet face was just a few centimeters behind the lid, totally blank. No expression. No life.

She nodded. “She was one of my instructors here, during my basic training, and my Starcaster upgrade training later on.” She nodded again. “Yes, ma’am, I knew her pretty well.”

Kira walked on, letting others file past the grave and pay their own respects. That completed the funeral for her. Just a simple, brief ceremony, followed by the symbolic burial by those in attendance, and that was it. Part of the simplicity was how practical things were—even the act of saying goodbye. There were a lot of funerals these days. But part of it was the Starcaster Corps itself. Not attracting attention to itself was hardwired into the Corps, for many reasons. Some were sound, and some were more irrational, but all of the practices felt like dogma at this point of the war.

At least the location was nice, a grassy hill overlooking Code Nebula. Narvez would have a good view from up there.

Kira turned around, scanning the cemetery. And so would all of the others. Dozens of them. Some were actual graves, and some were memorial markers only, for those whose bodies could never be recovered. This hill had started out as an unofficial site to commemorate fallen Starcasters, but it had since been formalized. Now, all Starcasters who fell in honorable service were buried, or at least memorialized here. Sentinel Hill, it was now called. The name hinted at watchfulness, of waiting, as though these fallen Starcasters were still on duty, standing guard over Code Nebula and the new ’Casters that trained here.

Kira sighed. She’d seen enough of the war to know that none of these dead ’Casters were watching anything. They were just dead.

Unless, of course, Thorn decided to bring them back to life, but that would be—

Kira stopped. A lone figure stood in the distance, shoulders slumped against the purple-blue sky.

She took a breath and started to walk. She knew this was going to be tough, and just hadn’t been ready for it. She still wasn’t, really, but that lonely figure needed her.

“Hello, Damien,” she said.

He didn’t look at her. His bleak gaze just stayed fixed on Narvez’s grave, and the last, few celebrants now walking away from it. An autonomous digger, parked discreetly down the hill, rumbled to life, and began to climb toward the grave. It was time to finish the burial that Kira and the others had started.

“Hello, Kira.”

There was none of the spark Kira had become used to from Damien. None of the hinted cleverness, the sly awareness, the humor simmering just beneath it all. His tone was as flat and listless as the fitful breeze rippling the grass.

Kira stood for a moment, trying to figure out what to say next. Where to begin? She’d read the report about what had happened, but it had been a sterile recounting of events, nothing more. An addendum to it confirmed that an investigation and inquiry had been completed, concluding that while mistakes were made, there’d been no actual negligence. Damien had been weaponized, used to kill Narvez, but he officially bore no blame for it.

Of course, there was whatever was official, and then there was the haunted desolation in eyes that should be sparkling with life.

They stood awkwardly for a moment in silence. Kira finally spoke just to break it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you sooner, but Mol got me back here only a couple of hours ago,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s okay.”

Silence.

Kira looked down at Code Nebula, gathered herself, and turned back. “Damien—”

“Kira, look, don’t bother. I know what you’re going to say. It won’t make any difference.”

“So you’re a Joiner now?”

“No, I’m a diplomat. I’m supposed to know what people are going to say, and be ready with an answer when they say it.”

“So what am I going to say?” Kira asked him.

He gave her a sharp glance. “That it wasn’t my fault, that I was being controlled by that squid, that others were responsible for making sure things didn’t get out of control, that I was an innocent bystander.” He shrugged. “Something like that, anyway.”

“Okay, so what’s your answer to that?”

He turned and met her gaze squarely. “That even if it’s true, none of it matters. It doesn’t change how I feel. I killed an ON Commander, a respected officer I barely knew. I was aware of what was going on, but I couldn’t stop it from happening. All I could do was—”

He stopped, looked away, swallowing hard.

Kira fumbled for something to say. This sort of thing had never been her strength. She either ended up getting unaccountably angry, or she commiserated way too much.

“You’re right, you don’t need me around to have this conversation, I guess,” was all she finally managed.

“No, I don’t, because I’ve been having it with myself ever since it happened,” he replied, then turned and walked away.

* * *

Kira closed the fasteners on her travel bag, sealing away the sight of that damned dress uniform. She was back in her uniform-of-the-day, enjoying its comfortable practicality. The best part was the boots. Her regular combat boots embraced her feet with firm, but yielding support, protecting them without squeezing them, or scraping against the tops of her toes. The dress boots were like wearing vac-armor.

She blew out a breath and looked around her room. This was the first time, she realized, she’d been assigned visitor’s quarters at Code Nebula. She remembered doing oh-dark-thirty runs past this building. She glanced at it every time, bitterly jealous at what seemed to her like a veritable palace. She lived in a barracks, jammed in with a couple dozen other sweaty bodies, all tumbling past one another as they raced to get out of bed for reveille, or back into bed for lights out. These visitors, though, had their own rooms. They shared washrooms, but only one at a time, and could lock the door. They had that rarest commodity, privacy, rivaled only by sleep for scarcity.

What it actually turned out to be was another standard barracks template, only divided into cubicles by thin sheets of plasticized fiber-board. There was privacy, sure, as much as a few millimeters of divider provided, anyway. It reminded her of an old saying, far fields are greener. Sure they were, until you got closer to them and could see all the rocks and weeds.

Kira hefted her travel bag and turned to leave. Mol would be waiting for her. She was going to return to the Hecate, then redeploy with her to wherever Fleet intended to send her next. She had no idea where that would be.

Far fields are greener.

People always think others have it better than they do.

Kira dropped the bag back on the bed, put on her uniform hat, turned and strode out of the visitors quarters.

Mol would have to wait a while. Kira wasn’t leaving Code Nebula yet. Not while she had unfinished business here.

* * *

She tracked Damien down to the infirmary, where he’d just finished another examination, both mundane and magical. Fleet security protocols required that, having been subjected to Nyctus mental influence, he be tested and monitored for a mandatory period. Until that passed, he remained stuck in Code Nebula. It struck Kira that it was almost a sort of punishment, leaving someone who’d been traumatized alone with nothing but their own, brooding thoughts for ten days.

She stopped at the closed door, knocked twice, then entered.

She caught Damien in the act of lacing up his shoes. He actually managed a watery smile when he saw her.

“Good thing you didn’t walk in her a couple of minutes ago, or you’d be seeing a lot more than me with one unstrapped shoe.”

Kira just put her hands on her hips. “Finish that up, and let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“For a walk.”

Damien sighed. “Look, Kira—”

“It wasn’t a request. This is an ON installation, I’m an ON officer, so you’re subject to the Fleet Code of Conduct.”

Damien stood. “Really?”

Kira sniffed. “No, that’s actually bullshit. But it still wasn’t a request.”

She turned, gesturing for him to follow. “Come on.”

Kira didn’t look back and just started walking. She wondered if Damien might just refuse. But she heard his footsteps fall in behind hers in the corridor, and just kept walking.

She walked with him across the Code Nebula campus, to the beginning of the obstacle course. From here, they followed a winding path that rose as it progressed up a ridge. Most of the way was shaded by lush trees, but when they reached a broad clearing, Kira stopped. From here, two more paths diverged, one striking out further uphill to the left, while the right-hand way fell into marshy low ground. Further to their right, the clearing looked over a portion of the obstacle course, a series of progressively higher walls in drier low-ground about a hundred meters away.

Damien looked around. “Well, this is—” He looked around again. “—random. Any particular reason we’ve come here, or did you just want to go for a walk in the sun?”

Kira turned to Damien. “I brought you here because I made a friend here. It was during my upgrade training. We were doing a cross-country run, and according to a map my friend managed to sneak a look at, we were supposed to go that way.” She pointed at the right-hand path, the one that descended.

“Okay. Um—”

Kira just went on. “That leads into the Fire Swamps. Supposedly an awful, terrible place. It’s really just Code Nebula folklore, though. If you go that way, you’re going to get wet feet, but that’s about it.”

“Why are you telling me this, Kira? Why are we here?”

She turned back to Damien. “Because that friend, a woman named Rainer, ended up being captured by the squids on an op gone wrong. I was the one commanding that op. I got captured, too.”

Damien just stared for a moment. “You never told me about that.”

“I’ve never told anyone about it, except those who needed to know. The op was a covert one, and there’s a whole shitload of security and secrecy regs involved. More to the point, I just don’t want to tell anyone about it.”

“So you’re telling me about it now because you think it can help me,” Damien replied, a sour note of sarcasm tinging his voice.

But Kira shook her head. “No. I’m telling you about it to give you some context.”

“For what?”

“For letting me Join with you, so I can share with you what we went through. What I went through.”

Damien looked up at the other path, the one that led toward even higher ground. “So that was the right path?”

“It was. Rainer thought she was being clever, sneaking a look at the map, but it was a trap, a deliberate ruse to trick us into going the wrong way. We had to Join with the instructors monitoring the run to find out the truth, and not let them catch us doing it.”

“I gather you succeeded,” Damien said.

“I did. That’s because I’m a damned good Joiner.” She pushed her gaze into Damien’s. “That didn’t stop the squids from doing what they did to me.”

Damien looked back at the path leading down, then the other one, leading up. Time passed. Kira let it.

Finally, he turned back to her. “You really think this will help?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I was alone with what happened to me, until I wasn’t and there were other ’Casters, other people I could lean on.”

“Like Thorn,” Damien said.

“Yeah, like Thorn.”

He looked between the two paths, then back at Kira.

“So what do you need me to do?”

* * *

They made their way back to Code Nebula slowly, ambling back along the winding footpath through the trees. Aside from the soft hiss of wind through the leaves and needles, and the occasional hum of a bug or flutter of a bird, the only sound was their footsteps against the packed dirt.

As soon as Code Nebula came once more into sight through the trees, though, Damien stopped.

“So what happened to them?”

Kira stopped as well. “To whom?”

“Rainer, and Riley, and Gillis.”

“The squids sent Gillis back to ON space as a sort of message, I guess. He died aboard the Hecate when a bomb they’d implanted in him detonated. As for Rainer and Riley—” She shrugged. “I don’t know. They haven’t showed up as Skins anywhere in the Fleet that I know of, so, I don’t know. I try not to think about it too much or too hard.”

“Look, Kira, I appreciate what you’ve tried to do for me. You being inside my head was a way more pleasant experience than—”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.

“Anyway, I’m so sorry for what happened to you and your friends. But as terrible as it was, you were able to fight back. I’m just a diplomat, a guy who’s good at talking. I should never have been there in the first place.” His shoulders slumped more and more as he spoke, and his gaze dropped into the dirt.

Kira stepped forward, planting herself in front of him. “I’m not done yet.”

He looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Being rescued by Thorn didn’t heal me. All of the counseling and support and afterwards didn’t heal me. See, here’s the thing. I’m still not healed. I never will be. My captivity by the squids, and the things they did to me—they’ll always be a part of who I am.” As she spoke, she lifted her hand and looked at her index finger. “You can’t even tell it was 3-D printed in a lab, can you?”

“No.”

“I can. And I always will.”

“I think I asked you earlier where you were going with all of this, so pardon me while I ask it again.”

“Can I Join with you again?” Kira asked.

Damien blinked. “I—sure. Why?”

“It won’t take long,” Kira replied, then extended her thoughts to once more encompass Damien’s. She made her entry into his mind as gentle as possible, and carefully avoided delving into his thoughts too deeply. That’s not why she was here, even if there were things she was at least curious about.

But Damien trusted her, and she wasn’t about to violate that. Instead, she remembered the thing she specifically intended to remember, and let Damien remember it, too.

Not long after Thorn had rescued her, she’d been part of a desperate effort to save a large ON task force from a Nyctus trap. She’d Joined with a squid shaman Thorn had captured, then used its identity to mask herself, and infiltrated the thoughts of other squids aboard a Nyctus battleship. Her subterfuge had allowed her to briefly seize control of the ship, turn its formidable weapons on other squid ships, and ultimately crash it into a battlecruiser. It had been a turning point in the battle.

But Kira focused on one memory in particular, recalling it in as much detail as she could, for Damien’s sake.

Only a moment before the collision with the battlecruiser, she’d Joined with a dying shaman aboard the doomed battleship’s bridge. It had tried to remain defiant, claiming that the ON had won nothing that day. But she’d felt the shaman’s acrid, spiraling fear, and slammed back thoughts just as defiant.

I guess we’ll see. Meantime, though, you’ve definitely lost. And now, you’re going to die. How does that feel, knowing that death is coming for you, and there’s nothing you can do about it?

She lingered on that moment, on the savage glee of deceiving, and then defeating these Nyctus. Hundreds of them had died when the two ships collided, and thousands more in the brutal ON attack on the disrupted squid battle-line that followed.

And Kira had savored every second of it.

She withdrew from Damien’s mind, leaving him staring at her.

“Revenge isn’t a good motivation, Kira. It diminishes us,” he finally said.

“Oh, bullshit. Revenge is one of the most human motivations there is. If you let it define you, then sure, it can become an obsession and ultimately destroy you. But used properly, it’s one of the best motivators around. But, if it bothers you, just call it justice instead.”

“Cynical? You?”

“No, I’m just realistic. War has a way of stripping away the crap we use to pretty up some unpleasant truths.”

Damien looked at Code Nebula. “So what are you suggesting I do?”

“First, accept that what happened is part of who you are now, and always will be. Then, hit back. Get revenge. Or justice. Anyway, stop making yourself into the villain. You’re not. They are. So make them account for it.”

He looked back. “Sure. That sounds good. But how?”

Kira gave a hard, thin smile. “I have an idea about that, too.”

* * *

“It’s an intriguing idea, I must admit,” Admiral Scoville said, his eyes narrowed in thought. Kira had made her pitch, so now she and Damien just waited for the Admiral’s response over the comm-link from Code Gauntlet.

“So how would this work?” he finally asked. “We’ve had Starcasters scoping out our ships for some time now, looking for Skins. How would this be any better than that?”

“Sir, do you remember the two Starcasters Lieutenant Stellers traveled with, when he first met the Danzur? The two that turned out to be Skins?” Kira asked.

“I do.”

“Even he couldn’t sense that they’d been turned, and he’s—well, he’s Thorn Stellers. Joining by itself just isn’t enough.”

“Well aware, Lieutenant. Even sometimes keeps me awake at night, wondering how badly we’ve been infiltrated.”

Kira looked at Damien. “What we need is someone who’s an expert in reading people, not just thoughts. And Damien here is. Between that, and my Joining, I think we’ve got a much better chance of uncovering any Skins than a Joiner would alone.”

“What do you have to say about this, Forester?” Scoville asked Damien.

“We need to roll up these Skins, sir. Each and every one. And we need to do it soon. Hell, we need to do it now.”

Scoville gave a slow nod. “I read the report on the incident that occurred during the interrogation. Sorry that happened to you. I get where you’re coming from.”

Scoville tapped a finger against his desk, then gave a quick, firm nod. “Lieutenant Wixcombe, your proposal is approved. Effectively immediately, you and Forester are detached for special duty, visiting ships across the fleet to uncover Skins. We’ll get it cleared with the diplomatic folks, and get a schedule worked up here, to ensure priority ships get done first. You’ll report directly to my office, to my Adjutant.”

Kira couldn’t help smiling. She noticed that Damien smiled, too, the first genuine smile she’d seen from him since she’d arrived at Code Nebula. That made her smile a little more.

“Understood, sir,” she replied.

“For the duration, Forester, you’re a Mission Specialist, with the acting rank of Lieutenant,” Scoville went on.

Damien’s smile faded. “I’ve got no training as a soldier, sir. And I’m a little old to be dragging myself out of bed at some forsaken hour, trying to keep up with recruits half my age.”

Scoville laughed. It was the first time Kira had ever seen that, too. “Don’t need you to be a soldier, Forester. We need you to just be you.”

“I think I can pull that off, sir.”

Kira waited to sign off, but Scoville’s image turned to her. “Lieutenant Wixcombe, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s unclear chains of command. Makes things messy. Introduces mistakes. To avoid that, and ensure it’s clear who’s in command of your little detachment, and give you a little more clout as you go about your work, I’m promoting you to Lieutenant-Commander, effective immediately.”

Kira just stared. Promoted? Lieutenant-Commander?

Damien, though, grinned something resembling his old grin and clapped her on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Kira. Or should I say, congratulations, boss?”

21

Thorn put his hands on his hips and looked around. “You know, for a race known for its high tech, these Imbrogul are really in touch with nature.”

Bertilak grunted his agreement, but kept his head craned back, staring in wonder. Yinzut gave a slow blink.

“It’s because of their facility with technology that they so immerse themselves in the natural world,” the Astarti said.

Thorn nodded back. Immerse was right.

The meeting place, appropriately enough called The Glade, was a broad expanse of grass enclosed all around by soaring trees. Their silvery-grey trunks were so smooth and straight they could have been artificial columns. But ten meters overhead, they flung out a spray of branches laden with broad, golden leaves. These had woven themselves together into a tight canopy, one so thick that no daylight shone through. Instead, lamps were hung from the lower branches, casting a warm, golden light across The Glade.

Yinzut led them to a cluster of circular benches arrayed around a brazier that glowed with a flickering, gilded light. It looked like fire, but produced no heat or smoke. Thorn had originally thought it was just another sort of tech, but now that he’d got closer to it, he wasn’t sure. On impulse, he extended a sliver of perception on a current of magic, and examined the brazier that way.

That confirmed it. This wasn’t tech, but it wasn’t something strictly natural, either. It was magic.

“The Imbrogul can use magic,” he said to Bertilak.

The alien pushed up his lower lip. “Good to know. Let’s just hope they also don’t abuse magic.”

“We do not,” a new voice said. Thorn looked at the speaker, and saw a tall, lithe and willowy figure stepping out of the trees from a discreet path. Four others followed. All were clad in simple, loose-fitting tunics and trousers in a variety of mostly earth-tones, and were barefoot. Their features were fine and elfin, and so pale and delicate they could have been rendered in porcelain.

They looked, Thorn thought, nothing like the apparently highly-advanced, technologically-savvy race they were. If anything, they reminded him of the members of a farming commune he’d once encountered, back during his days as a laborer cleaning up polluted worlds. They’d been similarly simple, barefoot, homespun clothing types. But the resemblance was only superficial, he knew, admonishing himself for letting outward appearance start coloring his judgment about these people.

“I meant no offense,” Bertilak said, bowing deeply.

“And none was taken. I am Ondric, Speaker of the Council of the Tree. I, and my four companions, are responsible for overseeing trade and commercial relations with others.” He looked past Thorn. “Yinzut, it’s good to see you again.”

“Same,” the Astarti replied. Her voice, which Thorn had got used to, suddenly went back to sounding harsh and guttural compared to the almost musical lilt of the Imbrogul. Even the translators, which the Astarti had preloaded into their database when the Imbrogul had agreed to the meeting, portrayed some of its lyrical tone.

“Allow me to introduce Thorn Stellers, representing the human realm of the Allied Stars. As to his large friend Bertilak, he too represents the Allied Stars—and Thorn, as his battle companion and advisor.”

Thorn grinned. “He tells jokes too, but don’t let it go to his head.”

Bertilak boomed with laughter. “You forgot my good looks.”

“And that too,” Thorn said, clapping Bertilak on a meaty shoulder.

“Now, where were we?” As Yinzut spoke, a faint but distinct scent vaguely reminiscent of mint wafted into Thorn’s nose. Yinzut had explained that odors were a part of Imbrogul communication. The Astarti maintained an olfactory database, approved by the Imbrogul, approximating the various aromas as closely as possible. These were indexed by whatever mood or emotion they represented. Since the Astarti were effectively gatekeepers for the Imbrogul, it was important they could prepare potential visitors as much as possible.

The smell like mint meant approval, or agreement, Thorn remembered. He took that as a good sign.

“We have heard of humans, but I don’t think we’ve ever met your species,” Ondric said.

Thorn immediately extended his hand, but Ondric simply stared at it. Thorn offered a sheepish smile.

“My apologies. It’s our custom to grasp hands as a form of greeting. I’m not used to making what amounts to first contact like this. I hope you’ll forgive any clumsy moves on my part.” Thorn had withdrawn his hand, and now glanced from Ondric, to it, then back. “Like that one.”

Ondric’s expression changed little, but the sharp smell of mint intensified. “The Astarti have already explained to us that you’re not a formal diplomatic mission. Rather, you’re a—”

The translator failed on the word, so Thorn only heard a word that involved a trilling sound, and a click from Ondric’s tongue. The Imbrogul paused, then looked at Yinzut. A tang like cedar-wood now wafted from the Imbrogul. That was—uncertainty, he recalled.

“The idea you’re attempting to share is magic. There’s enough difference between how you and Thorn conceptualize it to cause confusion, though,” Yinzut said. She went on to mention Thorn’s moving of the three asteroids using magic. Ondric had apparently already heard the story, and now cedar changed back to mint.

“Ah. You Sing,” Ondric said to Thorn.

Who blinked. He was pretty sure he’d been smelling like cedar, too. “Sing? Well, kind of. Mainly when I have too much to drink.”

This time, Ondric and the other Imbrogul smelled of something fresh, like rain. That was humor.

“To Sing is how we can affect the universe. We each have some insight into the Song of Creation, and our respective roles within it.”

Thorn just stared blankly. He’d be reeking of a whole cedar forest, if he was Imbrogul. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, sorry.”

Ondric smelled briefly of cedar, then something not far off the smell of a freshly-turned earth. That was certainty, the scent of a decision. A moment later, he began to speak. The translator didn’t even touch it, though, so all Thorn heard was more of the musical Imbrogul inflections. He glanced at Yinzut.

Then he winced as a gust of wind swirled around him and Bertilak.

“Magic,” Bertilak said, and Thorn nodded. Ondric had just manifested a Tempest effect, a minor ’casting of air magic. And he hadn’t been speaking, he’d been Singing, crafting a series of tones with his voice that resulted in the gust of wind.

He wanted to be sure, though. “Can you do that again?” he asked Ondric.

The Imbrogul paused, then once more Sang. This time, Thorn let his awareness embrace the effect as it unfolded. He could see how Ondric’s Song had apparently functioned as a means of focusing his thoughts, using their structure to imprint the effect he wanted on power drawn from the ether. It was essentially the same thing a Starcaster did, but it was done a different way.

“I get it. You’re what we would call a Starcaster,” Thorn said.

“Is this a common thing among your people? Or are only certain Imbrogul able to—um, Sing?” Bertilak asked.

“All Imbrogul have their part in the Song of Creation. It’s—” Ondric paused, smelling of cedar uncertainty. He finally went on. “It’s fundamental to how the universe works.”

“So all Imbrogul are able to use magic? To Sing?” Thorn asked. If true, if every Imbrogul was what amounted to a Starcaster, it made them extremely powerful potential allies.

Or enemies.

But a bright, citrusy note tinged the air. That was disagreement, and if it became more intense, and took on an acrid, almost chemical edge, it was suspicion.

“Yes, but only a small number of Imbrogul are able to do more than cause a small, ephemeral breeze. Perhaps, with great effort, they could cause a cloud to disperse, or a very brief and localized rain shower. Those Imbrogul whose Songs are more truly reflective of that great Song of Creation are Adepts, such as myself.”

Ondric gestured to the benches, inviting everyone present to sit. “Now then, Thorn—or is your name Stellers? Or do you use different names for different purposes? I don’t wish to offend you,” he said.

Thorn made to answer, but hesitated. In a way, he did use different names for different purposes, didn’t he? Identifying himself as Lieutenant Stellers carried a very different connotation from saying he was Thorn. And Tanner variously called him Lieutenant, or Stellers, or in a few rare and special instances Thorn, each of which communicated a different message.

He decided to keep it simple, though. “I’m Thorn. That’s the name I prefer to use with most people, because it’s the friendliest, I guess.”

“Very well, Thorn. Yinzut has provided us with a summary of your reasons for wishing to meet with us. I’ll be blunt, it normally takes a long time for any party to establish a trading relationship with us. We’re a very cautious people.”

“I respect that. We’re hoping, however, that we might, I don’t know, hurry things along a little. And now I’ll be blunt. We’re at war with the Nyctus. It’s a costly war, one that’s causing the deaths of many on both sides. We’d like to end it as soon as possible, and end the bloodshed with it.”

“Yes. We’re well aware of the Nyctus. They’ve made numerous attempts to normalize relations with us. Unfortunately, they’ve also attempted to use subterfuge and deception to get what they want from us, so that makes us deeply suspicious of them.” Ondric smelled once more of cedar. “You, however, are just silence to us, which gives you an opportunity to fill that silence with your own Song.”

Thorn nodded. He sensed he had a very narrow, very briefly open window in front of him. What he did and said in these next moments could be pivotal in turning human and Imbrogul affairs one way, or the other.

He decided to follow his instincts. He and Ondric had something in common, so start with that.

“Tell me, did the Nyctus attempt to subvert or corrupt any of your people with their magic?” he asked.

He felt Bertilak stiffen beside him, probably surprised by the bluntness of Thorn’s question. Yinzut gave him a hard glance. And the Imbrogul smelled of uncertainty, with a hint of suspicion creeping on the edges.

“They did, yes. They sought to overwrite the Songs of some of our people with those of their own manufacture. It was a major affront to us, and is the reason we have maintained our distance from them. Why do you ask this?”

“Because they’ve done the same to us. They’ve captured humans, then used torture and brainwashing and magic to turn them into what we call Skins. Those are basically humans that are entirely, but secretly, under squid control.”

“Squid?”

“Sorry, that’s our nickname for the Nyctus. They kind of resemble creatures called squids, that live in the oceans of the human home planet, Earth.”

“Ah. Yes, well, the Nyctus are clearly duplicitous and untrustworthy. That’s why we have refused to have business with them.”

One of the other Imbrogul spoke, a bitter smell like hot metal fuming the air. Even if he hadn’t been briefed on it by the Astarti, he’d have known that was anger. “And they, in turn, have threatened us overtly. They seem to believe that, if they can’t manipulate us into cooperating with them, they'll try to browbeat us, instead."

"That sounds like the squids, yeah,” Thorn replied.

“So now we only need to establish that you aren’t like them,” Ondric said.

“So far, you’re proving promising,” another Imbrogul said.

“But, as I said, we’re a cautious people,” Ondric added.

Thorn nodded. “Believe me, we’re nothing like the squids, the Nyctus.” He pursed his lips, then had an idea.

“I want to be completely honest and up-front about who and what we are, so please bear with me for a moment,” Thorn said. The Imbrogul responded with a mixed scent of mint, cedar, and an edge of citrus. Agreement, uncertainty, and suspicion. That was fair enough, although Thorn was starting to realize that he’d probably soon be heartily sick of the myriad scents these Imbrogul used to enhance their communications. If they did establish diplomatic relations, he hoped whoever was assigned to the mission didn’t have an overly keen sense of smell.

He pushed the thought aside, extracted his talisman from his pocket, and focused his attention into, and then through it. Thorn lifted his thoughts up, into the sky, to the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. He kept going, sweeping his perception through low orbit, seeking—

There. A chunk of rock and raw metal, about a meter across. A remnant of some ancient collision, trapped by the planet’s gravitation. He shifted his focus, recrafting some of the magic he’d summoned into a Hammer effect, and a blunt one at that. In essence, he grabbed the rock and yanked it down into the atmosphere. Friction immediately began to heat the air ahead of it. Thorn let it fall, only nudging it, to keep it on the path he’d chosen. He felt the planet’s surface rushing up to meet it, so he began to brake, applying more and more Hammer force to slow the chunk of rock.

A bright light flashed through the trees overhead. It was followed by a brief, rushing roar, then a sharp boom as the supersonic shock wave of the rock’s initial passage through the atmosphere caught up to it. It all finally ended with a dull thud that they felt through their feet, as much as they heard.

The air around Thorn thickened with the smell of citrus and hints of hot metal. Bertilak gaped at him.

“What did you do?”

“I pulled a meteor out of the sky and brought it in for a soft landing not far from here, in an empty field,” Thorn replied.

Bertilak kept gaping, but a clean scent, like the smell after rain, embraced Thorn. It was humor, and it emanated from Ondric.

“You are a bold one, Thorn. We could have taken that as an attack, or at least a threat. And yet, you did it anyway.”

“I wanted to show that there’s nothing deceitful about us, Ondric. We’re up-front about who and what we are. Yes, we can use magic. Or, at least, some humans can. We call them Starcasters. You’re obviously looking at one,” Thorn said.

“Indeed. Your magic sounds formidable.”

“It can be. But again, we don’t use it to try to corrupt and enslave others, the way the Nyctus do. We use it to protect ourselves.”

Thorn noticed that the air was softening to a minty scent of agreement, and even a few more fresh flickers of rain. One of the other Imbrogul pointed at Thorn’s talisman, still sitting in his lap.

“And what is that?”

“This? Oh, my talisman. It’s a book I had, as a kid. It’s all that’s left of my childhood, after the Nyctus destroyed my home planet. It helps remind me of who I am and where I came from.”

Ondric gave Thorn a keen look. “That being all that remains of your childhood has terribly sad implications, Thorn. The way you say it makes it sound literal, as though you no longer even possess memories of it.”

Thorn looked at the old book. There were memories associated with it, certainly. But, as a whole, his childhood had vanished behind the searing flash and colossal blasts of the KEW strikes on Cotswold. That was, he realized, a sort of event horizon, past which he could no longer see.

So Ondric was right.

The Imbrogul Adept stood. “You said that your people have a custom whereby they grasp hands in greeting.” As he said it, he extended a slender hand toward Thorn.

Thorn stood, took Ondric’s hand in his, and shook it. The Imbrogul’s touch was surprisingly warm, and also much firmer and stronger than he’d expected from the spindly-looking fingers.

“I am sorry for the loss of your childhood. It leaves your Song incomplete, and that’s a terrible thing. And the Nyctus are responsible for that. They have changed you, Thorn, into something else, as surely as they have done to your people, and have tried to do to ours.”

Thorn just stared. He’d never thought about it that way before.

He released Ondric’s hand and looked at his talisman again.

“Yeah. I guess they have, haven’t they?”

* * *

Ondric’s words hung heavy on Thorn. He stood on the balcony of the apartment he’d been offered as quarters, a pleasant suite of well-appointed rooms on the seventh or eighth story of a soaring tower. A city sprawled before him, marked only by more towers, and a few smaller but no less elegant buildings, rising from a sea of trees. Further away, near the horizon, a bigger built-up area loomed, a more city-like area than this one.

So this must be the suburbs, he thought, leaning on the railing and looking down at the ground, into a courtyard a good twenty meters or so below.

“Thorn?”

Thorn glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m out here, Bertilak.”

The big alien joined him on the balcony. “I bring word from our hosts. Ondric has requested that we meet with him at our convenience, in the entry lobby on the ground floor.”

“Okay.”

Bertilak knelt, and leaned on the railing beside Thorn. “Something troubles you, my friend?”

“Oh, yeah. Lots of things trouble me. Do you want the list chronologically, or alphabetically?”

Bertilak smiled. “This is something new.”

Thorn stared out at the horizon, past the distant city core, and into the sky beyond. “It’s what Ondric said. That the Nyctus changed who I am, when they erased my childhood.”

“You disagree with that?”

“No, and that’s the problem. I think he’s right.”

“Of course he’s right,” Bertilak said, and Thorn glanced at him, bemused at the blunt reply.

“Every instant of our lives changes us, Thorn. I am literally only a couple of years old, and I’m no longer the person I was when Morgan created me. The only real difference is if those changes are small and incremental, or vast and dramatic.” Bertilak sniffed. “After all, this conversation has already made both of us slightly different than we were a moment ago.”

Thorn gave a wry smile. “Point taken. But this feels different. The squid attack on Cotswold changed me in a—” Thorn stopped, not even sure how to proceed with the thought.

He didn’t have to, though. “I understand, my friend. In a way, it makes you and I very alike. We both came to be who we are suddenly, and have no memory of what might have come before that.”

“This is a deep dive into our respective psyches,” Thorn said, grinning easily.

“It is. And we’re having it while our Imbrogul hosts are waiting for us.”

Thorn straightened. “Another good point. Let’s not keep them waiting any longer, shall we?”

He left the sumptuous quarters, Bertilak in tow. An Imbrogul Thorn didn’t recognize waited in the small lobby outside. He immediately offered his hand to Thorn, who took it and shook it, bemused.

“Ondric informed us that this is how your species greets others,” the Imbrogul said.

“We do. Generally only the first time we meet, though.”

“I will pass that along.”

The elevator fell smoothly, and in utter silence. Thorn barely noticed the deceleration at the bottom. It must be some sort of mag-lev tech, he thought, and wondered what would happen if the power failed. Were there even cables or brakes?

He survived the trip, though, and exited into the building’s lobby. Ondric, Yinzut, and another Imbrogul, wearing a sash woven from some fine, silver thread, waited there for them. This second Imbrogul held a small wooden box.

“Thorn, I would introduce Telesa. She leads the local chapter of our Engineer’s Guild,” Ondric said.

Telesa tucked the box under one arm and offered the other for Thorn to shake. The gravity with which she did it forced Thorn to not smile. Apparently, the Imbrogul took the whole handshake thing very seriously.

Telesa returned the box to both hands and opened it. “I thought you might wish to see this. We retrieved it a short time ago.”

Thorn stared at a dull, bulbous lump of something metallic, then he glanced at Bertilak, who seemed just as mystified as Thorn was.

A scent of rain, of humor. “This is a piece of the meteorite that you pulled down from orbit yesterday. It’s now part of your Song,” Ondric said.

Thorn looked at the Imbrogul, but his face was impassively unreadable. Fortunately, he smelled of mint and rain, so his motives weren’t based in anger or fear. Under other circumstances, Thorn might have thought it to be a warning for having crashed a meteorite into what amounted to a populated area, even if it had been under absolute control. But the Imbrogul smell-thing was actually proving pretty handy.

Which led to an epiphany. He knew he’d been taking a terrible chance with the meteorite, but he wanted to, as he’d told Imbrogul, be entirely up-front about Starcasting. By extension, he had been trying to be honest about their motives in general, as being benign. In retrospect, it could have gone terribly wrong, but it seemed Thorn had inadvertently stumbled into a way to ingratiate himself with the elfin aliens.

They couldn’t lie, at least about their feelings, their emotions. Or they couldn’t do so easily, anyway. Not when those feelings were accompanied by a distinctive smell. Sure, they might be able to work around it, but it meant that, in general, the Imbrogul tended to be completely transparent about their feelings. It was all in the smell.

And that explained why they hated dissembling and subterfuge so much. The Nyctus had proven themselves untrustworthy, Ondric had said. That wasn’t just an observation. That was, to the Imbrogul, pretty much a curse. Thorn, in the meantime, had been completely forthcoming. And that had turned out to be the absolutely correct way of dealing with these people.

Thorn accepted the box from Telesa with a show of overt gratitude. “I appreciate this very much. Thank you.” He meant it. This was the Imbrogul way of saying that he wasn’t untrustworthy. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Ondric inclined his head in acknowledgement. “There’s more. However, you will have to accompany us to see the rest,” he said.

Thorn and Bertilak followed the Imbrogul and Yinzut out of the lobby to where a vehicle that seemed like a mostly transparent bubble waited. Thorn noticed that it apparently floated a few centimeters off the ground, but there was no exhaust, no sound at all, and nothing at all to indicate what held it in place.

They entered the vehicle, the third Imbrogul, the one who’d greeted them just outside their rooms, seating himself in the most forward seat. He slowly advanced a small lever, like a throttle, and the bubble-car, as Thorn now thought of it, rose smoothly into the air.

“Must be gravity-polarizing tech in action,” Thorn said quietly to Bertilak, who’d hunched himself into the seat beside him.

Bertilak nodded, but it was Ondric who answered.

“Indeed it is. Yinzut tells us that that area is your main interest, so we thought we would show it off,” he said, a rain-smell of good humor rolling off of him.

“It’s really something. We can’t do anything like this. At least, not without using magic,” Thorn said.

The pilot advanced another lever, and the bubble-car sped forward. He seemed to steer it with foot-pedals, leaving his hands free to operate the two levers. Aside from a small display on a panel in front of him, that seemed to be the extent of its controls. Elegant simplicity, Thorn thought. Hell, he’d been in the bubble-car for maybe two or three minutes, and he was pretty sure he could drive it, if he needed to.

They flashed over trees and domed buildings, and zoomed past towers. Other bubble-cars flashed and flickered through the sky around them. Thorn found himself enjoying the ride—the speed, the smooth quiet, the sudden maneuvers that seemed to ignore momentum, the expansive view. All too soon, though, the bubble-car descended toward another domed building. The pilot grounded it, and they disembarked.

Telesa took the lead, ushering them inside. They passed a long corridor and rooms containing tech that meant nothing to Thorn. She finally led them into a room where a machine sat against the wall. About three meters long, it contained another, larger lump of heat-scarred metal in one transparent compartment. Periodically, harsh laser-light flared across its surface, puffing up clouds of vapor that were drawn away, into the machine. In a second compartment, also misty with vapor, a small device floated, flitting quickly about in a way that was reminiscent of the bubble-car. Another Imbrogul watched over the machine with a critical eye.

Thorn peered into the machine. The flitting bit of machinery seemed to be quickly creating something as it moved, a tiny bit at a time.

“It’s a 3-D printer,” he said.

“It is,” Telesa replied.

Thorn wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be impressed or not. 3-D printing tech was common. The Hecate had a number of them on-board for printing parts and tools, and one big one for making bigger structural components. Still, he did his best to look impressed, even if this was kind of underwhelming. Of course, it made sense, he supposed. He was still a stranger here, so they weren’t likely to show him their best, and probably most secretive tech.

“That’s impressive,” he finally said, smiling.

A wave of fresh rain scent rolled off the Imbrogul. Ondric even smiled. “When we first met, Thorn, it struck me that you may prove as difficult to read as any other race we’ve encountered.” He nodded toward Yinzut. “Our Astarti friends are particularly hard to see as more than somewhat dour and closed in on themselves.”

“Hey. We’re passionate in our own way,” Yinzut put in, blinking slowly.

“I needn’t have worried, though. Your emotions inscribe themselves on your face, for everyone to see,” Ondric went on to Thorn.

“Really?”

“Yes. And you are not, in fact, particularly impressed by this technology.”

“Well, to be honest, we use 3-D printing, too,” Thorn replied.

“And you were expecting something more spectacular.”

“Yeah, I kind of was.”

Ondric looked at the machine’s operator, who nodded, fiddled with some controls. The mist in the second compartment faded away. He opened the machine, extracted the slim blade, then immersed it in a small tank of murky fluid. After a moment, he extracted it, dipped into another tank, then wiped it clean and presented it to Ondric.

Who presented it to Thorn.

Thorn accepted the smooth metal blade flat, across his palms. His immediate thought was, well—it’s a knife. The Imbrogul had made a knife, which was only a few thousands years short of the tech that interested him—the grav tech of the bubble-car, or even the elevator he and Bertilak had taken down from their quarters.

But, as he studied the blade, his breath caught.

The blade, blue-grey metal, shone with a deep luster. Fine, spindly characters had been inscribed into it, then picked out with a brighter, cleaner metal. The edges seemed insanely sharp, so much so he found himself suddenly nervous even having the thing near his skin.

“If I may,” Telesa said, taking the blade back from him. The printer operator held out a small metal bar. Telesa smoothly shaved a metallic curl from it, apparently without much effort. The operator then dropped a square of fine, gossamer fabric. Telesa placed the blade beneath it as it drifted slowly to the floor. When it touched the edge, it neatly parted in two.

Thorn examined the blade when Telesa returned it to him. The edge looked as keenly sharp as ever.

“Okay, this is one hell of a knife, I have to admit. Your 3-D printing tech is nothing short of brilliant.”

“As the atoms are vaporized from the source, they’re drawn into the fabrication chamber. There they are mixed with nano-fabricators, which cooperate to arrange them in a precise configuration, one that depends on what we wish to manufacture,” Telesa said.

Thorn looked from her, to the knife. “Wait, you mean that you can assemble things by controlling how the atoms are arranged? I’m no expert, but that’s beyond our current capabilities. Excuse me—beyond my people’s ability, that is.”

“This time, I believe you,” Ondric said. “And that does please me, because this blade is yours, Thorn. It is made from metal culled from the meteorite you brought down to the surface.” He pointed at the lump of metal still in the 3-D printer. “We gave you a piece of that, as well, in the box we gifted you.”

That pulled his eyes from the remarkable knife. “Ondric, this wasn’t necessary.”

“Oh, but it was. We needed some way for you to remember this day, when we paired against the Nyctus, rather than together for mere profit,” Ondric said.

Now Thorn gaped for a moment. “You mean you’re willing to work with us?”

“We are. We have considered the matter, and have decided that the moment has come to stand against the—what did you call them? Skids?”

“Squids.”

“Yes. The truth is that the Nyctus are an aggressive, expansionistic menace. They have already subsumed several races, and would soon turn their attention toward us and the Astarti. Your war with them explains why they haven’t done so already.”

Bertilak smiled. “It also means that by helping us fight them, you don’t have to.”

Ondric arched a delicate eyebrow. Mint sharpened the air. “I never said we weren’t a practical people.”

Thorn gripped the blade by the tang, making sure to keep his soft flesh away from that fearsome edge. “Thank you, Ondric. Thank you to everyone. This is—” He stopped and shook his head. “Let’s call it memorable.”

He offered his free hand to Ondric. This time, the Imbrogul didn’t hesitate to shake it.

* * *

“Just keep that spiffy new knife of yours in its sheath. I think it could probably puncture the hull if you drop it,” Bertilak said.

Thorn laughed and settled himself into the Jolly Green Giant’s co-pilot’s place. The knife still hung from his belt, now sporting a finely-graven wooden hilt and securely enclosed in a sheath made of the same metal it was.

Thorn touched the hilt. “Ondric told me what the characters inscribed on it mean. They’re apparently the part of the great Song of Creation that describes their first meeting with us, with humanity. It seems they record historical events as music. In theory, I guess, you could inscribe their entire historical record and it would hang together as one huge song.”

Bertilak’s eyebrows shot up. “Impressive. It also seems a little complex and unnecessary, though.”

“Not if you’re an Imbrogul. Is everything loaded?”

Bertilak nodded. “I just finished securing the hold, in fact. We’re ready to get underway anytime.”

Thorn looked at the viewscreen, at the Imbrogul homeworld sprawled out before them. This had gone remarkably well. Far better than he’d expected, in fact. They’d retrieved a load of various types of ore from the Astarti, then returned it here, where the Imbrogul crafted it into a load of gravity polarizers. The devices, which ranged in size from a clenched fist to a control console, could manipulate gravity much faster and more fully, and with far more control, than any corresponding ON tech.

He smiled. To the Imbrogul, the knife had been the most trifling of toys. What the Giant now carried in her hold could actually change the war.

Mind you, the knife meant far more to him than even the slickest gravity polarizer.

Thorn turned to Bertilak. “We’ve said our goodbyes to our new allies, my friend. Let’s go home.”

22

Morgan pried her eyes open. Something had changed.

She floated in a sphere of water, contained within a powerful field of magical denial being continuously generated by an unknown number of Nyctus shamans. She’d been here—she wasn’t sure how long. It seemed like forever.

Yes. Something had changed. Someone was approaching out of the heavy darkness that pressed in from all around, a presence that lit up her awareness—and her deepest, most primal instincts.

Morgan allowed herself a shuddering sigh. When would they give up?

The Seeker had led repeated efforts to break through her defenses already, and now it seemed another was on the way. Morgan had no clear idea how many times it had tried, only that it had failed every time. They’d reached a sort of grim stalemate, the Seeker fruitlessly shifting tactics, but coming up short every time.

Morgan kept wrapping herself in an impenetrable cocoon of protection, her own little bubble of denial, that shrugged off both psychic and physical harm. It took all her willpower to do it, though, leaving her unable to do anything more than simply keep resisting. Offensive attacks were beyond her, for the time being.

They couldn’t even starve her. Morgan just kept altering reality slightly, maintaining one in which she was comfortably hydrated and nourished. It was the only proactive thing she could manage, though. They infused drugs into the water to keep her senses dulled, and constantly maintained at least some magical pressure, never giving her a chance to rest or recover.

And here it was again.

Morgan slowly turned herself to face whoever was approaching. She blinked, and it took effort, and it hurt her eyes. Her vision, blurred by a haze of stress and fear and fatigue, cleared slightly.

It was the Seeker, because of course it was.

“Go away,” she whispered. “Leave me alone.”

The Seeker said nothing for a moment. When it did speak, Morgan couldn’t help noticing a hardness to its voice, an almost brittle tone that hinted at bitter resentment and frustration.

That almost made Morgan smile.

“I am not the one that will be going away,” the Seeker said. “You are.”

Morgan blinked again. “Where am I going?”

“You will soon find that out,” the Seeker snapped, then began issuing rapid-fire orders.

The wall of psychic refusal surrounding her vanished. Morgan wished she could take advantage of it, to strike back, maybe even try to escape. But it took all of her strength just to hold off the relentless pressure from the shamans trying to break into her mind. That hadn’t abated at all.

Armored Nyctus closed in around her, wielding poles ending in loops of black cable. These were clamped round her limbs, then she was dragged away, out of the blackness of wherever they’d been keeping her. She had vague impressions of rooms and corridors, all shrouded in gloom, and then the sensation of rising. Above her, the world began to slowly brighten. Eventually, light flared, dazzling her, and she was pulled out of the water and onto a hard platform made of smooth stone.

Morgan gasped with the transition from water to air, from darkness to sunlight, from black despair to—hope? She didn’t think for a moment the Nyctus were just letting her go, but if they were taking her somewhere, it might give her a chance to break free along the way.

Figures swam into view. They were silhouettes, though, vaguely framed by a sky so bright and blue it hurt. It took her a moment to realize that these figures were different. They weren’t Nyctus. They had, instead, two arms, two legs and a head, which meant they might be humans—?

Morgan was suddenly dragged to her feet. The human-like figures, she could now see, were clad head-to-toe in some sort of dark, smooth armor. It even covered their faces. As her vision continued to clear, she could see they weren’t actually human. For one, they weren’t proportioned quite right, being a little too thick and stocky, their legs too short and squat for their bodies. They were also short, only about her height and, in a couple of cases, even shorter.

Morgan didn’t have time to get much more than a vague impression of them, though, before she was dragged off toward a spaceship squatting on a blast-pad nearby. She was pulled up a ramp, into a big compartment with metal walls. The ship stank of something like mildew, a comingled reek of mold and decaying leaves. A single seat had been placed in the very center of the compartment, with others lining the walls. Morgan was unceremoniously dumped into the lone, center chair, then strapped in so tightly she couldn’t move a muscle. Even her head ended up strapped in place, a single band cruelly digging across the soft skin of her forehead. She fought a whimper, and tried to speak.

“Where are you—”

A strap was pulled across her chin, cutting her off and preventing her from opening her mouth.

The ramp closed, sealing her in the ship. The reek of rotting vegetation intensified, now that no fresh air wafted into it. Morgan saw the short, armored figures settle themselves into the seats along the walls. All of them were armed with guns with big, gaping muzzles, all trained on her. She noticed that the Seeker was here, too, conferring with one of the short figures, before turning and settling into a seat. The Seeker still radiated a sense of anger and frustration. That had to be important, but Morgan couldn’t figure out how.

A shrill, teeth-chattering whine vibrated through the ship, and it began to move, lifting and climbing away from the planet. Morgan could do nothing but sit here, helpless, firmly strapped into a seat, on her way to some place that was no doubt at least as bad as where she’d been, and maybe even worse.

* * *

Morgan snapped awake. That grating, ear-scraping whine from the ship’s drive had stopped. Figures moved around her, unstrapping her from the acceleration couch. Again, she was caught up in looped cables mounted on poles, and stumbled, half-dragged and half-carried, down the ramp and out of the ship.

In a cruel flood, light stabbed her eyes after the dim interior of the ship. It was a colder, greyer light than the planet she’d just left, though, so her eyes adjusted more quickly. Worse, though, that vile, organic stink of wet and rotting vegetation slammed into her like a wall as she came down the ramp. Blinking stupidly, she stared across a flat, green-brown swamp that extended into a pervasive fog. An elevated walkway led across it, from the pad where the ship had landed, to some humped, boxy buildings rising from the marsh a few hundred meters away.

Morgan was pulled that way. She did her best to keep her feet, glancing from side to side as they went. She saw a swamp. Swamp one way, swamp the other, swamp everywhere. The whole landscape seemed to either be murky, brackish water in standing pools, or hummocks of moss and reedy plants protruding from it. In one direction more bulky shapes in the mist might have been buildings, maybe a town or even the edge of a city, but she couldn’t tell.

Her captors thrust Morgan into a small cell with metal walls, and a thick metal door with a small window covered with a metal plate that could only be opened from the outside. As soon as they released her, she turned toward the door and stood as defiantly as she could, wobbling on her feet.

The Seeker stood with one of the short, armored figures. It reached up, twisted something on the neck of its helmet, and popped it off with a brief hiss.

Morgan just gaped at the face that it revealed.

A lizard, or something like it. Sharp teeth set in wide jaws, dark yellow eyes with vertical slits for pupils, scales that were mostly bluish-black. A deep, crimson stripe started on the top of its snout, extending up and across the top of its head, and presumably continuing down its back.

“You’re ugly,” she croaked.

The creature ignored her, instead turning to the Seeker and starting to rock from foot to foot.

That piqued Morgan’s curiosity. If this were a human, she’d think it was excited, anxious, or both. Curious, she extended her thoughts, but did it tentatively, ready to retreat back into her mental fortress. Nothing impeded her, though. She found no resistance, no wall of denial from a massed group of shamans. She still didn’t have full or clear control over her magic, though, probably because of the drugs. She was able to sense that the creature—it was apparently called a Bilau, she saw in its mind—was indeed anxious and excited, but not in a good way. It seethed with apprehensive uncertainty, as though worrying about something terrible about to happen.

She withdrew her thoughts. As she did, two more Bilau pushed into the cell. Before she could react, one of them jammed a tube filled with a yellowish liquid into her arm. A sharp burning, like fire, quickly spread from the puncture, pulling a groan from Morgan. Once more, her head began to swim, and she had to work hard at just concentrating on understanding the creatures as they spoke.

The helmetless Bilau looked up at the Seeker. “Despite my misgivings, we have honored our agreement. Six hundred forty days and nights of peace begin now.”

The Seeker’s gaze remained on her. The Nyctus still emanated a sense of frustrated outrage. When it spoke, its voice was tightly controlled. “Very good. It will give us the opportunity to finish our war against the humans.” The Seeker turned to the Bilau. “You are not the only one with misgivings. I believe we were close to breaking her.”

Morgan glared. Or tried to. “You wish,” she slurred.

The Seeker and the Bilau ignored her. “I am warning you, she is willful and she is very, very dangerous. You must be prepared to kill her in an instant.”

“We are. And we will.”

As soon as he said it, his head exploded in a bright shower of gore.

Morgan blinked. What?

The Seeker turned, just as dazzling bolts of energy slammed into its armor. It threw a protective barrier of magic around itself, then lunged toward Morgan. She wasn’t sure if it was going to try and grab her and escape, or simply kill her. She did her best to interpose her own magical barrier, and the creature faltered. More shots flashed along the corridor. Another Bilau died to a fusillade of searing bolts, just outside the door to her cell. The Seeker turned and fled, using magic to shield itself from the fire.

More shots. Morgan cringed, waiting to see what would happen next. Her world had collapsed down to a tiny window of time, extending only a few seconds into the past and future. Nothing else seemed to matter.

More Bilau appeared. Two rushed into her cell, grabbed her, and dragged her toward the door. She thought about resisting, but these Bilau seemed to be attempting to—rescue her? At the very least, they wanted her to leave the cell, and she was quite happy to do that.

They shoved her along the corridor, back the way they’d come. Morgan scanned the aliens with a quick spike of insight, harsh and violating.

The Bilau were wracked with fear. It was a very specific fear, too, and aimed squarely at her.

They were terrified of her.

They reached the exit from the building, where it opened onto the walkway leading back to the pad where the ship had landed. The ship still sat there, Bilau dashing around it, exchanging shots. Dead or incapacitated Bilau sprawled across the walkway. The Bilau pulling Morgan along were dragging her toward the ship, but she wasn’t sure why.

“Wherewegoin,” she slurred, so soft they didn’t hear.

She dredged their thoughts again. Yes, they were terrified of her. Morgan got the sense of a split in the Bilau, with the ones who’d first brought her here considering her a prize, albeit a dangerous one. The others just thought she was dangerous. Far too dangerous to keep here.

So they wanted to take her somewhere else. Maybe. Or—

The shooting around the ship died down. A group of Bilau moved into the open, standing and waiting for her to be dragged before them. She bit her lip and pushed her thoughts further and harder, desperately struggling against the befuddlement of the drug that still burned in her arm.

They were about to decide her fate. Some thought she might still be useful, but others just wanted her dead.

There were more of the latter.

Morgan was tossed into their midst. She dropped to her knees and looked up, seeing only blank, impassive helmets. The minds inside them flared like beacons, now, with fear, uncertainty, and a growing, deadly resolve.

After all of this, they were probably just going to kill Morgan. Just kill her, and be done with it.

Morgan shook her head.

“No.”

The Bilau closed in. She heard muffled voices, as they conferred, speaking across some sort of communications channel, arguing themselves into killing her.

“No!”

A final burst of chatter. One of the Bilau impulsively stepped forward and aimed its gun at her, the double prongs of its muzzles swallowing the world.

“NO!”

A surge of power swept through Morgan, burning through the haze of drugs. It roared like a furnace, fueled by her own terror, and anger, her outrage, her desperation.

But the sense, as keen as knife-edge, that it was all just so—

“NO!”

Unfair.

Morgan flung back her head and screamed at the sky.

“DADDY!”

23

Tanner planted his hands on his hip and scowled at the Hecate’s hangar bay, currently unpressurized and sealed. “Why the hell has my ship become the crossroads of the ON?”

“The Hecate’s a popular place, sir,” Thorn said. He could see the Gyrfalcon nudging its way into the bay, the magnetic guides bringing the fighter safely to a standstill, then docking clamps locking her in place. The outer doors rolled closed, and the pressurization sequence began.

Tanner glanced at Thorn. “Have you heard from Wixcombe, Lieutenant?”

“Uh, no, sir. Not for quite some time. Is there a problem?”

The Captain just kept a keen gaze leveled on Thorn for a moment, then shook his head. “Not at the moment, no.”

Thorn couldn’t help taking note of Tanner’s ambiguous answer. Not at the moment wasn’t the same as no. And Tanner wasn’t a man who embraced ambiguity; quite the opposite. So he’d meant to answer that way.

A chime cut off his musings, as the pressure indicator for the hangar bay turned green. The airlock slid open at almost exactly the same time as the Gyrfalcon’s. Figures clambered out.

Mol, which wasn’t a surprise, of course. Neither was the next one, who at least wasn’t a surprise to Thorn, anyway. Alys Densmore took a moment to stretch, then headed toward him and Tanner, her usual, slightly sly smile beaming ahead of her.

The next two passengers to dismount surprised both him and Tanner, though. Damien Forester disembarked following Densmore, and after her—

Kira.

Thorn’s heart skipped a beat. Part of it was just seeing Kira again, after so long apart. But part of it was seeing her with Damien. Thorn knew the two of them were working together again. Tanner had briefed him on the tragic incident at Code Nebula.

Thorn gave himself a mental shake, shoving the sudden glimmer of jealousy away. That’s what it was. Jealousy. It suggested that, on some level, he didn’t trust Kira, which was unworthy of both of them.

“Captain Tanner,” Densmore said, stepping through the airlock. “Permission to come aboard your fine ship?”

“What if I said no?” Tanner replied, his expression utterly unchanging.

Densmore’s unsettling smile didn’t change, either. “Has any Captain ever said no to that question?”

“Good to see you, Alys.”

Damien and Kira followed her through the airlock, Kira stopping, saluting smartly, and also asking permission to come aboard.

“Always a berth for you aboard the Hecate if you need it, Lieutenant Commander Wixcombe. And congratulations on the promotion. It was well-earned.” Tanner turned to Damien and extended his hand. “Forester—sorry, Acting Lieutenant Forester—good to see you, too. How are you doing?”

Thorn glanced at Tanner in surprise. He knew that the man actually did have a heart, somewhere under all those medals, but he didn’t reveal it very often. He did now, in a genuinely concerned tone to his voice.

Damien offered a smile that, to Thorn, seemed mostly genuine. “I’m okay, sir. Tired, mostly. Kira and I have been living out of kit-bags for a while now, moving from ship to ship. It wears on you.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve been doing that for almost thirty years,” Tanner replied, smiling.

Thorn leaned closer to Kira. “Good to see you—ma’am.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You forgot to salute, Lieutenant.”

They locked stares for a moment, then broke into smiles. Since Thorn was in the company of Tanner, a more senior officer, he wasn’t required to salute. But, still smiling, he did so anyway. “Congratulations, ma’am. Like the Captain said, well-earned.”

“That doesn’t sound right, you calling me ma’am.”

Thorn gave her an innocent look. “Oh, I don’t know. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Please, not again, ma’am—”

“You two can get a room,” Tanner snapped. “After we attend to business, that is.”

Densmore stepped up beside Kira. “Stellers, it’s been a while since we’ve met, at least in person.”

Thorn got the message. It was time to come clean.

“Captain Densmore,” he replied, then gave Tanner a rueful smile. “I think we can drop the story, ma’am, yes?”

“By all means.”

“Story?” Tanner asked, his brows lifting as Thorn extracted a small data-chip from his pocket and handed it to Densmore. “Alys, surely you aren’t telling me that Stellers was involved in something off the books? With you?”

“Perish the thought! But, yes, of course. While Stellers was meeting with the Imbrogul and the other races around them, he was doing some intelligence gathering for me,” Densmore said. She held up the chip. “I gather it’s all on here?”

Thorn nodded. “It is ma’am.”

“Well, then, we should review this, the sooner, the better. Captain Tanner, I’d like Stellers to brief us about the contents of this chip. It’s quite possible the course of the war hinges on what it tells us.”

“Did I ever mention I hate spooks?” Tanner said, gesturing for the group to follow him.

Densmore’s crafty smile became an equally crafty grin. “Every time we meet, Galen. Every time we meet.”

* * *

Thorn handed the data-chip to Osborne, the Hecate’s Tactical Officer, who plugged it into his console and tapped at his controls. The ship’s main view-screen shifted from an image of Bertilak’s ship keeping station a few klicks away, to a star chart. Thorn knew it well, having studied it while traveling the region aboard the Jolly Green Giant, but this would be the first time any of the others on the Hecate’s bridge had seen it. Everyone, from Osborne to Tanner, instinctively leaned toward it.

“This is the area of space Bertilak and I travelled. Or, we travelled through it, anyway,” Thorn said. He then began to highlight the different-colored sections of the chart, pointing out the space controlled by the Astarti and the Imbrogul, as well as two more races, the insectoid Owath, and the avian Philomek.

“We didn’t actually do much with the Owath or Philomek, aside from quick goodwill visits to each,” Thorn said.

“And it’s the Imbrogul that produced those amazing gravity-polarizers you and your big green friend dropped off at Code Gauntlet, correct?” Densmore asked.

“Yes, ma’am. They seem to be the most dominant of these four races, but not through force or intimidation or anything like that. They actually just seem to be highly respected by the other three. The Astarti, who are incredible miners and metallurgists, act as the gatekeepers for the Imbrogul. The Owath produce a lot of agricultural products, timber and rare woods and exotic spices, that sort of thing. And the Philomek are a particularly aesthetic society, all about art and song and stuff like that. They also weave this amazing cloth that feels like silk, but instantly goes rock-hard under an impact.”

“So toad-like miners, bug-like artists, and bird-like farmers,” Tanner said.

“And the Imbrogul, who are basically humanoid, running the show,” Densmore put in.

Thorn shook his head. “I think running the show is a little strong, ma’am. They’re more the glue holding this alliance together. The other three races provide the raw materials, which the Imbrogul turn into high tech products, that they trade back to the others in payment.”

“So these four races essentially have a single, integrated economy,” Damien said.

“That’s right. They cooperate closely in just about everything,” Thorn replied.

Osborne leaned into the conversation. “Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but why are these four small empires, or whatever they are, important to us now? I get the value of the gravity tech, but are we interested in them beyond that?”

