Chimeras star, p.1
Chimera's Star, page 1
CHIMERA’S STAR
STARSHIP’S MAGE
BOOK 14
GLYNN STEWART
CONTENTS
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
A Royal Family… Shattered by Betrayal
About the Author
Also by Glynn Stewart
Credits
Chimera’s Star © 2024 Glynn Stewart
Illustration by Roman Chalyi
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a registered trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.
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For Glynn Stewart news, announcements, and more, visit GlynnStewart.com
1
By any usual standard or objective measurement, the man in the big seat at the center of the starship had no right to be there.
First, the starship was an exploratory cruiser of the Royal Martian Navy and he had never been an officer of the RMN. In a long-past era, where he’d served the Protectorate of the Mage-Queen of Mars in a more usual fashion, he’d risen to Mage-Major of the Royal Martian Marines. He’d never been an RMN officer, so he would never have commanded a starship.
Second, the only people qualified to use the semiliquid silver simulacrum of the ship in easy reach of his hands were the Jump Mages of the Protectorate’s Mage Guilds—or the Navy Mages of Her Majesty’s Navy—and he had never qualified to be one of those. While he had the silver-inlaid runes in his palms to interface with the starship’s jump matrix and he had been trained, he’d never formally qualified as a Jump Mage.
Third, of course, was that he was wanted for treason and a list of other crimes as long as his arm.
Fourth was that the starship, Rose, had been intended for a completely different commanding officer. That man was dead now, having been immune to the mind-control nanotech the man in the chair had used to take control of the ship.
Because, of course, none of the reasons why Kay, also known as Nemesis One, shouldn’t be in the chair aboard the cruiser Rose mattered. The only thing that mattered was that he’d taken the ship by storm, with a cadre of elite commandos of the organization known as Nemesis and ruthless use of the mind-control weapon known as Orpheus-Ultima.
None of the people they’d used Orpheus on were left alive. The roughly six hundred Nemesis personnel Kay had brought along with him weren’t really enough to crew Rose to her full effectiveness, but they had been more than enough to handle the Martian officers and crew when Orpheus had run out.
Kay had hoped that at least some of those personnel would be salvageable. He’d been wrong.
“Report,” he ordered aloud.
The dark-haired man commanding Rose knew he was terrifyingly gaunt to an outside eye. He wasn’t entirely sure why, though he suspected he should probably eat more. His continual lack of appetite had never impeded his physical or magical strength, and he found his ever-more sunken appearance a useful tool.
The woman who appeared in response to his order was one of the few people who could nag him to eat. Adwoa Tomas was a towering Black woman, as plump and curvy as her Captain was gaunt and bony, and—unlike Kay—was a fully trained Jump Mage.
Not a Navy Mage. She’d been a senior Ship’s Mage in civilian shipping before falling into the orbit of Nemesis. She was a useful officer but no threat, physically or magically, to Kay.
“We’re still pulling together sensor data,” Tomas told him. “The scanners on this ship are incredible, but that’s the problem.”
Kay turned the chair away from the simulacrum to look at her. He’d just used the ship’s runes to make the final jump to their destination, and fatigue tore through him. He thought he was hiding it well, but he also knew that Tomas, at least, knew perfectly well how he was feeling.
She’d cast the jump spell more times in her life than he ever would. She had to know the bone-deep exhaustion of funneling all of your magic into that spell.
“What I’m looking for should be relatively obvious,” he pointed out.
Twenty years earlier, the Royal Order of the Keepers of Secrets and Oaths had found this system by collating information from a dozen archaeological dig sites and a thousand telescopes. The main purpose of the Keepers—the cause that Kay, who had been Lieutenant Kent Riley then, had been recruited for—had been to keep secret the knowledge of just how, exactly, magic had been brought back to humanity.
The open history, involving a brutal eugenics project by a fascist totalitarian state already run on eugenicist principles, was bad enough. The secret behind it had been even more horrifying: a nonhuman species called the Reejit had created and guided that horrific program to produce humans whose brains could be extracted to fuel the alien ships.
And twenty years ago, the Keepers had found the location of a Reejit fleet base, just barely within striking distance of the modern Protectorate of Mars.
“That’s part of what I’m saying, sir,” Tomas told him. “Scans are suggesting there’s a lot here, but… none of it’s active.”
“There’s a fleet base here, Tomas,” Kay snapped. He looked around him. Rose’s bridge also served as her simulacrum chamber, the critical nexus of the magic and runes that allowed her to jump. Part of that required a perfect view of the outside of the ship—and now the nature of what he was seeing cut through his fatigue.
Rose was running dark, as many of her systems shut down or venting into heat sinks as was physically possible. Kay could, theoretically, conceal the ship further with magic, but he’d brought her in far enough away from the base that that shouldn’t have been necessary.
