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

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Are you out of your goddamned mind?” Chloe asked as the first Void Crusher’s massive engines spun to life, shooting white-hot flame into the air as it veered to avoid the falling wreckage from its comrade. That was fine, veering meant it wasn’t shooting at us.

  “Where else did you want me to put it?” I asked, glancing at her as Jeffry kicked in the door, causing it to slide across the ground in a spray of sparks. The room beyond was dark, lit only with what seemed like emergency lighting, and if I’d had half a mind to look around more, the reptilian creatures growing in the green tanks all around me would have frightened me to the point of being catatonic. As it stood, my passing glance made me think of when Ripley walked into that clone growing room in Alien Resurrection, and that was enough.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” Jeffry said, snapping off his light sword as he moved toward what looked like a console in the center of the room. Just beyond it sat a flat, metallic pad covered in flashing lights. They blinked in what seemed like a pattern, but at the same time, I couldn’t exactly discern what said pattern might be.

  “She just threw a nuke into the archive. She’s lucky the thing didn’t splat her just on principle,” Chloe said, dropping me to the ground and moving toward the doorway like she was going to stand guard.

  “Better than having it explode in our face,” I said, rubbing my ass because the fall had stung something fierce. “But yeah, don’t think we’ll be doing that twice, and I bet that ship will start firing soon.”

  “I’m on it,” Jeffry said, his fingers flying across the alien controls in a blur of speed. “Once I introduce the tectonic shifter to the correct tachyon emission frequency, we’ll jump to the capital.”

  “First, it sounds like you’re just saying a bunch of made up words.” I put my hands on my hips. “Next time just say slipstream, warp drive, or something I’ve heard of.”

  “Everyone has heard of tachyons,” Jeffry grumbled. “And none of those other things are real.” He pointed at the controls. “This is.”

  “Secondly, why didn’t we just teleport to the capital?” I asked, dropping the question like I was dropping bombs.

  “Um… cause it is covered in an energy shield, and last time you tried to teleport through one we got bug-zappered, or have you forgotten?” The vampire raised an eyebrow at me as he hit a lever, causing it to snap off and fall to the ground with a disheartening thud. “Oh… that’s not good.”

  “No, what’s not good is that!” Chloe said right before she was flung backward across the room.

  As the werewolf hit the far wall and slid down, a creature that sort of resembled Killer Croc strode through the door wearing a loincloth and holding a mace the size of his, well, member, which was quite large, let me just say.

  23

  “This place about to blow,” I said, stepping forward and calling forth a crackling handful of magical fire. Waves of pink and purple danced around me as I flung the magical ball of death at the behemoth. The blast slammed into its chest before exploding in a fireworks show that forced me to look away.

  Which was something I wished I hadn’t done because the monstrosity stepped through my attack like I’d thrown a gob of Playdoh at him and reared back to smash me into a smudge.

  As his huge hand came arcing toward me, Chloe darted between us, crashing into Killer Croc with enough force to cause his hand to whip by me. A sonic boom shattered my hearing as his attack sliced through the air beside me. My ears popped as I staggered back, agony ripping through my temples.

  “Foolish wolf girl,” the creature said in a voice that reminded me of a more macho version of Dolph Lundgren before he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and flung her across the room. She hit some sort of metallic desk, shattered it, and kept going until she crashed into the wall.

  Breath exploded from her lungs as she collapsed to the ground, limbs twisted at all the wrong angles. Already I could see things writhing beneath her skin as her awesome werewolf healing struggled to put her back together, but I knew it wouldn’t be quick enough.

  “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I asked, reaching out and grabbing the closest desk with my mind. Then I flung it at him. It shattered against his massive bulk as Jeffry struggled to put the lever back together again with something that looked a lot like duct tape.

  “You are not my size,” the behemoth said, dusting the fragments of the desk from his shoulder with one hand before reaching down and grabbing his huge member and shaking it at me. “I do not think you are properly equipped to take me on.” A grin split his face, causing his jagged, yellow teeth to flash in the light of the room. “But we can try. Is no harm in doing that.” His grin grew monstrous. “Well, for me, anyway.”