“Damned right we are,” Thorn replied. “Call up that second overlay.”

Osborne did, and a series of gently curving lines appeared, connecting star systems among all four of the races’ territories. Thorn pointed, though, to a cluster of lines that vanished off the bottom right corner of the chart.

“This is why they’re important. Those are trade routes with the Nyctus. All of them have commercial agreements with the squids. And that’s why the squids never seem to run short of resources or supplies. They’ve been receiving them from these guys,” Thorn said.

“Ah. Ouch. Hate to have to prosecute a war against them as well as the Nyctus. Think that’s probably a losing battle,” Tanner said.

Thorn offered an unabashedly triumphant smile. “We won’t have to, sir. Turns out that the Nyctus love of infiltration, deception, making Skins, and all that, has come back to bite their rubbery butts.”

He went on to explain how the Imbrogul, although many things, were generally incensed by dishonesty. Again, he suggested, it went back to the fact that they were terrible liars themselves, thanks to their scent-influenced way of seeing and communicating with the world around them. They prized honesty, and considered bluntness to be a truly noble quality.

“A little contradictory from the kind of ethereal way you described them, but okay,” Tanner said.

Thorn nodded, then drew the knife he’d been gifted by Ondric. “They made this for me, from a meteorite that I, uh, kind of brought down out of orbit.” He went on to explain the circumstances around that.

“Crashing a meteorite into their planet was about as blunt as you could possibly be,” Densmore said. Kira chuckled, and even Damien grinned.

Thorn offered a shrug. “Well, it seems to have worked. The Imbrogul have soured on the Nyctus, which means the other three races have, too. They’ve sent word to the squids that they’re ceasing all trade relations with them immediately. They want to open up diplomatic and trade relations with us, instead. That includes discussions about locating ON forces and bases in their territories.”

A moment of stunned silence hung over the bridge. Osborne broke it, with a simple, “Holy shit.”

Tanner stood. “Holy shit indeed.” He walked up to the viewscreen, studied it for a moment, then looked at Thorn.

“That opens up the squid’s entire left rear flank to us. With the Danzur on their right, it means we’ve got the Nyctus open on three sides now. That’s good work, Stellers.”

The Captain glanced back at Densmore, then looked at Thorn again. “So tell me what this cozy little secret job was, that you were performing for Captain Densmore.”

Thorn looked at Densmore, who just shrugged. “You said being blunt is a virtue. And Captain Tanner is being characteristically blunt.”

“Captain Densmore asked me to scope out the military capabilities of these four races, their leadership, their power structures, the key players. I did that and used Joining to confirm it.” Thorn pointed at Osborne. “That data-chip plugged into the Tac O’s station has three more overlays, detailing all of it.”

“Which, needless to say, is classified above the level of at least some people on this bridge,” Densmore immediately cut in. “So we won’t be calling those overlays up.”

Tanner’s eyes narrowed at Thorn. “You, ah, weren’t just being a diplomat, you were being a spy. Risky business, that, Stellers.”

“Yes, sir. But Captain Densmore felt that we needed to be ready, in case things didn’t go our way and these four races decided to stick with the Nyctus, against us.”

Tanner turned to Densmore. “And you’d have used that information to strike at them, decapitate their leadership, undermine them, that sort of thing.”

“It’s what I do, Galen,” Densmore said.

“Yes, the exact opposite of blunt.” Tanner turned back to Thorn. “Glad you weren’t caught being a spy. That could have gone very wrong.”

“Yes, sir, it could have.”

“Well, that’s okay, because as long as you’re a member of this crew, you’ll never go behind my back on some covert op again, isn’t that right, Stellers?” Tanner was speaking to Thorn, but he was looking squarely at Densmore.

Thorn gave an inward sigh. It was no fun being caught between Captains jockeying for control. He finally decided that blunt had worked out better for him, and nodded. “That’s right, aye, sir.”

Densmore said nothing, and just smiled her furtive smile.

Damien broke the tension with a laugh. “Okay, I’ve been a career diplomat, pushing twenty years of service. And in just a few months, you’ve helped wrangle a cooperation agreement with the Danzur, and made what amounts to an alliance with four other races. You’re in the wrong line of business, Thorn. You’re the real diplomat here.”

Thorn tried to shrug it off. The fact was, he was proud of what he’d accomplished, and rightfully so. But he was also realistic.

“No, I’m not. I’m just the pointy end of something much bigger. Everyone here is part of it. Everyone on the Hecate, and in the ON is part of it,” he said.

“That sounds like something a diplomat would say,” Kira said, provoking laughter around the bridge.

“Well, I must admit, this is the best news I’ve heard in a long time,” Damien said, when the laughter died off. “Personally, I can’t wait for this war to be over, and this seems to bring that a little closer.”

No laughter at that. Someone just said, “Truth.” Thorn wasn’t sure who, and it didn’t matter, anyway.

* * *

Thorn swung his leg over the bench-seat and settled himself on the hard metal. The Hecate’s mess was a far cry from the hospitality of the Imbrogul, or even from Bertilak’s ship, in terms of creature comforts. Somehow, though, he felt more at home sitting on a hard alloy bench, about to eat a mass-produced meal from a metal tray. Plush furnishings and sumptuous food were fine, but only as an occasional treat, he’d decided.

“I’m taking the liberty of joining you two,” he said to Kira and Damien, who were already sitting at the table.

“Always room for one more,” Kira said.

Thorn turned to Damien. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you yet. I’m doing that now.”

“I appreciate it, but there’s probably nothing you could say that I haven’t been told already.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m not saying any of it. Just consider it said.”

Damien met Thorn’s eyes, then gave a genuinely grateful smile. “I really do appreciate that, Thorn. Thank you.”

“You are blunt,” Kira put in.

“Hey, it works for me, what can I say,” Thorn replied.

“It does indeed. I just want to say it again, Thorn, you did some damned fine work. Much better than anyone expected, I think,” Damien said.

“He got us a bunch of new allies, denied the squids a bunch of resources, and opened up both their flanks? Yeah, I’d say that’s a good day’s work,” Kira said, offering Thorn a fond smile.

“And I understand you guys are touring the Fleet, chasing down Skins,” Thorn said.

Kira nodded. “We are. Not a bad success rate, either. Thanks to Damien’s keen insights into human behavior, he’s able to point me at likely candidates. I use Joining to confirm it. We’ve rounded up almost two dozen Skins so far, with no false positives.”

“One of them was the Deputy Chief Engineer on the Arcturus. Admiral Scoville was really happy we uncovered her, because she could have done a lot of damage to his flagship,” Damien added.

“A lot of damage, as in, boom,” Thorn said.

Kira smiled and nodded again, opening her mouth to say something. Whatever it was vanished—

—into a howling scream.

24

“Sir, we’ve got reports coming in from every ship and installation within twenty-five light years, and a few messages already showing up from beyond that,” Osborne said. “Starcasters everywhere have been hit with—well, whatever this was.”

The XO, who’d only just returned to the Hecate from leave and hadn’t even yet unpacked, gave a grim nod at her own tactical display. “It’s not just Starcasters, either. Lots of ordinary people, too. Panic, nightmares, explosions of violence, vandalism, the list goes on.”

Tanner drummed his fingers on the arm of his command chair, then turned.

“Starcasters everywhere, except for you, Stellers,” he said.

Thorn puffed a stressed-out sigh. He’d just come from Kira, who was in the infirmary under sedation. “Except for me, aye, sir.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“I’ve got no idea sir, sorry. It’s like the Vision, when the Nyctus hit Nebo and—and killed my daughter, Morgan. A powerful blast of psychic energy, like a wave propagating through space. This time it seems even stronger, though.”

“Could it involve your daughter again?”

Thorn gave a miserable shrug. “Possibly? I don’t know. Since it didn’t seem to affect me in particular, and since it’s similar to the Vision, then I’d say it’s likely. But I don’t know what it means, or even where she is to try to do something about it.”

“Alright. It seems like the overall tactical and operational situations haven’t changed, so we’re good here. Get to the infirmary and see if you can learn anything from Wixcombe, as soon as she wakes up.”

“Aye, sir.”

Thorn saluted and left the bridge, wending his way along the cramped corridors toward the infirmary. He arrived to find that Kira wasn’t the only patient.

“Her name is Darby Hoopes. She’s a Senior Rating in the Logistics shop,” the nurse said.

The Hecate’s Quartermaster, a gruff block of a man well-known for his ability to say no, you can’t have that, stood over her with his arms crossed. “When she went missing, we went looking for her. We found her collapsed in a cargo hold, where she’d been doing routine inventory.”

Thorn glanced at Kira, still under sedation in another bed. Damien sat at her side. Thorn felt another of those flickers of jealousy, but again cast it aside. He focused, instead, on the young Rating Hoopes. She moaned, turning her head, her eyes fluttering open, closed again, open again.

She was awake, or at least somewhat so. Thorn leaned in. “Rating Hoopes? Darby? Can you hear me?”

The young woman turned toward Thorn’s voice, but her gaze penetrated past him, into some unknowable distance. “No. No. Please. I’m so tired. Don’t, please—”

“That’s basically all she says,” the nurse said, eyeing Hoopes’s vitals on the monitor. “Doesn’t make any sense to us.”

“How about you, Lieutenant?” the Quartermaster asked. “Can you make anything of this? Maybe use your voodoo to figure it out?”

“Voodoo?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant. No disrespect intended. It’s just that I’m as magical as an old boot, so I don’t even pretend to understand how you do what you do.”

Thorn gave a thin smile. “Never underestimate the power of an old boot.” He turned back to Hoopes, the smile vanishing. “And, no, I don’t get what she’s saying, either. But yes, I can use my voodoo to figure it out, or at least try, anyway.”

Thorn pulled out his talisman and gripped it. Ordinarily, he really didn’t need to use the book to simply Join with another human that wasn’t, themselves, a Starcaster. However, he had no idea what he’d find inside this woman’s mind, so he wanted to be ready for a hasty exit.

Channeling his thoughts into the familiar psychic landscape of the talisman, he refocused them on Hoopes, and started a tentative entry into her mind.

Resistance. Not much, but it was there. Had he just inadvertently uncovered a Skin?

He immediately banished the thought, though. This resistance was instinctive. Her mind sensed Thorn’s presence, and reflexively tried to block and expel him. There was no chance of that, because Thorn was orders of magnitude stronger than she was. But the fact that she was able to pose any resistance at all suggested she was something between an ordinary, non-magical human, and a Starcaster. That might explain why whatever happened to Kira had also happened to her. It could also explain why it affected her less than it did Kira.

And that, by extension, explained why there’d been such an outburst of madness and disorder across the ON and Allied Stars. This ‘Vision’, or whatever it was, seemed to affect anyone with any innate magic potential.

That was interesting, but it didn’t answer the important question. What the hell was going on, exactly?

He pushed deeper into her mind, past the chaotic slurry of her surface thoughts, which were just broken, isolated fragments, like the loose pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Beneath the anarchy of her immediately conscious mind, Thorn found what he was looking for. There were more coherent thoughts, still somewhat disjointed, but still showing Thorn what had thrown this woman’s mind into such disarray.

“NO!”

A surge of power erupted from her, a wave of energy so intense it simply vaporized everything for dozens of meters around her.

“NO!”

For a moment, she hung at the center of a coruscating sphere of howling magical power, then Morgan flung back her head and screamed at the sky.

“DADDY!”

Thorn gasped and stumbled back. The intensity of the image left him reeling, requiring him to catch himself against a gurney before he toppled over. The nurse and the Quartermaster both rushed to his side.

“I’m fine,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut as the last throbs of pain subsided into diminishing, hurtful echoes. “I’m fine. Really.”

“You sure, Lieutenant?” the Quartermaster asked.

Thorn opened his eyes. “Yeah, really. Just need a moment.”

“Just wanted to make sure your voodoo wasn’t suddenly gonna get out of control.”

Thorn straightened and looked at the Quartermaster. “It won’t,” he said, then turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” the Quartermaster asked. “Is Hoopes okay?”

“She will be, I think. As for where I’m going, it’s to find some answers,” Thorn snapped, then strode out of the infirmary, heading for the airlock. On the way, he slapped his comm.

“Bertilak, this is Thorn. I need to see you, now.”

* * *

Thorn stepped out of the shuttle-pod he’d taken to Bertilak’s ship, through the airlock and into the corridor beyond. Despite its relatively small size, the Jolly Green Giant managed to be a maze of twisting passages and little compartments. The layout was, Thorn had come to realize, a product of his daughter’s limited understanding of spaceships. She knew they were ‘complicated’, and that was it. It certainly showed, in the multitude of compartments containing cryptic machinery that seemed to have no purpose, and pipes and conduits that actually appeared to do nothing. She’d created Bertilak and his ship from the perspective of a child, and this had been the result.

Although he’d never been able to figure out why she’d made Bertilak green.

He threaded his way toward the bridge, only hitting one dead-end along the way. Usually, it was a couple, and that was despite having spent many weeks in total aboard the Jolly. When he finally stepped into the bridge, he found Bertilak simply sitting there, in his pilot’s seat, staring at the starfield.

“Hello, Thorn,” he said, without looking.

“You know why I’m here.”

“I can guess.” The big alien finally turned in his chair. Thorn got stuck a moment on the look on his face. Instead of his usual good humor, or sly bemusement, his features drooped in a haunted, desolate way.

Thorn had been about to launch into a rant, but changed course and sat, instead, in the copilot’s seat.

“What’s going on?” Thorn asked.

“What do you mean—?”

“Oh, don’t, Bertilak. Just don’t. You know damned well what I mean. And don’t try to light up some bullshit for me, either. Other Starcasters, or anyone with even a whiff of latent magical potential, have had some sort of terrible image of my daughter. Somehow, I haven’t.” He leaned toward Bertilak, his gaze boring in. “Have you?”

Bertilak stared blankly into some unseen distance for a moment, then gave a slow nod. “I have, yes.”

Thorn straightened. “Okay. So what am I missing here? Why hasn't it affected me? Do you know?”

Bertilak’s expression slid into an even more crestfallen one, and he nodded. “It was me. I prevented you from experiencing the vision of your daughter.”

“What? Why?”

“Because that’s what she wanted,” Bertilak said.

“You’ve been talking to her—?”

“No. Not exactly, anyway.”

“Bertilak, what the hell does that mean? What is going on?” Thorn couldn’t help himself, jumping to his feet. It made him only a little taller than the alien, who had once easily kicked his ass and might be immune to magical attack. But Thorn didn’t care. Anger had suddenly flashed through him, like a fusion reactor being lit, and it only spooled up by the second.

“Bertilak, answer me, damn it!”

Bertilak briefly met his eyes, then stared at the deck. “It happened some time ago. Maybe a couple of weeks. For some reason, Morgan’s feelings toward you changed. Before that, she was—”

His voice broke and he paused. Thorn clenched his fists, but just waited.

“She was determined to kill you, Thorn. I don’t know why, but she was absolutely determined to kill you. Her feelings leak through to me all of the time.” He looked up at Thorn, misery etched into his face. “Do you know how much effort it took to not attack you, Thorn? To not contrive an accident or leave you vulnerable to something the Nyctus did?”

Thorn stared. Bertilak had been feeling pressured to kill him? Thinking back, he could only recall the alien’s typically buoyant humor. He hadn’t had a clue that Bertilak had been locked in some sort of internal struggle over whether to turn on him.

“So, why didn’t you? If that’s what Morgan wanted, what stopped you?”

“You’re my friend, Thorn. I didn’t want to harm you. Morgan gave me enough free will that I’m not bound to her, like some sort of mindless slave. But I still feel her compulsions, and she really wanted to kill you. She hated you.”

Thorn stood, struck dumb by the realization. Morgan hated him? Wanted to kill him?

He finally ground out a single word. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I get any details. It’s just impressions, like echoes of feelings, hints of emotion.” Bertilak gave a shuddering sigh. “It’s why we never found her, even when you, Kira and I went looking for her. I made sure we’d never locate her, because if we did, I was terrified about what I might be forced to do to you. Like I said, you’re my friend.”

Thorn’s anger suddenly dulled, the sharp corners and edges rounded off of it by pity. “Oh, shit. Bertilak, why didn’t you say something?”

“What? That I wanted to kill you, and had to fight every moment not to? How would you have dealt with that, Thorn?”

Thorn sighed. “By never trusting you again.”

“At least you’re being honest.”

“Okay, but you said that changed,” Thorn said, sitting back down.

“It did. At some point, she stopped hating you. Now she wants to protect you. From the Nyctus, and whatever they’re planning, I guess. That leaks through, too. Now, I feel a strong compulsion to protect you, too. That’s a lot easier to handle because I am no monster, and you are a true friend. Of that much, I am certain.” He offered a weak, watery smile.

Thorn leaned his elbows on his knees. “So, what? You prevented me from experiencing this new vision to protect me?”

Bertilak nodded.

“Okay. I need you to let me see it, experience it, Bertilak. And I need you to do it now.”

“Thorn—”

“No. This has to happen. She’s my daughter. And she’s in trouble. I need to help her, Bertilak, but I can’t do that while you’re—”

Thorn paused, trying to think of a nicer way of putting this. He couldn’t.

“I can’t do that while you’re in the way.”

“Are you sure about this, Thorn? If experiencing this is so difficult for people who don’t even know her, then it might be too much for you.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Thorn said, locking his gaze on Bertilak’s.

The alien stared back, then nodded. “Alright. Fine. I’ll be right here, Thorn. Just remember that.”

He gripped the alien’s hand and squeezed it. It was like squeezing the hand of a massive, and green, marble statue. “I know you will.”

Bertilak managed another weak smile. “Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The bridge of the Jolly Green Giant vanished.

…a wave of energy so intense it simply vaporized everything for dozens of meters around her.

“NO!”

For a moment, Morgan hung at the center of a coruscating sphere of howling magical power, then she flung back her head and screamed at the sky.

“DADDY!”

The word raced away from her with the force of an exploding star, echoing with desolation so keen, so bleak—where the word went, hope died. The magic roared a moment longer, the sphere expanding, consuming more of reality as it did, then it abruptly died away. Morgan hung in space for an instant, the focal point of a thunderclap, as air rushed back into the hole she’d torn in creation. Then she fell. She plunged into brackish water now rushing into the crater her magic had carved out of the swamp, vanishing into the churning murk with a splash.

The water sloshed into a thick silence, like the stillness of a tomb.

* * *

Thorn gasped, blinked, and sat bolt upright.

“Oh, shit! Doctor, I need help here!”

Strong hands gripped Thorn, pushing him slowly, but relentlessly back down. A face swam into his vision. It was the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon.

“Lieutenant Stellers, look at me! You’re aboard the Hecate, in the Infirmary.”

Thorn’s jaw hung open, slack. He’d been on a swamp planet, where his daughter had—

He tried to jam himself upright again, but the Surgeon held him firmly down. “Lieutenant Stellers, do you understand what I’m saying?”

Thorn stared a moment longer, then sunk back to the mattress. “I—yeah, I do. How did I get here?”

“Bertilak brought you. You were unconscious. He said he’d let you finally experience a vision of your daughter. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but when it happened to you, it seemed to shake others being affected by it out of, well, whatever the hell it was.”

“You mean like Kira? She’s awake?”

“She is,” Kira said, just entering the Infirmary. “Awake, and wanting to know what the hell is going on.”

She strode up to his bedside and opened her mouth, but Thorn raised a hand, cutting her off. He explained what had happened, everything that Bertilak had told him. As he spoke, he finally sat up, swinging his legs out from under the sheet to stand.

“I don’t think you’re ready to get up and about just yet,” the Chief Surgeon said, but Thorn waved her off.

“Sorry, Doc, but there’s no time for me to just lay around. I need my uniform.”

The Surgeon glared at Thorn for a moment. Then she nodded at the nurse, who pulled Thorn’s effects from a locker.

“Thorn, does Bertilak know where Morgan is?” Kira asked.

“No idea,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “But it doesn’t matter, because I do.”

Kira’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious, yeah. Do me a favor while I finish getting dressed. Call Tanner and tell him I need to see him right away.”

Thorn didn’t need Joining to see the desperate questions tumbling through Kira’s mind, because each one played out on her face. But she finally just turned and hit the comm.

“Captain Tanner? Wixcombe here.”

* * *

Tanner took a moment to just stare, once Thorn had finished explaining what had happened. Thorn started to wonder if the man was just completely floored and left speechless, which would be really out of character. But he leaned back in his command seat and steepled his fingers together in front of him.

“You’re sure you know that your daughter is located—” He stopped and gestured at the star chart Thorn had asked to have put on the main viewscreen, where a particular star system had been highlighted. “Is located there, in that specific system, which seems to be in the middle of nowhere?”

“That’s just empty space, not claimed by us, the Nyctus, or anyone else,” Osborne put in.

But Hackett, the Hecate’s de facto Science Officer, stepped forward from where she stood at the rear of the bridge, alongside Damien. “I’m not sure that’s quite right. From what Thorn has described, it sounds like a planet very similar to what those squid worlds we visited were turned into.”

Tanner rotated his chair to face her. “You’re suggesting there’s some unknown race, or races, occupying that space?”

“Sir, we didn’t know about any of the races that Thorn visited, either,” Kira put in.

“Not until Bertilak told us about the Imbrogul, and even then, we didn’t find out about the others until we went to their space,” Thorn added.

Tanner turned back. “So you’re telling me that your daughter, who might be even more powerful than you are magic-wise, might be in the hands of some unknown race, and in trouble?”

Thorn had to work at keeping his angry impatience simmering, instead of letting it boil over. “Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Are you asking me to invoke Section Five, Subsection Two, Article One-point-Two of the Allied Stars Security Act? The Article that allows me, as a Command-rank officer, to declare exigent circumstances and effect the rescue of an Allied Stars citizen from a foreign or alien power? Is that what you’re asking me, Lieutenant Stellers?” Tanner asked.

“I, uh.” Thorn blinked. “Yes, sir?”

“Very well. Lieutenant Osborne, note this in the ship’s log, that I’m invoking Section Five, Subsection Two, blah, blah, at this time.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Now, what are the closest ON ships to our current location?”

Osborne tapped at his controls. “The escort carrier Viper, in company with the missile frigate Nimbus, are patrolling four light-years spinward of us, sir.”

“The Viper, eh? Elenora Brost is her Captain, which is perfect, because she owes me a favor. Comms O, my compliments to Captain Brost, and raise her on the comm,” Tanner said.

While the Comms O worked, Tanner turned back to Thorn. “I’ll be honest here, Stellers. If your daughter weren’t capable of rewriting reality itself at a whim, I’d probably just pass this up to Fleet and let them decide what to do with it, notwithstanding her being your child. I’m sympathetic, certainly, but we might be about to pull some unknown race into the war. This is one hell of a gamble we’re taking here, but ensuring she doesn’t end up in hostile hands makes it more than worth it.”

“I understand, sir,” Thorn said, making his tone as grateful as he could. He appreciated Tanner’s position, certainly. If Morgan had just been an ordinary little girl, as much as it sucked, he couldn’t justify what he was apparently about to do—take the Hecate, and maybe some other ON warships, and violate some unknown race’s space. That might be harsh, but it was fair.

But Tanner was right. Even if Morgan hadn’t been his daughter, they needed to extract her from the hands of whoever had her. She was just too dangerous not to.

Kira leaned in. “Thorn, are you sure she’s there? You’ve never been able to sense her location before.”

“That’s because she didn’t want me to find her. Now she does.”

She called for him. Screamed for him. Screamed DADDY.

Thorn gritted his teeth. He wanted to be on his way to her, now. He had no idea what was happening to her, and it was starting to tear him up.

“Sir, I have Captain Brost,” the Comms O said.

“Put her on the main viewscreen,” Tanner replied.

The image flicked to that of a middle-aged woman with hair the color of iron, and an expression to match. “Captain Tanner, I understand you have something urgent you want to discuss.”

“I do. It involves walking right up to the boundary of what Regs allow, and probably putting at least one toe over them. Maybe more than one toe. Could make whoever’s involved heroes, because they’ve stopped some very, very bad things from happening to the Allied Stars. Or, it could be a career-ender, and make everything a lot worse. You interested in hearing more?”

The woman’s flat, metallic gaze pierced the screen for a moment. Then it softened, and she smiled.

“I’m listening,” she said.

25

Thorn opened his eyes. The view from the Hecate’s witchport hadn’t changed in any way he immediately recognized. Had something gone wrong? But then the ship maneuvered, the starfield sliding aside and revealing the enormous disk of a gas giant, striped with swirls of cloud and the oval scars of enormous storms.

“Stellers, you still with us?” Tanner asked over the intercom.

“Aye, sir, I am.”

“Oh. Kind of expected you to be semi-comatose after moving us like that.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes at the gas giant. Or, rather, at a point just above the great, sweeping curve of its surface, where one of several dozen moons was rising into view.

He understood Tanner’s concern. Previously, when he’d moved ships using magic, it had effectively kicked the shit out of him. Semi-comatose indeed. But the impact of it varied with the number of ships he was moving, and how far he was moving them. Moreover, it seemed to get a little easier each time he did it. This time, though, there was another factor at play, more important than all the rest.

He was here to get his daughter.

So his reply came out not just clearly, but calmly, too. “No, I’m locked and loaded, sir. Morgan’s on the biggest moon we just see rising now, almost dead ahead.”

“Roger that. Okay, Task Force Tanner, we’re implementing part alpha of the plan now,” Tanner said, broadcasting over the comm net linking the three ON ships and the Jolly Green Giant.

Thorn had actually objected to naming the impromptu task force after Tanner, reasoning it put a bullseye on him if this went wrong. But Tanner had countered that that was exactly the point.

“Not looking for glory here. Just want to make sure it’s clear who’s taking the blame,” he’d said.

He’d get the credit, too, but Thorn believed him. Tanner really wasn’t after glory or medals or anything of the sort. Thorn accepted that the man genuinely wanted the universe to know that, if this went badly sideways, this Tanner guy was the one responsible.

Thorn closed and pressurized the witchport, so he could go to the Gyrfalcon. As he did, he reflected on how calm and measured he felt. It was remarkable, really, that he felt so in control. There were so many things to rage about, so many desperate worries and so much frantic second-guessing. But all of it had subsided into a quiet background hum, barely noticeable over a veritable ocean of composure.

The witchport sealed, the pressure indicator turning green. Thorn released the little, habitable bubble he’d created around himself, then clambered out of the witchport and hurried to the Gyrfalcon.

* * *

Mol spun the Gyrfalcon hard, then accelerated to match pace with the Hecate. She led the approach to the moon where Thorn knew Morgan was. The missile frigate Nimbus rode her right rear quarter, ready to give fire support, while the escort carrier Viper trailed a thousand klicks back, primed to launch her wing of Kestrel fighters on order. The Jolly Green Giant hung even further back, five thousand klicks, acting as Tanner’s reserve. It also happened to keep Bertilak clear of the battle, at least initially, because Thorn wasn’t sure what effect his being in close proximity to Morgan, his creator, might have.

“We’ve got contacts coming up on the scanners,” Osborne announced over the tactical comm net. Four large contacts rising over the gas giant at two o’clock, and three smaller ones breaking orbit from around the moon.”

Thorn glanced at the Gyrfalcon’s tactical display, which automatically repeated the Hecate’s data. The ships were of unfamiliar design, the largest being a little bigger and bulkier than the Hecate herself. They also seemed more advanced, already launching missiles, which accelerated at a stunning rate toward them.

Tanner spoke up. “I guess that counts as a failure of diplomacy. Am I correct, Acting Lieutenant Forester?”

“Firing missiles without any warnings or attempts to make contact? Yeah, I’d say so, sir,” Damien replied over the comm.

“Very well, then. All ships, weapons-free. Viper, you may launch your fighters at your earliest convenience,” Tanner said.

Thorn, are you ready for this? Kira asked in his mind.

Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?

Because you haven’t exactly had a typical father-daughter relationship with Morgan? I mean, most fights between a daddy and his little girl don’t end up creating new celestial phenomena.

Understood, yeah. Doesn’t matter. She’s our daughter, and we’re here to rescue her.

Just be careful. We have no idea what she’s been through, or how she’s going to react to any of this. Remember that I’m right here, on the Hecate.

I know. But those missiles are coming fast, so I think it’s time for you and me to earn our paycheck.

It is. Good luck. And—I love you, Thorn.

Thorn smiled. Love you too. Be safe.

Gripping his talisman, Thorn began to pull magic from the vast reservoir that filled him, an ocean of titanic potential. Kira would be doing the same. The only other Starcaster present was a relatively junior one, aboard the Nimbus. She’d focus on the immediate protection of the Task Force, and leave the heavy hitting to him and Kira.

“Mol, take us straight in to the moon, best possible speed. Don’t let anything slow you down.”

Mol opened her mouth to answer, but Trixie cut her off.

“Know what? I’m done with all this melancholy music and—well, all the rest of it. Let’s go get those bastards, and rescue your little girl!”

Music began to blast out of the speakers. Thorn smiled as he recognized it, a piece that Trixie had called one of her favorites, before a virus had wiped her personality away.

Backgrounded by the mounting power of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, the Gyrfalcon surged forward, its prow pointed straight at Thorn’s daughter.

* * *

The first missiles raced in, far too fast for the Gyrfalcon’s point defense cannon to track. Three were poised to slam into the Gyrfalcon in just a few seconds.

Thorn lashed out a roaring tendril of power, flicking each one of them to debris.

Mol jinked the Gyrfalcon anyway, and did it with increasingly wild abandon. “Trixie, how many g’s was that last skid we did?”

“Thirty-five.”

Mol glanced at Thorn. “Usually, above twenty-five g’s, we start to feel it. This is smooth as, well, my butt.”

Thorn blinked, then sketched a small salute. “And now that I know you have a smooth butt, I can die complete.”

Mol grinned back. Her point was a good one, though. As an experiment, Mol, assisted by the Hecate’s engineering department, had plugged some of the Imbrogul gravity polarizing tech into the Gyrfalcon’s systems, turning her into a test-bed. She’d done fine in trials, but this was the first test in the swirl of battle. It seemed to be working just fine, letting Mol twist the fighter through maneuvers that tested the limits of its structural integrity. Inside the cabin, though, there was no sensation of acceleration at all.

She snapped the Gyrfalcon through a roll that made the gas giant spin through a dizzying arc, making a full circle in a little over a second. The point defense system tried its best to track targets, but finally gave up and threw an out of limits error. While Trixie cleared it, Thorn focused on the rest of the battle.

The Hecate and the Nimbus were in the thick of it. Besides high-velocity missiles, the opposing ships mounted both projectile and energy weapons. The latter were an especially big concern, flinging bolts of collimated plasma at high sub-light speed. Both of the ON ships had taken serious hits, blackened scars pocking their hulls, fragments of reactive armor trailing in their wakes. Their best defense was the swarm of Kestrel fighters from the Viper. Smaller and even more nimble than the Gyrfalcon, they were extremely elusive targets that packed a heavy punch, well above their weight. Even so, about a third of their complement had been taken out of action. Another vanished in a flash of blue-white plasma even as he watched.

Okay, Thorn was starting to worry about that. It would be the most bitter of ironies, if he rescued Morgan and lost the Hecate, and Kira along with her. Maybe he should have Mol slow down, or even turn back to help.

But he didn’t. Tanner had been adamant about that. Thorn had one job—rescuing Morgan. So he yanked his attention off the tactical display, and grimly focused on the task ahead, instead.

Mol clicked her tongue while dodging another missile. “Okay, we’ve got three assholes ahead of us. Small ships, each about twice our tonnage, but if they’re packing those plasma cannons or whatever they are—” She glanced at Thorn. “I’m good, but I’m not dodging things moving nearly the speed of light good.”

Thorn nodded. They didn’t have time to simply dodge or fight their way through those ships, and they sure couldn’t leave them behind them, while they dove into the moon’s atmosphere.

He had a sudden thought.

Kira, I could use your help.

Kinda busy, Thorn. Trying to take control of the helm of that destroyer-sized thing closing on the Hecate.

I know. But we’ll take care of two things at once.

He outlined his plan to her.

Okay, let’s do it.

Thorn redirected his magical energy, focusing it behind the Gyrfalcon, on the biggest enemy ship. His approach was simple, and blunt. He slammed a wave of confusion and disorientation through the crews’ minds, a raw blast of the crudest sort of Joining. While doing it, he glimpsed fragments of the crews’ thoughts, wholly alien, but still recognizable.

They called themselves the Bilau, and they were outraged, absolutely pissed at this intrusion into their space. But beneath it was a certain fierce glee, which boiled down to a single thought.

We finally get to test ourselves against these humans.

Whoever these Bilau were, they’d been enemies of the Nyctus. But that had changed, and they’d set their sights on the Allied Stars. Aggressive, expansionistic, opportunistic—

In other words, Mol was right. Assholes.

He didn’t feel bad, then, at sending a wave of chaos and bewildered panic coursing through the ship’s crew. It left them reeling, letting Kira move in for the second part of their one-two punch.

Riding her wave of magical might, Kira used her formidable Joining potential to seize control of the befuddled minds of the entire crew. For a moment, she was the crew, and seized that moment to have the ship decelerate as hard and awkwardly as possible, while also loosing a volley of missiles at the three ships blocking the Gyrfalcon’s approach to the moon. At the same time, she had the gunners redirect their plasma-cannon fire into their two flanking ships. The Bilau force immediately collapsed in confusion. This gave the Hecate, the Nimbus, and the Kestrels the opening they needed, all of them seizing it to pour rail-gun and missile fire into the Bilau ships. The Viper herself even joined in. The Kestrels were her primary weapon system, but she still mounted a few of her own weapons, and now she pounded away at the enemy with them.

“Bertilak, now’s the time,” Tanner said.

The Jolly Green Giant swept forward, Bertilak adding the lurid green flashes of weapons to the fray. One of the Bilau ships burned laterally and hard, trying to make a break for it. Thorn turned his attention back to the battle ahead.

Sure enough, the missiles that Kira had fired from the Bilau destroyer had distracted them. They snapped out shots from their plasma-cannons, methodically blasting the missiles apart. That took their attention off the Gyrfalcon.

Perfect.

Thorn reached out with a vast, magical grip, and squeezed space close to the enemy ships. He drew on his memories of redirecting the massive rock that had threatened to destroy Code Gauntlet, remembering how the Alcubierre drive had distorted space just so. He didn’t have an Alcubierre drive to work with this time, but the actual mass involved here was trivial. So he’d do this using raw magic alone.

Thorn kept squeezing space time, fashioning reality into a funnel, whose open end pointed directly at the gas giant. The narrow end, hundreds of thousands of times smaller, encompassed the three Bilau ships. The fearsome radiation from the gas giant, which normally spread in all directions evenly, became channeled into Thorn’s spatial distortion. For a few seconds, all of the radiation streaming away from the gas giant’s entire near hemisphere was concentrated into a volume of space just a few klicks across.

At first, nothing. Then the three Bilau ships began to glow, rapidly heating to white heat. Clouds of vaporized hull and components streamed away from them like the tails of comets. Then, in rapid succession, each one exploded as its reactor containment failed.

Thorn gasped and released the effect, slumping back in his seat. Okay, that had kind of kicked the shit out of him.

“You okay?” Mol shouted over In the Hall of the Mountain King, now blaring into its crescendo.

“Fine! Just keep going!”

The Gyrfalcon raced through a fading, expanding cloud of vapor that had once been three Bilau ships, and plunged into the moon’s atmosphere.

* * *

“There!” Thorn shouted, pointing.

The fighter zoomed toward a landing pad elevated over a swamp. A long walkway connected it to a cluster of buildings, but a huge chunk of both pad and walkway were gone. Now, a nearly perfectly circular crater full of water had taken their place.

Figures surrounded the crater, firing pulses of blue plasma into the water, which hissed and boiled. Thorn could see them striking a shimmering hemispherical bubble protruding above the water, that flashed and flickered with discharging energy. A few desultory blasts of energy shot back at the Bilau, but Thorn could tell that his daughter was nearly done.

“I don’t think so,” he hissed, and lashed out with magic of his own, cracking it like a whip that ripped through the Bilau, forcing them to flee or take cover.

He unbuckled his harness and clambered out of his seat. “Keep us steady, right over top of her, Mol!”

“Trixie and I got this! You just go get your little girl!”

The Gyrfalcon skidded to a halt over the crater, its engines thundering to keep it aloft. Bilau plasma bolts poured in, a few striking the hull with fierce detonations before Thorn was able to cast a veil of denial around the fighter. He smacked the airlock control, cycling it open.

The roar of the Gyrfalcon’s engines filled the cabin with a steady thunder. Dank, fetid air washed in through the open airlock. Thorn looked down, and saw that Morgan had finally reached her limit. She was sinking out of sight, into the crater’s murky depths.

“No!” Thorn shouted at the universe, reaching down with a Hammer ’casting, grabbing his daughter, and lifting her toward him.

Blackish water and mud streamed from her as she rose. The Bilau poured in ever-increasing amounts of fire that slammed against Thorn’s shielding, making him wince. He fought, desperately, to keep up the protective effect, while lifting his daughter the twenty meters from the swamp below.

Something began to throb behind his eyes. Searing pain ripped through his neck and throat. He just bore down even harder.

A few meters away, Morgan’s eyes fluttered open and met his.

“Mister Starman?”

“I’m here, little girl—”

A single plasma bolt ripped through the shield and detonated against the Gyrfalcon’s hull with a blinding flash. More followed, rocking the fighter. Thorn yelped in stunned pain, and Morgan started to fall back toward the swamp.

She screamed.

A second later, the world turned white.

Silence, slowly refilled by the roar of the Gyrfalcon’s engines. Thorn caught Morgan, halted her fall, then began to lift her again.

“Holy shit,” Mol breathed.

Thorn glanced away from Morgan. For kilometers in all directions, the swamp was simply gone, scoured down to bedrock. Murky water rushed in, refilling the space that had once been a Bilau star-port. There was no more shooting, because there were no more Bilau left to shoot at them.

As soon as she was in reach, Thorn gathered Morgan in his arms and pulled her to him. She was wet, filthy, battered—

But she was alive.

“Okay, Mol, let’s go home!”

As the airlock cycled closed, the Gyrfalcon lifted, pointed her prow skyward, and began to accelerate back into space.

Epilogue

“Not used to having children aboard my ship, Stellers,” Tanner said, arms crossed, his frown fixed on Morgan. Thorn could see it was put on, though, and that a smile played in the Captain’s eyes.

Thorn reached out and brushed Morgan’s hair. She’d been cleaned up, her wounds dressed, and now she slumbered on a bed in the Hecate’s infirmary. Kira sat on the other side of the bed, holding her daughter’s hand.

“I never imagined I’d be bringing my daughter aboard the Hecate, sir. Well, except maybe for take-your-kid-to-work day,” he replied.

Tanner shot him a glance, that became a genuine smile. He then turned back to look at Morgan, and the frown reappeared.

“Uh, correct me if I’m wrong, Stellers and Wixcombe, but you said your daughter here was born only about five years ago. This is no five-year old.”

“No, she’s got to be, what? Nine or ten?” Damien said.

Thorn nodded. “When I tried to bring her back from being dead, I guess this is how I envisioned her.”

“Tried to bring her back from the dead. Huh. Probably the first time those words have been spoken here,” Damien replied, but the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon shook her head.

“You’d be surprised at the things that have been said in here. And now, here’s another one. My patient needs rest, so I need all of you to leave. That includes you, Captain.”

“Your infirmary, your rules, doc,” Tanner said, gesturing everyone toward the door.

They stopped outside the infirmary, in the corridor. Thorn looked at Tanner.

“Sir, I just want to thank you. I know how risky this was.”

“Worth it. Your daughter’s a strategic asset.” He started to turn away, then stopped and turned back.

“She’s also the daughter of two people for whom I have a great deal of respect. Still have some explaining to do to Admiral Scoville, but I’ll be doing it with a clear conscience.”

Thorn saluted. Kira and Damien followed suit.

Tanner returned it. “Now, then, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, we have a war to finish winning.”

When he was gone, Damien cleared his throat. “Look, I think you two need some time alone. I’m going to—” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “I’m going to leave you guys to it.”

Before he could move, Kira hugged him. “Thank you, Damien. You’re a damned good man.”

Damien smiled and hugged her back. “I appreciate that, Kira. But the damned good man you should be concerned about is right there,” he said, pointing at Thorn. He released Kira, and walked away.

“So I guess we’re a family,” Thorn said.

“I guess we are. Now we can actually get to know our daughter.”

“We can, yeah.”

It still hadn’t sunk in, Thorn thought. They might be a family, but their daughter was a complete stranger to them. He was anxious for her to wake up, so he could start to get to know this little girl named Morgan, but a part of him almost dreaded it.

Kira turned to reenter the infirmary. “Come on.”

“Doc kicked us out, remember?”

“We’re her parents, Thorn. No one separates us from our daughter. Not ever again.”

She strode back into the infirmary.

Tanner was right. There was a war to win, against the Nyctus, and now against the Bilau, as well. But it didn’t have to be won right this minute.

Smiling himself, Thorn followed Kira to their daughter’s side.

* * *

Keep reading to continue the story in CRY VICTORY.

1

A Kestrel fighter wheeled away from the swirling melee, trailing smoke and debris. The pilot struggled to keep the damaged craft airborne, let alone pry it from the planet’s icy atmosphere, but it was a losing battle. With a flash, the ejection capsule flung itself skyward. The Kestrel immediately plunged into a steep dive and slammed into the ice covering the frozen sea. It smashed a hole through and vanished into the black water. A second later, it exploded, hurling a column of water a hundred meters into the air.

Thorn watched the progress of the escape capsule as it settled onto the ice not far from the crash site. He made careful note of the location, then turned his attention back to the battle raging below—and it was raging, a firestorm of steel and alloy and weapons, all coming together in a merciless, chaotic dance.

The Viper had sent two of her three squadrons of Kestrels planetside to help the stricken Imbrogul outpost, and now they fought desperately to hold off nearly twice their number of enemy craft. The attackers were unidentified, but Thorn suspected it was the Bilau. The lizard-like aliens had become an increasingly irritating barb, pricking not just the ON, but the Imbrogul, the Danzur, and, if intel was to be believed, even the Nyctus. This sort of attack would fit their apparently favored approach to warfare: strike hard and fast, inflict as much damage as possible, then flee.

They seemed to have little interest in taking territory or fighting sustained battles, but if there was some overarching strategy to it all, no one had been able to figure it out yet.

Thorn watched as the Kestrels jinked, banked, dove, and dodged against the smaller, more nimble enemy fighters. The ON fighters had the edge in power and thrust, so their pilots had quickly learned to take advantage of it. They called it boom-and-zoom. Start with an altitude advantage, dive down on the lighter enemy craft, trading altitude for velocity, attack, then climb away, surrendering velocity for altitude again. It wasn’t a new tactic by any means, but it was effective here. The smaller enemy fighters just couldn’t climb as fast as the Kestrels, but the enemy had quickly shifted their tactics in response. They deliberately swarmed one Kestrel during its attack run, taking it out, while ignoring the rest. Losses mounted on both sides, but the enemy had the advantage of numbers.

It was a trade-off the ON could not tolerate. Or live with.

“Bertilak, we don’t have time for anything fancy. Just take us straight in,” Thorn said.

Bertilak’s fingers danced over the controls. His ship, the Jolly Green Giant—now an official ON auxiliary ship, known Fleet-wide as the Jolly—dropped through the clouds and dove toward the battle like a swooping raptor on the hunt.

“Kira, you ready?” Thorn asked.

“Just point me at a target,” she said.

Thorn swept a hand toward the viewscreen, a swirl of ships marked by blue friendly and red enemy icons stark against the ice. “Take your pick.”

Bertilak aimed them at a cluster of enemy fighters savaging a Kestrel. Emerald energy bolts flashed away from the Jolly, blasting apart two of the enemy ships in rapid succession, their hulls reduced to spinning debris. A third suddenly spun and dove vertically into the ice. Kira whooped.

“Splash one!”

Thorn kept his focus on three more of the little enemy craft, dodging and weaving as they lined themselves up for another melee with the Kestrels. Their pilots were canny and careful, flinging themselves around faster than the Jolly could track them. Thorn scowled. There was no time for this. Smoke and flames poured from the Imbrogul outpost, which probably meant casualties and a desperate need for help.

Thorn gripped his talisman, and his senses began to fill with the power of ’casting. He smelled something burning and heard the faint echoes of massive explosions brushing the edges of his thoughts. Despite all the time that had passed, the old book was still infused with psychic echoes of pain and fear, of the trauma of the Nyctus attack on Cotswold, his childhood home. Thorn embraced it, used it to anchor himself, then gathered magic power from the ether and shaped it according to his intent. He picked a spot about a klick ahead of the racing enemy fighters, reached under the ice with Tidal magic, and lifted a massive chunk of the frozen landscape.

The three enemy fighters didn’t have time to avoid the towering pressure ridge that suddenly loomed ahead of them. All three slammed into it almost simultaneously, sleek little fighters suddenly nothing more than smears of flaming debris across the face of the ridge. Black, oily smoke flared out, then roiled upward.

“Splash three,” Thorn said, then he let go of the ’casting with a gasp. The huge slab of ice settled again, fountains of water erupting around it as it sank back into the water. Bertilak wheeled the Jolly into a hard bank, trying to track another fighter. Finally, he snapped out a curse, yanked the Jolly into an even tighter turn, then poured fire into his target’s trajectory ahead of it. The fighter flew into the stream of searing green blots and vanished with a flash. Bertilak pulled the Jolly up at the last second, cutting it so close Thorn was sure he heard something scrape against the bottom of the ship’s hull.

The Jolly immediately wheeled back to rejoin the dogfight, but there were no more red icons left. The Kestrels had taken advantage of the confusion sown by the Jolly’s attack to pounce, and pounce hard, downing the remaining enemy fighters.

“Okay, Bertilak, there’s a man down on the ice off to our ten o’clock about—call it three klicks away,” Thorn said.

Bertilak kept the Jolly turning, putting her onto a course to take her where Thorn had indicated. At the same time, he decelerated the ship, quickly reducing her speed to about that of a stiff breeze.

“There,” Kira said, pointing.

Thorn followed her finger. The ejection capsule rested on an ice floe, awash with greyish water as it heaved and bobbed. It had landed close enough to the impact site of its Kestrel that the ice had been shattered around it, leaving the hapless pilot desperately fighting to cling to the floe while freezing water sloshed around him.

As Bertilak brought the Jolly to a halt and hovered over the ice, Thorn and Kira unstrapped and hurried to the airlock. It opened with a blast of frigid air. Thorn lowered the ground ramp and clambered down it, Kira beside him. Together, they clung to it while Bertilak nudged them toward the downed pilot, a few centimeters at a time.

Kira shouted directions over her comm. “Left a bit. A bit more. Now forward. Now left—cancel that, go right, just a bit!”

They were almost close enough to touch the man now. Icy water sloshed around him, and he watched Thorn and Kira, eyes filled with a pleading, last-ditch sort of desperation. The pilot was only seconds away from losing his grip on the ice and sliding into the water. He’d either be caught between two of the rolling floes and crushed, or he would sink under them and drown. Thorn felt Kira ’casting, no doubt Joining with the pilot to try and calm and reassure him.

Thorn blinked as something snagged the corner of his gaze.

An enemy fighter, boring in fast. It must have gotten separated from its fellows, probably during a chase with a Kestrel, and was only now back in the fight. It raced toward the Jolly, only seconds away from opening fire.

“Thorn!” Bertilak said, but Thorn shouted him down. If they pulled away, this downed pilot would die.

“Keep us where we are!”

Thorn yanked magic from the ether and crafted it into the quickest, crudest ’casting possible—a Hammer blow against the incoming enemy fighter. He had time to focus it on the onrushing craft’s engines, then struck. A solid bludgeon of magic smacked into an engine casing, shredding it. The fighter immediately rolled and tumbled, trailing a long tongue of incandescent plasma.

But it kept on coming.

“Shit!”

Kira had managed to grab the pilot by the hand, but the cold was getting to her, too. All she could do was hang onto him, and then only for a few seconds more.

Thorn yelled and flung out a wall of denial, angling it like a ramp dropping away from the Jolly. The fighter struck it, bounced upward, and sailed overhead with a roar of venting plasma. After a brief wash of searing heat, Thorn braced himself for the shock of an impact. But the ruined remains of the enemy fighter swept over the Jolly, missing the green hull by maybe three meters. It came down again on the floe beyond, cartwheeling in a plume of shattered ice and water before the smashed remains came to rest.

“Thorn!” Kira shouted. She held the railing on the ramp with one hand, the pilot with the other. “I can’t hang on!”

The pilot’s eyes fluttered, and he went limp.

Thorn didn’t hesitate. He dove into the water.

A burst of cold so intense it hurt crashed through him, sucking the breath from his lungs. He heard Kira screaming but focused every bit of concentration he could manage into one more ’casting. The water surged, lifting both him and the pilot up to the ramp. Kira was able to drag the pilot onto the bottom step, then she slumped and started to slide downward. Thorn desperately tried to formulate another ’casting, but the frigid water seemed to suck the thoughts right out of his head.

Well, shit. After everything they’d been through, he and Kira were going to die by drowning in some nameless lake.

A massive green hand swept down and grabbed him. Another grabbed Kira. Bertilak strained, pulling both of them back onto the ramp. Thorn changed his focus, desperately hanging onto the pilot so he didn’t just slip back again. As soon as Bertilak had them far enough up the ramp, he shouted, “Jolly, close it up!”

The ramp smoothly lifted back into place on the Jolly’s underside and sealed with a sharp hiss.

The sudden transition from clashing ice, freezing water, and frigid gusts of wind, to quiet warmth, left Thorn momentarily reeling. He lay on the deck, gasping, shaking so hard he was almost convulsing. Bertilak moved among all three of them, confirming they were conscious, then lifted them, one by one, and carried them through the airlock and back into the Jolly.

For a while, Thorn just lay there, sucking in air as heavy shudders ripped through his body. He finally got his thoughts back under him but found his voice wasn’t working. “I—I—I—” was all he managed because his teeth chattered so hard.

Bertilak raised a finger. “Don’t talk. I’m going to get you out of these wet clothes. Sorry about your modesty,” he said, pulling off one of Thorn’s boots. Water gushed out of it onto the deck.

Thorn focused hard and tried again to speak. “The—others—”

“Are fine. I’ve already taken care of them.”

Thorn managed an unsteady nod. As warmth crept back into him, he was able to regain more and more mastery over his own body.

Bertilak helped him strip down to his underwear. By then, Thorn had managed to sit up. “Where are they? Kira and the pilot?”

“Off getting some nice hot showers, I’d imagine.”

Something struck Thorn. “Did you undress Kira, too?”

“Had to. Say, did you know she has a mole right on her—”

“Yes, I did,” Thorn said, levering himself to his feet. A hot shower sounded just about right, but he shot Bertilak an exaggerated glare. “How about we just keep whatever we happened to see to ourselves, huh?”

“Hey, your intimate secrets are safe with me.” A mischievous grin lit the big alien’s face. “That includes the mole that you’ve got on your—”

“That’ll do, Bertilak. That’ll do.”

* * *

Bertilak landed the Jolly on the ice about 200 meters away from the embattled Imbrogul outpost. He wasn’t sure how solid the ice was closer to it. The outpost itself squatted on a small rocky island, little more than a glorified reef protruding out of the lake.

Now properly bundled up against the cold, Thorn and Kira picked their way across the ice, avoiding some ominous-looking cracks. Otherwise, it felt as solid as an alloy deck. The outpost itself proved more of a challenge. They had to work their way around still-smoldering blast craters, chunks of flyrock blasted out of the reef, and scattered piles of debris. They found several Imbrogul in the small compound enclosed by the facility’s outer wall, apparently assessing the damage in a series of musical exclamations.

Thorn walked up to the first and introduced himself. The Imbrogul was a woman, though he knew that from her voice, not her appearance. They all looked pretty much the same, wrapped in bulky environment suits, faces covered against the frigid wind.

“I’m Tocci,” she said, exuding a powerful whiff of something similar to mint. The Imbrogul communicated, in part, through scent, and Thorn knew that the mint-like smell denoted approval, or something affirmative. The wind quickly whipped the smell away, but it had been clear. Thorn offered a smile in return.

“Lieutenant Thorn Stellers. Pleased to meet you. And this is Kira Wixcombe. She’s a Lieutenant Commander in the Orbital Navy,” Thorn said.

Tocci’s eyes narrowed slightly as Thorn introduced himself. More importantly, the mint-smell didn’t change. “Thorn Stellers. You were named by Ondric as a friend of the Imbrogul. It is fitting, then, that you’ve come to our aid.”

“You know Ondric, then.”

“He’s my brother.”

Thorn’s eyes widened. “Small universe.” He ducked as a powerful gust of wind swept across the frozen lake. It whipped up stinging ice particles, along with smoke from the damaged outpost, and the wrecked fighters scattered across the ice. “What made you choose this frigid little hellhole as your first toehold toward the Allied Stars, anyway?”

“It is, believe it or not, the closest planet with a breathable atmosphere to our space, in this direction. Everything spinward of this system is controlled by the Nyctus.” Another gust swept over them. “That said, frigid hellhole is apt. Our engineers have restored power and heat, so why don’t we move our conversation inside?”

Thorn glanced at Kira, who gave a grateful smile.

“Sounds good to me. I’ve done the freezing cold thing enough for one day, thanks,” Kira enthused.

They followed Tocci up a ramp and into a geodesic dome. There were doors, but they stood open. Still, as soon as they stepped through the entrance, the wind died as though closed off by a solid wall. Warm air flooded around Thorn, and he unfastened his jacket, letting it penetrate inside his environment suit.

“Unfortunately, our defensive systems weren’t fully online when the attack occurred,” Tocci said, gesturing for them to follow her. “We’re very fortunate that you weren’t far away.”

“We were on our way here, actually, on a goodwill visit,” Kira said.

“I am aware. Even so, we didn’t expect you to arrive for at least another full day.”

“When we received your distress call, I kind of, ah, hurried things along,” Thorn said.

Tocci looked at him, and the mint smell returned. “You used the phenomenon you call magic. Ondric said you were capable of quite impressive feats with it. I understand you actually moved several rather large asteroids for the Astarti.”

Thorn offered a self-deprecating shrug. “We have an entire Starcaster Corps in the ON. I’m just one of many.”

“If that is the case, then your ON is to be greatly feared.”

“Only by our enemies,” Thorn replied.

Tocci smiled again and smelled the amused smell of fresh rain.

The dome wasn’t itself a building; instead, it enclosed three smaller, boxy ones. The Imbrogul already had grass and trees planted among them, mimicking the lush forests on their home planet. The greenery stood in stark contrast to the frozen world just outside the dome.

It apparently caught Kira as well. “You guys have already started planting trees and things? Usually, that’s pretty far down the to-do list for an ON facility.”

Tocci smiled as she pulled off her mask and lowered her hood. “Imbrogul very quickly become uncomfortable if we are denied the presence of greenery. It’s in our nature to establish vegetation as soon as we can.” Her smile widened, and she smelled of ozone, and drizzle, and fresh breezes.

That was amusement, Thorn thought.

“So, for us, planting trees and things is very near the top of our to-do list,” Tocci said.

Her good humor didn’t last, though. She led them into one of the interior buildings, along a corridor, then to a control room lined with view screens. She spoke to one of the Imbrogul who was already there, operating a console.

“Please retrieve the imagery I asked you to set aside,” she said.

The other Imbrogul complied, calling up a video playback on one of the view screens.

“I thought it would be useful for you to see this,” Tocci said.

As Thorn and Kira watched, the image lit up with a view of a ship that was grounded on the ice. There were towering mountains in the background, which meant this wasn’t near the outpost.

“We had a ship on a routine supply run develop a serious problem with its stabilizers as it entered the planet’s atmosphere. The pilot was forced to land almost one hundred kilometers to the east of this installation. This imagery was captured by a ship dispatched from here, with a technical crew on board to assist with repairs.”

Several Imbrogul appeared in the frame, walking away from the camera, toward the disabled ship. They’d almost reached it when they stopped as one and looked up.

“Acoustic sensors recorded the passage of a sonic shockwave, which is what has commanded the technical crews’ attention. You will note that, in a moment, they will continue toward the disabled freighter. We believe that they thought it was one of our ships, passing overhead on its way to this base.” Tocci looked at Thorn and Kira. “It was not.”

Tocci spoke to the Imbrogul tech operating the playback, telling him to skip forward to a particular time index. He did, and the video showed the arrival of a third ship. It was an entirely different design than the streamlined Imbrogul ships. This was chunky, even somewhat awkward looking, its hull all planes and angles.

“I’ve seen a ship like that before,” Thorn said.

Kira glanced at him. “Where?”

“Sitting on a landing pad in a swamp, right before we rescued Morgan.” He glared at the image. “It’s the Bilau.”

The newly arrived ship spun about and dropped a ramp as it settled down. Squat, armored figures poured out and immediately swarmed toward the disabled freighter. They broke their way into it, and then the image went still for a few moments.

“We have no record of what occurred inside the freighter,” Tocci said.

It didn’t matter. Thorn knew exactly what had happened. Carnage.

About five minutes after entering, the Bilau piled back out of the Imbrogul ship. Thorn saw that they dragged several Imbrogul with them. They hustled them up the ramp, into their ship, which then lifted and vanished from the image.

“Six minutes after this, another Bilau ship enters the atmosphere and releases the fighters that attacked this outpost. On their way here, they destroyed both of these ships.”

Kira grimaced. “Very thorough of them.”

Thorn had to open fists he hadn’t even realized he’d made. Whatever else these Bilau might be, they were clearly vicious, warmongering assholes. They seemed entirely indiscriminate in their attacks, having apparently waged a campaign even against the Nyctus. They’d gone so far as to essentially exterminate the squid population of two entire planets, then terraformed them into swamp worlds. They were, Thorn thought, either a dangerous powerful race, or a suicidally foolish one.

Maybe both.

“The first Bilau ship, the one that captured our people, left the system a little more than an hour before you arrived. The second ship, the one that carried the fighters, likewise lifted and fled as soon as you entered the system,” Tocci said.

Kira crossed her arms. “So they didn’t even bother recovering their fighters? That’s not good.”

“No, it isn’t. It means that they seem to have as little regard for their own lives as they do for anyone else’s,” Thorn said, his fists wanting to clench themselves again.

He thought about the last Bilau fighter, the one that had attacked the Jolly while they were trying to rescue the downed ON fighter pilot. Thorn had assumed it would strafe Bertilak’s ship, then pull up. But now he didn’t think so. That Bilau pilot knew he was already effectively dead and meant to take someone else with him.

Great. Dangerous and suicidal.

Thorn tapped his comm. “Bertilak, there’s a Bilau ship that left here about—oh, let’s say two hours before we arrived. Do you think the Jolly can catch up to it?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Thorn said, then turned back to Tocci. “I hate to be that guy who helps save the day and then runs, but we’re going to try and get your people back.”

Tocci positively reeked of mint. “Ondric was right. You are a friend to the Imbrogul. Go, add this new verse to your Song.”

Thorn nodded and headed for the exit, to return to Bertilak’s ship. As he pulled his hood back up and made to fasten his facemask back into place, Kira gave him a puzzled look.

“Add this new verse to your Song? What does that mean?”

Thorn smiled back at her. “It’s an Imbrogul thing. I’ll tell you all about it while we run these Bilau bastards down.”

2

Thorn leaned back in the Jolly’s copilot’s seat. “So that’s the rundown, sir. We’ve initiated a pursuit of the Bilau ship, but Lieutenant Commander Wixcombe thought we should get clearance to leave ON or Imbrogul space to chase it.”

Tanner steepled his fingers and leaned closer to the viewscreen. “Your estimate on how long it’s going to take you to catch these bastards?”

“Without the Viper in company, we figure it’ll take the Jolly about four hours, sir.”

Thorn saw Tanner turning something over in his mind, then punching at the console on his command chair. This should be a no-brainer, but there was obviously something else going on. Thorn just waited. No good ever came of trying to push Tanner or hurry him along. “Tanner time” was a thing aboard the Hecate, defined as the exact amount of time required to do something, no more, no less.

