Witch Nebula (Starcaster Book 4) Read online

  It only gave her relatively superficial access to the Danzur thoughts, but it was enough to tell her that the aliens found the request an uncomfortable one. She’d nudged Tadrup’s mind a little harder, having already insinuated herself into it several times. There she had seen past discomfort into actual disapproval. Tadrup, she knew, intended to work against fulfilling the request. She couldn’t discern why without probing even deeper, and she hadn’t wanted to do that. She needed more time to become acquainted with the particular contours of Tadrup’s mind, the peculiar planes and curves and angles that characterized his thoughts. The better she knew those, the easier it was for her to tread among them unnoticed.

  And that was fine, because his resistance was, in itself, useful information.

  Discussing it afterward, Kira and Damien had both assumed the Danzur had something to hide. But here Tadrup was, with his good news.

  “Well, that’s . . . wonderful news, Tadrup,” Kira said, then she kicked herself. She was no diplomat and was most definitely receiving some intense on-the-job training. But she’d done enough of the verbal and mental sparring that constituted diplomacy to know overt expressions of pleasure or disapproval were to be avoided. Unless such reactions were intended to be used to achieve some particular effect, the correct response would have been a polite but utterly neutral thank you, backed up with a bland smile. To allow an honest reaction was to give the Danzur a free view inside Kira’s mind.

  “The Tribunal gave your request close consideration and determined that the disclosure was in both our best interests as our negotiations proceed.”

  While Tadrup had been speaking, Kira had turned to look out the excessive viewport. At the same time, she extended a wisp of thought and brushed it through the Danzur’s mind. She sensed some misgivings, but—

  More. There was an agenda deeper than this—of course, because as Kira had learned, no matter how deep a hidden agenda may be, there was always one even deeper. In order to discern what this mysterious agenda might be, though, she’d have to probe harder. That was something she could do while remaining undetected, but only by expending obvious effort.

  She turned back. “You must extend our sincere appreciation to your Tribunal.”

  “I will happily do so,” Tadrup replied. As he said it, he spit a dollop of saliva that splatted on the carpeted floor. Kira resisted a smile. The cultured tone of the Danzur was purely a product of the translator. Their actual speech seemed to consist mostly of guttural grunts, harsh growls, and the occasional menacing hiss. All of it tended to come out wet and sloppy—one of the most comically jarring things Kira had ever seen.

  Tadrup gestured at her terminal. “You should find the response to your inquiry is already available, in fact.”

  Kira crossed to the terminal to check for incoming documents and indeed found a new one. She opened and read it. It didn’t take long.

  “Your sole export to the Nyctus is . . . a drug?”

  “No, it’s a beverage, called krol.”

  “It says here that krol has psychotropic effects,” Kira said.

  “It does have certain medicinal properties, yes. They seem to be greatly favored by the Nyctus.” He held two hand-paw palms up for a moment, the Danzur version of a shrug. “We find it induces a mild euphoria but otherwise has little effect.” Tadrup bared his teeth in an intimidating way—a smile, apparently. It seemed, Kira thought, that everything the Danzur said or did appeared, to humans, as exactly the opposite of what was intended.

  Not for the first time, Kira reflected that it was a good thing translators existed. If they hadn’t, she might see Tadrup as snarling, growling, and threatening to bite her instead of engaging in a calm discussion.

  “Personally, I think krol tastes like—” He paused. “I’ve heard you use a word that seems appropriate here. I think it tastes like crap.”

  “A psychotropic drink? That’s all the Danzur trade with the Nyctus?” Damien asked.

  Kira offered him a small shrug. “That’s what they say. This drink, krol, is—” She stopped and read the screen. “Eagerly sought for acquisition by the Nyctus, to use their words. They generally receive certain agricultural products and types of ore in exchange.” She looked back at Damien. “Again, that’s what they say.”

