Star Angel: Rising (Star Angel Book 4)

by David G. McDaniel

  She took a deep, cleansing breath. It was late in the afternoon, they were atop their mounts and continuing on the way. She closed her eyes in quiet rapture; turned her face to the setting sun, nearing the horizon. On their horses and on the trail. Headed slowly down the road once more. No more lessons for the day.

  The only thing that matters is that it works.

  She gave up thinking about it. This was far too tranquil a moment for such deep ponderings. Sunlight beat red through her closed lids, warm on her face. Birds chirped in the woods, the horses clip-clopping along. Giant Erius swayed as he walked, far too gently for such a massive beast and she appreciated his effort not to jar her. It was crazy to think an animal would try and give her a pleasant ride but he was, and she knew it mostly because he told her he was, though not in any way she could explain. After everything that had happened and was happening she was no longer much hung up on what was “crazy” anymore. Erius was trying to give her a pleasant ride and that was that. She could let the horse know things. The horse could let her know things. It worked.

  Truth.

  She struggled to let that be. To simply be. No heavy thoughts, no wondering what came next or how any of this was possible. After all the running, all the chasing, it was like she’d hit the brakes and now everything was suddenly calm. She had no idea where she was, or even really where she was going or even what exactly she was doing, but everything in that moment felt right. She was in no immediate danger, no known challenge waiting just around the corner …

  She tried to enjoy the tranquility.

  Though Erius did what he could with his gait there was no getting around his size. His flanks were so wide she’d taken to riding with her feet up, either cross-legged or, as she sat now, knees drawn to her chest, arms hugged around them, feet flat on his mighty shoulders, pumping up and down gracefully beneath her heels. The gentle, rubbing feeling of his soft hair against her soles felt good. Erius was a sweetie. There was a definite communication of all kinds going on between them. It wasn’t as if he spoke in her head like Mister Ed or anything, a horse version of Galfar, but she understood him. At least enough. He was a gentle giant, filled with curiosity about the world and still young enough to appreciate it, and he’d already come to love this exciting human who rode like a feather upon him, happy she was happy, content she was content, almost as if he’d decided to make a game of taking care of her.

  She soaked it up.

  Behind her Haz rode further back, playing a stringed instrument of some sort. He’d been strumming it now and again. Galfar led the way up ahead, the entire trio strung out with gaps between, the horses walking rhythmically along the alternating dirt and grass trail. After getting a few last things from the hut, including the strange guitar, they set out on the road, destination “The Castle”, Haz playing since their last stop. He’d also played last night when they lay down to a very primitive camp-out under the stars, not far from the village but underway. No tents, no covers, just them on the hard ground in the cool air. Remarkably she’d woken refreshed.

  Erius stepped around some bumps in the road and she opened her eyes. Though the sun was bright it didn’t make her squint. Everything about this place was refreshing. The air, the sun—everything. The trees here were less green than the ones back at Galfar’s village, more yellow, even red. The air seemed rich in oxygen and was invigorating. A spiritually stimulating world, in all. It felt easier to breathe, easier to move. Subtle shades of improvement over what she was used to.

  Of course aiding this feeling of freedom was the terrific displacement of having left everything she knew far behind. It should’ve bothered her but it didn’t.

  Why don’t I care?

  For some reason the thought of that, of her, Jessica Paquin, having such an untroubled attitude while simultaneously being bothered that she couldn’t explain it made her laugh. Like, since she was not, apparently, worried, she needed to worry about not being worried. Gotta have something to worry about. Rather than bite back the laugh she let it go. Laughing loudly at herself, not caring that it was an oddly random thing to be doing in that peaceful moment on the trail, caring less what the other two might think. Behind her Haz stopped playing.

  he asked. Then:

  she asked without looking back, thinking the thoughts clearly to him even as her voice chuckled on the air.

  His tone became angry.

  Wait. She stopped laughing.

  He said nothing.

  How self-conscious! But then, he was a teenage boy. Weren’t they all self-conscious? Weren’t all teens?

  she assured him.

