Tyger Bright Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  TYGER BRIGHT

  T.C. McCARTHY

  Tyger Bright

  by T.C. McCarthy

  A YOUNG GIRL MUST INFILTRATE THE HOME WORLD OF HUMANITY'S GREATEST ENEMIES. New space opera from former CIA weapons expert T.C. McCarthy.

  San Kyarr is a noviate within a secretive holy order tasked by Fleet to infiltrate the home world of mankind’s most dangerous enemy: the Sommen. If caught, her mission could bring war to Earth—long before its forces are ready.

  When a competing faction within Fleet learns of the clandestine assignment and sends her own brother to destroy her, San is set on a journey toward destinies far greater than she ever imagined. As she evolves into a mysterious woman with the powers to send and receive quantum messages, she achieves humanity’s most unattainable dream of instantaneous interstellar communication.

  BAEN BOOKS

  by T.C. McCARTHY

  Tyger Burning

  Tyger Bright

  Tyger Bright

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by T.C. McCarthy

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2517-2

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-795-7

  Cover art by Adam Burn

  First printing, February 2021

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCarthy, T. C., author.

  Title: Tyger bright / T.C. McCarthy.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, [2021] | “A Baen books original”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020050078 | ISBN 9781982125172 (trade paperback)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C3563 T93 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050078

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version of Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For Hannah Watters Wever;

  your family and friends will never forget you.

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Win gazed into the hologram, absorbing its emptiness. Static. He knew where they were going, and why, but preferred the lies because truth guaranteed a gruesome death by their enemy where lies promised victory—a chance that at least some of them would return from this excursion instead of being sliced open. There were slower ways to die and Win clung to another lie as if it were a buoy: If caught, he and the crew would die quickly by rifle fire, not by one of the slow methods, the ones reserved for cowards. There was nothing more offensive to the Sommen than gutlessness.

  His captain, Markus, glared. Hatred splashed over Win’s mind and he tuned it out, doing his best to ignore the acidity, a fluid kind of anger that threatened to soak the fabric of his thoughts and weaken them with distraction. What did the captain matter, or his name? This man is corpulent. It would be easy to spear the captain with one of the legs from Win’s servo harness—one of the two things that made Win look different from the Higgins’s crew. The other was his head. With the drugs come physiological changes; with the changes come sight and power—the power of Sommen thought, the greatness of war and corpses. Elongated after so many treatments, the shape of Win’s skull attracted looks wherever he went and even after months in space nothing had changed; his body’s muscles had continued to wither and without the armored servo harness he’d be immobilized. The crew thought him disgusting; their thoughts washed over Win too, a sewage that wouldn’t drain.

  I am a weapon. Through the absorption of hatred and aversion I power my thought, and with thought I will cut my enemy’s throat.

  “Captain, we couldn’t reconstitute the recording at all,” an ensign said; the man “sat” next to Win, suspended in zero g. “Its base files are lost and we had to move on. But the metadata is there and there are E-M spectra consistent with Sommen patterns. My guess? They slaughtered our people.”

  The captain nodded. “How long ago?”

  “Like Win said: just before we arrived at Childress transit.”

  The captain pinched the bridge of his nose and Win studied the signs; the man had taken off his suit helmet to reveal a bald head, its muscle tremors screaming that exhaustion made him less human, more zombie than anything else. The man feared war. Win imagined war was coming whether the captain wanted it or not and that conflict would be the life of their offspring, prayers a poor method for preventing destruction. Sommen invasion fleets were still decades away, but they would come.

  I am a weapon and war is my promise.

  “What’s the damage to the signal buoy’s shell?” the captain asked. “Can we get anything from that?”

  “Outer shell vaporized, and the rest of it pretty much scorched. The only thing operational was the locator beacon but it lost power almost immediately. Standard missile damage, propellant and warhead consistent with Sommen weapons signatures.”

  “I want intel working on this around the clock,” the captain ordered. “We make our transit into Childress in three hours, so get as much information as you can. Meeting’s over, I need the conference room.”

  Win was about to release the straps keeping him in his seat when the captain waved.

  “Stay put.”

  The others unhooked from the table and pushed themselves off, drifting toward a door. One at a time, they glided from the room.

  “Zhelnikov,” said the captain, “is safely aboard the station and we move into an area where we know the Sommen are now operating. I’ve got orders to do what you say. But I won’t move this ship another meter unless you tell me about the mission. Now.”

  “I can tell you this, Captain: Zhelnikov wants us to pop into the Childress system, reconnoiter, and return to him with any remaining research data that the Sommen haven’t destroyed.”

  “Data? Like what?”