  Damien shifted in his seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. They were aboard the Venture, the one place where they knew they could speak without worry of someone eavesdropping. “So do you have any reason to think they’re lying?”

  Kira sniffed. “Of course they’re lying. Isn’t that all diplomacy is? Telling lies and hoping they’re better lies than your opposition’s?”

  “Wow. You’ve been doing this for, what, a few weeks? It took me at least a year or two to become that cynical about it all,” Damien said, grinning.

  Kira grinned back. She had to grudgingly admit that, for a civilian and a diplomat, Damien was affable—which was necessary for him to be a successful diplomat. She’d expected to be working with some hidebound bureaucrat—a human version of a Danzur, basically—but he was nothing like that.

  He reminded her of Thorn in many ways—if Thorn was less mercurial and more tactful, that is.

  “I’ve been in the ON long enough to recognize bullshit when I see it,” she said.

  Damien laughed, but it trailed off and he turned serious again. “So, this belief they’re lying—is that based on your, uh, unique talents?”

  “It’s okay, you can use the word Starcaster. Anyway, to answer your question—yes, or kind of, at least. When I was speaking to him, I could tell there were things there that I wasn’t seeing. It’s like”—Kira paused, thinking of analogy— “you see a hole. All you can tell is that it’s a hole. You aren’t close enough to see how deep it is, but somehow you know it’s deep, even without checking it out.”

  Damien considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, I get it. And of course, in negotiations like this, there are always wheels within wheels.”

  “Wheels within wheels?”

  “An old diplomatic corps saying. Plans within plans. Agendas hidden inside other agendas.”

  Kira leaned back, stretching minor aches from too much sitting. “Okay, yeah. That’s another of those cynical things I’ve learned about all of this. Anyway, without probing more vigorously into Tadrup’s mind, I can’t really say much more. And he puts up such a rigid façade that it even closes around his thoughts. I can almost certainly penetrate it, but it takes some effort and might be evident if I do it to his face. Bottom line—I probably could dig into what’s going on, but the Danzur might detect it.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want to show that card—your abilities. At least not yet. There might come a time when it will be advantageous, but right now it would just set us back,” Damien replied.

  Kira stood and glanced around the compartment, with its surprisingly plush furnishings. The Venture was, by ON standards, almost luxurious. This compartment was actually a common room, a block of space given over to nothing but the leisure of the crew. Of course, she was a courier sloop, not a warship. She’d been built to be nimble and fast, while fulfilling a range of missions, including diplomatic envoys. That meant she was also barely armed, equipped with only a single missile tube and a pair of point-defense turrets.

  She took a moment to collect her thoughts. Damien’s comment about showing her abilities had tweaked her. Why?

  “Kira? Is something—?”

  She held up a hand. “Just give me a second.”

  Her hole analogy had been apt, but it also made her realize she’d been concentrating on the hole—and ignoring the area around it.

  She made herself reconsider her brief encounter with Tadrup’s thoughts, but she ignored all the implied hidden motives and focused instead on the surrounding thoughts.

  Tadrup had been annoyed about . . . something. Something specific—

  “He lost something,” Kira said.

  Damien gave her a puzzled look. “Who lost some
thing?”

  Kira turned back. “Tadrup. He lost . . . whatever the Danzur use for currency, he lost a bunch of it. A business deal gone bad.” She gave a slow nod. “It was right there in front of me, and I was too busy focusing on the hidden, scheming stuff.”

  Damien’s look didn’t change. “Okay. That’s too bad, I guess, but what does that have to do with these negotiations?”

  “Whatever that deal was, he blames us for it falling apart.”

  3

  Thorn found himself immersed in the dream again.

  It started the same way it always did. He was sitting in the co-pilot’s slot aboard the Gyrfalcon. Trixie was there, thanking him for bringing her back from oblivion. The virus Brid and Dart had injected into her had effectively scrubbed her identity away, but she was restored—almost. He rolled his eyes at the effusive, bubbly praise which, with dream logic, now had Trixie’s voice coming out of Mol’s mouth.

