Witch Nebula (Starcaster Book 4)

by J. N. Chaney

  “It is not that simple,” the High Shaman cut in. “There are still aspects of this we don’t understand. She was dead. We confirmed that by her sudden and complete absence in the Firmament.” The Firmament was where real lives could be seen, and felt, and counted. It was the living space of the Nyctus, a place where their psychic energy was as tangible as their flesh. To a race like the Nyctus, the Firmament was of equal importance to the ground they walked on—or swam over.

  “And yet, you say she is somehow on Tāmtu, and has changed our people there,” Satu shot back. “What does that even mean, changed?”

  Another chorus of shouts rang out, accompanied by strobing flashes of angry confusion. This time, the High Shaman didn’t wait for it to subside.

  “Yes, she was dead. Now, she is not. Her presence in the Firmament is suddenly clear again. Moreover, the planet Nebo is once more intact and populated, as though we never destroyed it.”

  “But how is that possible?” someone exclaimed, fear saturating every sound of their question.

  “We believe we are seeing the hand of Stellers in this,” the High Shaman replied. “He has brought Nebo back, and, in the process, brought Morgan back as well.”

  This time, the stunned silence was absolute. Finally, a single voice spoke.

  “How could he contravene death?”

  “We don’t know,” the High Shaman said. “We’re aware, of course, that Stellers is a profound threat. He was, after all, responsible for the destruction of Kuvor. But it would appear that his ability to move an entire fleet great distances represents only a part of his powers.”

  “There!” Satu shouted, leaning over the balustrade lining the gallery where she had her place. “There is the reason that we must seek another way of dealing with the humans. In the face of such power—”

  “Stellers is only one man,” another Delegate shouted, cutting Satu off. The High Shaman noted this with satisfaction. This speaker was a reliable ally. “He cannot be everywhere, or do everything.”

  “Are you even sure about that?” Satu shot back. “And what if there are other humans with such powers? For that matter, why should we lend credence to anything you are saying here today?”

  “The High Shaman occupies the Stone of Truth. Are you suggesting that he flouts what it represents?”

  “Of course not. But there is a stark difference between lying and merely being wrong,” Satu replied, then turned back to the High Shaman. “And, so far, you have been wrong repeatedly. You said the war would be brief, that the humans would not stand for a protracted conflict. You said that the bombardment and destruction of human worlds such as Nebo would compel them to back down. You said that the trap prepared for the human fleet through our operative high in their command structure would convince them to sue for peace. None of those things have come to pass. Instead, our warriors fight and die, Kuvor is an irradiated ruin, our use of the Firmament against the humans has proven that they are as strong as us, and perhaps stronger. So again, High Shaman, why should we find you credible?”

  The High Shaman had to resist a bioluminescent display of anger. “Whether you find me credible, Satu, is entirely up to you. And, yes, I admit that the course of the war has not progressed as I’d originally envisioned. However, the humans have a single point of failure, one that has become our priority to neutralize.”

  “Stellers,” a Delegate said.

  Agreement flashed across the Caucus, tinged with both anger and anxiety. The name Stellers had become evocative of untold and fearful power. It was, the High Shaman thought, a name with which to elicit a fear response in larvae.

  “Yes,” he said. “Stellers. And, to the end of neutralizing him, we have several courses of action underway. The humans seek peace and cooperation from the Danzur. We have managed to leverage our operatives on their Ruling Council to deny such an agreement with the humans, unless they hand Stellers over to them, whereupon they will transfer him to us.”

  “Do you really believe the humans will agree to that?” Satu asked. “Would we agree to hand over one of ours to them? If the roles were reversed and it was you, High Shaman, that the humans were demanding to be handed over, do you expect that we would do so?”

  “If it was up to you, Satu, then I’m sure the answer to that question would be yes, without hesitation.”

  Despite the tense and confrontational atmosphere, amusement flickered among the Delegates. It gratified the High Shaman that only a small number of the Delegates remained, like Satu, impassive.