Kira leaned toward Thorn. “If we don’t get clearance to do this, then what? Do we go back to Tocci with the bad news or let someone else tell her?”

Thorn sighed. “No, I’ll tell her—”

“That the pursuit’s going to continue,” Tanner cut in.

“Sir?”

“I want you to run these Bilau assholes down. And I can even arrange some help for you to do it. By a lucky coincidence, Specialist Wyant just did a personnel run to the frigate Angkor Wat, which is patrolling just anti-spinward of your current course. If we can get them redirected sometime in the next ten minutes or so, they should be able to catch up with the Bilau not long after you do,” Tanner said.

Thorn blinked. He’d been expecting a denial, even if a reluctant one, not reinforcements. And one of them would be Mol. “Oh. Okay, sir. Sure not going to say no to that.”

“The Angkor Wat’s under the command of Demaris Popescu. Report to her ASAP, fill her in on the details, and then take your orders from her. We’re bringing the Hecate to the Imbrogul outpost to marry up with the Viper. We’ll keep station there and give the Imbrogul some cover while they get their defenses online.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Hecate out.”

Thorn puffed out a breath. “Okay, Bertilak, you heard the man. Pour it on.”

Bertilak grinned. “Already have.” In response to Thorn’s raised eyebrow, he gave an offhanded shrug.

“I’ve gotten to know Captain Tanner well enough to know he wasn’t going to say no to chasing some bad guys,” Bertilak said.

“Thorn, we could probably speed this up if you just, you know, go ahead and move us closer to the Bilau,” Kira said.

Thorn crossed his arms and sighed again. “I thought about that. But it seems to me that we don’t want to run down these Bilau too soon.”

Kira gave a slow nod. “So we can find out where they’re going.”

“Exactly.”

“So it means we’ve got a few hours to kill.”

Thorn lifted his eyebrows suggestively. Kira blew him a slow kiss.

Bertilak groaned. “Would you two get a room? It’s not like there’s any shortage of them here on the Jolly.”

* * *

“Jolly, this is the Angkor Wat,” a quick, clipped voice said over the comm. Bertilak touched a control, and a window popped open on the viewscreen. It held the image of a short, intense woman with black hair and eyes the color of steel.

“Jolly here, ma’am. Lieutenant Commander Kira Wixcombe at your service.”

“Roger that, Wixcombe. Demaris Popescu, master of the Angkor Wat. So what’s your SITREP?”

Thorn stayed silent as Kira briefed Popescu on the details of the Bilau attack. In rapid-fire discussion, information flew between the officers, letting Thorn simply observe.

“How did the engagement end?” Popescu asked. Her questions were crisp and direct, fitting the competent air she wore with ease.

“With a chase, and the Imbrogul recovering, but not without revealing some critical details about the Bilau,” Kira said, her voice rich with disgust.

Popescu arched a brow, inviting detail.

“They’ll attack anyone at any time. The concept of giving quarter is beyond them. They’re vicious, acquisitive, and warlike to a fault, and that’s their good qualities, from what I can see.”

Thorn watched Popescu sidelong, gauging her reactions and general tone. Tanner tended to be the bar by which he judged other Captains. The Hecate’s master was, as far as Thorn was concerned, just about a perfect mix of aggression and caution. Of weighing, and then either accepting or rejecting his subordinate’s advice. He’d met captains who varied from that in both directions, ranging from egotistical assholes to timid pushovers.

Popescu gave him more of a Tanner vibe. She came across as tough and determined but also fair and open. She sealed the deal when Kira had finished her SITREP with a wave of anger.

“Suggestions?” she asked.

She was definitely more of a Tanner.

Kira spoke up. “Ma’am, we’re probably crossing into what the Bilau consider their space. How much fight are we prepared to give?”

“You have Stellers with you, don’t you?”

“Right here, ma’am,” Thorn said.

“We only met once, Stellers, and then only for the briefest moment. I was in the Ops Center at Code Gauntlet when that squid rock was thundering toward us. I congratulated you on the well-earned medal you received for that.”

“I wish I could say I remember you, ma’am.”

Popescu smiled. It was like a light switched on, then switched off again. “Understood. Ordinarily, I’d be really wary about violating a border with a force comprising a single frigate, a lone Gyrfalcon, and an alien auxiliary ship. What I need from you is an assurance that you can get us out of trouble faster than we might get ourselves into it.”

“Nothing’s guaranteed, ma’am. But I expect I could haul our asses out of there if needed,” Thorn replied.

“Good enough for me. We’ll rendezvous in thirty minutes at a waypoint my Nav O is sending you. From there, we’ll run straight in toward what seems to be our quarry’s destination, that next system, dead ahead.”

They acknowledged and signed off. Kira looked at Thorn, a wry smile playing on her face.

“You’re famous,” she said.

Thorn stretched out his legs and let out a long sigh. “Yeah, I know.”

“That doesn’t seem to please you, my friend,” Bertilak put in.

Thorn rubbed his eyes. “It doesn’t. Fame just means people expect more from you.”

“Then stop being such a damned good Starcaster,” Kira offered.

“As soon as this war’s done, I think I’ll do just that. It’d be nice to just be, you know, a regular guy for a change.”

“That ship has sailed, dear,” Kira said, but her tone was gentle.

Thorn smiled, but he looked tired doing so. “Promise me we can try?”

“Done,” Kira said, and Thorn believed her.

* * *

“What the hell is that?” Popescu asked.

“No idea, ma’am. Just a big-ass ship,” Thorn replied, studying the image on the viewscreen.

The Bilau ship they’d been chasing had decelerated to rendezvous with whatever it was—a massive, lumbering ship in a wide, slow orbit around the unremarkable star. Their scans suggested a multitude of point-defense batteries but no heavier armament. The only other ships present were more of the nimble little Bilau fighters, which had begun forming up into a pair of wedge formations as soon the Jolly, Angkor Wat, and Gyrfalcon had entered the system.

“Careful about those fighters. They pack a hell of a punch,” Kira put in.

“Roger that. Okay, straight in. Gyrfalcon, you’re free to maneuver at your discretion. Jolly, keep station within a thousand klicks of the Ankgor Wat and cover our butts. We’ll lead the way, straight in. All ships, weapons-free now.”

Mol acknowledged. So did Kira. All three ships accelerated. Mol immediately broke formation and climbed above the system’s ecliptic plane to spread out the Bilau’s attention.

A few seconds later, the Angkor Wat loosed a volley of missiles. Mol did the same, a pair of missiles streaking away from the Gyrfalcon. Bertilak’s ship only mounted the exotic energy weapons—the ones that fired pulses of green plasma. ON techs had examined them, hoping to replicate them, but Thorn knew they were wasting their time. They were creations of, and powered by, magic.

Tech had nothing to do with it.

The Bilau fighters raced in, their attack run unwavering. They were brave—Thorn had to give them that. Some broke off to engage the oncoming missiles. Four more detached themselves and raced after the Gyrfalcon. The rest just bored in, accelerating as hard as they could.

“Kira, can you help Mol out? I’m going to see what I can do about those guys coming straight at us,” Thorn said.

“On it,” Kira replied.

Thorn picked out one fighter and crafted magic into a Scorch ’casting, a furious blast of flame like a cutting torch. He directed it against the cockpit, slashing it open. It flashed through the thin armor and structural members beneath. The fighter drove on for a moment, then snapped into two tumbling chunks of debris. Another unfortunate Bilau fighter got in the way of the spinning drive section and wasn’t able to jink fast enough. They collided with a flash and spectacular fan of debris.

Thorn let the magic dissipate, then refocused himself on the larger battle. One of the fighters racing to intercept Mol had latched onto his wingman’s tail, and was now pumping plasma bolts into his confused target. Thorn glanced at Kira and saw her concentrating. He smiled, since she seemed to have this well in-hand, and returned to the rest of the battle.

The Bilau made their plan clear and forged ahead with maniacal devotion—and futility. Their fighters broke off, circled back, and began a strafing run along the port side of the Angkor Wat at speeds that would render most weapons useless.

But Popescu’s gunners were ready.

With brutal efficiency, the close-fire skill of the Angkor Wat filled space with lethal rounds. The first two Bilau fighters were torn apart in a blaze of plasma, their hulls reduced to hot gas in the blink of an eye. A third Bilau braked hard and rolled across the Jolly’s path, only to vanish in a green blur of killing energy. As a fourth and fifth Bilau tried to break off for a final attack, railgun rounds flickered across the distance, each rod tearing into the enemy ship like the hand of a vengeful deity. One Bilau managed to dodge the railgun, only to meet a particle cannon shot at less than a klick, leaving no debris larger than a centimeter in size.

In less than three minutes, it was over. Aside from a few plasma hits on the Angkor Wat, the ON ships avoided significant damage. The Bilau, on the other hand, weren’t so lucky. The combined firepower of the three ships, a coordinated barrage of missiles, railguns, particle cannons, and plasma shots quickly overwhelmed and shredded the Bilau fighters, destroying all of them.

Thorn took a breath. Now, to figure out whatever the hell that big ship was. Or maybe barge was more appropriate, since it didn’t carry heavy weaponry and seemed to have engines barely adequate for its mass—

“Thorn, I’m sensing a lot of minds on that big ship. A lot of them,” Kira said.

“A whole bunch of Bilau, I guess. I wonder what they're doing here.”

But Kira shook her head. “Not Bilau. In fact, that’s the one sort of mind I’m not sensing. But there’s a multitude of others. Imbrogul, a few I don’t recognize—” She suddenly tensed and looked at Thorn. “There are Nyctus, too. And humans, Thorn. There are humans aboard that thing.”

“So it’s, what, a prison ship?” Thorn asked.

“If it is, then the guards have just made a run for it,” Bertilak put in, pointing at the viewscreen. Sure enough, the Bilau ship they’d been chasing had undocked from the barge and was now burning away hard.

Thorn glared at it, then summoned magic into a ’casting, a Joining, and flung his perception across space, into the barge. Kira was right. Myriad beings representing at least six or seven different races were on board. Thorn swept his awareness across them, counting at least a dozen humans, and nearly twice that many Nyctus. All were stressed and frightened, some to the point that their thoughts verged into sickened hysteria.

Not surprising, Thorn grimly thought. If it was a prison, then of course the inmates would be scared.

“Thorn, the Bilau have abandoned their prison ship,” Bertilak said.

Thorn pulled his awareness back into the Jolly, into his own mind. He found Bertilak staring at him, wide-eyed. What the hell was the big alien getting at?

Oh.

“Shit. Captain Popescu, the Bilau are going to scuttle that prison barge!” he snapped, then hurled his awareness back across the void. If he could figure out where the charges were, maybe he could—

A searing flash of light pulsed across the viewscreen, washing it out in dazzling white. At the same time, absolute terror erupted from every one of the prisoners.

Thorn reeled back in his seat. He heard Kira cry out in pain.

The blinding flash died. All that remained of the prison barge was whirling debris and shattered bodies.

This star system suddenly had a swarm of new and grisly satellites. Most would probably eventually fall into the star, but it would take years—decades, even. And some would settle into stable orbits that might last thousands or even millions of years, a horrific sort of immortality.

“All ships, let’s stay clear of that debris cloud,” Popescu said, her voice tight and subdued. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know what she was thinking. If they’d been a little faster, tried a little harder, maybe several hundred unfortunate people wouldn’t have just been blasted into oblivion.

But something else had jammed itself into Thorn’s mind. The dying thoughts of one of the Nyctus had rattled into his consciousness, and he had no idea what they meant.

“Are we going to try and catch that Bilau ship?” Mol asked.

“No. A long stern chase is just going to pull us further into Bilau territory, and next time, they’ll likely have the edge in combat. Not prepared to tempt fate that way. All ships, let’s one-eighty and return to friendly space.”

Thorn stared at the viewscreen.

“Thorn, are you okay?” Kira asked.

He turned to her. “I’m fine, yeah. It was one of those squids aboard that prison barge. I happened to catch his very last thoughts.”

“Okay, and?”

“And they weren’t—right, Kira. They didn’t have the usual shape or feel of a squid’s thoughts. Not as I’ve come to know them, anyway.”

Bertilak leaned into the conversation. “What do you mean, Thorn? What are you saying here?”

“I’m not even really sure. All I know is that this squid wasn’t hostile. It didn’t have the usual sort of hard, dark determination we’ve come to expect from them. This one felt, I don’t know. Reasonable. Compassionate, even.” He glanced from Bertilak to Kira. “But even that wasn’t the strangest part.”

Kira grimaced. “Damn it, Thorn, these dramatic reveals get really old really fast—”

He held up a hand. “I’m not just trying to be dramatic. I genuinely don’t understand what just happened. It took only a few seconds for that squid to die, and its last thoughts weren’t of its parents, or some deity, that sort of thing. They were of its homeworld, a place called Tāmtu.”

Kira looked at him in mild confusion. “And?”

“And they were of Morgan.” Thorn looked straight at Kira. “That squid was thinking of our daughter when it died, Kira. It was practically praying to her, beseeching her to save it.”

A moment of stunned silence was finally broken by Bertilak. “Why? Why would a Nyctus’s dying thoughts be about your daughter?”

Thorn looked back at the viewscreen, at the expanding cloud of debris that had been the prison barge.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I intend to find out.”

3

Thorn crossed his arms and watched the Hecate’s viewscreen with mounting alarm, as Admiral Scoville laid out the ON’s position on the Bilau.

“We realize that the enemy of my enemy argument holds about as much water as a bucket with no bottom. But we can’t ignore the fact that the Bilau have attacked the Nyctus in the past and devastated at least two of their planets. And they apparently continue to attack the Nyctus, as shown by the squid prisoners aboard their prison barge. The opportunity to join forces with the Bilau, even temporarily, is just too good to pass up.”

Tanner leaned back in his command seat. “Sir, is this a done deal?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t want to bother voicing my objections if it is.”

Thorn stepped forward. “Well, I don’t mind doing just that. Sir, the Bilau are attacking everyone. There were Imbrogul aboard that barge. There were humans aboard it. The Bilau can’t be trusted, not at all. As soon as we show our flank to them, they’ll attack it.”

Scoville scowled. “Stellers, I long ago learned to respect the things you’re capable of. And you’re capable of some pretty amazing things. But ON and Allied Stars politics aren’t really in your field of expertise, are they?”

“No, sir, but they’re in mine,” Kira said, stepping up beside Thorn. “Since I was tagged to act as a diplomatic liaison to the Danzur, I’ve had at least one foot in the world of interstellar relations. So I agree with Lieutenant Stellers. The Bilau aren’t to be trusted. Not one bit.”

“All due respect, Lieutenant Commander Wixcombe, but your good work with the Danzur doesn’t really make you an expert on the Bilau, now does it? We’ve been feeling out the Bilau, and they haven’t bitten our fingers off yet.”

“Operative word being yet,” Thorn said. Then he added, “Sir.”

Tanner raised a finger. “Admiral, please indulge me. Again, it sounds to me like you, or someone above you on the food chain, has already decided to open negotiations with the Bilau. So, that being the case, why are we having this conversation?”

Scoville’s lips pressed into a thin line. He looked around, then muttered at someone, or several someones, off-screen. Thorn caught sounds of movement, then a door closing and sealing.

“We’re having this conversation because I personally don’t disagree with you. I have deep misgivings about getting into bed with these Bilau, frankly. Aside from the fact their tech seems at least a little superior to ours, we know virtually nothing about them. We don't know how their society is structured, how they govern themselves—hell, we don’t even know how they reproduce.”

Scoville sighed. “The fact is that the good people of the Allied Stars are sick of this war. They’re sick of feeling that little spark of fear whenever they look up at the stars, or that clench in their gut when they see a shooting star. They’re sick of the casualty lists and the imagery of wounded personnel being offloaded from medical shuttles. They just want it to be over.”

“Can’t blame them for that,” Tanner said.

“No, neither can I. And that’s why there’s huge pressure on the Allied Stars Council to make some sort of decisive move to wind this thing down. If allying with the Bilau offers even a chance for a quick end to the war, then the Council is going to look at it very, very seriously.”

Thorn paced toward the viewscreen. “That’s right, sir. Allying with the Bilau probably will make for a quick end to the war. But it will be because they’ve turned on us and left us vulnerable to the squids, not the other way around. Hell, we’d be better off asking the Nyctus to ally with us against the Bilau.”

Thorn shook his head at his own words even as he said them. Asking the Nyctus to ally with us was a phrase he could never have imagined using. And yet, here they were.

Kira put her hands on her hips. “For all the fact that they’re miserably aggressive assholes, at least the squids do maintain amicable relations with other races. They’ve got trade and commercial stuff going on with the Danzur, and apparently also the Imbrogul and other races out in that part of space. Like Thorn said, the Bilau just seem to attack who or whatever happens to be in front of them. They’re opportunists, above all else.”

“And the Council is proposing to do just that—put us out in front of them,” Tanner said.

“So I don’t think I’m too far off base here saying that the consensus aboard the Hecate is that we should tell the Bilau to go to hell,” Scoville snapped.

Tanner’s reply was unfazed. “To the extent that the opinions of the Captain and officers aboard a single destroyer matter, yes, sir, I think that sums it up quite nicely.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I don’t make a habit of running command decisions, much less Allied Stars Council deliberations, past the commanders or bridge crews of any of my ships,” Scoville shot back.

“So, I’ll ask it again, sir. Why are we having this conversation? What, exactly, are you asking from us here?”

“You folks are at the pointy end. Stellers, you and Bertilak met the Astarti and the Imbrogul, and you obviously charmed them. You’ve all faced the Nyctus, and now the Bilau. You know how to cut through the bullshit and get to the truth underneath.”

Thorn crossed his arms again and waited.

Scoville leaned forward. “That’s what I want you to do now. Cut through the bullshit and bring me back the truth. If I’m going to advocate for staying away from the Bilau, I need hard evidence as to why. Effective immediately, that’s your primary task, Captain Tanner.”

“Just to be clear, sir, you’re directing me to find reasons to not ally with the Bilau. This is despite the fact that the Admiralty and the Allied Stars Council both want to find reasons to ally with the Bilau. Do I have that correct?”

“You have a problem with that, Captain Tanner?”

Tanner smiled and shook his head. “No, sir. Not at all. Just wondered how much I’m going to be trying to undermine Allied Stars policy. Gives me an idea about how big the shitstorm’s going to be when we get back, that’s all.”

“You get the shitstorm, I get the hurricane, Galen.” Scoville leaned forward, his face earnest. “I’m not going to draft up a detailed set of orders for this little operation and hope that nobody at Fleet starts wondering where the Hecate is.”

“I have a suggestion, sir,” Thorn put in.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Sir, we could really use some, let’s call it specific expertise. I understand that Damien Forester is now working for Captain Densmore. If we can get him attached aboard the Hecate, then the whole op would fall under Densmore’s special ops area, wouldn’t it?”

Thorn felt Kira look at him in surprise. He ignored it—for the moment, at least.

Scoville smirked. “You’ve got one hell of a devious mind, Stellers. But it’s an excellent idea. I’ll contact Alys Densmore and work it out. Meantime, Captain Tanner, I’ll send along a discreet briefing document on a private comm channel. That’ll have to do in lieu of actual orders.”

“Be watching for it, sir.”

Scoville signed off, Tanner named a time for their first coordination meeting, then the bridge emptied of anyone not actually on duty. Kira caught Thorn and gestured to a side corridor.

They waited for a Rating to pass by, then Kira leaned in spoke, her voice low.

“Thorn, you’re really okay with Damien coming along on this op?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Because—um, what? The guy radiates interest in me—he’s not subtle, that way, and I think he holds you in a kind of inhuman regard. He fears magic but he sees how it works. How it can win this war, maybe,” Kira said.

“Both fair. You’re stunning. I have excellent taste. So does Damien. So do you, by the way—”

“Easy, now.”

Thorn laughed softly. “And Damien knows I’ve, um, changed the fabric of the universe now and then, and that our daughter can likely do the same.” He gave a small shrug. “Then there’s the unspoken reality. Of us.”

“Unspoken? What? Or, how?” Kira said with a searching look.

“Do you remember how, right after we rescued Morgan from the Bilau, and she was here, aboard the Hecate, you sat with her? Like, constantly, until she finally woke up?”

“Well, of course I was going to sit with her, Thorn. She’s my little girl.”

“I know. And she’s my little girl, too. That’s why, as soon as I stepped into that infirmary, I felt it.”

“Felt what?”

“That we’re a family. Probably one of the strangest families to ever exist. I mean, how many families can say they’ve created a new, six light-year wide nebula?” He smiled, but it was laced with affection. “Damien is an asset and a good officer. That comes first, just like we do, as a family. We’re good.”

Kira smiled back, then took Thorn’s hands in hers.

“Careful, Captain Tanner’s not a big fan of shows of overt affection aboard his ship,” Thorn said, making his voice dramatically stern.

Kira rolled her eyes. “There is not a ship in this Fleet that hasn’t seen its share of overt affection. In fact, when I was aboard the Stiletto, we had this one couple who just couldn’t keep their—”

Tanner’s voice over their personal comms cut her off. “Stellers, Wixcombe, heads up. Just got word from Admiral Scoville that we’re taking a detour before we launch our little op-that-isn’t. We’re taking you to Nebo to see your daughter.”

They released one another’s hands, the moment of fond humor turning to vapor. “Is there something wrong, sir?” Thorn asked.

“Scoville didn’t say so, no. Seems more that she’s made it clear she wants to see you, to talk about something she’s apparently remembered, or is at least willing to share. But she’ll only talk to you two.”

Thorn looked at Kira and sniffed. “Kids.”

“Uh-huh. Remember us as kids, Thorn? By comparison, Morgan’s a saint.”

“I know, right? You were terrible.”

Thorn winced as Kira punched his arm, then he followed her back toward the bridge, grinning at her reaction.

Totally worth it.

* * *

Mol grounded the Gyrfalcon a short distance from the farm, far enough away that the engine blast wouldn’t stir up too much dust or damage anything. She powered the fighter down, smiling from behind mirrored sunglasses at Thorn and Kira.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived. Please ensure you take all your belongings.”

Thorn gave her a sidelong eye roll as he clambered out of the co-pilot’s couch. “That’s, what, the thousandth time you’ve said that? Can’t believe how funny it still is.”

“Actually, Mol has said that line, or some variation of it, four hundred and sixteen times during her tenure as pilot of this Gyrfalcon,” Trixie put in.

Mol stared at the console. “Really?”

Kira clapped her on the shoulder. “You need some new material, Mol.”

They disembarked, blinking in the bright Nebo sunshine. A pair of Marines approached from a discreet bunker that had been constructed near the edge of the northern sourfruit orchard.

“Sir, ma’am, I’m Major Alec Fenton, commander, Bravo Company of the First Marine Expeditionary Battalion. I’ll need to see your ID tags.”

While the Marine accompanying Fenton checked their tags, Thorn scanned the landscape around the farm. Rolling green hills were splotched with darker green stands of trees and the colorful dots of other farms. From somewhere nearby, the steady, placid hum of a farm machine at work vibrated the warm summer air.

It was hard to reconcile this idyllic, pastoral setting spread around them now with the raw terror of the Nyctus KEW attack. That attack had spawned the Vision, Morgan’s experience of her own death, that was then vicariously experienced by every Starcaster everywhere. And that brought Thorn’s own memories of the KEW attack on Cotswold back into sharp focus, the memories seared into his mind provoking a sudden burst of warmth and burning smell from his talisman.

“Thorn?”

Thorn blinked. Apparently, he’d been standing, staring blankly at the ground, while Kira talked to Fenton, the Marine company commander tasked with guarding Morgan.

“Sir, are you okay?” Fenton asked.

“Yeah. I’m fine. I was just remembering—” He cut himself off. “Never mind.”

“No problem, sir. I understand that you brought this planet back from the dead after a Nyctus attack. That’s got to make anyone stop and take a moment, if you know what I mean.”

“Let’s go see our daughter,” Thorn said, starting to walk toward the farmhouse.

He understood the need to have Fenton’s company here. Battle-hardened and heavily armed, they were meant to keep anyone from getting near Morgan who didn’t need to be. Of course, they were also implicitly keeping tabs on Morgan. Still, Thorn was a little surprised at how much this bothered him. He didn’t blame Fenton, and he didn’t blame Fleet for sending them here. Nor did he blame Fleet for keeping a heavy cruiser and two frigates on permanent station at Nebo to guard approaches to the planet from space.

No, what bothered him was the fact any of it was necessary at all. He’d told Kira that they were a family, and they were. That said, families generally didn’t have to be guarded by squadrons of warships and elite companies of Marines, and parents didn’t normally have to show ID tags before being able to see their kids.

Thorn gritted his teeth. He was sick of this damned war. He really, really was.

“Mom! Dad!”

Morgan came pounding down the back steps of the farm. Fenton and the other Marine hung back while she raced up and hugged Kira, then Thorn.

“Looking good, kid,” Thorn said, taking in his lanky, almost-teenaged daughter. Her changes would have been alarming if he wasn’t so overwhelmed with relief at seeing her.

That was something no one yet understood. When Morgan had died in the Nyctus KEW attack, only a few meters from this very spot, she was four. When he pulled her back from death, which had precipitated her fleeing from him and creating the Witch Nebula in the process, she was about nine—because that’s how Thorn saw her, in his mind’s eye. That made sense, he supposed, because he had almost no experience with younger children, so about nine was the youngest version of her he could imagine.

Since they’d rescued her, she continued to rapidly age, nine becoming ten, then eleven, then twelve, all in a few short months. And then she apparently stopped her rapid aging and settled into being a preteen, complete with the occasional eye roll and everything else that particular age bracket entailed.

And here she was. It sucked that most of her childhood had been taken from her, but then, if she’d been anyone else, she would have died at four and stayed that way.

Two more figures came out of the house, smiling. They were Morgan’s foster parents, the family who’d taken her in when Kira first brought her here. Now, they were taking care of her on their behalf. Good people, Thorn thought. Kind, loving and fair. They waved but hung back, obviously not wanting to intrude on this family moment.

Morgan grinned and shaded her eyes against the sun. “Let’s go over to the orchard. I do my best thinking over there.”

Without waiting, she turned, waved them on, then strode off in the direction of the nearest grove of sourfruit trees. Thorn and Kira exchanged a bemused glance, then followed.

As soon as they’d stepped into the shade under the trees, Morgan turned and plunked herself down cross-legged in the grass. Thorn and Kira sat beside her.

“How are you?” Kira asked, touching her daughter’s arm.

“I’m okay. I don’t have as many of the bad dreams anymore.”

“That’s good to hear,” Kira replied, smiling and squeezing her arm.

“I guess, yeah. Doctor Dan says that they should get further and further apart. They’ll never go away, though.”

“We are just the sum of our memories,” Thorn said. “Everything that happens to us becomes part of who and what we are.”

Thorn had been staring into the grass as he said it. In the silence that followed, he looked up to find both Kira and Morgan staring at him.

“What? I can’t be philosophical?” he said.

They both grinned, then Morgan launched into a long, rambling description of life on the farm, the myriad events that had happened since she’d returned here, friends she’d made with the Marines—a stream of consciousness chatter that went on and on. Neither Thorn nor Kira objected, though. It did his heart good to see Morgan being all bubbly and effusive, exactly the way a twelve-year-old should. Kids really were resilient, weren’t they?

Eventually, Morgan’s talk edged in the direction of the war, as Thorn knew it would. She stopped and looked at Thorn.

“Did I ever tell you about Mister Starman, dad?”

“You’ve mentioned it. Or him, I guess. He was your doll.”

“He was, yeah. I had him for as long as I can remember. He was the only friend I had after—”

She stopped and swallowed hard.

“It’s okay, honey. Take your time,” Kira said.

She nodded. “After I ran away from you, dad. And I’m so sorry for that.”

“Don’t be, Morgan. You were, how do I put this? You were facing things I don’t think any other human being has faced, ever. And I made matters worse for you by trying to take away your ability to use magic. I was trying to change you, make you into something you aren’t. That wasn’t right, and I’m sorry for that.”

Morgan smirked. “So I guess your sorry and mine cancel out, then?”

“I think that’s how it works, yeah. Something like that, anyway,” Thorn replied, smiling back at her.

Morgan’s face suddenly turned serious again. “Anyway, there was something I wanted to talk to you guys about.”

“Okay. We’re both listening,” Kira said.

Morgan pulled up her knees to her chest and hugged them, then stared at a sourfruit tree. “I think I made the Nyctus.”

Thorn started to laugh, but he stopped when he saw that his daughter was being serious. Kira just stared at her.

“Why would you ever think that?” Kira finally asked.

Morgan went on to explain what she had tried to do on Tāmtu, how she’d tried to magically fiddle with time itself, to pull the ship called the Pool of Stars out of the past and into the present. She’d wanted to change the artwork emblazoned on it from Una’s Ass to Morgan’s Ride. Instead, she lost control when the Nyctus she called the Monsters launched a magical assault on her. In the process, she changed the humans aboard the Pool of Stars into the only other type of creature she knew about—the Nyctus. Her words were a liquid tumble, gaining speed as she darted from concept to event to feeling, all in a voice so leaden with certainty that Thorn and Kira both reached out to touch her, so tangible was her pain. Her burden.

Her imagined guilt.

“So it was me.” Tears suddenly sprang from Morgan’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. “I made them. This whole war is my fault.”

Kira turned her gaping stare onto Thorn. He, in turn, reached out and took his daughter’s hand, firmly.

“I hate to break this to you, Morgan, but no, you didn’t create the Nyctus.”

She sniffed and looked at him. “I did. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I changed those people into the Nyctus. I did the same thing to them you almost did to me—the thing that made me so mad at you.

But Thorn gave his head an emphatic shake. “Morgan, listen to me, okay? The Nyctus are an ancient race. We know that. They evolved over millions of years, the same way humans did. Now, I’m not sure what it was you did end up doing, but you didn’t create the Nyctus. You couldn’t have, because the Pool of Stars didn’t even exist until a couple of hundred years ago or so.”

She lifted her head and wiped her eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I am. Absolutely certain. That is, unless you sent the Pool of Stars a few million years back into the past.” Thorn paused. “You didn’t do that, did you?”

Morgan wiped her eyes again. “No. It only went back to its original time. I’m sure of that.”

“Well, there you go, then.” Thorn glanced at Kira. “This explains a lot, though. Like how the Pool of Stars ended up on our radar the way it did. Morgan must have pulled it out of the past, and that’s why it suddenly went missing—well, in the past.

But Kira’s face became a puzzled frown. “Wait. Where is the Pool of Stars, then? Morgan says it went back to its original time, but we know it didn’t.”

“Actually, we don’t know that. We know we lost contact with it, but that’s all.” Thorn stared at the rough bark of a sourfruit tree for a moment, then turned back to his daughter. “Morgan, just a few days ago we encountered a Nyctus from that planet you mentioned, Tam—er—”

“Tāmtu. It’s where I ended up going to hide after I ran away from you.”

“Right. Tāmtu. Anyway, this Nyctus was different, somehow, from the others we’ve encountered. It was—”

“Nice?”

“Uh. Sure. I guess nice is as good a description as any. It also used your name.” Thorn refrained from telling her that it cried out her name in its death throes. She didn’t really need to know that.

Morgan just nodded. “Yeah. It must have been one of the Radiant Nyctus.”

Thorn leaned toward her. “Radiant Nyctus? What do you mean?”

“The Nyctus on Tāmtu. They were my friends. I made them that way.”

“Morgan, are you saying there’s a whole planet full of Nyctus that are nice?” Kira asked.

She nodded. “They’re not like the Monsters. The Monsters just wanted to hurt me. They killed this poor creature that was trapped in a sunken ship just to try to make me do what they wanted.”

Now Kira leaned in. “What did they want you to do?”

“They wanted me to kill Mister Starman.” She glanced at Thorn. “They wanted me to kill you, Dad.” She sobbed and more tears flowed down her cheeks. “I almost did, too. They almost made me do that. I’m so sorry—”

Thorn grabbed her and hugged her close. “Doesn’t matter what they wanted you to do, Morgan. The important thing is that you’re here now, and you’re safe, and we are never, ever going to let them come near you again.” He pulled back from her, looked into her face, then wiped at her tears with his thumb. “That’s a promise. You’ve got Orbital Navy ships protecting you up there, the Marines protecting you down here, and then there’s your mom and me.”

“Between us, I think we can handle anything that might try to hurt you,” Kira said, rubbing Morgan’s shoulder.

Thorn almost added, and you can probably take care of yourself, if you want to. But he didn’t. Not because it wasn’t true. Quite the opposite, in fact. This was the girl who created Bertilak, and the Jolly Green Giant, and a freakin’ nebula, for that matter. She was also apparently the girl who created a whole sub-sect of the Nyctus, one not immediately predisposed to attack humans.

“Morgan, your mom and I have to leave again soon. We’re going to ask the ON to send some people here to talk to you, though. You’ll need to tell them every little detail about everything you just told us. Everything you can remember. Even the tiniest thing might be really important, okay?”

Morgan wiped her nose and nodded. “Okay.”

“As for making the Nyctus, you did. The Radiant ones, I think you called them. You made a split in the Nyctus so that there are some, now, that maybe we can talk to and reason with.” Thorn ruffled her hair. “You didn’t make this war happen, Morgan. In fact, you might have just given us a way to end it.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

Morgan hugged them both, then they levered themselves to their feet. Before leaving the orchard, though, Thorn stopped.

“Morgan, I have a question for you,” he said.

She and Kira both stopped and looked at him. Without even thinking, Kira laced her fingers with Morgan’s and held her hand.

A sudden flash of certainty flared through his mind at the sight.

I’m going to make a universe where they can do this again—hold hands, but without a company of troops watching over us.

“Morgan, when we do get to the point of winning this war, what do you think should happen to the Nyctus? The ones you call Monsters? Should we let them live?”

Thorn saw the sudden question on Kira’s face, but he kept his attention on his daughter.

She barely hesitated. “Yes. I would. I really don’t want anyone to die. That’s why I just want this war over, so we can all just become friends, like the Radiant Nyctus are.”

Kira’s questioning look changed to one of fierce pride that Thorn knew matched his own.

“Well, when the time comes to make that decision, I’m going to make sure you’re part of it. I think everyone needs to hear what you just said to us.”

“I just want one thing, Dad,” Morgan said.

“What’s that?”

“If you can’t win the war, if you can’t end it so that everyone gets along after, then I’d like to try.”

Once more, Thorn and Kira exchanged glances. “How do you think you’d do that, Morgan?” Kira asked.

“I don’t know. I just would. Then you guys could come here and we’d all live together,” Morgan replied, a smile creeping onto her face.

Thorn exhaled, slowly. “Okay. It’s a deal. If we can’t win the war, then yes, we’ll let you try.”

A look of shocked surprise flashed across Kira’s face, but Thorn just gave her a smile.

They said their goodbyes, hugging tightly. Then Morgan, under the watchful gaze of the Marines, headed back for the farmhouse, while Thorn and Kira started back toward the Gyrfalcon.

As soon as they were out of earshot, Kira gave Thorn a hard look. “What the hell was that? If we can’t win the war, she can try? What does that even mean?”

“Does it matter?”

“What? Yes, of course it matters!”

But Thorn just shook his head. “Kira, if we can’t win the war, it means we’re losing it. It means humanity’s on the ropes. If it comes to that, Morgan might just be our last throw of the dice.”

Kira’s mouth opened to disagree, but then her face fell into a darkened scowl. When she spoke, each syllable was fierce. “Then we better win.”

4

Thorn leaned back in his seat and watched the Hecate receding behind the Jolly. Tanner’s last words to him still rang in his mind.

“You have fun with that, now, Stellers.”

The that Tanner was referencing was none other than Alys Densmore, who sat comfortably ensconced in a seat at the back of the Jolly’s bridge. Damien sat beside her, looking self-conscious, like he’d been caught at something. Which he kind of had, considering Densmore had come along on this mission to find the truth about the Bilau.

“My fault,” he’d said to Thorn during a furtive conversation shortly after he arrived aboard the Hecate with her. “I said something like, hey, Captain Densmore, you should come along, this sounds right up your alley. I was joking. Never imagined she’d say it was a good idea.”

Thorn gave him a measured look. “How long have you been working for Densmore?”

“Almost two months.”

“Long enough that you should know that whatever you expect she’s going to do, she’ll end up doing something else. It’s in her nature, Damien. It’s what she does.”

And here she was. Thorn had tried to persuade her to travel aboard the Gyrfalcon, but Kira had already claimed that privilege. She’d even offered Thorn a triumphant grin.

“I worked for the woman for three years. Tag, you’re it,” she’d said.

Now Densmore loomed behind Thorn, her presence beating on the back of his neck like a noon sun. At least she’d decided to bring along some muscle, in the form of Tiger Team Three. Thorn had been thrilled to see Alix and Toff again. Knowing they were nearby made him feel a whole lot more secure.

“So, Stellers, I understand your daughter is doing well,” Densmore said.

Thorn swiveled the seat around. “Yes, ma’am. She’s on Nebo, living with the family that originally fostered her.”

He hoped that was the extent of the conversation. The idea of days of small talk, as they traveled and checked out leads regarding the Bilau, appealed to Thorn about as much as jumping back into the frozen lake beside the Imbrogul outpost. That might even be preferable, actually.

Bertilak glanced back. “So, exactly who should I call boss here? Thorn was tasked with this mission by Admiral What’s-His-Name, but you’re a captain, Captain.”

Thorn had to admit, the idea of Scoville’s reaction to being called Admiral What’s-His-Name amused him. But the blunt question left him staring first at Bertilak, and then at Densmore.

Who smiled and waved a hand. “Lieutenant Stellers is the commander of this mission. I’m along only as a SME, a Subject Matter Expert.”

“And what subject matter are you the expert in?” Bertilak asked.

“Whatever subject needs me to be.”

Thorn started to turn back to face the viewscreen but stopped himself. “Ma’am, I think that kind of glosses over Bertilak’s question. You do outrank me, by a lot. Are you really prepared to take orders from me?”

Densmore’s smile remained enigmatic but hardened slightly. “Didn’t we already have this conversation with Captain Tanner?”

Thorn decided to press the issue, to get it resolved now, before it became a problem later. “All due respect, ma’am, but as I recall it, Captain Tanner spoke, and you listened, and no, you didn’t object. But you didn’t commit to it, either.”

Densmore glanced at Damien. “I don’t think Lieutenant Stellers trusts me, even after all this time.”

Bertilak cut in. “Whether he trusts you or not doesn’t matter to me. I don’t trust you, Alys. You are, by definition, an untrustworthy person. You have to be, being a spy and all.”

“I am not a spy!”

“Sorry, my error. You’re the one who runs the spies, gives them their orders,” Bertilak replied evenly, somehow managing to look bland and smug at once.

Thorn gave the big alien a grateful look and got a wink in return. Thorn might have to tiptoe around Densmore’s rank, but Bertilak didn’t, especially aboard his own ship.

“And, on top of that, Alys, you still haven’t answered the question I asked. Who’s the boss here?” Bertilak persisted.

Densmore crossed her arms and settled back in her seat. “Lieutenant Stellers commands this op. You take your orders from him.”

“Thank you. That clears things up nicely. Doesn’t it, Thorn?”

Thorn nodded. “It does indeed. And that brings us to my first command decision, for which I’d really appreciate your input, Captain Densmore. Bertilak has suggested that we start looking for answers about the Bilau among the traders that do business with them.”

Bertilak sniffed. “They try to do business with them, anyway. But the Bilau aren’t the easiest to work with, it seems.”

“So you’ve traded with the Bilau before, Bertilak?” Densmore asked.

“Nope, never had the displeasure. While Thorn and Kira were off visiting their daughter, I took the Jolly and met up with a few old acquaintances. None of them have dealt directly with the Bilau either, but they had some suggestions for where to find those who have.”

“So what do you think, ma’am? We’d be dealing with civilian traders and merchants, the sort of individuals that are motivated by profit, more than anything else.”

“What’s your alternative?” Densmore asked.

“Go poking around in Bilau space and gather evidence about them directly.”

“Well, if this were my decision to make—and, just to be clear, it’s not, it’s entirely up to Lieutenant Stellers—I’d suggest going to talk to the traders. It’s not as dangerous and, like you said, they’re motivated by profit. That makes them pretty easy to predict.”

“We might also learn other useful things while we’re doing it—about the Nyctus, for instance,” Damien put in.

Thorn tapped his finger against his chin. “Okay, let’s do that. Frankly, we could snoop around Bilau space and never find anything useful. We’d be counting on getting lucky. I’d rather have too much information and have to sift through it, than none at all.”

“There’s another reason to go mix it up with some wannabe pirates, Stellers,” Densmore said.

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“It’ll be a hell of a lot more fun.”

* * *

Thorn watched as the massive, disk-shaped structure slowly expanded in the viewscreen. Called FreeFare, it was, in effect, an artificial moon, itself orbiting a moon, which orbited a ringed gas giant, which orbited a yellow-white star near the cusp of Bilau space. The rimward boundary between human and Nyctus space began not too far away. But it was a vague boundary at best, sputtering into existence in an empty void of deep space. It only finally firmed up into a real border almost ten light-years further coreward, among a cluster of contested star systems. That meant the region of space around FreeFare was unclaimed by anyone. It made it the perfect place to put a free-trading station, unencumbered by things like taxes or customs regulations.

Or, really, any regulations at all.

“So let me get this straight, Bertilak. One of your contacts gave you another contact, who’s located here? Do I have that right?” Damien asked.

Bertilak fiddled with his controls, tweaking the Jolly’s course. “Pretty much. Hasgul, an Owath, says that his entire nest pod was wiped out by the Bilau. He’s pointed me at a merchant named Ugeel, who’s based here at FreeFare. Hasgul says that if anyone has dirt on the Bilau, it would be Ugeel.”

“I’m just going to take all that as making sense,” Damien said.

Thorn gave Bertilak a puzzled look. “Who the hell are the Owath? I don’t remember them ever coming up before.”

“They apparently live on the far side of Bilau space, on the other side of a stellar rift. Aside from individual traders, we don’t see much of them anywhere near human space,” Bertilak replied.

Thorn just nodded. He’d been plying space for years now, but only in the past months had he suddenly found himself face-to-face with a multitude of other races. As big as this arm of the galaxy had seemed before, learning that so much of it was inhabited just made it seem that much bigger and more complex.

“Hey, Jolly, Gyrfalcon here,” Mol said, over the comm.

“Go ahead, Mol,” Thorn replied.

“I just got pinged by whatever passes for traffic control from that FreeFare station ahead of us. They don’t seem too pleased to have an ON ship entering their space.”

Thorn drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat. They weren’t sure how the denizens and customers of FreeFare might react to the Gyrfalcon, an ON vessel clearly emblazoned with ON insignia. They weren’t even sure if they’d react to it. Apparently, though, they had.

“Put them through to me, Mol,” Thorn finally said.

“Will do. Wait one.”

A moment passed, then a new voice came on the comm. There was no imagery with it, so Thorn could only infer what the speaker probably looked like. If he actually looked the way he sounded, then he was probably a robot tossed into a metal shredder.

“Why are you here, ON?”

“Business,” Thorn replied.

“What business?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“We don’t like having military here.”

“Okay. And?”

“And we think you should leave.”

Thorn smiled. “Okay. We’ll leave. We’ll be heading straight back to Allied Stars space, where I’ll report back to the Admiral who sent us on this mission that you refused us docking rights. I’ll then recommend to him that the ON declare an embargo against any human traffic or trade to FreeFare. Oh, and since refusing us docking makes it look like you have something to hide, then I’ll also recommend we deploy some cutters and frigates to patrol neutral space out here.” Thorn grimaced, then brightened, as if he’d just found the answer to a sticky issue. “Oh, this is all neutral space, isn’t it? Well, in that case, I guess the ON will be stopping and searching ships traveling to and from FreeFare to make sure they aren’t carrying any illegal weapons, contraband—”

“Alright, alright. Don’t get your shit into a knot. You can dock at ports twenty-seven A and B. We’re transmitting docking parameters now. Oh, and docking fees are payable in advance.”

Thorn glanced at Bertilak. “And probably two or three times the regular rate.”

Bertilak smirked back. “Two or three? I’d say five times, at least.”

Thorn grinned, then switched back to the comm. “Thank you, FreeFare traffic, you’ve been most helpful.”

“Huh.”

“Well done, Stellers,” Densmore said from where she’d been lounging at the back of the Jolly’s bridge. “You sound like you’ve done that before.”

“More like I know the type. Remember, ma’am, I had a whole life before I joined the ON. I mixed it up with some pretty sketchy types.”

Damien laughed. “I said it before, Thorn, and I’ll say it again. You should be a diplomat. You’re an absolute natural.”

The Gyrfalcon and Jolly closed on their assigned docking ports. The FreeFare traffic control system requested remote access, so their automation could guide the ships in on their final approach, but Thorn and Mol both refused. ON policy precluded it. It led to an admonishment from FreeFare that doing so waived any responsibility for damage to their ships, while holding them fully accountable for any corresponding damage to the station. But Mol and Bertilak were skillful enough pilots that, a few minutes later, both ships were snugged into their berths, airlocks pressurizing.

Alix appeared as they waited for the pressure to equalize, wearing stripped-down battle rattle—just her tactical vest and fatigues. “So what’s the plan, ma’am?” she asked Densmore.

Densmore, in turn, gestured to Thorn. “Lieutenant Stellers is the boss. I’m just along as an SME.”

Alix glanced from one to the other, then shrugged. As long as she had a chain of command to follow, she obviously didn’t care who was in it. “Okay, sir, over to you. What’s the plan?”

“I think we’ll leave your people here aboard the Jolly for now. I can’t imagine things going so badly sideways here, on FreeFare, that we’d need a Tiger Team to get us out of it. But stay by your comm.”

“Lounge around in these plush quarters and wait for a call? I think we can manage that,” Alix said, giving a thumbs up.

“As for the rest of us, let’s go find Ugeel and see if we can start getting some answers,” Thorn said, then he opened the Jolly’s airlock when the pressure finally equalized.

“To what questions, exactly?” Densmore asked, giving him a sly smile.

“Which questions we have to ask is the very question we need to answer,” Thorn said, grinning back at her.

“You’re a complicated man, Stellers.”

“I try, ma’am.”

* * *

Joined by Mol and Kira, they made their way along a broad concourse bustling with activity. Autonomous tractors rolled along on balloon tires, warning lights flashing and chimes sounding. Some carried cargo, and others passengers. Crowds of what were probably ships’ crews ambled and milled about, or else strode purposefully along on business of their own. Thorn saw some humans, but also Astarti, Philomek, Danzur, and a few aliens he didn’t recognize. Thorn and the others had little trouble finding a path among them. As soon as the crowd recognized the insignia on the ON uniforms, they tended to immediately look elsewhere and give way.

“Seems like all of these folks have a guilty conscience,” Mol said. “At least, that’s the vibe I’m getting.”

“You’re not the only one, believe me,” Damien replied.

“We’re authority figures to them, and not in a good way,” Densmore said.

Kira sniffed. “Hey, they want to stay out of our way? Works for me.”

They carried on. From kiosks and trading stands set up along both sides of the concourse, merchants vended food and drink, and hawked all sorts of goods and wares. Most of it struck Thorn as obvious junk, but a few items caught his eye. He particularly took note of a trader selling jewelry, including rings, bracelets, necklaces, and brooches, all made of some mirror-bright metal set with ruby-red stones. Rubies were Kira’s favorite stone, so before he left, he needed to pick something out for her. But he’d have to do it when she wasn’t around. He needed to get something for Morgan, too—

Thorn stopped, suddenly marveling at himself. He’d not only come to think of himself, Kira, and Morgan as a family, but the idea had become natural to him. Thorn Stellers, family man, father—partner. A reliable man, now. When the hell had that happened?

“Thorn, are you okay?” Kira asked, concern etched on her face.

“What? Oh, sorry, yeah. I just had one of those moments when you realize something about yourself.”

Mol glanced around at the seedy commotion all around them. “You had a moment of self-discovery here?”

“Did it have anything to do with those prostitutes over there?” Damien asked. “Pretty sure they’re all registered guild members.”

Thorn shook his head but then smiled. “A guild? Really?”

“Sure. Legit business, with rules, regs, even a retirement plan,” Damien said.

“How the hell do you know all that?” Thorn asked him, mildly bewildered.

Damien pointed to his face and hair. “If the spy thing didn’t work out, you think I’d waste these looks?”

“A fair point,” Thorn said gravely.

“He does have great hair,” Kira said.

“Easy, don’t want him getting more—you know. More Damien,” Thorn said, and Damien snorted in laughter. “Okay, let’s move. Captain Handsome can primp later.”

“Got it,” Damien said, grinning. They moved on along the concourse.

Bertilak’s contact had said that Ugeel, the merchant they were seeking, sold garments out of an actual storefront on the upper concourse level of FreeFare. It took them a while just to find a way out of what was apparently the lower concourse, and then a further while to track down Ugeel’s shop. They arrived just as Ugeel, a Danzur, seemed to be closing up.

“Are you Ugeel?” Thorn asked as the Danzur grabbed a strap and started to yank down a rolling gate.

“I am, and I’m closed for the day.”

“We’re hoping you’ll stay open for us.”

“Nope. I’ve had a long day, and—”

“Hasgul sent us,” Bertilak said, cutting him off.

The Danzur finally turned and actually looked at Thorn and his companions. “Hmm. Humans. And whatever you are,” he said to Bertilak. “And Orbital Navy, too. Okay, this sounds too interesting to pass up.”

Ugeel rolled the gate back up and gestured for them to enter his shop. He closed the door behind them, though, and locked it.

“When Hasgul sends people to me, it’s because they want information. And information always has a price,” Ugeel said, slipping in behind his counter.

“Everything has a price,” Thorn said, taking in Ugeel’s merchandise. The Danzur seemed to sell a complete range of apparel, from basic work coveralls to much more elaborate and formal outfits. “The question is whether it’s worth paying,” he went on, feeling the smooth texture of a pair of trousers.

“And that depends on what information you’re seeking,” Ugeel replied.

Thorn smiled at the Danzur. The little alien seemed completely unfazed by the arrival of ON officers in his shop, suggesting that he was probably more than just a tailor and cutter.

“We’d like to know about the Bilau,” Thorn said.

“Okay. What would you like to know about them? Where their space is? Their command hierarchy? How they reproduce? Knowing about them is pretty broad.”

Densmore stepped forward. “We think they’re a serious threat to the ON. Others don’t necessarily see it that way. So we’re looking for information that will tell us, one way or the other. And how much is this scarf? I have an outfit it’s perfect for.”

Thorn shot a glance at Densmore. He hadn’t taken her for the stylish sort.

“Oh, they’re a serious threat alright. You might notice a complete absence of Bilau from FreeFare. There’s a reason for that.”

“Which is?” Damien asked.

“Because they’re banned from here.”

Thorn narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

Ugeel looked at Densmore. “The scarf is four credits. Further information about the Bilau is—more than four credits.”

“Ugeel, what else do you sell? What do you have in your back room?” Bertilak abruptly asked.

The Danzur blinked at him. “Just stock. What do you expect me to have back there?”

“Stock. But I’m sure it’s more than just jackets, trousers, and socks.”

“I fully adhere to the Trade Practices Code of FreeFare—”

“I’m sure you do. I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But the Trade Practices Code of FreeFare really doesn't preclude you from doing pretty much whatever you want, now do they? They really just say that FreeFare gets its cut.”

Ugeel stared at them for a moment in thought. Finally, he shrugged. “If this was an ON sting, you probably wouldn’t be wearing ON uniforms.”

“Not to mention that the ON has better things to do than run sting operations against some FreeFare merchant,” Kira said. “Excuse me, a hardworking, honest FreeFare merchant.”

Ugeel hesitated a moment longer, then grinned. “My lady. And... the rest of you. Follow me.” He took them into the back of his shop, where the rest of his stock was on discreet display.

“Body armor,” Mol said, her tone reverent.

Thorn nodded. He saw tactical vests, blast jackets, kinetic breastplates, alloy-composite pauldrons, everything someone expecting to be shot at could possibly desire. Ugeel let them gawk for a moment, then led them to the very back of the shop, where more ordinary clothing hung on mannequins representing a range of species.

“This just looks like more of the stuff you have out front,” Damien said.

“Nice quality but, yeah, just more trousers and stuff,” Mol put in, brushing her hand along the breast of a jacket. “Ooh, velvety.”

Ugeel made a snarling sound Thorn had learned was Danzur laughter. “They look like it but aren’t. These all have a layer of ballistic-shock weave incorporated. So they’re supple and flexible like ordinary clothing, until they’re impacted by a blow, or shrapnel, or other solid projectiles. Then they instantly go rigid and become virtually impenetrable. It’s only an instantaneous effect, though, so as soon as the energy input stops, it goes back to being ordinary cloth.”

Thorn took one leg of a pair of trousers between his fingers, rubbed it, then turned back to Ugeel. “I’d like sets of military-grade body armor that incorporate this ballistic shock-weave stuff for myself and all of my companions, except Bertilak here. I’m going to send another half-dozen humans here when we get back to our ships so you can outfit them, too.”

Densmore leaned in toward him, her face taut with a puzzled scowl. “You’re planning on buying body armor from him? Why?”

“Well, first, I think that given such a large purchase, Ugeel here will be more than happy to answer just about any question we’ve got.”

The Danzur bobbed his head in an eager nod. “But of course.”

“Besides, we’ve fought most of this war in space. That won’t always be the case, though. We might very well end up fighting the Bilau on their worlds, I think.”

“A land war? Not very appealing. Those can get damned nasty,” Densmore said.

“Land and sea. But in a gravity well, yes. And we’ll do it in places that aren’t our home turf. I’ve been giving this some thought lately. We’re going to need Fleet to understand that orbital bombardments can only destroy, not hold ground. We should have learned that from our own history,” Thorn said, thinking of Cotswold, of things that would likely never exist again.

Kira moved in beside him and touched his arm. He glanced at her and gave a sad smile. He knew there were those out there wondering why, if he could bring Nebo back from oblivion, he couldn’t do the same with any world attacked by the squids. Or, for that matter, bring back anyone who died in the war. The fact was, he probably could. But he wouldn’t. The universe wasn’t meant to be rebooted and overwritten that way. The potential for profound harm far outweighed whatever benefits it might bring.

Nebo had been enough. Yes, bringing it back had also brought back their daughter. But there were limits, even for Thorn. Cotswold would remain dead.

“Anyway, good body armor is going to be important, I think,” Thorn finally went on. He turned to Ugeel. “How long do you need to get us kitted out?”

The Danzur looked from him, to Kira, to the others, a mental calculation narrowing his eyes each time. “I can fit all of you in a day,” he finally said.

Thorn leaned close to the Danzur. “Okay, so do you have any suggestions about what to do for a day here at FreeFare? Something useful that could occupy our time?”

He stared Ugeel directly in the eye as he asked it. The Danzur replied with just as steady a gaze.

“I recommend the Hub Club. It’s not the biggest bar in FreeFare, but it’s certainly the one with the most character, and the best if you’re looking to find something useful to do with your time.”

Thorn smiled and nodded. “Thanks. We’ll leave Damien and Mol here for now so you can start getting them dressed out. They can come find us when they’re done, and we’ll send the next ones to you.” Thorn straightened and looked at the others. “Meantime, let’s go check out this Hub Club, see if we can make ourselves useful.”

5

Thorn had been to his share of bars, everything from upscale places made of polished wood and attitude, to downbeat dives where your feet stuck to the floor. At first glance, the Hub Club seemed to be somewhere between the two extremes.

They entered and stopped, taking the place in—dark, starkly furnished in things made of metal, the air a dank mix of stale booze, some sort of pungent smoke, a stew of organic stinks, some of them human, all edged with a hint of desperation. Music with a heavy, thumping bass-line thundered out of speakers the size of monoliths stacked around the edges of the place.

Densmore shouted something. Thorn couldn’t hear her over the music, so he pointed at his ear and shook his head.

I said, isn’t this charming, she said, her voice bypassing the music and streaming straight into his brain.

Thorn smiled at her and shrugged, then led them toward the bar, a round edifice at the center of the broad, circular compartment. Ugeel had specifically said the Hub Club wasn’t the biggest bar on FreeFare, which was surprising. It was certainly larger than most Thorn had seen.

FreeFare really was a big place.

They reached the bar. A Philomek bartender scuttled over to them. Through some trick of the sound, the music didn’t overwhelm their voices here the way it did further away from the bar.

“Help you?”

Thorn hadn’t had much to do with the roughly avian Philomek. He’d been briefly introduced to them when he and Bertilak visited the Imbrogul for the first time. They specialized in organic goods, rare woods, exotic spices, and more basic foodstuffs, and they had a close trading relationship with the Imbrogul. Thorn had found them kind of brusque, even reclusive, but otherwise really didn’t have much of an impression of them.

Thorn nodded at the Philomek and shouted back. “Yes, you can help us. First, a ten credit tip if you lower the volume on that music to—”

The alien immediately reached under the bar and fiddled with something. The pounding roar of the music subsided some.

“—something more reasonable,” Thorn said, grinning.

“Hey!”

A chunky human trader with greasy skin and even greasier hair had stood from his table, and now stumbled up to the bar. “Hey, I paid you hard coin to keep that music good and loud!” He glanced at Thorn, his eyes bleary. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the guy who just paid even better money to have the music turned down.”

“Hell with that, here,” the man blurted out, tossing a few more credit chips onto the bar. “Crank it back up!”

The Philomek reached for the chips, but Thorn slapped a hand down on top of them. “Whatever he pays you to raise the music, I’ll pay you one more than that to keep the volume down,” he said to the bartender.

The greasy trader pushed himself close to Thorn, putting himself and his considerable stink of booze and body odor deep inside Thorn’s personal space. “You think you’re some kinda hotshot, tough guy piece of shit, huh? ’Cause you wear that ON bullshit?”

Thorn wrinkled his nose at the man’s stink but made himself smile. “I’m going to give you five seconds to back off.”

“Or what?”

“Or you’ll find yourself on the deck, crying like a little kid. Five.”

“Screw you—”

“Four.”

“Why don’t you—”

“Three.”

The man wound up and swung at Thorn.

Thorn had time to roll his eyes as the clumsy punch drove at him. He caught it, twisted the man’s wrist, then slammed out a vicious chop with his other hand that dropped the man to his knees. A kick sent him flopping to the grimy deck. Surprisingly, the man did burst into tears. It wasn’t a good look for him.

Kira leaned in beside Thorn. “Hope you don’t mind. I used Joining to make him cry.”

Thorn glanced at her. “Wow, that’s mean.”

“Yeah, but look around you.”

Thorn did. Other patrons now stared at them with wary, and somewhat resentful, awe. The Philomek bartender leaned over the bar and glared down at the fallen, weeping trader.

“Bisko here usually gets his way,” the alien said.

“Not this time, he doesn’t,” Thorn replied.

While they were ordering drinks, Thorn noticed three of the toad-like Astarti off by themselves, huddled around one of the tables he’d just realized were fastened to the deck. In fact, all of the furniture had been securely bolted down. Even the ashtrays were screwed into the tables. Moreover, drinks were served in cups made of some soft, pliant plastic. Nothing in the bar could be readily weaponized.

He glanced down at Bisko, who’d dragged himself back to his feet and was now stumbling for the exit, shooting venomous glances back at Thorn and his companions as he did. Other patrons just sneered and laughed at him, which spooled up the man’s bitter hostility that much more.

“You were here less than two minutes, and you already made an enemy,” Densmore said.

Bertilak laughed and gestured around. “I know. In a place like this, Thorn should have been able to make at least one enemy a lot faster than that!”

Thorn, though, kept his eyes on the three Astarti. All had been injured and were bandaged in various ways. Thorn glanced at the bartender. “We’ll also have a round of whatever those three are having,” he said.

When the drinks were poured, Thorn, Kira, and Bertilak each picked up one, then they made their way to the Astartis’ table. The three aliens looked alarmed as they approached, but Thorn just smiled and plunked a drink in front of one of them.

“Everything’s good, no problems here. I was just hoping we could sit with you three for a minute,” he said.

The Astarti looked at the drink, then back to Thorn. “What do you want?”

Thorn swung a leg over an empty chair and sat down. Kira sat at the last empty place. Densmore and Bertilak, unprompted, simply stood nearby and kept their attention on the rest of the bar—and potential trouble.