  Thorn shook his head. “It was nothing, really.”

  Mol’s face immediately darkened, and Trixie’s tone changed to her new, melancholy dreariness. “You’re right. It was nothing. Prove yourself, Thorn. Prove how good you really are. Bring your daughter back. Do that and prove you really are as good as you think you are, Mister Hero.”

  Thorn gaped at the abrupt change, adulation giving way to suspicious contempt. He started to think, isn’t this what I wanted? To not be a hero anymore?

  He opened his mouth to agree, or to protest that he really was as good as people thought he was? He’d moved a whole fleet, after all. He’d saved Code Gauntlet from the enormous Nyctus impactor. Who else could have done that?

  He just didn’t want to be lauded for it. It was enough for him to know—

  Before he could say anything, Mol and the Gyrfalcon vanished. Thorn found himself drifting through space—hard vacuum and no-g. He felt no discomfort, though, aside from a mild, pervasive chill. It wasn’t too different from an open witchport. But this time, there was no witchport, because there was no ship. It was just him, Thorn Stellers, drifting between the stars.

  For a while, he was content. But there was something important. Something he needed to do.

  Thorn had his talisman in hand, the battered old storybook that gave him an anchor, a link back to a time when there’d been no war, no ships, no Starcasting. It gave him a baseline against which to measure everything else he did. And now he remembered what he needed to do. It was, measured against his talisman, something massive. It was the thing Trixie had coldly challenged him to do.

  Thorn would bring his daughter back.

  She’d died, of course, on Nebo, when the squids bombarded the planet with KEWs. Every Starcaster had experienced her death, and vividly, through a massed psychic event still referred to as the Vision. But Trixie had been dead, and he’d brought her back. He’d even told Kira that he could bring their daughter back to them.

  Now here, among the stars, it was time.

  Thorn hurled his awareness into the void, an expanding bubble of consciousness that raced away from him at the speed of thought. His perception embraced the incandescent fury of stars, the gentle drift of dust and gas, and everything in between. In this version of reality, his daughter was dead. That was a truth. But it wasn’t Thorn’s truth. His truth was what he made it. His universe was the one he shaped around himself.

  So, like a potter with clay upon a wheel, he began to shape and nudge creation. He drew power from the infinite reservoir of the ether, the place where magic lived. It was a task both delicate and monumental, altering all of reality to bring back into existence one little girl.

  He paused, frowning. It wasn’t enough. This wasn’t like bringing Trixie back from extinction, because she was an AI. For despite all, she was a thing. Incredibly lifelike, but ultimately lifeless. Nor was this like changing the way an Alcubierre drive worked, or rebooting the universe to one where he could move fleets with his thoughts. All of those things were just matter and energy. None of them were alive.

  But his daughter wasn’t just matter and energy. She had thoughts. Dreams. Things she liked and disliked, for no reason more complex than because she did. Things she had come to—or had started to—believe, others that she disbelieved. She’d begun to craft values for herself, things that would come to inform and shape her life.

  Some might say she had a soul—whatever a soul was. It might just be a name for the totality of who and what a person was. It might be something more, the actual spark of life that turned matter and energy into a living, vital being. Thorn didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do.

  Thorn reached out across the gulfs between the stars. He swept up handfuls of elementary particles, of the emanations of stars, of actual star dust itself. These were the building blocks, the things from which all other things were derived. When he’d gathered a vast cloud of this stuff of creation around him, he reached out again, this time for the savaged ruins of the planet called Nebo.

  There. A scorched, blasted surface, bedrock scoured bare by the fury of fire and shockwaves. He remembered how he had seen it from the Hecate’s orbit, pocked with massive impact craters, some of them still glowing. But he also remembered how it appeared in the Vision, verdant and pastoral. The kind of place where a little girl should be able to grow up and grow old.

  He focused now on the girl herself, in those gentle, innocent moments before the world literally ended.

