Witch Nebula (Starcaster Book 4)

by J. N. Chaney

  Her focus was the Pool of Stars, or, more properly, the picture of Una’s Ass. She held the image fast in her mind, using it like a beacon. Her consciousness swung to and fro through the years, hunting for it. She knew it was out there, somewhere and somewhen—

  Ah. There. She saw it in the remote, temporal distance. She allowed herself to be drawn to it, the way the flicker moths were drawn to the lights of the farm on Nebo at night. And just like that, the Pool of Stars was right there, hanging against a starscape, about to depart on its maiden, and doomed, voyage.

  The image of Una’s Ass zoomed in, filling her awareness. Okay, the first thing to fix was that. She knew exactly how she wanted Morgan’s Ride to look, right down the particular colors of the horse she’d be riding. For instance, it had a white blaze on its forehead, a startling splotch of brightness against its dark coat.

  But nothing happened. She could see Una’s Ass, but she couldn’t change it.

  Oh. Wait. Right. She hadn’t actually changed the universe yet. Her awareness was in the past, but that was it.

  She drew up more magic and began to shape it according to her desire, the clay of creation feeling good in her small hands. The Pool of Stars started forward in time, traversing it the same way it would fly through space. Now Morgan had to strain, exerting her will to overcome the inertia of creation. Apparently, the universe didn’t like having time change the way it worked. Again, her head began to throb. Wisps of blood drifted from her nose. She was making headway, but it was so hard. She needed a touchstone, something upon which to focus her efforts and channel her power. It was like when daddy watered the sour-pod trees, back on Nebo. If he didn’t use a hose, the water would just splash all around the pump. The hose let him make the water go where he wanted it to.

  She bore down harder, grinding her teeth. She had something like that, didn’t she? Hadn’t there been something that she’d used? It was suddenly all so cloudy, her memories blurry. A face? A sewn patch? Words that said Orbital Navy?

  It didn’t matter. It was working. The Pool of Stars had begun to cross time, blurring through the years, part of it still rooted in the past, and part of it now in space, above Tāmtu—

  Like a fat rubber band stretched too much, time snapped back, pulling the Pool of Stars with it. Grimly, she dug deep into the magic, drawing more and more to her. Much of it was wasted, though, and simply dissipated around her in swirls and eddies and bursts of lost eldritch potential. She just drew up more to replace it. Blood swirled around her face, and her whole body hummed and tingled, like thousands upon thousands of little electric shocks rippled through her.

  Again, the Pool of Stars began dragging itself across the decades.

  The ship began to merge with now, more and more of it fading from then, from the past. It was working. She could even see the picture of Una’s Ass, and not just in her memories. As the Pool of Stars became more and more real in the present, it grew more solid and persistent in Morgan’s awareness. She could see it now, the clunky, boxy shapes of its struts and modules blotting out the stars above Tāmtu—and Una’s Ass, the silly girl and her sillier donkey, was right there. It was real, and she could see it, could almost touch it.

  The past still clung to the ship like cobwebs, though, holding it back from coming fully into the present. Morgan pushed and pulled, trying to shake it finally free. Time was stubborn, though, not wanting to surrender its normal, linear nature, where second followed second, minute followed minute, effect followed cause. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to get the last of the ship’s existence to join with this one, this new one, where she wanted time travel to be something you could just do. She finally began hammering at the obstinate bonds of reality, like daddy swinging his axe to cut a dead branch off a sour-pod tree. If she pounded at them enough, they should finally break.

  Unconstrained magic howled around her now, a wild, unfocused storm of it that turned Tāmtu’s water to ice, to steam, to swirling foam, shot through with bursts of bluish flame and dazzling lightning bolts. But she doggedly refused to give up. She’d come too close to changing Una’s Ass to Morgan’s Ride. It wasn’t about testing her ability to move things through time anymore. This was about her getting what she wanted. The universe would obey her, it was as simple as that.

  It was about that stupid picture of that stupid donkey. She hated it.