  “Not cool,” I snarled as I searched through my repertoire of spells for something that could hurt the bastard. So far he’d shrugged off a hit from a desk that had broken Chloe into pieces and laughed his way through my fireball. I could teleport, but that wasn’t a lot of good at the moment, unless…

  “I am quite cool,” Killer Croc replied, taking a step forward and raising his massive club into the air, which was when I realized it was wrapped in barbed wire. Mother fuck.

  “No. Negan is cool. You’re amateur hour.” I shook my head at him. “I mean, maybe this is where the story ends, and you kill us all, but something tells me I have a lot more story to tell.” I took a step forward calling on my power as his club arced out toward me in a blur of speed.

  I stepped forward, slowing down time and sliding past his attack as the world turned itself down. Then I kicked him in the junk. Hard.

  Okay… I lied. I kicked him a few times. So many times that my foot actually hurt after I was done. Then I let time come back.

  Croc’s eyes bugged out of his fucking skull as the club flew from his hand and embedded itself into the far wall. He came down, collapsing to his knees as his hands went instinctively to grab himself, only before he could, I gave him an awesome uppercut straight out of Mortal Kombat. As my magically strengthened left fist impacted the underside of his chin, his head snapped backward with a horrible crack.

  Agony ripped down through my bones from the impact as he fell, flopping backward. I shoved down my pain as he did and tore open space behind him. The heat of the sun hit me like I’d just opened an industrial oven, but thankfully the magic of space and time kept it from doing more than giving me a wicked awesome suntan. Or it would have if I’d laid around sunning myself like I was a Real Orange County Housewife. Instead, as the creature flopped backward into my sundered hole in reality and found himself suddenly trapped in the vastness of space, I collapsed the portal.

  I didn’t need to watch the next part. It would end in two ways. First, the lack of atmosphere in space would rip all his fluids out of his body as the air inside him struggled to evacuate by any means necessary. Exhale my ass.

  Even if he did, somehow, survive the vacuum of space, he was going to fall into the sun.

  Yeah, I took the Superman approach. When in doubt, throw the bad guy into the sun.

  A smirk crossed my lips as I rubbed my hands together before turning to Jeffry. “Can we get a move on?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at the vampire as I approached. “I feel like I’m carrying this team. If you don’t do something useful, I’m going to make you start calling me Derek Jeter.”

  Chloe wasn’t quite back on her feet, but it wouldn’t be long. I wanted to be gone as soon as that happened.

  “I can’t make it work. There’s some kind of safeguard in place. I’ve got the coordinates punched in, but I can’t get it out of the warm up phase so it’ll actually teleport us.” Jeffry pointed at a screen in the middle where an amorphous blob was sticking its tongue out at us and the words “Ha, Ha, Ha” danced around his head in strobing black and white letters.

  “Okay,” I said, glancing past him toward the teleporter as a really bad idea jumped into my mind, and it was definitely one of Mallory Quinn’s Patented Very Bad Plans.
“I’ve got a VBP, and you’re not going to like it.”

  “What’s a VBP?” Chloe asked, limping toward us dragging her left leg. She’d shifted back to werewolf form which was bad. Werewolves healed a lot faster in wolfman form. If she’d reverted, it meant she was running out of energy. Sigh.

  “A Very Bad Plan,” I said, grabbing another Snickers from my pocket and tossing it to her. “Eat this. You’re not ferocious enough when you’re hungry.”

  “I’m a bit concerned you have an acronym for Very Bad Plan,” Jeffry said, which was fair because he should be concerned. I didn’t have an acronym because I had good plans. “But let’s bloody well hear it.”

  “You hook me up to the gizmo, and I use my power to teleport us with its whateverness to where we need to go.” I nodded as Chloe snatched the candy out of the air and tore into it without even bothering to unwrap it.

