by J. N. Chaney
Keeping his focus firmly on himself, Thorn once more drew power from the roiling swirl of it within him, imposed his will on it, and placed the version of reality together with a silent, formless union. In this plane made of two places, he could contain and wield more power still.
It’s time.
Magical discharge flashed from the join of his fingertips and the talisman, power like gaseous lightning leaking out of him and into the real world, endless streamers tailing away into nacreous ribbons of dancing light.
Beautiful.
He did it again.
Now power howled through Thorn, a vast lake of it held in place only by the dam of his concrete will. It shoved against his consciousness, an ever-mounting pressure trying to break free and dissipate back into its natural, ethereal state—a place of chaos and undoing. A place without form. Somehow, Thorn knew that death waited there, but he would not go. Instead, he loosed bolts and pulses from his fingers, from the dog-eared corners of the book, from the wild miasma of energy that sizzled through his bones.
He was magic. He was the talisman, and more. His teeth were so tight that he had to inhale desperately through his nose just to draw a breath. A groan escaped his lips, deep and animalistic, a sound not heard among humans since the times of earlier shamans who painted in caves.
Again. Thorn released the power, and it ran free.
He soared to a pinnacle of magical might; it poured from his eyes, from his mouth, flared from his skin in an inhuman light, and gouged chunks out of the witchport’s black foam lining in spitting fires that survived, impossibly, in the vacuum of space. Bolts of it flashed away into the black, but the power kept growing, filling a titanic capacity both welcome and terrifying.
For an exquisite instant, one that merged agony and ecstasy into a coruscating singularity of raw, incandescent experience, Thorn stood as the most powerful being in the universe. He was the universe—every atom, every particle, every wave. The magic that infused its sprawl of billions upon billions of light-years was, for this instant of time, a continuum—a single, coherent whole, with Thorn its epicenter, the focal point of some universe-spanning antenna.
Glimpses, hints, fragments of reality flashed and flickered through Thorn. Time—he could sense all of it, all the time that had ever passed, would ever pass. Stars were born, grew old, died with desolate whimpers or creation-shaking explosions. Galaxies swirled, collided, spun off into new ones. Life rose, flourished, fell again.
His awareness touched on the primordial moments after creation, then brushed against the heat-death of the universe itself, entropy’s ultimate victory. But there was even more. There were other universes, alternate, parallel, a labyrinthine jumble of them, a tangle of infinite complexity, of infinite scope—
It was too much. This was bordering on godhood, a state of existence the mortal frame and mind were never meant to contain.
Thorn screamed, and the universe screamed back.
He launched his awareness through the ether, encompassing myriad specks of matter and organized energy—the fleet, a dim and distant part of him thought.
The fleet.
Ships. People.
An anchor, his last tether against apotheosis and whatever would come next.
Thorn reached across the light-years, grabbed creation, and folded it like a blanket. It was a trivial thing, consuming barely a fraction of the power he commanded. He merged that place and this one, making them one, then separating them again, returning them each to its naturally flat, three-dimensional existence.
But he still commanded power. Oceans of it. He still was the universe—
And it was killing him.
Thorn couldn’t just let the power drain away, because more would rush in to fill the void. That was how the universe worked. But the flood of power battered against his psyche like a storm surge, eroding away who and what Thorn Stellers was. If he didn’t make it stop, he would cease to exist altogether. He would be something made of magic—maybe a god, maybe just a dust mote forever lost among the thundering gales of a hurricane. Either way, he would no longer be human, or even alive.
Thorn desperately clung to that nebulous thing he called himself, an amalgam of thought and memory, of experience and belief, of hope and desire, of needs, of dreams. He particularly focused on one aspect of it, the one fueled by the psychic impressions indelibly stamped into his talisman—that night when his life was yanked off one path and shoved onto another, when fire fell from the sky.
A dazzling glare. Thunderous shockwaves. Blasts of furnace-hot wind. Fire. Smoke. Pain. Terror.
Death.
He was Thorn Stellers, a frightened boy, an outcast young man—
A Starcaster. And Starcasters could only wield so much power before it overwhelmed and ended them.
This much power.
This much.
This—
Thorn slumped back in the witchport. The actuators for the domed enclosure sensed his sudden change of posture and immediately sealed and pressurized the cramped little space.
Thorn opened his eyes.
Alive.
He was, though hurt, as was the witchport itself. Both were splotched with scorched burn scars, and ragged, frostbitten patches. Water sluiced around Thorn’s feet. Strange, acrid smells hung in the air—sulphur, hot metal, something like lavender, wood-smoke, sweat, and a hint of decay, as though a decomposing corpse sat somewhere upwind. His uniform had been torn, chunks of it simply missing. He’d lost a boot and couldn’t find it.
Most bizarre, one of his socks had been turned inside out—
No. Wait. He’d put it on that way this morning.
For some reason, the sight of his wrong-way-around sock made Thorn smile, then laugh. A moment ago, he’d stood astride the universe itself, poised on the brink of godhood. Now, he wore one sock inside out.
“Crash team.” Tanner’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Get Stellers, get him—”
“Sir?” Thorn said, his voice still bubbling with mirth. “Sir . . . Stellers here. I’m . . . in one piece. I’ll be damned.”