  “In any case,” the High Shaman went on, “I do not actually expect the humans to hand Stellers over to the Danzur, no. More important is that there is no successful alliance between them and the humans. When it comes to dealing with Stellers, we have a far more powerful weapon.”

  “And what is that?” Satu asked, her voice tinged with skepticism.

  “The girl, Morgan.”

  After a moment of silence, a Delegate spoke. “You said that she is responsible for changing our people on Tāmtu.”

  “And I’ll ask again, what does that mean? How have our people on Tāmtu been changed, High Shaman?” Satu asked.

  “They are no longer in communion with the rest of our people. The girl, Morgan, has somehow made them into something else. It would appear that they are loyal to her, and are keeping her safe and well.”

  “And our ships? The ones that have been lost? Was that the doing of our changed people?”

  “We don’t know, but we don’t believe so. We believe that that, too, was the doing of Morgan.”

  “As was the occurrence of the new nebula,” one of the High Shaman’s advisors said. “We discerned that both she and Stellers were involved in its creation.”

  Another Delegate leaned forward. “So Stellers is immensely powerful, and Morgan is immensely powerful. Both are able to move fleets, create stars—to change reality itself. What possible hope could we have against that?”

  “Very little,” the High Shaman said.

  Once more, there was silence. Again, Satu broke it.

  “So you admit, then, that this war is a losing proposition, and it is time to approach the humans in the spirit of peace.”

  “No. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  Satu flashed her frustration. “That makes no sense. You would have us fight against powers we cannot match, merely to pursue a war we can’t win? Is your ego so large, High Shaman—so large and fragile—that you cannot admit defeat, even when it’s painfully obvious?”

  “But we are not defeated,” the High Shaman replied. “In fact, we have an opportunity to deal with both Stellers and Morgan at once, to save our people on Tāmtu and deliver a final, crippling blow against the humans.”

  Luminous flickers, both intrigued and skeptical, flashed around the Caucus, accompanied by a faint murmur of conversation. The High Shaman pressed on.

  “Morgan is powerful but also immature for her species. Her thoughts are pliant. After much consultation with my Advisors, we have concluded that it would be possible to reshape her thoughts in a way that would not be possible with a mature human, based on a concept we know they identify as neuroplasticity—a complex word for a repulsive species trait, I might add. You may recall the report given here regarding the human female, Wixcombe, who proved utterly intractable despite our best and most concerted efforts. Were Morgan to be similarly mature, this would probably not be possible. As it is, her age is a boon to us.”

  “So you propose—what?” Satu said, her tone and luminosity both doubtful. “To influence Morgan’s thoughts sufficiently to change Tāmtu back to its natural state? To release our people from whatever she has done to them?”

  “Yes,” the High Shaman replied. “But we would go beyond that. There is some relationship between her and Stellers that we don’t understand. However, we believe we can continue to influence Morgan, turning her from adversary to neutral party, and then to ally.”

  “You’re suggesting that we ally with a human? And an imma
ture one, at that?”

  The High Shaman flashed an amused but strained patience. “Only in a manner of speaking. In fact, she would become our operative, what the humans refer to as a Skin.”

  “To what end?”

  The High Shaman paused for dramatic effect, sensing this moment as the critical one. He would either convince the Caucus, or he wouldn’t.

  “To destroy Stellers, of course, and, in the process, destroy herself. And once that is accomplished, the two most potent obstacles to our victory will be removed.”

  The silence went on and on. Slowly just a few, then many of the Delegates glinted their approval. Satu and her closest collaborators abstained, but it didn’t matter. The support for the High Shaman’s proposal was overwhelming.

  18

  Thorn had been immensely gratified to find out that Bertilak did indeed have appropriate hygiene facilities aboard his ship, including a toilet. Of course, that raised other questions. Like why would the outsized alien have human-scaled plumbing? Thorn decided to leave the questions unasked for the moment. He decided to be as cooperative with Bertilak as he could be, hoping to leverage the alien’s effusive good humor into a more open relationship between them. After all, what he ultimately wanted from Bertilak was information, so it only made sense to make the alien as comfortable with him as possible.