“I’m curious as to what happened to you guys. You were obviously in a scrap.”

“And why does that interest you?”

“Does it matter?”

The Astarti gave Thorn’s ON insignia a pointed glare. “Yeah, it does matter.”

“We’ve got zero interest in your business dealings. We’re simply looking for information to help us prove or disprove something. Now, I see three of you sitting here, swaddled in bandages, it’s obviously for a reason. That reason might be of interest to what we’re looking for. Or it might not.” Thorn pulled his lips to one side, then tsked. “Only one way to find out, yeah?”

Kira pointed at one of the Astarti’s arms, which gleamed with dried first-aid spray. “That looks like a flash burn. I’m thinking a plasma flash. You didn’t get that in a bar fight.”

Densmore’s voice rang in Thorn’s head. The one you’re talking to is worried about some cargo delivery he can’t make because their ship is damaged. They need—a self-distributing power coupling, but they can’t find one here on FreeFare.

Thorn glanced at Densmore, but she’d kept her eyes on the rest of the bar as she spoke. It was one thing to use Joining to pry open the thoughts of an enemy. But these Astarti were more like innocent bystanders, which made it feel just wrong.

On the other hand, though, they needed results, and they needed them sooner rather than later. Of course, that was really nothing more than a different way of saying the ends justify the means, an argument which had always bothered Thorn. It was, however, pretty much Alys Densmore’s basic philosophy of life.

He shook the thoughts away. This was not the time for ethical introspection.

“So a plasma flash could come from the failure of, say, a self-distributing power coupling. Those are probably hard to come by on short notice, especially for a specific model of ship,” Thorn said.

The Astarti’s eyes widened. “They are, especially when the damned manufacturers use proprietary parts.”

“I think we can scare one up for you.”

The Astarti’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How did you know about that?”

“Again, does it matter?”

“Again, what do you want?”

“Just to know what happened to you. That’s it. Nothing more.”

This might be a dead-end, Stellers, Densmore said. And you just promised a specific spaceship component to these people, which I assume you intend to create by ’casting, and that—

Well aware of all that, ma’am. Now, if you’ll excuse me, he said, cutting her off as the Astarti began to talk.

“What happened was, we were attacked.”

“By whom?”

“Was it the Bilau?” Kira asked.

The Astarti shook his head, hissing in pain as he did. “No. We don’t know who it was. The ship that attacked us didn’t match anything we recognized.”

“They came at us pretty damned fast, though,” one of the other Astarti put in.

“So we ran. And I’m not too proud to say it,” the first Astarti said. “Anyway, it was after we overcharged the engines that the power coupling blew. Between that and the hits whoever attacked us got in, well, here we are.” He gestured at his injuries, and those of his fellows. “We were able to cobble together enough of a repair to get us here, but FreeFare’s the end of the line for us, if we can’t get a replacement coupling.”

“Which you just promised us,” the third Astarti snapped, his wide-set eyes fixed on Thorn with a hard, flat gaze.

“A promise I’ll be keeping, trust me,” Thorn replied.

“You’re lucky whoever was attacking you didn’t run you down after that coupling blew,” Kira said.

“That’s the strange part. They could have, but they didn’t. Once we were able to start running, they broke off.”

“And we’re not the only ones it happened to,” the second Astarti put in, gesturing at another table on the far side of the bar. Sure enough, the figures sitting around it were just as beaten up, flash-burned, and bandaged as these Astarti.

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Bilau, Densmore said. Are you sure you want to chase down pirates, Stellers?

Not particularly keen on it, no, ma’am. But there’s something about this that intrigues me.

I’ll grant you that. Trouble is, the intriguing things can be worthwhile to run down or a complete waste of time. And the only way to find out which is to try and run it down.

You advocating we do that, ma’am?

Densmore glanced his direction, her smile sly. You’re the boss here, Stellers.

Which means I wear it if this proves to be a bust.

Or get the credit if it works out.

So what’s your recommendation, ma’am?

Densmore’s smile became briefly more genuine. Once more, you’re the boss, Stellers. You’re currently at the top. And you know what they say about the top. It’s lonely up there.

“Do you find our situation amusing?” the first Astarti asked, its gaze like cold glass. Thorn hadn’t even realized he’d been chuckling.

“What? Oh, no. I don’t find your situation funny at all. Mine, though, is funny as hell,” Thorn said.

Densmore grinned and looked away.

Kira looked at the far table of injured spacers, then back to the Astarti. “So where, exactly, did all of this happen, anyway?” she asked.

The Astarti looked at one another. “A power coupling. Within one day.”

Thorn nodded. “Done.”

The Astarti glanced at one another again. The other two finally made affirmative noises and gestures, and the first one looked back at Thorn. “The Ghosts,” he finally said.

“The Ghosts. What ghosts? What about them? Who are they?” Thorn asked.

“Not who. Where. That’s where these attacks are happening. In The Ghosts.”

Thorn leaned back in his seat. He didn’t need Joining to know that, wherever these Ghosts were, these Astarti were terrified at just the thought of them.

Which meant, he thought, that was exactly where they needed to go.

6

Morgan plodded down the steps from the farmhouse door, then she stopped and squinted across the yard. Her dad had his attention buried in the inner workings of a tractor parked just in the shade of the south sourfruit orchard. She heard a clang, then a curse, and smiled.

Okay, he wasn’t her dad. Thorn Stellers was her dad. In a way, though, this man was, too. Her foster dad. But she was still quite fond of him and was happy to accept him as her father while Thorn and Kira were away.

Movement in the orchard caught her eyes, and her smile became a frown. A pair of Marines had been patrolling on the far side of the orchard and were on their way back to their bivouac, having been relieved. She had very mixed feelings about the Marines being here. On the one hand, they did make her feel more secure. On the other, she resented them having to be here in the first place.

And, of course, she was pretty sure that she could take care of herself. Kira and Thorn had made it abundantly clear that she had to refrain from using her powers, unless it was an extreme emergency. But if it was, she suspected she could probably do way more harm to anyone trying to attack the farm, or even Nebo itself, than the Marines ever could.

She also suspected Kira and Thorn both knew that, which is why they weren’t too fussed about letting her stay here, on Nebo, in the first place.

But that made Morgan chew her lip in thought. Why hadn’t the Monsters, the dark and dangerous Nyctus, tried to come after her again? For that matter, what did they do when they weren’t coming after her? She assumed they’d be off fighting the Orbital Navy, and that’s where her mom and dad, Kira and Thorn, were. That’s why they had to leave her here. But she wasn’t sure that was the case. And now the question intrigued her in a strange, compelling way. It was as though the question really wanted Morgan to find an answer to it.

She turned and headed for the Marine bivouac, a small sprawl of prefabricated buildings sitting in a hollow on the west edge of the farm. She ambled up to the sentries standing guard at the top of the hollow. The sentries, in turn, waved to her, and one of them came forward. He was a Corporal. Or Morgan thought he was, at least. She was only just now starting to sort out the bits and bobs on their uniforms that said what rank they were, what division or battalion or whatever it was called they belonged to, and their medals. And there were lots of those. Of course, these Marines had apparently seen a lot of combat and were really good at it. She’d heard them called ee-leet, and she knew the word, but not how it applied to them as soldiers.

“Hello, Morgan. Everything okay?” the Corporal asked.

“Yeah. I was just looking for Major Fenton.”

The Corporal turned and nodded to one of the other sentries, who ran off, down into the hollow. He reappeared a moment later, Major Fenton with him.

“Hi, Morgan. I understand you’d like to talk to me,” he said.

“If you’ve got a minute.”

He smiled. “You’re the reason we’re here, so yeah, if you need a minute, you’ve got it.”

“I’d like to see the war records,” she said.

Fenton’s face became a puzzled frown. “War records?”

“Yeah. Someone must be, you know, writing it all down. What happens. And when. And where. All the battles and stuff. I’d like to see that stuff.”

Fenton rubbed his chin. “Well, we don’t have much of anything like that here. We basically just keep records of what we’ve been doing. And that’s all classified.”

“Classified?

“That means a lot of it’s secret stuff that you can only see or read if you’ve got permission to.”

“Oh. Okay. How do I get permission?”

Fenton crossed his arms. “It’s not really that simple, I’m afraid. To get permission, what we call clearance, in the ON, you need to pass certain background checks, to make sure you’re not a security risk. You also have to have a need to know whatever it is you’re reading.”

“But I do need to know it.”

Fenton offered an indulgent smile. “Tell you what, I’ll call up to the Apocalypse. That’s the big cruiser orbiting the planet. Maybe her Captain can help you out.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why do I think you’re just trying to pass me off to somebody else?”

The sentries laughed. “She’s a sharp kid, sir!” the Corporal said.

Even Fenton smiled. “She is. And yeah, I am, actually. But I really can’t help you, Morgan. Maybe the folks up there can.”

* * *

But they couldn’t. The Captain of the Apocalypse, a slim, fussy man named Ruden, unhesitatingly quoted articles and sections and such from regulations, all to say, “no, I’m sorry, I can’t give you any of that information.” Morgan asked to speak to someone else, someone who could just work around all those sub-paragraphs and clauses, but she ran into a blank wall there, too. She might be the reason they were all there in the first place, to protect her. But while she might be one of the most powerful ’casters in existence, they all saw her as a kid. She was just supposed to stay out of the way and play silly kids’ games, and do silly kids’ things, and just stay out of trouble.

Now, Morgan brooded in the shade of a sourfruit tree. She hugged her knees to herself, trying to think a way past the implacable barricades intended to seal her up on Nebo, like she’d been put in prison.

She felt her eyes widen. Prison. How many times had the Nyctus, the Monsters, locked her up? Sure, she might be a lot more comfortable and safe in this prison, but it was still a prison, wasn’t it?

She glanced at the Marines as they moved about through their daily routine. She could, if she wanted, just make them all ignore her. She could make it so she could just take over a ship, and they’d never even notice. And if any of them did get in her way, well, she could take care of that, too. Even the big ships in orbit above wouldn’t be able to stop her if she didn’t want them to.

Morgan blinked and exhaled, long and slow. Wait. What had she just been thinking? Using magic to force her way off the planet? To get what she wanted? Wasn’t that exactly what the Monsters had done? Wasn’t that why they’d put her in prison in the first place, because they wanted to force her to cooperate with them?

She looked at the Marines again. It wasn’t fair to call this a prison, now, was it? These people really were here to protect her from harm, not to cause it.

She sighed and stared at her toes. Besides, she had promised both Thorn and Kira—mom and dad, she corrected—that she’d do absolutely no ’casting, except in that one case of an extreme emergency.

Morgan stood, brushing dirt and bits of grass and leaves off her pants. She was sure that she knew something important, something Thorn and the rest needed to know. But she wasn’t sure what. She needed to find out some more stuff, first.

Maybe there was a way she could use ’casting, except in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone, to help her solve this. She just needed to figure out who else to involve. Thorn and Kira were obvious choices, but they were off doing some important mission. She didn’t want to disturb them in case she tried it while they were in the middle of doing something really dangerous. She remembered how bad things had gone on Tāmtu, when she’d been fighting off the Monsters and Bertilak had tried to contact her. The distraction had been a disaster. Everything that had happened to her after had started when Bertilak plucked at her attention, even just for that brief moment.

Okay, not Thorn and Kira. Who else? Who did she know? Who did she trust?

But there was no one, certainly not in the Navy. She—

Wait.

A slow smile spread across her face. There was someone. Someone that both Thorn and Kira respected deeply. Someone who wasn’t a ‘caster, so someone she probably wouldn’t interrupt at a bad time.

Morgan sat back down on the grass, cross-legged, and leaned back against the tree. She took a few minutes to just breathe, then reached down into that huge pool of magic that lurked just under the surface of the world.

Morgan began to ’cast.

* * *

Tanner frowned his way through the end of one report and the start of another. SITREPS in which the situation was uniformly no change were boring enough to read. But some of the authors obviously felt that it wasn’t enough to just say that, so they crafted long, convoluted reports that ended up in exactly the same place, no change. But he still had to read through it all, because you never knew when there might be a crucial nugget of information buried in them somewhere, a two somebody else happened to know, that you could put together with a two you knew, and suddenly make that critical four pop into clear existence.

Still, he needed a break. He leaned back in the chair tucked into his little briefing room behind the Hecate’s bridge, reached for a cup of tepid coffee—

And froze.

He wasn’t alone.

Tanner turned and found himself face-to-face with a young girl. She was dressed in scruffy pants and a zippered top with a hood, currently thrown back. He just stared for a moment, completely taken aback by the sudden appearance of this girl aboard his ship. Was he hallucinating now? Had the stress of the war gnawed so deeply into him that he was starting to come apart from what was real?

“Hi, Mister Tanner!” the girl said, grinning and waving at him.

The sound of her voice abruptly snapped Tanner free from his moment of stunned unreality. He recognized this girl. It was Morgan, Stellers and Wixcombe’s daughter. But she was supposed to be on Nebo.

Which is exactly what he said. “You’re supposed to be on Nebo.”

She nodded. “I am on Nebo. But I needed to talk to you.”

Tanner raised a finger to her, then tapped at his terminal, bringing up a star chart centered on the Hecate. Nebo was over seventy light-years away.

He turned back to Morgan. Or rather what was obviously some sort of magical projection or image of Morgan. “You’re on Nebo? So we’re talking, in real time, even though we’re more than twenty-five light-years apart?”

Morgan’s grin faded. “I guess. Unless it’s fake time. Is that the opposite of real time? Is twenty-five light-years a long time? And is it real? Or is it—?”

Tanner held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it, Morgan,” he said, trying to sound casual. He was anything but, though. Stellers had told him he could talk to Wixcombe and Densmore over enormous distances but hadn’t said anything about actually appearing to them. And they were all Starcasters. But here was his daughter, doing the same thing with a non-Starcaster, and with a physical presence at the receiving end. If this could be put to use for operational and strategic messaging by the ON, it would be a seismic shift in interstellar comms.

He jammed the thoughts aside. That was something to look at later. Right now, though—

“It’s okay, Morgan. It’s not important. Why are you here?”

“Because I need to know some stuff. Some navy military stuff. I have these ideas, see? These things in my head that I know, that don’t make sense to me, ’cause I don’t know what they mean. So maybe, if I can read stuff about the war, I might be able to figure out what they do mean.”

Tanner leaned forward, his fingers laced together on his desk. “What sort of things do you know, Morgan?”

She shrugged. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Just, like,” she started, then broke off biting her lip. “It’s like when you look at the clouds, and you think you see a horse. But you don’t really see a horse, of course—”

She stopped again, giggling. “Horse, of course. That rhymes!”

Tanner forced his mouth into the shape of a patient smile. “Yes. Yes, it does. But you were telling me about clouds, and how they’re like whatever it is you think you know.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right. So you think you see a horse, but no one else does. But that’s only because everyone knows what horses look like. And then someone else might point at another cloud and say, that looks like, oh I don’t know, a certain type of spaceship. But I wouldn’t know that because I don’t know all the different types of spaceships. So if I could read about all the different types, I might see the one in the clouds. You know?”

Tanner couldn’t resist a smile. Morgan’s explanation hadn’t only been charming, it had been more insightful and to-the-point than any of the SITREPS he’d read in the last hour or so. He got her point exactly.

Two plus two equals four.

Tanner gave her a firm nod. “Okay, Morgan, so what are you asking me for? What would you like me to do?”

* * *

“I’d still love to know how you managed to get Admiral Scoville to let you have all this stuff,” Major Fenton said, his arms crossed, a scowl on his face.

Morgan looked up from where she was kneeling in the dirt. “I asked.”

“Uh-huh. Well, unless you have a whole comms array hidden under your bed or something, you used magic to do it. Morgan, my orders are to make sure you don’t use magic, and to report it immediately if you do.”

“Okay. Report me,” Morgan said, turning her attention to the dirt in front of her. She’d brought them here, to the shade of the barn, in the spot where dad normally parked the tractors. The oily smell kept the animals away, so there was less chance the dirt here would be mixed with their poop. It wasn’t that she really minded animal poop. You sure wouldn’t live on a farm if you did. But she also didn’t deliberately touch or play with the stuff. Yuck.

She began to draw a wide circle in the dirt. Fenton crouched, but the scowl remained on his face. “I am going to report this, Morgan. I have to.”

“Do it.” She finished the circle, then pursed her lips, considering where to go from here.

“Fine. I will then,” Fenton snapped back.

A gruff laugh pulled both his and Morgan’s attention to the other figure standing nearby. Chief Gunnery Sergeant Barber was the Marine company’s Sergeant-Major, which apparently meant he was in charge of discipline and making sure all the soldiers wore clean socks and brushed their teeth and stuff. If Fenton was the Marines’ dad, then Barber was their mom. Morgan had told him that, once, and got first a hard glare, and then a hearty laugh.

“Yup, I suppose I am their mom!”

This time, though, he was laughing at Fenton. “Sorry, sir. Just listening to you two is like listening to me and my own daughter when I’m home on leave.” He grinned. “I’m going to report you. Oh yeah, well do it. Fine, I will then, so there—”

“We get the picture, Gunny,” Fenton replied.

Morgan, though, drew another circle, one that interconnected with the first. Then she drew a third, linked to the other two. As soon as she did, a dull rumble echoed across the fields. Morgan gasped, and they all looked up.

But she didn’t see the sun-bright glare of another Nyctus attack. She just saw clouds, dark ones, piled up to the west and moving inexorably toward them.

“Gonna rain,” Barber said.

Morgan grimaced. “Yeah. And it’s gonna ruin my drawing.” She glanced back up at the storm, then gathered magic to her, reached up and out, and deflected the storm to the north. With a negligent wave, Morgan flicked her fingertips toward the distant storm, then settled back to draw. Fenton and Barber both gaped as the ominous pile of cumulonimbus clouds, laser-white on their tops and slate grey below, suddenly changed direction.

“There,” Morgan said, then looked back at her drawing. “Anyway…”

Fenton and Barber exchanged headshakes. Barber finally spoke.

“Kid, in case I’ve never said it before, I am really glad you’re on our side.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Fenton replied, then pointed at the circles. “Anyway, what is this, Morgan? What do these circles mean?”

She pointed at them, one after another. “That’s us. And that’s the Monsters. And that’s the other ones, the ones that smell like stinky wet socks.”

“The Bilau?”

“Yeah, that’s them.”

“And the Monsters are the Nyctus, right?”

“Except for the Radiants, yeah.”

“Okay—”

“See, I feel the Nyctus come and go, and I wonder why. The ones I lived with on Tāmtu would never abandon me because, well, I made them want to protect me. So why would they leave me?”

“Sorry, Morgan, I’ve got no idea.”

“I think I do, though. Sort of, anyway.” She looked from circle to circle, biting her lip. “What does it mean when the shamans, the, um, Nyctus, aren’t fighting us? Where are they? What are they doing,” Morgan asked, peering up into the sun, one hand covering her eyes from the glare.

Now Barber knelt beside Fenton, obviously intrigued.

“They pull back, we think, to recuperate from battles. To re-arm. To rebuild ships and recover from damage whenever we win a Fleet action. That’s what we call space battles,” Fenton said.

Morgan nodded, looking down at her crude drawing. “Do we win a lot of battles?”

Fenton hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not as many as we’d like, anyway.”

Morgan paused, thinking. “Do you know how long it takes to make one of their ships?”

“It depends on the class—the, ah, size of a ship. Their big ones, like their battleships, take several months to build, just like ours,” Fenton said. He glanced at Barber, but the Gunny’s attention was fixed on Morgan’s drawing and words. He and Fenton were both obviously trying to process what Morgan was seeing—or what she thought she saw.

“Sometimes my—the shamans, they would leave me, or there would be lots of things happening. The ships in orbit would leave, and everyone was mad,” Morgan said, concentrating on the circles, and especially on the points where they overlapped. “Do you know if my dad attacked the shamans at a place called something like Messy-yay four?”

“Messier-4?” Fenton asked.

Barber glanced at him. “You know it, sir?”

“Yes. Or, no, not really, but every Marine company commander and up has to do some astrogation training so we can read the damned star charts properly. Messier-4 is a star cluster well outside Allied Stars space.

“That’s it. Did my dad ever fight there?” Morgan asked.

Fenton inhaled sharply, staring hard at the drawing, then at the girl, and then at Barber. He moved next to Morgan and crouched beside her. His next words were slow and deliberate. “Where did you learn that name? Messier-4? Where are you going with this, Morgan?”

“I heard it from one of the shamans. But he said it in their language, not ours. I just remember our name for it, Messier-4, ’cause they stole charts from our ships and I know you can’t speak squid,” Morgan said.

“And you know there was a battle there?” Fenton asked.

“Yeah. A really big one, I think. The Monsters, the shamans, they were really mad about it. They lost a lot of ships. They also lost something called a pro, er—a protype drive?”

“Protype? Do you mean prototype?” Barber asked.

“That’s it, yeah. Prototype. A prototype drive. They were really mad and upset about that.”

Fenton’s eyes went round, and he touched his comm. “Comms, Fenton here. Get me Fleet. Now.” He forced a smile, exhaled, and tried to relax, then he sat cross-legged next to Morgan. “Okay, Morgan. I think you really do know a lot more than you understand. So tell me everything you know about this battle, and especially everything you know about that prototype drive.”

7

Damien watched, wistful and more than a little nervous, as the Jolly and the Gyrfalcon backed away from their docking ports and started to maneuver away from FreeFare.

That made it official, he thought. I am truly, genuinely alone here.

He took a breath, and deliberately turned away from the view of the departing ships. He was alone because he had a job to do. And Kira, Thorn, and Densmore had all made it clear they had ample faith in his ability to do it.

“That makes three of us,” he muttered, walking back along FreeFare’s sprawling docking concourse, weaving his way through the crowds and racket, the babble and chatter and hundreds of contrasting smells. For all intents and purposes, he looked like any other scruffy human merchant on the big station. If he’d been thinking ahead, he’d have actually kept himself more apart from Thorn and the others. He couldn’t help feeling that there might be eyes watching him, even now, well aware of his connection to the ON.

Of course, he hadn’t known he’d end up alone on FreeFare, doing some more information gathering while the others zipped off to find The Ghosts. He couldn’t deny that it was a good idea, though. He’d be a lot more valuable here, doing what he did best: interacting with others.

If the Jolly and the Gyrfalcon did end up running into trouble, even a fight, well, he’d be of almost no use then. And Thorn and the others were more than capable of taking care of themselves.

Hell, Thorn could probably take on an entire squid fleet by himself if he really wanted to.

Regardless, they’d collectively decided to leave Damien here so he could continue poking and prodding his way around FreeFare, seeing what useful things he could learn. He was both unobtrusive and sneaky when he wasn’t being charming. It was an excellent skill set to have.

“Hey, you! Mister Human! You look like the discerning sort!”

Damien turned toward the voice. It came from a vendor, one of the insectoid Owath, at a kiosk alongside the concourse’s main thoroughfare. Damien recognized him as a merchant from whom Thorn had purchased a small ruby-and-silver pendant shortly before he departed FreeFare. Based on how he’d recruited Mol into keeping Kira busy, it was pretty obvious who Thorn had bought it for.

“Something for your lady friend, perhaps?” the Owath said, his voice a rough, buzzing hiss.

Damien gave a thin smile and started to shake his head but stopped. “Maybe. Suppose I wanted something suited to, well, remember someone who’s gone?”

“A question that tells a great tale of sadness. For whomever you have lost, I am truly sorry.” The merchant reached under his kiosk and extracted a small box. Opening it, he revealed a small collection of finely wrought rings, some rendered in silver, some in gold, and some in both, the metal dancing in elegant whorls.

“By no means are these the most elaborate or valuable items I have for sale. But one of them may suit your desire. They are remembrance rings, crafted by a skilled Owath jewel smith for just that purpose. It is said that the rememberer’s eye will always be drawn to one in particular—”

“That one,” Damien said, pointing at a slim band of interwoven gold and silver. He wasn’t sure why he wanted that one, but he did, because it was somehow the right one.

As he walked away from the booth, he put the ring on, a firm image of Narvez in his mind as he did. The distraction made him bump into another human—a ragged, grubby man in a long duster coat. The man glared at him over a bushy, scraggly beard.

“Eyes on where you’re going, asshole,” he snapped and strode away. As he did, Damien caught a glimpse of something concealed under the duster coat.

“Sorry,” Damien said to the man’s back. He let him gain a few paces, then started after him. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was following this man, but again, it was just right.

He glanced at the ring. Of course, it was silly to think Narvez might have reached out of the afterlife to give Damien a hand, pointing him in the right direction.

But it was also silly to think that Thorn Stellers could move an entire fleet across light-years, or his daughter could create an entire nebula, wasn’t it?

“Okay, Narvez, let’s find out what you want me to see,” he muttered, keeping his focus fixed firmly on Duster Coat ahead.

* * *

Damien considered pretty much all of FreeFare to be seedy. It was obviously a place deliberately intended to work outside the laws of—anyone, really. At best, it had a sort of rough, internal justice of its own. But establishments like the one into which Duster Coat had just disappeared, a moneychanger, were highly illegal even by the loosest standards of regulation among any of the major powers. None of them liked having their currencies traded off the regular markets and, worse, others making money off it. It was currency speculation, and the Allied Stars, along with everyone else, hated it. It was, in fact, probably one of the very few things about which humans and Nyctus agreed.

Damien sidled up to the door of the moneychanger’s shop, leaned against the wall, and pretended to read something on a data pad. At least, it appeared to be a data-pad, but thanks to Captain Densmore, it was also a nifty piece of spy tech. It could be used to isolate a single conversation in a crowded place. Even someone whispering in the Hub Club, with its music at full bass power, wasn’t safe from the little device’s ability to eavesdrop.

With the device in hand, Damien turned and entered the moneychanger’s shop.

It was dimly lit, deliberately so, to allow patrons to remain relatively anonymous. A series of a half-dozen booths were lined along the wall opposite the door, and that was about it. Damien suspected there were all sorts of hidden, or at least discreet, security systems and features as well. His forehead itched at the idea that even now, a weapon might be trained on him.

He entered an unoccupied booth and extracted a credit-tag, into which he’d already loaded currencies from every major player. That had been a bit of lucky prescience. He’d meant only to do it so that they had access to whatever currencies they needed, but it now gave him an excuse to come in and change some currency.

And break Allied Stars law in the process. Sometimes, though, you had to bend the rules for the greater good. And if they happened to crack, or even break along the way, well, that was for the greater good, too. At least that’s what he told himself now and then.

While a transaction processed, he pulled the data pad back out of his belt pouch. He’d set it to scan conversations underway, and he now read text excerpts from each one of them. The eavesdropper cycled from one discussion to the next in a continuous loop. There were five conversations currently underway—no, wait, make that four. One had ended, and one of the speakers, a Danzur, was hurrying out of the shop. Two of them immediately jumped out at him, because both mentioned the Nyctus. He set the device to focus on those two in particular. One of them seemed to involve Duster Coat, but he wasn’t sure.

Damien was switching some more currency when one of the conversations ended. A few moments later, the other one did, too. He let the device scan the ones still underway, but it didn’t ping any of the keywords he’d set it to flag if they came up. On impulse, he cancelled his last money-change transaction, packed up the data-pad, and exited the booth—

To almost collide with a pudgy man with piggish, glaring eyes. He’d been eating something spicy, Damien thought, judging from the stale, peppery cloud of breath that preceded him.

“You,” the man said.

Damien put on his best, most disarming smile. “That’s right, me.”

“You done a bunch of changing, just back and forth between monies.”

“I did, yes.”

“Why? Made no sense. Looks like you were just wasting time.”

“Whether I was or not, you got a cut of each of those transactions, didn’t you?”

“Well, uh, yeah.”

“And I’m willing to bet I did more transactions, with bigger amounts, than your average customer, right?”

“Uh. I guess.”

“So you made more money off of me than you normally would from any other customer.” He sweetened his smile. “So what’s the problem here?”

That left the man staring and blinking, like his brain had gotten stuck on the question and now spun it around and around in his mind. He obviously wanted to keep complaining, but what Damien had said was entirely true. So what could he complain about?

Damien took advantage of his puzzled distraction to slip past the man and head for the exit. “Sorry, I have other places to be,” he said in passing.

The man turned to watch him walk away. Damien waited for a shout, a sound of sudden pursuit.

But there was none, and he was able to simply walk out of the moneychanger’s shop and back into the cavernous gloom of the lower concourse.

Damien released a relieved breath.

He even felt a little smug. Maybe this spy thing wouldn’t be so bad after all. He seemed to have a knack for it, reinforced by years of diplomatic parrying and thrusting. He stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled quickly along, heading for the ramp back up to the main concourse above. In comparison to the bustle of activity up there, this part of FreeFare echoed with a desolate loneliness. Many of the shops and storefronts and kiosks down here were closed and locked down, and there were few other people around. A sudden thrill of apprehension shivered Damien, and he picked up his pace, hurrying past another sealed storefront. It wasn’t empty though, because he caught glimmers of light sneaking out through the chinks and gaps around doors and windows. There were voices, too, and one of them seemed to be in some sort of distress, pain or anger—or both.

Damien walked faster, keeping his head down. It should only take a few minutes to reach the ramp, and he’d be able to ascend back into the bubbling stew of life and light and ruckus that was the main concourse.

He’d just finished that thought and walked on another half-dozen paces or so, when someone stepped out of the shadows ahead of him. Damien saw a duster-coat, a hard gleam of eyes, and an even harder gleam of something metallic, a blade. He slammed to a stop, then spun to head the other way. He had no idea where to go, he just knew to get away. But a figure stood just a few paces behind him, blocking his way back.

“What—?” was all he managed to say before a blade the size of a broadsword slammed into his back.

* * *

Damien felt almost nothing.

As soon as the point of his attacker’s blade struck his jacket, the material went as stiff and hard as alloy deck plate. The force of the hit, which should have driven the rest of the blade right through him and out his chest in a shower of gore, was instead instantly spread over the entire surface area of his back. A fearsome blow was suddenly rendered into a gentle nudge.

A curse exploded from just behind Damien. He took advantage of the moment of confusion to sidestep and turn so he was facing both of his attackers, Duster Coat to his left, his accomplice to his right. He had no idea if there were any other attackers, and it didn’t really matter anyway, because he had nowhere to go. At best, he could run, but these men probably knew the nooks and crannies of FreeFare far better than he did and would quickly run him down. Acrid despair engulfed him. He’d been too casual, too cocky, even.

And now, he was going to pay for it with his life.

“I’ll give you my money,” he blurted out. “All of it! Just—”

“We’re gonna take it anyway,” Duster Coat growled.

“We’ll take whatever we want, everything,” his accomplice snapped.

“Including that recording thing you’ve got. Especially want that,” Duster Coat added, raising his blade.

Damien grimaced in disgust. His armored outfit, purchased from Ugeel, had saved his life once, but he couldn’t count on it again. All they had to do was strike at his exposed head, face, and neck. His neck. Wouldn’t that be a cosmic irony, if he died to a stab wound in the neck, the same way Narvez had?

All of this flashed through his mind in a second, but it was a second too long, a second that let his attacker close in to strike. “Please!” he cried, meaning to offer to surrender, to do anything to stop these men from killing him, but it was pointless, and now he was going to die.

Duster Coat swung his blade at Damien’s face.

Damien yelped and tried to duck, too slow.

But the blow never connected. A figure had materialized behind Duster Coat, snagged his arm, and spun him aside. Damien’s savior twisted Duster Coat’s arm, sending the blade clattering to the deck, then hooked a foot behind his ankle and pushed, making Duster Coat topple back. The savior lunged and struck with his free hand, slamming a fist into Duster Coat’s throat. Duster Coat hit the deck with a heavy thunk and gasped, gurgling from the blow to his neck, but his attacker wasn’t done. He straightened, leapt over Duster Coat, lashing out with a foot as he did, and smashed it into Duster Coat’s face. He landed in a crouch and half-turned, ready to take on the second assailant, but that man was already down, taken out by another shadowy figure.

Damien blinked. It had all been, as far as his stunned senses could tell, one smooth, continuous flow of movement, lasting all of two seconds, maybe three.

The mysterious figure that had taken down Duster Coat stepped in front of Damien, who had a sudden, terrifying thought. Had these two just taken out Duster Coat and his friend so they could have Damien for themselves?

The figure pulled back a hood, revealing a face. A face he recognized.

“You’re—Toff. From the Tiger Team,” Damien rasped.

“That I am, sir. You okay?”

“I—yeah. I think so.” Damien didn’t feel anything hurting, anyway. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Alys detached me and Merrill here to keep an eye on you until they got back to pick you up,” Toff said.

“Alys,” Damien said, blank on the name until it struck him Toff meant Densmore. That’s right, these spec ops people tended only to use only first names, no ranks, while on an op. It was another layer of security, one of a seemingly endless series of them, like nesting dolls made of almost paranoid caution. It worked, though, because here they were, in the nick of time.

Speaking of which—

“Wait, have you guys been following me this whole time?” Damien asked.

Merrill, a compact young woman from a high-g world with a seemingly perpetual smirk, nodded. “Pretty much. We try not to watch too close when you’re taking a leak and stuff like that, but yeah.”

Toff glanced down at Duster Coat and his sidekick, both lying mostly still, wheezing wetly and occasionally groaning. “We’d best be off before someone else comes along.”

“Yeah, more bad guys, or maybe the cops,” Merrill said.

Toff grinned. “In a place like this, not much difference.”

Damien fell into step with his saviors from Tiger Team Three. He saw they both wore charcoal-grey from head to toe, including the hoods they’d both pulled back. Some property of the smooth, tight-fitting fabric made Damien’s gaze just want to slide off it, not quite able to find a place to land and stick. They led him to a gap between two shops and retrieved a set of normal-looking, workaday clothing each, which they slipped over their remarkable camo. Even these ordinary clothes were special, essentially a one-piece outfit that could be put on or removed all at once, and in a second or two. Once they’d fastened them back into the place, Toff and Merrill looked like any of another few hundred nondescript people aboard FreeFare.

Damien’s mouth, which had gone as dry as old leather in the face of apparently certain death, finally found some moisture again. “Why didn’t someone tell me you guys were here? Why didn’t you guys tell me?”

Toff glanced in both directions of the little alley, then led the way toward the ramp to the main concourse. “Two reasons. One, when noobs know they have handlers watching over them, they tend to try to spy out those handlers. It becomes a distraction, and they lose situational awareness around themselves.”

“Noobs?”

“Sorry. Subjects new to this sort of shit are called noobs.” He gave Damien an apologetic smile. “And, due respect, but you’re a noob, Damien.”

Damien waved a hand. “Am I ever.” It made sense, he supposed. If he had known he had benefactors out there watching over him, then he knew he’d have devoted at least some of his attention to spotting them. It wasn’t just a distraction, but it might compromise his handlers, too.

Damien looked at Toff. “You said there were two reasons.”

Toff grinned. “Yeah. Reason two is that look on a subject’s face when we pull their ass out of some terrible shit and they realize they’ve been rescued at the last possible second. I love that.”

“Never gets old,” Merrill agreed.

Damien couldn’t fault them for that, either. Although it did make him wonder about something.

“Last possible second? That implies you engineer things to make it as dramatic as possible, even if it leaves us noobs hanging a bit longer.” He glanced at Toff sidelong. “Do you?”

“Sorry, can’t say anything more. Our specific SOPs are classified,” Toff replied, but his grin didn’t fade. If anything, it only got wider.

“Kinda dickish, if I may say so,” Damien said, returning the smile.

Toff laughed, then gave a small bow. “You may.”

* * *

Sitting in the scruffy room he’d rented for his stay aboard FreeFare, Damien felt a lot more secure knowing that Toff and Merrill were somewhere nearby. He wasn’t sure where, because he was still a noob and might inadvertently give them away, but it didn’t matter. They were out there somewhere nearby, keeping a careful watch over him. Guardian angels were nice, he thought. It was even better when those guardian angels were remorseless killing machines.

He scanned through the transcripts of the two conversations he’d recorded. The first mentioned the Nyctus only in passing. Someone was complaining that a Nyctus trade deal had gone bad and urged someone else to switch their money into Danzur currency to deal with them instead. That was at least potentially interesting, though. Why had a trade deal with the Nyctus fallen through? Was it just an isolated, one-off thing? Or was there more to it than that?

Maybe the second conversation would tell him more. As far as he knew, the two conversations had been completely separate from each other, so maybe this one would offer some sort of corroboration. It was tempting to think it might be full of revelations, but in Damien’s experience, that was almost never the case. Conversations were incremental things, each adding a new piece of information, slowly building up a picture over a period of time.

At least, that’s how it tended to work in diplomatic circles. He didn’t think it would be much different here.

He got just a few lines into the transcript and realized he was very, very wrong.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. He read to the end, then started back at the beginning and read again.

The conversation was between Duster Coat and someone else. Damien wasn’t sure who the other party was, but it didn’t really matter.

So the squids lost again, Duster Coat had said. Lost another big battle.

That’s, what, the third in two months? the other speaker replied.

Something like that, yeah. They lost another one of those special ships, too. There’s a real shitshow going on about that.

Holy shit, another one?

Yup. That’s three of the damned things, now. And that’s where all our money is going, Duster groused.

Damn it.

I know, right? The squids are getting their asses kicked here. Starting to think we backed the wrong side.

We can always switch, Duster offered.

Gonna have to. At this rate, the squids are gonna be done in another six months. And by done, I mean freakin’ done.

There was more, but it was some nitty-gritty stuff about the specifics of their financial dealings, and Damien didn’t care about that. Instead, he sat back in the creaky chair in his tiny room, tapped a finger on the cracked tabletop, and pondered what he’d just read.

The Nyctus had suffered three major defeats in two months, in battles Damien knew nothing about. He suspected that the ON didn’t know about them either. The squids were at war with someone else, and they were losing. It was probably the enigmatic and violent race known as the Bilau, but the speakers never said.

More to the point, though, there seemed to be a lot of concern about three special ships. The Nyctus had lost them, although whether that meant lost as in destroyed, or lost as in captured, or even something else wasn’t clear.

He considered finding Duster Coat and trying to pry more out of him somehow. He had no doubt that Toff and Merrill, behind their easygoing, almost charmingly casual attitudes, could extract information from someone if they really wanted to. But if Duster Coat was even still alive, he’d likely holed up somewhere in the massive expanse of FreeFare to recover, or he might have left altogether.

Damien sat forward. He needed to get this information to the ON. That was going to have to wait until Thorn, Densmore, and the others got back, though, or until he could otherwise make contact with the ON.

He nodded to himself, then copied the conversation transcripts onto a chip and slipped it out of the data pad. He’d give it to Toff as a backup. In the meantime, though, he’d carry on with his investigations aboard FreeFare to see what else he could find out.

As he stood and headed for the door, Damien had to admit that staring down the barrel of death had certainly taken the fun out of doing this. On the other hand, though, he had his spiffy armor and two skilled, professional protectors watching out for him. He really had no excuse for holding back.

Besides, he thought, glancing at the remembrance ring of silver and gold, he suspected that Narvez wouldn’t have given up and just hunkered down in her room.

So he wouldn’t either.

Damien stepped out of his seedy little room and headed back to work.

8

“The Ghosts is a damned good name for this place. Totally gives me the creeps,” Mol said.

Thorn nodded. “I hear that.”

“Me too,” Trixie chimed in. “Totes.”

“Totes?” Thorn asked.

“She’s channeling something called Millennial Speech. Just go with it,” Mol said with a patient air.

“Noted.” Thorn inclined his head politely, deciding that Trixie was, in fact, recovering some of her earlier quirks.

To switch things up, they’d changed places, Kira traveling with Densmore aboard the Jolly. Kira hadn’t been happy about it, but Thorn pointed out that she couldn’t complain. He’d traveled with Densmore all the way to FreeFare, so it gave him a moment of vicious glee to say, “Tag. Your turn.”

“At least you had Damien aboard to distract her. It’s going to be just her, Bertilak, and me.”

“And Alix, and the rest of Tiger Team 3, minus Toff and Merrill. They’re damned good people.”

“They are. And they work for Densmore, and guess what? They hide in the back of the Jolly so they don’t have to spend time with her, either.”

“You’ll be fine,” Thorn said with a magnanimous wave, then turned and walked off toward the Gyrfalcon’s docking port, whistling a lively tune.

They’d reached the near edge of The Ghosts not long after departing FreeFare. A particularly dusty nebula, one arm of The Ghosts started less than a light-year away from FreeFare and extended for dozens more light-years spinward and coreward. It offered the advantage of a discreet approach to within a short hop of the station, meaning ships could approach and depart FreeFare mostly without being detected. It had the further benefit of roughly connecting five rich star systems, three Danzur and two independent, and a couple of minor systems. That’s why it was such a massive blow to FreeFare that The Ghosts had swung so suddenly and decisively from discreet and safe, to exposed and dangerous.

Mol frowned over her instruments. “Uh, sir, all this dust, is it a reason to worry about the squids? Scanners are already degraded, and we’re not even inside The Ghosts yet. And the squids were using their mojo to pile even more dust on ships’ sensor inputs.”

Thorn shook his head. “I doubt it would have any effect on the Jolly at all. Bertilak’s scanners are basically magical anyway. And as for the Gyrfalcon, well, you got me aboard. I think I can handle it.”

It was a good point, though. All they knew was that The Ghosts were a hazardous place, with ships subject to attack by someone. If that someone was the Nyctus, then the dust might be an issue.

Except Thorn didn’t think it was the squids. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but somehow, this just didn’t feel like something the squids would do.

“Okay, we’re just starting to pick up something at long range. It’s from that nearest G-class star just off to starboard of our current course,” Mol said.

Thorn consulted an updated regional star chart they’d purchased on FreeFare. “That’s the Owath outpost we heard about. You know, the one that the Owath have apparently pretty much given up on because of attacks on shipping inside The Ghosts.”

“Gotcha. Want to check it out?” Mol asked.

“Yeah. Let’s. Gives us a starting place, anyway, since it’s kind of the gateway into The Ghosts.”

The Owath had rather cleverly established their outpost, called Portal, in the nearest habitable star system to FreeFare, that was also mostly outside of The Ghosts proper. It gave them a lock on traffic entering or leaving the nebula, letting them claim customs tariffs over ships and goods transiting the space they’d claimed. In return, they provided a safe haven to ships that had just finished the difficult journey through The Ghosts, including rest, recreation, refueling, and repairs—the four Rs of spaceflight. It had worked out just fine, until whatever force was prowling the nebula and attacking shipping also started hit-and-run raids on the outpost.

After just a few months of that, the Owath had given up. Portal had just proven too difficult to defend from raiders that would appear suddenly out of the voluminous dust and gas, strike, and then immediately flee back into the nebula and vanish again. Thorn wasn’t really sure what they might learn, if anything, from the abandoned outpost. But if they were going to enter The Ghosts, they needed to do it somewhere, and that seemed as good a place as any.

Mol clicked her tongue. “Got some more hard scanner returns coming in. Trixie, can you clean those up and ID them?”

“That’s wreckage. Debris. Chunks of spaceships. Big Yikes. Doesn’t make this place seem any more welcoming, does it?” Trixie replied.

“No, it does not. Can you identify whose spaceships they were, Trix?” Thorn asked.

“Judging from the lack of anything I recognize as armor, I’d say you’re probably looking at the wreckage of about a half-dozen commercial vessels, freighters, that sort of thing. Closer in toward that old outpost, there are a few things that probably are the remains of military ships.”

“Probably what’s left of whatever Owath ships they based here to try and protect Portal,” Mol suggested, and Thorn nodded.

“Okay, let’s head to the Portal system. From there, we’ll push on into The Ghosts,” he replied.

“Into The Ghosts and the unknown,” Trixie said, drawing out the unknown into a long, spooky tone, and ending on a theatrically fiendish laugh. “11/10 do not want.”

Thorn looked confused, then Mol shrugged, helpless in the face of such anachronistic speech.

Thorn responded the only way he could. “Millennials.”

* * *

As they made a pass by the planet that hosted Portal, Thorn swept his magically infused attention over it, trying to discern if there was anyone or anything alive on the surface. Kira did the same, but neither were able to detect any signs of life at all.

And as for the orbital platform that had served to dock ships so they didn’t have to enter the atmosphere to land, Thorn only had to take in the gaping rents, scorched blast marks, and shattered sections of hull to know there was nothing and no one left there, either.

He activated the comm, so Bertilak and Kira could hear him. “Okay, Mol, there isn’t much reason to stick around here. Let’s move on, into The Ghosts.”

“So, from creepy and abandoned derelicts to an even creepier and likely dangerous nebula? I can hardly wait!”

“Bertilak, did you guys copy that?” Thorn asked.

“We did indeed. You want me to lead the way into The Ghosts? The Jolly’s not as likely to be affected by all that dust and crap.”

“No, we’ll lead. We’re kind of stuck traveling at the Gyrfalcon’s best speed because its scanners aren’t magically enhanced. I’d hate to lose contact with you guys,” Thorn replied.

“Roger that. Taking up station about a thousand klicks behind you.”

“Sounds good,” Thorn said, but he was already casting his attention forward, focusing on the thickening spray of dust and gas now filling most of the forward viewer.

“Have to admit, it is kind of pretty,” Trixie said.

Thorn couldn’t disagree. The Ghosts had a solidity to it that belied its ephemeral nature. It really was nothing more than an enormous plume of dust, gas, and other debris, the remnants of one or more ancient supernova explosions. The plume had expanded over the past few million years, swallowing other star systems that now shone inside it, lighting it from within. It supposedly got its name from the fact that ships could ghost their way through it. But Trixie had pointed out there was an even older possible origin to the sinister name.

“Because it’s full of ghosts, as in, haunted by the spirits of the dead. Not sure where that one came from, but it stuck. That’s even a notation in the ON star charts for this region,” she’d said.

Mol blew a raspberry. “Spirits of the dead my ass.”

“Thorn can move whole fleets with the power of his mind. He brought his own daughter, not to mention a whole planet full of people, back from the dead,” Trixie replied, her voice smugly matter-of-fact. “Also, your denial is so typical for an Earth sign. You’re giving off real Capricorn energy right now.”

Mol rolled her eyes so hard they almost fluttered. “Astrology.”

“I—never mind,” Thorn said then tilted his head in utter confusion. “Millennial again?”

“Sort of,” Mol answered, then sniffed. “But that nickname doesn’t mean anything. Ghosts aren’t real.”

“Whatever,” Trixie said, closing the argument with a huff.

They flew on in a series of Alcubierre hops, stopping every half light-year or so to scan the dusty space around them. After the third, Mol grimaced at her tactical display.

“Scanner resolution down by forty-two percent. That’s pretty bad,” she said.

Thorn drummed his fingers on the arm of his crash couch, then sighed. “Okay, Bertilak, I take it back. You should go ahead. You’re less likely to be taken by surprise, and besides, you can scan normal space through your Alcubierre bubble.”

Bertilak acknowledged. As the Jolly swept past the Gyrfalcon, into the lead position, Mol sniffed. “Wish we could do that. That would so change the whole space-battle thing.”

“Yeah, well, his scanners aren’t even actually tech. They’re—”

“Magic. Yeah, I know. But that means you should be able to do it, right? With your mojo?”

“Except I can’t. When I’m inside an Alcubierre bubble, that’s the whole universe, as far as I’m able to tell,” Thorn replied.

“So ask your daughter how she did it.”

“I have, and she doesn’t know, or remember. It might be because she never even imagined it was impossible that she was able to make it possible—”

“Thorn, we’ve got ships up ahead,” Bertilak cut in.

“Where? How many?”

“Sending the data now. I’m making it three, maybe? No, wait, four. No, five.”

“Thorn, there’s a whole squadron of ships ahead of us, closing fast,” Trixie called out.

Thorn watched as the Gyrfalcon’s tactical system repeated the data Bertilak had sent. That little trick was tech, in the form of a data link installed in the Jolly by the ON. It only interfaced with Bertilak’s systems because Thorn had cheated and simply made it work that way. He judged the relatively minor change to reality was justified by the Jolly being able to share data with other ON ships.

And it was. Right now, it showed a growing number of ships ahead—a dozen and counting. They were visible only by their drive signatures, fusion plumes burning at full power. That struck Thorn as odd. Standard tactics, as practiced by both the ON and the Nyctus, generally had drives kept at more subdued power levels until battle was actually joined. It saved helium-3 fuel but, more importantly, made ships harder to detect at longer ranges.

“Whoever these guys are, they’re in one heluva hurry,” Mol said, narrowing her eyes at the tactical display.

“Yeah, and I think we should be, too,” Thorn replied. He tapped the comm.

“Bertilak, let’s do an about-face and pull out of here. Our ships are good, and you and Mol are terrific pilots, but those are shitty odds. I don’t like it.”

“No argument here. Coming about now,” Bertilak said.

The Jolly wheeled around, the Gyrfalcon hard on her tail. Both flung themselves into Alcubierre hops, only dropping back into normal space when they were clear of The Ghosts and close to the wrecked Owath outpost.

“Round one to the bad guys, I guess,” Mol said.

Thorn rubbed his chin. “Yeah. The end of our mission, too, unless we can prove those are Bilau ships.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“That we need help. And that means going back to the ON for it, and the best way to do that is to talk to your friend and mine, Captain Tanner.”

* * *

“Stellers, received your message. I’ve passed your SITREP and all the associated operational and tactical stuff that goes with it to Fleet. By the time the Hecate’s in real-time comms range of you, we should have an answer.”

Thorn expected Tanner to just sign off. They could only send delayed, recorded messages back and forth, because the Gyrfalcon and Hecate were more than twenty-five light years apart. But Tanner wasn’t done.

“I also had a visit from your daughter. As in, she projected herself here, right into my briefing room. I was able to talk to her in real-time. Don’t need to tell you that that’s a huge deal.”

Thorn looked at Kira and saw her eyes were just as wide as his felt. Even as powerful as he and Kira were, neither of them could ’cast real-time projections of themselves and use them to speak to other non-Casters.

“To sum up, she asked for access to records about the war. Major campaigns and battles, that sort of thing. I concurred and submitted her request to Fleet, and they concurred, too. She got a bunch of files that had been redacted as required. She seems to think she’s onto something, so if you can, or as soon as you can, at least, you should talk to her. I recommend you do so. Tanner out.”

The screen flicked back to the ON logo.

“Morgan talked to Tanner? Talked to him, in real-time, across light-years?” Thorn said.

“I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do that,” Kira said.

They stared at one another for a moment, then both spoke in unison.

“Holy shit.”

* * *

They didn’t have to wait long to see their daughter in action, either. Thorn was just about to head back to the Gyrfalcon, when Bertilak came on the comm.

“Thorn, can you come to the bridge? Like, right now?”

“Something wrong?” Thorn asked.

“No, not wrong. Weird and wonderful, but not wrong.”

Thorn, his face screwed up in a puzzled frown, turned back for the bridge. When he stepped onto it, he slammed to a halt.

“Hi, dad!”

Morgan sat cross-legged and barefoot in shorts and a loose shirt—in mid-air, about a meter off the deck. Kira and Bertilak both stood nearby. Densmore lurked in the background, a data pad in her hand, recording what was going on. Thorn caught her eye and, for the first time since he’d known her, saw that she was completely taken aback. Stunned, even. It seemed strange and wrong for Alys Densmore to be anything but in smug, even sly control. But Thorn got it. This was as far beyond the best Joining that he’d ever known, as magic itself was beyond the strictly mundane.

“Uh. Yeah. Hi, honey,” Thorn finally said. He glanced at Kira.

“Can she really hear me? Like, while I’m speaking out loud?”

Morgan rolled her eyes. “Duh. Yes, I can hear you, Dad.”

“You do realize that no one is able to do this, huh?” Thorn said, shaking his head in wonder.

“Uh, again, duh? Here I am, talking to you!”

“I know. It’s just that—” Thorn stopped, shaking his head again.

“Don’t worry, I’ve already been through all the stages of shock and awe,” Kira said.

Bertilak just crossed his arms and beamed proudly. “That’s my creator for you!”

Morgan giggled. “Stop calling me that, Bertilak!”

“But it’s true. You made me and the Jolly Green Giant out of magic. So there.” He stuck his tongue out at her.

Morgan giggled again, but Thorn cut in. “Morgan, how long are you able to do this?”

“I don’t know. ’Til I get bored, I guess.”

Densmore sniffed. “Amazing. I have to learn how to do this.” She looked at Thorn. “Imagine being able to get into places without triggering security. Hell, without leaving your office!”

“Yeah. Spying. That was the first thing I thought of, too,” Thorn replied, adding a sigh of exasperation.

“Anyway, honey, you obviously wanted to get hold of us for a reason,” Kira said.

“Oh. Yeah. I got a bunch of stuff sent to me from, um, you call it Fleet, right? Your bosses?”

Thorn nodded. “Yeah. Captain Tanner told us about it. Why did you want that stuff? What were you looking for, anyway?”

“I wasn’t sure. But I think I found it. Major Fenton seems to think it’s a big deal, so I thought I should tell you and mom about it.”

Kira shifted from foot to foot. “What? What is it?”

“I was looking at all the different battles the Monsters fought against you. I really liked reading about that big one, where you and mom saved a whole bunch of ships that got jumped by the Monsters, by the way. That was cool, you guys were so awesome!”

“Thanks, Morgan. But let’s stay on track, shall we?” Thorn said, trying not to fidget. He didn’t want to pressure Morgan, but he also wanted to know what it was that she’d discovered.

“Oh. Yeah. Anyway, I can still feel the shamans. The ones who are Monsters. I don’t let them feel me, but I feel them. I can get ideas about what they’re thinking. And they’re pretty upset.”

“About what?” Kira asked.

“About some battles they lost. There was one at—aw, poop. I always forget how to say this. Messy-er 4? Messy-ay 4? Anyway, it’s a place where Major Fenton says you guys never fought. There’s nothing in the records I got about a battle there, either.”

“Messier-4? I’ve seen it on the charts, but that’s nowhere near Allied Stars space,” Thorn said.

Densmore moved to Bertilak’s side and whispered to him. He nodded, turned, and called up a star chart, then he zoomed into the region around the cluster of stars called Messier-4. She studied it for a moment, then turned to Thorn and Kira.

“I wondered if we might have run a covert op out there, but no, we never have. To the best of my knowledge, the ON has never been anywhere even close to Messier-4.”

Bertilak pondered the chart. “It looks like it’s on the edge of Nyctus space, not far from territory that seems to be claimed by the Bilau.”

“Are you sure about that, Morgan? That was where the battle happened?” Kira asked.

“Yup. That was really clear to me. The Monsters fought a big battle at Messier-4, and they lost. They lost a whole bunch of ships, and a whole bunch of Monsters died.” She curled her lip. “Does it make me a bad person to think good, I’m glad they died?”

“After what they put you through, Morgan, no. I’d say it’s completely understandable you’d feel that way,” Kira said, offering her daughter a reassuring smile.

Thorn started to pace. “So the squids fought someone at Messier-4 and got their assess kicked. The most likely candidate for their opponents is the Bilau.” He stopped and looked at Kira. “Shit.”

“Yeah, shit is right. It’s going to be hard to convince the Council and the Admiralty that an alliance with the Bilau is not a good idea when they seem to be beating the crap out of the squids,” Kira said.

“In fact, it’s evidence to exactly the opposite effect,” Densmore put in, smiling sweetly.

Thorn grimaced. “Every other race considers the Bilau to be untrustworthy, backstabbing, warmongering assholes. But here we are considering leaping into bed with them.” He banged a fist onto the back of the pilot’s seat and swore softly under his breath.

“It’s the idea of a quicker end to the war that’s so appealing, I guess,” Bertilak said.

“Oh, it’ll be quicker alright. We’ll take out the squids, then the Bilau will take us out—”

“Uh, dad?”

Thorn turned abruptly. “Sorry, Morgan. I got carried away there.”

“Yeah, well, there’s more. See, the Monsters are especially upset about something called a proton—” She stopped and chewed her lip. “No, wait. A proto—no, a pro-toe-type, yeah, that’s it! They have something called a pro-toe-type drive, and they’ve lost two of them, and only have one more, and they’re really deps—desperate— to not lose that one, too.”

Thorn, Kira, and Densmore all took a step toward Morgan. “A prototype drive? Are you sure about that, Morgan?” Densmore asked.

“Yeah. Totally sure. It seems to be a really big deal for them.” She sniffed. “Seems to be a really big idea for you guys, too.”

“It could be, Morgan, yeah. It could be a huge deal,” Thorn said.

“We need to find out more about it. See if we can find out where it is, and if we can grab it for ourselves,” Densmore said.

Kira glanced at her. “Prototypes don’t always work. It might be nothing, ma’am.”

“True. But it might be the thing that changes the war. And that’s why we need to find out more about it.” Densmore moved to stand right in front of Morgan’s image. “Morgan, can you find out more about it? Its location would be fantastic, but anything at all could be helpful.”

“I dunno. Maybe? I’ll try and see what I can do.” Her image suddenly shimmered slightly, as though seen through hot air over a sunlit tarmac. She rubbed her eyes, then her nose between them. “Getting a headache here. I think maybe I should say goodbye.”

“Do that, Morgan. Go, rest, and don’t worry about trying this again for at least a couple of days,” Kira said. Thorn caught a new tone in her voice, one of flat certainty, that clearly was not going to take no for an answer.

He smiled. It was Kira’s mom voice.

Morgan must have recognized it, too. She gave a tired smile and waved. “Okay. Almost dinner time here, anyway. See you. Love you guys!”

Her image vanished.

“Unbelievable,” Thorn said.

“We have got to find out how she does that. That could be as much of a game-changer as any prototype drive,” Densmore mused, staring at the spot where Morgan’s projection had been.

“We might not be able to figure out how she does it. She probably doesn’t know. She just knows she can, so she does it,” Bertilak replied.

“And, if it comes to it, it will be her choice whether she agrees to let her be studied,” Kira said to Densmore. She was still using her mom voice.

Densmore seemed to recognize it, too. She smiled a genuine smile. “Of course. I might spend a lot of my time in the shadows, Wixcombe, but I’m not some sort of psychopath.”

“Besides, if you tried to force Morgan to do anything, she’d probably just erase you from existence,” Bertilak said, his voice bright and cheery.

Densmore’s smile slipped slightly, but she nodded.

“Yeah, there’s that, too.”

9

Thorn counted the ships as they popped back into normal space. He reached seventeen and thought, screw it. What mattered was the ON had taken this seriously. Fleet had dispatched a task force, and a potent one at that, built around a pair of carriers, the Hammerhead and the Vicious. But even that wasn’t the most striking part. That would be the officer commanding the task force.

It was Tanner.

Commodore Tanner.

“Congrats on the promotion, sir. Well-earned,” Thorn said.

Tanner nodded, once. “Appreciated. I think we need to get you promoted now, Stellers. You’ve been a Lieutenant long enough.”

Thorn waved a hand. “Rank doesn’t really mean much to me, sir, so it’s no big deal.”

“You’d get paid more,” Tanner said.

“Not to mention that your, ah, special lady friend currently outranks you,” Kira put in, grinning.

Thorn looked from one to the other. “Okay, you both make good points, and can we agree not to use the term special lady friend ever again?”

Kira gave a sweet smile but said nothing.

“So I see that, despite your promotion, you’re still aboard the Hecate—sir,” Densmore said, smiling her typically sly smile. She put a bit of additional emphasis on the sir.

“For now. It’s where my kitbag is, after all,” Tanner replied, then cut himself off and looked offscreen. Thorn heard someone speaking.

Tanner turned back to Thorn. “Okay, looks like it’s showtime already. Guess the squids saw us coming out of Alcubierre space and decided to try and catch us flat-footed.”

Thorn glanced at the Jolly’s tactical display. Sure enough, a swarm of ships had emerged from The Ghosts, then dropped back into normal space within striking distance of the ON task force.

“I think that clears up who owned all those ships we saw gathering inside The Ghosts,” Kira said.

“Stellers, your little force of two ships is going to stay detached, while the rest of the task force engages. I want you to keep a sharp eye out for anything that might look like it’s powered by this prototype drive, whatever the hell it is. And if you see any opportunities to exploit, go for it. Now, I’ve got a battle to run. Tanner out.”

Bertilak stared intently at the tactical display. “Huh.”

