Witch Nebula (Starcaster Book 4)

by J. N. Chaney

  Thorn couldn’t help hearing an edge to Tanner’s words, a hint of recrimination. Although what amounted to a squid ambush had nothing to do with Thorn, he obviously suspected it involved magic in some way. Thorn was an easy, even if unfair target for his frustration.

  “Understood, sir. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Thorn glanced at the repeater. Four ships, including a destroyer, a frigate, and two corvettes. The Hecate was a match for any one of them and could likely take on both corvettes and pound them into scrap. But all four?

  Badly outgunned indeed.

  Thorn would try to change that. He once more let his awareness fall into his talisman, then radiate outward, focusing on the incoming Nyctus ships. His thoughts brushed against the cold, alien minds of the squids—

  Wait.

  Cold and alien, yes. But these squids were different, somehow. He wasn’t sure how, but these Nyctus were definitely different. Another sect, maybe? A different religion, to the extent they had anything that could be called a religion? It was something about how they viewed the world, a distinctly new flavor of thought processes, open to him for discovery. He explored their offerings, gathering what he could in bits and pieces, and concluded that their sect was irrelevant—they were the enemy.

  Thorn let his awareness sweep across the enemy ships, but decided that now was not a good time to get fancy. Drawing power from his reservoir, it grew shallower still. He used some of it to tighten his focus on the lead ship. Thorn felt the lines of the destroyer and sought out the containment generator for its fusion reactor. There was nothing subtle about this. He would try to bludgeon the containment into collapse, because some jobs required nothing more than a hammer.

  Thorn grinned, flexing his magical focus. A bigger hammer.

  His effort might lead to an explosion, but it would more likely just trip safeties and scram the reactor. Either way, it would take the destroyer out of the battle, at least for a time, and dramatically even the odds.

  There it was—the bounded fury of the fusion reaction howled away within its magnetic prison. Again, Thorn didn’t plan to be subtle. He simply focused power on the containment system, his intent to make it fail, at least enough to initiate a scram—

  A powerful blast of denial slammed into him, the will of a shaman backed up by magical might. Thorn’s awareness was pushed away from the reactor and back into the void.

  Gritting his teeth, Thorn called up more and more power, desperately trying to jam his perception back into the Nyctus ship. He had to find a weakness, a vulnerability of any type, and exploit it.

  But he couldn’t. The shaman had created a nearly impenetrable wall of repudiation, keeping Thorn at bay. Worse, his power was dwindling by the moment, the shallow lagoon of potential about to drain dry.

  He finally gave up. He simply didn’t have the strength to attack the Nyctus directly. The best he could do would be to prowl around the edges of things until an opportunity presented itself.

  “Missile range now,” the Tac O said, truncating Thorn’s frustrated thoughts. “The Nyctus have just fired their own missiles—I count twenty-two on the way.”

  “Return fire,” Tanner said, and Thorn could hear the tension in his voice.

  Twenty-two incoming missiles would swamp the Hecate’s defenses. Unless Thorn could figure out some way to prevent it, his ship was about to be pummeled, and hard.

  The Hecate shuddered under another hammer blow, the blast of the missile strike trembling the ship from top to keel. The reactive armor deflected most of the warhead’s impact, but Thorn still heard damage alerts sounding.

  “Damage control to section seven alpha,” Tanner said, his voice over the intercom as impassive as ever. The man didn’t panic. Ever, even in the face of an attack that felt wildly imbalanced to Thorn, who trusted Tanner to find a solution, regardless of the odds.

  Another missile detonated close by. The starfield slewed as the Hecate wheeled hard, trying to keep her orientation relative to the incoming attacks optimized for defensive systems. The point-defense batteries spewed almost constant streams of tracer, streaks of light lashing out like reaching fingers, trying to clutch and destroy onrushing ordnance.

  “Stellers, Tanner here. Anything you can do?”

  Thorn took a shuddering breath. He was tapped out. He could barely manage to defend the Hecate’s crew from the mental onslaught of at least three Nyctus shamans. The fact that Tanner had appealed to him to do something spoke volumes about the deep shit into which they’d plunged.

  “I am so sorry, sir. I’ve done all I can,” he replied.

  Which has basically been nothing.

  Despair draped itself over Thorn like a funeral shroud. He’d tried to bring his daughter back from the dead, and failed. Instead, he’d lost her completely and, in the process, diffused and diminished his magical potential so much that he was now probably one of the weakest Starcasters in the Corps. He felt confident that would change, that his power would come back, in time—but time had all but run out.

  He couldn’t even bootstrap his magical potential up the way he had in the past, rewriting reality to make himself more powerful. He’d tried. It hadn’t worked. Changing tea into coffee he could do, but that was about all he could do.

  The Hecate slewed again. This time, something slammed into her hard enough to make the ship ring like a gong. More damage alerts blared.

  “Decompression in sections eight alpha through nine delta. All hands evacuate.”

  Something—probably a squid rail gun shot—had hit the Hecate hard, wounding her badly.

