Cosmic Witch

Book summary

In "Cosmic Witch," Earth's witches, once hidden, now lead efforts to combat the climate crisis, resulting in thriving space colonies and restored natural environments. Centuries later, Tia, a witch grappling with personal demons on board The Merlin, senses trouble when her organization orders the dismantling of crucial environmental tools from young colonies. As she delves into the mission's true intent with her crew, a deep conspiracy unravels, challenging everything they know.

Excerpt from Cosmic Witch

Tia clutched her prosthetic arm in her other hand, its normally polished finish battered and caked with mud. The damage to its intricate workings was clearly extensive, even in the soft glow of The Merlin’s evening light settings. She had no hope whatsoever of fixing it on her own.

Lannah’s going to kill me. She’s going to ritually sacrifice me to the engineering gods for this mess and not even think twice about it.

Leaning against the smooth wall of the ship’s main corridor, prickles splintered through Tia’s muscles, culminating at the stump of her left elbow. A shiny metal plate covered the area, protecting her nerve endings and allowing her prosthetic to fit snugly in place. When it was still attached, that was.

Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. She’d pushed her magic too far. Much too far. The look on Drake’s – on the captain’s – face as he'd watched cut her to the core. Horror, pure and simple.

‘Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Violating the terms of my position in one huge sweep,’ she muttered aloud. The terms were simple: avoid using her full power whenever possible or get the boot. Until now, she'd done so. It'd been easy, in fact, as though unintentional, the spellwork etched on her prosthetic (allowing it to function just like her organic arm) had the side effect of restricting her magic. And while the restriction was a royal pain in the arse most of the time, she couldn't deny it was useful to keep herself in check.

Yet having magic fill her every cell again and releasing it freely – it'd felt so good. That scared her the most. How satisfying the taste of her own raw power was. Even standing alone with nothing but the dimly lit walls around her, the rush echoed in her veins. There was also the undeniable truth that it'd worked. The team had come out safe, no injuries in sight. Unless she counted her own current predicament, which wasn't so much an injury as the delayed wrath of her prosthetic engineer for wrecking such a masterpiece.

Shuffling to the nearest control panel, Tia checked the time. Two minutes past nine, nearly half an hour since the ground team had returned. That settled it. She couldn't delay any longer; she had to break the news.

Heading for the engineer's workshop, she paused outside the door. Tucking the prosthetic under her arm, she wiped a bead of sweat from her brow before waving her hand over the door's sensor. It slid open with a hiss. Immediately, the upbeat rhythm of a King P song boomed out and knocked her backwards; the long-dead musician’s lyrics about love and feverishness thrashed around in her brain. Typical Lannah, hardly a day went by where she wasn’t listening to one of his albums. At least it wasn’t some dreary ballad this time.

'Don't speak. Don't even mumble about it, I already know. Drake called me on the comm the moment you all came back onboard,' Lannah said, turning from her workstation to glare at Tia. Taking a second to adjust her wrist supports, she then made a quick motion in the air with her fingers, and instantly the music softened.

Tia chewed the inside of her cheek, quenching down the familiar pang of envy that rose inside her. If she’d been born a Zero One, she'd be able to use Tsa marks too, and thus losing focus or going overboard wouldn't be an issue. But she hadn’t. She was a plain witch gene Zero, like the majority of witches aboard The Merlin – and in the colony system, in fact. Though none of them appeared to have any trouble.

'Come on, get on the table and let me have a look at it,' Lannah continued crisply, ushering Tia over to the operating table in the centre of the workshop and switching on the intense overhead lamp next to the tool caddy.

Nervously, Tia placed the metal arm down. It'd been ripped from her body as she'd raised it to block an offensive spell. Little had her attacker known that the subsequent shockwave she let out would flatten the colony's witches altogether and send their guards fleeing.

'The attachment is completely crushed! What in the universe did you—'

'It wasn't me. One of Dale Run's guards accidentally stomped on it when they were doing a runner. The, er, broken wrist joint might be my fault, though. I stepped on it myself when Drake gave the order to retreat,' Tia admitted, nodding to the hand dangling on by a few thin wires.

Lannah groaned and pulled her blonde hair up into a ponytail. ‘Fine, fine. I’d better set to it, then.’

The first hour passed in silence as the young engineer reshaped the prosthetic's components using a compilation of magic and precise equipment. Every so often, she'd clip a wire to the special plate connected to Tia's arm nerves to check each individual component's compatibility. Each time, a searing pain shot through Tia's left side along with the taste of rust, and the stronger the compatibility, the more intense the sensation.

Tia wanted to do something to take her mind off it, but interrupting Lannah's thought process when she was in a bad mood was asking for trouble. Her only option was to hold still and hope the repairs would soon be over.

Yet gradually, the engineer's enthusiasm for her work broke through, and she began uttering comments about her handiwork. Now talking might be an option.