 

  She beamed it at him. How annoying. But then she found herself looking at Galfar, a few lengths ahead, and smiled in spite of herself. He was hunched on his little horse, fuzzy white head bobbing back and forth like a Q-tip on his pencil-thin neck.

  He did look kind of funny.

  But before another laugh could escape her lips she shot back:

 

  Then: Can Galfar hear us talking? If they’d been talking out loud he most certainly would’ve. But as she’d so far noticed the telepathy worked differently. Was more directed. Her words were meant for Haz and, so it seemed, were his meant for her. Galfar gave no sign he knew they were talking about him. In fact, now that she watched him more closely she wondered if he was even awake. It looked as if he might be asleep, sitting straight, on auto-pilot. Suddenly she hoped he didn’t slip off. While that would be funny, in a mean way, it also wouldn’t be. At his age he would break something.

  But the horse walked steadily and Galfar stayed as he was, bobbing and swaying, catching himself to the left and to the right each time before he went so far as to fall. A perfect nap balance; like when your head jerked and you caught it and fell back asleep. Only here it was his whole body. Probably a lot of experience was at play.

  Haz wasn’t getting off the topic that easy.

  She sighed. Then, wanting him to shut up so she could get back to her reverie—if she even could now:

  Silence.

  She turned to face him.

  he asked.

  she said, and meant it.

  That seemed enough. He took up the instrument again, sure to let her see how annoyed he was, strummed twice, found his chord and began. She turned back to the front.

  As long as Haz kept his mouth—in this case his mind—shut he was an okay kid. The rest of the time he was just a pain.

  Soon the soothing strings filled the air once more. High overhead thin, wispy clouds had appeared, way up in the pale blue sky. She shut her eyes as they flitted across the face of the sun, their fleeting shadows darkening and lightening the red glare beaming through her closed lids.

  Haz did play well.

  Not only that she was pretty sure he was trying to impress her.

  Uncurling her arms from around her knees she extended her hands behind, palms down, and leaned back onto Eriuses’ hips, keeping her feet flat against his swaying shoulders, palms on his mighty back, face aimed directly at the soothing heat of the sun.

  Such a wonderful moment.

  Reverie restored.

  Yes, Haz did play beautifully, she thought, losing herself in the music. It began to take her away.

  He was a nice boy. Just not a boy for her.

  And as she thought this, for a funny little instant she could swear she heard Erius smile.

  CHAPTER 25: RETURN TO ANITRA

  They’d been back in the Anitran system a while. How long Zac did not know, nor did he ask. It felt like years. Like a lifetime; like everything they’d done until that moment was in fact part of some other time, some other life. Now he was home, yet
it didn’t feel like a homecoming.

  It felt like the worst feeling he’d ever had.

  He stared at the view out the domed screen from the bridge of the Reaver. They were back, but had not yet returned. Had not yet announced themselves. Anitra hung in the distance, floating in the black of space, blind to their presence, one side illuminated in daylight, the other a crescent of darkness, flecked with the lights of civilization. Emotionally it was a terrible time. Zac was overwrought. The others were stressed. And Willet … Willet would hardly speak to anyone. Zac didn’t blame him. The events of their escape …

  Nani was right in snatching them away as she had, though since their return she’d beaten herself up mercilessly. Like Willet she was inconsolable, and the two of them hardly spoke, especially to each other. As well Willet was angry with Zac, though Zac could tell he realized that was, to a degree, irrational. Zac was also right in his split-second decision, to not go after Satori, and Willet knew that. It would’ve led to nothing. Had either of them reached her they would never have gotten her out alive. And Nani could never have waited. Nani barely got them out in one piece as it was.

  Sitting there enveloped in the quiet of the bridge second-guessing only drove the pain deeper. Zac could think of other things they might’ve done, other ways they might’ve played it, but in the end none of that mattered. What was done was done. They got away. Now they were back, less two of their number.

  The agony of the loss of Jess tore at his heart.

  Steadily he focused on his breathing.

