Maverick: A Supernatural Space Opera Novel (Witching on a Starship Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Hey, you don’t know a damned thing about my personal life,” I snapped, glaring at her hard enough to cause steam to rise off of her. Though if she noticed my heat vision, it didn’t show.

  “Oh, you’re totally single. I checked your file.” She smirked at me. “I bet your last girlfriend was all ‘you don’t pay attention to me when I talk’ and then would go on about how you’re a selfish, immature child.” Chloe raised an eyebrow at me, and as I took a step forward to wipe that self-satisfied smirk off her face with my fist because Jen had said stuff exactly like that to me just this morning, Jeffry stepped between us and raised a hand.

  “Enough. We have a mission to complete,” he said, jerking the last pink barb from his flesh and flinging it onto the tall blue grass. Not like bluegrass from Iowa or wherever the fuck, but actual sapphire-blue grass. It was weird since the horizon was green, and speaking of which, why could I breathe the air here?

  I mean, when you burned barium it produced a green flame (a summer spent selling fireworks for the win), so I doubted this place was hospitable to humans.

  “Um… shouldn’t we need respirators or something?” I asked, and as I spoke Chloe laughed at me. “What’s so funny?”

  “You remember those injections we got before the mission?” She gestured at the spot on my shoulder where they had injected me with vaccines or whatever to keep alien influenza from turning my insides into mush.

  “Yeah, so?” I asked, shaking my head. “That was for Maverick Flu or whatever.”

  “It also injected you with a bunch of nanobots that are converting the air here into stuff you can breathe.” Chloe beamed at me. “Congrats, you have a colony of robots living inside you. How’s it feel to be colonized?”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, wiping my hands on my body like that could somehow rid my body of all the machines living in my organs. “I totally didn’t sign up to have my insides filled with robots.”

  “Actually, mate, you did,” Jeffry said as he started forward, crossing the blue plains and heading in a direction I would have said was random but probably wasn’t. “It was on page sixteen.”

  “Oh,” I said because I hadn’t read any of the pages in the thirty-seven-page contract. I’d been too busy envisioning all the money I was going to spend on boots. What can I say, I’m a simple girl, and I love boots. A lot. Like one time the delivery guy was like “Geez, lady, you sure do buy a lot of shoes.” In my defense, the website had a two for one sale, and I was able to get a pair of both tan and black riding boots for the price of the single pair I’d bought the day before!

  “You signed the contract without reading it, didn’t you?” Chloe asked, sidling next to me and throwing her arm around my shoulder, causing the smell of wet dog to assault my nose. “Dumbass.”

  “You didn’t read it either,” I countered, shrugging away from her, and as I did, I felt her sweat linger on my skin. Ugh. I was going to need a shower stat. Otherwise, I was gonna smell like a kennel.

  “True,” she barked, skipping up to Jeffry. “But my lawyer did. So, when do we get to punch stuff?”

  “Soon,” he said as we reached a hill, and he grabbed the laser sword off his belt and flicked it to life, causing a crimson blade to spring to life.

  “Nice weapon,” Chloe said, rolling her eyes at the laser sword as we crested the hill and saw a whole platoon of four-legged transports that looked a whole helluva lot like AT-ATs covered in those same black spikes that decorated the Void Crushers. They were guarding a pylon that stretched so far up into the atmosphere, I couldn’t actually see the end of it.

  “Dude, those didn’t work that well in Empire,” I said, shaking my head as I stared at the half a dozen robot things.

  “Yeah, but we don’t have any snow speeders with grappling cables to deal with them. We’ll have to take down Zug’s TAR-13s the old fashioned way,” Chloe reminded me, which I knew, duh. “With force.”

  “That’s true,” I said glancing at the vampire. “So what’s the plan?”

  He pointed toward a dome in the distance. “That’s the transport relay. If we can get in there unseen, we can use it to teleport to the capital and then can move forward.”

  “The capital?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him. “That’s what they named it?”

  “Yes.” He waved a hand at the surroundings as a sly smile flitted across his lips. “We’re in District 11. It’s the farming district.”