‘You always wear the same expression when you fix me up. Half-annoyed but half-pleased,' Tia said through clenched teeth as her arm flinched in response to yet another component test. It looked like the last part. The next step would be to re-etch the Tsa marks on the prosthetic's outer plating, then attach the entire lot to her stump – never a pleasant experience. Such a jolt sent her reeling, and she'd passed out several times before.

Lannah picked up her thin etching tool and heated it over a green-flamed burner on a stand unsettlingly close to Tia's head. The engineer's ponytail had fallen into a mess of long strands that fell about her face, and shadows hung under her eyes.

Tia flicked her gaze down to the scuffs and tears on her top and cargo trousers. She doubted she looked much better.

‘That’s because you're particularly hard to repair. But I do enjoy the challenge, even if my body doesn’t,’ Lannah said archly, nodding to each of her joints. Though only the engineer’s wrist supports were visible, Tia spotted faint outlines of more supportive gear under Lannah’s clothes, a sign that the aches caused by her hypermobility were especially prevalent that day. ‘Do you have any idea how many extra enchantments I have to put on your arm just so it can keep up with your antics?’ She brushed a few metal filings off her otherwise immaculate lab coat with her free hand. ‘Last month you broke the fingers in combat training, the month before you melted half the outer plating, and I can't even remember what you did prior to that. And today you ripped it off completely. If we were still on Earth where I had other clients, I'd never get any of their stuff done.’

‘I didn’t do it voluntarily, it got caught when I was fighting,' Tia protested, making a fist with her organic hand.

'Yes, about that. I'm not entirely sure how things escalated that far in such a short amount of time. As far as I was aware, the idea was for the ground team to remove Dale Run's Tek as agreed. What went wrong, exactly?'

Tia shrugged. What had gone wrong? Drake said CW's instructions were clear and that Dale Run received notice well in advance that it was time for their Tek to be removed. Yet when the ground team showed up to do the work, they were treated like criminals.

A hiss followed by a sharp, sulphurous tang rose to her nose as Lannah began etching. Most of the Tsa marks she worked in were simple do-overs where they’d been partially worn away from use, but Tia noticed her adding a few new ones, too. She raised an eyebrow. 'You're putting more on?'

'No. Some of the old marks are so out of date I haven't bothered reworking them. These are new combinations I came up with to make the arm's functions even smoother, so in fact the amount hasn't changed. I try not to add more unless I need to; I know it's not good for you to have your magic restricted.' She set down the etching tool and clipped all the prosthetic's parts together. 'Now, are you ready?'

Tia sucked in a breath through her teeth. 'Sure, go ah—OUCH!' Before she'd even finished, Lannah had thrust the wires into her metal plate and twisted the arm into place with a neat click, causing white hot shards of agony to skitter through Tia’s entire body.

'Jeez, Lannah! A little warning!'

'I did warn you. You gave the okay, so I proceeded,' Lannah replied primly. 'Oh, that'll be ten dessert credits, please.'

Tia bolted upright, the fact that her prosthetic felt five times more natural than before escaping her under her sheer incredulity. 'Dessert credits? As payment? But the ship's medical cover pays all the costs.'

'It might cover expenses and time, but it doesn't cover personal loss. Designing this arm was probably the highlight of my career so far, and you practically destroyed it. And I'm not just talking about what happened tonight. You've been neglecting the maintenance routine I painstakingly laid out for you. Another month or so, and it would have been so caked in grime that it'd be out of action anyway.'

'But… but… we're best friends.'

'All the more reason to listen to me. Now, hand them over.'

'Gah.' Hopping off the table, Tia moved to the small touch-screen module to the side of Lannah's desk and input her password ready to transfer her credits to the engineer's account. Hitting confirm, she spun back around and folded her arms. 'Done.'

'Wonderful. How does it feel?'

'Losing out on Terran's dessert specials after I worked so hard to save for them? Oh, great. Fantastic.'

'Tia, stop being cocky. How is your arm functioning?'

Tia stuck out her tongue. 'Spoilsport.' Raising both arms to compare, she performed a series of simple movements. The new Tsas must have been for lightness as well as dexterity, as the metal's weight barely registered at all. 'It's perfect, as always. Thank you, Lannah.'

Lannah smiled, massaging her shoulders. 'You're welcome. Now, you didn't answer my question earlier. What happened on the colony? How did you end up fighting?'

'Honestly, I'm not sure. We went down and introduced ourselves, saying we were there on behalf of Cosmic Witch. They took us to their Tek straight away, but as soon as we started dismantling it, the guards and a team of witches were called in on the grounds that we were stealing. Drake tried to reason, but they said he was spouting nonsense and the guards drew their swords. After that, it gets a bit hazy, but I do know the witches were casting spell spears. Good ones, too – I reckon they must train in fast casting as much as we did. Well, me and the others, I mean. Seeing as you don't need to.’