  Win cleared his throat. “I can’t answer that.” When he saw the captain begin to speak, he added, “Zhelnikov was clear. We pop from Childress wormhole and then make for the research station. Get in and get out. But what I’m to do at the station is classified and not for you. Not yet.”

  “I don’t like it. Zhelnikov wants the Higgins for a high-risk mission; okay. I accept that. But to not give me the details as we enter what could be hostile territory where the enemy is active? Unacceptable.”

  “Understood, sir. I’ll pass your thoughts on to Zhelnikov.”

  The captain’s glare faded.

  “That . . .” he stammered, “that’s not necessary. Forget what I said. What’s your full name, anyway?”

 
A sucking sound rang through Win’s helmet when the suit’s automatic systems began their periodic removal of saliva that had begun to run from his chin. “I’m Burmese. My father named me Win and nothing else. His last name was Kyarr. My mother died when I was little and I never knew her.”

  “How the hell did you get drafted into Zhelnikov’s little show, and what the hell did he do to you? To your body?”

  “I am a weapon. Zhelnikov put me in charge because he and I know how scared you are, and that you’ve no concept of what we face. But I do. I’ve seen it. You will hide under rocks and mountains on that day.”

  “Your father,” the captain said, pointing first at Win’s head and then gesturing at the rest of him. “He agreed to make you into this?”

  Win held himself back, wanting to push off the wall and strangle the man, killing him in micro-increments to see the fear of death as his eyes’ lights dimmed. It would have made everything right. A burst of memory blinded him, a picture of his father in the Charleston slums with the other Myanmarese playing backgammon in the street while they squatted and pulled on cigarettes. Many of them had no teeth. Some stumbled, drunk and with emaciated leg muscles that somehow held the men up. His father grinned at Win; then he held up the dice and threw them on the board.

  “My father disappeared when I was young, Captain Markus. I chose to do this to myself.”

  “You’re either insane, or the stupidest son of a—”

  Win cut him off and unhooked from the table, pushing toward the hatchway. “Captain, I don’t have time for this. You will hear from me when we get closer to the transit point.”

  I am a weapon. He moved through white corridors, making his way toward the ashram. Zhelnikov hid in the safety of a hollow rock; he would not be taking the risks that Win did in visiting the scene of a Sommen massacre. A distant ship’s voice warned of imminent evasive maneuvers upon entering the wormhole and Win strapped into an emergency couch sunk into the ashram’s floor. After turn upon turn, the gees dislodged deep memories and pushed Win into a twilight place where there was just enough light to see but not enough to chase the shadows. Soon they’d be locked into a fight; conflict was almost here and the instant the Higgins crossed over, they’d be outside the zone permitted to humans—an act of war.

  The wormhole grew with every second and Win watched, fascinated, examining the silvery orb that hung in space as if someone had placed it there like an orphaned Christmas ornament. He squinted, zooming in, to try and see what kept the wormhole alive.

  “Our guys salvaged a message.” The captain’s voice crackled in Win’s helmet. “The buoy is from a Fleet drone carrier, the Majestic. Go ahead and play it over coms.”

  Win whispered at his faceplate so that when the message began, a spectral analyzer danced across his heads-up, forming a series of jagged green lines blurred with static.

  “Contact at fourteen-thirty-three hours Earth time, Zulu. Patrol reports multiple unknowns coming from, we think, an uncharted wormhole in the direction of the Orion arm. I sent half our squadron of fighter drones to intercept and the rest are falling back to carrier patrol. Weapons research was successful and installation complete on one vessel. Doctor McCalister seems to have . . .”

  The recording ended in a hiss.

  “That’s all we recovered, sir,” someone said. “Nothing from the base itself and our semi-aware calculates an eighty-seven percent chance that all Fleet vessels, including the Majestic, were destroyed. Doctor McCalister was Childress’s lead scientist and the head of the Childress mission.”

  “One of Zhelnikov’s?”

  Win broke in. “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Win. That’s confirmation; it looks like Childress fell to hostile forces. Likely Sommen.”

  “Captain,” Win said, “it was the Sommen. I have seen this. And you have no idea what they’ve done to your Fleet comrades.”

  Win’s spectral analyzer continued to dance, its lines reacting to the soft sound of static but coming to life at occasional pops in the noise. When the captain spoke, the spectrum and his tone indicated he was furious.

  “Battle stations. Have the computer plot an evasion course beyond the hole, post transit; we can’t do high g because our passenger isn’t engineered, so if we get hit, thank Win. Once we determine Childress space is safe, one of our shuttles will make for the research station. That is all.”