Tanner’s reply was flat and direct. “Glad to hear it, Lieutenant, since you’re our ride back home.”
Behind Thorn, thumps and clatters rose as the medical crash team, stationed just outside the witchport, began opening it up to retrieve him. He just kept laughing, though.
A reversed sock, and Tanner’s unchanged gruffness.
Guess godhood will have to wait.
21
The crash team rushed Thorn to the infirmary, but he wasn’t going to be there for long, it seemed. Doctor Al-Nouri gave him a quick scan. Tanner arrived in the middle of it.
“What’s the verdict, doc?” he asked.
Al-Nouri crossed her arms and sniffed at a monitor. “I’m treating him for some minor burns, and, believe it or not, minor frostbite, as well. Is that a leaf stuck to your elbow? Huh.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Well, he otherwise checks out as completely normal, except for—um, you’ll see.”
Tanner gave her a puzzled look, then turned to Thorn. “What the hell happened in there, Stellers?”
Thorn frowned. “Sir?”
Al-Nouri moved to stand beside Tanner, both of them staring at him. “You see it, don’t you, Captain?” she said. “It’s the damnedest thing.”
Tanner nodded. “It is that.”
Thorn felt the start of a scowl. “All due respect, sir, ma’am, but what the hell?”
Al-Nouri tapped at a monitor, then swung it around. She’d activated its camera, and projected the image onto it. Thorn found himself looking at—
Himself.
He had to stare for a moment to get a grip on what he was seeing.
He was—older.
Not much older, but enough to be noticeable. He seemed to now be in his late twenties, maybe even pushing thirty.
“Shit.”
“You’ve been in here often enough—not always alive, I might add—that I’ve got some pretty
baseline references to work with,” Al-Nouri said. “Compared to them, all of your current stats are those of a somewhat older man. Your biochemistry has . . . aged, Lieutenant, which means you have, too.”
“He’s actually gotten older?” Tanner asked.
“Yes. Of course he has. Sometimes he’s dead, sometimes he’s younger, sometimes he’s older—” Al-Nouri shrugged. “I mean, that might as well all happen, sure.”
Thorn stared at Tanner, fascinated. He’d thought the Captain to be endlessly unflappable. This was probably the closest he’d ever seen the man come to being dumbfounded.
“Stellers, did you expect this to happen?” Tanner asked.
Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, really. But this sure as hell wasn’t on the list.”
“Can you undo it? Wind the clock back?”
Thorn considered it. Maybe? He could rewrite reality again, to put his age back the way it was.
Possibly.
But what would be the consequences of that? For that matter, what would be the ripple effects of what he’d already done? He could see, now, that this was a supernatural rabbit-hole, one down which he could chase some particular version of existence, but never quite reaching it because his own pursuit kept changing it.
“I don’t know, sir. I really don’t.” Thorn gaped at his own image a moment longer, then turned to Tanner. “Sir, I haven’t even heard if it worked, if the Task Force moved to where it was supposed to go. I’m assuming from the fact that you and Admiral Scoville are here, I must have got us close.” He considered another, less palatable option. “Or I didn’t move us anywhere at all.”
“Astute observation, Stellers—you’ve discerned that you’re not in shit from the fact that you’re not in shit,” Tanner said. “According to Wyant, you dropped us into the edge of the system, almost exactly where you left it with the Gyrfalcon when you magicked your way back to friendly space.”
“It must have functioned as some kind of anchor,” Thorn mused.
“Like you were picking things up where you left them off, yes, the thought had occurred. Anyway, the Task Force is reorienting itself onto a reverse course, back toward the squid world. We anticipate planetfall in eight hours.” He took one more look at Stellers, then shook his head. “I have to get back to the bridge. When you’re done here, your priority is resting back up, so you can take us back home.”
Tanner glanced at Al-Nouri. Thorn didn’t have to Join to know what they were thinking.
“If it’s going to cost me a few more years of my life, then I’ll—disregard, sir. Need a moment to process the possibilities,” Thorn said.
Tanner stared for a moment, then turned and walked away, mulling a universe in which star travel was at the mercy of a single man, who was being consumed by the very act of magic they needed to win. He called back over his shoulder just before he reached the door.
“Let’s hope that’s the most it costs you, Stellers. I don’t like losing people to begin with, and I’ll be damned if I lose a crew member to old age.”
Osborne, the Hecate’s Tactical Officer, ran a hand over his buzz cut red hair. “That cannot be the sum total of the squid defenses,” he said, staring hard at the viewscreen.
Tanner checked the status board built into his command chair. “You’re not the only one asking that question, Tac O. But the Star Tiger has confirmed these data. What you see is what you get.”
Thorn, jammed once more into the cramped jump seat while a work crew raced to repair the witchport, peered at Tanner’s display. Admiral Scoville had sent literally that message from the Star Tiger, his flagship—All ships, what you see is what you get. A single glance at the main display showed that what they got was a token force at best, a handful of Nyctus capital and light ships, and about another dozen planetary defense cutters—basically, little more than fighters. And that was it. Task Force Trebuchet had them outgunned by—
Thorn wasn’t even sure how much. Lots.
