by J. N. Chaney
Thorn puffed a stressed-out sigh. He’d just come from Kira, who was in the infirmary under sedation. “Except for me, aye, sir.”
“And why do you think that is?”
“I’ve got no idea sir, sorry. It’s like the Vision, when the Nyctus hit Nebo and—and killed my daughter, Morgan. A powerful blast of psychic energy, like a wave propagating through space. This time it seems even stronger, though.”
“Could it involve your daughter again?”
Thorn gave a miserable shrug. “Possibly? I don’t know. Since it didn’t seem to affect me in particular, and since it’s similar to the Vision, then I’d say it’s likely. But I don’t know what it means, or even where she is to try to do something about it.”
“Alright. It seems like the overall tactical and operational situations haven’t changed, so we’re good here. Get to the infirmary and see if you can learn anything from Wixcombe, as soon as she wakes up.”
“Aye, sir.”
Thorn saluted and left the bridge, wending his way along the cramped corridors toward the infirmary. He arrived to find that Kira wasn’t the only patient.
“Her name is Darby Hoopes. She’s a Senior Rating in the Logistics shop,” the nurse said.
The Hecate’s Quartermaster, a gruff block of a man well-known for his ability to say no, you can’t have that, stood over her with his arms crossed. “When she went missing, we went looking for her. We found her collapsed in a cargo hold, where she’d been doing routine inventory.”
Thorn glanced at Kira, still under sedation in another bed. Damien sat at her side. Thorn felt another of those flickers of jealousy, but again cast it aside. He focused, instead, on the young Rating Hoopes. She moaned, turning her head, her eyes fluttering open, closed again, open again.
She was awake, or at least somewhat so. Thorn leaned in. “Rating Hoopes? Darby? Can you hear me?”
The young woman turned toward Thorn’s voice, but her gaze penetrated past him, into some unknowable distance. “No. No. Please. I’m so tired. Don’t, please—”
“That’s basically all she says,” the nurse said, eyeing Hoopes’s vitals on the monitor. “Doesn’t make any sense to us.”
“How about you, Lieutenant?” the Quartermaster asked. “Can you make anything of this? Maybe use your voodoo to figure it out?”
“Voodoo?”
“Sorry, Lieutenant. No disrespect intended. It’s just that I’m as magical as an old boot, so I don’t even pretend to understand how you do what you do.”
Thorn gave a thin smile. “Never underestimate the power of an old boot.” He turned back to Hoopes, the smile vanishing. “And, no, I don’t get what she’s saying, either. But yes, I can use my voodoo to figure it out, or at least try, anyway.”
Thorn pulled out his talisman and gripped it. Ordinarily, he really didn’t need to use the book to simply Join with another human that wasn’t, themselves, a Starcaster. However, he had no idea what he’d find inside this woman’s mind, so he wanted to be ready for a hasty exit.
Channeling his thoughts into the familiar psychic landscape of the talisman, he refocused them on Hoopes, and started a tentative entry into her mind.
Resistance. Not much, but it was there. Had he just inadvertently uncovered a Skin?
He immediately banished the thought, though. This resistance was instinctive. Her mind sensed Thorn’s presence, and reflexively tried to block and expel him. There was no chance of that, because Thorn was orders of magnitude stronger than she was. But the fact that she was able to pose any resistance at all suggested she was something between an ordinary, non-magical human, and a Starcaster. That might explain why whatever happened to Kira had also happened to her. It could also explain why it affected her less than it did Kira.
And that, by extension, explained why there’d been such an outburst of madness and disorder across the ON and Allied Stars. This ‘Vision’, or whatever it was, seemed to affect anyone with any innate magic potential.
That was interesting, but it didn’t answer the important question. What the hell was going on, exactly?
He pushed deeper into her mind, past the chaotic slurry of her surface thoughts, which were just broken, isolated fragments, like the loose pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Beneath the anarchy of her immediately conscious mind, Thorn found what he was looking for. There were more coherent thoughts, still somewhat disjointed, but still showing Thorn what had thrown this woman’s mind into such disarray.
