by J. N. Chaney
She glanced at the Marines as they moved about through their daily routine. She could, if she wanted, just make them all ignore her. She could make it so she could just take over a ship, and they’d never even notice. And if any of them did get in her way, well, she could take care of that, too. Even the big ships in orbit above wouldn’t be able to stop her if she didn’t want them to.
Morgan blinked and exhaled, long and slow. Wait. What had she just been thinking? Using magic to force her way off the planet? To get what she wanted? Wasn’t that exactly what the Monsters had done? Wasn’t that why they’d put her in prison in the first place, because they wanted to force her to cooperate with them?
She looked at the Marines again. It wasn’t fair to call this a prison, now, was it? These people really were here to protect her from harm, not to cause it.
She sighed and stared at her toes. Besides, she had promised both Thorn and Kira—mom and dad, she corrected—that she’d do absolutely no ’casting, except in that one case of an extreme emergency.
Morgan stood, brushing dirt and bits of grass and leaves off her pants. She was sure that she knew something important, something Thorn and the rest needed to know. But she wasn’t sure what. She needed to find out some more stuff, first.
Maybe there was a way she could use ’casting, except in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone, to help her solve this. She just needed to figure out who else to involve. Thorn and Kira were obvious choices, but they were off doing some important mission. She didn’t want to disturb them in case she tried it while they were in the middle of doing something really dangerous. She remembered how bad things had gone on Tāmtu, when she’d been fighting off the Monsters and Bertilak had tried to contact her. The distraction had been a disaster. Everything that had happened to her after had started when Bertilak plucked at her attention, even just for that brief moment.
Okay, not Thorn and Kira. Who else? Who did she know? Who did she trust?
But there was no one, certainly not in the Navy. She—
Wait.
A slow smile spread across her face. There was someone. Someone that both Thorn and Kira respected deeply. Someone who wasn’t a ‘caster, so someone she probably wouldn’t interrupt at a bad time.
Morgan sat back down on the grass, cross-legged, and leaned back against the tree. She took a few minutes to just breathe, then reached down into that huge pool of magic that lurked just under the surface of the world.
Morgan began to ’cast.
Tanner frowned his way through the end of one report and the start of another. SITREPS in which the situation was uniformly no change were boring enough to read. But some of the authors obviously felt that it wasn’t enough to just say that, so they crafted long, convoluted reports that ended up in exactly the same place, no change. But he still had to read through it all, because you never knew when there might be a crucial nugget of information buried in them somewhere, a two somebody else happened to know, that you could put together with a two you knew, and suddenly make that critical four pop into clear existence.
Still, he needed a break. He leaned back in the chair tucked into his little briefing room behind the Hecate’s bridge, reached for a cup of tepid coffee—
And froze.
He wasn’t alone.
Tanner turned and found himself face-to-face with a young girl. She was dressed in scruffy pants and a zippered top with a hood, currently thrown back. He just stared for a moment, completely taken aback by the sudden appearance of this girl aboard his ship. Was he hallucinating now? Had the stress of the war gnawed so deeply into him that he was starting to come apart from what was real?
“Hi, Mister Tanner!” the girl said, grinning and waving at him.
The sound of her voice abruptly snapped Tanner free from his moment of stunned unreality. He recognized this girl. It was Morgan, Stellers and Wixcombe’s daughter. But she was supposed to be on Nebo.
Which is exactly what he said. “You’re supposed to be on Nebo.”
She nodded. “I am on Nebo. But I needed to talk to you.”
Tanner raised a finger to her, then tapped at his terminal, bringing up a star chart centered on the Hecate. Nebo was over seventy light-years away.
He turned back to Morgan. Or rather what was obviously some sort of magical projection or image of Morgan. “You’re on Nebo? So we’re talking, in real time, even though we’re more than twenty-five light-years apart?”
Morgan’s grin faded. “I guess. Unless it’s fake time. Is that the opposite of real time? Is twenty-five light-years a long time? And is it real? Or is it—?”