  “Horses are way prettier,” she muttered, arms waving as she worked.

  Only a few strands of cause-and-effect held the Pool of Stars back now. Morgan felt like her head was going to burst, but she forced herself to keep at it, not give up, and bludgeon the cosmos into submission. There were few things more unyielding than the fabric of a universe, but one such thing was the will of a child who knew how to manipulate magic. Another strand of causality snapped. Another. Now only a few isolated facts held the Pool of Stars back, the last dregs of its existence in the past.

  Unfocused magic roared around her, scooping enormous craters out of the abyssal plain below her, out of the ice far above. Chunks of it rained down, plunging through the plumes of sand and silt that she’d dredged up from the ocean floor. Terrified sea creatures—fearsome beasts only moments before—darted around, their instincts overwhelmed by the light and sound and chaos.

  If only she could gather all of that wasted magic to her, using it to finish what she’d started. If she’d been able to do that, she knew, this would have been over and done by now. But she couldn’t. She didn’t know how.

  Only one tendril of history remained. The Pool of Stars had been mankind’s first foray into faster-than-light travel. That truth, more than any other, rooted the ship in the past. For some reason Morgan didn’t understand, severing that last bit of reality was harder than all the rest. It was as though the universe desperately fought back to prevent something truly terrible from happening.

  But Morgan didn’t care. She raised her magical bludgeon, poured power into it, and made to hammer it down as hard as she could, finally freeing the Pool of Stars from his historical bondage. Do that, and her truth would be the right one, the only one.

  The tortured water around Morgan flared as bright as the sun, squandered magic shining so brightly it lit the ocean daylight bright, its radiance shining out to every horizon.

  Before Morgan could break this last bond of time, though, a wall of compulsion slammed into her, an avalanche of magical imperative that swept over her like a tsunami, and Morgan’s body shook.

  Silence fell as the debris began to settle, currents slowing to a stop. In the middle was Morgan, her body drifting, hands spread.

  Eyes closed.

  24

  Thorn wasn’t sure if he should dislike Bertilak, or even hate him, as the opportunistic smuggler and part-time arms dealer he was, or like him for not letting greed get the better of his conscience. On top of that, there was the fact that Bertilak had become a welcome part of the Hecate.

  Thorn hated to admit it, but Tanner had been right. Thorn had been jealous of Bertilak’s easygoing popularity among the crew. He’d tried to convince himself that he hated the attention, the adulation for the things he’d done for the war effort. He was better than that. Didn’t need it. Was happy being who and what he’d always been, Thorn Stellers, a lonely orphan who grew up mucking toxic shit from the ruined surface of contaminated planets, his fingernails black with the stuff.

  He was wrong, though. Thorn had to grudgingly accept that a good part of him accepted and even craved being needed, being appreciated—so different than his years as a forgotten soul who didn’t matter to anyone at all. All his life, Thorn had never needed anything except himself, and to learn otherwise now was discomforting.

  “No man is an island. Not even you,” he told himself. He was shaving, and doing a thorough job of it. He didn’t need to shave, but he wanted time and routine in order to process what he would say to Bertilak.

  It was some consolation that he had convinced Bertilak not to proceed with the particle cannon
deal. And he’d done it not by shaming or sermonizing to the big alien, but by example. He’d walked away from a deal that would have made him rich, and that might have cost him access to Bertilak’s formidable tech. If nothing else, his moral code held when it mattered most. Tech, he could find. Innocent lives were much harder to protect, even with his unusual abilities. With a final swipe of the razor, he began to wash his face and towel off, steam rising from the sink.

  Satisfied that he could face Bertilak, Thorn joined the alien on his bridge.

  Bertilak sat with his enormous feet propped on the console, perilously close to the controls. It made him feel that some sort of mishap, or even disaster, was only one toe-cramp or itchy foot away. The casual nature Bertilak took toward astrogation was, if nothing else, consistent with his attitude about almost everything—except money. That, Thorn knew, had Bertilak’s attention.

  Thorn stopped and looked around the bridge. “What’s her name?”