Still, the scale of the infrastructure detected by the telescopes and incorporated into the dataset that had fractured the Keepers and birthed Nemesis should have been visible around the fourth planet.
He started stabbing commands into the repeater control panel on the Captain’s chair. Tomas said nothing, clearly judging that it was better for him to see for himself.
The fourth planet was highlighted on the all-encompassing displays, and he stared at it. They were far enough out to be nearly impossible to detect, even without magic, but that also meant they were far enough out that the planet was little more than a dot.
He’d expected it to be the blue-green dot of a habitable world, a Reejit colony whose populace provided economic and industrial support to a major fleet base. Instead, it was a vague brown color.
Kay dragged a finger down a digital slider on his screen, and swallowed as the image zoomed in. At this distance, he couldn’t see if there were inactive stations or debris around the planet, but if there had been the major fleet base infrastructure that the Keepers had detected, he would have seen it.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered. “We ran the analyses a hundred times. It took data from across the entire Protectorate to be sure, but we were sure.
“There is a Reejit fleet base here.”
“There was a Reejit fleet base here,” Tomas said softly. “I only saw the highest summaries of the data, sir, but we’re over a hundred light-years from the edge of the Protectorate. Two hundred and more light-years from Earth. Our data is ancient… and something happened here.”
He swallowed away as much of his fatigue as he could and nodded slowly.
“Then we find out what,” he growled. “This base may not be the threat we feared, but anyone who would destroy it may be an even worse danger than we thought!”
Despite Kay’s best efforts and intentions, rest after a jump wasn’t optional. He’d been determined to make the final jump into the nameless star system the Keepers had feared, but in hindsight, letting one of the other three Jump Mages on the ship cast the spell would have left him more able to command.
That, he supposed, was the exact kind of thought process and training that coming up through the Royal Martian Navy would have given. As it was, he had to learn much of commanding a ship the hard way.
As he freshened up and put on another insignia-less uniform—thanks to the logistics teams of the RMN, Rose had a practically infinite supply of shipsuits and uniforms and effectively zero civilian clothes—he reflected that at least he didn’t need to worry about chain of command.
Everyone aboard Rose had seen Kay in combat. None of them were so foolish as to think they could challenge him. He ha
A Navy Captain had hundreds of years of tradition and the authority of the entire Protectorate behind them. Kay had his own personal ability to crush any mutiny, and the cause they all shared.
It was the cause that let him take a six-hour nap after confirming there was no immediate threat. Three centuries earlier, aliens had sought to turn humanity into supplies for their jump drives, accidentally creating the modern Mage.
And then they had vanished.
The Protectorate had forgotten about the Reejit, their existence buried by the first Mage-King of Mars except for his hand-chosen Keepers. But the Keepers hadn’t been ready for the reality of an active threat, for the Nemesis System to be found.
And now… now Kay stood in the Nemesis System and there was nothing there.
The enemy was farther away, but the enemy was out there. He knew that in his bones and he sent out a command as he put his wrist-comp back on.
Meeting in ten. Bring the scan data.
The leadership cadre of a conspiracy made for middling starship officers at best, but they were the people Kay had.
“There is nothing alive here.”
Karl Chaudhary was not known for beating around the bush, Kay reflected. The tall Tau Cetan man shared his Captain’s dark hair, but matched it with tanned-looking skin drawn from Earth’s Marathi lineage.
Chaudhary had also taken over the leadership of Nemesis’s “direct action” arm from Kay after their original leadership had been destroyed. He was an Augment, a cyborg super-soldier assembled for the now-defunct Republic of Faith and Reason.
The Republican soldier had been trained as a Mage-killer. But Kay knew he could handle the Augment if he needed to.
“I can see that,” Kay said drily, looking around his team and assessing them.
Chaudhary led the Nemesis commandos, the elite strike force that Kay had extracted from the collapse of the original organization. Mostly Augments with a handful of ex-Marine Combat Mages, they were among the deadliest groups of human beings in the galaxy.
Adwoa Tomas was effectively Kay’s executive officer, the person aboard the ship with the most experience in actually running a ship. She’d been XO on a freighter for a few years before joining Nemesis and running a series of high-speed covert couriers for the conspiracy.
The rest of the Protectorate might have access to the Link, the quantum-entanglement-based FTL communicator developed by the Republic, now. Nemesis, however, had been far too aware of the level of eavesdropping and control built into the new coms system by the former Republic and had every reason to think the Protectorate had duplicated it.
If, for no other reason, than specifically to catch Nemesis.
