“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.”