  His daughter.

  Thorn began to knead the stardust and other things he’d drawn to himself, pushing creation into a new truth. The only truth. His truth.

  Substance took form. Form evolved, becoming identity. From nothing, Thorn built everything that was, and would be, the person known as—

  Morgan. Her name was Morgan—

  Daddy?

  Like him, she drifted among the stars. Otherwise, she was exactly how he remembered her from the Vision. She was whole. She had always been whole. That was the truth, the only one that mattered.

  He smiled at her across the Void. I’m here, Morgan, he said. I’m here. Daddy’s here.

  Daddy, I can’t see you!

  That’s okay. I’m right here. We’ll be together soon.

  It was working. He was bringing her back. He would make her whole again and, in the process, make himself whole. Make Kira whole.

  Thorn grinned as bright as a thousand stars—

  But it faded, like the cooling residue of a supernova.

  As he shaped and chipped and carved reality, smoothing it toward the final shape he sought, he hesitated. Morgan was a Starcaster, because of course she was. How could she not be, considering who her parents were?

  Daddy, where are you?

  I’m here, Morgan. I’ll always be here.

  But I can’t see you! I can’t find you!

  We’ll be together very soon, I promise.

  A Starcaster, and a powerful one. Her death had resonated through the ether, propagating across it in a wave of anguish and terror. A powerful ’caster. As powerful as he was. A Conduit, like him, and only like him. There were no other Conduits, not so far. She could accomplish great things, monumental things, with her powers—

  But.

  But she was just a little girl. And that was probably why the squids had killed her. They’d somehow found out about her and knew they had to strike before she got her Starcasting feet under her. Even then, untrained and unaware what magic really was, she’d managed to outright stop the Nyctus KEW strikes on Nebo. For a time, at least. Grown into a full understanding of her power, she could prove decisive in the war. The squids couldn’t let that happen. So, they’d killed an entire planet, all to kill a little girl before she ever became anything more.

  Images erupted from Thorn’s memory and flashed through his mind. Some were fragmentary, like still photographs, some like bursts of video. After he’d been taken off Cotswold and placed into the care of a bureaucracy never designed to handle literally tens of thousands of orphans at a time, he’d s
kipped and bounced from one place to another. Every time, his uncontrolled manifestations of magical power had mired him in trouble. He started fires. He caused small floods. He caused things to fling themselves across rooms. Foster parents and orphanage staff, at first suspicious, reacted with ever-mounting fear.

  Thorn would be thrown out of one place, then shuffled to another, often on a different planet. Sometimes he just ran away. Twice he found himself alone on the cold, neon streets of a vast and unfamiliar city. Sometimes he was beaten.

  Once, he’d been seized and taken away by dour police in the middle of the night. He later learned that a scheme was starting to coalesce, one that would see Thorn die under apparently accidental circumstances.

  It was the Twenty-Fourth Century, and he’d almost been the victim of a literal witch hunt.

  And all of it had eventually led him to where Kira had found him, expecting to end his days mucking toxic sludge under cold, leaden skies.

  But it would be worse for Morgan. Magic wasn’t something stuck in the transition between superstitious fantasy and hard reality anymore. Magic was well known. It might still be poorly understood, but its potential was clear. Thorn had demonstrated it himself, many times.

  Morgan would be seen not as a freak of nature, to be feared and shunned and despised.

  She’d be seen as a weapon.

  Morgan didn’t deserve that. Morgan deserved a chance to be a little girl, to grow up, to lead a normal life.

  Daddy—!

  Almost, Morgan. Just a little bit longer.

  Thorn began to reshape part of this new truth, nudging it from where Morgan’s inherent nature was taking it, diverting it somewhere else. He would remake her, but not as a Starcaster. Not only would he bring her back without any access to magic, but he would also take away any desire to be a ’caster. He would ensure she would live a long and happy life, because wasn’t that a father’s ultimate duty to his children?