Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (26 page)

Tytamon hummed. “Then yes, let’s go see what General Pewter can show us.”

A few moments later found them standing outside the walled compound known as Little Earth. It was forty acres square, a few miles outside of Crown City, and served at the fleet’s lone outpost on the Prosperion world. Orli’s father, General Pewter, was trusted by the Queen, and so it had gone to him to command the post.

The general rose and came out from behind the desk to greet Roberto, the handshake turning to a hug. He greeted Tytamon warmly and gave Deeqa an up-and-down look that prompted him to smile. He knew a smuggler when he saw one. But she came in good company, so he shook her hand and welcomed her.

“General,” said Roberto. “We need a look at those alien ships. I’d say more, but God knows which one of the flies on the roof up there is working for some faction or another on Kurr.” He looked up to the ceiling to prove that it was true. It was. There were several flies buzzing about here and there, flown in through the open window, along with a moth in one corner and a crane fly hanging lazily from the thatch.

The general nodded and retook his seat behind the desk. Roberto watched him as he worked the controls on his console. He couldn’t help remembering having stood before this desk on numerous occasions in the past, the worst of them being the time he and Orli had been commanded to leave the planet for good by then-Captain Asad. That’s when Orli was first stationed on the base on Tinpoa, a moon around the gas giant Naotatica several planets farther out from Prosperion around the sun. So much had changed in such a short amount of time. And yet it seemed like trouble never stopped. What was wrong with people, with the universe, anyway? Was there ever going to just be peace and happiness, ever? If not for everyone, at least for someone? Anywhere?

“Here it is,” the general said. He turned from his desk monitor to the large one mounted on the wall behind his desk. “That’s the view from orbit.”

It wasn’t much to look at. It was a smear of colors, lots of yellows and oranges, a few places where the yellow crept toward green.

“I’ll zoom in closer to the top of the clouds so you can see them,” he said. “One sec.” A moment later the shifting patterns of yellow and orange on one area of the screen began expanding. Soon four lines became visible, deep red, their arrangement symmetrical, like four red spokes radiating out from a hub of yellow and orange.

“Well, Tytamon,” Roberto said, “that look like anything you saw in your fortune-telling spell?”

Tytamon shook his head. “No. Sadly it does not.”

“Well, it was worth a shot.”

“Is that as close as you can get?” Tytamon asked. “Can you not see them directly, like this …?” He muttered a few words, and there appeared in the air above the general’s desk a perfect likeness of the four alien ships, a section of the mountains visible behind them, and even the movement of the violent wind blowing sand around them and churning the clouds.

“A little,” said the general. He tapped his console and brought up the feed from Roberto’s camera, attached to the relay he’d set up on the surface. They could see dim, shadowy silhouettes in the distance, barely visible through the haze of so much blowing sand. “That’s as close as we can get under the clouds. This is better than most days, although every once in a while, it’s not so bad. I can’t get you anything else down there without another probe. And the fleet won’t clear one for me, for fear of agitating the enemy.”

“So they
are
an enemy?” Tytamon said. “It’s been determined, then?”

“They captured my daughter, so, yes, they are.”

“But has the NTA officially pronounced a state of war?”

“No.” The general did not look happy about it. He looked back at the illusion Tytamon had cast above his desk. “Can you move that around? Is that live?”

“If you mean, is it linked to a scrying spell, no, it is not. It is simply from memory of my last seeing spell. And I still can’t get inside the ship. The seeing spell simply stops working at the hull. I am certain that is why I can’t learn anything directly. It is as if I am chasing shadows of memories and time. It’s the strangest thing. But as I told our young captain here, I have invited Doctor Leopold to dinner tonight. If the two of us can’t solve it, well, then they are in serious trouble indeed.”

“What about that crazy cat lady Altin talked about?” Roberto asked. “The Z-ranked nut bag out in the woods. She helped him before.”

“Ocelot, yes. I started there,” Tytamon said. “She is the one who told me they would be lost in time. If I did not know she was so gifted in the school, I’d have to say it was that bit of information that is muddling the rest of the magic up. So, hopefully the doctor will help me break through. Perhaps these images here will help as well, somehow, even if I don’t understand how just now. And your news from earlier, Captain. All of it adds to the divining. And we must hope more than just confoundingly so.”

The general looked like he was going to ask about what news Tytamon was referring to, but the old wizard pointed to the flies buzzing around the room. The general rolled his eyes, but let the question pass unasked.

“Come to dinner tomorrow, General. This sort of information tastes better with elven wine.”

Chapter 26

O
rli drifted in the wind, gripping her Higgs prism, gasping in the heat of the rising steam. She knew she was being cooked alive. She thought about trying to get into the spacesuit she’d caught in the wind as she fell, but it was so torn apart, it would only serve as a heat trap. What she needed to do was get out of the damn steam cloud.

She tried angling herself to ride the wind up, working back the way she’d just so precipitously fallen. She immediately collided with an alien soaring past, the massive creature emerging from the dim mistiness like some phantasmal behemoth made real from a misty nightmare.

The alien billow mashed around her, carrying her along with it and striking her hard enough to make stars swim in her vision, all the worse for the pain of what was now likely two broken ribs. She tried to catch her breath as she lay pinned against it by its momentum. The indentation her body pressed into the relatively soft tissue offered her a measure of reprieve from the heat, not much, but some, in the manner, perhaps, of being removed from a bed of coals and simply hung over the flames.

She let herself be carried along and pulled the spacesuit to her. She took the utility belt off it and wound that around her waist. She extracted a combination tool from one of the pouches and opened up the knife blade. She quickly set to work cutting the helmet seal and its metal ring away from the suit itself.