  I sighed and was about to yell at him for messing with me when one of the TAR-13s turned its stupid metal head toward me and began to glow like it was a fire-breathing dragon. Alright. It was time to get serious. After all, this was a really important mission with the fate of the galaxy at stake! And I was not going to let the galaxy down. Disappoint it from time to time, sure, but let it down? No way, José.

  “Fuck!” Chloe cried, leaping toward us and knocking us out of the way as a lance of flame scorched the spot where we’d been standing. Flame leapt from the hill, following along behind us as we tumbled down it like broken mannequins.

  I slammed into a rocky outpost that knocked the breath from my lungs, and as I lay there trying to remember how to breathe, Chloe and Jeffry plummeted past me.

  As I spun around to watch, I saw that not only was the TAR-13 glowing again, but worse, the other transports were turning toward us. Damn.

  “Wind Slash!” I cried, tearing my wand from the holster on my thigh and whipping it around in an arc while imagining I was dumping ten points of mana (the maximum amount, duh) into the spell like I was straight out of a video game. As I did, a blade of wind ripped from my wand and slammed into the TAR-13’s leg, rending the limb from its body in a shriek of tortured steel.

  It toppled forward, crashing down on its side as its blast of flame went off. As plumes of black smoke began to rise from the scorched earth, the robot’s head exploded into a billion scintillating shards, causing the flame to ripple backward down its throat and into its body from the backlash.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to care because I was already on my feet and sprinting downhill toward my comrades. As Jeffry and Chloe slammed into the metal wall that surrounded the area containing the armored transports with an ear-splitting crunch, the gate opened and an entire platoon of Mavericks in those exo-squad suits marched outflanked by good old-fashioned mechs.

  21

  As I raised my wand to deliver another wind slash, Jeffry tore forward, laser sword trailing behind him like he was Naruto or, you know, any samurai ever. As the crimson blade came up in an arc, shearing through the lead mech’s armor and ripping its arm from its body in a spray of molten metal, Chloe leapt through the air.

  I didn’t quite catch the where and when of her transformation because when she started the attack she was in human form, but by the time she’d landed on the next mech, she was a full-blown wolf-woman. Golden fur rippled along her twelve-foot form as she slammed into the mech, grabbed the chest plate with her massive black claws, and snapped her crocodile-sized jaws down on the things neck.

  The tortured scream of steel filled my ears as she ripped her head back, tearing a spray of blackened oil from the mech before she planted her feet on its chest and pulled backward, wrenching the things arms off in a burst of werewolf strength.

  As she dropped lithely to the ground and the armless mech careened backward into its friends, she whirled around and smashed the mech to her left in the face with the broken robot arms in her hands. The faceplate shattered upon impact as it wobbled and collapsed onto its butt, causing its missiles to fire upward into the air.

  “Holy fuck,” I mouthed as Jeffry sliced through the remaining exo-suits, turning them into glowing slag piles while Chloe grabbed the fallen mech and stood up to her full height.

  She began to spin, gaining momentum as Jeffry approached the gate and jammed his sword into the control box. The blade burst through the wall in a spray of sparks that splattered red hot metal across the ground.

  Chloe released the mech mid
-spin, sending it flying through the air where it crashed into the side of the closest TAR-13 with enough force to punch a hole through its side and send the massive machine toppling to the ground.

  “Come on, Quinn!” Jeffry called before darting inside and charging a TAR-13 like he wasn’t very tiny in comparison.

  I nodded as the transport did the smart thing and stomped on his candy ass. Only instead of flattening him into a pancake, Jeffry reached up and caught the leg with one hand. The knee joint in the machine buckled as hydraulics screamed. Then some kind of hose must have broken inside because black and green fluid began to spray from around the knee joint right before Jeffry tore the leg off and flung it toward a squat building on the left of the compound. It slammed into the front of the structure before punching through it like a javelin and sliding across the field, spraying debris in every direction.