  Thorn took another shaky breath, trying to desperately to concoct anything—

  Mol in the Gyrfalcon shot past the witchport, flying close formation with the Hecate, trying to act like an additional point-defense battery for her, as well as providing a second target for the squids. It had worked, but it wouldn’t matter. The best thing Mol could do would be to bug out.

  “Stellers, Tanner here.”

  He was on a private channel. Thorn’s stomach flipped completely.

  “Sir?”

  “Unless you have something up your sleeve, in about two minutes I’m going to order the Chief Engineer to blow the reactor and scuttle the ship. I have absolutely firm orders that you are not to fall into the squid’s hands.”

  Thorn closed his eyes, then opened them. “Understood, sir.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’d rather be turned to plasma than end up a captive of those bastards.”

  “Sir,” Thorn said, licking his lips. “It has been been an honor, a privilege—”

  “Hold that thought, Stellers,” Tanner snapped. “Another ship has just hopped onto our sensors. Stand by.”

  Thorn flicked his attention to the repeater. His desperate hope was that it would be an ON ship. Preferably a big one. His mind-numbing fear was that it would be big, alright, but also Nyctus.

  But it was neither. The Hecate’s tactical systems didn’t recognize it and, when Thorn zoomed in the image, neither did he.

  For one thing, it was green.

  The new arrival raced in at high speed. The two Nyctus corvettes swung onto an intercept course and began a fast, head-on approach. The green ship, whatever the hell it was, didn’t seem large, being smaller than either of the corvettes. Thorn expected this to be brief, but ultimately not much help. Whoever this was should just break off while they still could and make a run for it, rather than trying something heroic.

  Thorn glanced away from the repeater—then back again, as it flared with lurid, emerald light. The glow enveloped one of the Nyctus corvettes, and then it wasn’t a corvette anymore. It was just an expanding cloud of debris. A few seconds later, the second corvette suffered the same fate.

  “Holy shit.”

  It took Thorn a moment to realize he was the one who’d said it.

  When he looked back at the repeater, he saw that the remaining Nyctus destroyer and frigate were turning hard. They altered their trajecto
ries away from the newcomer while pumping out another salvo of missiles at the Hecate. They were apparently intent on finishing her off before making their escape, but another of those dazzling flashes of green energy engulfed the missiles as they launched. Part of that blast also hit the frigate, opening a gaping hole on its port side. A second later, both Nyctus ships vanished, flinging themselves away from the battle at superluminal speed.

  “All hands, priority damage control,” Tanner said. “Engineering, you’ve got five minutes to get me a list of what’s still working. Comms, raise our green friends out there and get them plugged into a channel. As long as they don’t decide we’re their next target, I should probably thank them for saving our asses.”

  It took Thorn a while to reach the bridge from the witchport. He had to route himself around some battle damage, a section of the Hecate’s forward port quarter that had been breached by a missile strike and was now sealed off. He ended up taking a shortcut up one of the cramped access ladders that traversed the ship vertically, giving access to the various power distribution nodes coming off the main buses. The alternative was to go all the way back to near midships, then pick his way forward again. The ladder brought him up one deck short of the bridge, so he had to detour partway back anyway. By the time he arrived, he found Tanner in conversation with whoever was crewing their strange, green benefactors.

  Tanner saw Thorn enter and raised a hand. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have to deal with something of some urgency. If you could wait a moment—”

  “Please, Captain Tanner,” a smooth baritone replied from the comm. “Do whatever it is that you need to do. We’re in no hurry.”

  “Thank you,” Tanner replied, and pointed at the Comm O, who put the channel into standby mode. Tanner turned to Thorn.

  “What happened, Stellers?”

  Thorn swallowed and glanced around the bridge, uneasily aware of the number of people in earshot. Tanner immediately shook his head.

  “Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Lieutenant. I expect all of my division heads to be able to give me an accounting of what worked and what didn’t. You’re no exception. We all need to know why your magic fell short this time, so we can contingency plan around it. You know, in case our squid friends decide to come back with reinforcements.”

  Osborne, the Tac O, caught Thorn’s eye and offered what was meant to be a reassuring nod. Thorn acknowledged it briefly, then turned back to Tanner.

  “Some of the ’castings I’ve done lately have drained me, sir, and I haven’t had enough recovery time.” He offered Tanner an apologetic look. “For the time being, you should probably plan as though my contributions to any fight are going to be pretty limited.”

  Tanner held Thorn’s gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Understood. Now, let me ask you this—is there anything you can tell me about our green rescuers out there?”

  Thorn pulled open the cramped jump seat, his usual spot when he was on the bridge, from the bulkhead where it was stowed. “Give me a moment, sir, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Tanner nodded and turned his focus back to other matters, which seemed to be a dozen different problems, all of which he had to juggle at once. Not for the first time, Thorn found himself marveling at the man’s ability to take in information, digest it, and spit back orders, all in a few seconds.

  But he pulled his attention away from the drama swirling around the Captain, instead pulling out his talisman and centering himself around it. He’d recovered a tiny bit of his potential and used that to push his awareness beyond the Hecate’s wounded hull and into—

  Nothing.

  Thorn frowned. He pushed a little harder, expanding his perception like an inflating balloon. He dug deep and kept at it, until his awareness had expanded beyond the strange, green ship.