  Willet wanted to return. Wanted to be taken and left on Earth so he could fight his way to his true love and to hell with everyone else. The idea was absurd, of course, and very unlike Willet, but they were all under great strain. Bianca, in those darkest moments, actually rose to lead, convincing Willet to ease the persecution, of both himself and others. Based on all Satori knew in that moment she’d done what was right and, as Bianca insisted, saved an entire world. Anitra was safe thanks to Satori and Willet should not begrudge her that sacrifice.

  Then there was the broken Icon. Even now Nani was off in one of the science rooms studying it, had been for some time, trying to see what she could do. At first glance the prospects did not look good, and Zac had to contain himself at the possibility that, in the end, they wouldn’t be able to find her. He wanted so badly for it to be salvaged; for Nani to find a way to make it work so he could twist it and use it and go rushing after Jessica wherever she’d gone.

  Waiting for that moment, now, alone on the bridge, he was barely able to sit still. Part of him wanted to be beside Nani and hover over her while she worked, ask questions, see and hear what she knew the instant she knew it. The greater part of him knew that was a bad idea. So he waited, consumed with the agony of not knowing, the passage of time killing him.

  The ship was deathly quiet.

  Impatiently he rose and walked a circle around the small space. He’d cleaned up as much as he could but still wore the tattered remains of the dress pants he’d had on since the club. There was nothing else. He stopped and stood near the big screen, looking at the world ahead and scratching his beard. It was coming in perfectly flush, all hairs growing at the same rate. New territory; no Kazerai had gone this long ...

  Dammit!

  He almost punched a console; held himself in that same instant, acutely aware of the damage it would cause. He, of all of them, could not afford to let frustration get the better of him—and that, in its own way, only amped the frustration further. The others could at least rail in anger, throw a chair or pound the wall. In some ways Willet already had.

  Not Zac.

  Zac could never lose it. Not even for a second. Never blow off steam or even shout. Especially not aboard a starship. All he could do was seethe; careful, rage fully internalized, mindful of every fragile thing around him.

  It was unbearable.

  How did I let her go! First Jess, now Satori. The second failure restimulated the first.

  I will get them back.

  Satori was his friend. Jessica …

  Jess he longed for with such terrifying intensity, it ached so deeply … he was afraid it might cause its own slow death. Physically, a pain in his chest the likes of which he’d never felt. If he didn’t get a grip he knew it would devour him.

  The bridge door slid aside and Nani walked in, followed by Bianca. Zac’s breath caught in anticipation but he noticed at once Bianca had fresh tears in her eyes and Nani looked lost and his brief, excited turn of expression fell and the pain in his chest gripped him tighter.

  It was as he feared.

  “It’s totally inert,” Nani delivered the heartbreaking news. “It lost coherence.”

  The Icon was useless.

  “We’ll search every system,” she tried to sound confident but her voice betrayed the hopelessness of her words. “Everything is in the ancient records. All the worlds the Kel knew of back then. It had to go to one of them.”

  Zac felt like he would fall.

  Nani was just as lost. “I’m so sorry, Zac.”

  He found a seat and slumped.

  Bianca came to him. Came all the way over to where he sat and, unexpectedly, leaned and grabbed him. Like she would a child, a reassuring hug, holding his head to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and cradling him, chin resting in his hair, squeezing him full with her own emotion.

  “She’s okay,” she said quietly. A statement for him alone. “For some crazy reason I know it. She didn’t fall, she’s not in space, she’s somewhere safe and she’s ok. I just know it.

  “We’ll get our Jessica.”

  He put his arms around her and hugged her back, needing her so much right then. Her voice fell to a tearful whisper.

  “We’ll get her.”

  **

  There was no such thing as magic. Of this Jess was convinced. She recalled the truism that any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic, the idea being that, eventually, once you advanced far enough, each new mystery would be revealed, understood, and, at the end of the day, there was no magic. Only science. She was a child of that culture, one that had advanced at least far enough to realize scientific discovery bore out in the end, and no matter how fantastic something might at first appear, the inclination of the modern, discerning mind was to look for answers. Citing gods or witches or mystical forces just wasn’t an option. Not anymore. If, in the end, the mystery was found to be a god—and maybe one day man would find God—then God would be able to be explained. By science. Same with the witch, the mage. All things. There was an explanation for everything, even the most bizarre, and once that explanation was discovered, if it turned out to be bizarre, well ...