  “Whose name?”

  Thorn gestured around them. “Your ship. It suddenly struck me that you’ve never told me its name.”

  “Name?”

  “Yeah. My ship’s called the Hecate. What’s yours called?”

  Bertilak smiled. “I call it my ship, because that’s what it is. Is it essential to give it a name?”

  Thorn thought about how he’d asked Bertilak the name of his AI, his pretty much silent partner in running his ship. The idea of naming it had apparently struck the alien as odd. It seemed to be the same for his ship as a whole.

  “Essential? Well, no, I guess not. It’s more customary.”

  Bertilak’s smile didn’t waver. “I must admit, I got the sense that you and your crew considered your ship—the Hecate—to be more like a person than a machine. But it’s not. It has no personality. It’s just a collection of systems and sub-systems and components that let you live and travel and fight in space.”

  “Yeah, of course it’s that. But it’s also more. When you spend enough time with a machine, especially a ship, you get fond of it. It kind of does become like another member of the crew, or even a friend.” Thorn touched the console. “You come to rely on it as much as it relies on you.”

  Bertilak dropped his feet to the floor and laughed. “Thorn, my friend, somewhere beneath that grumpy exterior of yours dwells the heart of a poet. Very well, then. What shall we name my ship?”

  Thorn smiled back. “It’s not really my place to say, Bertilak. You should be the one naming your ship, not me. After all, you have to live with it.”

  Bertilak’s laugh died into a thoughtful, narrow-eyed look directed squarely on Thorn. “Tell me, Thorn, should the name reflect the thing, or should the thing accommodate the name?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bertilak thought for a moment. “Suppose you were going to name this ship. What name would you give it? And don’t think about, just say the first thing that—”

  “The Jolly Green Giant,” Thorn said.

  “The Jolly Green Giant, eh? Why?”

  Thorn shrugged. “It’s something I heard years ago. Don’t even remember where. But it seems to fit, right? You laugh a lot, so you’re jolly. And you’re green. And you’re big, so, yeah, giant.”

  “The Jolly Green Giant.” Bertilak said it slowly and deliberately, as though tasting the words while they passed through his mouth. Finally, he nodded. “It’s a good name. I like it. You obviously chose it because it reflected me and my ship.”

  “I did, yeah.”

  “So, indulge me for a moment. Suppose you had a name you loved. It was absolutely perfect. You’re anxious to name something whatever it is, it’s that good. Trouble is, you can’t find anything that it fits. You finally realize that you’re going to have to make something fit it. And, of course, you can, being a—Starcaster, that’s the right word, isn’t it? Would you?”

  Thorn kept his face blank. He wasn’t used to such introspective, theoretical musing from Bertilak. Why was he, to use his word, indulging in it now?

  Curious, and more than a little wary, Thorn decided to play along. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on the circumstances. What the name was, and what I was considering changing. I’m not casual about my ability, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “But you would consider changing something’s fundamental nature to fit this perfect name.”

  Thorn kept working at keeping his poker face intact. “I get the impression you’re fishing for something here, Bertilak. Why are you asking me this?”

  “I am curious about the way you see the world, Thorn, my friend. How much you might change it to suit your needs, or desires. Again, you’re in the somewhat unique position of being able to literally do that,” Bertilak replied.

  “I have no need or desire to change very much, unless it’s something related to fighting the Nyctus. Then, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

  “I understand you resurrected an entire planet after the Nyctus destroyed it.”

  Thorn felt suspicion show on his face. He couldn’t help it. There was some sort of subtext to Bertilak’s words that he wasn’t picking up. He suddenly felt like he needed to be very, very careful.

  “Nebo, yeah. I was involved in bringing it back to life.”

  “I assume it was your home planet, and that you were seeking to restore your friends and loved ones.”

  “No. My home planet was Cotswold.”

  Bertilak cocked his head, his expression becoming curious. “Ah. And it, too, was destroyed by the Nyctus.”