  “So, captain, a question?” Thorn said, stepping onto the spartan bridge.

  “Ask, friend.”

  “Where the hell are we going?” Thorn waved vaguely at the expanse of black.

  The alien swept a hand toward the viewscreen, which depicted nothing, just the blankness of an Alcubierre bubble. “That way.”

  “That way.”

  “That’s right. You’ll note that we have plenty of room.”

  “Well, if I remember my intro nav course, we can go about thirteen billion light years that way, and then we’ll run out of universe.”

  “Ah, will we?”

  Thorn blinked at that. “I don’t know. That’s just how big I’ve been told the universe is. And who am I to doubt the astrophysicists who are all definitely smarter than me?”

  “Bah, you sell yourself short,” Bertilak said as Thorn sat down. “You are not a stupid man, Thorn Stellers, although I note that you enjoy staying below the radar, as some humans might say. I think this is by design.”

  “Saying that someone’s smarter than me isn’t the same as saying I’m stupid,” Thorn replied, forcing a smile. “How’s that for boundless confidence?”

  Bertilak laughed. “True. But that shows the importance of being precise. These specialists may be better educated and experienced in their fields, but that doesn’t make them necessarily smarter than you.” He glanced at Thorn sidelong. “I’m sure an astrophysicist would say the same about you when it comes to magic, no?”

  “Possibly,” Thorn said. “I just—”

  An alarm sounded, cutting him off. Bertilak turned back to his controls.

  “We aren’t alone, it seems,” he said. “There is a ship ahead.”

  Thorn deliberately said nothing. There was no technology he was aware of that would allow a ship inside an Alcubierre bubble to gather information about anything outside of it. That was the whole point—the drive generated a tiny, separate universe around the ship. It was a limitation that the ON, the Nyctus, and anyone else who used a similar drive for superluminal flight simply had to work around. And there weren’t, as far as Thorn knew, any other ways of traveling faster than light.

  So if Bertilak had some tech that would allow him to scan normal space from inside an Alcubierre bubble, that by itself would offer the ON a massive advantage.

  As he peered at the panel in front of Bertilak, all he saw was more of the flowing geometric shapes and a bunch of controls that amounted to little more than flashing, colored lights. If Bertilak was able to derive useful information from it, Thorn couldn’t see how.

  “Can you tell what sort of ship it is?” he asked.

  Bertilak narrowed his eyes. “Let’s find out, shall we? I do not enjoy surprises that are not culinary in nature.”

  “Culinary?”

  “I like food that looks like other things. That is pleasant. This? No.”

  Bertilak tapped at the controls. A few seconds later, the starfield reappeared as the ship returned to normal space. A dim point of light in the distance gradually grew larger as they approached it.

  “It’s a Nyctus vessel,” Bertilak said, looking at Thorn. “Badly damaged and broadcasting a distress beacon.”

  Thorn studied the zoomed image of the Nyctus ship. It was a frigate. She’d been badly pummeled in a recent fight and bore the scars. Her bow had been opened, ragged holes and gaping rents had been torn in her hull, and she seemed to only have power in the rearmost part of the ship, probably the engineering section. The rest of her interior had either been destroyed or laid open to hard vacuum.

  “No debris,” Thorn said, frowning.

  Bertilak glanced at him. “Should there be?”

  “There’s no debris. I’ve been in enough battles to know that it doesn’t take long for space to get filled with debris—pieces of ships, pieces blown off of ships, expended missiles, escape pods, all that sort of thing. But I don’t see any here.”

  “There,” Bertilak said, pointing at his enigmatic displays. “There’s your debris, over there.”