  An explosion of orange flame rippled up from the building as the transport came crashing down. Jeffry lithely leapt back, and as it slammed into the ground, the vampire slashed outward with his sword, cutting a circle in the exterior. Then he kicked the molten door he’d created inward and stepped inside.

  Screams filled my ears as I sprinted down the hillside, but by the time I’d gotten to the gate, he was already walking out of the thing covered in green blood.

  My eyes went wide as I realized he’d literally taken out an entire TAR-13 in the time it took to get from my rock on the middle of the hill to the gate at a dead sprint, and it’d only been thirty feet or so. Downhill.

  The ground to our right opened, sliding backward to reveal another mech army, but before the ground cover had moved enough to allow them out, Chloe was there. She dove through the opening and hit the lead mech like a bowling ball to the face. It crashed to the ground in a spray of sparks as she grabbed it by the arm and flung it sideways into the others. They toppled like bowling pins while more mechs filed out of the opening, scrambling to evade the werewolf.

  Jeffry wasn’t watching them as he ran toward the next TAR-13, and I instantly knew why. The other transports were beginning to glow with the energy they’d gathered to blast us into very tiny flaming pieces. They were the primary target.

  I brought my hand up, and because I was feeling a little outmatched, I called upon the fire lord himself. Ragnaros must have heard my call because as I pointed my hand at the mechs targeting Jeffry, the sky above us ripped apart. Heat and flame spilled across the horizon as the fire lord stepped his pixilated ass out of Mount Hyjal’s Firelands and summoned smoldering meteors of burning magic from the ether.

  They came crashing down on the mechs, slamming into the ground with enough force for the shockwave to throw me to my feet. As I landed on my butt, the ground the blasts had struck turned to glass. Then molten golems began to rise from the craters.

  The burning creatures spun around before fixing their eyes on the Mavericks and running like screaming banshees into the mechs who knew not what they had wrought. The moment the golems slammed into the mechs, they exploded, obliterating everything within a ten-foot radius and filling the battlefield with a flame that charred the atmosphere and nearly killed my friends. Whoops.

  Guess with friends like me, who needed enemies, am I right? But seriously, I was going to have to be way more careful next time because the only thing that saved Chloe was her dropping onto her belly inside the hanger as the flame washed over the top, melting the heads off the mechs.

  As she got to her feet and shot me an angry look, Ragnaros evaporated into a puff of smoke, and the void from whence he’d come closed itself. My heart hammered in my chest as the whiplash of summoning a fictional being straight out of World of Warcraft hit me. My vision tunneled for a second while I pulled in a breath and shook it off.

  Then I reached into my pocket, pulled out the Snickers I’d grabbed before we’d left on this mission because I needed the energy, and tore it open before chowing down like I wasn’t in the middle of a battlefield. As a rush of sugar hit me, endorphins filled my brain and power surged back through me.

  “What, never seen anyone summon down the fire lord?” I called around a mouthful of chocolate before walking forward and raising my wand. With a flick of my wrist, I teleported on top of the back of the TAR-13 closest to the dome we needed to occupy.

  As my feet materialized on its metal skin, I sent another wind slash arcing through the air. The blast cleaved through the robot’s neck, ripping its head from its body in a sheet of flame and smoke. The smell of burned plastic filled my nose as the thing started to collapse. Only I wasn’t waiting around for that.

  I jumped from the thing’s back as I swallowed the last of the candy and used my magic to slow my descent. I hit the ground in an awesome superhero pose that threw gravel in every direction as the TAR-13 crashed to the earth behind me and exploded into a fireball of flame and death.

  I whipped my hand out, catching the flames as they came toward me and compressed them into a seething sphere of fire before flinging them at the TAR-13’s next closest friend. The fireball struck with enough force to punch through the armored transport like this was an episode of Looney Tunes. My attack continued on for the span of an eye blink before detonating like a nuclear bomb, obliterating the armored transport in a whipping tornado of molten death that sent a black mushroom cloud up into the air.