  As I moved closer to the platform and reached out toward it with my magic. It felt foreign, and well, alien, but at the same time, I could feel the currents of space and time traveling through it. As my power reached through it, understanding popped into me. I knew how it worked, and even better, this might actually work. So, you know, that was good too.

  “That’s a terrible plan,” Chloe said, swallowing the bite of candy and coming toward me, shooting me a smile that almost made me think we might someday be friends. “I like it.”

  “It definitely has moxie,” Jeffry agreed, coming toward me as he dropped a beeping satchel on the ground beside us. “Oh bollocks, let’s try. The charge is set to go off in two minutes. When it does, this whole pylon will be nothing more than a distant memory, and take their Brain Wave communications with them.”

  “Alright!” I said, wrapping my arms around their waists. “Let’s get weird.” The crystal hanging around my neck flared like the sun I’d just thrown Killer Croc into as the machine surrounding us began to glow with ethereal green light. Tendrils of power wrapped around us as I tried to picture the currents of time stretching around us.

  As I did, the teleporter’s own currents appeared before me like brightly lit ribbons amidst a seething mass of dull, boring ones. As I focused on those ribbons and reached out to grab them with a metaphysical hand, the others fell away until all that was left was the coordinates Jeffry had locked into the system.”

  “Hold on to your butts!” I said as I threw all my power into the spell, catching hold of the teleporter’s pathways and blasting us all to smithereens.

  But, you know, in a good way.

  24

  Everything was going great until our composite atoms and what not slammed into a supernatural wall of force like a corvette going full speed into a brick wall.

  My bits and pieces smashed back together in a thunderclap of pain that threw me backward across the metaphysical plane of space and time. Pink fire stretched around me like a glowing shark cage as a Maverick made of light and sound stood in front of us.

  “Interesting,” he said in the voice of Antonio Banderas as he looked at me from behind the glow of a burning emerald cube that cast his face in malevolent shadows. “I knew you’d try this, earthlings. I’m actually surprised I had to wait this long.” He smiled, revealing teeth of dazzling light. “Actually that’s not true.” He held the cube out in front of himself. “I literally know all now. I am an omniscient god.”

  I rolled my eyes at him because if that was true, he’d have killed us the second we stepped on his planet. The fact that he hadn’t proved him wrong. Or, at least, I hoped it did.

  “Well then you know how this is going to end,” I said, raising my fist. It was weird because I was a translucent wrath of pink energy as were Jeffry and Chloe, but I never let a little thing like being incorporeal stop me.

  “With my supreme victory over the universe?” he asked before his arm wreathed itself in cascading waves of emerald light that flitted across his skin like skipping fireflies. “Because that’s the only future the Gideon Cube shows me.” Then he reached through my metaphysical shark cage and plucked something from Jeffry. I was too busy having my brain smashed into slime by the awesome thrum of his voice to notice what had happened until the Maverick held his hand out, revealing the Neutrino Vortex Bomb.

  “Hey, that’s ours!” I said, trying to cry out even though my brain felt like it was being torn to bits. Whatever he’d done to my cage was causing it to unravel. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if we’d been outside the time force, but I’d been here enough times (don’t ask), to see the flicker of his corruption in my cage. That was bad because that was literally made by my mind, and that meant whatever he had done was not only eating away at my power, but it could shatter my mind.

  “Actually, this is from the Nothiagons.” He held it up, examining it closely. “Prince Sor-Ur-Kah was a good friend.” He shook his head before stepping through the front of the cage, shattering the bars into fragments of pink light that dissolved along with my sanity. The scenery warped and dilated as the time force surged forward, trying to rush into my little box of safety.

  Only, instead of engulfing us in endless agony that would rip us atom from atom and spread us across all space and time, the whole of the universe buffeted against the Maverick. The cube in his hand flared, and as it did, we were suddenly jerked backward out of the time force.

  I can’t even tell you how it happened because one moment we were in the metaphysical realm, and the next? The next we were laying on the cold steel floor of a massive throne room. A thousand Mavericks stood around us, all armed with what looked like wrist-mounted plasma cannons, and that said nothing of the mechanized Gatling gun things attached to the walls.