  Bizarre was the new normal.

  And so, after moving more and more things with her mind as they traveled, bigger and bigger things, Jess had begun to ponder: How was psionics actually possible? How did it really work? The theory playing at the edges of her meandering speculation—and there was plenty of time to speculate on this idle journey—was that it had to do with the manipulation of energies tied up in the fabric of space. Science already knew such energies must exist, they just hadn’t figured them out yet. Now, from what she’d directly experienced, there were ways to tap them. But what energies? What exactly were these forces? Maybe so-far-unexplained dark matter? Or even dark energy? She recalled those physics debates, how she’d often found herself fascinated, perhaps unusually so for a teenage girl, reading journals and postings, watching science and “what-if” shows on TV and digging through other cutting-edge discoveries.

  How the mind might tap such forces and direct them by pure thought was a mystery, of course—and perhaps the real question—but at the moment did not need resolution. She’d done it. She’d seen the Bok do it. Galfar did it. Even Haz had been taught the “trick”. (That came as no particular surprise, but when Haz showed her it was nevertheless mind expanding in its own way.) And so Jess knew at some level it was explai
nable, scientifically, could be quantified, and for now that was enough. It worked. Therefore it was truth.

  As Galfar said, the only thing that mattered was that it worked. What works … that is Truth.

  Still, it seemed like magic.

  the old man was bobbing along up ahead. The sun had set on yet another day and his form atop his horse was silhouetted starkly against the horizon-spanning gas giant, brilliant blue as it reflected the light of the home star. This evening it stretched high into the sky, arching all the way to the limits of vision at either side, fully half of it showing in front of them as it absolutely dominated the view. Icy rings sparkled at a sharp angle where they appeared from the midpoint of its girth, shooting straight up in a line like a white laser, flying away and high off the top edge, out into space, bending sharply to curve around the far side. Static, glistening like a freeze-frame of something spectacularly fast, the scale so massive that the actual, staggering motion of the rings could not be seen.

  Jess inhaled deeply.

  She’d been breathing deeply a lot on this world. The air was so incredibly fresh; vitalizing.

  Though they’d been riding toward the gargantuan planet for hours she could not simply take its image as part of the scenery. No matter how long she was exposed to it it failed to become “usual”. Looking at it gave her a perpetual rush, one she could not, no matter how hard she tried, get used to. It was like walking toward a live, three-dimensional sci-fi painting.

  It was incredible.

  Galfar led them to a stand of trees. He and Haz seemed unaffected by its beauty. Maybe no more than she would’ve been by her own moon. She heaved another, deeper sigh as they left the trail for the night. The terrain had gotten sparse, fewer trees and more of the rust-colored rocks. To her the rock formations and hills had begun to look like scenery out of an old Western.

  Galfar stopped and dismounted. Now that the sun was below the horizon the colors of the landscape were muted. Already the deep shadows in the stands of trees were shades of monochrome blue, absorbing the light of the “moon”. Behind her Haz got off his horse and she prepared reluctantly to slide from Erius. It had actually gotten quite comfortable atop his soft back and she’d learned to sit different ways, leaning back, leaning forward, legs off to either side, even laying, front and back. He was gentle enough she could do it. It felt a little strange at first, swaying back and forth as she lay on him looking up at the sky, worried she might roll to the side and fall, but he was so wide there was actually enough edge on which to balance. Right then, as she prepared to dismount, she thought she might even sleep on him, but as she threw her legs over and slid off, gasping at the fall—an instant of vertigo when the ground took a fraction of a second longer to hit than expected, something she still hadn’t gotten used to—she decided that would not be such a good idea. At least alert she could catch herself if she started to slip. Asleep she would roll right off and …