Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (10 page)

“I’m working on it. But I can’t do anything until Orli is safe.”

“Ah, the priorities of youth,” cooed the older man. He nodded to himself as he said it, which made the folds of the many chins cascading down his neck spread outward like smiles intent on strangling him.

“She doesn’t have time for a lecture on priorities. I need you to find her. My divination is too weak, and there isn’t time.”

“Surely they’ll have a trial and that sort of thing first. The Earth people are not orcs.”

“Their entire world is surrounded by an uncountable number of Blue Fire’s legions. They will know I am coming for her, and they’ll cut her down as quickly as Her Majesty would were she in their shoes. Her Majesty is not an orc either, and you know how it would go if things were reversed.”

“Hmmm. You’re probably right. Then let’s not waste any more time.”

Altin could not have looked more relieved. “Please, hurry.”

“I think speed is the last thing you need, my boy. You’re asking me to find someone on a planet I’ve never even seen and as it relates to a tumult of events caused by another planet I’ve not only never seen but never had a chat with, as you seem to have, and much less a thousand other intricate details about which I have no knowledge at all.”

“I can fix that. Some of it anyway.”

The doctor looked intrigued and terrified in turns by the way Altin’s eyes were narrowing. “Then do so,” he said, but his expression made it look as if he were admitting that having his head removed was the best remedy for a headache.

Altin wasted not another moment, and by the time the doctor had finished speaking, the two of them were at Calico Castle. Altin had teleported them directly to the clean room, a space reserved for teleportation in the tall tower that had been occupied for centuries by Calico Castle’s recently murdered keeper, the great mage Tytamon.

“That was fast,” commented the doctor. “I didn’t see you cast.”

“I’ve gotten better,” was all Altin said. He closed his eyes for a few moments after that, then stepped out of the chamber, beckoning the doctor to follow.

Altin went straight to an arched window on the far side of the cluttered room, stepping over the tumble of Tytamon’s collected artifacts and magical curiosities as he went. “There,” he said, pointing through the window. “That’s Blue Fire.”

The doctor nearly stumbled twice trying to navigate his prodigious bulk across the room, squeezing between tables that were set at random angles and which created pathways never meant to accommodate such commodiousness. Muttering and cursing his way through them, stepping over and around the stacks of books and the odd antiquities, and doing so with far less grace than Altin had, he finally approached the window where Altin stood. Upon looking out, his mouth fell open and stayed that way for quite some time.

This was a man who had never been to space. Despite Altin’s several invitations in those first few months after the fleet had arrived on Prosperion, the doctor had always found a reason to decline. Not even a trip to the pink moon Luria had tempted him past his fear. And now, here he stood, gazing down upon another world in its immensity, a massive brown and gray globe with vast seas around both its poles as if it wore a mantle and an immodest skirt of matching blue.

Altin gave him exactly long enough to adjust to the suddenness of the teleport and the equally sudden discovery of his whereabouts—which came with no small degree of awe—and then he did it a second time. In the span of a blink, at least as the doctor saw it, the planet he observed changed clothes, so to speak, and was, in that seeming instant, transformed to a bright ball of blue, painted in places with wisps of white clouds, beneath which stretched large expanses of land similar in hue to those he’d just seen, though not nearly in equal measure to its seas. This world was wrapped mainly in blue.

“And that,” said Altin impatiently, “is Earth.”

Doctor Leopold simply had nothing he could say for a time, and he leaned against the stone of the windowsill staring at the world, his breath whistling audibly through his nose as he slowly pieced things together, eventually realizing what the movement and flashing lights were, and how all of what he’d seen related to Altin’s tale.

Altin waited as long as he could stand to do so and then called the doctor out of his reverie. “Doctor, we have to work fast or Orli will die somewhere down there.”

The doctor blinked free of his amazement and turned to face his longtime friend and patient. “You hop around the universe like a rabbit on hot rocks,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” said Altin. “You get used to it. Now, please, we have to get her out of there.”

“Look at them all,” the doctor intoned, his voice sounding as if his lips had gone numb. “I take it the little reddish balls are the Blue Fire planet’s eggs, and the bright fortresses are the fleet ships?”

“Yes, Doctor, but please, you of all people appreciate the value of her life.”

He shook himself, a great wiggling of jowls and folds of breast and belly beneath his clothes, waves of movement that made it seem as if he were scarcely more than a bag of buttermilk below the neck. “You are right,” he said. “I will marvel at it more when we are done. Let me see what I can do. Have you got anything that belongs to her?”

Altin’s mind raced, but he couldn’t think of a single thing. He briefly considered going to the evacuated mining base on the Naotatican moon Tinpoa to search for something. But he wasn’t sure if there would be air to breathe. He knew the fleet had taken many of their machines when they left to attack Blue Fire. He then thought about going to her ship, snatching something from her quarters and then coming right back, but that seemed too risky as well. Even if they didn’t have some energy trap or poison gas waiting for his arrival, he might appear just in time for a Hostile to destroy the ship. He was tempted to do it anyway, but he knew he wouldn’t be any good to Orli dead.

He realized in that moment that he didn’t have anything of hers at all. He had nothing. No trinkets. No gifts. The daisy chains and crowns of laurels she’d made for him on their outings together had all been lost when his tower was destroyed, now several months back. He had nothing of her now. If she was lost, her absence would be in totality. He felt panic begin to rise.

The doctor saw it, sensed it in that way that people whose entire lives have been spent in comforting others can. He reached a hand out and placed it on the small of Altin’s back. “I know her well enough,” he said. “I did heal her leg, you’ll recall.”

“That’s true,” Altin breathed with relief.

“All right, clear me out some space to work. I can’t do anything in all this clutter.”