“Huh, what?” Thorn asked.

“Huh, those Nyctus ships are behaving strangely,” Bertilak replied.

Thorn leaned in to look at the display. At first, he didn’t see what Bertilak was talking about. And then he did.

“They’re just charging straight at the task force. They’re not even trying to maneuver, or do anything remotely clever,” Thorn said.

“Unless that’s what they want us to think,” Kira noted.

Densmore leaned closer to her. “My thoughts exactly. Seems like I’m starting to rub off on you, Wixcombe.”

“I mean this with the deepest respect, ma’am, but holy shit I hope not.”

Densmore laughed.

Thorn kept his attention focused on the impending clash between the two fleets. Tanner had gone for a standard deployment, a skirmish line of destroyers, frigates, and corvettes leading the capital ships. Missile frigates were already spewing ordnance at the onrushing squid ships, and the Vicious was launching her fighter wing, two squadrons of the nimble Kestrels, backed up by a squadron of heavier fighter bombers similar to the Gyrfalcon. The Hammerhead retained her fighters for now, a potent reserve Tanner could commit if he needed them to plug a hole in his battle line or run down and destroy a fleeing enemy.

The Nyctus, in contrast, just barreled headlong toward the ON ships. Their line was a ragged sprawl of vessels each apparently just burning as hard as it could to close with their opponents. They’d barely formed a coherent attack formation to begin with. Now, slight differences in thrust were smearing their line into an even more ragged, haphazard sprawl of ships. Those mounting missiles were firing them with wild abandon, pumping them out at their maximum rate of fire.

“There’s something badly wrong here,” Kira said.

Thorn nodded. “It’s like the squids are desperate to get into battle. The question is, why?”

“Do you see anything that looks like it might have a spiffy new prototype drive installed?” Densmore asked, but she got headshakes from everyone.

The fleets continued to converge. Missiles began to trigger point-defense fire on both sides. A moment later, warheads began to detonate with dazzling pulses of light.

“Okay, I have to admit, I do not like just sitting out here on the flank, playing spectator,” Thorn finally said.

“Yeah. We should be in there, helping the fleet,” Kira replied, giving a firm nod.

Densmore, who’d resumed her seat at the back of the bridge, stretched out her legs. “I will point out that Commodore Tanner didn’t say we couldn’t fight. He just said we remain detached and aren’t considered part of the fleet.”

Kira looked at Thorn. “She’s got a point. We do remain a detachment, under your command.”

“Despite being junior to both me and Wixcombe,” Densmore put in.

Thorn stared at the tactical display, then tapped his comm. “Mol, we’re going in to join the fight. Our priority, though, remains trying to track down any squid ship that might be using a new or experimental drive.”

“Best way to do that is to get in there for a nice, close look,” Mol replied.

“I don’t think she likes being a bystander any more than we do,” Kira said.

Mol made an emphatic uh-uh sound. “I absolutely do not.”

“Okay, then. Mol, you fly wing for the Jolly. Bertilak, you may join the battle at your earliest convenience.”

Bertilak grinned. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m ready right—now.”

He tapped his controls, and the Jolly shot forward, toward the battle, the Gyrfalcon falling in behind, scissoring from side-to-side as cover.

* * *

Thorn lashed out a blast of Hammer magic that slammed a bolt of force into the flank of a squid heavy cruiser like a battering ram. Bertilak spun the Jolly on its vertical axis and followed up with a stream of emerald blasts that raked the enemy ship along its length. Just a few tens of klicks away, Mol punched out a railgun shot at a squid destroyer trying to close on the Jolly, then loosed a pair of missiles for good measure. She was thorough in her pursuit of destruction. It was just one of her many good qualities.

Ahead of them, a big Nyctus battleship spun crazily as Bertilak rolled the Jolly, trying to maneuver for a shot at the next squid ship in line. The battered heavy cruiser fell away behind them, leaking atmosphere in billowing clouds from its shattered hull.

“Still don’t see anything that looks like our target,” Densmore called out, then raised a hand. “Wait. Four o’clock, low. That squid destroyer seems to be burning a lot stronger—”

There was a searing flash as the ship she’d started to indicate blew apart. A flight of Kestrels streaked away, searching out a new target.

Thorn gripped his talisman and focused on the battleship looming ahead of them. “Well, if that was a prototype drive, it’s not anymore,” he said.

But Kira shook her head. “Don’t think it was. What looked like some supercharged plasma exhaust was just its reactor losing containment.”

Thorn glanced at her. “How do you know that?”

“Because I’m the one who made the squid engineer cut out the containment system.”

“Ah. Gotcha.”

Thorn dug down into his stores of magic, drew up a slug of eldritch power, and cast it ahead of them. It enveloped the Nyctus battleship in a shimmering halo of light. Dazzling, blue-white electrical arcs flared and crackled along its hull. The battleship’s weapons immediately fell silent, knocked offline by the sudden rush of power surging through its systems. Bertilak drove the Jolly in hard, pouring streams of green energy into the massive hull. Each strike blasted open hull-plating, shredding interior compartments and structural components. Mol joined in with the Gyrfalcon’s railgun, each shot punching right through the big vessel’s hull and erupting from the opposite flank in clouds of debris. The rounds flickered away into space at hideous velocities, only visible by the gleam of dispersing gases as they left on a trip into eternity.

The battleship flashed past. As it did, Thorn ’cast again, this time sweeping his awareness across the minds of the crew. If this ship was the one mounting the mysterious new drive, then it should probably register in the minds of at least some of the squids on board, if only because their ship had just been badly damaged. Only he sensed nothing but furious desperation and burgeoning panic as the extent of the damage became clear. Nothing even hinted at experimental drives, or experimental anything else.

The Jolly and Gyrfalcon swept clear of the melee, soaring straight up and away from the plane of the galactic ecliptic. It took them out of the immediate swirl of battle, letting them take a moment to scan the squid fleet, or what was left of it.

“Mom! Dad!”

Thorn turned. Morgan’s image once more hung a meter or so off the deck. She looked haggard but determined.

Kira scowled at her daughter. “Morgan, I thought I told you not to try this again until you—"

“No, you have to listen! I can feel them. The Monsters. Their shamans. I can feel what they’re thinking.”

“Okay, and what are they thinking, Morgan?” Thorn asked.

“That you’re gonna take their special new drive. They’re really scared of that because they think it’s their only chance. That’s why they’re gonna run!”

Thorn glanced at the tactical display. He saw nothing to suggest the Nyctus were contemplating a retreat.

“Morgan, I don’t think the Nyctus are planning to run away,” he said. “They seem pretty determined to—”

Bertilak tapped his arm. “Thorn, look at the unengaged squid ships.”

Thorn did. Sure enough, they were decelerating hard, maneuvering to break off and make a run for it, probably back into The Ghosts.

“Morgan, that’s great. Thanks for your help. Now, it must be night on your part of Nebo. Go to bed,” Kira said.

“Mom, I want to see how the battle turns out!”

“We’ll let you know in the morning. Now, girl, get your butt into bed.” Kira’s tone brooked no argument.

“Aww. I never get to do what I want,” Morgan snapped, then vanished.

Thorn couldn’t help laughing. “That was such a touching family moment, and it happened across freakin’ light years, in the middle of a massive space battle.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’s twelve, and it’s late. She’s supposed to be in bed,” Kira said.

Thorn smirked. “Yes, Mom.”

His wry smile became a yelp, though, when Kira punched his arm.

* * *

“Your daughter’s right on top of things, I’ll give her that,” Tanner said over the comm. “The squids are suddenly trying to execute a general disengagement. If they weren’t so damned uncoordinated, they might even be able to make it work.”

“She’s definitely a valuable source of intel,” Densmore said, then raised a hand as Kira glared at her. “If and when she wants to be, of course.”

“Yeah, Alys, I’d say you definitely don’t want to make this kid or her parents mad,” Tanner said.

“Sir, we notice that a whole squadron of squid ships bringing up the rear of their attack have already broken off. It doesn’t look like you’ve got anything available to stop them,” Thorn said.

“We do not. We’re fully engaged with the rest of the squid fleet. We’re going to win this, but it’s going to take us a couple more hours simply due to physics and time,” Tanner replied.

“Roger that, sir. In that case, we’re going to chase them.”

“It does stand to reason that if they have some experimental prototype drive they’re trying to protect, it would be a priority to pull out of battle,” Kira said.

Densmore crossed her ankle onto her knee and leaned back in her seat. “That’s assuming it was even here to begin with.”

“Only one way to find out.” Thorn looked back at Tanner. “Sir?”

“Your show, Stellers.”

“We’re going after them,” Thorn said.

Tanner gave a firm nod. “Couldn’t agree more. Good luck in that damned nebula, Stellers. I’ll send a squadron after you for support, but it’s going to be at least two hours behind you. Unless, of course, you intend to magic things along.”

“Rather not, sir. We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, so I’d rather keep myself fresh.”

“Roger that. Tanner out.”

* * *

“Once more into the breach,” Densmore said as they started their first Alcubierre hop into The Ghosts. Fortunately, the Jolly’s scanners kept a firm lock on the squid ships. Only four of the original eight that had fled the battle were still ahead of them, the others having succumbed to battle damage and dropped out of the chase. Kira and Thorn were both certain that none of them were anything more than run-of-the-mill squid warships, with no special tech installed.

Thorn glanced back at Densmore. “Once more into the breach?”

“You’ve never read Shakespeare, Stellers?”

“Uh, no, ma’am. I prefer authors who’ve written something in the past, oh, couple hundred years, anyway.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing. Romance, sex, war, swordfights, he’s got it all.”

Thorn just shook his head. They were chasing aliens through the swirl of dust and gases of The Ghosts nebula, intent on capturing some tech that could be instrumental in the greater conflict—and talking about Shakespeare while doing it.

“Another squid ship just fell back into normal space, and—and he just. . . exploded,” Bertilak said.

“So three left,” Densmore said, sitting forward.

“Yeah, a battlecruiser, a destroyer, and a frigate. That’s still a lot of firepower, ma’am,” Thorn replied.

“So are you, Stellers. And Wixcombe. And me. We’re a lot of firepower, the three of us.”

Thorn couldn’t argue with that.

They kept up their relentless pursuit. The squid ships hopped through Alcubierre space in seemingly random directions, albeit generally deeper into The Ghosts. Were it just the Gyrfalcon, or any other ON ship pursuing them, they’d quite likely have shaken their pursuers by now. But Bertilak’s ability to keep tabs on them with his scanners, even from inside an Alcubierre bubble, rendered their wild course changes moot. The Jolly and the Gyrfalcon were bloodhounds, locked onto the trail of their quarry and doggedly staying there.

“Hey, Jolly, check out the comm, anything above the gamma-band,” Mol suddenly said.

Thorn glanced at Kira, shrugged, and switched the comm to one of its higher channels. It immediately began to emit a rising and falling tone, alternately hitting thin, high peaks of sound, then plunging deep into a tonal abyss, before rising again. It almost sounded like a slightly discordant choir, filling the Jolly’s bridge with an eerie, ethereal sort of almost-music.

Thorn used his own comm to contact Mol. “What the hell made you go looking for that, anyway?”

“I didn’t. It was Trixie. She regularly scans the comm spectrum and happened to hit on that. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Kira shivered at the uncanny wail. “Gee, thanks.”

“Well, I thought, why should I be the only one to enjoy this creepy concert?” Mol said.

Bertilak reset the Alcubierre parameters for the next hop but stopped and looked at the viewscreen. “Have to admit, that sound definitely fits with the scenery.”

It did. Ahead of them sprawled a panorama of stars, some of them seemingly torn into streaks and swirls of incandescence. They lit vast columns of gas, making them glow like luminous pillars, shot through with nearly every hue of color from red to blue. Beyond the vast towers of ancient star stuff, the deeper parts of The Ghosts were hidden behind shadowy veils, immense clouds of dust, the carcass remnants of long-dead stars.

And against all of it, that warbling howl rose and fell, like the voices of actual ghosts, lost and crying out in their desolate loneliness as they wandered the terrible splendor of the nebula.

Thorn shivered. “That’s . . . unsettling.”

He was glad when they slipped back into an Alcubierre bubble, shrinking the universe down to a less sinister, much more peaceful place.

10

The Nyctus had given up. They hadn’t surrendered, but they’d obviously reasoned out that they weren’t going to shake Thorn’s little force. They dropped back into normal space on the edge of a titanic sweep of dust and gas that swirled around a big star, a red giant. Such an ancient star stood out starkly among so many brighter, hotter young ones, making Thorn wonder just how old it was.

“As stars go, it’s damned old,” Mol said. “Trixie figures it to be one of the oldest stars on record.”

“It probably doesn’t have long for this universe, though. I’d expect it to go supernova very soon, which is going to be one hell of a show. It’s also going to completely rearrange this nebula,” Trixie chirped.

“Now, by very soon, what do you mean, Trixie? How soon is very soon? Are we in danger here?” Thorn asked.

“I’d estimate it could collapse and explode any time between now and, oh, let’s say a million years from now,” the AI replied.

He glanced at Kira. “Well, that narrows it down.”

“I think we can afford to take the chance,” Kira replied.

Two of the Nyctus ships, the destroyer and the accompanying frigate, had come about. The frigate loosed a volley of missiles at extreme range. Mol clicked her tongue at that, skidding the Gyrfalcon from side to side as she prepared to jink and dodge. The ships’ point-defense systems should be able to stop them, but there was no sense taking chances.

“I’ve been wondering something. If they’ve got a fancy new drive, why aren’t they a whole hell of a lot faster than this?” she asked over the comm.

“We don’t know what this drive does, though,” Densmore replied. “For all we know, maybe it’s just more fuel efficient, or smaller, but not necessarily more powerful.”

“No. That’s not it. They’re not installed. They’re carrying them,” Kira said, eyes narrowed as she watched the two squid ships charge at them. “Glorified transports. This is a navy on the edge.”

“Edge of what?” Mol asked.

“Defeat,” Thorn said, nodding at Kira’s thinking. “Complete defeat.”

But he pushed his attention past the two attacking ships, at the receding bulk of the battlecruiser. Curious, he pulled out his talisman and crafted a ’casting, then he swept his magical gaze across the big ship.

Bingo.

“Mol, can you take on one of those approaching squid ships on your own?” he asked.

“Uh, probably. Why?”

“Because we’re not going to stop and get mixed up in a fight. Kira, Captain Densmore, and I will do our best to take out the destroyer, or at least disable it, then carry on. We’ll leave the frigate, and mopping up, to you.”

In answer to Kira’s puzzled look, Thorn gestured at the battlecruiser. “Like you said, a glorified transport. That ship is carrying the prototype drive. The crew are desperate to get it back to—I’m not sure where. There’s a squid base somewhere here in The Ghosts, but they seem hesitant to even go there.”

Kira looked at the tactical display, then closed her eyes. Thorn waited. After about half a minute, she opened them again. “You’re right. It’s that battlecruiser we want.”

“Then let’s go get it.”

Bertilak adjusted his controls, angling the Jolly toward the Nyctus destroyer. It immediately opened fire, pouring missiles into space as fast as it could shoot them. Bertilak wove the Jolly from side-to-side, up-and-down, spinning and gyrating as he raced them through the storm of incoming fire. Mol swooped toward the frigate, flinging the Gyrfalcon around just as hard. The two ships had to split their fire, trying to track two small, nimble vessels on different trajectories, while bracing themselves for the counterattack.

A missile detonated close enough to the Jolly to bathe her in incandescent plasma. A railgun bolt slammed into her somewhere aft, making Thorn glance back sharply. Alix and most of Tiger Team 3 was still back there. But he couldn’t do anything about that right now because he had a job to do.

Thorn narrowed his eyes at the destroyer, then gripped his talisman hard enough that he could feel the grit that seemed to perpetually cling to it scraping under his fingers. That familiar reek of burning filled his nostrils, and he used it as a focus for his thoughts. Magic streamed into the talisman, and through him. Gritting his teeth, he shaped it into a titanic extension of his own hand, a Hammer ’casting that reached out from the Jolly as they swept past the destroyer.

His gaze fixed on the destroyer, Thorn flung out his arm, then snapped his fist closed. Something slammed the destroyer hard, as though it had just flown into something solid. Then its near flank peeled back, a long strip of hull plating and structural members ripped from it as the Jolly raced past, Bertilak pumping shots into the stricken ship as they did. In his mind, Thorn hung onto the shredded debris as long as he could, keeping his fist tightly clenched until the Jolly had flashed by the destroyer and it fell behind them.

Thorn gasped out a breath and glanced at the tactical display. Bertilak popped open a window on the viewscreen, showing the view behind the Jolly as she sped on.

The Nyctus destroyer slewed aside, fishtailing like she skidded on unseen ice. A vast cloud of vented atmosphere trailed in her wake. A few seconds later, she bent just ahead of her drive section, then snapped into two pieces, trailing debris and bodies.

Thorn found the others staring at him, eyes wide.

“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Densmore said.

Kira and Bertilak just nodded. Thorn dropped his talisman into his lap and slumped back in the Jolly’s co-pilot seat. “I will point out that it’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said.

“Well, considering I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do that, you make it look pretty damned easy,” Kira said.

“Mol, how are you doing?” Thorn asked over the comm.

“Hmm? Oh, not bad. This asshole’s proving a little tougher than I thought, but I shouldn’t be too far behind you.”

While she spoke, Thorn checked out the Gyrfalcon’s progress on the tactical display. Mol spun and danced around the frigate, landing railgun hits and slipping in a missile shot at close range that delivered a devastating blow. Like the rest of the squid ships, the frigate’s return fire was haphazard and uncoordinated, as though every weapons mount just fired as fast it could in the hopes of hitting something. Mol just didn’t give them the chance.

Thorn switched his attention back to the battlecruiser. She was close enough, now, that they could see the damage she’d taken from Tanner’s task force. Blast marks scorched her hull. Direct impacts had left gaping scars and rents, some of them still leaking wisps of atmosphere. She was still a formidable ship, though, outgunning the Jolly by a big margin.

“So how do you want to do this?” Bertilak asked. “We can attack for sure, and probably eventually win. With you three on board, in fact, I’d say we’ll win sooner rather than later, but do you really want to destroy this ship if it has that drive on board?”

“No, of course I don’t,” Thorn said, then glanced around the bridge. “Any ideas?”

“Well, if you don’t want to destroy them, then you kind of have to make them surrender, right?” Kira said.

“Which means you need to give them a good reason to surrender. Something that will make it clear they’re a lost cause,” Densmore put in.

Thorn rubbed his chin for a moment, then nodded at the image of the battlecruiser. Bertilak had held back, keeping the range open, but the squid battlecruiser fired a defiant volley of missiles, anyway.

Thorn ignored them, trusting Bertilak and the Jolly to deal with them. Mol, too, since she’d finished off the frigate and was now racing after them.

“Kira, can you Join with me, and then the crew of that battlecruiser, enough to make sure they all know what’s happening?” he asked.

“I’ll give it a try,” she replied, closing her eyes. A moment later, Thorn felt the soft touch of her mind against his.

Done, she said. Her voice only whispered in the back of his thoughts, not as firm and assertive as usual. It was because, he figured, she was spreading her Joining across dozens of minds, a diffuse web of talent that was gentle but insistent.

Thorn grabbed his talisman again, wove magic into a ’casting, a Joining of his own, and hurled his consciousness across the void. He sought one Nyctus in particular—the battlecruiser’s captain.

And there he was.

He drove his awareness at the squid captain like a guided warhead. He encountered a thin veil of resistance from a shaman somewhere aboard the ship, but he slammed through it and carried on until the squid captain’s thoughts rang in his mind.

You have no hope of defeating us. Even damaged, our ship is more than a match for your puny little craft.

The words thundered in Thorn’s mind with bold hostility, but he could sense how brittle they were, how bleak despair echoed just under the defiant shell.

Whatever. We both know that’s not true. You might have us outgunned, but let’s face it, I can probably rip your ship apart all by myself, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

We have powerful shamans on board—

Shaman. Singular. She tried to stop me from reaching you. Guess what? It didn’t work because here I am.

I refuse—

I don’t care. Refuse, don’t refuse, it’s going to come out the same either way. Again, you know it, and I know it. So how about thinking of your crew?

What do you mean?

You’re carrying a prototype drive. I want it. Surrender your ship to us, let us have the drive, and you and your crew can be on your way.

I don’t believe you. This is just an excuse to close in and destroy us.

That would be terminally stupid, wouldn’t it, since I just made it clear I want that drive.

A surge of rage flooded across the Joining. I will scuttle this ship before I let you—

Thorn slewed the trajectory of his magic. He reached out, grabbed the captain, and pulled. As he did, he momentarily altered the nearby hull, changing it from unyielding alloy to just the idea of unyielding alloy, but without substance. The captain swept through it, then Thorn let go, flinging the captain away from the battlecruiser and into space.

He shifted back into a Joining, this time with Kira, using diffuse connections she’d established with the rest of the crew as a conduit for his own ’casting. It was a whole series of weak links to the squids’ minds, but it was enough for his purpose.

Let me be clear. You do not let, or allow, or cause or permit anything when you’re in my sphere of influence. Does anyone else want to be adrift in the black, frozen and alone? The choice is yours, and I might add this is far more generous than I should be.

A long moment passed. Thorn could feel the consternation, bordering on panic. The final, black despair. The voice that finally spoke back was that of the shaman.

We surrender.

Excellent choice. Power down your weapons and prepare to have us come aboard. Oh, and if I find that drive has been sabotaged, every one of you will spend your last seconds choking in vacuum. Slowly.

An abyss of despair gave way to a reluctant, but final acceptance.

Thorn severed his connection to the shaman and backed out of Kira’s thoughts. She did the same, and they both sat for a moment, blinking at one another.

“Well?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn glanced at him. “Well what?”

Bertilak rolled his eyes. “What happened?”

Thorn just stared at him, confused, then understood. From his perspective, and Densmore’s, Thorn and Kira had merely sat in silence for a few moments.

“Oh, they’re surrendering to us.”

“You managed to convince their captain to stand down? Good work, Stellers,” Densmore said.

“Nope, I didn’t convince their captain at all. That’s why he’s now drifting away from his ship, somewhere off their port quarter. That convinced the rest of them to give up.”

Densmore’s eyes widened, and for an instant, her façade of cool, professional calm cracked.

“Remind me to never piss you off, Stellers,” she finally said.

He smiled at her. “If it comes to that, I absolutely will, ma’am, believe me.”

* * *

“This is the weirdest boarding action I’ve ever done,” Alix said, glancing at the squids standing nearby. She kept her rifle raised into her shoulder, alert. The rest of Tiger Team 3 did the same, forming a tight perimeter around Thorn, Densmore, and Kira.

“Oh, I don’t think our Nyctus friends here will be giving us any trouble,” Thorn said, glancing around. They stood in the battlecruiser’s depressurized hold, fully vac-armored up. The external hatch stood open, revealing the Jolly about a hundred meters away.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Kira said, eyeing the prototype drive. It was essentially a cylinder, about five meters long and one around, with a few bulbous protuberances extruded from it here and there. Even the metallic sheen of its housing was bland, which told Thorn it was early in the production process.

“Again, it might not be much. We won’t know until we get a chance to test it,” Densmore replied.

One of the Nyctus stepped forward, its own vac-suit gleaming in the wan light. It was the shaman. She’d been plugged into their comm for the sake of easy communication. Alix aimed her rifle at the creature’s head, but Thorn waved her off.

“It is the pinnacle of our technology. If we had been able to get it into mass production, we’d be having a very different conversation right now. Probably aboard one of your ships, captured by us,” the shaman said, doing her best to sound rebellious.

Thorn, though, just returned a derisive snort. “Yeah, yeah. And if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to. Although I will tell you this. Next time you decide to start a war, don’t. Just don’t.” Thorn turned so the shaman could see his face through his helmet’s visor. “You can take that to your leadership. If you ever cross us again, or even so much as threaten a human, I will see to it that your race is wiped from existence. To the last of you. Is that clear?”

The shaman said nothing but simply stepped back again.

“Okay, folks, let’s get this thing aboard the Jolly and head back home,” Thorn said, starting to ’cast.

* * *

Tanner actually grinned across the comm. Grinned. “Damned good work, Stellers. Same with you, Wixcombe. And Alys, I gather you were there, too.”

“You wouldn’t be the first Commodore I’ve told to bite me—sir,” Densmore said, grinning right back.

Tanner laughed. It seemed, though, he’d reached his quota of good humor, and it faded from his face. “What you didn’t do, though, was find any good reason to not ally with the Bilau,” he said.

Thorn sat forward and leaned toward the comm terminal. “Actually, sir, I think we did.”

“Alright. What am I missing here?”

“The Nyctus are done, sir. They’ve been defeated. That last fleet action was basically a death ride,” Thorn said.

“I can vouch for that, sir,” Kira put in. “I saw it in the minds of all the squids aboard that battlecruiser. They’ve given up. They’ve lost the war, and they know it.”

Densmore sat up. “I have to agree, Commodore. The squids somehow managed to get themselves into a two-front war against us and the Bilau. It was too much for them.”

“Just what would have happened to us if someone hadn’t gotten the Danzur on our side,” Bertilak added, giving Kira a sidelong look.

Kira shrugged in response.

Tanner tapped his chin. “Okay, those are good points. I’m going to go back to Admiral Scoville and suggest we reach out to the Nyctus, see if they’re willing to negotiate a cease-fire with a view to a peace agreement.”

“Which leaves the Bilau,” Thorn said.

“Indeed it does. That’s going to be our next job, I think. If we don’t need them as allies against the squids anymore, then we’re going to have to decide what sort of relationship we do want with them.”

“It’s probably going to be war, sir. Based on what we’ve learned about them, I can’t see any alternative. They’re not going to be happy as the number two power in this part of the galaxy,” Thorn replied. “Or any galaxy, for that matter. It’s their nature.”

Tanner nodded. “Like I said, I’ll take this to Admiral Scoville. Meantime, this task force is returning to friendly space. Assume you’re coming with us, so consider yourselves no longer detached.”

Thorn made to sign off, but Tanner raised a hand. “Stellers, I have a question for you. Is what I’m hearing about how you dealt with that squid captain true? You simply tossed him into space, right through the hull of his own ship?”

“Yes, sir. I figured a suitably dramatic gesture might sway the rest of the crew. Is there a problem?”

“For me, no. For a lot of the other Captains in this task force, yeah, kind of. The idea that magic can do that is making everyone a little uncomfortable, I think.”

“Tell them not to worry, Commodore. I doubt that anyone but Stellers, and maybe his daughter, are capable of it in the first place,” Densmore said.

“Assumed as much, but still good to know. And I seem to say this at least once a month, but damned if I’m not glad he’s on our side,” Tanner muttered, shaking his head.

11

Thorn stepped out of the Gyrfalcon’s airlock under a gloomy overcast that clamped a lid of dull, grey cloud over Code Nebula. He wasn’t used to the place being so socked in. In fact, Code Nebula had a reputation for being mostly sunny and hot. But he reminded himself that this overcast wasn’t natural. It had been crafted, and was being maintained by a cadre of Starcasters. The point was to create a visual block from orbit so that any surreptitious eyes trying to spy on the base would see nothing but cloud. It was crude, sure, but also very effective.

“Okay, Mol, I’m not sure how long I’m going to be. You might as well go scare something up to eat,” he called back into the fighter.

Mol’s dark face popped out of the hatch. “Code Nebula mess food? Oh, yes, please!” she said, then stuck out her tongue and made a retching sound.

“I ate here for months. The food isn’t that bad.”

“I have a refined palate.”

“She really does,” Trixie put in. “If you ever want to hear Mol really complain, just hang around her at mealtime. One time, she tried something called a burrito and I thought there was going to be a fistfight between her and the chow worker.”

“There was hot lettuce in it, you glorified speakerbox. I was well within my rights to pick a fight,” Mol said, aggrieved.

“Can’t really argue. Sorry, Trix. I’m with Mol. Lettuce should be cold. Or in the trash,” Thorn admitted. “And with that, I’m out.” He waved and began walking toward the clustered buildings of Code Nebula proper.

Approaching them revealed something else Thorn wasn’t used to. Code Nebula was swarming with ON personnel.

When Thorn first arrived here, the base had been a relatively out-of-the-way place, devoted to the very niche business of training Starcasters. Now, it was a central hub for ON ops, hosting the Starcaster Corps headquarters, and a variety of other installations, from signals intelligence to psychological warfare. Anything that wasn’t directly involved in operating, fighting, and maintaining ON warships had seemingly been relocated to Code Nebula. Densmore hinted that her own HQ may be moving here. Thorn suspected it already had, especially given the ominous presence of some heavily fortified and guarded bunkers sitting off by themselves in the middle of a sprawling, open field of grass.

As he approached the buildings, he felt a sudden tingling surge of magic. The Starcasters maintaining the wall of denial around the base recognized him and immediately let him pass. That wasn’t just a part of the base’s new and expanded purpose. The prototype drive was here, and Fleet was determined that no one—Nyctus, Bilau, or otherwise—should be able to discover that. Accordingly, fifty Starcasters working in shifts of ten were maintaining the denial ’casting around Code Nebula around the clock.

To an outside observer, the base would seem entirely unremarkable. It would still obviously be a military installation, but it wouldn’t seem to be any busier than would be expected for a facility of its size. Once through the obfuscating veil, though, the true magnitude of what was going on here came rushing into place all around Thorn.

Code Nebula was a hive of activity.

He wended his way among cargo containers laid out in specific patterns around the base, some incoming and yet to be unloaded, others outgoing and awaiting pickup. Logistics personnel hurried and scurried among them, scanning ID tags on the containers with portable readers. A chunky, six-wheeled contraption had just driven into place over one of the containers, and now hoisted it up into its belly for transshipment somewhere else. Thorn did his best to stay out of the way and stick to the main road passing through the bustling logistics yard, making his way into the base itself.

More personnel thronged here, too. There were still courses running, confirmed when Thorn had to step aside and let a platoon of recruit Starcasters jog past, their instructor shouting out a cadence. The woman leading them saw Thorn, recognized him, and waved.

“Hey, sir! Good to see you!” She shouted at her platoon, “Everyone say hello to Lieutenant Commander Stellers!”

The response boomed back in a chorus made a little ragged by panting. “Hello, Lieutenant Commander Stellers!”

Thorn smiled and waved back, then carried on, aiming himself at the base HQ building.

“Lieutenant Commander Stellers, huh? It’s about time,” a voice said.

Thorn turned and saw Kira striding toward him, her face split in a broad grin. “When did that happen?” she asked, pointing at his rank insignia, still shiny and unblemished.

“At Code Gauntlet. Admiral Scoville did the honors,” he replied. He’d been sidetracked to Code Gauntlet for a debriefing with Scoville and his staff, while Kira had carried on here, escorting the Nyctus drive.

“Well, Captain—sorry, Commodore Tanner did threaten to promote you,” Kira said, giving Thorn a tight hug.

Thorn chuckled as they disengaged. “It’s only been four days. Not complaining, though.” As he spoke, he caught a Commander he didn’t recognize passing by and frowning, apparently at their overt display of affection. Thorn readied himself for an objection, but the woman seemed to recognize them both, then turned hastily away and hurried on.

“Reminds me of Narvez,” Thorn said.

“Yeah, except Narvez wouldn’t have hesitated to jack us up for fraternizing, or some such thing,” Kira replied.

They both took a moment to look into the distance, toward Sentinel Hill, where Narvez now rested with every other Starcaster who’d fallen in battle. A bigger memorial, listing the names of all who had been lost in the war and their remains never recovered, stood starkly against the grey sky.

“Anyway, when I heard that Mol had landed, I came looking for you. I’m supposed to bring you to the lab,” Kira said.

“The lab?”

“You’ll see.”

* * *

Thorn studied the Nyctus drive, now mounted in a frame and secured in a heavily protected vault in “the lab.” This had turned out to be a secret research installation buried several tens of meters underneath Code Nebula. Thorn had had absolutely no idea it was here.

“How long has this place been around?” he asked one of the researchers, a young woman in a lab smock hovering over an instrument array.

“Hmm? Oh, at least three years, which is when I was posted into it,” she replied.

At least three years. That meant it was longer, which meant it might have been here while he was sweating his way through recruit training all those years back. Now that was a well-kept secret.

Tanner appeared from a side room, chatting with another researcher in coveralls. Thorn knew he was here because the Hecate was one of at least fifty ships in orbit. That meant a good chunk of the fleet was here, which struck Thorn as a little counterproductive. If you really wanted to deflect attention away from a place, why the hell would you park fifty ships in orbit above it?

He waved the thought aside. Decisions like that were way above his pay grade, and Tanner caught his eye.

“Stellers. Like you to meet the R&D boss running the show here.” He gestured at the woman beside him. She was striking, a classical beauty, the sort that artists use as the model for statues and paintings. Her coveralls took the edge off her sheer attractiveness, though, making her seem a little more human—which, ironically, just made her that much more attractive.

“Thorn Stellers, Kira Wixcombe, this is Doctor Eleanora Gaust. Doctor, these two are—”

“Responsible for recovering the drive from the Nyctus. Yes, I read the report of your chase and how you ran down that battlecruiser.” Her green eyes, somehow mysteriously dark and luminous at once, settled their gaze on Thorn. “You ejected the captain into space through the hull of his own ship. That’s remarkable, and by remarkable, I mean terrifying. You’re obviously a very dangerous man, Lieutenant Commander Stellers.”

Thorn smiled. “Thank you. I—” He stopped. “Um.”

She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? Kira said, her voice almost gleeful in his mind.

She’s okay.

Thorn, you’re literally speechless. But I get it. She is absolutely stunning. I’m not so inclined myself, but if I were, I’d be all over getting to know her better.

Really? The two of you? Huh—

You go any further down that road, and you’re going to find it goes over a cliff.

Thorn’s smile widened. “Sorry, Doctor. I haven’t been back to Code Nebula in a long time. I’m still getting used to it.” He gestured around. “I mean, how long has this facility been here?”

Good catch, Kira said, her tone dry.

Tanner wasn’t fooled, either. He briefly caught Thorn’s eye and lifted one corner of his mouth in a glimmer of a smile.

Gaust glanced around. “I’ve only been here a few months. As for this facility?” She turned her striking gaze back on Thorn. “That’s classified.”

“So, Doctor, have you figured out much about this drive, yet?” Kira asked, smoothly saving Thorn from himself.

“We have, actually. We’ve studied it thoroughly, right down to the details of its metallurgy. We then took it to an uninhabited moon, hooked it up to a fuel supply, and powered it up. We only idled it, but we could tell right away that it's an amazing piece of tech. Without going into the convoluted details, it uses some clever particle physics trickery to get about 20 percent more thrust out of a standard ON fusion drive unit, while using about one-third the fuel. And that’s from a device that’s about 60 percent smaller and not much more difficult to build.”

“This is—it’s a leap forward. And yet, they were transporting it?” Thorn asked, curious.

Tanner lifted a finger. “A word from an amateur historian? This kind of thing has happened before. A man named Private Theodore Grabowski took a picture, with a camera—a primitive form of video capture—hundreds of years ago. The picture is important to us now because of what it is, not who’s in it.”

“What was it, sir?” Thorn asked.

“Two boys. Children, probably ten or twelve years old. They had no shoes and were steering a pair of oxen—beasts of burden, pulling a two-wheeled wooden cart. The year was 1945, on Earth, and the cart carried a jet engine for an atmospheric fighter. It was the most advanced piece of tech on the planet, and it was under the control of two kids with cow shit on their feet, running for their lives from American bombers.” Tanners shook his head mournfully. “The war was over, even if their leaders wouldn’t admit it. I was reminded of this event when you captured the drive because I can only hope that the Nyctus aren’t like the Germans. I pray, for all of us, that they know when to quit. That they . . . that they understand what we’ll be forced to do, in order to assure that this never happens again.” He sighed, a long, dolorous sound, but then his smile returned, irrepressible and bright. “Could have been a game-changer if the squids had managed to get it into production even a year ago,” Tanner said.

Thorn looked at the drive. “Glad they didn’t.”

“So am I, Stellers,” Tanner murmured, but his eyes were somewhere else, the smile a faded memory.

* * *

Thorn watched the image on the viewscreen intently. The Hecate had parked herself two million klicks away from the moon, an uninhabited hunk of rock orbiting the Code Nebula system’s sole gas giant. The last of the research ships had just lifted off and would be at a safe distance shortly.

The drive sat snuggly secured into a cradle, which had been rock-bolted deep into the moon’s surface. Thorn was about to witness the first test of a human-built version of the prototype drive. Whether or not this proved a game-changer to the ON’s benefit hinged on the next few moments. Having the prototype squid drive was one thing, but being able to reproduce it was something else again.

“We are fully Shaded,” Densmore said over the comm. “We should be able to maintain it for at least an hour.”

“Roger that,” Tanner said. He turned to an inset window in the viewscreen, one showing Doctor Gaust and several of her colleagues, all of them staring intently at instruments of their own.

“Anytime you’re ready, Doctor,” Tanner said.

“We’ll start the countdown in thirty seconds.”

Thorn felt the persistent, but faint tingle of the massed Shade effect in the back of his mind. Densmore, who’d been put in charge of security for the drive program, had deployed two dozen Starcasters to maintain the obscuring effect while the test proceeded. Thorn had been gratified, when reading the various operational briefs, that more and more mention was being made of the Bilau as a possible security threat. And, since the Bilau seemed to have no facility for magic at all, it seemed the most effective way to keep them in the dark about this new drive. All of that had been Densmore’s explicit doing.

“I’ve come to trust your judgment, Stellers,” she’d said to him when he asked her about it. “Or I trust it most of the time, anyway. And you seem convinced that the Bilau are bad news, so I just can’t ignore that.”

It had been gratifying, but there was still a faction in Fleet command that felt some sort of deal with the Bilau was the best way to go. Thorn knew that if this drive test failed, then they’d gain a lot of traction in their arguments. One way or another, the Allied Stars Council was getting desperate to end this war, even if it meant reaching out to an alien race Thorn was convinced were as dangerous as the squids. Maybe even more so.

“Ten second countdown starting at my mark,” Gaust said.

“And, mark.”

Thorn watched the time tick down. At one, he took a deep breath. So, he noticed, did pretty much everyone else around him.

“Ignition,” Gaust announced. An instant later, the experimental drive lit.

A tongue of fusion plasma shot across the surface of the moon. Thorn immediately saw it was a much paler, more diffuse exhaust plume than he was used to. In fact, it was more evident by its effect on the moon itself, sending dust and fragments of rock flying so fast that some of them no doubt reached escape velocity.

It kept burning.

Thorn released the breath at almost the same instant as everyone else.

“Well, it starts,” Kira said.

Tanner flicked his attention from the viewscreen to the display set into his command chair. “Looks stable, too. Any issues at your end, Doc?”

Gaust shook her head. A smile slowly spread across her face, and those of her colleagues, who were now whispering excitedly among themselves.

“None. Everything’s green. So we know it idles just fine.” She tweaked something, then looked back up. “Commodore, I’d like to start throttling it up.”

“At your discretion, Doctor Gaust,” Tanner replied.

As they watched, the drive began to spool up. The rock washed by the plasma exhaust had started to glow dull red; now, it brightened, cherry red becoming a more intense orange, shot through with flickers of yellow.

“That’s ten percent power,” Gaust said. “Going for twenty.”

The drive amped up even more. The exhaust started to sear a trench into the moon, molten blobs being flung through a glowing cloud of vaporized rock.

Gaust kept applying power. At just over 40 percent, the drive suddenly just vanished. Thorn found himself staring at the twisted wreckage of the structure that had been holding it in place, and a glowing pit scoured into the moon, now cooling back through duller and darker shades of red.

“Well, shit,” Kira said, but Tanner raised a hand.

“Verdict, Doc? What failed?”

Thorn expected Gaust to be disappointed, but her expression was anything but. “The cradle,” she said, beaming triumphantly. “We weren’t expecting a real risk of catastrophic failure of the cradle system until at least 60 percent power. But it failed at 43 percent.”

“And that’s a good thing.”

“Yes, very much so. It means our first, home-built version of the prototype drive is even more efficient than we’d hoped. If we combine that thrust with the Imbrogul anti-gravity tech—”

“We’ll have ships that can fly like proverbial bats out of hell. Well done, Doc,” Tanner said, nodding his satisfaction.

Gaust’s smile brightened even more. “Thank you, Commodore.”

Thorn glanced at Kira. Brains, good looks, and now a beautiful smile. She’s something, isn’t she?

Kira turned and, in full of view the Hecate’s bridge, poked Thorn in the ribs.

“Mmmph,” Thorn muttered.

Tanner’s eyes narrowed. “Problem, Wixcombe?”

She kept a poisonously cool glance leveled on Thorn. “Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Commander Stellers was letting his mind wander. I just wanted to ensure he remained attentive to his duties.”

Tanner stared for a moment, then understanding dawned and he nodded. “Ah, I see. Well, if you need to ensure he remains properly attentive in the future, you have my permission to do whatever you need to. That’s as long as you don’t break him, of course. We still need him to fight this war.” He looked at Thorn. “Stellers, eyes on the prize.”

Thorn rubbed his ribs absently and gave Kira a sweet smile.

“Always, sir. Always.”

* * *

“Did you have a hand in this, sir?” Mol asked, handing Thorn a data pad with a set of orders displayed on it. She’d caught up with Thorn and Kira just outside the officers’ mess and seemed excited, albeit in a subdued sort of way, and a little baffled.

Thorn scanned the data pad’s display. “Oh, wow. So your Gyrfalcon is going to be one of the first ships to be outfitted with the new drive and anti-grav tech,” he said, smiling, but his smile faded when he saw Mol’s face. She wasn’t angry or otherwise unhappy, but she didn’t look especially thrilled, either.

Thorn cocked his head to one side. “It is great, isn’t it?”

“It’s going to take me out of the line for however long the work takes. And then, I’m going to be flying an experimental ship, which is going to mean all sorts of monitoring and reports and bureaucratic shit. And new tech often breaks or needs tweaking and adjustments, which is just more time out of the line.” She gave an obviously annoyed shrug. “So is it great? You tell me, sir.”

“Well, you are being trusted with the state of the art in ON military tech. You’re being trusted not just to use it, but to test it. You’re a damned good pilot, Mol, who not only gets the best out of her ship, but always seems to get a little more. If anyone can put this stuff through its paces, it’s you.” He gave her a wry smile. “Let’s put it this way. You don’t give mediocre pilots your newest, slickest stuff. Hell, you don’t even give it to the good ones. You give it to the best ones.”

Mol finally offered a reluctant smile. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a damned good salesman, sir? Or is it a damned good bullshitter?”

“A little from column A, a little from column B,” Thorn said, laughing.

Thorn returned her salute, then entered the officers’ mess, where the warm, spicy smell of lunch beckoned. But his shouted name made him stop and turn again. He started to scowl in annoyance, until he saw it was Tanner.

It was Thorn’s turn to salute. “Sir?”

Tanner stopped. “You’re going to visit your daughter, Stellers. You and Wixcombe.”

Thorn just stared. “Sorry if I’m repeating myself, but, sir?”

“Let’s just say that Fleet was deeply impressed by her insights into the battles the Nyctus have fought, that our intel shop didn’t even know about. Like Messier-4, for instance. And even more importantly, her knowing about that prototype drive. Like it or not, she’s made herself into a—well, valuable intelligence asset barely begins to describe it. However, I made it clear to Admiral Scoville that you and Wixcombe would not be at all impressed with us subjecting her to the usual intel debriefing and analysis routine. I’m assuming that’s correct?”

“Damned right it is, sir.”

“Damned right indeed. Anyway, Fleet has agreed that the best ones to debrief her would be the two of you, her parents.”

Thorn crossed his arms and moved aside as a group of Code Nebula officers walked past and into the mess, saluting Tanner on the way. He waited until they’d passed by to speak.

“Sir, she’s a kid, and our daughter. She’s not just an intelligence asset to us—”

“No, of course she isn’t, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. But I have to put my practical hat on here, Stellers. She does know things about the squids that we never even suspected. We are fighting a war against them, one that’s been dragging on for years now, has cost untold lives, and that we’re heartily sick of having to fight. We all want to end this war, which is why there’s still talk of courting the Bilau, and—”

Thorn sighed and held up a hand. “I get it, sir. And I’m sure not going to say no for a chance to spend some time with Kira and Morgan.” He looked down at his feet. He was about to do something he’d never done before. He could only hope Tanner would understand and wouldn’t just blow him off or get offended.

“But I need something, sir. I need a promise.”

Tanner, who’d just been waiting for Thorn to go on, crossed his arms. “Not used to negotiating for things that amount to orders, Stellers. What sort of promise?”

“I need a promise that no one else will try to contact Morgan, to debrief her, or do any such spook things. It has to be me or Kira, and no one else.”

Thorn raised his head and made himself look right into Tanner’s eyes as he spoke. He hoped they’d developed enough of a mutual respect that he could presume on this man, his superior, to have his back in this.

Tanner held the stare for a moment. “Stellers, I will pass this condition you’re stipulating to Fleet. And I’ll tell them that if they can’t accept it and adhere to it, they can shove their biggest carrier up their ass and find themselves another Commodore. And then, I will come find you, because I’ll be looking for work. I suspect I’ll have most of the crew of the Hecate with me.”

Thorn hesitated because he saw nothing but earnest sincerity in Tanner’s eyes. Failing to speak, he stuck out his hand on impulse. Tanner shook it.

“Think that by now, Stellers, you’ve earned it.” Tanner’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Although, just to be clear, you’re out of chances to slap conditions on the orders I give you. From here on, I expect nothing but blind, unquestioning obedience. Do I make myself clear?”

Thorn saw the faint smile spread across Tanner’s face, the mischievous spark dancing in his eyes. He smiled back and nodded.

“You got it, sir. You order me to jump, I’ll be asking how high? on the way up.”

Tanner’s face returned to its usual, dispassionate, not-quite-a-frown. He gestured at the mess. “Join me for lunch, Stellers?”

“Glad to, sir.”

12

Kira clasped her hands together, placed them against her cheek, and batted her eyes at Thorn. “Oh, Lieutenant Commander Stellers, you’re so brave and strong and handsome, and such a dangerous man, too.”

Morgan laughed and snorted, her mouth filled with yams.

Thorn waved a hand at her to close her mouth. “It was nothing like that at all. She was strictly professional.” He spooned up another helping of mashed yams but paused with it partway to his mouth and offered a sly smile. “She did think I was dangerous, though, didn’t she.”

Kira blew a raspberry, and Morgan laughed again. From further along the table, Asher, Morgan’s adoptive father, joined in with a chuckle of his own.

“Women love us dangerous men, Thorn, and don’t you forget it,” he said.

His wife, Calie, looked at Kira. “The most dangerous thing this man does is make me wash his socks.”

Morgan made a disgusted sound. “I know, right? Ewww.”

Thorn joined in the laughter around the table. He had to admit, the vagaries of chance had given them damned fine foster parents for Morgan. Asher and Calie had two kids of their own, both serving in the ON. One of them had died aboard the Centurion, a ship whose destruction Thorn had helped investigate. The other was, as far as they knew, still alive, working a staff job at Code Gauntlet. Their loss of one child, and undoubted worry over the other, hadn’t hardened them or made them bitter, though. Even though they each had at least twenty years on Thorn and Kira, and could be more like the indulgent grandparents, they treated Morgan like their own child. They were firm and fair, and didn’t let Morgan’s ability to literally reshape reality get in the way of maintaining some pretty strict boundaries. Most importantly, they clearly loved her, and she loved them, and that’s what ultimately mattered.

Kira, still laughing, shook her head. “I do have to admit, this Doctor Gaust is one, ah, striking woman, so I can’t say I blame Thorn for being at least a little attracted to her.”

“It’s like I say. Married, not dead,” Asher put in.

“You’re just making it so that when you meet some super-handsome guy, you’re covered,” Morgan said, giggling.

Kira’s smile widened. “See? My daughter understands the need for planning.”

The dinner carried on in much the same vein, which was perfectly fine with Thorn. Until he’d experienced it, he hadn’t realized just how comforting it was, how nice it was, to simply be a family. That would end tomorrow, when he and Kira dug a little deeper into the things that Morgan knew, even if—and especially if—she didn’t realize she knew them. Tonight, though, was about this. It was about lighthearted, nonsense chatter around the dinner table.

Thorn cleaned the last food off his plate and was a little sad to do it. Beef marinated in a sourfruit sauce, mashed yams, mixed veggies, and steaming-fresh rolls were a homemade feast compared to the institutionally bland food he’d become used to aboard ON ships or on ON bases. He already knew there were no seconds because that had been his second helping. He leaned back with a contented sigh.

“That was amazing,” he said.

Calie returned a bright smile. “Thank you. Now, Morgan, dishes.”

She curled her lip and sighed. “Okay.”

Thorn started to stand. “I’ll help her—”

“You will not,” Calie snapped. “That’s Morgan’s chore. And you’re a guest.”

Thorn considered arguing, but something in Calie’s look told him there’d be no point. He sat back down and offered Morgan an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, kid. I tried.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what it’s like, being a farmworker and all,” she said, sticking out her tongue at Calie as she did. Morgan dodged back, grinning, as Calie swatted at her, then carted dishes off into the kitchen.

“You two have done such a great job of taking care of her,” Kira said.

Asher said nothing, just gave a small, modest shrug. Calie leaned forward, though, clasping her hands around her coffee cup. “She’s a wonderful girl. Given who she is and what she’s been through, she could have been something very different.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Asher said, leaning back and clasping his hands across his stomach.

Calie glanced at him and nodded. “She could have been, well, difficult—” She stopped and looked from Thorn to Kira. “Look who I’m talking to. You’re both famous Starcasters, and Thorn, you literally brought us all here on Nebo back from the dead.”

“Thanks for that, by the way,” Asher said.

Thorn smiled, abashed. “Any time.” He turned serious, though, and looked back at Calie. “Actually, most of the thanks for the person she’s become has to go to you guys. She is a powerful ’Caster, and she did go through hell thanks to the Nyctus. But when we visit here, we see a happy girl growing into a happy young woman.”

“You two are definitely doing something right,” Kira said.

“Yes, well, we need to get this war ended so she can be where she belongs—with you and Thorn,” Asher said.

Calie offered a sad smile. “When that day comes, we’ll miss her terribly. But she belongs with her real parents.”

Thorn smiled. When that day comes.

He hoped to live to see it.

* * *

Kira consulted her data pad, then leaned over the porch railing and looked up into the starry sky. “We should be able to see it any second, just a couple of degrees above the small moon.”

Morgan peered up alongside her. “I don’t see anything. Oh, wait.” She pointed. “There. Is that him?”

Thorn followed her pointing finger. A tiny point of light slid across the sky, its trajectory perfectly straight and constant. “I think so, yeah.”

“It is,” Kira said. “That’s the Jolly.”

“So how come Bertilak didn’t come down with you guys? How come he stayed up in orbit?” Morgan asked.

“He was worried he’d just get in the way, I think. He wanted this visit to be about, um, us. Our family,” Kira replied.

“Yeah, sure, but I think he’s part of our family, too, isn’t he? He shouldn’t be up there all alone.”

Thorn watched the tiny dot race across the sky and quickly vanish into the dying glow of the day. From Bertilak’s point of view, the sun would be rising again, of course.

They had invited him to join them on the surface. But, as Kira had said, he’d refused, citing a desire to let the family be the family. That was probably part of it, sure, but Thorn wondered if Morgan being his creator had something to do with it. Was meeting her like meeting a god for him?

Thorn wasn’t going to push it. Mol had brought them here, with the Jolly in company. Now Mol was gone, back to Code Nebula to have the Gyrfalcon upgraded with the new tech. But Bertilak had been determined to just remain in orbit.

“It’s like he’s watching over us,” Morgan said.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Closer by, night bugs had started to hum lazily, attracted by the lights on the porch. The night was warm, and still, and fragrant with the rich organic smells of the farm.

“He is watching over us. Or, more to point, he’s watching over you, Morgan. That’s what he does,” Kira said.

“Yeah. I think he’d stay in orbit here all the time, doing just that, if we let him. But he’s like the rest of us in thinking that the best way to keep everyone safe, you included, is to end this war,” Thorn said.

Morgan turned, half-leaning, half-sitting on the porch railing. “That’s why you’re here, huh? To find out more stuff about what I know, about the Monsters and things?”

Thorn immediately shook his head. “No. Or, yes, that’s why the ON sent us here. But, as far as I’m concerned, no. I’m here to see my daughter, to spend some time with her.”

“We are going to be asking you some questions tomorrow,” Kira said. “But for tonight why don’t we just go for a walk?”

She held out her hand. Morgan took it, and Kira led her down the steps from the porch.

“Take us to your favorite place to go at night,” Kira said as Thorn followed.

“That would be bed.”

Kira laughed. “Okay, never mind the night part.”

“I usually just go sit under the sourfruit trees, where it’s nice and shady when it’s hot.” Morgan bit her lip, then brightened. “Oh, I know. Let’s go this way.”

They started in the direction she’d pointed. Thorn glanced back, noting the Marines preparing to follow them. A full squad would never let them get more than a couple of hundred meters away from them. Of course, Thorn and Kira between them could probably muster many times the firepower any Marine squad could, but they had a job to do, and they were going to do it.

“Dad, how come you don’t make your own Bertilak?” Morgan suddenly asked, glancing back as they walked between the barn and the orchard.

“How come I—what?”

“You should make your own Bertilak. I made my Bertilak to be as strong as he needs to be. I think I wanted him to be strong enough to take care of everyone and everything he ran into.” She gave a sheepish shrug. “Mostly including you, I guess.”

Thorn exchanged a glance with Kira. Bertilak had been one of the things they’d been meaning to ask Morgan about, in fact. But this explained why Bertilak and, by extension, the Jolly, always seemed up to whatever challenge they had to face. Thorn remembered fighting Bertilak, once, in the Hecate’s gym, to settle a wager the alien and Tanner had made. Thorn made himself supremely skilled in unarmed combat through his teenage years and into his adulthood. It was the only way to survive the hard, uncompromising life he’d expected to live after being orphaned on Cotswold.

But Bertilak had been just a little better.

It had always been like that. The Jolly turned out to be as fast or as nimble as the situation demanded, its weapons strong enough to do whatever they needed to do. Bertilak had likewise been strong, quick, or smart enough to get the job done. But she’d created him when she was much younger. He and Kira had agreed that one of their foremost duties to Morgan was teaching her to use her enormous powers responsibly, and with due care to the outcome. She’d made one Bertilak. What if she made ten? Or a hundred? Or a hundred thousand?

“Making another Bertilak, or someone like him, is a really complicated matter, Morgan,” Thorn finally said. “There are a lot of good reasons not to do it.”

“Like what?”

Thorn held up his hand. “You know what, kid? We’ll have this conversation, you, your mom, and me. Just not tonight. Tonight we’re just out for a walk, as a family.”

“Okay.” Morgan’s smile was visible even in the gloom.

They walked on in silence for a moment, hearing nothing but their own footsteps, the distant rattle of a vehicle plying some rough, dirt track, and the occasional hiss of a fitful night breeze through the sourfruit trees. Thorn glanced back again. He knew the Marines were still there, but he couldn’t see or hear them. He’d have to compliment Fenton, their company commander, about that.

* * *

Morgan led them to a small, placid creek that wound across the southwestern corner of the farm. The ground here was fallow, mostly sand, but it had allowed the creek to really meander, turning and coiling back on itself in tight bends. A native tree vaguely reminiscent of weeping willows clung to its banks, drooping their fronds until they trailed in the water. Virtually no undergrowth grew among them, leaving the impression of stout columns and wispy tapestries, as though they traversed some ancient temple in the growing double moonlight. Thorn thought it was somehow charming, placid, and eerie all at once.

“I like coming here sometimes,” Morgan said, stopping and crouching beside the water. “Dad—Asher—never brings the machines down here. Neither do any of the neighbors. So it’s always like this.”

Kira glanced around. “It’s lovely.”

“But kinda creepy at night,” Morgan replied, chuckling. “It’s better during the day. But I don’t mind it in the dark with you guys here.”

Thorn’s first thought was, You might be the most powerful ’Caster in existence, Morgan. You really don’t need to be afraid of anything.

But he brought that thinking to a stop. When he’d pulled her back from oblivion, he’d tried to change Morgan, to surgically remove her ability to use magic from her. The result had been a disaster forever written in the glowing sprawl of the Witch Nebula. Now, here she was telling them that she was at least a little bit afraid of the dark, perfectly normal for a kid her age. It just underscored how badly he’d screwed that up, his good intentions notwithstanding. Changing Morgan to save her from her own magic, and the feelings it provoked in others, hadn’t been the answer. Offering her love and support, both their own and that given to her by Calie and Asher, had been.

Morgan, still crouching, looked into the water, which was black, dappled with hints of softly golden moonlight. “I still hear them,” she said.

“Hear who?” Kira asked.

“The Monsters. I still hear them in my head sometimes. They’re why I don’t like it out here when it’s dark. It’s too much like the places they live.”

Kira and Thorn sat beside her on the creek bank, one to either side. Without even speaking, they’d both known to sit close to her, a protective bubble of warmth around her. Morgan went on to start divulging some of the details about what had happened to her while she’d been a captive of the Nyctus. They’d both simply listened, saying nothing and just letting her speak. Thorn found it tough, though, because the more he heard, the more he wanted to go and make the Nyctus answer for it.

Monsters was exactly the right word for them.

Morgan turned to Kira. “Mom, you got taken by them for a while, didn’t you?”

Kira nodded. “I did.”

“And, like you, she never gave into them, not even once,” Thorn said.

“And, like you, I was rescued by your dad,” Kira replied, smiling at Thorn through the gloom.

“I seem to recall you being there, too,” Thorn sat back. “Credit where it’s due, right?”

Kira reached out and took Thorn’s hand. He squeezed it back. Morgan glanced from one to the other, smirking. “You guys need to get a room.”

“We’ve got one back at the farmhouse,” Thorn said.

“Umm. Eww. Kissing,” Morgan said, then she made a face like she’d bitten a lemon.

They laughed together, but Morgan turned serious again. “Anyway, I still hear them sometimes. They’re scared. And angry. But mostly scared. I thought that would make me happy. You know, knowing that they’re frightened and upset, like I was when they had me.” She looked from her mother, to her father. “But I’m not. I just feel kind of sad. Sorry for them. That’s—is that dumb?”

Thorn put his arm around her. “No, it’s not. What that is, is you being good. In your heart. Your core.” He thought about the number of times he’d gleefully watched squids die in battle, often because of some ’casting he’d done, thinking it served them right. Morgan’s compassion made him feel more than a little shame.

Morgan suddenly leaned forward, touched the water with a fingertip, and traced out a circle. It remained inscribed in the water, glowing slightly, undisturbed by the slow current passing through it.

“The shamans are scared because this is their circle,” she said.

“Their circle?” Kira asked.

“Yeah. Like, where they live. All their stars and planets.” She shrugged. “This is how I explained it to Major Fenton, anyway.”

“That’s okay, Morgan. We get it. Go on,” Thorn said. They hadn’t intended to talk about the Nyctus, the Bilau, the war, or any of the rest of it until tomorrow, but this was clearly something Morgan needed to talk about now.

She drew two more circles, each intersecting the other two, and all three overlapping in the middle. She explained as she drew. “This is where we live, where all the humans are. And this is the—um—Bilo—Bib—”

“Bilau,” Thorn said.

“Yeah. Them. Anyway, the Monsters are really really scared of the Bilau—more than they are of us, even.” She touched the Bilau circle and pushed its intersection deeper into Nyctus space. At the same time, the Nyctus territory became smaller and more and more like a crescent. Thorn couldn’t help noticing that more of human space got taken up by the Bilau, as well. Of course, this was an abstract way of portraying the three races and their territories, so that was just geometry.

Wasn’t it?

Thorn leaned in, suddenly curious. For some reason, the bottoms of both the Nyctus and Bilau circles were slightly flattened. Morgan must have drawn them that way deliberately. “Morgan, can you draw where the galaxy is compared to this? The best you can, anyway?”

“You mean all the stars?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at the drawing for a moment, biting her lip, and then began to draw. Eventually, she’d outlined a rough boundary for the upper and lower edges of the galaxy, and she made them swell outward in what was clearly meant to be the galactic core.