  Thorn returned a blank look. “What I see is a bunch of circles spinning inside each other on your screen there. If that says there’s debris out there somewhere, I’m sorry, Bertilak, but I can’t—”

  Bertilak nodded. “Yes, I forget that you wouldn’t be familiar with these instruments.” The big alien fiddled with the controls, and the image on the main viewscreen changed. It now showed a debris field about a hundred klicks across, fragments of shattered alloy and hull plating slowly tumbling across a few tens of klicks.

  Thorn stood and walked up to the display. “Looks like they managed to move the ship this far, probably to get clear of that mess.”

  Bertilak switched the view back to the stricken Nyctus vessel.

  “You said they’re broadcasting a distress signal?” Thorn asked.

  “Correct,” the alien replied, tapping yet another incomprehensible display. “That, and minimal life support are the only returns I am seeing from my scans. At face value, that indicates a ship on the edge of being dead.”

  “They must have been hit by an ON patrol,” Thorn said, staring at the image of the battered ship. “Not sure why they didn’t finish her off.”

  “Should I do it for them?” Bertilak asked, hands posed like a musician waiting to strike the first note.

  “Bertilak, do your”—he gestured at the panel— “instruments tell you if there are actually any squids still alive?”

  “Yes. Four, all in the engineering section.”

  Thorn sighed as he studied the wreck. Thanks to radiation shielding and all of the structural bracing holding the powerplant and drives in place, the engineering sections of most ships were probably their toughest parts. These four squids must be the engineering crew, or what was left of them, who’d managed to take refuge in the only part of the ship still holding atmosphere and heat.

  For a moment, he tried to imagine what it would be like if the Hecate had been pounded to scrap with only her engineering compartments still intact, crew trapped inside. They’d know little or nothing about what was going on around them and would only be able to huddle in the fitful darkness. They’d be desperately hoping for rescue, terrified that safeties were going to fail, or the powerplant would suddenly explode. Or maybe worse, the lights and air processors dying, leaving them alone in the dark, the atmosphere getting ever more stale, their breath starting to form clouds of frozen mist—

  “Thorn?”

  He turned to Bertilak, nightmarish imaginings still hovering nearby.

  “Should I simply destroy this vessel and then we’ll be on our way?” Bertilak said. “I ask for your input here,
as you are now part of this ship.”

  Thorn took a breath and nodded. Living a nightmare or not, they were still squids “Yes. Go ahead.”

  Bertilak stared back at Thorn for a moment, then reached for his panel—

  “Wait.”

  Thorn blinked as Bertilak turned again to look at him, surprised at his own word. The alien just waited.

  Thorn stared at the smashed remains of the Nyctus frigate.

  —huddle in the fitful darkness, desperately hoping for rescue—the atmosphere getting ever more stale, their breath starting to form clouds of frozen mist—

  “Can you tell if there are any other Nyctus ships nearby?” Thorn asked. “Any close enough to respond to their distress call?”

  Bertilak looked at his instruments, then nodded. “About four light-years distant, a Nyctus patrol. They’re on their way here.”

  “How long?”

  “About three hours, at their current velocity.”

  Thorn nodded, making a mental note that Bertilak couldn’t only scan outside of an Alcubierre bubble, he could scan ships inside them—and up to at least four light-years away.

  “Thorn, do you want me to destroy this Nyctus ship, or not?” Bertilak pressed.

  Thorn sighed, rich with disgust. “No. Let’s just leave them and hope that one of them doesn’t turn out to come up with some war-winning scheme.”

  Again, Bertilak just watched Thorn for a moment. “Are you sure?”

  “I am.”

  “What about looting her? There might be some useful items aboard.”

  Thorn shook his head at the wreck. “I doubt it.”

  “There is in the engineering section. The fuel alone would save me having to replenish for a good, long while.”

  Thorn gave Bertilak a hard look. “You seem really determined to find a reason to screw with these squids.”

  Bertilak grinned. “It isn’t about them. You see, I’m an opportunist. And this is an opportunity.”

  “So, if I wasn’t here, you’d just scavenge whatever you could and let the squids die?”