Tanner held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it, Morgan,” he said, trying to sound casual. He was anything but, though. Stellers had told him he could talk to Wixcombe and Densmore over enormous distances but hadn’t said anything about actually appearing to them. And they were all Starcasters. But here was his daughter, doing the same thing with a non-Starcaster, and with a physical presence at the receiving end. If this could be put to use for operational and strategic messaging by the ON, it would be a seismic shift in interstellar comms.
He jammed the thoughts aside. That was something to look at later. Right now, though—
“It’s okay, Morgan. It’s not important. Why are you here?”
“Because I need to know some stuff. Some navy military stuff. I have these ideas, see? These things in my head that I know, that don’t make sense to me, ’cause I don’t know what they mean. So maybe, if I can read stuff about the war, I might be able to figure out what they do mean.”
Tanner leaned forward, his fingers laced together on his desk. “What sort of things do you know, Morgan?”
She shrugged. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Just, like,” she started, then broke off biting her lip. “It’s like when you look at the clouds, and you think you see a horse. But you don’t really see a horse, of course—”
She stopped again, giggling. “Horse, of course. That rhymes!”
Tanner forced his mouth into the shape of a patient smile. “Yes. Yes, it does. But you were telling me about clouds, and how they’re like whatever it is you think you know.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. So you think you see a horse, but no one else does. But that’s only because everyone knows what horses look like. And then someone else might point at another cloud and say, that looks like, oh I don’t know, a certain type of spaceship. But I wouldn’t know that because I don’t know all the different types of spaceships. So if I could read about all the different types, I might see the one in the clouds. You know?”
Tanner couldn’t resist a smile. Morgan’s explanation hadn’t only been charming, it had been more insightful and to-the-point than any of the SITREPS he’d read in the last hour or so. He got her point exactly.
Two plus two equals four.
Tanner gave her a firm nod. “Okay, Morgan, so what are you asking me for? What would you like me to do?”
“I’d still love to know how you managed to get Admiral Scoville to let you have all this stuff,” Major Fenton said, his arms crossed, a scowl on his face.
Morgan looked up from where she was kneeling in the dirt. “I asked.”
“Uh-huh. Well, unless you have a whole comms array hidden under your bed or something, you used magic to do it. Morgan, my orders are to make sure you don’t use magic, and to report it immediately if you do.”
“Okay. Report me,” Morgan said, turning her attention to the dirt in front of her. She’d brought them here, to the shade of the barn, in the spot where dad normally parked the tractors. The oily smell kept the animals away, so there was less chance the dirt here would be mixed with their poop. It wasn’t that she really minded animal poop. You sure wouldn’t live on a farm if you did. But she also didn’t deliberately touch or play with the stuff. Yuck.
She began to draw a wide circle in the dirt. Fenton crouched, but the scowl remained on his face. “I am going to report this, Morgan. I have to.”
“Do it.” She f
inished the circle, then pursed her lips, considering where to go from here.
“Fine. I will then,” Fenton snapped back.
A gruff laugh pulled both his and Morgan’s attention to the other figure standing nearby. Chief Gunnery Sergeant Barber was the Marine company’s Sergeant-Major, which apparently meant he was in charge of discipline and making sure all the soldiers wore clean socks and brushed their teeth and stuff. If Fenton was the Marines’ dad, then Barber was their mom. Morgan had told him that, once, and got first a hard glare, and then a hearty laugh.
“Yup, I suppose I am their mom!”
This time, though, he was laughing at Fenton. “Sorry, sir. Just listening to you two is like listening to me and my own daughter when I’m home on leave.” He grinned. “I’m going to report you. Oh yeah, well do it. Fine, I will then, so there—”
“We get the picture, Gunny,” Fenton replied.
Morgan, though, drew another circle, one that interconnected with the first. Then she drew a third, linked to the other two. As soon as she did, a dull rumble echoed across the fields. Morgan gasped, and they all looked up.
