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—”