Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (37 page)

Orli gasped at the suddenness of the ordeal, the pass by the demon, the minaret and the sudden altitude, all in the span of a few breaths. In doing so, the cold air of the lofty moment filled her lungs with chill as she clung to Altin like a sweater all through the stomach-churning turn. Plummeting down, she could see the city spreading beneath them like some huge holographic map. She might have marveled at its myriad styles and mottled disparity of architecture had she not been so afraid that they were now going too fast to pull up.

They weren’t, but barely, or at least so it seemed to her. The g-forces she endured as the dragon pulled out of the dive felt like they would grind her into the dragon’s spine, splitting her in half. It was all she could do to lift her chin off her chest and turn and watch as the streak of Taot’s flames filled the split in the demon’s side as they shot by again. They were already soaring out over the battlefield when the monster blew up, its guts painting the inside of the city wall in disgusting pus-colored hues.

Orli saw spots for a moment as Taot banked, caused more by the last turn than this one, and again they were headed back toward the city’s heart, Altin sending spears of ice down into the demons as they flew past the wall, and, like before, it seemed they had very little effect.

There came a sound through the wind then, a high-pitched tone, accompanied by a sensation upon her back. At first she attributed the sound to internal ringing in her ears, a pressure effect as she continued to recover from Taot’s rapid shifts in altitude and hard-grinding turns. She attributed the touch upon her back to the movement of her new Prosperion clothing in the wind; she was hardly used to her new attire yet. But the tone came again, three short, equidistant beeps, and the vibration this time was definitely pressed against her back. Where the tablet was tucked into her waistband.

Quickly, she holstered her blaster and pulled the tablet out. A pair of taps and her father’s face appeared.

“Orli, girl,” he said. “Thank God you are still alive.”

“I am. We both are.” She had to shout to be heard over the rushing air.

Altin looked back, startled and fearing she’d been injured, but she turned the tablet briefly so that he could see. He nodded and sent instructions to Taot to maintain altitude.

“Are you okay?” she asked when she’d turned the tablet back around. “It’s a disaster here. More and more demons are getting over the wall.”

“We’re not good. But we’re holding them off. The
Aspect
and a few other ships are in orbit now. More are coming.”

“Tell them to use the ships’ lasers to clear off the city walls,” Orli shouted over the wind. “Tell them they need to hurry or Crown City is going to fall.”

Director Nakamura’s face appeared in the lower left quarter of her screen, Captain Asad’s in the lower right. “That’s actually what we wanted to talk to you about.”

Orli had to turn the volume all the way up, and even then she had to bend right down near the tablet to hear, hiding in the relative calm to be found at the base of Altin’s back. “Save the city, Asad, you prick,” she said as she leaned in. “Do one decent thing in your whole goddamn life.”

The director nodded as he spoke. “That is exactly what he will be doing, Ensign, the moment you get your friend the Queen to call off the Hostiles attacking us here on Earth.”

“It’s not her attacking! For the love of God, how blind can you possibly be? Look at the fucking city.” She held the tablet up, tilted down so they could see the battle taking place beyond the city walls. “Do you really think she’d be using any of her power anywhere other than here right now if she had a choice?”

“We know all about the situation there,” said the director, perfectly calm, as Orli hunched once again into the shelter of Altin’s warm body. “We are prepared to burn the area around the city clear the moment the War
Queen does what we ask. Have her call her ally, Blue Fire as you say, and demand that she withdraw her orbs. The moment they leave our system, Crown City will be ready for picnics in the park again.”

“They’re in the city,” Orli pleaded, anger giving way to desperation. “Right now. Look.” She held the tablet out again as Taot’s flight carried them over a large courtyard near the center of town. The twisted shape of a demon, a crooked mass like a bent bit of lumber, was pulverizing a warhorse as they flew by, its rider already dead, lying in three pieces on the ground not far away. Several townspeople were fleeing down a nearby street, brooms and wood axes in their hands, no longer willing to fight with the loss of the knight. Orli turned the tablet back and looked down into it. “
They
don’t have time for this, Director. Don’t do this. Don’t play this game. People are dying. Innocents.”

“Tell it to the
War
Queen,” he said, once again putting emphasis on the bellicose title. He sounded exactly like Captain Asad.

Orli’s frustration and helplessness came out in one long scream. Altin turned back, as did the dragon whose head rose up and peered down at her over Altin for a moment.

“What do I have to do to convince you Blue Fire has nothing to do with the attack on Earth either? She didn’t send the orbs. She’s not working with the Queen. Are you really going to let a million people die here just to make a point?”

“Billions of people are going to die, Pewter,” spat Captain Asad. “And it’s your fault, you and your friends on Prosperion and your pal Goldilocks. You are going to get those people killed if you insist on clinging to naive fantasies while ignoring the obvious truth. We all agree this isn’t a game, but it’s your powerful friends who are playing one anyway. We never asked for any of this.”

“There’s no goddamn game,” Orli screamed. This time all the volume was in the service of her rage. “What possible benefit is there to killing absolutely everyone? Nobody is that stupid. Not even you, Asad. Clear off the fucking walls. Help those people out there in the fields. They are dying. This is real.”

The director’s face seemed to pinch in for a moment. Clearly he was thinking. For the barest moment, Orli had hope, but Captain Asad’s face was stern as stone. The director saw it, seemed to waver for an instant more, then shook his head negligibly. “When the orbs leave, it will be done,” he said, though with perhaps the barest note of regret. “Not before. Talk to the Queen. This channel will remain open for her reply. Hopefully it will come before both planets are destroyed.” The director’s quarter of the screen went blank.

Captain Asad started to say something, but Orli cut the power to the tablet, uninterested in what he had to say.