“NO!”
A surge of power erupted from her, a wave of energy so intense it simply vaporized everything for dozens of meters around her.
“NO!”
For a moment, she hung at the center of a coruscating sphere of howling magical power, then Morgan flung back her head and screamed at the sky.
“DADDY!”
Thorn gasped and stumbled back. The intensity of the image left him reeling, requiring him to catch himself against a gurney before he toppled over. The nurse and the Quartermaster both rushed to his side.
“I’m fine,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut as the last throbs of pain subsided into diminishing, hurtful echoes. “I’m fine. Really.”
“You sure, Lieutenant?” the Quartermaster asked.
Thorn opened his eyes. “Yeah, really. Just need a moment.”
“Just wanted to make sure your voodoo wasn’t suddenly gonna get out of control.”
Thorn straightened and looked at the Quartermaster. “It won’t,” he said, then turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” the Quartermaster asked. “Is Hoopes okay?”
“She will be, I think. As for where I’m going, it’s to find some answers,” Thorn snapped, then strode out of the infirmary, heading for the airlock. On the way, he slapped his comm.
“Bertilak, this is Thorn. I need to see you, now.”
Thorn stepped out of the shuttle-pod he’d taken to Bertilak’s ship, through the airlock and into the corridor beyond. Despite its relatively small size, the Jolly Green Giant managed to be a maze of twisting passages and little compartments. The layout was, Thorn had come to realize, a product of his daughter’s limited understanding of spaceships. She knew they were ‘complicated’, and that was it. It certainly showed, in the multitude of compartments containing cryptic machinery that seemed to have no purpose, and pipes and conduits that actually appeared to do nothing. She’d created Bertilak and his ship from the perspective of a child, and this had been the result.
Although he’d never been able to figure out why she’d made Bertilak green.
He threaded his way toward the bridge, only hitting one dead-end along the way. Usually, it was a couple, and that was despite having spent many weeks in total aboard the Jolly. When he finally stepped into the bridge, he found Bertilak simply sitting there, in his pilot’s seat, staring at the starfield.
“Hello, Thorn,” he said, without looking.
“You know why I’m here.”
“I can guess.” The big alien finally turned in his chair. Thorn got stuck a moment on the look on his face. Instead of his usual good humor, or sly bemusement, his features drooped in a haunted, desolate way.
Thorn had been about to launch into a rant, but changed course and sat, instead, in the copilot’s seat.
“What’s going on?” Thorn asked.
“What do you mean—?”
“Oh, don’t, Bertilak. Just don’t. You know damned well what I mean. And don’t try to light up some bullshit for me, either. Other Starcasters, or anyone with even a whiff of latent magical potential, have had some sort of terrible image of my daughter. Somehow, I haven’t.” He leaned toward Bertilak, his gaze boring in. “Have you?”
Bertilak stared blankly into some unseen distance for a moment, then gave a slow nod. “I have, yes.”
Thorn straightened. “Okay. So what am I missing here? Why hasn't it affected me? Do you know?”
Bertilak’s expression slid into an even more crestfallen one, and he nodded. “It was me. I pre
vented you from experiencing the vision of your daughter.”
“What? Why?”
“Because that’s what she wanted,” Bertilak said.
“You’ve been talking to her—?”
“No. Not exactly, anyway.”
“Bertilak, what the hell does that mean? What is going on?” Thorn couldn’t help himself, jumping to his feet. It made him only a little taller than the alien, who had once easily kicked his ass and might be immune to magical attack. But Thorn didn’t care. Anger had suddenly flashed through him, like a fusion reactor being lit, and it only spooled up by the second.
“Bertilak, answer me, damn it!”
Bertilak briefly met his eyes, then stared at the deck. “It happened some time ago. Maybe a couple of weeks. For some reason, Morgan’s feelings toward you changed. Before that, she was—”
His voice broke and he paused. Thorn clenched his fists, but just waited.