When it was done, she folded the knife and put it away, then tied the sleeves and legs together respectively. Even with the huge rent down the open front, she could still maybe use the spacesuit as a sail. If so, she could get herself someplace safe, collect her wits and her bearings, and then have a look around. If she could get back to Altin, she could cut him out of the jelly and they could get the hell out of this hellhole.

Once she had a makeshift billow of her own, she started crawling up the rounded expanse of the alien upon which she’d been caught. She wondered if it could feel her like she might have felt a mosquito or a flea. Taking the example from that, she made sure she did nothing that might constitute a bite. Maybe she really could get away.

She got to the top edge of the creature’s natural parachute and found that she could walk if she set the Higgs prism appropriately. It was remarkably calm traveling with the wind as she was. The air no longer roared, even if the churning roil below was still monstrously loud. She got to her feet and set the Higgs prism just high enough that she could get traction to run. The flesh of the creature’s billow was soft, like running on a feather bed.

But run she did, and she leaped off to the side when she’d built up enough speed, turning the dial back to zero gravity as she flew free. Soon she was drifting along next to it. It was moving past her gradually, its billow more efficient in the wind than her body was.

She immediately realized she was going to drift past one of its big damned eyes, so she set right to work getting her spacesuit sail experiments under way.

She had to wrestle with it for a time trying to make it work, but eventually she found that by hooking her feet through the loops created by the tied sleeves and tied legs, she could spread her legs far enough apart to catch the wind in the scoop of the spacesuit. It wasn’t elegant, but it was effective, and with a little practice using her flattened hands as rudders and ailerons to help guide her, she was making gradual upward progress.

She didn’t know exactly what level she and Altin had been on, but she suspected that in terms of fore and aft, the alien that she’d just been stuck to had to have taken her at least two or three miles the wrong way. The one before that, the alien whose tentacles she’d bounced around in, well, where that had taken her, she had no idea.

All she could do was try to catch the opposite wind current in the level above and blow back the other way. Hopefully she could find the updraft that had, without a doubt, saved her life, and, maybe, use it to find Altin and save his.

She sailed her way up to the nearest grate, squeezing her ankles together to reduce the pull of the wind. She wasn’t just going to shoot up through it and get blasted back the other way. With the Higgs prism working as it was, she’d end up getting bounced along the surface of the damn thing back the other way and break all the rest of her ribs. And whatever else too.

She managed to slow enough and to slip up into a gap in the grate. She stopped herself, absorbing her momentum with her legs, then pulled herself through the squared opening. She peered up over the edge and searched for aliens anywhere around. She didn’t know why she bothered, since her previous captors hadn’t been too concerned with her, but she looked anyway.

Three aliens were strung out into the wind, downwind from her. They were bound to the grate by four tentacles apiece, wrapped tightly around a beam like tethered kites, and they bobbed gently as their long bodies stretched up into the dimness and steam. The wide mushroom shapes of their billows were shadowy in the distance, but the lights flickering along their bodies shaped them well enough, particularly the nearer parts of them. Each had anchored itself with the lowest portion of its body, the slender end where the puckered orifice was, angled downward and situated close to the grate. Only five or six yards of stretched tentacles kept them from touching their rumps on the grate, and they looked like three long, billow-topped reeds bending in an alien breeze.

The three of them were flashing colors back and forth, obviously communicating to one another as they lay in the wind like that, while a fourth creature, much smaller than they were, scuttled along the grate using three short tentacles attached to its leading end to pull itself along. This fourth alien was long in its own right, perhaps fifty yards or so, with skin that was milky and whitish, and which had red veins visible beneath. At the tail end of its body—which was something like a cross between a prawn and a wasp—grew a long hook, which it poked down through one of the gaps in the grate. It was thusly that it secured itself to a beam. After doing so, it fanned out a section of its abdomen, spreading the length of its body like the skirts of a crawling snail, and swung upward at a roughly forty-five-degree angle in the wind, bobbing gently in the air currents in much the same way that its much larger counterparts did.

It was a few yards closer to Orli than the larger aliens were, and as it rose and fell gently on the blowing air, it pointed itself at the nearest of them. On its head, or just above it—it was hard to say what was what with the creature—there was a puckering sphincter sort of apparatus, right above its three short tentacles. It looked rather like pursed lips about to whistle, and she decided that end must be its face.

A droplet—or at least it seemed as one compared to the size of the thing—of brown fluid formed at this puckering cervical orifice. The larger alien nearest the little one was apparently aware of this operation under way, and it curved its lower end toward the growing droplet and puckered its own orifice—the same sort of opening from which ochre jelly had been spat at Altin when he’d cast the fireball in his attempt to rescue her. That seemed like a million years ago, though she thought it couldn’t have been more than some span of minutes at best. Less than an hour certainly.

The hook-tailed alien let the droplet go, and the wind caught it and blew it right into the orifice of the larger alien. The bigger one sucked it up, and for a moment neither it nor its two large counterparts flashed any lights at all. Then its whole body began to light up again, just that alien that had imbibed the droplet. What began as a dull, mucous gray turned blue, then darker blue, then a deep purple that began to darken nearly to black. The alien became so dark it almost disappeared into the darkness around and beyond it. Its whole body went rigid, and most of its tentacles stiffened straight as morphine needles for a time. It actually lost its grip on the grate with all but two of its anchoring limbs, and the other two aliens had to catch it so that it wasn’t blown off by the wind.

These other two flashed blue and green and yellow in alternating patterns. Despite the dire nature of her predicament, Orli couldn’t help thinking they were beautiful. If she hadn’t been in fear for Altin’s life and her own, she might have watched for as long as the strange ritual went on.