Thorn studied the shimmering diagram in the water. Human space lay entirely above the galactic ecliptic plane. But Nyctus and Bilau space butted against it and, for some reason, were both truncated by it.

“Morgan, these flat spots here, and here. Did you mean to draw these circles like that?” he asked.

Morgan stared. “Uh. Yeah. I guess so. I just draw them the way that feels right.”

Thorn looked at Kira. “Do you see it?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

“What? What are you guys talking about?” Morgan asked.

Thorn pointed below the flattened circles. “This line is called the galactic ecliptic plane. That’s a fancy name for the line that divides the galaxy into its upper and lower halves if you looked at it edge-on.” He narrowed his eyes. “For some reason, all of this space below that plane seems to be empty, as though the Nyctus and the Bilau have decided to stay out of it.”

“Or were forced to stay out of it,” Kira said.

But Morgan shook her head. “It’s not empty. I get echoes from there, too, sometimes. They’re way quieter than the shamans, but they’re there. They’re, I don’t know, sad. Like an old, old song almost no one remembers anymore.” She clasped her hands together. “I thought it was more of the Monsters, but I guess not.”

Thorn extracted his battered old storybook and held it. “I’m going to try something. Why don’t you guys Join and try it along with me?”

Kira moved to take Morgan’s hand, and then Thorn’s. He dove down into his reservoir of magic, drew a prodigious plume of it back up as he ascended, and then cast his awareness far off into the void.

For a long time, there was nothing except the warm thrum of stars and the cooler, dimmer tones of dust and gas. As he launched his thoughts through Nyctus space, he caught hints of the frantic, furtive whispers of the distraught shamans Morgan described, but he ignored them and pressed on, pouring more and more eldritch power into sustaining his empathetic journey.

Eventually, the harsh buzz of the Nyctus fell behind him. Now, ahead, loomed nothing but more of the void, more stars and dust and gas singing their mindless songs of dumb matter. There was nothing else.

Maybe Morgan was wrong. Or maybe she was actually right and these echoes she’d heard had just been hints of the Nyctus. He was about to give up and end the ’casting when he caught a sudden flicker of something deep and sad, a mournful mental dirge unlike anything else his mind had ever touched.

Thorn swallowed. It hurt. The sorrow that flowed through his mind, as slow and cold as the creek in which Morgan had drawn her circles, hummed among the stars with such a desolate melancholy that he found himself wanting to cry.

Even so, he doggedly kept himself immersed in the slow funeral procession of dreary tones, waiting to see if they changed, or somehow incorporated an actual message. But they seemed just to be a carrier wave of sadness, and he eventually just backed out.

Kira sat, wiping her eyes. Morgan now stood, her head cocked, her small hands held out, palms up to the moonlight. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she sobbed. Kira put her arms around her, making the small, warm noises of comfort that mothers have made for their hurt children since the dawn of time.

Morgan finally sobbed out a question. “What was that, dad?”

Thorn opened his mouth to answer, but movement off to his right caught his eye. He turned and saw two Marines, Fenton and his company’s Gunnery Sergeant, had emerged from the darkness. They both looked at him with worried, questioning looks. He waved them off with a thumbs-up, and they both nodded and quietly withdrew again.

Thorn put his arms around Kira and Morgan, then he looked at his daughter.

“I don’t know what that was. So let’s go find out.”

13

Thorn had long ago become accustomed to the cramped confines of the Hecate. Being jammed into an alloy shell fragrant with the mingled reek of electronics, lubricants, old food, and stale sweat was just the nature of the beast. But the Hecate was now cramped beyond even the standard set by, well, the Hecate.

Tanner was becoming known through the Fleet as the Commodore who refused to leave his ship. Commodores and Admirals normally chose a capital ship to hoist their flag. But Tanner had stubbornly decided to remain aboard the Hecate, appointing his former XO, Commander Reynaud, as her new Captain and elevating Osborne, former Tactical Officer, to XO. It had necessitated completely repurposing the Hecate’s biggest remaining cargo bay into a Combat Information Center, a CIC, where Tanner could command a fleet and run a battle. That left the bridge as Reynaud’s domain, from which she commanded the ship.

The Hecate’s crew obviously had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, carrying a Commodore’s flag was a tremendous honor for any ship, and unheard of for a destroyer. On the other, Tanner’s presence not only cost them a cargo hold and diminished provisions, but also brought another dozen personnel aboard, his staff. More people meant most of those who’d enjoyed quarters of their own now had a roomie. Grumbling ensued. Fortunately, the crew revered Tanner enough that they were willing to live with it.

Besides, it pissed off every capital ship that considered itself in line for a flag, and pissing off capital ships was one of the great joys of a destroyer’s crew.

Mind you, it meant that Tanner’s new CIC had a lot more free space than that tiny briefing room jammed behind the Hecate’s bridge, so Thorn and Kira were able to spread out a little as they described what had happened to Tanner.

“Sir, whatever it was, it seems to permeate this region of space below the ecliptic,” Thorn said, sweeping a hand across the star chart depicted on the CIC’s main tactical screen.

“And you’re sure about this?” Tanner asked, leaning against a console with his arms crossed.

“We are, sir,” Kira said. “Both Morgan and I heard it when we Joined with Thorn, er, Lieutenant Commander Stellers. It was very real, and painfully sad. Heartbreaking, even.”

“But you don’t know what it was, other than heartbreaking.”

Thorn looked at the chart. “No, sir. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s some sort of psychic resonance that’s been imprinted on the region by some sort of massive tragedy. And by massive, I mean interstellar-scale massive.”

“War? Could it have been something the Nyctus, or the Bilau, or both did?” Tanner asked.

Thorn rubbed his chin and sighed. “Maybe. But there’s also some reason that the squids and the Bilau are staying out of that space.” He traced his finger across the chart. “These are their boundaries, as Morgan understands them. We did ask her to confirm that, and she’s pretty damned sure about it. So, if it was war, it wasn’t about conquering territory.”

“If anything, the squids and the Bilau seem determined to stay out of that region,” Kira said.

Tanner straightened and walked up to the chart. “Put up the most detailed survey the ON has of that region.”

The CIC’s AI, for some reason named Ralph, complied. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice as flat and dispassionate as Trixie’s was bubbly and effusive.

A handful of star systems in the region in question lit up with data. They weren’t very good data, though, obviously only having been collected by remote sensing. The vast majority of systems remained dark, meaning the ON knew only the most basic facts about them—brightness, mass, distance, the sorts of things that were probably observed and recorded by astronomers on Earth several hundred years ago. There’d been virtually no more detailed analysis done since.

“Not very helpful, is it?” Tanner said.

“No, sir,” Thorn replied.

Tanner turned to him and Kira. “In an hour, the Hecate’s going to rendezvous with a corvette, the Zenith. She’ll be carrying someone I want you and Wixcombe to meet.”

“Is it Alys Densmore? Whenever someone’s being all mysterious, it’s usually Alys Densmore,” Kira said.

Tanner smiled. “Can’t say if she’ll be aboard or not. With her, who knows? But, no, there’s someone else I want you to meet and talk with. His name is Colton Urbanek. He’s—”

“Admiral Urbanek,” Kira put in. “Sorry, sir. He’s pretty well known across the Fleet.”

“He is, yes. Anyway, you’ll be meeting with him to talk about this,” Tanner said, gesturing at the star chart.

Thorn knew that was all Tanner was going to say about it. They’d have to wait to meet with Urbanek to find out anything more. But, as he and Kira made to leave the CIC, Thorn stopped and turned back.

“Sir, I am really curious about something, if you don’t mind my asking. Why—?”

“Have I kept my flag hoisted on the Hecate,” Tanner cut in.

“Guess you’ve been asked that a lot.”

“Pretty much every other Flag Officer has asked me, yes. Afraid I’m going to set some sort of precedent for Flag Officers generally. I tell them it’s because the operational tempo is just too high right now for me to take the time to transfer to a new ship and integrate into a new crew.”

Thorn glanced at Kira. “But that’s not the reason, is it, sir?”

Tanner leaned back against a console and crossed his arms again. “No, it is not. I’m only telling you this because I trust you two and figure you might even understand.” He paused and scratched an ear. “I had a dream, shortly before I got promoted. The upshot was that if I leave the Hecate, something terrible is going to happen. Don’t know what, just that it will. So, here I am.”

Thorn again exchanged a look with Kira. “Didn’t take you for the superstitious type, sir,” she finally said.

“This coming from two people who use magic to hear funeral music imprinted on the stars themselves.”

Thorn grinned. “You got us there, sir.”

Tanner straightened. “See, Stellers? Even an old sailor like me can learn new things. Just a few years ago, I would have gone pfft, it was just a damned silly dream. Having gotten to know you Starcasters and what you can do, well, let’s just say dreams don’t seem so damned silly anymore.”

* * *

Admiral Urbanek reminded Thorn of Tanner. He projected an air of quiet authority, a thoughtful aura of command that radiated from his burnished skin and black eyes, and his close-cropped, iron gray hair. Unlike Tanner, though, a predatory sense of danger hung about the man. Where Tanner was aggressive when he needed to be, Urbanek seemed to be aggressive all the time and had to work at keeping it in check.

He was also a war hero. In the early days of the war, especially in its first year, Urbanek had commanded an ON fleet to the only two victories of any significance they’d scored over the Nyctus. In the darkest days, when it seemed that the squids were unstoppable and humanity’s days numbered, Colton Urbanek had become a household name across the Allied Stars. He’d given people hope, and that included the officers and sailors of the ON itself.

He was still a Rear Admiral, though, having refused any further promotion. The scuttlebutt about it was that he simply didn’t want the inevitable staff or desk job that came with a Vice Admiralty. He was a warrior at heart and had long ago resolved to fight humanity’s wars in the field, not from some distant HQ.

“Stellers, Wixcombe, I’ve heard a lot about you two,” he said, returning their salutes, then shaking their hands.

“Likewise, sir,” Thorn said, looking around at the Hecate’s hangar bay, which was mostly filled by the Gyrfalcon. Mol’s upgraded fighter had just undergone the last of its field trials and had been certified for flight and combat ops. Thorn was honestly itching to see what it could do.

Right now, though, his attention had been drawn to something covered by a security shroud, a wrap intended to defeat radar, or any remote attempts to peer beneath it. Urbanek saw him looking at it.

“We’ll get to that shortly, Stellers. Meantime, tell me about the Nyctus, the Bilau, and everything you, Wixcombe, and your daughter—saw, heard, felt, experienced, whatever the right word is for it.”

Thorn and Kira spent the next few minutes giving Urbanek a precis of what they knew. He had two staff officers in tow, and one of them, a Lieutenant Commander with striking blue eyes contrasted by skin as dark as night, dutifully recorded it all on a data pad. When they were done, Urbanek nodded, looking satisfied, almost smugly so.

“I have to admit, I was kind of excited when you started sounding the alarm about the Bilau. I sensed that there was a third major player out there, based on little bits and pieces of intel, including a lot of unclassified, public domain stuff that our own intel people often overlook. I got a lot of hints from civilian traffic control records, in fact. No one wanted to listen, though.”

“I find that hard to believe, sir, given your record,” Kira said. “You’d think the powers that be would have been all over it.”

Urbanek shrugged. “It didn’t fit with their bigger intel picture. I also think they just didn’t want to believe it. It was hard enough fighting the squids without having a whole other potential enemy out there.”

“Ah, denial. Human kind’s go-to for problems we don’t want to face,” Kira replied.

Thorn gave her a bemused glance. “Your philosophy is showing.”

“I keep telling you, I am not just another pretty face,” she shot back, smiling sweetly.

Urbanek raised a hand. “You two can keep your arguing, or flirting, or whatever the hell that was, for your own time. Right now, I have something a little more important for you to do.”

He waved them to follow, then led them across the bay, to the shroud-wrapped something. It sat on a cargo pallet, making it easier to heave, maneuver, and have brought aboard the Hecate from the Zenith. A pair of Marines guarded it, and at a gesture from one of Urbanek’s staff officers, they unstrapped and pulled back the shroud.

It revealed something not quite spherical, more like an egg, except equally sized at both ends. It was about two meters long, and a little less than that across. Thorn noted that it seemed to be made of some sort of alloy he wasn’t familiar with, something much more of a bronze color than the metallic bluish-greys he’d become used to. Dents, scratches, and small craters scored its surface, some looking like the regular micrometeorite damage that plagued all spacecraft. Some, though, seemed more egregious, including one large crater iridescent with heat discoloration, suggesting a weapons impact of some sort.

Thorn turned to Urbanek, but he had touched a round plate in one end of the object. A cylinder just a few centimeters across slid silently out from the surface. The Admiral glanced at Thorn, a wry smile on his face. “Took us about two weeks to figure out how to open that.”

“Okay, so you went carefully. What is it, sir?” Thorn asked.

“Something we found on a deep patrol, three years ago, into the edge of that zone you, Wixcombe, and your daughter have outlined.” He handed the cylinder to Thorn. It rested heavily in his hand, a construct of ceramic and metal, with odd scrollwork inscribed on the exterior. It looked like writing, but as soon as he thought that, the somber dirge he’d heard echoing among the stars flooded his head. Far louder and more distinct than it had been when he reached out to it on Nebo, it slammed through him like a roundhouse kick, making his knees buckle. Kira caught him.

“Thorn? Thorn, are you okay?”

He nodded, levering himself back to his feet with her help. Urbanek just waited.

“Why did you show me this?” Thorn asked, desolate pain tightening his face into a grimace. It wasn’t his own pain, though, but a bleak, vicarious suffering transferred from the cylinder. Whatever it was, it acted as a conduit, Thorn’s bones echoing with inarticulate howls of loss.

Tanner arrived, striding toward them. “Apologies for being late, but Admiral Scoville—” He stopped, his eyes on Thorn. “Something going on I should know about?”

Urbanek raised a hand toward Tanner. “Just a moment, Galen.” He turned back to Thorn. Somehow, Thorn’s reaction to the cylinder didn’t seem to surprise him at all.

“Do you believe in revenge, Stellers?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“Revenge. Although you might call it justice,” Urbanek said.

“With respect, sir, I would not. The two are different.” Thorn looked down at the cylinder, eyes losing focus as he worked the implications of what he held. “This is a cry for revenge, isn’t it?”

Urbanek said nothing but did look a little surprised.

Tanner chuckled at that. “Told you he was different, sir.”

Urbanek smiled, but it was thin. “Oh, I knew you were right, but I needed to see for myself,” he told Tanner, then addressed Thorn again. “What else can you tell me?”

Kira gave a derisive snort, earning a sharp look from Tanner. Urbanek again put up a hand, though, waving off any concern for the breach in protocol her snort represented.

“You’d like to add something, Wixcombe?” Urbanek asked, his tone mild.

“Sir, he can’t tell you much you don’t already know. And if I’m allowed to guess, then this—thing—is the reason why you’re here, and why you haven’t told us that we’re about to give the Nyctus an ultimatum containing some very unpleasant options.”

“You’re damned quick, Wixcombe. I like that. And you speak your mind. I like that even more,” Urbanek said.

Thorn glanced at Kira, then nodded to himself and ran his fingers over the cylinder. “These people, whoever they are, are gone. But we have this, and it’s evidence enough to blame the Nyctus and the Bilau for their deaths. And that means all of their deaths, doesn’t it, sir? They’re all gone, totally wiped out.”

“All. Six worlds that we know of, and that’s only by remote survey. None of this has ever been marked on any ON charts. And we’ve never touched down on any because we think the Bilau used a sterility prion to kill their entire race,” Urbanek said.

“Wait. The Bilau—killed off their fertility? So they couldn’t reproduce?” Thorn asked. His cheeks flashed red with anger at that, and his knuckles turned white on the cylinder. Kira touched his shoulder. As parents, they both knew what a deep, existential horror being unable to conceive offspring would be.

“They were a tri-racial species, we think. Emphasis on think. We won’t ever know, because they’re gone, but we do know who did it. Which brings us to this moment,” Urbanek said.

After a long moment, Thorn spoke. “Then I have an answer for you, sir. To both of your questions, in fact.”

“Both?” Urbanek asked, eyes narrowed. “Clarify, please.”

“Justice to the Nyctus. Revenge to the Bilau. Both,” Thorn said, his voice flat and cold.

Urbanek gave a hint of a smile and looked at Tanner. “Told you he would see. That both of them would. Although, you were right, by the way, Galen.”

“About Stellers? Rarely,” Tanner said.

“Sir? Right about what?” Thorn asked.

Urbanek sighed and crossed his arms. “About who gets what, justice or revenge. I’m here to negotiate the surrender of the Nyctus. You’re here to negotiate the end of the Bilau. Whether we can do it depends on many things, but first, a question. You can control the environment around you with complete impunity, yes?”

“I don’t know if complete impunity is right, sir. There are costs, and complications. But, yes, I generally can, sir.”

Urbanek returned a terse nod. “Good. Then you’re going to a planet, a small world, and a dead one, and you’re going to bring me something, Stellers. You’re going to explore this world of bones, and you’re going to find and bring me a specific object. The Bilau use a characteristic ceramic casing for their missile technology, so I want you to secure a piece of glorified pottery from a city that once held a billion people. Those are the people speaking to you through that cylinder, Stellers. You’re going to bring back a piece of the thing that contained their ultimate destruction and then do exactly what I tell you with it.”

“I will, sir,” Thorn said, then he stood, ready to listen.

“This Gyrfalcon has had nav data uploaded as of five minutes ago. One of my people is briefing the pilot now—Wyant, as I recall. You’ll go with her, and no one else. It’s too dangerous on the surface, so I don’t want to risk anyone unnecessarily. When you come back with what I need, here’s what you’re going to do—”

Urbanek gave Thorn three simple commands, then leveled a gaze at him to make sure he understood.

“We’re going to win this war,” Urbanek finished. “Of that, I have absolutely no doubt. And this is what it’s going to take.”

Thorn gaped for a moment, then a smile crept across his face. “Sir, I understand and will absolutely comply to the letter and spirit of this order.”

Urbanek and Tanner exchanged a look, but Kira spoke first.

“Sirs, if this goes badly—”

“Yes, Wixcombe?” Urbanek asked, his face neutral.

She looked at the cylinder, and Thorn saw her shudder. “Maybe we should inscribe a message like this one, too. I don’t want to be forgotten.”

14

“Okay, sir, before you fling us across space with your mojo, let me show you what my Gyrfalcon can do,” Mol said.

Thorn leaned back in the co-pilot’s crash couch. “Is this going to hurt?”

“Only if something goes badly wrong.” Mol tapped at her controls. “Okay, Trixie, confirm that the new drive is on standby, and the new g-system is online.”

“Both! We’re ready to show Thorn what this baby can do!”

“You sound, ah, excited,” Thorn said, smiling, albeit a little nervously. He had to admit, even though he’d been instrumental in acquiring both the Nyctus drive and the Imbrogul g-system, it was still alien tech and relatively new. And new meant unproven. Yes, the Gyrfalcon had already done a bunch of flight tests, but sometimes failures only became obvious with time.

And explosions. And screaming.

“Okay, then,” Mol said. “Three, two, one, mark.”

Thorn felt a slight thrum in the Gyrfalcon’s bones as the drive lit, but that was it.

“That’s thirty g’s of acceleration,” Mol said. “Let’s try fifty.”

She touched her controls, and the thrum intensified a notch. Again, though, that was it—just a small sensation.

Thorn looked at the flight management system. Sure enough, it read fifty g’s. Without the Imbrogul tech, Thorn would weigh about 9,000 kilograms, but he felt absolutely nothing. The old inertial dampers could offset anything up to about twenty-five g’s, but the old drive could only crank out about thirty. But here they were racing along at fifty, and they might as well be sitting docked inside the Hecate.

“How much acceleration can you manage?” Thorn asked.

“I’ve got her up to seventy-five g’s. Even burning that hard, I still don’t feel any forces at all. The Gyrfalcon does, though. I don’t think her engine mounts will take much more than about eighty-five,” Mol replied.

“Yeah, that sounds plenty fast.”

“Oh, it’s not just the straight line flying. Watch this,” Mol said, her fingers dancing over the controls.

The Gyrfalcon banked. It banked hard. The only way for a ship to do that outside of atmo was to expend enormous amounts of power changing its direction and maintaining its velocity simultaneously. But Mol and her upgraded Gyrfalcon made it look easy. That deep thrum might have ratcheted up another notch, but that was the only noticeable effect.

Thorn shook his head in wonder. “Okay, I’m convinced. This is a game changer, at least as far as fighters are concerned.”

“The big brains are working on scaling it up for capital ships, too,” Mol said, once more tapping her controls. The engine cut out, leaving the Gyrfalcon racing along unpowered. Mol sat back, looking pleased with herself. “Trixie, SITREP on the ship.”

“Little bit of fluctuation in the starboard fuel feed, but nothing outside the green limits. And everything else is green as grass, so we’re ready to rock and roll!”

Mol rolled her eyes and Thorn chuckled. “Anyway, sir, that was the show,” she said. “If you’re happy with it, you can catapult us across half the universe whenever the mood strikes you.”

“Okay, then,” Thorn said, extracting his talisman and settling back in the couch. “Next stop, the saddest place in the galaxy.”

“Beg to differ, Thorn,” Trixie interjected.

“You—you do?”

“The saddest place in the universe was during the Emo Phase, a musical period largely ignored by modern artists. For our trip, I’ve prepared a selection of emo classics guaranteed to make you feel as desolate as—”

“The Ghosts?” Thorn asked helpfully.

“Exactly! Let’s get maudlin,” Trixie announced as dark guitar chords thrummed to life.

“Glad we got the faster drive,” Mol quipped.

After about thirty seconds of singing by a misunderstood youth who was doubtless wearing all black, Thorn nodded in agreement, his head tilted to one side in mild discomfort. “Um. Same.”

* * *

“How’s that nav fix coming, Trixie?” Mol asked.

“It’s coming. Sheesh, talk about impatient. I need to find two more reference pulsars and then do a whole pile of really complex math to account for—”

“We believe you, Trix,” Thorn said. “You just go ahead and do you.”

The Gyrfalcon hung on the edge of a star system close to the far side of Nyctus space, as seen from the Allied Stars. Thorn had decided to do the trip in three hops, and this was the end of the second. He didn’t have a good sense of distance to, or even the true location of their intended destination, a star known to the ON only by its chart number. He could have done it in one hop, but his uncertainty about the true location of their objective would require him to expend more effort, and more magic, to compensate. He really didn’t want to drop into the creepiest place in the galaxy exhausted, and maybe even temporarily unable to ’cast at all. This way, he could rest along the way while refining their location.

Even then, it would have been faster to cut through Bilau space, but they’d decided against that, too. Given the chaos that had engulfed the Nyctus, it was less likely they’d be able to interfere.

Almost the very instant he thought that, a chime sounded, and two red icons appeared on the tactical display. It was the Nyctus, and they were here to interfere.

“Two corvettes. They just popped back into normal space. Pretty damned close, too.” Mol glanced at Thorn. “No one’s that lucky.”

Thorn had already reached out with a flicker of perception, sweeping it across the two ships. One of them carried a shaman, which explained it.

“It’s not luck. Or, it is luck, but only because the shaman aboard one of those ships must have sensed us arriving here and was near enough to actually do something about it. Shit.”

Mol gestured at the Alcubierre drive panel. “We could just hop away.”

Thorn pursed his lips, then shook his head. “If that squid shaman’s any good, she’ll be able to track us. That’s going to leave us trying to cat-and-mouse our way away from them.” He looked at Mol. “How confident are you that your spiffy new tech isn’t going to crap out in the middle of a fight?”

“Sir, I am never confident my tech isn’t going to crap out in the middle of a fight, spiffy and new or not.”

“Hey, I’m right here, guys,” Trixie said.

Mol grinned. “That wasn’t a shot at you, sweet girl. In fact, if it wasn’t for you riding herd on the collection, I’d have no confidence at all.”

Thorn raised an eyebrow. “Collection?”

“Yeah. Every ship’s just a collection of spare parts, all flying in really close formation.”

Thorn gave a bemused grimace at that, and Mol shrugged.

“Okay, I’m a pilot, not a comedian,” she said, but her face turned serious. “So what do you want to do, sir?”

Thorn looked at the display again. “I don’t want these guys behind us.”

Mol nodded. “Roger that. Trixie, get ready for things to redline.”

Trixie laughed. “You mean pushing this ship to the limits and threatening to have it rip apart under its own power? I have a name for that.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“Tuesday.”

Thorn laughed. “Okay, Trixie is a comedian.”

Mol blew a raspberry while her fingers flew over the controls. The Gyrfalcon’s drive came humming to life, the ship accelerating to forty g’s and starting a hard turn back toward the squid corvettes.

“Mol, I’m going to leave the one on the right to you. I’ll take care of the one on the left,” Thorn said.

She nodded but kept her attention flicking between the flight management system and the tactical display.

Thorn threw his consciousness ahead of the racing Gyrfalcon, zooming his attention onto the enemy ship. Each corvette massed about three times what the fighter did, making them formidable opponents. He was counting on Mol being able to use the Gyrfalcon’s amped-up tech to keep them out of trouble long enough for him to do what he intended.

His mind brushed across those of the squid crew, including the shaman. He had to smirk at their consternation over the Gyrfalcon’s sudden attack. From their perspective, the fighter had come about and raced toward them with preternatural speed and maneuverability, already only moments away from railgun range. Both squid ships frantically loosed a volley of missiles. Mol, in turn, began jinking, taking advantage of the Gyrfalcon’s ability to abruptly change direction to confound their seeker heads.

Thorn focused briefly on the shaman, flinging a barrier of denial around her. The squid suddenly found herself unable to ’cast and began to desperately batter at his mental containment. He let her, knowing she’d eventually break through, but that was fine. He had another target in mind.

He found it. The helmsman. Thorn drove hard into the squid’s mind, flooding it with images of heat, sand, and dust, a desiccated landscape that should, to a Nyctus, be a literal hellscape. For good measure, he threw in a few images of once-lush hydro planets reduced to stinking swamp worlds, inspired by his memories of the two that he’d visited after the Bilau had terraformed them. The squid helmsman utterly forgot his duties and panicked. This left the corvette stuck partway through the maneuver it had started, burning at full power off in a random direction.

A few seconds later, Mol opened fire with the railgun. She pumped out shots that slammed into the second corvette, at the same time deftly dodging the Nyctus return fire. The hypervelocity slugs tore through the ship, in seconds reducing it to an unpowered hulk spewing silvery clouds of atmosphere.

“Mol, take out the second one before the squids regain control over it,” Thorn growled, his face a mask of controlled effort.

She obliged, spinning the Gyrfalcon around in a tight bank and coming up at the second corvette’s six o’clock. The railgun snapped out more shots, each accompanied by a heavy thud of recoil that shook the fighter. The rounds ripped through the Nyctus ship’s stern, traveling fast enough that the incandescent exhaust plume barely had time to warm them up before they impacted. After a few seconds of that, the corvette exploded in a spectacular flash of uncontained plasma.

Mol hammered the controls. “Shit!”

Whirling chunks of debris came racing toward the Gyrfalcon. Mol jinked frantically, barely missing a torn chunk of hull plating as big as the fighter. Another shredded hunk of debris, glowing cherry red, flashed by close enough that Thorn was pretty sure he could have reached out and touched it. The fighter tore through the cooling cloud of plasma, temperature and radiation levels briefly spiking to alarming levels, before dropping back off.

Mol slumped back as the Gyrfalcon raced into the clear. “Well, that was a lesson learned. This baby closes on targets a lot faster than I’m used to.” She glanced at the flight management system. “Trixie, how are we looking?”

Thorn braced himself for bad news. He hadn’t felt any hits, but he’d been pretty damned preoccupied. Moreover, they’d just strained both the new drive and the new anti-grav system pretty hard. Trouble wouldn’t have surprised him.

“Hey, what do you call that color between yellow and blue again? Oh, I know—green! Everything’s still green, Mol!” Trixie replied. “Unlike the color black. It’s popular among emo kids because—”

“Trix?” Thorn asked.

“Yes?”

“Music later. Explosions—not us—now.”

Mol sighed, then gave Thorn a contented smile. “I love my job.”

“Oh, by the way, I have a hard fix for our current position,” Trixie went on. “I’ve also triangulated our destination off these two hops and added that to the data from the star chart. I know exactly where we are, and almost exactly where we’re going.”

“You did all that in the middle of fighting a battle, Trix?” Thorn asked.

“What can I say? I love my job!”

“Me too,” Mol said, tapping the panel with a contented smile.

Thorn gripped his talisman. “Yeah, well, time for me to do mine.”

* * *

“This is creepy,” Mol said, switching her gaze between the tactical display and the planet-scape scrolling by beneath them.

“Yeah, I think we can add a new type of planet to the list,” Thorn said, his voice somber.

“What’s that?”

“Tomb world.”

The two words hung in the Gyrfalcon’s cabin like a breath of cold air. They certainly fit. The planet beneath them had once hosted a thriving population of billions. Thorn couldn’t even really fathom how many. Billions was the best he could do. Now, though, it was devoid of life, a barren husk of a once-living world, now reduced to that bleak, two-word description: tomb world.

When Thorn extended his mental senses, he immediately felt that forlorn lament of anguish, loss, and ultimately death. But while it had been only a distant keening on Nebo, here it intoned from every dust particle, every hydrogen atom. This race, whoever they were, must have had some sort of psychic capacity, causing their extinction to become imprinted on space-time itself. The effect was both deeply unnerving and profoundly depressing. It was the funeral dirge of an entire people unable to reproduce and watching their numbers relentlessly dwindle.

What must it have been like for the very last of them to finally die?

Thorn cursed and shook the thought away.

Mol looked at him. “You okay, sir?”

Thorn rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, I’m fine. This place just . . . sucks.”

“Yeah, I hear that. Can’t help shivering every time I look down at it,” she said.

Thorn nodded. Mol wasn’t a ’Caster, of course, so she had no way of directly experiencing the psychic mourning of a dead race. Instead, it resonated with her on a subconscious level, a creeped out, on-edge discomfort. It was the sort of thing nearly everyone felt at one time or another, in a place tainted by tragedy. Starcasters, though, had the dubious advantage of being able to feel all the agony and suffering nearly firsthand.

Thorn didn’t often envy those who weren’t ’Casters, but this was one such occasion.

Trixie spoke up. “I’ve isolated five potential landing sites, based on your criteria of an obvious weapons impact. Three are badly contaminated by radiation or industrial toxins. The other two are pretty much a toss-up.”

Thorn looked at the two sites as Trixie put them up on the tactical display. He pointed to the second. “That one. It’s right on the outskirts of a big city.”

Mol’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? I thought you would have preferred the other one, more out of the way.”

“No. I want to get a sense of who these people were. Landing out in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to accomplish that.” He turned to Mol. “Whoever these poor bastards were, they deserve to be remembered.”

“Roger that. Going down.”

Mol decelerated the Gyrfalcon, lowering its orbit until it touched atmo. For the next few minutes, the fighter was cocooned in the searing plasma of re-entry. When it had slowed enough to emerge from the dazzling light show, Thorn found them flying toward a sprawling city that stretched across a broad river delta, the alluvial fan stretching out into water that appeared utterly devoid of life.

“The impact crater is at eleven o’clock, twenty kilometers,” Trixie said. “I’ve highlighted it on the FMS.”

“Got it,” Mol said, banking the Gyrfalcon slightly. Thorn watched the ground scrolling by beneath. Builds of unknown purpose, many of them sprouting towers and spires, flashed by. A complex series of tubes wound their way among them in graceful, sweeping arcs. Some sort of mass-transit system, he assumed. Some parts of it, and some of the buildings, had fallen into early stages of decay, but most of it stood intact. The exception was a cluster of buildings that seemed to have been blown apart from within. As they passed near them, Thorn saw the rad count suddenly shoot up. Mol immediately veered the Gyrfalcon aside.

“Nuclear fission plant, it looks like. It failed and blew up, and now we’re seeing the exposed core, or what’s left of it,” she said.

Thorn nodded but said nothing. The ground around the plant, for at least two klicks in all directions, looked to have been burned over and scoured down to soil and bedrock. Based on the rad count, even a few minutes within a couple of hundred meters of the derelict plant would be lethal, without some major protection, anyway.

Mol banked the Gyrfalcon again, avoiding a group of particularly tall buildings, fluted spires, and soaring towers easily pushing 300 meters tall. The FMS highlighted the impact crater just beyond them in a built-up area of smaller structures. Further on, the city’s core soared above them, the tallest of the delicate towers easily 1,000 meters high. One of the spires had apparently fallen, victim to some catastrophic failure, and now existed only as a long stretch of pulverized debris.

He sighed, long and slow. It had been a supremely advanced society, this city once bustling with life, its citizens engaged in all sorts of esoteric pursuits. Some would have been pragmatic, the various things that needed to be done to keep a civilization functioning. But some of it would have been purely aesthetic, painting and sculpting, writing and singing, or whatever the alien equivalents of those things would have been.

And there would have been families, at least until the Bilau perpetrated their monstrous, slow-motion genocide. Just the thought of it made Thorn queasy. The sterility prion weapons had landed, and then every day after that, each death would have been a permanent loss. It must have been sheer, unadulterated hell. Whether born, hatched, or formed by budding or mitosis or whatever, societies were meant to have offspring. It not only literally kept the species going, it gave the species a reason to keep going. Without it, what was the point?

Mol landed the Gyrfalcon as close to the impact crater as she could. Thorn donned his vac-armor, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Mol, you vac-armor up, too,” he said.

“I thought I was staying here, keeping the motor running.”

“You are. It’s just a precaution. The last thing we want to do is risk spreading what happened here back to any human worlds.”

She grimaced. “You think that’s possible? This ship is perfectly airtight.”

“Humor me.”

When she was suited up, Thorn cycled the airlock. Before he opened the outer door, though, he surrounded himself with a hermetic cocoon of magic, similar to the ’casting he used in the Hecate’s witchport when it was open to the void. He infused it with the intent to keep out anything that might be a pathogen, whether bacterium, virus, prion, or even nanoscale machine. Surrounded by a faint shimmer like heat-haze, he opened the outer door and stepped onto the surface.

“Okay, Mol, comm check,” he said.

“Reading you five-by-five. Be careful out there.”

“Always,” Thorn said, and started for the crater about five hundred meters away.

As he walked, enclosed in his protective ’casting, he kept his hand on his sidearm. It wasn’t his primary weapon, though. That would be his magic. This far from home, he wouldn’t hesitate to use it however he had to in order protect himself, Mol, and the ship.

He followed a broad avenue between soaring towers. They weren’t even close to the tallest in the city, but they still loomed over him. Amid the ruins, he could make out details, including numerous statues of flying beings, slender and elegant, like dinosaurs or birds with feathered crests. They were graceful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. He stopped to look at one that rose at least four meters over him atop a plinth in the middle of the avenue. He had no idea if this was a rendition of these people or just a motif they favored. And that made him even sadder. The Bilau had mostly erased this society from existence, leaving Thorn and Mol among the few sentient beings to even appreciate what was once here.

His foot knocked against something. He looked and saw it was a bone.

There were more bones scattered around him. Thorn tried to examine them more closely but soon gave up. He wasn’t a xeno-biologist, so they were just bones to him. He couldn’t fashion any coherent picture of the creature they’d come from. Whoever they’d been, they were just bones and dust, stirred by a thin, keening wind that whispered among the buildings. Occasionally creaks and groans of overstressed structures punctuated the dreary breeze, but other than that, his own footsteps were the only sounds.

Thorn pushed on, hurrying now. He’d had his fill of this forlorn and dreary place, this tomb world. He wanted nothing more than to climb back aboard the Gyrfalcon and get the hell out of here.

* * *

Thorn clambered back into the Gyrfalcon’s airlock with a grateful sigh. He placed his prize—a chunk of ceramic shrapnel from the Bilau weapon that had blown open the crater—on the deck. When the outer door had closed and sealed, he summoned more magic and flooded the airlock with a flare of ’casting that would render its interior, his vac-armor, and the roughly thirty centimeter long fragment completely sterile.

“Is it done?” Mol asked over the comm. Thorn made to answer, but music suddenly flowed over the comm, something Trixie had played before. It was from something she called a game show, the light, bouncy theme somehow still managing to ratchet up the tension.

Thorn puffed out an exasperated sigh.

“You mind, Trix?” he snapped.

“Sorry. Thought you would appreciate some theme music apropos of the moment. A man named Alex hosted that show, and he would approve of your steely nerve right now. The contestants had to—”

“Trixie?”

“Yes, Thorn?”

“Shh.”

“Copy that.”

He stowed the fragment in a compartment meant to hold samples, that was built into one of the airlock bulkheads. When it was sealed, he cycled open the inner door.

“Okay, Mol. We’re done here. Let’s get the hell back into space and go home.”

“No argument here, sir,” Mol replied, the drive immediately powering up and vibrating the Gyrfalcon with its reassuring thrum.

15

Thorn watched as the Nyctus ship approached. He had to work at keeping his face, and for that matter, his whole attitude, impassive. He wasn’t used to watching Nyctus ships doing anything but fighting, fleeing, or dying. To see one sidling up to an ON ship just seemed wrong.

He stood aboard the massive carrier Memphis, one of the newest additions to the ON fleet. She was the first in a new generation of capital ships, almost a thousand meters long, meant to carry a swarm of Super Kestrel fighters upgraded with the new drive and anti-grav tech. Thorn knew that Admiral Scoville had chosen this ship deliberately, despite her not yet having seen battle. She must have been an overwhelming sight for the Nyctus, a vast engine of destruction poised like a blade to drive deep into the faltering heart of what remained of their once-great empire. It was a choice deliberately intended to instill a sense of hopeless despair in the squids.

Good.

Thorn turned to scan those assembled to meet with the Nyctus delegation. Virtually everyone of consequence, at least to him, stood here, waiting for the airlock to roll open. He, Kira, and Bertilak stood together with Tanner. Damien and Densmore had put themselves near Admiral Scoville. And all of them stood behind Admiral Urbanek, who would be leading the negotiations about to get underway. He’d been impressed enough by Thorn’s and Mol’s retrieval of the Bilau weapons fragment that he’d asked Thorn to join his negotiating team. Thorn had insisted on Kira being part of it as well, her being a stronger Joiner than he was, and therefore more likely to be better at digging into the squids’ minds as the talks went on. Urbanek had made it clear that he had no compunction about using magic to support the Allied Stars and ON position, so why not have two of the most powerful Starcasters around present?

The Nyctus ship powered itself to a relative halt with the Memphis, keeping station about five klicks away. It was as close as Scoville would allow them to approach one of his newest and biggest ships. Thorn could only guess how many weapons were trained on the squids, waiting for them to do something stupid. They’d been told to power down their weapons and take their tracking scanners offline for that very reason. Scoville didn’t want to give someone aboard an ON ship, who’d lost friends or family to the war, an excuse to get some justice with a railgun.

An ON shuttle brought the squid delegation to the Memphis. As it thumped into place at the airlock, Thorn touched his talisman. The faint whiff of fire and acrid smoke helped steady him. It had, in a strange way, become comforting. It embodied the destruction of his home, his family, and his childhood, at the hands of the very aliens who were about to step aboard the carrier. But it also reminded him of what he was fighting for, more than preserving the integrity of ON territory or resisting Nyctus aggression and tyranny. He had a family to protect, to make sure Morgan never faced a day where her only memories of her mother and father were captured in a tenuous psychic echo imprinted on some old book.

Are they here yet?

Thorn glanced at someone who’d appeared beside him. Literally appeared beside him, out of thin air. Morgan stood there in pajamas and bare feet, looking sleep-messy, rubbing her eyes.

Morgan, what are you doing here?

Mom said I could be here when they arrived.

I did not! Kira interjected. I said I’d tell you all about what happened when they arrived. What time is it for you right now?

Morgan seemed to glance at something Thorn couldn’t see. I can’t tell. It’s too dark to read the clock.

You get your butt back into bed, young lady! Kira snapped.

Thorn glanced quickly around, ready to apologize to Tanner, Urbanek, Scoville, and anyone else who might be unhappy with the sudden appearance of his daughter amid the proceedings. But no one else paid any attention to her whatsoever.

Still, Thorn didn’t want to chance anything disrupting what could be one of the most important moments in human history. Morgan, you need to leave before someone finds out you’re here, he said.

No one but you and mom can see me or talk to me. I mean, duh, I’m not dumb, you know.

Morgan—! Kira started, but the airlock’s pressure indicator turned green with a single sharp chime, cutting her off. The door slid open, and the Nyctus delegation filed out.

Twelve shamans made up the bulk of the group, representing some aspect of Nyctus governance that Thorn still didn’t quite understand. The briefing documents hadn’t really been clear, probably because the people writing them had to cobble together whatever they could, and on damned short notice. The Nyctus had only requested this meeting a few days ago, after all. Moreover, he and Mol had only returned from their long trip to the tomb world the day before yesterday, so Thorn had been lucky to get any prep time for this at all.

The twelve shamans lined up, facing the humans. Six more Nyctus, apparently soldiers, lined up behind them. Their weapons, wicked blade guns, were slung on their backs, not easily deployed. The cadre of Marines surrounding all of the Nyctus weren’t handicapped like that, their weapons in their hands, fingers alongside the trigger guards.

Thorn studied the Nyctus as Admiral Scoville stepped forward. Ugly sons of bitches, he thought, all rubbery, greyish skin and dangling tentacles, bulging eyes, and a slick, gooey coating that seemed to glisten over top of it all. It was, apparently, a mucus-like secretion intended to protect their skin when they weren’t immersed in water. A series of compartments aboard the Memphis had been hastily reconfigured to fill with water to provide the Nyctus with rudimentary quarters while these initial talks went on. The actual negotiations themselves would be held in air, though, an environment the squids could apparently tolerate for much longer than Thorn realized.

He wondered if the squids would have been as accommodating were the roles reversed. As soon as he thought the question, though, it answered itself.

Dad?

Thorn glanced at his daughter. Or, rather, at the psychic projection of his daughter. What is it, Morgan?

He’d let a flicker of annoyance creep into his manner because he really wasn’t thrilled by the idea of having his daughter standing beside him as an invisible presence, asking a bunch of questions. But that attitude instantly evaporated when he saw the look on Morgan’s face and felt the raw emotion suddenly emanating from her. She had seen something that triggered a deep, raw pain.

That Monster. That one, right there. I know her. Her name’s Falunis.

Thorn followed her finger to a shaman standing near the middle of the group.

What about her? Kira asked.

Is there something we should know about her? Thorn added.

Morgan’s face crumpled and she nodded. She choked out a sob, then pushed words through her sudden tears.

She . . . she hurt me. She was . . .one of the monsters. She killed . . . the poor alien, in the ship, the one . . . that was all alone. And she hurt me!

Thorn looked at the shaman named Falunis. As he did, rage boiled up inside him like erupting magma. He took a step forward and felt Kira do the same.

Something big and green stepped in front of him. Bertilak leaned in.

“Thorn, no. There will be a time for a reckoning. But this isn’t it,” he whispered.

Thorn clenched his fists hard enough to dig his fingernails into his palms. He might have drawn blood. He saw that Kira had been intercepted by Tanner, who was whispering to her and coaxing her back. He must have been alerted by Bertilak, who in turn must have been able to hear Morgan.

“When that time does come, then you and I shall both see justice done, I promise you that,” Bertilak hissed.

Thorn took a deep breath, held it, then let it slowly out. He stepped back into line.

The remainder of the strange ceremony-that-wasn’t played out, both the Nyctus and the other officers present seemingly unaware how close they’d come to a firsthand display of the fury of two powerful Starcasters. After a few brief words, the Nyctus were led away to their flooded quarters, while the rest of the group was dismissed by Scoville. Thorn turned to help Kira deal with Morgan, but Tanner intercepted him.

“The hell was that, Stellers?”

“Sir?”

“Do not play dumb with me. Bertilak told me that Wixcombe was about to launch herself at the Nyctus. And then he went and stopped you from doing the same thing. So, what the hell is going on?”

Thorn sighed. “Morgan recognized one of those squid bastards as one that tortured her.”

“Oh. Shit.” Tanner turned away, then back. His lips had pressed into a thin, cold line. “Not sure how you could possibly know that, but it doesn’t matter. You do. So I understand. Admire your restraint.”

“That squid is going to answer for it, sir,” Thorn said, looking at the projection of his daughter.

Kira stood, speaking with her, but to any other observer, she simply lingered, looking out a viewport into space.

“And nothing, no one, is going to prevent it,” Thorn finished.

Tanner nodded once, and sharply. “Wouldn’t expect it to be any other way.”

* * *

Thorn and Kira extracted a promise from Morgan that she wouldn’t just drop in on them unannounced. Not only could she unknowingly distract them at a critical moment, but neither of them wanted Fleet to learn she could do it. They could both well imagine what would happen if someone like Densmore found out that Morgan could essentially put her point of view anywhere she wanted it, even light-years away. She would be the ultimate spy.

The next morning, both Thorn and Kira found themselves at a loose end. They’d been ordered to the Memphis to be part of the negotiations with the Nyctus, but those negotiations had started, and they’d been left waiting around. Hurry up and wait was just how the military often worked, but it usually didn’t involve relatively senior officers, much less two of the Fleet’s most powerful Starcasters. Thorn had the sense they were being kept around for something, and it just hadn’t been revealed to them yet.

Now, he sat with Kira, drinking mediocre coffee in the forward officers’ mess, just waiting. For what, neither of them could be sure. Presumably, someone would come and get them when they needed them, but until then—

Kira nodded over Thorn’s shoulder, toward the door. “I think we’re on.”

Thorn glanced back. Tanner and Densmore had entered the mess and started directly toward them.

Both of them offered due respect to Tanner, a nod and a polite Good morning, sir. You didn’t salute in the mess. He sat down beside Thorn, while Densmore slid into place beside Kira. They waited for the Mess Steward to bring them coffee, then Tanner got straight to the point.

“Negotiations have hit an impasse,” he said.

Thorn stared. “Really? They’ve only been underway, what, two hours?”

“Long enough for the squids to draw a line in the sand that we can’t accept,” Densmore replied. “They want their Empire restored and our help fighting the Bilau.”

Kira barked out a laugh. “Is that all? How about help rebuilding their fleet? A bunch of weapons, while we’re at it?”

“They do realize that they’re losing this way, don’t they, sir?” Thorn asked.

“Nevertheless, here we are. They’ve decided to dig in on this position, one that we obviously can’t accept,” Tanner said.

Thorn stared into his cooling coffee for a moment, then looked back up.

“No.”

Densmore raised an eyebrow.

Tanner looked at him. “No, what?” he asked.

“No, they don’t get to drag us into a war, lose it, and then think they can just back out of it intact and get our help fighting and dying against the Bilau. Hell, much as I distrust the Bilau, I’d ally with them long before I agreed to that.”

He turned to Tanner. “Sir, I propose that we turn the entire Starcaster Corps loose on these assholes. Show them what angry magic can really do. They can have their empire back, alright—as pulverized gravel and dust.”

Thorn saw the coffee in his cup sloshing around. It took him a few seconds to realize it was because he was squeezing it so hard.

Tanner surprised Thorn by turning to Densmore. “Told you, Alys.” He looked back at Thorn. “She thought you’d never get around to asking us to turn you loose, Stellers. I disagreed. And now I just got twenty credits richer.” He shot a quick, smug smile at Densmore.

Kira shook her head, confused. “Sir, what are you talking about?”

“Fleet fully expected that the Nyctus would come here with some damned stupid position. The diplomats were adamant that we had to give them a chance to be reasonable, though. We did, and they weren’t, and here we are. So this is where you two come in,” Tanner said, gesturing to both Thorn and Kira.

“Commodore Tanner and I convinced Admiral Scoville that you should be here in case we need to let you off your leash,” Densmore added.

Tanner nodded. “And the leash is off. We’re going to send you two in there and let you try to convince the squids that they’re pissing into the wind.”

“You’re already a big, scary boogeyman as far as they’re concerned, so we figure we should leverage that,” Densmore said.

Thorn looked at Kira, who just offered a humorless smile back.

“When do we get started, sir?” he asked.

Tanner stood. “No time like the present. Unless you want to finish your coffee first, of course.”

* * *

Thorn strode into the meeting room, Kira and Bertilak in tow. He’d asked—actually, demanded—to have Bertilak present. Not only was the big alien intimidating just by being present, but he had a bona fide investment in what happened.

Especially whatever happened involving the squid named Falunis.

They sat down at the three chairs that had been emptied for them. Urbanek still sat at the head of the table, overseeing the proceedings, and started to introduce the three newcomers. He’d only just started speaking when one of the Nyctus interrupted.

“What is the point of having that creature present?” he asked, waving a tentacle toward Bertilak. “It isn’t human, so it has no—”

Bertilak stood and leaned on the table, which creaked ominously. “I am the pure will of someone you wounded, and if you leave this room without sufficient progress toward a common goal of peace, I will expend my entire existence killing every one of your race.”

If Thorn ever needed a mental go-to image for the idea of a stunned silence, he’d just remember this room, in this lingering moment.

The Nyctus named Falunis began to speak. “That is hardly an appropriate way to address a good-faith effort on our part for peace.”

“The wounded my good friend mentioned is my—excuse me, our—daughter,” Thorn said, leveling a febrile stare on Falunis. She, in turn, flashed an array of colors—first uncertainty, then anger, and then recognition, followed quickly by fear.

“You are Stellers.”

“Yeah, I am. And I’d say I’m pleased to meet you, but I’m not. I’m the exact opposite of pleased, in fact. You hurt my daughter. You know, Morgan, she who can reshape the damned universe if she wants, much like me, her father?”

He leaned closer to the table, magical potential crackling around him at the edges of perception. He didn’t care and didn’t try to rein it in.

“Stellers,” Densmore began in a warning tone, then she closed her mouth. With a resigned sigh, she waved, bidding him to continue. “You were saying?”

Thorn closed his eyes, tapping into that magical potential and reaching out across the void between the Memphis and the squid ship that had brought the delegates into the mind of its captain. He immediately sensed fear, an impending sense of terrible loss, a looming threat of destruction—and the number thirty-six. That number, he realized, bore down heavily on the captain’s mind, and for good reason. That was all the capital ships left in the Nyctus fleet. Thirty-six, and not all of those were even ready for battle. The Nyctus, as a military force, were done.

Thorn opened his eyes and aimed his gaze at Falunis. “You have thirty-six ships capable of muster, and some of those are barely serviceable. Your crews are paralyzed with fear, and you—ahh, okay, that’s what he meant. One of your captains is convinced the Bilau will seize three more worlds where he has family, draining away the water, rendering it all down to a stinking swamp and fouling the air. He thinks this will happen after the next battle, and he has said his goodbyes to them already.”

Thorn maintained his hard stare on Falunis, whose skin had dulled to a neutral gray, tentacles still. “Well, I can make that captain commit an act of war against every ship in your fleet until he’s finally shot to pieces. I can turn what remains of your navy into scrap and let the Bilau assume control of your worlds, your young, your holy places. They’ll be turned into muddy, reeking swamps before you can gather a last-ditch effort, and you know it. So the only question I have for you is this: why shouldn’t I do this, given what you did to my daughter?”

Silence fell like an asteroid impact, heavy and total. The only sound came from above, the Memphis’s air recyclers working overtime to handle so many nervous beings in one room. Thorn took advantage of it to speak to Kira, mind-to-mind, asking her to do something for him.

Falunis finally moved a tentacle, but an older Nyctus stood up.

“I am Winuk, and I hold the rank of Governor. May I speak?”

Thorn nodded without looking to his commanders. His fists rested on the table, knuckles down. Kira put a hand on his arm, her eyes narrowed in rage. Thorn wasn’t sure if she touched him to steady him, or to steady her. And Bertilak sat so still he might have been a statue—which just made him seem all the more menacing.

“Are you going to kill us all?” Winuk asked.

“No,” Thorn answered, remembering Morgan’s answer to this very question when he’d asked it of her.

Winuk’s tentacles moved in a pattern of relief, and his skin shifted from gray to pink, settling into a neutral pattern of darkened stripes. “But you will not restore our empire.”

“No.” Again, Thorn answered without looking away from the shaman.

A small buzz of activity erupted among the Nyctus, several of them muttering accusations of treachery at Falunis and at least one other shaman. Even amid the last gasps of a dying empire, factions were vying for control.

It suddenly made the Nyctus seem very human, a perception that just pissed Thorn off.

“This is, I must admit, expected. Will you allow us to defend ourselves?” Winuk asked.

Thorn shook his head. “No, because you won’t have to.”

Surprise rippled across the dermis of every Nyctus, and Thorn held up a hand. Even Tanner looked surprised, as they’d clearly wandered off the edge of the map that any of them had envisioned for Thorn’s involvement in these talks. But he didn’t care. These creatures, these Monsters, as Morgan called them, had hurt her. He was in no mood to budge even a millimeter.

“Care to inform us what your plans are here, Stellers?” Urbanek asked drily.

For her part, Densmore leaned forward, her eyes boring into Thorn. She seemed ready to step in, but she apparently realized there wasn’t any point. Thorn Stellers had taken point on these negotiations, whether anyone had intended it, or not.

He did glance at Scoville. The Admiral, though, simply leaned back in his chair, looking as though he was enjoying the show.

Thorn looked down at Kira, then to Tanner, and finally to Urbanek. Fixing Winuk with a baleful stare, he held up a hand, three fingers extended. “I recommend the following, in the spirit of mutual cooperation among our peoples.” Someone snorted on the human side of the table, while all the Nyctus flashed shades of red, alarmed and even bordering on panic at the prospect of their fate being determined by an enemy whose young had been tortured by one of their own.

“Point one. The Nyctus Empire no longer exists. Any resistance to this will result in the end of your race.”

Again, silence fell—a deep unease, followed by a discreet cough. It was Densmore.

“Uh, Stellers, perhaps we should think long and hard about proposing genocide?” she said.

“I propose nothing of the sort, ma’am. Rather, I’m proposing to inform our enemy that they will not enjoy the protection of Orbital Navy forces as the Bilau advance. The result of that is their own issue, not ours.”

“Fair enough,” Densmore said. “Your second point?”

“Neither I nor my daughter will use our abilities against any Nyctus who wish to accept a binding offer of peace. Those who refuse, though, or those who renege on that offer, are fair game.”

“Generous,” Winuk said. “We accept.”

Thorn smiled a smile as cold as the void. “I wasn’t quite done. Third, I recommend the Nyctus give back any and all territory seized from the following races—us, of course, but also the Philomek, the Astarti, the Imbrogul, and the Owath. And for good measure, any other races from whom you’ve stolen territory that we don’t happen to know about. We’ll consider them human allies until proven otherwise.”

The Nyctus erupted in a blaze of color and anger, but Bertilak silenced the room with a booming shout.

“Heed the Starcaster!” he raged, slamming a fist against a bulkhead with a metallic clang, like a struck gong.

Scoville curled his lip. “Brand new super-carrier, and the first damage it takes is from somebody punching it.”

Falunis, though, stood, tentacles moving as though she was about to ’cast, her skin flashing with uncontained rage. Winuk and others leapt out of their seats. The room, Thorn knew, was coming apart by the second. Time to yank back control.

He pointed out into space. “Look.”

“What?” Winuk asked. The uproar eased slightly, but tension still filled the room like an electric charge.

Thorn touched his talisman, shaping magic and flinging it into space as an expanding wave. “Your ship, the one called the Hidden Spring—message its captain.”

“How do you know—?” Falunis began, but her skin flashed with brief alarm, then turned grey as ash and she fell quiet. After a moment, she spoke. “I cannot reach the captain. I cannot reach anyone on the ship.”

“No, you can’t. And as for how we knew it was there, well, you can thank Kira Wixcombe for that. See, you held her captive for a time, during which she became intimately familiar with how Nyctus minds work. There’s probably nobody in the Orbital Navy better qualified to go poking around in that filthy little cesspool of your mind, Falunis.”

“Didn’t even know I was in there, did you?” Kira asked, smiling. “Oh, and by the way, cesspool is a really good description. You’re definitely not a moralistic squid, Falunis dear.”

Thorn turned to Urbanek. “Sir, I’ve taken control of a Nyctus captain whose ship is hidden about fifty thousand klicks away, among some asteroids and heavily stealthed. I now have his weapons trained on the other Nyctus ships lurking out there. Your orders, sir?”

Urbanek regarded Falunis with amused contempt. “Okay, I knew you were full of shit, but I didn’t think you were dumb enough to actually bring ships into range of Steller’s power. I mean, what the hell were you thinking?” Urbanek looked over to Thorn. “How many ships?”

“Four, sir,” Thorn answered.

“Splash one,” Urbanek said.

Thorn gave a small nod and closed his eyes, imposing his will on the entire bridge crew of the Hidden Spring. He rendered most of them effectively catatonic, then ordered the rest—including the captain and the weapons officer, both of whom struggled futility against Thorn’s compulsion—to fire a broadside of missiles into his sister ship, the Anticyclone. Before she could even begin to react, the missiles slammed home, reducing her into a flare of glowing gas and whirling wreckage. In an instant, six hundred Nyctus died, their psychic screams tearing through space like a stellar shockwave.

“Done, sir. Now they have thirty-five. I’ll apologize to my daughter for this later, but now? It’s the right decision.” Thorn kept his eyes locked on Falunis as he said it. She radiated a palpable aura of hate-filled rage back at him. He smiled. And winked.

“Alright,” Urbanek said, turning back to the stunned Nyctus. “Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, shall we begin?”

16

“I don’t know, Thorn,” Kira said. “What do you think? I’d just as soon leave Morgan well away from all this.”

Thorn stared at the viewscreen mounted on the wall of the quarters he’d been assigned aboard the Memphis. Actual viewports, physical openings in the hull of a ship, had finally been phased out by the ON in its newer ships. They were an anachronism, a hangover from the distant days of wet navies, when there were good reasons to have ways for the crew to look directly out of the ship. They were no longer necessary and just made weak spots in the hull. High-res view screens, switchable between sensors across the EM spectrum, were far more efficient anyway.

As fancy as it was, though, the viewscreen didn’t show much. Thorn had selected a view into deep space because he’d seen more than enough of warships and military hardware.

He sighed and turned back to Kira. “I don’t know either. On the one hand, I want to keep her as far away from the Nyctus as possible. But on the other, Urbanek and Densmore have a point. If anyone can tell asshole Nyctus like Falunis from ones we can actually work with, it would be her.”

“What are you guys talking about? Me?”

They both jumped. Morgan sat on—actually, a few centimeters above—Thorn’s bed. She was dressed in scruffy overalls, spattered with grease and oil, and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“You’re filthy, kid,” Kira said, trying to look severe. The smile kind of killed the menace, though.

“Yeah, I’m helping Asher fix the little tractor. Check out my hands!”

She held them up, revealing palms stained midnight black.

“Gross,” Thorn said, then raised an eyebrow. “You call him Asher, now?”

She shrugged. “It was their idea. They said that mom and dad and words like that should belong to you guys.”

Thorn smiled fondly. Again, he was thankful for such fine foster parents. His daughter was in excellent hands.

“What made you decide to project yourself right now, Morgan?” Kira asked.

“I could tell you guys were thinking about me pretty hard. Like you were worried about me. I just wanted to say I’m fine, everything’s fine.”

“That’s great to hear, kid, but we’re not really worried about you where you are,” Thorn said, then went on to explain what Urbanek and Densmore had proposed.

“But we’re really worried about bringing you back into contact with the Nyctus,” Kira put in. “That’s probably what you were sensing.” She glanced at Thorn. “By the way, remind me that if we ever want to do anything without the kid knowing about it, I’ll need to Shade us.”

Thorn lifted his eyebrows suggestively. “Oh, there are a few things I’d prefer she not know about, alright. Like . . . kis—"

Morgan groaned. “Gross! Get a room!”

They shared a laugh, but all fell serious again. “So they want me to come there and tell them who’s a Monster and who’s a Radiant?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll do it.”

Kira gave Thorn an uneasy glance. “Morgan, you’d be facing some of the Nyctus you call Monsters. That includes the one you named—”

“Falunis. Yeah. I especially want to see her,” Morgan said, her face darkening.

“Uh, Morgan, I get that you hate her, and I don’t blame you one bit,” Thorn said. “We both hate her, too. But hurting or killing her isn’t going to help end this war.”