“She was determined to kill you, Thorn. I don’t know why, but she was absolutely determined to kill you. Her feelings leak through to me all of the time.” He looked up at Thorn, misery etched into his face. “Do you know how much effort it took to not attack you, Thorn? To not contrive an accident or leave you vulnerable to something the Nyctus did?”
Thorn stared. Bertilak had been feeling pressured to kill him? Thinking back, he could only recall the alien’s typically buoyant humor. He hadn’t had a clue that Bertilak had been locked in some sort of internal struggle over whether to turn on him.
“So, why didn’t you? If that’s what Morgan wanted, what stopped you?”
“You’re my friend, Thorn. I didn’t want to harm you. Morgan gave me enough free will that I’m not bound to her, like some sort of mindless slave. But I still feel her compulsions, and she really wanted to kill you. She hated you.”
Thorn stood, struck dumb by the realization. Morgan hated him? Wanted to kill him?
He finally ground out a single word. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I get any details. It’s just impressions, like echoes of feelings, hints of emotion.” Bertilak gave a shuddering sigh. “It’s why we never found her, even when you, Kira and I went looking for her. I made sure we’d never locate her, because if we did, I was terrified about what I might be forced to do to you. Like I said, you’re my friend.”
Thorn’s anger suddenly dulled, the sharp corners and edges rounded off of it by pity. “Oh, shit. Bertilak, why didn’t you say something?”
“What? That I wanted to kill you, and had to fight every moment not to? How would you have dealt with that, Thorn?”
Thorn sighed. “By never trusting you again.”
“At least you’re being honest.”
“Okay, but you said that changed,” Thorn said, sitting back down.
“It did. At some point, she stopped hating you. Now she wants to protect you. From the Nyctus, and whatever they’re planning, I guess. That leaks through, too. Now, I feel a strong compulsion to protect you, too. That’s a lot easier to handle because I am no monster, and you are a true friend. Of that much, I am certain.” He offered a weak, watery smile.
Thorn leaned his elbows on his knees. “So, what? You prevented me from experiencing this new vision to protect me?”
Bertilak nodded.
“Okay. I need you to let me see it, experience it, Bertilak. And I need you to do it now.”
“Thorn—”
“No. This has to happen. She’s my daughter. And she’s in trouble. I need to help her, Bertilak, but I can’t do that while you’re—”
Thorn paused, trying to think of a nicer way of putting this. He couldn’t.
“I can’t do that while you’re in the way.”
“Are you sure about this, Thorn? If experiencing this is so difficult for people who don’t even know her, then it might be too much for you.”
“That’s not your decision to make,” Thorn said, locking his gaze on Bertilak’s.
The alien stared back, then nodded. “Alright. Fine. I’ll be right here, Thorn. Just remember that.”
He gripped the alien’s hand and squeezed it. It was like squeezing the hand of a massive, and green, marble statue. “I know you will.”
Bertilak managed another weak smile. “Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
The bridge of the Jolly Green Giant vanished.
…a wave of energy so intense it simply vaporized everything for dozens of meters around her.
“NO!”
For a moment, Morgan hung at the center of a coruscating sphere of howling magical power, then she flung back her head and screamed at the sky.
“DADDY!”
The word raced away from her with the force of an exploding star, echoing with desolation so keen, so bleak—where the word went, hope died. The magic roared a moment longer, the sphere expanding, consuming more of reality as it did, then it abruptly died away. Morgan hung in space for an instant, the focal point of a thunderclap, as air rushed back into the hole she’d torn in creation. Then she fell. She plunged into brackish water now rushing into the crater her magic had carved out of the swamp, vanishing into the churning murk with a splash.
The water sloshed into a thick silence, like the stillness of a tomb.
Thorn gasped, blinked, and sat bolt upright.
“Oh, shit! Doctor, I need help here!”
Strong hands gripped Thorn, pushing him slowly, but relentlessly back down. A face swam into his vision. It was the Hecate’s Chief Surgeon.
