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.”