“Oh, I know. I’m not going to do anything to her. But she won’t know that.”

Kira actually laughed. “That’s evil, kid. Sounds like something I’d do. I love it.”

Thorn raised a hand. “Nice to see mother and daughter bonding over the idea of psychologically torturing an alien, but you need to think about this really hard, Morgan. You need to give a lot of thought to what it’s going to be like to face—”

“Geez, I said I’d do it,” Morgan said, rolling her eyes. “When do I leave?”

* * *

As much as it worried Thorn to have Morgan come aboard the Memphis, he took comfort in the fact that Mol was the one bringing her here. He wouldn’t trust the safety of his daughter to many people, but Mol was definitely one of them.

The Gyrfalcon settled onto the Memphis’s hangar deck with a clunk. Thorn watched on the viewscreen as the big doors rolled shut and the deck began to pressurize. The carrier had her hangar compartmentalized, so only small parts of it had to be exposed to space, but her hangar crews were trained to work in vacuum, too. On a split screen, he saw the Marines’ two assault shuttles settle into a separate bay. Major Fenton had apparently insisted on remaining Morgan’s security detail. He’d cited her critical importance to the ON, but Thorn knew the real reason—he and his company of tough, trained killers had been utterly charmed by their twelve-year-old charge.

When the airlock into the hangar deck finally cycled open, Morgan flew out, straight into Kira’s arms.

“Woah! We haven’t been apart that long,” Kira said, laughing.

“I know. I just miss you guys.” She let go of Kira and hugged Thorn. “Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, kid.”

Boots clomped across the deck. Fenton and his Gunnery Sergeant strode into view, a full squad of Marines in full battle rattle right behind them.

“Hey there, Major. Expecting trouble?” Thorn asked.

Fenton stopped and nodded. “Always. And doubly so when there are squids involved. So, if you don’t mind, we’re going to keep a close eye on Miss Bossy Boots here, a full squad at all times.”

“Miss Bossy Boots?”

The Gunnery Sergeant leaned forward. “She’s the one who really commands this company, sir. Major Fenton here just follows orders.”

“He’s not wrong,” Fenton said.

Thorn grinned, mentally adding Fenton and his Marines to the list of people he’d definitely keep trusting with his daughter’s safety.

He turned his grin on Morgan. “Okay, let’s get you settled in, Miss Bossy Boots, and then we’ll put you to work.”

“You’re going to call me that from now on, aren’t you, Dad?” she asked Thorn as they started along the corridor.

“Only until you’re married, should we find someone to take that task on. Then you’ll be Missus Bossy Boots.”

* * *

The door opened, admitting the first of the Nyctus. Thorn and Kira stayed close to Morgan, flanking her in a protective bubble of wary readiness. It struck him that, between the three of them, they could probably deliver as much destructive effect as the entire ON fleet, and, if pressed, much, much more. Still, it felt good to have such dedicated and competent people watching over her.

Urbanek sat at the head of the table once again, Densmore by his side. Tanner had returned to the Hecate, keeping station nearby, to deal with some staff problems. He kept himself plugged in over the comm, though. Damien stood at the other end of the table, switching his attention between the Nyctus, as they filed in, and Morgan.

She watched each of the Nyctus carefully, in turn, as they entered. She either gave a nod or shook her head to identify each as a Monster or a Radiant—her terminology, but Urbanek had decided to adopt it for ON use. When Falunis entered, she stood and stepped forward.

“Hi, there, Falunis. Are you having fun yet?” she asked.

The humans all smirked and grinned, expressions that suddenly switched to surprise and alarm as Fenton suddenly flung himself forward and bowled over a Nyctus, bludgeoning it with his sidearm, which he then trained on the alien’s head. Thorn immediately drew magic to him, a ready reservoir poised to defend or attack.

“What the hell was that?” Fenton snapped.

The Nyctus, bleeding and obviously dazed, luminesced its confusion and anger. “I was merely greeting the child!”

Fenton’s aim didn’t waver a millimeter. “By waving your tentacles around?”

“It is part of how we greet others.”

“But it’s also how you do magic, right?”

“It is, but—”

“Then use your voice from now on, or the next time I hit you, it’s gonna be fatal.”

The Nyctus staggered to its feet. Morgan shrugged.

“He’s a Monster anyway,” she said, waving a dismissive hand.

“I object to the presence of his child,” Falunis spat.

Fenton, who’d just holstered his weapon, planted his hand on it again. “Oh, please, say that again, but wave your tentacles around while you do.”

Falunis’s dermis rippled with contempt, and a forced, but unconvincing, display of anger. “And you humans call us the Monsters,” she snapped. “You are only too ready to kill.”

Thorn strode forward. “First of all, we only call some of you Monsters. Morgan’s helping us sort out exactly which ones of you deserve the title. Second, yeah, we take a dim view of anyone who tortures our children. Kind of irritates us. It also convinces us that you deserve to be called a Monster, Falunis. But, by all means, continue objecting.”

Fenton grinned. “Oh, please continue objecting.”

Falunis turned to Urbanek. “Is this how you conduct negotiations? By allowing your underlings to make threats and attempting to intimidate us?”

Urbanek, who sat casually, one ankle crossed on his other knee, fingers steepled in front of him, shrugged. “Seems to be working. And who am I to argue with success?”

“What amuses me is that you think these are negotiations,” Densmore quipped, looking even more relaxed than Urbanek.

Urbanek nodded. “Yes, about that. These are negotiations in the sense that we’re going to tell you what we want you to do, and you’re going to do it.” He leaned forward, his casual attitude suddenly replaced by alloy-hard resolve. “That’s what happens when you start a war and then lose it.”

Falunis started to speak again, but Winuk cut her off. “Falunis, that is enough—” he started, but she just stood.

“We haven’t lost this war yet,” she snapped, then turned and stormed out of the room.

Urbanek glanced at Fenton. “Major, make sure she has an escort back to her quarters.”

“No problem, sir. Should she stumble into a faulty airlock along the way? Suffer a tragic accident?”

“Don’t tempt me, Major.”

Fenton smiled and left, and Urbanek turned to the remaining Nyctus. Before he could speak, though, Winuk stood.

“Admiral Urbanek, please allow me to apologize for Falunis. She is among those who are having difficulty accepting the reality of the situation,” he said.

“It’s not me you need to apologize to,” Urbanek replied and gestured toward Morgan, Thorn, and Kira.

Winuk turned to face them. “Of course. I have actually been waiting for this moment.” Thorn tensed as the old Nyctus came around the table and stopped in front of Morgan. Fenton, who’d returned from making sure Falunis was properly overseen, reached for his sidearm again.

But Morgan just smiled. “You’re not a Monster. I’d share a current with you.”

“I am very pleased to hear that, child, even if I don’t believe I deserve it.” He raised his tentacles and placed one on each of Morgan’s shoulders, then a third on her head. Another wave of tension swept through the room, but Morgan just crossed her arms and placed her own hands on the tentacles resting on her shoulders.

“On behalf of my people, I am so sorry about what we did to you, child. It is a shame we shall carry into the deeps with us.” Winuk looked at Kira and Thorn. “I offer the same apology to you, her parents. I understand your anger toward us. We have earned it. Now, we have to earn your forgiveness and your trust.”

“That’s going to take a while,” Thorn said.

“Of course it will. I am sure I won’t be alive to see that day.”

But Thorn shook his head. “Don’t be so certain. You’ve just taken a huge step on the right road.” He locked his gaze on Winuk’s. “Thank you.”

The old Nyctus turned back to Urbanek. “Now then, it’s time for you to tell us those things you want us to do, and for us to commit to doing them. Let us begin with two clear hearts, shall we?”

* * *

As the discussion went on, Morgan bit her lip and studied the Nyctus. Some of their leanings were obvious, such as the case of Falunis and Winuk, the first clearly a Monster, the second, a Radiant. She muttered to Thorn and Kira as she considered the others.

“That one, just speaking, I’d share a current with him.”

“Okay, that one, she flashes too quick, and too red when she does. I don’t trust her.”

“That one, he’s definitely a Radiant. I can tell from the way his gills move.”

By the time she was done, Morgan had identified four other Nyctus, besides Winuk, who she considered Radiants, and therefore trustworthy. She was unsure about four more but leaned toward not trusting them. The remaining three, which included Falunis, were definitely Monsters.

“So do you want the ones Morgan has named as Monsters ejected from the proceedings?” Densmore asked once the discussions had finished for the day.

“Or an airlock?” Thorn put in.

“Again, don’t tempt me,” Urbanek replied. “But it’s no to both. I don’t want to encourage this factionism among the squids any more than I have to.”

Tanner’s voice spoke out of the comm. “Best to keep them close anyway, so you can keep an eye on them.”

“I don’t want to give them too much airtime, though,” Urbanek replied. “We run the risk of these talks becoming about them and their grievances.” He turned to the comm. “Galen, what progress have we made on that little project the Nyctus asked us about?”

“On schedule. A little ahead, in fact.”

Thorn exchanged a confused look with Kira. “Sir, is this something we don’t need to know about? Because if so, we can leave—”

“No, not at all. In fact, getting you and Wixcombe read into this was pretty much next on my to-do list. Galen, I’m going to send Stellers, Wixcombe, and their daughter over to the Hecate. You can take them to visit the project.”

“Roger that. As soon as they’re aboard, we’ll be on our way,” Tanner replied.

Kira looked at Urbanek, then at Thorn, then at Urbanek again. “The project?”

Thorn shrugged. “Beats me.”

Densmore laughed. “I don’t know why, but this restores some of my faith in the way the world’s supposed to work.”

Thorn glanced at her. “Ma’am?”

She laughed again. “There’s finally something going on in the ON that you don’t know about, Stellers, but I do. You know, the way it’s supposed to be?”

* * *

Thorn just stared at the massive ship hanging in space over Code Gauntlet. “A colony ship?”

Tanner, his eyes fixed on the tactical display in the Hecate’s new CIC, nodded. “The squids, or at least the ones your daughter calls Radiants, secretly contacted the ON a few months ago. At the time, it was the Monsters that were running the show over there. But these good-guy squid knew the writing was on the bulkhead. They were losing ground to us and trying to hold off the Bilau. They figured they had to make peace with one of us and decided we were the better bet.”

“But what’s that got to do with colony ships, sir?” Kira asked.

“The Nyctus are well aware they’re balanced on a knife edge here. The Bilau aren’t going to stop driving into their territory, and there aren’t that many hydro-planets to begin with. They’re looking for our help in, ah, what amounts to relocating their entire civilization,” Tanner replied.

Thorn crossed his arms. “Holy shit. How did we keep this under wraps so long, sir?”

“It was easy, at least until these colony ships got big enough that we couldn’t really hide them anymore.”

“Colony ships? There are more than one?” Kira asked.

“Seven, in fact. They’re based on an experimental water hauler, designed to harvest water from comets and bring it to outposts and installations that need it. We’ve worked with some Nyctus engineers to modify them, which wasn’t hard, since they were designed to actually haul water. We’ve got six under construction, and the Imbrogul are building the seventh.”

“So, wait. What was all that noise Winuk made about restoring the Nyctus empire and all that?” Thorn asked.

“Good question. Based on what you said, sir, this has been going on for months, long before that delegation arrived on the Memphis,” Kira added, gesturing at the image of the nearly completed colony ship.

“Oh, that was for the benefit of the bad-guy Nyctus, the Monsters. Winuk’s been trying to keep them in line, while also keeping them in the dark about this little joint project we’ve got going on with them. And that’s why you two didn’t know about this, either. We’ve kept the circle of knowledge as small as possible—just Admiral Urbanek, myself, about a hundred ON staff officers, and a few thousand construction personnel.”

“Wow. We’re way better at keeping secrets than I thought we were,” Thorn said.

“Yes, well, to be blunt, we particularly wanted to keep you two out of the picture, along with the rest of the Starcaster Corps. If anyone was likely to go, uh, mind-to-mind with the Nyctus, it would be you.” He gave a thin smile. “But now that these ships are getting to be the size of small moons, there wasn’t much point keeping up the secrecy.”

“It was Alys Densmore’s idea, all the subterfuge and circle-of-knowledge stuff, wasn’t it?” Kira asked.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Tanner said, nodding vigorously. “In any case, Winuk will be arriving shortly for a tour of their new colony ship. He’d like you two to accompany him, along with your daughter, if possible.”

“All due respect, sir, but I think we’d rather leave Morgan here, aboard the Hecate,” Kira said. “I know she’s good with it, but I still get nervous having her around the squids.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Thorn said.

“Fair enough. The crew’s already fallen in love with her, so there’ll be no shortage of people willing to keep her entertained.”

Thorn couldn’t resist. “Including present company, sir?”

“If she likes watching a man do paperwork and sit in endless meetings, sure,” Tanner replied, without even a hint of irony.

* * *

“This is impressive,” Winuk said, gazing around at the vast interior bulk of the colony ship. “You’ve made a great deal of progress since my last visit here. I give you my sincere gratitude. Your currents are clear and productive, the tides mild.” Winuk waved two tentacles in a complex motion of thanks as he spoke.

The ship’s original design as a cometary water hauler had called for a massive, unpressurized hull, which would contain raw ice kept suitably cold, or else melted into water and stored in pressurized tanks. The jury on which approach to take had still been out, as far as Thorn knew, when the design and existing hulls had been co-opted to help the Nyctus. That meant, of course, that several of these huge hulls had been built, without even knowing exactly what was going inside them.

Design and management by committee. Enough said.

The project’s Chief Engineer offered Winuk a grateful nod. “We appreciate that. Our crews have been working hard to meet the deadlines we’ve been given. The new drive tech and the Imbrogul gravity polarizers are going to speed things up a lot.” She turned to Thorn. “Thanks to you, I understand.”

“I’m just one end of a long chain of people, ma’am,” Thorn replied, offering a self-deprecating nod. “It took way smarter people than me to turn that into stuff we could actually use.”

Winuk rippled with the colors of amusement. “That is, perhaps, the way in which you are most unlike us, Thorn Stellers. A Nyctus would not hesitate to claim glory at any opportunity.”

Well, there’s that difference—and the fact you started waging a campaign of apocalyptic genocide and we didn’t, Thorn thought. He didn’t bother actually saying it, though, in the interest of trying to maintain decent relations with the Nyctus. He settled on a pleasant smile and a single statement.

“I’m not a Nyctus.”

“No, indeed you are not,” Winuk replied amiably.

The group carried on. While the interior of the big ship was still under construction, the engineering systems and drives had been installed, and she was scheduled for a shakedown cruise tomorrow. It would be a simple flight, from orbit here to an unremarkable star system about two light-years away, and back. It was a well-worn test course used by ON ships, so well-used that it had come to be known as The Groove. It was a bit of spacers’ lore that originated with Thorn himself. When he saved Code Gauntlet from a massive Nyctus KEW, he explained it as making a groove in space-time so the huge impactor would follow it instead of hitting the base. The idea and the term had stuck. Now, the word groove was used to describe any well-traveled route, but especially this one, the original, beginning at Code Gauntlet itself.

Thorn thought it was kind of silly, but sometimes these things just took on a life of their own. In any case, it promised him an odd sort of immortality, because he was pretty sure generations of spacers yet to come would still be calling it The Groove long after Thorn was gone.

They climbed up into a gantry and reached a platform about twenty meters above the outer hull below. A multitude of cargo containers had been brought aboard and now clung to the interior of the ship. It was amazing, Thorn thought, that all of them, even the ones seeming to hang down from above them, were resting there under their own weight. The entire hull had been lined with Imbrogul gravity polarizers, meaning that as far as the containers on opposite sides of the hull were concerned, the deck beneath them was down, and the opposing containers were above them.

There were a lot of them, though, prompting Thorn to ask what they were.

The Chief Engineer leaned on the gantry railing and waved a hand. “Stuff. Literally stuff. Anything from the shipyard and Code Gauntlet that wasn’t nailed down. We need to simulate the mass of all the water that’s going to be aboard this ship when it finally flies. The final mass distribution will be different, of course, but for her first Alcubierre flight, we just need to have it aboard.”

“Will you accompany us on the flight tomorrow, Thorn Stellers?” Winuk asked.

“First of all, you can just call me Thorn. And secondly, yes, I’ve already been told that I’ll be coming along,” Thorn replied.

“In case of problems.”

“Yes, in case of problems.”

Winuk flickered with bioluminescence in a way Thorn recognized as bemused, with maybe just a tinge of sadness. “And by problems, we mean interference from my people opposed to this whole endeavor.”

“My daughter calls them the Monsters,” Thorn said.

“Yes, as opposed to the Radiants. I gather that refers to the manner in which she changed the Nyctus of Tāmtu to render them non-hostile. It affected the luminescence of the entire population. Now, all Nyctus who are choosing to collaborate with humanity are called Radiants.” Winuk waved a tentacle. “It isn’t an unpleasant name. In fact, I rather like it.”

Thorn gripped the railing for a moment, then looked at Winuk. “Yes, well, it’s too bad that you Radiants couldn’t have headed off this war before it happened. Instead, you let the Monsters have their way and start it.”

“It was more complicated than that,” Winuk countered.

Thorn considered just dropping it. But no. To hell with that. He’d earned the right to question why his family had been killed, his childhood destroyed, the woman he loved and their daughter imprisoned and tortured.

“Oh, I’m sure it involved all sorts of squid—sorry, Nyctus politics and intrigue and special interests. But, you know what? I don’t care. In the end, your people started an unprovoked war, so you all bear responsibility for it.” He focused the hardest glare he could muster on Winuk. “You might not have pulled any triggers or thrown any of those KEWs, but you also didn’t stop the ones who did, now did you?”

Winuk flickered with momentary anger, but it quickly faded into the dreary shades of mourning. “No. We didn’t. And I’ll regret that to the day that I die. We allowed unchecked, wild forces to take over our thinking and tried to shape it and accommodate it. But it wouldn’t be shaped or accommodated, and the result was disaster for everyone.”

“Yes, it was,” Thorn said, then turned back to the expansive sprawl of the colony ship.

“I realize that this will be little comfort, Thorn, but I am going to say it anyway. I am truly, deeply sorry for what we have done. And I am even more truly and deeply sorry to you, for the loss of your family on Cotswold, and for what subsequently happened to Kira Wixcombe and, in particular, your daughter,” Winuk said.

Thorn glanced quickly back at Winuk. “Checked up on me in whatever dossier your people maintained on me, huh? Hope it was a good read.”

But Winuk flickered with denial. “No. Admirals Scoville and Urbanek and Commodore Tanner made certain that I knew your history. I’m glad they did.”

Thorn stared. Two Admirals and a Commodore not only knew his story but wanted to make sure the Nyctus knew it, too.

He turned back to the panoramic view of the massive ship for a moment, then looked back at Winuk.

“Well, since you know all about me, what about you, Winuk? What’s your story?”

In response, Winuk flickered with fond gratitude. “Thank you for asking, Thorn. It is such little things that will eventually bring healing to our two peoples.”

Thorn nodded.

“Eventually, it will, yeah.”

17

As far as the ON was concerned, Thorn wasn’t part of a ship’s crew. He was a Mission Specialist. Still, he knew enough about spaceships to know when one was a wallowing, cumbersome hulk. And this new colony ship, now christened Conveyor One, was just that.

Thorn felt the drives burning as a steady hum through the deck plates but saw no evidence the ship had even started to move. Eventually, the image on the bridge’s main viewscreen began to change, the moon beneath them finally beginning to slide out of frame. It took almost five minutes before it finally vanished.

The ON Lieutenant manning the Nav station leaned back in her seat and sighed. “You guys can wake me up when we have to, you know, navigate somewhere.”

The Acting Captain, an ON Lieutenant Commander named Styles, shot her a glare. “If you want to sleep, Lieutenant, I can arrange a nice little room with a bed for you. Oh, a toilet, too.”

The Nav O sat up. “Sorry, sir. Just not used to crewing something with the flight characteristics of a footlocker.”

Styles couldn’t resist a smile. “The ON promised you’d see the galaxy, Lieutenant, but didn’t promise it would happen quickly.”

Thorn smiled at the banter but kept his attention on the viewscreen. A graphic had been superimposed on it, showing Conveyor One’s projected trajectory, leading to the point where it would eventually activate its Alcubierre drive. Engineers, both human and Nyctus, bustled around the bridge, keeping a close eye on strain gauges and damage sensors. Aside from a few ominous creaks and groans from the big ship’s structure, though, everything seemed to be holding together.

“Conveyor One, Hecate here. You guys can get underway anytime.”

Styles sighed at the voice of the Hecate’s former XO, and new Captain, Reynaud. “If it takes me a while to answer, Hecate, it’s because I’m debilitated by the power of your jokes.”

“Noted. We’ll work on new material,” Reynaud replied, a laugh barely contained.

The Hecate led the colony ship’s escort, a flotilla of destroyers and light cruisers backed up the escort carrier Corregidor. The flight was considered low-risk, being confined in relatively secure ON space, so the Third Fleet’s capital ships not on patrol or engaged in training exercises had been left at Code Gauntlet—a far more tempting and critical target. Bertilak and Mol had both stayed there, too, having no particular need to make this there-and-back-again trip.

“Thorn, I am going to inspect the ship,” Winuk said. “Would you care to accompany me?”

“Sure. Lead the way.”

As Thorn followed Winuk, another pair of Nyctus, and a pair of ON engineers, he reflected on how strange this seemed. He’d grown up despising the Nyctus as murderous, psychopathic brutes, only good for killing. And yet, here he’d not just gotten to know one as an actual individual, with a unique and even somewhat charming personality, but he could actually think of Winuk as a friend.

A squid. His friend. It was a seismic shift in the way Thorn Stellers viewed the universe.

Not for the first time, he wondered if that had been the key all along, if Morgan hadn’t had it right. He had the means to change the universe, so why not just change the Nyctus into something like her Radiants and end the war that way?

But that question, as it always had, answered itself. Who knew what the unintended consequences of that might be? And, anyway, was it right to impose something like that artificially on a people? Wasn’t this the right way, earning and building genuine trust through hard work and mutual understanding?

Again, as always, the thoughts began chasing themselves through Thorn’s mind, a whirling cycle of question leading to question leading to question, like a dog chasing its own tail. He flung them away and concentrated, instead, on what the others were saying.

“—strain gauge up there, showing deformation in the hull plates above what we’d expect,” one of the ON engineers was saying, pointing up with one hand, a data pad in the other.

“Is it a problem?” Winuk asked.

“Not yet. We’re going to keep an eye on it, though—”

A sudden, dazzling flash followed by a thunderous boom cut him off. Thorn winced, blinking at the dazzling afterimage seared into his retinas, trying to shake off the high-pitched whine suddenly filling his head.

A howling gale swept past him, almost knocking him over. He gaped at a section of Conveyor One’s hull that had simply vanished, replaced by a gaping hole with torn, glowing edges. His immediate thought was a mechanical failure, but then he heard the general quarters alarm faintly ringing through the thunderous rush of venting atmosphere.

Fortunately, there was a lot of atmosphere to vent through a relatively small hole. Despite the howling wind tearing at him, trying to pull him toward the hole, Thorn was able to hastily summon magic and fling a barrier of force, a Hammer ’casting, over the rent in the hull. The decompression instantly stopped, leaving Thorn with sharp jabs of pain poking through the ceaseless ringing in his ears.

“Is everyone alright?” he shouted.

Winuk and the other Nyctus had wrapped their tentacles tightly around whatever was handy and clung on. One of the ON engineers wasn’t so lucky. She’d been pitched over the railing and sent plunging down to the deck below. Thorn couldn’t attend to her now, though, and could only glance helplessly at her unmoving form sprawled beneath him. Instead, he turned his attention back to the barrier he’d created. It would seal the hole, but only for as long as he maintained it. And although it was a simple ’casting, even simple ’castings had their cost. Thorn could hold a paperweight at arm’s length in his hand for a long time, but eventually, his arm would tire out. This would be the same.

Thorn turned to Winuk. “Call an evacuation of this section. Now. I’ll hold the air in until you do.”

Winuk flickered acknowledgement and activated the comm hung at his side. Thorn turned back to the hole, ensuring his ’casting was still solid, then yanked out his talisman and flung his perspective into the void surrounding Conveyor One.

A battle raged around the colony ship.

Thorn saw the Hecate and her consorts accelerating around the massive ship, forming a protective screen. He shoved his awareness even further into space, focusing on the enemy now charging headlong into the fight. How had the Bilau even known—?

No. Wait. The attackers weren’t Bilau. They were Nyctus.

An evacuation alarm sounded. Winuk plucked at Thorn’s arm. “We have to return to the next section so this one can be sealed off!”

“I’ll leave when everyone else is in the clear,” Thorn growled back, most of his attention on his ’castings.

He felt Winuk hesitate, then again caught flickers of agreement from the corner of his eye. The old Nyctus turned and barked orders to those nearby, both squid and human. None of them hesitated. That gave Thorn a momentary flicker of fond humor. His attitude, his clipped words, even his tone reminded Thorn of Tanner. He wondered what the gruff Commodore would think of being favorably compared to a squid?

The compromised section was quickly evacuated, a crash team retrieving and extracting the fallen engineer. As it did, Thorn watched the battle unfold. The Nyctus ships, nine in all, seemed determined to either destroy the colony ship or die in the attempt. A ferocious firefight raged only a few thousand klicks away, building in intensity as the Corregidor’s Kestrel fighters swarmed into the fray. Two of the Nyctus ships were already tumbling derelicts, but so were two of the ON escorts, the Hecate’s sister ship, the destroyer Caliban, and a frigate. The biggest of the attackers, a squid heavy cruiser, doggedly drove straight through the melee, fixated on breaking through the ON line and getting a clear run at Conveyor One.

It was a real threat. If she got even a momentary clear line of fire, she could loose a volley of missiles that they likely wouldn’t be able to stop. The colony ship’s point-defenses were only partly complete and activated, and there was nothing else available to intervene.

Except for Thorn himself.

He turned to Winuk. “Go! Get to safety, then tell them to seal this compartment.”

“What about you?”

“I seem to live half my life in a witchport open to hard vacuum, Winuk. I’ll be fine. Go. Now.”

The old Nyctus hesitated a moment, then slapped a tentacle against Thorn’s arm, turned, and fled for the airlock opening in the nearby pressure bulkhead.

As soon as it sealed, Thorn wrapped himself around the railing, then released the barrier he’d ’cast. The roaring wind instantly picked up right where it left off. Thorn grimly hung on until the wind began to die. The thick, muffled silence of vacuum started to close in around him. He crafted a bubble of survival—cocooning himself against a suddenly hostile environment in the same way he had on the tomb planet. When the last of the air had vented, he let go of the railing, stood, then clambered down the nearby scaffolding leading to the deck below. Fortunately, the Imbrogul gravity polarizers were still online, so he was able to hurry across the forty meters or so of open deck to the hole blasted in the hull.

A surge of vertigo swept through Thorn when he reached the gaping opening, provoked by the sudden transition from having solid stuff within a few meters of him, to endless light-years of empty nothing. He swallowed it down, took a moment to get himself oriented, then turned toward the battle. It raged at his ten o’clock and high, visible to the naked eye only as sparks of light that flared and died against the stars. But he wasn’t constrained to what he could physically see and once more sent his perception racing across the void, until it encompassed the vicious firefight. Smaller ships like the ones that made up most of this battle lacked the stately majesty of capital ships hammering away at one another at range. This was more like a street brawl, ships accelerating through hard, abrupt maneuvers, seeking one another’s weak spots like two street rats in a knife fight.

The ON was going to win. Thorn could tell. The new drives and gravity tech installed on even just a few of the ON ships gave them a decisive edge. They could accelerate, decelerate, turn, twist, and even bank in ways that let them dodge the worst of the Nyctus attacks, while slamming their own home. Winning this battle wasn’t going to be the problem.

Thorn focused his attention even more, locking it like a targeting scanner on the heavy cruiser. That was going to be the problem.

The squid strategy was clear. Their other ships sought to tie up the ON ships long enough for the big ship to finally break the line and take the clear shot at Conveyor One she so desperately craved. Once her missiles were clear of the point defense systems of the ON escorts, even the new drives wouldn’t be enough to catch them. Their last and only line of defense would be the handful of working point-defense batteries on the colony ship and whatever ’castings Thorn could contrive.

He considered how he could alter the nature of reality, if there was something he could do that wouldn’t likely have any significant, unintended consequences. He raced through all the obvious options he could think of, but each time he slammed face-first into a wall of I don’t know. It would be better to lose Conveyor One than to screw up existence itself. But he wasn’t going to let that happen, either. So, he was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

Besides, maybe the Hecate and the other escorts would manage to stop the heavy cruiser—

“Shit.”

The heavy cruiser, trailing a stream of atmo and shedding debris from multiple weapon hits, nonetheless managed to vomit out a barrage of missiles-- twenty-nine in all. Thorn estimated he had two, maybe two and a half minutes to stop them.

He gripped his talisman and concentrated. Simple Hammer ’castings were enough to knock the missiles off their trajectory, but after a half-dozen such attempts, he gave up. The missiles were smart enough to regain their target locks.

He switched to Scorch effects, turning magic into blasts of incandescent fury as hot as fresh magma. One after another, he burned through the casings of the onrushing missiles, destroying their motors and guidance systems. Seven, eight. Nine. Ten.

Too slow.

“Can I help?”

Thorn glanced at the figure that had suddenly appeared beside him. It was Winuk, clad in a Nyctus spacesuit. His immediate thought was, no, Winuk, get out of here. But Winuk was a shaman, capable of his own magic. Moreover, he had a deeply vested interest in keeping Conveyor One intact. He wanted to fight for his ship. Who was Thorn to deny that?

So Thorn nodded. “Yes! Whatever you can do to take those missiles out!”

Thorn turned back to the frantic task at hand. He resumed incinerating missiles, destroying four more, starting on a fifth, then realizing it had suddenly been encased in ice. Off-balance and with its seeker head blocked, it tumbled out of control, its motor burning the last of its fuel in furious but futile attempts to correct.

“Winuk, concentrate on the missiles starting at the top of the swarm! I’ll start at the bottom!”

The old shaman grunted his assent. It would be incredibly dumb if they failed to defend Conveyor One because they kept tripping over each other’s attempts to take out the missiles.

Less than thirty seconds to detonation. Seven missiles left. Six. The point-defense batteries with a clear field of fire opened up and took out one more. Now four. Three.

Two left, only a few seconds from detonation.

Thorn flung his awareness sideways, into Winuk’s mind. He could only hope the shaman wouldn’t resist or block him. He needed Winuk’s help to do what he was going to do.

A distant part of Thorn knew this was a pivotal moment. He wanted Winuk to trust him in a profoundly intimate way, by essentially letting Thorn take over his thoughts and surrender his identity. There would be no more telling moment of trust between the two peoples.

Winuk took a mental step back and let Thorn do what he needed to do.

Thorn summoned his own magic, and Winuk’s in tandem, then crafted both into a solid barrier of defiance, an impenetrable wall of magical denial. At least, he hoped it was impenetrable—

The two missiles slammed into the shimmering wall. One was pulverized to fragments, but the other managed to detonate its warhead. For a moment, the universe turned white.

Slowly, it faded, the starfield lost behind a glowing cloud of plasma vapor. The fact that Thorn was present and aware of it, and could see it, was definitely a good sign.

He blinked, then launched his senses back across the empty kilometers, toward the battle. The heavy cruiser pressed on relentlessly, Kestrel fighters swarming around and harrying it, the Hecate, and the other ON escorts racing after it. They’d soon catch it, but likely not before it managed to reload its missile tubes and fire another spread. Thorn and Winuk had expended a great deal of their magical potential and might not be able to stop another salvo.

Something shoved Thorn’s attention sideways, and he focused on a piece of debris, a ten meter-long chunk of broken hull plating spalled off the heavy cruiser by a weapon impact. Thorn glanced at Winuk and saw the shaman’s bulbous eyes staring back at him. Despite their alien depths, Thorn saw a spark of something familiar in them. It was a flicker of camaraderie. Winuk had been the one to divert his attention, and Thorn knew why even without asking.

He swung his awareness back into space, fixed it on the chunk of debris, then reached out and caught it in a magical grip. Then he wound up and flung it as hard as he could into the heavy cruiser’s bridge. It smashed through armor and structural members and buried itself deep inside the cruiser with a blast of icy fog and a spray of ice crystals. This Nyctus ship had apparently maintained an aqueous environment on board, or at least on the bridge. Now bodies tumbled out of the ragged gap, slowly spinning as they froze in the cosmic cold. The heavy cruiser began to veer, its course deflected by the impact and subsequent loss of control. Thorn was tempted to finish the job and just destroy it, but Winuk’s voice sounded amid his own thoughts.

Take them alive. Please. They may yet be saved.

Thorn hesitated, then ended his Joining with Winuk and released his other ’castings. Reality rushed back in, Thorn standing on the brink of the abyss yawning beyond the hole that had been blasted in Conveyor One’s flank. He got hit with another wave of vertigo and wobbled on his feet until Winuk steadied him with quick tentacles.

Thorn, are you alright? Winuk asked.

Thorn turned to the old shaman. He and this Nyctus, someone he once would have considered a bitter enemy, suited only for death, had just cooperated to save hundreds of lives—human and squid.

And just like that, the end of the war suddenly popped into view. It was still distant, but it was there. His promise to Morgan, that he would try to save what Nyctus he could, became something attainable, even though Thorn would kill when necessary. Thorn exhaled, feeling his shoulders rise.

He smiled at Winuk. Yes. I’m fine. Better than I have been for a long time, in fact.

* * *

Despite his unexpected moment of bonding with Winuk, Thorn kept a wary eye on the Nyctus survivors taken off the heavy cruiser. There were twenty-three of them, under the command of a junior officer, since all of the bridge officers were dead. They’d been brought aboard Conveyor One as prisoners, across a motley collection of shuttles and Mol’s Gyrfalcon, which had raced out to assist in the fight along with Bertilak in the Jolly. They’d arrived too late, so they had to settle for mopping up and prisoner transport.

Mol sidled over beside Thorn. “Hey, sir. Hear you managed to win a fight without me.”

“Touch and go without you there, but I got lucky with sixteen straight kills,” Thorn said. “Excuse me, sixteen and a half. Think some other cruiser winged one, so we’ll share.”

Mol grinned, but it faded as she watched the Nyctus prisoners huddle together in a miserable-looking group. Winuk and several of the Radiant Nyctus already aboard Conveyor One were moving now to speak to them. The humans kept a watchful but respectful distance.

“I guess we’re about to see if Monsters can be turned into Radiants just by the power of persuasion,” Thorn said.

Mol gave him a wry glance. “I’m sure that sentence would mean something to somebody.”

“It would. To my twelve-year-old daughter, in fact.”

“If that was meant to be a shot, it wasn’t. She created a whole freakin’ nebula with the power of her mojo. I’m not even going to begin trying to compare myself to that,” Mol fired back, waving dismissively toward space.

Winuk stopped in front of the group of prisoners and focused his attention on the officer commanding them. They were all doing their best to look defiant and uncowed, but Thorn didn’t need to use magic to see their abject, humiliated misery.

“Do you realize what you tried to do? You tried to destroy this ship and, in the process, kill dozens of Nyctus,” Winuk said.

“This ship is a travesty!” the officer snapped back. “It is nothing but piteous charity from the humans, intended to turn our people into refugees and relocate them to wherever the air-breathers decide is most out of their way!”

“So you would rather you stay and die as the Bilau terraform the waters away from our worlds?”

“We will fight them—!”

“We have fought them,” Winuk cut in, flashing crimson with anger. “We have fought them. Every time, we’ve been defeated and more of our people have died. It is pointless.” He gestured around with his tentacles. “This is our best chance for success. Can—can you not see that?”

The officer didn’t respond right away. Instead, he seemed to be doing—something. Thorn couldn’t make out what, but he opened his mouth to sound the alarm anyway. Before he could, though, a gunshot snapped out, echoing against the decks and bulkheads of Conveyor One. The Nyctus officer toppled to one side, a wicked blade clattering against the deck plates.

Mol lowered her sidearm as ON security closed in. They had their weapons trained on the rest of the Nyctus prisoners, their detachment commander shouting to search them again, and thoroughly.

“Saw something gleaming, figured it probably wasn’t something good.” She shrugged as she holstered her sidearm. “Didn’t think there was time to raise the alarm. Besides, it was just a squid.”

Thorn thought about speaking but decided that, if at all, he would have a quiet word with Mol later. Just because he’d had a revelation about how humans and Nyctus could actually not just coexist, but cooperate, it didn’t mean other humans would accept it anywhere near as quickly. Hell, it had taken staring down death, in the form of a barrage of incoming missiles, to make Thorn even begin to realize it. Now was not the time to start preaching about it to other members of the ON.

Winuk joined them. His scarlet anger had faded into the mottled greys and blacks of sadness.

“Thank you,” he said to Mol.

“How the hell did he get a knife past security, anyway?” Mol asked. “This some trick your people can do, hide stuff away? Or was it mojo—er, magic?”

“Neither. He simply inserted it into one of his dorsal tentacles to conceal it. The pain must have been excruciating.” Winuk’s anguish deepened as he said it. “Some of us will never swim in pure seas again, I think,” the shame and sadness in his voice echoing his somber bioluminescence.

“You don’t have to swim for them, Winuk. You are not their keeper,” Thorn said. As he did, that path he’d started to walk with Winuk became a little more distinct, that distant end of the war a little closer.

He realized he could not only accept the Nyctus, but he would also, in time, be able to forgive them. Not all, of course. But at least some of them.

Forgive the Nyctus. The thought felt even more alien than the squids themselves. And yet, there it was.

18

Thorn slid gratefully into his rack aboard the Hecate. Once, this had been his pretty much permanent home, the place where he knew he’d be resting his head almost every night. These days, though, he scattered his sleep across different beds—the Jolly, Mol’s Gyrfalcon, Code Gauntlet, Code Nebula, the Memphis, Nebo, and probably a few other places he’d simply lost in the blur.

It was nice to be home. Or home-ish.

He took a deep, slow breath and closed his eyes.

Then snapped them open again as the Hecate’s battle stations alarm ripped apart the darkness. Muttering a blistering stream of curses, he reached for his boots—only to catch the time. He’d been asleep for nearly four hours. It sure as hell hadn’t felt like it.

Reynaud’s voice rattled over the intercom. “All hands, battle stations. I say again, battle stations. This is not a drill. I say again, this is not a drill.”

Thorn yanked his sidearm out of its locker and jammed it into its holster. As he did, he mused—briefly—on how much Reynaud sounded like Tanner, her voice a calm, measured, near-monotone. That was what happened when you trained and worked under the best. They rubbed off on you. And Tanner really was the best.

The instant Thorn thought it, a new voice came over the comm.

“Stellers, Tanner. Report to my CIC.”

Thorn had exited his quarters and started for the witchport, but he reversed course and headed deeper into the Hecate. He found Tanner in the repurposed cargo bay that was his CIC, his staff already at work, tapping at terminals and chattering softly into comm sets. Tanner gestured him over to the big tactical display.

Thorn clumped over to him, one boot still not properly strapped up. Tanner looked like he’d just come off parade. Did the man ever actually sleep, or did he just sit, perfectly groomed, waiting for the next calamity to happen?

“Thoughts?” Tanner asked.

Thorn unceremoniously lifted a foot onto the edge of a console and strapped up his errant boot. As he did, he peered at the display. What he saw made his eyes go round, driving the last dregs of sleep from his brain.

“Nyctus, sir? Attacking Code Gauntlet? They’re insane!” Thorn said, stomping his foot back on the deck.

“Not as insane as you might think. Contrary to that squid who understood their fleet to only have thirty-odd ships left, they’ve got—hell, a lot more,” Tanner said.

“One hundred and fourteen ships total, sir,” a nearby Lieutenant Commander cut in. “Only sixty-eight are actual Nyctus warships, though. Another thirty-one look like repurposed transports and other auxiliary craft. And the other fifteen are—”

The man stopped. Tanner shot him a glance. “What have I said about dramatic pauses in my CIC, Piers?”

“Sorry, sir. The AI’s having trouble giving us a firm ID on them because they all seem to be different hull designs,” the staff officer replied.

Thorn pulled out his talisman and looked at Tanner. “Sir, if I may?”

“Didn’t bring you down here for your sparkling wit, Stellers. Do what you need to do.”

Thorn smiled quickly, then shoved his attention through the talisman, beyond the Hecate’s hull, and into space. He swept it out and across the inbound Nyctus fleet, which had been arranged in two roughly equal squadrons. The fifteen unidentified ships were in the second, more distant of the two, as was the biggest of the Nyctus ships, an enormous battlewagon probably half again the mass of a battleship. He ignored it for the moment and concentrated on the motley collection of unknown ships. He flicked his awareness from one to the next, scanning the minds of the crews to see if he could gain some sense of who they were.

Some Nyctus. But also Danzur. And Philomek. And Owath. Even a smattering of Bilau. But they were mixed up among all of the ships, each of which rang with its own psychic character, the accumulated mental reverberations of their crews over time. Not only were they unique, but the impressions also soared up to emotional highs, plunged into emotional lows, and were shot through with more than a little jealousy, greed, and deviousness. This was different from warships, whose psychic signature tended to be more uniform, one of muted conformity punctuated by brief bursts of strong emotion, the echoes of battles.

Thorn ended the ’casting, blinking as the hard reality of the CIC came thundering back into place around him. He turned to Tanner.

“Sir, those other fifteen ships are mercenaries,” he said.

Tanner crossed his arms. “Mercenaries? That’s interesting, and not in a good way.”

“Can confirm, sir. The AI pulled specs from the Allied Stars criminal database. Eleven of those fifteen ships have outstanding warrants,” Piers, the staff officer, put in.

“And the other four just haven’t been caught yet,” Tanner said, nodding at the screen.

Thorn followed his gaze. “Sir, if the Nyctus are hiring mercenaries—”

“Then they’re desperate. The question, though, is to do what, exactly? They’re still woefully outgunned by the Third Fleet, most of which is here, at anchor. And that doesn’t even count Code Gauntlet’s fixed defenses,” Tanner said.

“It’s not like mercenaries are very reliable, either,” Thorn added.

“No, they are not. That’s probably why they’re in the second wave of the attack.”

Piers cut in again. “Sir, Admiral Scoville on the comm.”

Tanner nodded. “Yes, sir?”

“Galen, there’s something peculiar about this attack.”

“Damned right, sir. Stellers has confirmed that a chunk of the squids’ second wave is mercenary ships,” Tanner replied.

“Yeah, we got that as well,” Scoville replied. “How long until you can get your squadron underway?”

Tanner glanced at the tactical display. “We’ll be crossing the start line in just over fifteen minutes, sir.”

“Good. I want you to take your squadron out to the far spinward flank and work your way back toward the squids’ second line. I do not want you to get decisively engaged. Stand-off attacks only. The rest of Third Fleet is going to form up on the Arcturus and take these bastards head-on.”

“Mind if I ask, sir, what you’re thinking here? Keeping us apart from the battle?” Tanner asked.

Scoville’s reply was frank. “I’m not sure. There’s just something about this that doesn’t feel right. I want you and your ships to act as an operational reserve, at least for now. You still have Stellers and Wixcombe aboard, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir. And their daughter. She was due to head back to Nebo the day after tomorrow.”

“Perfect. Wait for my order to engage, Galen.” Scoville’s eyes twinkled. “Or do what I know you’re going to do, which is to engage anyway, when you feel the time is right.”

“You know me too well, sir.”

Scoville grinned, then the comm flicked off.

“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 still 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.”

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,” Thorn 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.”

“So they’d eventually die.”

“I guess they would, yeah. But I suspect they’ve got a good few hundred years left in them, so I don’t think we’re on a clock, here. At least, not that particular clock.”

“And what about the rest of this stuff?” Bertilak asked, waving his hands around the interior of the lifeboat.

Thorn touched another statue, one much smaller than those he’d seen in the dead Meksun city, but no less spectacular. It was just one of dozens, maybe hundreds of objects stacked around the interior. Some of them, like the statue, were obvious cultural artifacts. Others were more cryptic. And some seemed to be containers, presumably holding more things. It wasn’t all neatly organized. The objects were jumbled haphazardly, as though loaded in a great hurry.

“I think it’s probably what they could salvage of their own cultural heritage,” Thorn replied. “Everything they thought they could save so their identity as a people was preserved.”

He had a momentary flash, maybe a flicker of psychic resonance from the ship. Instead of just him and Bertilak and the empty quiet, Meksun briefly bustled around him, frantically trying to jam whatever they could into the lifeboat. Some of them argued, apparently over whether or not something was worth the space it would take up. A pall of chaotic desperation hung over the scene like a funeral shroud. And then it was gone as quickly as it had happened.

“Thorn, are you alright?” Bertilak asked. He suddenly stood directly in front of Thorn. “You went completely blank there for a few seconds.”

“Yeah. I had a bit of a vision, I guess, of the Meksun loading this thing. It wasn’t a happy time.”

“I can only imagine.”

They investigated a bit more, then decided to take the whole lifeboat in tow and bring it back to ON space. The Jolly had been outfitted for this eventuality, having a universal docking cradle attached to her underside. Normally used for salvage ops, it would grapple the lifeboat and snug it securely into place, effectively turning both it and the Jolly into a single ship.

First, Thorn found the lifeboat’s drive and made sure it wasn’t active. It pained him to do so, but he used a Scorch effect to burn through several conduits, severing the drive from its power supply. They couldn’t, however, risk having the drive light up while the lifeboat was slung under the Jolly. Then, he turned his attention to a second, even more important task.

He had encountered the sterility pathogen on the dead Meksun world and vividly remembered the repugnant way it resonated with his magical senses. He did the same thing again to see if it was present on the lifeboat and if he would need to thoroughly excise it from himself and Bertilak before they returned to human space.

And it was present, scraping against Thorn’s perceptions with an acrid wrongness, something that shouldn’t exist, but did. Fortunately, though, it was also contained inside one of the containers, sealed into another container, that was sealed into a third, all of them chilled to only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. He took a moment to wonder why the Meksun had preserved a sample of it.

But the answer was obvious. Like it or not, it was now a part of their cultural heritage, too.

He turned to Bertilak. “Let’s get things packed up and start for home. Before you do, though, I want you to disable the Jolly’s transponder, even once we’re back in ON space. We can reactivate it when we reach the Tobruk.

“Why?”

“Because we’re bringing back something that could wipe us out as a species, and in the most horrible way possible. I’d honestly rather have nobody else know it.”

20

“So these people are called the Mek-sons?” Morgan asked.

“Meksun. And, as far as we know, they’re the only three left,” Thorn replied, turning his attention again to the airlock leading into the Hecate’s hangar bay. Mol had launched the Gyrfalcon and taken station off the destroyer’s flank, leaving the bay an empty, cavernous space. Based on the initial pass done through the archives that had been loaded aboard the lifeboat, the Meksun apparently shunned confined spaces as much as they could. Consideration had been given to using the enormous hangar deck on the Memphis, or the even bigger one on the Tobruk, but Urbanek had settled on the Hecate. It was Tanner’s flagship, so it was prestigious enough for a first contact and the start of diplomatic proceedings. More to the point, they knew almost nothing whatsoever about the Meksun. If things went horribly wrong, then the Hecate was expendable. The super carriers weren’t.

“Just three? I hope they’re not all girls or boys,” Morgan said. “Then they couldn’t have babies. And they have to have babies so they don’t go ex—er—shoot, I forget the word!”

“I think you mean extinct. And not necessarily,” Kira said. “But it’s complicated, and now’s not the time, Morgan. We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

“More importantly, do not talk about babies around the Meksun. Don’t even say the word babies, or offspring, or anything like that,” Thorn added, giving Morgan his best dad look. It wasn’t as potent as Kira’s mom look, but it still got Morgan to nod.

“Okay dad. I won’t. Promise.”

Morgan had inadvertently touched on a troublesome topic, though. The three Meksun had been awoken from cryo-sleep in accordance with the instructions included in their lifeboat. They’d then immediately been quarantined and treated by ON medical personnel specializing in xenobiology. The priority had been determining if they were carriers of the sterility prion plague, but luckily, they weren’t. Even so, the issue of reproducing and regrowing their race was a sensitive, potentially explosive one. Urbanek had firmly taken it off the table, at least for now.

Fortunately, they’d also included a language key, which had shown that they actually spoke four different languages, each apparently intended for a different type of conversation. For instance, one language seemed to only be used when expressing a strong, negative emotion, like anger or sorrow. What was apparently their language of commerce and business turned out to be similar to the tongue of the Imbrogul. That allowed basic translation, but there were still major parts of it the translators couldn’t crack.

The solution had been to bring in the Imbrogul to help, which was why, when the airlock opened, the first figure to step through was Ondric. Thorn smiled at the Imbrogul leader, whom he befriended during his surreptitious visit to their homeworld. Ondric returned the smile, and a whiff of something like fresh rain tinged with lavender. It was the smell of good-humored approval.

The three Meksun followed next. Thorn watched the stately beings with something like awe, keenly aware that this was, as far as they knew, the entire species. His brief, dreary sojourn on their dead world had somehow sparked a feeling of kinship with these people, despite this being the first time he’d ever actually met them. He’d considered it his personal duty to mourn for them, to ensure they weren’t forgotten. Finding three of them still alive had frankly filled him with a surprising joy.

Urbanek and Tanner, followed by Damien and Densmore, brought up the rear of the little group. They filed into the hangar, and the Meksun immediately unfurled and extended their wings slightly, as though relaxing.

Urbanek spoke to the Meksun. “I’m pleased to introduce Thorn Stellers. He traveled to your world and retrieved the encoded cylinder you left there. He, and Bertilak over there, then found your lifeboat and brought it back here.”

Ondric softly translated as Urbanek spoke. The translators did their best but only managed occasional words, like greet and appreciate. Ondric had explained that the Meksun spoke an archaic form of Imbrogul, one that was virtually dead outside of scholarly, linguistic circles. His people were hurrying to construct a proper translation key, but for the moment, he was the translator.

“We are pleased to greet all of you and particularly wish to express our thanks to those who have worked so hard to help us,” Ondric said when the Meksun had finished talking.

The conversation plodded awkwardly on. Thorn learned that the three Meksun were named Trill, Issa, and Serss. None of the names gave any sense of gender, but Thorn wasn’t sure how gender worked for these people, or if it even mattered at all.

Morgan’s voice suddenly rang in his mind. Dad, why don’t we just talk to them this way?

Because we don’t know if they’re capable of it, Morgan.

Sure they are! I’ve been talking to Issa. She’s really nice. She hopes we can help her people so they can have babies again.

Oh. Shit.

Morgan, we specifically told you not to bring that up—

It’s alright, a new voice said. It wafted through his head like wind chimes. Your daughter’s innocent questions actually make facing the terrible thing that happened to our people a little easier to bear. You should be very proud of her.

Oh, I am. We just didn’t want to cause you any pain.

None of the pain we feel has you as its cause. Quite the opposite. You are our saviors, or are trying to be, anyway.

Thorn cut into the cumbersome discussion still crawling back and forth between the humans, Ondric, and the Meksun. “Excuse me, Admiral. It turns out the Meksun are capable of telepathic communication. It might be easier if we use that as our main way of communicating with them, until Ondric can provide us with a working translation key.”

Urbanek narrowed his eyes and looked doubtful, but Densmore stepped forward. “Morgan, you can hear all of us speaking telepathically, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Can you—I don’t know, host everyone in your mind? I think the rest of us can only speak one-on-one.”

Sure. Mom, Dad, you guys there?

Thorn and Kira swapped a look caught somewhere between exasperation over Morgan’s casual innocence and pride over the same thing.

I am, Thorn said.

Kira nodded. Me too.

And, uh—sorry, I don’t remember your name. Mom usually just calls you that damned woman.

Densmore laughed, both in-person and psychically. Is that right, Wixcombe?

Maybe when I’m really angry. Sorry, ma’am.

Don’t be. I’ve been called far worse. I suspect you’ve called me far worse. And Morgan, you can call me Alys.

Uh, can the Meksun hear us? Thorn asked, and immediately received an answer.

We can. It’s a most undiplomatic conversation. And an utterly charming one, Issa said.

Urbanek crossed his arms and glanced at Tanner. “I’m starting to feel obsolete, Galen—you know, having to actually speak out loud and all.”

The ensuing conversation happened quickly and efficiently, with much more nuance than Ondric’s imperfect translation was able to provide. The Meksun recounted the invasion of their territories and attacks upon their planets. At first, they had managed to stand their ground and even repulse most of the joint Bilau and Nyctus attacks. Their navy, it seemed, was at least a match for their attackers, and even superior in some ways. For the first two or three human years of their war, they did well. They even appeared on the brink of winning overall and driving off the interlopers.

That all changed, though, when the Bilau and Nyctus deployed their bioweapons. The Meksun knew now that several different strains had been unleashed on them, but that the sterility prion plague had been the true payload. The others, various types of ailments, had just been distractions. And the ruse had worked. By the time the Meksun scientists had established the sterility prion as the real threat, it was too late.

I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like, Thorn said, his tone somber.

We’re so sorry this happened to you, Kira added.

We thank you for your words, Serss replied. But it is your daughter that truly lifts our spirits and gives us hope. It has been a long time since any of us have been able to experience the innocent honesty of a child.

Make sure you treasure her, because she is a gift, Trill said.

Yeah, Dad, Mom. I’m a gift, so you gotta treasure me.

A warm tingle hummed in Thorn’s mind. The Meksun were laughing, he realized. He, Kira, and even Densmore joined in.

* * *

Fortunately for Urbanek’s sense of usefulness, Ondric finally received a full translation key from his people. Once loaded into the translators, normal conversation with the Meksun became possible. Now, the three aliens sat with Thorn, Kira, Damien, Urbanek, and Densmore around a table that had been set up in the Hecate’s hangar bay. Although sat wasn’t quite right, at least as far as the Meksun were concerned. They more squatted, their posture somewhere between kneeling and a crouch, with their wings folded straight back behind them.

One of the first questions came from Serss. “What has happened to the artifacts stored aboard out lifeboat?”

“They’re all intact,” Damien replied. “We did some passive scanning of them to make sure there was nothing dangerous we should know about. And we retrieved whatever data we could from your lifeboat. But the actual artifacts themselves are right where you left them, untouched.”

“It was all we were able to retrieve. Eight thousand years of civilization, reduced to the contents of a small spaceship,” Trill said. Even without the translator, Thorn would have recognized the resigned sadness in his tone.

“You’ll probably be able to retrieve a lot from your planets,” Thorn offered. “From what I saw, a lot was undamaged.”

“That will be a long-term goal, at best,” Trill replied.

“We have no immediate desire to return to our worlds. Even the thought of doing so is simply . . . too painful,” Issa said.

Serss nodded. “They are the graves of eleven billion of our people. They should remain undisturbed.”

“Well, on behalf of the Orbital Navy and the Allied Stars, I’d like to once again offer our sincere sympathy to you,” Tanner said. He intoned it like it was a prepared speech, which it probably was. When he went on, though, he was back to the naturally brusque tone Thorn had come to know so well.

“Which leads to what seems to me to be the most immediate question. What would you consider to be justice for your people?”

The three Meksun stared at him for a moment, then conferred softly among themselves. It was Trill who finally replied.

“Is there a point to seeking justice? What was done to us was truly monstrous, but nothing that might be just will restore our people or undo what has happened.”

“Not even remotely suggesting it would,” Tanner replied. “However, we find ourselves in the midst of winning one war but facing a second, against the Bilau. And they’re the ones who seem to have been the instigators, and the lead in using this damned bioweapon. The Nyctus are guilty, too, but mainly by association.”

“And what happens to the Bilau will definitely be informed by what they did to you,” Densmore put in. “Genocidal crimes against sentient life can’t go unanswered. They demand justice. And you need to be part of determining what that justice is going to look like.”

Thorn raised an eyebrow at Densmore. He’d come to know her as the ultimate pragmatist. To her, the ends almost always justified the means. But here she was making an impassioned speech about abstractions, about what was right and wrong. Moreover, it wasn’t simply put on for effect. Genuine emotion rang in her voice.

The Meksun conferred again, then Trill turned and raised a hand, six long, delicate fingers splayed out. He then clenched three of them, leaving the other three extended.

“You’re correct. To let this go unpunished is to invite it being done to someone else. And we would wish that on no one. So here is what we would have as justice. What should be done to the Bilau is what they did to us. They should be reduced to three, just as we are. No more.”

Thorn shifted uncomfortably in his seat. What Trill was proposing was tantamount to genocide, which was exactly what Thorn had said he would not condone. But it was hard to be idealistic and just come out and say that in the face of the truly monstrous thing that had been done to the Meksun. His thoughts raced for a moment, before settling on what seemed like a reasonable, personal compromise. Or, at least, a half-assed one.

“I just want to restate that I won’t take part in genocide. But I also won’t argue with the judgement of the Meksun. If that seems to make me a moral coward, fine. I’ll learn to live with it,” Thorn said.

Thorn braced himself for outrage from the Meksun, but Trill simply nodded. “We understand. Again, we don’t advocate this dire fate for the Bilau lightly, nor do we expect it to actually set anything right. We don’t advocate it for ourselves at all, in fact, because that would be vengeance, not justice.”

Serss spoke up. “We advocate it, instead, on behalf of all sentient life, so that it’s clear that genocide will not be tolerated by those of a right and good mind.”

Thorn let out a relieved breath. He’d envisioned this turning into a bitter, acrimonious argument, but the simple, logical stance of the Meksun put his mind at ease.

“This is a time when the universe will be balanced and the right thing is shitty, the wrong thing is worse, and the best thing, I agree, is to remove an evil at any cost,” he said. He turned to Kira.

“I don’t presume to speak for you, of course. And we certainly don’t want Morgan involved. If anyone is going to have to stand witness to whatever happens, it will be me.”

Kira returned a thoughtful look, then nodded. “I’ll take care of Morgan. You do whatever you need to do, Thorn. And if you need me there to pick up pieces afterward, then I’ll be there.”

Despite the formal setting, Thorn reached, took Kira’s hand, and briefly squeezed it.

“All the morality and ethics of this aside, if the Bilau get the chance, they’ll do this again. We can’t allow that to happen.” He turned to the Meksun. “Will you share your cryo-sleep technology with us?”

“We will,” Trill said.

Urbanek nodded gravely, then turned to Densmore. “Have your people set aside a facility on Farthest Star Three. The blackout ring. We’ll freeze the last three Bilau and store them there.”

Thorn made note of the terms Farthest Star Three and the blackout ring. He had no idea what they were, other than sounding really ominous. But he just let the references pass for now and asked Urbanek the suddenly obvious question.

“Until when, sir? Under what conditions would we wake them back up? And would we let them restore their civilization?”

“All excellent questions, Stellers,” Urbanek said, then turned to the rest of the group. “I believe that will be sufficient for now. We’ll take a break and reconvene later.”

Thorn watched Urbanek leave. He wasn’t sure what to make of that non-answer, but it had seemed just as ominous as whatever the hell the blackout ring was.

21

The Allied Stars Council finally gave up on their fantastical idea that some sort of agreement with the Bilau would be even a remotely good idea. Urbanek instantly advocated for an immediate strike against the aliens, to probe their defenses and try to seize and keep the initiative. Fleet Command agreed but wanted immediate to be immediate, and tasked Admiral Scoville with making it happen. The job got handed over to Urbanek, who decided that this was a job best suited to their newest tech.

The upgraded Kestrel fighters had changed so much from their original design that they’d been designated as a new class, called the Goshawk. Armed with an equally upgraded multi-role missile system, the Killshot, they were formidable little craft with twin railguns, internal stowage for twelve Killshots or their equivalent mass in ordnance, and six external hardpoints that could accept an array of load-outs. Carried by yet another upgraded mothership, formerly called escort carriers and now called assault carriers, they could deliver a potent hit against any target on short notice.

Which was the case now.