“Lieutenant Stellers, look at me! You’re aboard the Hecate, in the Infirmary.”
Thorn’s jaw hung open, slack. He’d been on a swamp planet, where his daughter had—
He tried to jam himself upright again, but the Surgeon held him firmly down. “Lieutenant Stellers, do you understand what I’m saying?”
Thorn stared a moment longer, then sunk back to the mattress. “I—yeah, I do. How did I get here?”
“Bertilak brought you. You were unconscious. He said he’d let you finally experience a vision of your daughter. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but when it happened to you, it seemed to shake others being affected by it out of, well, whatever the hell it was.”
“You mean like Kira? She’s awake?”
“She is,” Kira said, just entering the Infirmary. “Awake, and wanting to know what the hell is going on.”
She strode up to his bedside and opened her mouth, but Thorn raised a hand, cutting her off. He explained what had happened, everything that Bertilak had told him. As he spoke, he finally sat up, swinging his legs out from under the sheet to stand.
“I don’t think you’re ready to get up and about just yet,” the Chief Surgeon said, but Thorn waved her off.
“Sorry, Doc, but there’s no time for me to just lay around. I need my uniform.”
The Surgeon glared at Thorn for a moment. Then she nodded at the nurse, who pulled Thorn’s effects from a locker.
“Thorn, does Bertilak know where Morgan is?” Kira asked.
“No idea,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “But it doesn’t matter, because I do.”
Kira’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly serious, yeah. Do me a favor while I finish getting dressed. Call Tanner and tell him I need to see him right away.”
Thorn didn’t need Joining to see the desperate questions tumbling through Kira’s mind, because each one played out on her face. But she finally just turned and hit the comm.
“Captain Tanner? Wixcombe here.”
Tanner took a moment to just stare, once Thorn had finished explaining what had happened. Thorn started to wonder if the man was just completely floored and left speechless, which would be really out of character. But he leaned back in his command seat and steepled his fingers together in front of him.
“You’re sure you know that your daughter is located—” He stopped and gestured at the star chart Thorn had asked to have put on the main viewscreen, where
a particular star system had been highlighted. “Is located there, in that specific system, which seems to be in the middle of nowhere?”
“That’s just empty space, not claimed by us, the Nyctus, or anyone else,” Osborne put in.
But Hackett, the Hecate’s de facto Science Officer, stepped forward from where she stood at the rear of the bridge, alongside Damien. “I’m not sure that’s quite right. From what Thorn has described, it sounds like a planet very similar to what those squid worlds we visited were turned into.”
Tanner rotated his chair to face her. “You’re suggesting there’s some unknown race, or races, occupying that space?”
“Sir, we didn’t know about any of the races that Thorn visited, either,” Kira put in.
“Not until Bertilak told us about the Imbrogul, and even then, we didn’t find out about the others until we went to their space,” Thorn added.
Tanner turned back. “So you’re telling me that your daughter, who might be even more powerful than you are magic-wise, might be in the hands of some unknown race, and in trouble?”
Thorn had to work at keeping his angry impatience simmering, instead of letting it boil over. “Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Are you asking me to invoke Section Five, Subsection Two, Article One-point-Two of the Allied Stars Security Act? The Article that allows me, as a Command-rank officer, to declare exigent circumstances and effect the rescue of an Allied Stars citizen from a foreign or alien power? Is that what you’re asking me, Lieutenant Stellers?” Tanner asked.
“I, uh.” Thorn blinked. “Yes, sir?”
“Very well. Lieutenant Osborne, note this in the ship’s log, that I’m invoking Section Five, Subsection Two, blah, blah, at this time.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Now, what are the closest ON ships to our current location?”
Osborne tapped at his controls. “The escort carrier Viper, in company with the missile frigate Nimbus, are patrolling four light-years spinward of us, sir.”
“The Viper, eh? Elenora Brost is her Captain, which is perfect, because she owes me a favor. Comms O, my compliments to Captain Brost, and raise her on the comm,” Tanner said.