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.”