  Upon a throne of crackling electricity sat a Maverick. He was short. At least compared to the others, standing about my height and was dressed in a long flowing tunic that covered his entire body. His head was bald and shiny as he fixed his tri-color eyes upon me.

  “Greetings, Miss Quinn, Mr. Hodges, Miss Deveraux.” He stood and swept into a low bow as the power of the cube in his hand crackled through his flesh, causing the skeleton beneath to become visible like I was staring at an X-ray. “I am Lord Zug of Space Planet Maverick, and if you don’t want me to throw you into the sun.” He smirked at me. “Thanks for that one by the way.” He waved his hand like it was an errant thought. “You will tell Captain Brand to get the fuck out of here before I turn his spaceship into a kitten.”

  As he spoke, I realized that while he could do that because I could feel the power of the cube vast and limitless and begging to be used, I realized Zug couldn’t actually do that. At least, not yet. There was too much metaphysical friction between him and the cube. He might think he could do that, but if he tried, the backlash would destroy him. That was good. It meant he hadn’t mastered the cube’s power, and that meant, no matter how badass he was, I could take him. Because at the end of the day, I knew how to use my power and he was just a kid with a gun. A very powerful gun, sure, but not one he really knew how to use.

  “Can he do that?” Chloe asked, glancing at me for confirmation as she started to get to her feet, only before she had moved more than a few muscles, Zug was next to us. His foot was extended in an upward arc even though I hadn’t seen him move. I saw the aftermath, though.

  Chloe’s head snapped backward before her body lifted into the air. A loud snap hit my ears as she left the ground and flew upward to crash into the ceiling some hundred meters above. Then she fell, only before she reached the ground, an emerald glow surrounded her, holding her in place. The bones moving beneath her skin stopped moving as though all of time had stopped.

  “I can do whatever I wish.” He nodded at the werewolf, and she collapsed to the ground, her body moving in overdrive as Zug approached her and placed a dainty foot on her back. The steel became molten as he pushed her entire body into the floor. She tried to scream, but no sound came out as she caught fire and burned.

  “Stop!” Jeffry cried, showing more emotion in that word than I’d ever heard fr
om him.

  “I will do no such thing,” Lord Zug said, glancing at the vampire before kneeling down and grabbing Chloe by the hair. He pulled her blackened, charred body free of the molten metal and tossed her to the ground beside Jeffry. “I have chosen her because she’ll heal. I can do anything I wish, and she’ll put herself back together again.”

  He appeared behind me. “Something tells me you’re a lot less durable.” Then his arm lashed out, striking me across the face. As my vision went blurry and dark around the edges, and the metallic taste of blood filled my mouth, I felt the spark of power coming off the cube.

  Its power was immense. So massive, it was like swimming in the ocean and knowing a goddamned whale was somewhere in the surrounding water, jaws open wide to swallow you even if you couldn’t see it. The press of the Gideon Cube’s hunger, the threat of its destruction reached deep down inside of me and rocked the core of my being, and for the first time in all this, I forgot about everything except sheer mind numbing panic.

  This thing wanted to take everything from everyone. It wanted to tear down the world into atoms and spew it out across the universe like grass clippings out the back of a mower.

  Zug was a fool to think he could control this. It was like trying to ride a tyrannosaurus rex into battle wearing a bacon harness.

  I crashed to the ground on my back, and as the world spiraled into a fractured maw, Jeffry launched himself at Zug.

  Thanks to the touch of power from the cube, I watched the horror play out in slow motion. Zug turned lazily and caught the vampire by the mouth with his open hand, shoving the neutrino vortex bomb into the vampire’s maw.

  Then he stood aside, allowing the vampire to fall forward as crackling energy erupted from the bomb’s explosion. I didn’t even have time to be afraid as a shaft of emerald light wrapped around Jeffry as he detonated with the force of a zillion stars. The world swam as the vampire was turned into little more than dust as flame and heat roiled inside the contained shaft of energy before winking out entirely, leaving no trace that anything had ever happened at all.