Altin rushed to the table at which Tytamon had sat in work for so many centuries and, with a sweep of his arm, pushed everything onto the floor. He pulled out the chair and indicated the doctor should take a seat.

Doctor Leopold looked at the heap Altin had made upon the rug, the dust cloud of its manufacture churning thickly in the air, but held back any disparaging expression or remark. He waved his hand before his face as he walked through the dust storm and took his place upon the chair. From the ticks and creaks it made, Altin feared it might not be up to the task of supporting the doctor, but it didn’t give out. He wished he had a strengthening enchantment memorized to cast upon the wood, but he let the thought go, resigned to hoping that the chair would make it through the duration of the spell. If it broke, the doctor would have to start again. Altin didn’t think Orli had that kind of time.

Chapter 9

O
rli came out of the drug-induced haze slowly. The rigidity of the surface upon which she lay suggested she was back in her quarters, although she couldn’t remember leaving sick bay. The memories of Captain Asad coming into the room with two Marines and a nurse slowly coalesced as images in her mind. There had been a syringe and Doctor Singh’s voice shouting something as one of the Marines dragged him bodily away. That was all she could recall.

She sat up, blinking into the brightness. She was weak and had to use her hands to push herself upright. Even blurred as her surroundings were, she knew she wasn’t in her quarters. Her quarters weren’t this small, this stark or this white. To her right was a door with a small square window in it, covered from the outside. To her left, a stainless steel toilet and a tiny matching sink jutted from the wall. Beneath her was this bunk. That was it.

Someone had dressed her, for she was no longer in the hospital gown. She felt for her communicator, but it was gone. So were the emblems of her rank. She wore only the plain black bodysuit of a first-year cadet, this one completely unadorned, not even an NTA patch. That was odd.

She looked under the bunk but knew before she did so that there wouldn’t be anything beneath it.

She lay back down and stared at the ceiling. Light came through all of it, a diffusion screen scattering it all evenly, the whole of it glowing so that the light came from everywhere above all at once. It was too bright.

She was in prison again. Why, she did not know. She couldn’t remember what she’d done this time, at least not clearly, though her thoughts were still reassembling themselves. She tried to focus, to think and speed the process along.

She vaguely remembered seeing something on a computer. There had been an orderly talking about Hostiles at Earth. Or that they were at Earth, the
Aspect
and the rest of the fleet. Yes, that was it. She could remember feeling shocked. And Orli was strapped to the bed. She remembered that too, prompting her to look to her forearms where the straps had been and to make a reflexive movement of her legs, both confirming that she was no longer bound.

Why had she been strapped to the bed? And what did the Hostiles have to do with Earth?

She looked around the cell again as her mind cleared. It slowly came to her that this room was not on any ship. The door was a conventional one, not the sort one finds on a spaceship. She was back on Earth.

Memories came rushing in. Suddenly she knew why she’d been bound to the bed. She’d tried to rescue Altin. She remembered the fight in the hallway outside his cell. The Marines and the canisters of gas. Shadesbreath, the Queen’s assassin, had come with a few other Prosperions. They must have gotten him out. Please, she begged silently, they must have gotten him out. The thought filled her so fully it almost burned. She sat up with the urgency of it. He had to have escaped. She could vaguely recall the empty cell, the last thing she’d seen through the fog. Surely he had.

And then something must have happened. The Prosperions had somehow sent the fleet home. That had to be it. And good for them. The best thing for everyone. Especially Blue Fire.

Thinking of her helped calm the rising tension that had begun to fill Orli, the torrent of emotions stirred to life by the recollection of recent events.

But how recent? She had no sense of time. She stared up at the bright white luminescence of the ceiling. No help there. It could have been days. Or hours. Or months. How long had she been asleep? What had they done to her?

She looked back at her arms, where the straps had been. There were faint red marks there from where she’d struggled trying to get out. So it couldn’t have been too long. And there were needle marks. Several of them. She wondered what they’d put into her. And why.

She lay back and tried to calm herself, tried to make sense of what she could recall, but in the end, she couldn’t. She had only a sequence of events, but somehow they lacked cohesion. Visions of things that had happened as if viewed through that gas cloud outside Altin’s cell.

At least he had gotten away. That was something to cling to. He was safe. They were all safe. The rest could be worked out in time.

Time was an odd commodity for her, however, for she had no gauge of it beyond the red marks on her arms. But more of it passed after. Her only measure of it was the fact that two meals were brought to her, pushed through a narrow slot in the door. She knew the meals must mark the passing of some set number of hours. The empty plate of the second had been taken away for what had to be another hour before she saw her first human face since awakening. Two faces, actually, both Fort Minot Security by the patches on their sleeves, which proved that the return to Earth was not some drug-induced dream. She wondered if the Hostiles’ arrival, if their presence in orbit around Earth, was also real. She feared it must be.

The two security personnel cuffed her and, unforeseeably, gagged her, shoving a black rubber ball in her mouth and binding it tightly in place with a series of straps over and around her head. The question in her eyes, sent to each of her captors in turn, prompted only, “Your captain’s orders,” from one of them.

They brought her out of the cell and led her through a brief series of hallways and onto an elevator. They kept her facing the back wall when they selected the destination floor, so she had no idea how far they’d gone when the doors opened again. She could tell by the sense of vertigo that hit her when she stepped off that they’d climbed very far and very fast, indicating that her cell was deep below the surface, well into the bowels of the Earth. The ball gag was uncomfortable. It spread her mouth too wide, hurting her jaw and making it hard to breathe.

They guided her down another series of corridors and finally into a small room where they sat her down in a small plastic chair at a small plastic table. An empty chair sat across from her. One of the guards removed the gag, and she couldn’t decide if she should thank him or tell him to fuck off. She chose neither, and both men immediately exited the room, leaving her once again alone.