The only actual officer from the Royal Martian Navy was ex-Commander Rokus Koskinen, a wide-shouldered blond man who had been cashiered for assaulting a fellow officer. Koskinen was, in Kay’s opinion, a throwback to a mythical time where strength had decided everything and had issues functioning in the modern world.
Fortunately, while Koskinen might outweigh Kay by fifty or so kilos, Kay had demonstrated that not only did he have magic the other man lacked, he was also better at martial arts—and, when push came to shove, was actually stronger than the big man.
He’d broken Koskinen’s arm in a “friendly” arm-wrestling contest. The ex-Navy officer had fallen into line after that—and he now handled Rose’s weapons.
The last person in the room was key to the ship’s operation. Kamilla O’Shea was the only person who understood Rose’s complex sensors and power cores and engines and stealth systems enough to keep them running.
She was a show-once student who’d studied Rose’s systems for six months before coming aboard with the boarding teams and taking to them like a fish to water. She didn’t talk much, but she followed orders and was undyingly loyal to both the cause and Kay himself.
“So,” Kay concluded, meeting each of his four key people’s gazes, except O’Shea’s, in turn. “There is nothing here now. At some point in the past, there definitely was enough here for the Keepers to scan this system and pick up a clear and major military presence.
“One that wasn’t human. This is Nemesis System, my friends. The star system our entire organization, in many ways, was set up to keep humanity safe from.”
That got him a few bitter chuckles. No one in this room—not even O’Shea, despite the impression the tech wizard happily gave the other senior Nemesis leaders—had clean hands. Kay’s hands were probably dirtiest, but that was the life he’d chosen.
“We rushed the takeover of Rose,” Koskinen said. “And it cost us. Fuck Kennedy.”
“Kennedy didn’t cost us Thorn,” Kay said flatly. “That was Damien Montgomery and Mage-Captain Chambers, ably assisted by our mistake with Robert O’Kane.”
“We needed him at one point,” O’Shea muttered. “Especially after Winton.”
Kay nodded. O’Shea was the only other member of this council who had been a senior Nemesis member when “Winton,” the ex-Martian spy and former senior Keeper who had created Nemesis, was still alive.
“Rebuilding our resources after Winton sacrificed himself to preserve the organization required steps that created issues in hindsight,” he allowed. “But Rokus is correct. If Kennedy hadn’t co-opted Kron and Aloysius into his damn stupid plan to kidnap the Mage-Queen, we would have had more time.”
He might even have been able to co-opt Mage-Captain Chambers herself, if given enough time. He doubted it—she had to be fully briefed on Nemesis now, given that he’d once deceived her into helping him steal the plans for the Orpheus mind-control nanites—but it would have been worth a try.
The room was silent for a few seconds, until Kay finally chuckled bitterly. He gestured, using a tiny spark of magic to float the coffee carafe over to him so he could fill his mug.
Even before they’d been on a single ship over a hundred light-years from civilization, Nemesis’s key leadership meetings had been self-serve on food and coffee. They had, after all, been carrying out a deeply illegal conspiracy to manipulate the Protectorate into being ready for a war too few people knew was coming.
“What are we looking at?” he asked, his gaze focusing on Koskinen. The man had been an RMN tactical officer. Along with the analysts tucked away elsewhere in Rose’s expansive hull, the Commander was the best-qualified person to judge the aftermath of a battle.
“A fight so long ago, I’m surprised there’s anything left,” Koskinen said flatly. “That I can pick out enough wreckage to say there were ships and space stations here is saying a lot, Kay. We’re still running the analysis of the sensor data, and the closer we get to Nemesis Four, the more we’ll know.”
“We’re still a dozen hours out,” Tomas reminded everyone. “We’ve dropped the stealth and we’re radiating normally, but we came out far enough away to justify a microjump.”
“Except that the data we’re picking up on the way in is as critical as anything we’ll get in orbit,” Koskinen growled. “A jump might save time now but it will waste it later.”
Kay held up his hand.
“It sounds like you two have already hashed this out,” he observed. “And we are approaching sublight, yes?”
“We are,” Tomas confirmed. “There are arguments both ways, but the Commander made his case… fiercely.”
Fiercely wasn’t eloquently or even convincingly, Kay knew. On the other hand, he trusted Tomas to just ignore the big Finn if she thought he was actually wrong.
“So what do we know so far?” he demanded.
“Going through the data from the old Keeper Project Panopticon is… fascinating,” O’Shea said, cutting in before anyone else said anything. “We should all have reviewed it in more detail before launching this operation, I suppose, but better late than never.
“The base definitely existed approximately two hundred and fifty years ago,” she continued. “After that, even reviewing the Panopticon data leaves me with more questions than answers.” She shrugged, looking up from the table but still not meeting anyone’s gaze.