  “Come on,” I called, turning back toward the door and extending my power. They looked thick and strong, but so had the TAR-13s. Guess that’s why I had magic. I splayed my fingers, gathering power that leapt from my fingers in purple tendrils. Then I closed my fist.

  The doors crumbled inward like a giant soda can under the force of my will. I spun on my heel magic still gripping the twisted wreckage and reared back like I was Larry Johnson. Then I flung the debris at another group of mechs.

  “Get inside!” Jeffry called, racing toward me with Chloe in hot pursuit. As they passed by me, his hand jerked upward. “Can you do anything about that?”

  I glanced up, and as I did, my whole world spun. Two Void Crushers were angling toward us, and if those pinpricks of angry red light all over their surface told me anything, it was that they were about to fire.

  Damn.

  22

  “Fuck!” I cried, throwing my hands out in front of me and calling upon my magic to keep me from becoming the human equivalent of burnt toast as the whole world erupted with laser fire.

  Flame roiled around me, slamming into my magical bubble as the whole of the structure screeched in agony. The walls started to melt as I hit the ground hard on my back. Sweat rolled down my face, stinging my eyes as I tried to push away the failings of my frail human body and focus. I could hear the vampire and the werewolf moving around beside me, but I was way too focused on the lightning leaping from my hands to notice what they were doing.

  My shield began to crack, and as it did, the temperature inside my bubble increased exponentially. My mouth went dry, and the sweat evaporated from my skin, and as that happened, I pulled my shield in closer, compressing the bubble and causing my power to redistribute itself along the outer edge of the shell. More power filled in the cracks, spackling them over with magic as the flames rushed by us, running roughshod through the corridor and turning the hallway into slag.

  The superheated building groaned like it was about to collapse, and as the last of the fire dissipated from in front of me, I saw the lights on the second star destroyed had begun to glow again. Damn.

  “We need to move,” Jeffry said, grabbing me by the collar and hauling me to my feet.

  “I can’t run and keep that from killing us,” I said, pointing at the Void Crusher as energy began to gather in front of its nose cone. That hadn’t happened before, and I was willing to bet that was going to make a big old boom when it hit.

  “I’ll run, you magic,” Chloe said, grabbing me and throwing me roughly over her shoulder so I was facing the doorway. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, not paying much attention as the roof overhead
blew open, raining debris down on top of us. So that had been what the first Void Crusher was doing. Clearing the path for that plasma bomb. Well, fuck that noise. Mallory Quinn was not getting her ass blown up today.

  I held out my hand, extending my powers. All of space and time stretched out before me as I tore the air in front of us asunder, splitting it open into a gash of white light. The archive appeared before me in her obelisk, and as she raised a perfect eyebrow to regard me curiously, the Void Crusher fired.

  “Got you a present,” I said as I tore my hands outward, ripping the gash in the horizon wide just as the plasma crashed into the tear and vanished within. The angel had half a second to fix me with a dispassionate stare before I brought my hands together, sealing off the void and trapping the Void Crusher’s attack within.

  “Did you just teleport the attack?” Jeffry asked, his light sword buzz, buzzing in the air as he slashed through the wall to our right, cleaving a makeshift door into the melted wreckage.

  “Yep, I sent it to the archive. I figured she’d be able to handle it.” I smiled right as the void reopened overhead and the pulsating energy bomb blew outward like a massive spit wad. It struck the firing ship, blasting it clean in two. As the starship exploded in an eruption of flame and sound that deafened me beyond all reason, the archivist rose from the ashes of the ship, huge and angry. Her massive wings beat the air as bits and pieces of the flaming starship cascaded down through the air all around her.

  “Know that I am not amused by your antics, Mallory Quinn.” The angel lady spoke, and it was loud even though my ears were filled with both cotton and ringing. “Attack me again, and I will not be so kind as to simply destroy your weapon.” With that, she vanished back into the ether, leaving such profound silence in her wake that it took me a moment to realize we’d stopped moving. That wasn’t good. We didn’t have a lot of time left. I shook myself back into action. I could gawk later.