“Stellers, one last check before we hit Alcubierre cutoff,” Tanner said over the intercom. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?”
Thorn ran a hand across the midnight velvet of the witchport’s thick cushioning. He’d been asking himself the same question. He did feel fine, but he’d also felt fine right up to the moment the powerful vision—or hallucination—body-checked his conscious awareness into a half-dead heap in the mess. Never before had he experienced something that intense, that—
Overwhelming. That’s what it had been. It had been utterly overwhelming. Whatever the cause, and despite his formidable talents as a Starcaster, he’d been wholly unable to sense it coming, or do a thing about it when it did.
He drew a slow breath, assessing. “Aye, sir,” he said. “I feel fine. A little dragged out, bit punchy, but otherwise fine.”
“Kind of wish the medics had found some reason to shove you into the infirmary and keep you there, to be honest. Thought we were past the whole Starcasters-are-unpredictable-and-therefore-dangerous thing by now.”
“Sorry, sir, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”
A moment passed. Thorn didn’t need Joining to know what Tanner was thinking. Despite almost three years having passed with him as the Hecate’s Starcaster and him having proven over and over again how valuable his magical talents were, the old thinking hadn’t really gone away. Tanner was better than most mundanes by far, but even he still had a simmering reservoir of superstitious distrust not far beneath the surface. It might be buried deeper in Tanner, but it was still there.
The logic was simple. Starcasters use magic. Magic defies scientific analysis and can’t be quantified, so it remains an unknown thing. And unknown things are frightening.
“Don’t need to tell me anything else, Stellers. One of my officers tells me they’re good to go, I believe them.”
Thorn offered the intercom a tired, but appreciative smile. Tanner really was better than most.
Thorn braced himself as the drive’s cutoff alarm chimed, then snapped his helmet in place, but left the faceplate open. A few seconds later, the Hecate’s private little Alcubierre universe winked out of existence, depositing the ship back into real space, in the Nebo system. With a small lurch that sent Thorn’s breather swinging under his chin, reality changed, and with it, a sense of calm descended on the ship.
Thorn focused on his talisman, his battered children’s book, now strapped in a purpose-made pouch on his crash suit, then he decompressed the witchport and opened it to the hard vacuum of space.
The planet called Nebo lay directly ahead, a tiny, sunlit half-disk. Tanner had brought the Hecate in as close to the planet as he dared, while still leaving the destroyer space to maneuver—and fight, if necessary.
A glance at the repeater tactical display mounted in the witchport showed no other ships in the system, though. Tanner had requested that the nearest ON assets, a potent fighting patrol centered on the battlecruiser Hammerfall, stand ready to help, but he hadn’t yet received a reply because of the distance involved. That left the Hecate on her own—but she was a capable ship, able to outgun anything smaller than her, and outrun anything bigger.
“No comm emissions from the planet,” the Comms Officer said over the ship's channel. “They’ve gone completely dark.”
Thorn inhaled, nerves dancing. A planet with almost a billion people living on it? It should be a hub of comms traffic. His gut tightened, like someone had started turning a vise.
Data kept sluicing in through the Hecate’s scanners. The picture steadily developing was ominous. No comms emissions, no local or orbital ship traffic, spectrographic data from the atmosphere that was all wrong.
“Stellers, you have anything?” Tanner asked.
“One moment, sir.”
Thorn touched gloved fingers against his talisman. He’d learned that direct physical contact, while slightly better, wasn’t necessary; it seemed that his intent to touch the old book was enough to let him focus his powers through it. Using it as a springboard, he cast his awareness ahead of the ship and pushed it through the dead space of hard vacuum until it brushed against the planet called Nebo.
Fire. Riven earth and shattered rock. Destruction, on an apocalyptic scale.
Death.
Thorn let his awareness snap back into place, like a stretched rubber band. It left him gasping for a moment, catching both his physical and mental breath as the echoes of Nebo began to fade from his awareness.
“Sir,” he finally said. “Stellers here. Nebo is dead. Utterly dead.”
1
“So it looks like every Starcaster, every single one, experienced essentially the same thing you did,” Tanner said, lifting a data slate so Thorn could see it. “The Hammerfall has reports from across four sectors, and they were still coming in when she passed out of range of real-time comms.”
Thorn quickly scanned the data slate. Seventy-one incidents were recorded, and three of them had been fatal—two Scorches who’d simply lost control of their powers and immolated themselves, and a Tidal who’d succumbed to a truly freakish accident. She’d had the misfortune to be on an EVA when the vision struck and managed to drown herself in her own vacsuit before anyone could intervene. Tidals could not only control water, they could make it, and in losing control of her ability, the ’caster shifted from target to victim in one fatal moment.
Thorn nodded. “When I first came to after the vision ended, I thought I heard screaming. Many people, all screaming together.”
“You made quite the bloodcurdling howl yourself, Stellers,” Tanner said.
“I thought it might be the stew,” the XO, Raynaud added. “That first mouthful almost made me scream, too.” She smiled, dark eyes lively, but Thorn could tell it was empty of humor, just an attempt to lighten the gloom gripping the Hecate’s bridge.
“The vision of what happened here affected all Starcasters, everywhere, all at once,” Thorn said, working through the implications. Or trying to. It was all new to him
“So it appears,” Tanner replied. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea, sir.” He’d already recounted as much of the horrific vision as he could remember to Tanner and the Raynaud, holding nothing back. “It must have something to do with that little girl. She was clearly powerful—hell, powerful enough to shield herself from a KEW (Kinetic Energy Weapon) impact and knock more KEW’s right out of the sky.”
“That sounds like some you-level magic,” the XO said.
Thorn shook his head. “I doubt I’d be able to pull that off, ma’am—not without doing things to reality that we might really regret. What she did doesn’t seem to have had any lasting effects, though. And she was just a little kid—three or four years old, maybe. I’ve never heard of a child manifesting more than the occasional, random effect, like starting a fire, freezing the water in a pot, that sort of thing. It’s just enough to flag the fact they actually have magical talent, and that’s it.”
Tanner turned to the main viewscreen. “Well, it seems the Nyctus somehow recognized what she was capable of and decided to put an end to it,” he said, his voice soft and somber.