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.