  Win shut the analyzer off. Soon the wormhole would fill his helmet’s screen with white light and he closed his eyes before pressing a button on his forearm; inside his suit, a tiny needle jetted out and buried itself in his neck, just long enough to push green fluid into one of his veins. He suppressed a scream. The liquid burned, coursing its way towards his brain which it soon entered. He shed a tear at the agony as new neural masses grew, forcing connections and firing electric pulses. This is the price of sight, the promise of victory, he decided, just before passing out. Win came to in a few seconds, his eyes open but his vision focused elsewhere, beyond the wormhole and into Childress space; he may not have been engineered for high-g maneuvers, but Win had been engineered by Zhelnikov for this.

  I am a weapon—not a timekeeper. I am not the clockmaker, or the keeper of dreams. There is one who sets the time, one who draws the pictures, and one who calls out the minutes and seconds. I ring the alarm of war. It is in war that my mind awakens. It is in war that the mind settles into its killing course where neurons spark and blood flows. It is in the death of enemies that I am reborn . . .

  The ship melted away. An illusion of acceleration shifted his insides as he popped into the wormhole, the slide through mirrored space making him nauseous. As soon as he popped out the other side a blinding darkness surrounded him, filled with Sommen whispers; their tongues clicked and he heard the gurgling of their throats when the things got angry, spitting insults while Win did his best to penetrate but it was as if he had been immersed in an ocean of ink. Nothing worked. No matter how hard he concentrated, the mantras ran empty and useless, the darkness impenetrable. A few seconds later he woke; Win’s arms and legs trembled and his undersuit stuck to his skin, soaked in sweat.

  “System—this is Win,” he said. “Get me the captain.”

  A second later the captain’s voice responded from the wall panel. “What?”

  “The Sommen hit Childress and are somehow blocking my readings. I’ve never seen this.”

  “High-g maneuvers in ten seconds. The Marines are staged in acceleration couches so that when we stop maneuvers they’ll move to the docking airlock for station boarding. With you. Now would be a good time to tell me everything, Win.”

  The Higgins pitched and yawed, throwing Win into the couch and then against his straps in a random series of movements. His suit’s servos whined. A warning light flashed red on his heads-up, alerting him to the fact that his harness’s structural integrity was in danger of failing. It frustrated him that the captain could operate under these conditions while Win had to marshal his resources, scraping just enough breath to speak.

  “You and your ship are to stay here near the wormhole transit point, Captain, and not approach the station. I and the Marines will dock with Childress using the shuttle, scanning for enemy along the way. If we see them, the shuttle turns runs back to the Higgins and then we drop passivated nuclear mines on this side of the hole and the other; passive mines are hard to detect. Then we wait. If the Sommen enter human space, we accelerate from transit to transit, rejoining with the main group—the Jerusalem and the Bangkok.”

  “And if we don’t see any Sommen?”

  “We head for the station, investigate, retrieve relevant information, and then fall back. The station computer contains plans for a weapon that will change everything. If possible, Zhelnikov wants the base nuked. Nothing is to remain.”

  “If the Sommen have already taken it, it’s too late to retrieve a damn thing.”

  “The Sommen don’t care about our tech. They came here to make a point: We broke the treaty. Zhelnikov was a
fool to put this base here in the first place.”

  “Why the hell is there a base out here?”

  “To avoid Fleet curiosity while Zhelnikov’s people work, something that might help him retake control of Fleet and win the coming war. I can’t give you the details but it’s based on Sommen tech and we had to test it. Someone up there thought that a demonstration outside our territory—that we were already capable of matching their weaponry, and didn’t give a damn about their rules—would also be a good idea. But we were betrayed. Zhelnikov’s enemies contacted the Sommen and alerted them.”

  “Let me see what we have so far. We just punched through; the Higgins is now outside human territory.” Win heard the click of someone else joining the conversation.

  “Finished first scans, sir. There are still a few sweeps to go, but sensors are clear.”

  “They’re out there,” said Win. He didn’t need the ashram to tell him that; every nerve in his body hummed. “The Sommen are watching.”

  “Stop evasive maneuvers,” the captain ordered. “Take us back to the wormhole and hold on this side.”

  The ship stopped its violent movements and Win breathed a sigh of relief, taking a deep breath and almost missing the captain’s next words. “Win, meet the Marines at the shuttle; take them in and let’s finish this. Get your ass back here if there’s trouble; if we detect any Sommen and they close on the Higgins, you’re on your own.”

  Marines loaded onto the shuttle, the men ducking under a tight hatch just large enough for them to squeeze through in battle kit. They wore blaze orange suits. Each had multiple layers of polymer armor that shone under the ship’s hover lights and their facemasks were similar to Win’s: A curved plate filled the space where their face should be, its surface coated with banks of sensors sending pictures to an internal screen. Win wondered if the Marines ever got claustrophobic—sealed into an armored sarcophagus for hours on end. After the last one pushed in, he followed, strapping himself to an empty couch.