  “It was.” Thorn crossed his arms. “Why are you suddenly interested in this? In what, exactly, am I indulging you here?”

  Bertilak held up a hand. “Just bear with me, please. So why Nebo? Why not Cotswold, or any of the other planets the Nyctus have attacked? Why not all of them?”

  “It just worked out that way,” Thorn said, looking away.

  “So there was something about Nebo in particular—”

  “Bertilak, I’d rather not delve into this any deeper. This is all classified stuff, and despite our unusual situation, I do have to maintain military decorum. I really can’t discuss it, and it’s best to leave it at that,” Thorn said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. There were, indeed, some aspects of Nebo’s resurrection that were classified. Production output, for instance, that contributed to the Allied Stars war effort.

  But the more compelling reason he wanted to drop it wasn’t about the war at all, of course. It was about Morgan, and the Witch Nebula, and all the cataclysmic events that had cascaded from his attempt to bring her back. Nebo had just been a side-effect.

  “I understand. I only have one more question,” Bertilak said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Who was it, on Nebo, that you were really trying to bring back?”

  Thorn had to turn away to cover his reaction, a mix of shock, anger, and fear. Bertilak knew something, or thought he did, anyway. It might have been some power or ability that Thorn just hadn’t detected, or maybe some aspect of his strange technology. Or maybe the big alien was just that perceptive.

  Thorn turned back, his eyes flat, voice cold. “The answer is both classified and irrelevant.”

  Bertilak stood, a thin smile on his face. “I think, my friend, that you brought Nebo back from the dead because you were trying to bring someone who was on Nebo when it was destroyed. It must have been someone you loved very much. A dear friend. A lover. A child.”

  Thorn kept his face blank. “Fishing won’t help you, Bertilak. Not now, and not in an hour. Not even in a year. I’ll still be an officer in the ON, and my commitment will be the same.”

  Bertilak pressed on, ignoring Thorn’s reply. “Whoever it was—did you try to bring them back as they were, or did you try to change them? Did you try to make them fit the world as you envisioned it?”

  Thorn stared. Somehow, he knows about Morgan.

  For a moment, Thorn fought a quiet war with the muscles of his face, schooling them into a blan
k expanse that gave nothing away—and kept the roiling waters of his guilt well away from the keen eye of an alien who was making some excellent guesses.

  Or reporting what he knew.

  “I’ve never tried to change anyone,” Thorn said evenly. “To repeat, you’re asking questions of a military nature. You kicked my ass in the circle, but that only goes so far in terms of what you’re entitled to know. Are we clear?”

  Bertilak’s face was inscrutable, but he answered. “We are.”

  Thorn turned and left, his back straight, but he felt Bertilak’s eyes on him, and for just a moment, he wondered if his guilt would ever stop making him feel hollow inside.

  If he had to spend most of the rest of his time with Bertilak in his quarters, at least he’d be comfortable.

  He sprawled on the bed, his hands behind his head. That strange interaction with Bertilak had left him more than a little unsettled. The alien knew. He knew. Thorn had no idea how, or why Bertilak had chosen to dig into it now, but Bertilak knew.

  He released a long sigh. He didn’t want to be aboard this ship, apparently now named the Jolly Green Giant, any longer. He didn’t want to be around Bertilak and his knowing manner. He wanted to be back aboard the Hecate, amid her familiar surroundings, the comforting rigor of her repetitive ship-board routines, the no-nonsense pragmatism of Captain Tanner. In fact, he would talk to Bertilak about it. Tell him that he wanted to disembark as soon as possible, at an Allied Stars planet, or at least a neutral one. He’d tell Tanner he did his best to work with Bertilak, but the alien just didn’t have anything to offer them. He’d lie, say that he refused to share his tech—

  “Thorn Stellers?”

  The flat voice truncated his thoughts. It took Thorn a moment to realize who, or rather what it was. It was Bertilak’s unnamed AI. Thorn had heard the voice maybe a half-dozen times during his time aboard the Giant. The rest of the time, it seemed, the AI was content to just sit and do whatever it did in the background.