  Still nothing. It was as though the other ship and its crew didn’t exist at all.

  Still frowning, he ended the scrying and looked back at Tanner.

  “Sir?”

  Tanner raised a finger, finished snapping out direction to a soot-stained Petty Officer from a damage control party, then turned to Thorn.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I get nothing, sir.”

  Tanner paused a beat, then nodded and started to turn away. “Okay then—”

  “No, sir,” Thorn went on. “I literally get nothing. As in, nothing at all, just empty space. Magically, there’s nothing and no one out there.”

  The older man turned back, fixing him with a hard stare. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure. It means that either there’s someone or something aboard that ship powerful enough to Shade it even though it’s sitting right in front of us, or it somehow just doesn’t interact with magic at all.”

  “Okay. So what are the implications?”

  “Well, sir, since this is the first time I’ve ever encountered anything like this, I don’t really know what the implications are. This is something entirely new.”

  “Huh.” Tanner looked back to the main viewscreen, holding the image of the unknown ship. “Can’t deny that whoever they are, they were here when we needed them. Also can’t deny it makes me more than a little uneasy that we apparently know nothing whatsoever about them. We’ve got nothing in our tactical or cultural databases, and now you can’t even sense them with your magic.”

  Thorn shook his head. “I have to be honest, sir. This feels like some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . a setup of some sort.”

  Tanner tensed. “I thought you said you couldn’t detect these people, or whatever the right word is for it.”

  “I can’t, sir.”

  “So what makes you think it’s a setup?”

  “I . . .” Thorn began, then trailed off. “I don’t know, sir. I can’t point to anything specific. It just feels wrong, somehow.”

  “Stellers, when anyone else says that I tend to give it the weight it deserves, which usually isn’t much. Maybe the XO, maybe the Chief Engineer when it comes to the powerplant and drives and the like. But that’s about it. When you say it, though, I have to follow up—”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not getting this from magic. At least, not that I’m consciously aware of. It really is just a feeling.”

  Tanner nodded. “Well, just park that feeling for now, Stellers.” He glanced at the Comm O. “Reopen the channel.”

  The Comm O gave a thumbs up.

  “This is Captain Tanner. My apologies for the delay, but as you can appreciate, we’re pretty busy over here.”

  “I understand,” the resonant voice replied. “Your ship clearly took some serious damage. I hope that you are able to get underway, and get help from your own people.”

  “We should be,” Tanner replied. “In the meantime, are you in a particular hurry to get anywhere?”

  “We are not.”

  “Very well then, I would like to invite you aboard the Hecate. The least we can do is offer you some hospitality for helping us out here.”

  Thorn glanced at Tanner, who returned the look sidelong, but said nothing.

  “I would be delighted to visit your ship, Captain Tanner.”

  “We still haven’t recovered our Gyrfalcon—that’s the fighter keeping station off our starboard side. I can have it shuttle you—”

  “No need. I will use our own shuttle. As you said, you’ve got a great deal to do, and I don’t want to get in your way.”

  “We appreciate that. I’ll have our Chief Engineer work out the docking details with you.”

  “Thank you. I will be ready when he contacts me.”

  The Channel Open indicator flicked off. Tanner gave the Chief Engineer his instructions, then turned to Thorn.

  “Alright, Lieutenant, let’s see how your feeling plays out when you get face-to-face with whoever the hell this is.”

  “Sir?”

  “As soon as the Chief Engineer works out where they’re going to dock, you and I are going to be the reception committee.�
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  “Aye, sir,” was all Thorn said. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on here than it appeared.

  Of course, maybe Tanner was right. A feeling was just that—a feeling.

  Besides, when wasn’t there more going on that it seemed?

  9

  Thorn had to work hard at not gaping when the pilot of the green ship stepped through the airlock and into the Hecate.

  Correction—when he ducked through the airlock. He stood a full head taller than Thorn, Tanner, and the two members of the Honor Guard the Captain had arranged for their visitor. The Honor Guard, Thorn knew, was less about honoring and much more about guarding. But even the two seasoned Ratings couldn’t help simply staring at their guest as he straightened.

  He was alarmingly tall. He was also bulky and muscular, with tendons like steel cables smoothly sliding beneath his skin as he moved.

  His green skin.

  Thorn caught himself staring, then shifted his features to a neutral look of thanks.

  In every respect, he looked like a man—an unusually large and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.

  Except for the green part.

  Every bit of his exposed skin—since he wore only trousers and a loose vest, there was a lot of it—was a similar shade of green to his ship. He wore sandals, so Thorn could see that even his bare feet were green. And he had no apparent body hair, the overall effect of which was to make him resemble an enormous green mannequin, albeit bulging with corded muscle.

  Their visitor stopped and stared for a moment, tracking his head left to right to take in the little tableau inside the Hecate’s airlock. Besides his minimal clothing, a number of odd gadgets hung from a broad belt around his waist. Any of them might have been weapons, although none were obviously so. Thorn noted the somber, almost grave expression on the alien’s face and braced himself in case there was trouble. He felt the two Ratings doing the same.