“We have to get to Her Majesty,” Orli shouted to Altin then. “We have to figure out what to do.”

“Her Majesty is out there,” he replied, pointing over his shoulder toward the battle raging out in the fields beyond the city gates. “Assuming she’s still alive.”

A long growl rumbled in her chest, her whole body quaking with the ferocity of it, until it finally released itself in a howl of impotent fury. “Fuck!” she screamed after, as a point of emphasis. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Altin, growing used to the alien word, nodded. He’d only snatched bits and pieces of what had been said out of the rushing wind, but from what he had heard, there was little he could do but agree with the sentiment she so violently expressed.

“We have to stop them,” she said.

“Stop who?”

“The other Hostiles. The other Hostile world.”

“I agree. But how? How many will die if we abandon the streets now, given that the fleet isn’t going to help?”

“They’re going to die anyway.”

Altin grimaced at that bit of cold logic. But part of him knew it was likely true. There was so little time. “We should go find Ocelot. Though I fear how long that might take.”

“Why don’t we just do what she already told us, do like you said before, go with what we know, what I know: Mars.”

“You said there’s nothing there. We can’t go off hunting around on hope. How many red worlds, how many red suns, did you say there were again? Millions? Billions?”

“Yes. But you said Ocelot is a Z. So, that matters. We’re not doing any good here. We’re only buying these people time. But for what? Look out there, Altin. This isn’t going to end in anyone’s favor. Everyone is as good as dead. Everyone! What difference does another hour, another three make, if the end is the same?” That’s when she realized she’d cut off her father when she shut down the tablet. “Shit, my father,” she said, and set to calling him back.

Altin nodded, chewing on his cheek as he considered what she’d said. “Let me at least see if Ocelot is poking about her home.” He set himself immediately to casting the seeing spell.

Orli got her father back quickly enough, and she apologized, though he perfectly understood. “I’m going to do more than cut Asad off when I see him again,” the colonel vowed.

“So are you going to be okay?” she asked him. “You saw what they said. I can have Altin come teleport you out.”

“The ships will be cutting our guys some room here in a minute or two. And we have more ammunition on the way. Roberto and the other pilots ought to be back soon. We’ll be all right.”

“You’re not really going to help them destroy Prosperion, are you? Asad and the director?”

“Right now I’m just trying to keep my people alive.”

“What about these people?” She shoved the tablet out for a moment but was too frustrated to aim it well. He couldn’t see but a portion of her arm reaching out into the air, but he got the sense of her meaning as she snatched it back and pressed on. “You’re not going to stand there and let them all die? You can’t.”

“No. I can’t, and I won’t. If I can help, I will. But there’s not much I can do right now. We’re pinned down.”

“Can’t you get the mechs into the city? And the Queen’s men you’ve been working with? Get Roberto to bring you all here. Surely he’ll fly you in.”

“I don’t think flying into the giant tornado of magic those people are casting is a good idea.”

“There’s not going to
be
a giant tornado of magic in another few hours,” she said. “Altin says the Prosperions are going to run out of mana.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the stuff they make magic with, and they’re going to use it all up somehow. Altin says it can actually run out. There’s a bunch of priests in the middle of the city doing something with a piece of Liquefying Stone right now—the one we lost when we crashed Altin’s tower that day. A high priestess in Leekant had it, and she turned it over to the big-shot priests here in Crown this morning. They’ve started some kind of ritual to funnel mana into the city, which is working according to Altin, but he also says they’re still going to run dry. If they run out, the city will fall and the streets will be overrun. At that point, the starships won’t be any help at all. Nuking the city or cutting it to ribbons with laser fire isn’t really much different than letting the demons tear it up.”

“Why didn’t you tell the director that? Maybe that would make a difference.”

“He would have told me that was another reason why the Queen needs to stop the attack on Earth. You were listening.”

The colonel nodded at that. “You’re probably right,” he said. “A sad truth about politics and power. But this brings brinksmanship to a new low.”

“Except that’s not what Her Majesty is doing. She’s out there stabbing demons with a fucking sword right now. Don’t you see? She isn’t playing this game with them. There is no game. So will you come? Altin said he saw your guys hammering the demons when he cast his seeing spell. He says you guys are doing better than we are with a tiny fraction of the numbers that we have.”

“Yeah, at first we were doing fine, but I’ve only got a few thousand suits left. It’s been grim. We’d need ten times that, probably more, to defend a city street-by-street. A hundred thousand would probably barely be enough given the numbers they have now.”

“Earth has a hundred thousand mechs.”

“Yeah, well, Earth is a long way away.”

“Not for a Prosperion.”

“Orli, there’s nothing I can do. You need to just stay with Altin, and when it gets too bad, get out of there. The two of you can go to Andalia. Find a place to hide from Asad, because if both worlds go down, you know that’s where the fleet is going to go. If he finds you there … it’s never going to end for you. Just be safe, you two at least. Promise me.”

She started to protest, but he waved her off. They had another wave of demons climbing up out of the giant trench. “Stay safe,” he told her. “I have to go, baby girl. I love you. I’m sorry I ever dragged you into all of this.”

“I have a feeling I would have been in it by now either way,” she said. “And I love you too.” She hated how final that sounded. Again. “Stay safe, and come help us when you can.” That seemed better.

He nodded, then cut off the feed. She stared into the empty screen for a moment, fighting off the wave of regret that washed over her, all those years their relationship had been surface only, a fondness conveyed in packets of transmitted video bits. She’d been so selfish all those years, so ungrateful, so careless of what he’d been through. Happy to simply use him as a way to get out of trouble, or to get under Captain Asad’s skin. And now it was going to be too late to make it up to him. Unless they figured out where that goddamn other Hostile planet was.