But she didn’t see the sun-bright glare of another Nyctus attack. She just saw clouds, dark ones, piled up to the west and moving inexorably toward them.
“Gonna rain,” Barber said.
Morgan grimaced. “Yeah. And it’s gonna ruin my drawing.” She glanced back up at the storm, then gathered magic to her, reached up and out, and deflected the storm to the north. With a negligent wave, Morgan flicked her fingertips toward the distant storm, then settled back to draw. Fenton and Barber both gaped as the ominous pile of cumulonimbus clouds, laser-white on their tops and slate grey below, suddenly changed direction.
“There,” Morgan said, then looked back at her drawing. “Anyway…”
Fenton and Barber exchanged headshakes. Barber finally spoke.
“Kid, in case I’ve never said it before, I am really glad you’re on our side.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Fenton replied, then pointed at the circles. “Anyway, what is this, Morgan? What do these circles mean?”
She pointed at them, one after another. “That’s us. And that’s the Monsters. And that’s the other ones, the ones that smell like stinky wet socks.”
“The Bilau?”
“Yeah, that’s them.”
“And the Monsters are the Nyctus, right?”
“Except for the Radiants, yeah.”
“Okay—”
“See, I feel the Nyctus come and go, and I wonder why. The ones I lived with on Tāmtu would never abandon me because, well, I made them want to protect me. So why would they leave me?”
“Sorry, Morgan, I’ve got no idea.”
“I think I do, though. Sort of, anyway.” She looked from circle to circle, biting her lip. “What does it mean when the shamans, the, um, Nyctus, aren’t fighting us? Where are they? What are they doing,” Morgan asked, peering up into the sun, one hand covering her eyes from the glare.
Now Barber knelt beside Fenton, obviously intrigued.
“They pull back, we think, to recuperate from battles. To re-arm. To rebuild ships and recover from damage whenever we win a Fleet action. That’s what we call space battles,” Fenton said.
Morgan nodded, looking down at her crude drawing. “Do we win a lot of battles?”
Fenton hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not as many as we’d like, anyway.”
Morgan paused, thinking. “Do you know how long it takes to make one of their ships?”
“It depends on the class—the, ah, size of a ship. Their big ones, like their battleships, take several months to build, just like ours,” Fenton said. He glanced at Barber, but the Gunny’s attention was fixed on Morgan’s drawing and words. He and Fenton were both obviously trying to process what Morgan was seeing—or what she thought she saw.
“Sometimes my—the shamans, they would leave me, or there would be lots of things happening. The ships in orbit would leave, and everyone was mad,” Morgan said, concentrating on the circles, and especially on the points where they overlapped. “Do you know if my dad attacked the shamans at a place called something like Messy-yay four?”
“Messier-4?” Fenton asked.
Barber glanced at him. “You know it, sir?”
“Yes. Or, no, not really, but every Marine company commander and up has to do some astrogation training so we can read the damned star charts properly. Messier-4 is a star cluster well outside Allied Stars space.
“That’s it. Did my dad ever fight there?” Morgan asked.
Fenton inhaled sharply, staring hard at the drawing, then at the girl, and then at Barber. He moved next to Morgan and crouched beside her. His next words were slow and deliberate. “Where did you learn that name? Messier-4? Where are you going with this, Morgan?”
“I heard it from one of the shamans. But he said it in their language, not ours. I just remember our name for it, Messier-4, ’cause they stole charts from our ships and I know you can’t speak squid,” Morgan said.
“And you know there was a battle there?” Fenton asked.
“Yeah. A really big one, I think. The Monsters, the shamans, they were really mad about it. They lost a lot of ships. They also lost something called a pro, er—a protype drive?”
“Protype? Do you mean prototype?” Barber asked.
“That’s it, yeah. Prototype. A prototype drive. They were really mad and upset about that.”