Thorn now watched as the Corregidor prepared to launch her new wing of Goshawks. Externally, he didn’t notice much difference in the carrier, but under the hood, he knew she’d been almost entirely rebuilt. She could carry half-again as many fighters as she used to, and launch and retrieve them almost twenty percent faster, thanks to the new Imbrogul force-field tech Thorn had first seen on the Tobruk. The Hecate, the Corregidor’s sole escort, kept station about a thousand klicks away from the carrier. She would launch one squadron of Goshawks, then make an Alcubierre hop to the next launch point, deploy another squadron, hop again, and then again. By then, she’d return to the original launch point, recover the first squadron of fighters, then work her way back to collect the remainder of her Goshawks. It wasn’t a complex plan, but it did involve some pretty narrow timings.

And that was only one batch of targets. There were seven more assault carriers doing exactly the same thing, meaning that over 100 Bilau targets would be hit within just a few hours. The list included surveillance outposts, comms relays, replenishment depots, and a wide range of other installations. Thorn’s job was to try and watch over the entirety of the Corregidor’s deployed Goshawks, a job that was going to tax him for sure. He now knelt in the witchport, his talisman in hand, waiting for the first launches.

Curious, he extended his thoughts across the gap between the Hecate and the Corregidor and checked in on the launch preparations. He immediately encountered a pervasive aura of grim purpose, shot through a resigned and pragmatic understanding. The Goshawk pilots were under no illusions about the danger of their mission and knew that some of them wouldn’t be returning from it. Each of the Goshawks had a scuttling charge built in, intended to destroy the craft and prevent it from falling into the hands of the Bilau. They would trigger automatically if capture were imminent, but the pilots could activate them as well.

To their enormous credit, Thorn didn’t sense a single pilot that would hesitate to do just that if the time came. Moreover, the most prevalent emotion was one of determination. The pilots knew what the Bilau had done to the Meksun and would probably do to other races, humanity included, if they got the chance. Each one of these men and women were resolved that that wouldn’t happen.

Canopies closed and sealed, preflight checks were completed, launch checklists were ticked off. One after another, the Goshawk pilots reported them and their craft green and ready to launch. When the last had checked in, the big hangar doors silently slid open, and the first Goshawks were hurled into space by electromagnetic catapults. Each immediately pitched up, their drive lighting and maneuvering them clear of the launch zone without fouling the Corregidor with their exhaust. By the time they were out of the way, the next wave of Goshawks were hurled out of the hangar doors. It was a delicate dance, one performed with utter precision by pilots who’d been training the launch process for weeks.

“Wave complete. We’re ready to proceed to the next launch point,” the Corregidor announced.

“Roger that. Stand by for Alcubierre activation in sixty seconds,” Reynaud, the Hecate’s captain, replied over the comm.

Thorn sought one of the fighters, now forming up for their attack on the inner system, a planet hosting a tracking and surveillance facility. He’d already tagged one of the pilots, a hard-faced woman from the Skydancer Squadron whose call sign was Skydancer Two, with a ’casting that would let him keep track of her no matter where she went. By the time he’d done that to her, and to one pilot in each of the two other attacking squadrons—Firebrand Two and Stinger Three respectively—and then actually exerted himself to see the battle play out through their eyes, he’d be magically tapped out.

But he was the one sitting in relative safety, well away from the action. So he didn’t begrudge the fact he was pushing the limits here, kneeling in the Hecate’s witchport. The limits the Goshawk pilots were pushing were far, far deadlier.

* * *

“Skydancer Lead, this is Skydancer Two. I’m reading us figures one-zero-zero out from my breakoff point.”

“Roger that, Skydancer Two. Wait until Skydancer Four and Five are clear, then you’re cleared to break off and start your run.”

No sign of enemy return fire. Yet. Still just pings by surveillance scanners. Maybe they’d get lucky. Skydancer Two checked her six, confirming that her wing, Skydancer Three, sat in the slot. She wasn’t really keen on the idea of splitting the squadron up like this, even for the few minutes the attack would take. It was the best way with multiple targets, though. Get in, get the target, get out. That’s how you came back from one of these little jaunts alive.

* * *

“Firebrand Two, watch your nine o’clock low. Two bogeys coming up fast.”

“I see ’em.”

Firebrand Two flung his Goshawk hard to port and pitched down. He aimed for a head-on run. The Goshawk should be nimble enough to avoid the incoming fire, or that was the theory, anyway. But they didn’t have much experience with these Bilau outside of simulators, and even that had been based on incomplete intel.

The Goshawk surged ahead. Firebrand Two snapped into a tight roll, at the same time applying a lateral thrust. It induced a tight, high-g corkscrew that would have crushed him into his seat without the new anti-grav tech. The maneuver made the Goshawk a lot harder to hit, which gave Firebrand Two a brief shot of comfort.

That ended as he waited for the humming tone that said his Killshot missiles had a lock. The Bilau ship opened up with an energy weapon, pumping out nearly point-blank shots as searing, blue-white bolts. He caught just a hint of a scream as Firebrand Three, his wing, vanished in a flash and became just a racing cloud of debris.

* * *

Stinger Three watched as her target, a set of gantries extending from a dome-shaped facility, some sort of replenishment depot, grew in her sights. She raced nap-of-the-Earth over the pocked surface of the planet, an asteroid that had been excavated with who knew how many tunnels and chambers, which now served as a FOB for the Bilau.

She glanced at the heads-up, confirming she’d selected Ground/Stationary target mode for her Killshots. In the brief instant her attention had flicked aside, the Bilau defenses opened up. Stinger Three immediately snapped her Goshawk from side to side, snap-rolling one way, then the other, then pitching up and down. Most of the incoming fire consisted of projectiles, but an energy weapon battery on a more distant facility had joined in. The pulses of coherent plasma reached for Stinger Three like grasping fingers, the missed shots either flashing into space over the horizon or slamming into the peaks of rocky ridges.

She got tone; the Killshots had seen and acknowledged their targets. Stinger Three didn’t hesitate. She launched the missiles, watched them flash away, then slammed her fighter into a hard left turn. She trusted her wing, Stinger Five, to stick with her.

“Damn, I love this ship. You go girl,” she muttered, thinking that such a maneuver in her old Kestrel would have left her and her fighter scattered across the asteroid’s rocky surface.

* * *

Skydancer Two snapped her Goshawk to one side like a cracking whip. An energy bolt flashed by close enough that she thought she could have reached out and touched it. Her target, a comm relay uplink, loomed ahead. The Killshots complained about her wild gyrations, petulantly starting and stopping their target-lock tone. It was the only way she stood any chance of surviving this, though—

Something slammed hard into the Goshawk, making it slew hard to one side. Alarms lit up across her instruments. She tried to apply thrust, swinging the nose hard, back toward the target. Fortunately, the Killshots once again sounded their monotone, and it stuck, a hard lock. She launched and was gratified to see the two Killshots streak away. Their hypervelocity drives were single use propulsion systems derived from the captured Nyctus prototype, and they kicked hard. The two missiles raced through a sudden storm of point defense fire, but by slightly varying their acceleration, they proved too elusive to take down. Both slammed into the uplink and detonated with ferocious blasts that flung debris in all directions.

Skydancer Two pitched the Goshawk’s nose up—or tried to. The fighter responded, but sluggishly, and desperately wanted to pull to the right. She still had control, though.

Again, something crashed into the Goshawk. The object, a chunk of debris from her own destroyed target, spun away. A few seconds later, the Goshawk went as dark as a grave.

* * *

The instant Firebrand Two’s Killshots returned a steady tone, he launched. The two missiles were flung from the weapons bay, their engines lit, and they sped off, seeker heads relentlessly tracking the Bilau ship. Halfway to the target, they split, their AIs coming to a mutual decision to engage a second Bilau fighter that had just zoomed into the dogfight.

Behind Firebrand Two, the rotating magazine spun, locking two more Killshots into place, ready to launch. He immediately got tone from them, but he held off because the first two missiles were almost at impact.

The closest Bilau ship disappeared in a searing cloud. The other missile missed the second as it jinked, detonated anyway, and caught the Bilau fighter in its blast. As it spun out of control, Firebrand Two hunted for anything standing in the way of his own target, a replenishment barge orbiting a gas giant close enough to scrape vapor from the topmost edge of its atmosphere. It represented an essentially infinite supply of fuel, including deuterium and helium-3, and made for a really high value target.

Nothing. Still, he was well aware that, without a wing, he was on his own. And on his own was not a great place to be in a growing dogfight.

* * *

Stinger Three let out a whoop of triumph as her missiles hit the replenishment depot. Both smashed through the dome and detonated inside, blasting it apart and scooping out a huge crater. She nimbly avoided the back-blast from the explosion, including a chunk of rock as big as the Goshawk. Once clear, she thumbed up the next target on her heads-up. The icon sat off to the left, so she reoriented on it, applied power, and smoothly accelerated toward it.

She took a second to glance at the part of the tactical display depicting the space behind her. Stinger Five was nowhere to be seen. Her heart sank, until she saw the IFF transponder return high above her. Her wing had engaged a pair of Bilau fighters and was keeping them off her back while she did her next run.

“Atta boy, Danny,” she said, settling the Goshawk onto its final trajectory as it flashed past the initial point. Once more, the Killshots got tone on the target, an uplink station to a platform orbiting directly above.

The Bilau defenses opened up, pouring fire toward as she closed. She began to jink and dodge, laughing almost hysterically the whole time.

* * *

Skydancer Two’s Goshawk sailed along a straight line, angling up from the shattered remains of the comm relay. With no thrust, Isaac Newton took over the controls, the fighter simply following the vector solution to whatever forces had been affecting it when the power died.

She ignored the tomb-like silence and hit the emergency restart.

Nothing.

She next switched to backup power and tried again.

Nothing.

Line by line, Skydancer Two worked her way through the POWER LOSS – IMMEDIATE ACTION checklist, as hundreds of hours had trained her to do. She reached the last item and switched the whole system over to emergency power cells. Minimal instruments and life support powered back up, as did the auxiliary thrusters. These injected pressurized gas into the regular thruster ports, giving her a scant ability to roll, pitch and yaw the Goshawk.

That was far, far from a solution, though. With enemy prowling nearby, it was like stepping into a fighting ring with handcuffs, then having your feet clamped into place. Her opponents would be the ones doing the skydancing around her, and there was nothing she could do about it.

* * *

Firebrand Two wheeled his Goshawk to one side, trying to throw off enemy tracking. Four more fighters from Firebrand Squadron were closing on the fuel platform from another angle and were taking the brunt of the defensive fire. It left him with a relatively clear run, with only two batteries lobbing shots his way.

He jinked again. And again. The Goshawk responded without hesitation, the combination of new drive and Imbrogul anti-grav not only making the extreme maneuvers possible, but also offering a smooth ride while doing it.

He checked his six. A bogey had fallen in behind him but had a lot of catching up to do. Firebrand Two reckoned he had time to finish this run and still turn to face the new threat. And once that was done, it would be time to start for home—

In the very middle of that thought, a stealthed missile fired by the trailing Bilau fighter smashed into the Goshawk, and Firebrand Two ceased to exist.

* * *

Thorn groaned as the pilot known as Firebrand Two just died. There was no warning, no preamble. He only knew what the pilots knew, and this one hadn’t seen whatever had killed him coming.

It took Thorn a moment to shake off the traumatic psychic echoes of a functioning mind suddenly ceasing to be. Grimly, he pushed himself back into the two remaining Joinings, Skydancer Two and Stinger Three.

* * *

Stinger Three whooped again as her Killshots blasted the uplink station into spectacular oblivion. She rolled the Goshawk onto its back to briefly admire her handiwork, then rolled back just in time to get a warning buzz that she’d been lit up by a new tracking scanner—and it had a hard lock on her.

She flashed her attention across the tactical display and saw that her wing had sailed up and away from the asteroid’s surface, engaging another Bilau fighter. Its wing seemed to have slipped away to come after her, though, and had managed to get close enough that a missile launch was only seconds away.

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

Stinger Three slammed the pitch thrusters to the firewall, flipping the Goshawk end-over-end. At the same time, she drove the main drive to emergency combat power. The Imbrogul anti-grav ate most of the sudden and extreme deceleration, but the excess still peaked at a brief, crushing eleven g’s. She groaned, then gasped as the abrupt force squashed her into her g-couch. Grey flowers blossomed across her vision, and a thin, shrill whine filled her head.

The Goshawk was smart enough to not kill its pilot, though, and dialed back the drive’s power. Stinger Three’s vision cleared in time for her to see the Bilau fighter, formerly behind her, now looming straight ahead. It suddenly found itself closing fast on the Goshawk, which now flew backward ahead of it, exhaust slowing it more and more. It put the Bilau’s would-be target inside the safety-arming range of his own missiles, costing him a second or two as he frantically switched weapons.

That was all Stinger Three needed. She opened up with both railguns, spewing streams of projectiles that shredded the Bilau fighter. She then flipped the Goshawk, the drive still burning, and desperately tried to pull away from the speeding wreckage.

A sawtooth ridge loomed ahead of her, jagged blackness truncating the stars. She pitched up hard, clearing the crest by less than a hundred meters. The wreckage chasing her didn’t and slammed into the rocky slope.

She glanced at the elapsed time. That whole maneuver, from detecting the Bilau behind her to the impact of the wreck against the rock, had lasted sixteen seconds.

Sniffing as her hands danced over the controls, Stinger Three reoriented the Goshawk while wearing a look of mild disgust. Sixteen seconds. Shit, she could do better than that.

* * *

Skydancer Two reached the bottom of the checklist, snapped out a curse, and started again.

There wasn’t much else she could do. She had no idea what damage the Goshawk had taken and couldn’t very well do an EVA to find out. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. The nature of the nimble little fighters was that they were generally either at peak performance, or they were broken. There wasn’t much in between.

She glanced at the comm. It was dead, too.

Finally, she put her focus on the one place she’d been avoiding, the trigger for the scuttling charge. She was a little surprised it hadn’t already detonated, but a quick check of its arming system showed it was offline, too.

Turn the key, pull it up, turn it again, push it down. That was all it took.

She glanced back at her tactical display, which was running at minimal power and showing a volume of space only a couple of hundred klicks around her. So, not only was she handcuffed with her feet fastened into place in that fighting ring, but the lights were also off, leaving her surrounded by confounding darkness.

* * *

Thorn felt Skydancer Two’s desperate hope begin its long, one-way slide into resigned despair. The woman was alone, in a dead fighter, deep in Bilau space. He desperately wanted to reach out to her, to show her she wasn’t alone. But Thorn couldn’t Join with a non-Starcaster, not this far away. He knew only one person who could do that, and she was the one person he didn’t want to drag into such a grim situation.

Thorn hung on the knife-edge of dilemma for a moment, twisting in indecision. Anything he did here would suck.

He finally blew out a sigh.

Morgan, are you there? I need your help.

* * *

Stinger Three loosed her last pair of Killshots, one targeting a Bilau light cruiser, the other an orbiting platform that may or may not be a valuable target. But it didn’t matter. She’d knocked out all of her primaries and was now free to pick targets of opportunity. And there was no way she was going back to the Corregidor with usable ordnance still on board.

The cruiser managed to knock down her Killshot with its point-defenses, and she cursed. The orbital platform wasn’t so lucky, though. The missile slammed home, making the platform stagger then start a long fall out of orbit and toward an inevitable end against the unyielding rock of the asteroid.

Her wing reappeared, sliding back into the slot behind and beside her. “Hey, Stinger Three, how are you doing?”

“I’m empty, except for about half my railgun ammo. You?”

“Same. I think it’s time to head home, huh?”

As soon as he said it, the recall beacon lit up, summoning the surviving Goshawks back to the rendezvous point, the RV, and pick-up by the Corregidor.

“Seems like Skydancer Lead thinks so, too.” She glanced at the tactical display. More Bilau fighters had scrambled and were closing in like an angry swarm of hornets. They had just enough time for recovery by the Corregidor and then a hasty retreat.

“Hey, I don’t need to be told twice,” she said, yawing the Goshawk onto a new course, away from the asteroid and the pocked, glowing debris fields that had once been Bilau installations.

The Goshawk settled into its new trajectory. Stinger Three seized the moment to finally relax, allowing herself a momentary breather—but only a momentary breather. As her flight instructors had driven into her, the op was finished when you took your boots off and fell into your rack, and not a moment before.

* * *

“Hi there.”

Skydancer Two yelped and turned. She wasn’t sure what the actual last thing she’d expect to have seen would be, but a little girl wasn’t one of them.

She shook her head. “So I’m hallucinating now. Great.”

Actually, you’re not, a somber baritone said, except it somehow came from inside her thoughts.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m seeing little girls, and now I’m hearing voices. That sounds like hallucinating to me,” she said.

Again, it’s not. It’s magic.

“That’s my dad,” the little girl said. “He asked me to make it so that he could talk to you. This is the only way I know how to do it.”

I’m Thorn Stellers, Lieutenant Commander. I’m a Starcaster aboard the Hecate.

“Stellers. Oh. The space wizard.”

He felt a glimmer of amusement. Space wizard?

“Yeah. That’s what we call you Starcasters. So I’m really talking to you?”

With the help of my daughter, yeah, you are. She’s acting as a sort of conduit. A bridge. A—He paused. It doesn’t matter. We can talk. That’s what matters.

“I’m Morgan,” the little girl said. “I guess you’re in trouble, huh?”

“You might say that, yeah. But it’s nice to, um, meet you, Morgan.”

“What’s your name?”

Skydancer Two leaned back in her g-couch. During an op, she wasn’t used to thinking of herself as anything but a callsign. That was an operational security thing. But she suspected that this op was probably over.

“I’m Tannis.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

Skydancer Two gave a tired smile. “Thank you.”

She still hadn’t figured out quite how the girl, apparently named Morgan, could be sitting with her in the Goshawk’s cockpit. There simply wasn’t room. She should be sitting half-in and half-outside, but here she was, apparently able to fit perfectly well. But she didn’t.

Skydancer Two shook her head. She knew almost nothing about magic, but she knew it was definitely a thing, so this strange fitting but not fitting must be a thing, too.

Tannis, you can call me Thorn. So what’s your status?

“I think the technical term for it is screwed,” she replied, looking at the trigger for the scuttling charge.

Is there any way I can help you? Would it help to talk to an engineer, maybe?

“An engineer might be able to tell me what’s wrong, but I sincerely doubt they could do anything about it.”

Okay. Then what I can do is use magic to pull you back here, to the Hecate.

“And what happens to my poor old Goshawk here? The automated scuttling system is as offline as everything else. The only way I can activate it is manually.”

Shit.

“My thoughts exactly. That is, unless you can do your space wizard stuff and bring me home between me hitting that trigger and the charge detonating.”

There was a long pause. She looked at Morgan, who frowned. “Dad? Did you hear that?”

Thorn finally answered, his tone sorrowful. Yes, I did. And the answer is, no, I can’t.

Skydancer Two smiled again and nodded. “Didn’t think so. Oh, but thank you anyway, sir.”

For what?

“For being honest with me. You could have said, I’ll try, or there’s a pretty good chance. Hell, you could even have said, sure, I can do that. No way I’d have known the difference, right?” She smiled again and closed her eyes. She was tired.

“But you decided to tell me the truth. I appreciate that,” she went on. “But do not beat yourself up about it. The day I strapped one of these fighters to my ass is the day I accepted I’d likely die in one. In other words, I regret nothing.”

Her voice trailed off as a proximity alarm sounded. A Bilau fighter had pulled up close and was hammering her with scanners.

“I think it’s almost time for me to check out, sir,” she said.

Is there, I don’t know, anyone I can—

“Talk to? Pass a message to? Tell my wife I love her, that sort of thing?”

That finally made her tear up. She lifted her visor and wiped her eyes. “Nah. If she doesn’t know it by now, she never will—”

A hand took hers. Morgan had reached out and, somehow, held her hand with the feel of warm skin on skin, despite her flight glove. “I’m so sorry,” Morgan whispered, tears suddenly brimming from her eyes.

“Actually, sir, you can tell my wife something. Tell her I died with a sweet girl holding my hand. And that that made it a whole lot easier.”

I will.

The Bilau fighter sidled in closer. As it did, it swung its shark-like prow directly toward her. Skydancer Two, who was also called Tannis, saw the gaping snout of a projectile weapon line up on her canopy. The bastard was going to try a point-blank, precision shot to kill her but leave most of the Goshawk intact.

Just what I would have done, she thought, reaching down, turning the trigger on the scuttling charge, then yanking it up and twisting it again.

She turned to look at Morgan and smiled.

“Thank you, Morgan. And thank you, Thorn, too.”

Still smiling, she shoved the trigger down.

* * *

Thorn opened his eyes. The hard reality of the witchport surrounded him, unchanged since the op began.

He had no more active Joinings.

Wait, no. Not true. He did have one.

Inside his thoughts, he heard Morgan weeping.

22

Thorn had desperately wanted to pry himself away from his duties long enough to spend time with Morgan. Guilt wracked him over pulling her into the Goshawk pilot’s death, despite the fact that everyone who knew about it, from Densmore to Tanner, had insisted it had been the right thing, the human thing, to do. But the only person whose opinion really mattered was Kira, and he braced himself for the worst when he told her about it. He’d expected her to lash out and accepted that he deserved it.

“I—I was Joined, and so was Morgan and the pilot—” Thorn began.

“She already told me about it,” Kira said. “Not long after it happened.” Her tone was colored with a deep sadness. Death had come too close to their daughter, if only through the mind of a lost pilot.

“Oh, for—I haven’t even talked to her. Is she okay? Or did I, I don’t know. Did I do some sort of lasting harm to her?”

Kira smiled. “She’s not made of starlight, Thorn. Think of what that girl’s been though, and how much it didn’t screw her up. She’s tough. Unfortunately, she’s also used to death. But I think that, in this case, you did exactly the right thing. As sad as it made her, she told me she was glad she got to help this poor woman in her last moments alive.”

Kira paused, then smiled again. “Actually, she asked me to make sure you were okay.”

That made Thorn swell with a little pride—but it was tinged with sadness. It spoke to a Morgan who should just still be a kid but wasn’t anymore.

He didn’t have time to brood over it, though. A summons arrived from Tanner, pulling him to the Hecate’s CIC. Thorn had managed to get his feelings back on an even keel by the time he arrived there, but he still had a question on his face at the unexpected call from Tanner.

The Commodore didn’t make him wait. “Stellers, you and Bertilak are going for a little trip.”

“Sir?”

“The Allied Stars Council and Fleet Command both agree with the Meksun. Three Bilau are going to be captured and placed in cryosleep. And you and Bertilak are going to be the ones to do it.”

* * *

Bertilak fussed with the Jolly’s controls. As he did, he glanced at Thorn, who sat in the copilot’s seat, elbows resting on the console, his chin on interlaced fingers.

“You’ve been a lot more introspective than usual since we left, my friend. Is there anything you want to talk about?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn leaned back and sighed. “No. And yes.”

“Ah. Well, then I’ll mind my own business and also offer to help.”

Thorn smiled briefly, then waved at the screen. Their quarry, a fat transport, plodded along ahead of them, a single corvette as escort. Thorn had been Shading the Jolly as they approached, and they were nearly close enough to start their attack run.

“It’s everything about this,” Thorn finally said. “We’re going to pretty much randomly pick three Bilau out of a population of billions, then wipe out the rest. Technically, it’s not genocide. But it really is, isn’t it?”

Bertilak shrugged. “No. And yes.”

Thorn rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. I’m just getting tired of it all. So many civilians, so many innocent lives lost. So much property destroyed. So many kids forced to grow up without getting a chance to be kids—”

“Thorn, you just need to love Morgan for who and what she is, not regret who she might have been. Do that, and you’ll just miss more of her life, then regret that…”

Thorn looked at Bertilak for a moment, then smiled. “For a big green alien guy, you have some excellent insights into how to human properly.”

“Being a big, green alien guy is an advantage when it comes to that. I’ve got the outside perspective.” Thorn opened his mouth to reply, but Bertilak held up a finger. “And, we’re now in firing range of that Bilau escort. I’d be happy to keep discussing the ethics of war and Morgan’s situation with you, but—”

“We’re here in the middle of Bilau space to do a job, yeah, I know.” Thorn sat up. “Anytime you’re ready, Bertilak.”

The alien nodded, then tapped at the controls, accelerating the Jolly directly toward the corvette’s aft port quarter. Bertilak watched his display, then nodded. “Okay.”

Thorn dropped the Shade. An instant later, Bertilak opened up on the unaware corvette. Twin streams of emerald pulses slammed into it, ripping its hull open. Its drive lit, though whether intentionally or because of the damage, Thorn didn’t know. And he didn’t care. He’d let Bertilak take care of it, while he kept an eye out for any other trouble.

Bertilak spun the Jolly as it swept by the stricken corvette, pouring more fire into it, raking it along its length. Its power died, and what had just seconds ago been a sleek warship was now just a drifting hulk. Bertilak immediately reoriented the Jolly and began closing fast on the cumbersome transport.

“I hope this isn’t where we find out that we’re about to board a troopship,” Thorn said.

“If it is, then we’ll just destroy it and go find another target.” He glanced at Thorn. “They’re Bilau, so they’d all have to die eventually, right?”

Thorn said nothing and just stood to go get suited up in his vac-armor.

* * *

The transport had put up a spirited, if fruitless, defense with its point-defense batteries. Between some precision shooting by Bertilak and Thorn’s careful use of magic, they silenced them, then brought the Jolly alongside the far more massive transport. The docking port adapter took a moment to configure itself to the Bilau airlock, then clamped down and locked. Bertilak led the way into the Bilau transport, Thorn close behind, his sidearm drawn.

They reached a junction of two corridors. A greenish, mildewy fuzz coated the decks and bulkheads in patches. The environmental system of Thorn’s suit told him the air was breathable, but incredibly dank and humid, the way the Bilau seemed to like it. Bertilak stopped at the junction and glanced back at Thorn.

He’d already started reaching out, feeling magically for the minds of the crew. Most of them were forward, probably in the bridge and crew hab, the rest of the ship being mostly empty space for cargo. Thorn pointed to the left.

“That way, but give me a second.”

Bertilak waited as Thorn scryed out the powerplant in engineering, then crafted a Scorch ’casting to incinerate the key power couplings. A few seconds later, the ship went dark. Emergency lighting, dim and grey, came online.

“Just wanted to make sure they didn’t scuttle the ship with us aboard,” Thorn said.

“They might still have explosive charges,” Bertilak replied in a bright tone.

“You’re full of happy thoughts, aren’t you?”

“It’s a gift. That, and great teeth.”

“Your teeth were made by magic,” Thorn countered.

“I stand by my assertion,” Bertilak said, smiling broadly.

They carried on. Thorn unerringly guided them to the crew, his face caught in a half-wince the whole way at the thought of the ship suddenly exploding around him as scuttling charges detonated. But they stayed intact and found the crew huddling on the bridge. Thorn used Hammer magic to rip open a blast door, then Bertilak strode in.

Thorn followed close behind, but the alien still managed to incapacitate two of the Bilau who tried to resist before he’d even fully entered the compartment. The rest quickly surrendered.

It took only a moment to bind them, then render them comatose with a potent soporific gas. That left Thorn and Bertilak staring at nine unconscious Bilau. They needed three.

“Any preference?” Bertilak asked.

Thorn stared at the inert aliens. He reminded himself that this race was itself apocalyptically genocidal, and they certainly wouldn’t be shedding tears if the situation were reversed. But did it matter? Did feeling terrible about doing this change the fact that it was exactly what the Bilau had done to the Meksun? How were humans any better?

Sudden fury at the Bilau swept through Thorn. How dare they put him into a position like this one to begin with. He suddenly stabbed out a finger. “That one. And that one. And that one on the end.”

Bertilak nodded. The Bilau were small enough that he could carry all three of them back to the Jolly without too much effort.

They cast off and moved a hundred klicks off. Without a word, Bertilak opened fire, quickly reducing the transport to tangled, glowing wreckage.

Thorn kept his eyes fixed on the destruction playing out on the viewscreen.

“I look at this way,” Bertilak said, powering down the Jolly’s weapons. “I’m made of magic, and even I know they did this to themselves. They must have known it would eventually lead to their destruction. I guess I’ll never understand organics.”

Thorn glanced at him. “I’m an organic.”

Bertilak regarded him for a long moment, then shrugged. “If you insist.”

* * *

The three Bilau were tried aboard the Memphis, one of the hangar bays converted to a makeshift courtroom. The trial dragged on for almost three days, Thorn being called on each day to testify about one thing or another, from what he’d found on the dead Meksun planet, to the rescue of his daughter from the Bilau’s clutches. It had been far from the most strenuous thing he’d ever done, but by the third day, he felt completely drained.

For their part, the Bilau insisted that they pretty much put the under into underlings—the classic I was just following orders defense, backed up by a healthy dose of we had no idea what terrible things our superiors were up to. But Kira, monitoring the three as they testified, could tell they were holding something back.

“They really are just bit players, crew aboard a tramp transport,” she told Urbanek, Tanner, and Densmore during a recess. “But they also know more and just aren’t saying it. It’s something all three of them have in common. I can probably find out what it is if I dig around in their minds.”

Densmore gave a sly smile and shook her head, though. “That won’t be necessary. This fits nicely with some intel we’ve unearthed about the Bilau and their mindset. I think I know what they’re holding back and how to get them to tell us all about it.”

Back in session, Urbanek gestured for Densmore to take the floor and speak. She walked up to the three Bilau, giving them a broad smile as she did. From the audience, Thorn could feel apprehensive fear radiating from them in waves.

For a moment, she just studied the Bilau, then she focused on one of them. “Tell me about The Way.”

The Bilau suddenly sneered back at her. “Do not dare to speak of our magnificence. You aren’t worthy.”

The alien abruptly stopped, realizing he’d been goaded into revealing the very thing he’d been desperately trying to suppress.

“Okay, then help me understand. Why did you try to wipe out the Meksun?”

The Bilau agonized for a moment, before settling into a resigned manner, accompanied by a wintry gaze.

“They were decadent. Weak. Flyers.” He shot a glare at the three Meksun who were watching from the back of the hangar. “They couldn’t defend themselves, so they saw The Way unfold before them as we took what was rightfully ours!”

“You will all soon see The Way unfold before you, too,” another of the Bilau snapped.

Densmore crossed her arms and gave a disgusted grimace. “Not only genocidal, but raving zealots, too.”

“It’s worse than that,” Urbanek put in. “They’re raving zealots who were trying to conceal their raving zealotry. They don’t even have the guts to stand up for their own beliefs, no matter how twisted they are.”

Densmore nodded and turned back to the Bilau. “I definitely will not be sorry to drop you three into the ice.”

The proceedings collapsed into chaos as the three Bilau, suddenly spitting, shouting, and flailing about, were dragged away by burly Marines. Thorn watched until they were gone.

Tanner, sitting nearby, rubbed his chin. “We might live to regret saving even these three,” he said.

Thorn sighed as the blast door sealed behind the Bilau, abruptly cutting off their hissing shrieks. “Well then, sir, let’s make sure that reactor at Farthest Star never goes cold.”

* * *

Thorn couldn’t resist a whistle. “Okay, that is one hell of a lot of ships.”

The Hecate had just cut out her Alcubierre drive and was powering toward the star ahead. Her new, upgraded drive and anti-grav system made the twenty g’s the destroyer was pulling irrelevant. They might as well have been sitting in a space dock. Before she flipped to begin decelerating, though, Thorn found himself in a ringside seat, looking out of the open witchport at the most fearsome collection of military might ever assembled.

Even without the Reserve Fleet, which had remained behind to protect human space, the ON by itself counted one hundred and ninety-two ships of all classes, including sixteen super-dreadnought carrier hybrids of the same class as the Tobruk, Urbanek’s flagship of the Second Fleet. Scoville had moved his own flag from the venerable battleship Arcturus, which was, along with the Hecate, one of only a handful of ships that had been involved in the war from its outset. He now commanded the Third Fleet from the Memphis.

It wasn’t just the ON present, though. A newly constituted Fourth Fleet, composed of task forces contributed by the Imbrogul, the Astarti, the Owath and the Philomek, fleshed out the force with another forty-two ships, ranging from battlecruisers to corvettes. Even the Nyctus had a presence, with seven of their few surviving warships taking station on the fleet’s right flank. Winuk commanded them from their sole remaining battleship, the Thunderous Tide.

This vast assemblage of ships, now known as the Combined Fleet, filled the space around a nondescript white dwarf called Kellogg’s Star. It wasn’t quite on the border with Bilau space, but it was close enough to let the fleet strike in any direction. Intel reported the Bilau as massing in their own space just three systems away, apparently intent on intercepting the Combined Fleet no matter what direction it headed. As yet, though, the Bilau had only marshalled about one-third of the Combined Fleet’s strength, so it was a win-win no matter what they did. If they did actually intercept, they’d almost certainly be wiped out in detail. But if they didn’t, then the Combined Fleet could roam, unmolested, across Bilau space. Either way, it offered Scoville, in overall command, a window of opportunity to make the aliens’ lives as miserable as possible.

“That’s what happens when you turn basically all sentient life against you, guys,” Thorn said, staring past the imposing might of the Combined Fleet and into Bilau space beyond.

Tanner’s voice cut off his reverie. “Stellers, Winuk’s on the comm for you. He asked for Wixcombe to join in. Putting them through now.”

Winuk’s voice replaced Tanner’s. “Thorn, I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to say this later, so I’m going to say it now. I want to thank you for the effort you’ve put into sparing my people. It is . . . appreciated, very much so.”

“You need to thank a lot of people, not just me, Winuk.”

“Indeed. However, none of this would have been possible without you and your daughter. I can only hope that we will acquit ourselves well and prove worthy of redemption.”

“I’m sure you will, Winuk,” Kira said. “I’ve been on the other end of your weapons more than a few times, remember? They were hard fights for sure.”

“I can vouch for that,” Thorn put in.

“That fighting spirit has largely left us, I’m afraid. My people will always keep a path open to flee. Simple survival has become our nature, I fear. Or, at least it has for some of us,” Winuk said, his voice thick with shame.

“Just because you’re Nyctus, you don’t have to be Nyctus,” Kira said. “The way your people used to be is gone. It’s time for your people to start a new chapter in your story.”

“Listen to her, Winuk. She knows what she’s talking about,” Thorn said.

“You are both very wise. It is clear why you are meant to be together.”

Thorn smiled. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”

23

Thorn gripped his talisman and simply breathed. He kept his eyes closed, focusing on his inner self. He tried not to focus on his actual self, sitting cross-legged in the Hecate’s witchport—at least not yet. That was the Thorn Stellers who could see the massive Bilau fleet rolling toward them like the shockwave of an exploding star.

“Final count for the Bilau fleet is three hundred and two ships,” a voice—Thorn wasn’t sure whose—said from the comm. He tried to maintain that inward focus, but it deflated like a punctured balloon and he gave up. He opened his eyes and glanced at the tactical display.

“Huh.”

There were surprisingly few icons, he thought, then he realized the display had changed the scale. With Bilau ships closing on the 260 or so of the Combined Fleet, the device had decided to portray squadrons only, each icon therefore roughly representing five to ten ships.

He pulled his attention back from the display and put it where it belonged—out the witchport, into the void and the ether infusing it, where an unseen ocean of magic ebbed and flowed.

“Stellers, Tanner. I’ve got Admirals Scoville and Urbanek on the channel.”

Thorn glanced at the comm and saw it had switched to a secure, private channel. “Sirs, Stellers here,” he replied.

“I know you’ve sat through all the intel briefings, Stellers. So I won’t bore you with the details. Bottom line is that the Bilau outnumber us and outgun us. Their ships are more advanced, and so’s their weaponry,” Scoville said.

“Not to mention they are fanatically pissed off,” Urbanek put in. “They’ve apparently decided enough is enough, so they’re drawing a line here, at Caleb’s Folly.”

“Not surprising, sir. We’ve taken out, what, a half-dozen of their worlds now?” Thorn thought about the bombardments, each a deluge of Avalanche missiles, upgraded versions of the weapons that had obliterated the Nyctus world of Kuvor. So far, all had delivered thermonuclear payloads, but Thorn suspected there were sterility prion warheads lurking somewhere in the fleet, ready to be used. Probably aboard the Stiletto, Densmore’s spooky battlecruiser, which had actually joined the Combined Fleet as an independent ship—one of only two, the other being the Jolly. So far, she’d done nothing but hang silently around in the fringes of their attacks on the Bilau planets. He found it hard to believe that the Stiletto was here only for her combat capability, which really wasn’t that impressive for a ship her size.

Even so, the nukes had worked with devastating effect, turning planets in blasted, irradiated cinders. The casualty count was estimated in the billions, now. It was no wonder the Bilau were out for blood. Thorn told himself they’d be out for blood anyway, though, because that was their basic nature—aggressive, expansionistic warmongers. Worse, the aliens had obviously applied a rigorous sort of discipline to their fury. They’d held the bulk of their fleet back, despite the Combined Fleet razing planet after planet, until they decided it was the right moment to strike.

So here they were, two fleets, almost 600 ships, about to slam headlong into one another. The Battle of Caleb’s Folly would be recorded in the histories as the pivotal moment, when the survival of entire races hung in the balance.

One of those races was, of course, humanity itself.

“Be that as it may, Stellers, we knew it would eventually come to this,” Scoville went on. “We’ve tried issuing ultimatums to the Bilau, but, unsurprisingly, they’re not interested in anything but blood. So we’re about to engage with a bigger, more powerful fleet, which is motivated by an unquenchable rage. We’ve only got one clear advantage over them, and that’s you.”

“The Starcaster Corps is definitely the ace up our sleeve today,” Urbanek agreed. “And you’re the most prominent, potent Starcaster we’ve got. So we’re letting you off the leash, Stellers. You’ve got leave to do whatever you need to, to help us win this battle.”

“We’ve propagated the same message out to the other Starcasters across the fleet, but as we understand it, none of them are capable of what you are, Stellers,” Tanner put in.

Thorn narrowed his eyes at the comm. “Sirs, what are you saying, here? Are you asking me to rewrite reality so we just win this battle outright? Are you ordering me to do that?”

Scoville barked out a laugh. “A blunt question, so it deserves a blunt answer. No, we are not ordering you to do anything in particular, Stellers. Honestly, you’re still pretty much a black box, as far as us old salts are concerned, anyway. You do whatever you do, and things happen as a result.”

“More to the point, we don’t really get the implications of it,” Urbanek added. “As I understand it, changing reality is potentially dangerous.”

“Yes, sir, it is. If I just made the Bilau cease to exist—and I’m really not sure I could—that would have ripple effects that we couldn’t foresee.”

“How about just killing them all so we don’t have to fight them? There are a lot of people, human and alien, that I’d really rather bring back home safe and sound, rather than making Caleb’s Folly their grave,” Scoville said.

Thorn blinked in surprise. They’d come a long way from the days of deep suspicion and mistrust of Starcasters. Now the brass were quite content to ask Thorn to just win the battle for them. He got it—no rational person wanted to oversee the deaths of potentially thousands of their subordinates.

“Again, sir, I’d have to kill them off somehow. We’ve got no idea what the long-term ramifications of that might be.” Thorn looked down at his talisman. “Sirs, what I can promise you is that, if it looks like things are going bad for us, then I’ll do whatever it takes. Until then, though, I’ll just do my damndest to help win this thing.”

“Then that will have to do,” Scoville said. “Now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a battle to win.”

Scoville signed off, Urbanek right behind him. Tanner lingered a moment.

“Stellers—” he started, then stopped.

Thorn gave the comm a bemused look. “Sir?”

“Stellers, you’ve done damned good work in the time we’ve served together. I know you’ll do the right thing when the time comes.”

Thorn smiled. “Thank you, sir. It’s been an honor serving under you.”

“This is starting to sound like a eulogy,” Tanner snapped. “Let’s just go do our jobs, then go home. You’ve got a family and a farm waiting for you.”

Thorn nodded, to himself as much as the comm.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

* * *

The Hecate shuddered under the impact of another missile, the reactive armor offsetting much of the blast. Another salvo came racing toward her, but the point-defense systems were predicting a 100 percent takedown, so Thorn swung his attention back to the battle raging around them. The void was no longer a void. It was now full of engines of destruction hurtling about, missiles racing toward their targets, railguns coughing out hypervelocity death, Bilau energy weapons shredding hull plates, fighters locked in vicious dogfights, all of it punctuated by whirling debris, glittering clouds of frozen atmosphere, and bodies, or parts of them.

The Hecate slewed hard to one side. A Bilau cruiser, with a missile frigate in company, plowed toward the Memphis. Scoville’s flagship had taken a series of devastating hits, including several suicide attacks by Bilau fighters and a crippled corvette that had ripped off a good chunk of the carrier’s bow. It was a testament to her sturdy engineering that she remained in the fight, still conducting flight ops with her fighters, and still carrying Scoville’s flag. But the Bilau seemed to sense blood and had sent forces converging to try to finish the carrier off.

Thorn desperately wanted to intervene, but he’d focused his efforts on a squadron of Bilau heavy cruisers, led by a pair of battleships that had almost broken the ON line. If it succeeded, a chunk of the Third Fleet would be cut off from the rest, and from the Second Fleet. Losing the Memphis would be a tragedy, but letting the fleet get cut in two would be a catastrophe.

Thorn had tried to seize control of key Bilau personnel, to try to disrupt the operations of their ships, or even cause something disastrous to happen. But the Bilau seemed to be much more decentralized in how they ran their navy, so Thorn had to jump from mind to mind, seeking someone who could enter the wrong command or push the wrong button. He eventually gave up and fell back on magic as firepower.

He crafted a ring-shaped Hammer effect, hundreds of meters across and centered on the lead Bilau battleship. His awareness plunged deep into his focus, he reached out with an open palm, marshaled his determination and intent, then snapped his fist closed. The Hammer-ring likewise slammed closed and abruptly tightened around the battleship like a noose. Reactive armor detonated all around her amidships, fruitlessly trying to stave off an effect that had no physical existence. A large portion of the battleship’s mid-section had been battered and buckled by the Hammer-blow, but she drove on, pouring out energy bursts at the thinning ON line. Thorn saw the Jolly Green Giant race in to intercept, but even Bertilak’s formidable little ship wasn’t a match for the big battlewagon.

“Thorn, Winuk here. I have an idea.”

Thorn let out a ragged breath, collecting himself. “Go ahead, Winuk. Any idea right now sounds like a damned fine thing.”

* * *

Kira braced herself as the Gyrfalcon slammed through a hard turn, Mol driving her upgraded engine to full combat overpower. Trixie let out a loud whoop.

“Oh, yes, you go, girl!”

Mol, her voice taut from the spillover effect of excess g-forces, growled out something between a laugh and a groan.

“Thanks, Trixie, but if you could just keep those point-defenses doing their thing, so I don’t have to feel what it’s like to weigh a thousand pounds, that’d be good.”

“Sorry, Mol, but there are a lot of missiles flying around out there—”

She stopped as the trio of missiles Mol’s maneuver had been meant to dodge raced by. “Like those ones,” Trixie added.

Mol swung the Gyrfalcon back onto a straight course, and the crush of undamped g’s faded. Now a massive wall of spaceship loomed in the view, the flank of the carrier Delhi, one of the Tobruk’s sister supercarriers. She hung in a vicious firefight with a flotilla of smaller ships, light cruisers, and frigates. She seemed to be holding her own, but Kira decided to help as they swept past her. While Mol lined up a target, one of the cruisers, Kira reached out with a powerful sweep of Joining, like a searchlight. The Bilau had no way of counteracting magic—as far as the Starcasters knew, anyway—so there was no need to be discreet. Her mind swept across the bridge crew, but she couldn’t find any particular Bilau she could control to cripple the ship. So, instead, she pushed and seized control of all of them. It taxed her right to her limits, but she dug deep and bent the bridge crew to her will.

Cold rage became a burst of panic and confusion, then that was washed away by mute compliance. Kira had the helm swing the light cruiser directly into the path of one of its sister ships, while the gunnery officer switched fire to a third cruiser. A flight of Goshawk fighters just launched by the Delhi immediately pounced, seizing on the confusion to wreak even more havoc and destruction. With a loud gasp, Kira released the Joining and sank back in the crash couch.

She was just in time to find Mol jinking them up and over a frigate, pouring railgun shots into its flank. Trixie whooped again and spun the point defenses around, turning a desperate volley of point blank missile fire from the frigate into scrap.

“Love this job,” Mol hissed, then fired again, a plasma bloom lighting her screens as she notched another kill.

* * *

Alys Densmore watched a battleship die.

The Shinto, an older ship and sister to the Arcturus, had taken several early, unlucky hits that had left her with only partial attitude control. She’d staggered out of the battleline and started a long fall toward the fiercely blue-white star called Caleb’s Folly. It left her alone and unsupported, and a Bilau carrier had pounced.

“Helm, this is taking too long. The Shinto needs our help now,” Densmore snapped.

“Sorry, ma’am, but we’ve got two Bilau frigates closing from port. We can maneuver or go faster, but not both,” the Helm Officer replied.

The Tactical Officer stepped into the conversation. “Ma’am, either because they’re angry or desperate, the Bilau are using their light ships, especially corvettes and frigates, on suicide runs. If we aren’t careful, we’ll—”

The Stiletto rattled as a pair of missiles struck somewhere aft.

“—we’ll end up taking one of those bastards right in the face.”

Densmore drummed her fingers on the arm of her command couch. Helm and Tactical were correct, of course, but the Shinto seemed to be in truly desperate straits. The Stiletto’s main purpose had never been combat, though. She lacked the long-range weaponry of other ships her size and had to close a lot more before she could help the stricken battleship.

She reached inside herself and cast her thoughts into the ether. Stellers, we’ve got a situation here, and I don’t think I can handle it by myself.

Love to help, ma’am, but—”

There was a pause.

Sorry, ma’am, Thorn went on. We’re kind of buried in a tough fight here, too, trying to help out the Memphis. What about Kira? She’s with Mol Wyant in the Gyrfalcon, so she could probably get to you a lot faster.

Densmore started to formulate a reply, but stopped and winced as the Shinto suddenly disappeared in a blinding flash that left purple spots seared into her vision. The blast faded, the fireball cooling, revealing the battleship in two chunks, bow and stern, with her amidships now an expanding cloud of debris.

Never mind, Stellers, she said. The situation just took care of itself.

* * *

Damien was no warrior, but he’d gotten too close to some of the people who were to sit out this great battle, effectively the Ragnarök that would determine the war and the fate of entire species. So he’d schmoozed and sweet-talked his way into acting as Densmore’s liaison to Urbanek, which put him on the bridge of the Tobruk.

“Quite the sight, isn’t it, Damien?” Urbanek asked.

The Admiral had left his CIC deeper in the bowels of the carrier and come to the bridge to watch the immediate fight. He still had one of the bridge workstations repeating critical data from the CIC, so he maintained situational awareness over his entire force. But he seemed to prefer the immediacy of the bridge to the sterile, almost wargame-like environment of the Combat Information Center.

Damien could only nod, his guts on the verge of flipping over entirely. The tactical displays and view screens depicted carnage and destruction on a scale that he couldn’t have even imagined. The word breathtaking fell well short. But the massive carrier sailed through it, along with her two consorts, the heavy cruisers Newport News and Scapa Flow. A Bilau battleship had swung out of line and made a direct run at the Tobruk, and the Newport News had immediately interposed herself, provoking yet another vicious firefight.

“It’s terrifying, sir, in a weirdly epic, beautiful way,” Damien finally replied, watching the Newport News maneuvering to flank the battleship. Shots from each slammed into the other, and Damien’s stomach tightened. It looked like the ON cruiser, well outclassed by the bigger, more massive Bilau ship, wasn’t going to survive the exchange.

“Well, put, Damien. I’ve always found—”

“Uh, sir?” Damien pointed at the screen showing the Newport News trading fire with the battleship. “That’s starting to look not beautiful at all, just terrifying.”

Urbanek frowned at the image. “Conrad Tyle’s the skipper of the Newport News. He’s a wily old dog, so I expect he’s got a trick up his sleeve.”

More shots slammed into the Newport News. “At least, I hope he does,” Urbanek said.

Damien shifted uncomfortably. There were no doubt already casualties aboard the cruiser. And he might be about to see its entire crew die.

But something leapt out of one of the cruiser’s holds, a dark, sleek, torpedo-like object. At the same time, the Newport News vomited a barrage of missiles, many of which exploded short of the Bilau ship. It took Damien a moment to realize that the missiles were a ruse to let the torpedo-like thing reach its target.

It did, where it detonated with a colossal flash. The Bilau ship’s entire flank flashed to vapor, and she began to break apart.

Urbanek grinned. “There we go. Told you Tyle had a trick up his sleeve. Avalanche missiles are meant to take out cities, not ships.” He glanced at Damien. “But whatever works, right?”

“Whatever works, sir,” Damien agreed, realizing he had just seen an entire crew die. They might all have been Bilau, but still.

* * *

Thorn held on as the Hecate flashed past the crippled missile frigate that had been pouring fire at the Memphis. Reynaud had cleverly taken the destroyer between the missile frigate and its accompanying cruiser, braving the crossfire to let them fire at both targets at once. The Jolly raced along after her. As expected, the Bilau ships had to be more careful about their shots to avoid hitting one another. It did lead to an uncomfortable few moments as the Hecate sailed through a storm of fire. Thorn had finally Shaded the destroyer, letting it break contact and gain some breathing room.

He glanced at the tactical display. Both of the Bilau ships were now derelicts, pouring gases and debris into space. The Memphis seemed to have recovered her full maneuver capability, and now trailed the Hecate deeper into the Bilau line.

Thorn expanded the tactical display, taking in the situation fused from sensors across the fleet. He winced at the result. The picture was grim.

The Combined Fleet was far from losing, but it was far from winning, as well. If anything, the battle seemed to have stalemated into a brutal attrition. They might prevail over the Bilau, but the cost would be horrendous. The words Pyrrhic Victory flashed through his mind in letters of fire and blood.

Scoville, Urbanek, and Tanner had given him leave to do whatever he needed to do to help them win. Magic really was their only advantage here, but most of the fleet’s Starcasters were capable of only local effects. They were basically glorified artillery, adding their power to the battle, but not quickly or decisively enough.

Thorn gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. If he really wanted to influence the battle on a large scale, he needed to do something reality-shifting. The knock-on effects might be catastrophic, but even as powerful as he was, he was only one Starcaster. Only one man.

But.

He remembered something Morgan had said to him, when she described how she’d created Bertilak. She’d done it by sheer force of magically infused will, then she went on to say that Thorn could do the same thing, if he wanted to.

He was only one man, at least right now. But could he change that?

Thorn took a deep breath, plunged his awareness into his talisman, into the familiar reek of smoke and despair. He channeled his mind through it, and into the ether beyond, trying to imagine how Morgan had brought Bertilak into existence. He was surprised to find it wouldn’t be difficult. It was really just another way of altering the universe. This time, though, he was sure he could do it without screwing up creation.

Thorn summoned magic, as much as he ever had, and began to ’cast.

* * *

Thorn stood on the bridge of the Tobruk, facing the main viewscreen. Behind him, he heard shouts, heard Urbanek asking what the hell was going on, and saw Damien step up beside him, already spewing stunned questions.

Thorn just held up a hand and concentrated on the situation ahead of the carrier.

* * *

Thorn stood on the bridge of the Stiletto, alongside Alys Densmore. She spun to face him, but he held up a hand, begging her indulgence. A smile that somehow managed to be sly and uncertain at the same time flashed across her face, and she nodded, making a carry on gesture.

* * *

Thorn stood in the cabin of the Gyrfalcon, leaning on the crash couches. Mol, Kira, and Trixie all yelped at once.

“Thorn, what the hell are you doing here?” Kira snapped, but Thorn held up a hand. He needed just a moment.

* * *

Thorn stood on the bridge of the Jolly Green Giant. He glanced at Bertilak, but the big alien didn’t seem at all surprised to see him there and offered him a knowing grin.

* * *

Thorn stepped up beside Winuk, standing on the bridge of the Relentless Tide, the flagship of his little squadron, provoking a startled gurgle from the Nyctus. He didn’t hold up a hand this time, though. He turned to the old Nyctus instead.

“Remember that idea you had? Now’s the time. I want everything you can give me, Winuk. Every last push of the tide.”

The Nyctus gaped for a moment, then began snapping out orders. From the holds of the surviving Nyctus ships, bulky chunks of rock began tumbling into space.

* * *

Thorn knelt in the Hecate’s witchport.

And stood on the bridge of the Tobruk, and the Stiletto.

And with Bertilak aboard the Jolly.

And in the cabin of the Gyrfalcon.

And with Winuk, on the Relentless Tide.

In each place, Thorn began to ’cast.

Six Starcasters. Six minds, drawing power from the ether. Six wills, resolutely determined to end this battle now and bring the killing and dying to an end.

One intent, crystal clear.

The chunks of rock dumped from the Nyctus ships began to accelerate. And not just a few, but dozens of massive chunks, and hundreds of smaller ones. Each started speeding along a trajectory that would intersect a Bilau ship, driven by the multiplied power of Thorn Stellers.

They were just chunks of rock. KEWs, but ultimately, just inert rock. They couldn’t be jammed, or decoyed, or confused by countermeasures. Point defense batteries, designed to shred missiles, chipped away at the onrushing KEWs, flaking off smaller pieces but making little difference otherwise. Suddenly desperate, the Bilau swung their main batteries into action, but the targets were small, fast, and gave off virtually no emissions. A few were destroyed, but most just sailed on through the firestorm unimpeded.

Across the Combined Fleet, incoming fire died away. The humans and their allies seized the moment, charging in behind the KEWs, driven by their powerful new engines. Railguns fired until their overheat cut-offs activated. Missile magazines were emptied. Kestrel and Goshawk fighters flung themselves at the suddenly confused and distracted enemy.

In each place where he stood, Thorn flung out his hands and closed his eyes, guiding the multitude of KEWs by ether-driven instinct. The Bilau fleet began maneuvering to scatter, but it was too late.

The first impact smashed a frigate in half. The next ripped off the drive section of a battlecruiser. Then the KEW strikes became too numerous to count, Bilau ships being torn apart by the rocky projectiles in a flashing orgy of violence that flared screens across the fleet into sheets of white light.

For a moment, the Combined Fleet’s fire slackened, as though every ship had to take a collective breath and just watch the unbridled carnage happen.

In a few moments, it was over. Over half of the Bilau fleet had suddenly been put out of action, ships smashed and battered into hulks by the impacts.

And moment after that, the Combined Fleet renewed its attack, pouring what remained of its ordnance into their stricken enemy.

In each place where Thorn stood, he opened his eyes, lowered his hands, and took in his devastating handiwork. In that moment, he did feel like a superior being, a construct of magic and willpower. He understood, now, why Bertilak had scoffed at Thorn’s insistence that he was just a normal man. Infused with magic, there was nothing Thorn couldn’t do.

Nothing.

He stood astride the universe, a veritable god.

No.

No!

Thorn fought to retain his identity as an individual, as a man, not as the magical construct he’d become. Desperately, he fought for some way of grounding himself again, of returning back to the mortal existence in which he belonged.

Kira. Morgan. Tanner. They all flashed through his mind, but it was a strange, extraneous memory that finally snagged his magically accelerated thoughts. Something Morgan had said to him. She’d so badly wanted to change the nose art on the Pool of Stars because she thought Una’s Ass was silly.

Una’s Ass. The cartoonish picture he remembered from the archives. A buxom, flouncy woman riding a donkey.

It was silly. But it was also clear in his mind, sharpened by Morgan’s fascination with the damned thing. Thorn grabbed the memory like a lifeline and used it to pull his fractured self back into a coherent whole. For a moment, the world was a fusion, a smeared blur of the Hecate’s witchport, the bridges of the Tobruk, Stiletto, and Relentless Tide, the cockpit of the Gyrfalcon. Thorn pulled Una’s Ass through the confusing swirl and dragged himself back from the brink of a godhood he didn’t want.

Reality coalesced, turning back into a single reality. Thorn stood aboard a ship he didn’t recognize, suddenly weightless and immersed in the silence of hard vacuum. He threw a bubble of air around himself, then took stock of where he’d ended up.

Something was stenciled on a boxy container mounted on a nearby bulkhead. Thorn pushed himself toward it.

BACKUP PORTABLE AIR UNIT

FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY

X-011A1 POOL OF STARS

A nearby viewport, small and round, showed the panoramic sweep of a planet sprawling below. It took Thorn only a moment to recognize the distinctive outline of Nebo’s southernmost continent. In fact, Morgan and the farm should be right about . . . there. It seemed that he might actually be in geosynchronous orbit directly over it.

Well then.

Kira?

Thorn? What the hell happened? Where the hell are you?

He smiled at the stenciled words, then the invisible farm below.

Yeah, this is going to take some explaining.

Epilogue

“Does that mean the war’s over?” Mol asked. “Like, really over?”

Thorn, lounging in the Gyrfalcon’s crash couch, shrugged. “Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the Bilau are virtually wiped out. No, in the sense that virtually doesn’t mean entirely. Honestly, I suspect that they’re going to try something in the near future.”

They watched as the massive Nyctus colony ships slowly accelerated away from Code Gauntlet. There were eight of them altogether, taking most of the remaining Nyctus to worlds specifically chosen in consultation with the Allied Stars and their various alien allies.

“So we say goodbye to them, and hello to the Meksun, huh? We sure these bird people aren’t just as bad as the squids?”

“No. But there are only three of them, plus genetic samples, so it’s going to be a while before they need anything bigger than this Gyrfalcon to transport their entire race.” Thorn smiled and laced his fingers behind his head. “I think that gives us ample opportunity to make sure they’re our friends—”

“Uh, guys? A ship just came out of Alcubierre nothingness and is accelerating, hard, toward the lead colony ship,” Trixie said.

Mol snapped a curse. “It’s a Bilau frigate. Only a few seconds until impact. Shit, there’s nothing we can do—!”

Without warning, the speeding frigate suddenly seemed to crash into a solid barrier and split in two up the middle. The two halves were flung aside, clearing the Nyctus colony ship by kilometers.

Thorn lowered his hand and opened his eyes.

Mol raised an eyebrow. “That was you and your mojo?”

“Whatever it was, that was so cool,” Trixie put in.

Thorn gave a tired smile. “See, told you they’d try something.”

Mol gave him a narrow-eyed, sidelong look. “You seemed awfully ready for that, sir. Did you know that was going to happen ahead of time?”

Thorn leaned back and closed his eyes. “A good magician doesn’t give away his secrets, sorry.”

* * *

“Dad, it’s fantastic!” Morgan said. “I love it!”

Kira leaned in. “You could have asked for virtually anything, and this was your choice? A two-hundred-year-old ship?”

Thorn gave an offhanded smile. “Hey, she’s got new drives, new computers, life support, anti-grav, all the bells and whistles.” He looked at Morgan and his smile warmed. “Besides, she likes it.”

Kira had to smile, too. “It does seem to mean a lot to her.”

“She tried to bring the Pool of Stars out of the past. And what are fathers for, if not to spoil their daughters?”

Beneath them, Code Gauntlet scrolled by. The Pool of Stars had finished her refit and was ready to depart. The Hecate, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Gyrfalcon had all taken station with her, waiting for her to spool up her drives and break orbit and start her way to Nebo.

“Dad?” Morgan asked.

“Yes?”

Morgan took Kira’s hand, then leaned over to Thorn and took his, too. Thorn smiled at her. She was a Starcaster, but she was also still a girl. She was still a child. She only wanted one thing, and he knew what it was.

“Mom, Dad, let’s go home.”

The Pool of Stars powered out of orbit, her escorts falling in around her. Una’s Ass was gone, replaced by a more prominent piece of artwork, rendered in brilliant, living colors.

A young girl riding a beautiful horse, over two words.

Morgan’s Ride.

“Home.” Thorn smiled. Never had a word tasted so sweet.

* * *

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About the Authors

J. N. Chaney is a USA Today Bestselling author and has a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He fancies himself quite the Super Mario Bros. fan. When he isn’t writing or gaming, you can find him online at www.jnchaney.com.

He migrates often, but was last seen in Las Vegas, NV. Any sightings should be reported, as they are rare.

* * *

Terry Maggert is left-handed, likes dragons, coffee, waffles, running, and giraffes; order unimportant. He’s also half of author Daniel Pierce, and half of the humor team at Cledus du Drizzle.

With thirty-one titles, he has something to thrill, entertain, or make you cringe in horror. Guaranteed.

Note: He doesn’t sleep. But you sort of guessed that already.