Tanner turned to him. “Well, Stellers? Is this really what we got? Or are the squids being magical and hiding a whole fleet from us?”
Thorn had consulted with the other Starcasters across the Task Force, on a comm channel dedicated to them. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing else out there, sir. So either there really is nothing else out there, or the squids have Shaded and hidden things so well that we’re just incapable of finding them.”
“And which is more likely?” Tanner asked.
Thorn looked at the viewscreen, at the tiny cluster of red icons staring down a far larger collection of blue ones. “The squids might be able to Shade a single ship, or even a few, and keep them pretty much invisible. But a whole squadron would be hard, and an entire fleet, well, pretty much impossible. There are just too many moving parts.”
Tanner laced his fingers together in his lap. “You were able to move an entire fleet hundreds of light years, Stellers. Could you likewise Shade, or hide, this whole fleet as well? Make it utterly invisible to the squids?”
Thorn was about to say no, because he was still thinking in limited terms.
But.
But what if there was the Nyctus equivalent of him out there somewhere, riding a pillar of magic toward deification? With that much power, Shading a fleet would be a trivial thing.
He wouldn’t be able to do it for long, though, before the power overwhelmed him, and either consumed him utterly, or changed him into something else entirely. Being a husk was one risk, but becoming something completely unknown, and dangerous to his own people was a possible outcome he could not entertain, not at any cost.
“Yes, I could have, sir,” he finally said. “But I don’t how long I could before it became the last thing I’d ever do.” He worked through the options, settling on something firm. “It might be possible to find out, though.”
“How?”
“There’s a reason we did the deception thing we did, sir. We didn’t tell anyone except the Task Force Captains what the real plan was, to minimize the number of possible leaks. That included disinformation on a grand scale. We bluffed any squid trying to Join with us by salting the fleet with false plans. Sherman’s Star was the false landing, and it seems to have worked.”
“I understand that, Stellers—”
“I’m going somewhere with this, sir. If I reach out and Join with some squids aboard the ships we know are out there, then unless they’ve somehow managed to keep their own fleet secret from itself, those squids will know about it.”
“Okay. And?”
“And, it means I have to Join with squids. If there’s a powerful enough shaman among them, we might end up fighting for control of each other.”
Tanner curled his lips. “So if there is, and the squiddy bastard wins, I’ve got a rogue Starcaster sitting beside me, on my bridge.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So don’t let him win the fight, Stellers.”
Thorn smiled. “Not gonna happen, sir.”
Thorn extracted the old story book, pushed his awareness into it, then used it like a springboard to launch his perception into the void. Compared to moving a ship, Joining was child’s play. The bridge of the Hecate shimmered and faded into endless stars, punctuated by the glaring exhaust plumes of Task Force Trebuchet as it closed on its quarry, the hydro planet.
Thorn let his awareness keep expanding, riding a swelling bubble of magical force that danced across the darkness with a feather touch. His mind brushed against a multitude of humans—the crews of the Task Force ships—but he ignored them and pressed on through the empty blackness.
Nothing, aside from the faint, pervasive flicker of stray dust and gas particles.
He pushed further. And found a mind. Then another. And then dozens, their chattering masses filling his senses with alien babble.
He’d found the Nyctus.
And they were terrified.
He found himself immersed in a harsh, discordant clamor of fear th
at bordered on panic. He chose one squid at random and focused specifically on its thoughts.
—this cannot be happening—
Thorn yanked his awareness back from the squid, as though he’d been burned. The raw emotion had rasped against his mind, gouging open a momentary burst of pathos, a flash of sorrow over this creature’s horrified despair. It was not deception, Thorn knew. This was real. These squids were genuinely frightened, for themselves and for the multitudes of their people on the hydro world.
Thorn found another squid, the commander of a ship. He entered its mind, seeing what it saw, feeling what it felt.
What it—he—saw was a vast array of enemy ships advancing implacably toward him—an unstoppable armada that had somehow appeared in this system without any warning.
What he felt was an empty hopelessness, the bleak knowledge that he and his crew were about to die defending their people, and it wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome. But underneath it, there was something sinister. Arrogant. Even mocking, if he dug deep enough.
Thorn pulled back. Before he did, though, he felt a tendril of thought come questing after him. There was a shaman somewhere aboard these ships, and she had sensed the presence of Thorn’s psychic regard. She locked her thoughts onto his, but not as an attack.
As a kind of plea.
Do not do this. You cannot. We have waged war with a junior species as honorably as you deserve, despite your simple minds and hideous bodies.
Thorn’s resolve wavered, as disgust rippled through his mind like a worm, turning over to spread poison at the root of his soul.
Densmore’s voice rang in his mind.
Fine. We hit this planet. A world of civilians—of women and children—and then what, Stellers?
Then we hit the next one, he’d replied. And the next. And the next after that. And we keep hitting them until there’s none left.
So, genocide.
That’s what this was. Genocide.
Thorn’s resolve cracked further. He almost pulled out of the Joining to turn back to Tanner, to Scoville, to convince them not to do this thing.