Fenton’s eyes went round, and he touched his comm. “Comms, Fenton here. Get me Fleet. Now.” He forced a smile, exhaled, and tried to relax, then he sat cross-legged next to Morgan. “Okay, Morgan. I think you really do know a lot more than you understand. So tell me everything you know about this battle, and especially everything you know about that prototype drive.”
7
Damien watched, wistful and more than a little nervous, as the Jolly and the Gyrfalcon backed away from their docking ports and started to maneuver away from FreeFare.
That made it official, he thought. I am truly, genuinely alone here.
He took a breath, and deliberately turned away from the view of the departing ships. He was alone because he had a job to do. And Kira, Thorn, and Densmore had all made it clear they had ample faith in his ability to do it.
“That makes three of us,” he muttered, walking back along FreeFare’s sprawling docking concourse, weaving his way through the crowds and racket, the babble and chatter and hundreds of contrasting smells. For all intents and purposes, he looked like any other scruffy human merchant on the big station. If he’d been thinking ahead, he’d have actually kept himself more apart from Thorn and the others. He couldn’t help feeling that there might be eyes watching him, even now, well aware of his connection to the ON.
Of course, he hadn’t known he’d end up alone on FreeFare, doing some more information gathering while the others zipped off to find The Ghosts. He couldn’t deny that it was a good idea, though. He’d be a lot more valuable here, doing what he did best: interacting with others.
If the Jolly and the Gyrfalcon did end up running into trouble, even a fight, well, he’d be of almost no use then. And Thorn and the others were more than capable of taking care of themselves.
Hell, Thorn could probably take on an entire squid fleet by himself if he really wanted to.
Regardless, they’d collectively decided to leave Damien here so he could continue poking and prodding his way around FreeFare, seeing what useful things he could learn. He was both unobtrusive and sneaky when he wasn’t being charming. It was an excellent skill set to have.
“Hey, you! Mister Human! You look like the discerning sort!”
Damien turned toward the voice. It came from a vendor, one of the insectoid Owath, at a kiosk alongside the concourse’s main thoroughfare. Damien recognized him as a merchant from whom Thorn had purchased a small ruby-and-silver pendant shortly before he departed FreeFare. Based on how he’d recruited Mol into keeping Kira busy, it was pretty obv
ious who Thorn had bought it for.
“Something for your lady friend, perhaps?” the Owath said, his voice a rough, buzzing hiss.
Damien gave a thin smile and started to shake his head but stopped. “Maybe. Suppose I wanted something suited to, well, remember someone who’s gone?”
“A question that tells a great tale of sadness. For whomever you have lost, I am truly sorry.” The merchant reached under his kiosk and extracted a small box. Opening it, he revealed a small collection of finely wrought rings, some rendered in silver, some in gold, and some in both, the metal dancing in elegant whorls.
“By no means are these the most elaborate or valuable items I have for sale. But one of them may suit your desire. They are remembrance rings, crafted by a skilled Owath jewel smith for just that purpose. It is said that the rememberer’s eye will always be drawn to one in particular—”
“That one,” Damien said, pointing at a slim band of interwoven gold and silver. He wasn’t sure why he wanted that one, but he did, because it was somehow the right one.
As he walked away from the booth, he put the ring on, a firm image of Narvez in his mind as he did. The distraction made him bump into another human—a ragged, grubby man in a long duster coat. The man glared at him over a bushy, scraggly beard.
“Eyes on where you’re going, asshole,” he snapped and strode away. As he did, Damien caught a glimpse of something concealed under the duster coat.
“Sorry,” Damien said to the man’s back. He let him gain a few paces, then started after him. He wasn’t entirely sure why he was following this man, but again, it was just right.
He glanced at the ring. Of course, it was silly to think Narvez might have reached out of the afterlife to give Damien a hand, pointing him in the right direction.
But it was also silly to think that Thorn Stellers could move an entire fleet across light-years, or his daughter could create an entire nebula, wasn’t it?