Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (47 page)

“I asked her to try to find Red Fire. She seems to be saying that she can’t. I think he has to find her. Something about his orbs and hers. Ripples in the mana and dandelion seeds. It’s giving me a headache. Maybe you need to talk to her in a dream. I don’t even know if I’m conveying the red sun idea properly.”

“Like there is any chance I can get to sleep,” she said. “My father patched me through to the director via the
Livermore
, and the director says he’s given the ready order for the mechs to redeploy to Prosperion. But nothing else has changed. The inbound orb count remains steady, so he’s holding off on giving the go-ahead. He’s not going to pull anyone off Earth defense until the Hostiles pull out. And frankly, I still think he thinks Her Majesty is bluffing somehow.”

“What about
Citadel
? Did they get rid of the other big one? It’s been long enough; they could have done it by now.”

“Yes, it’s gone.”

“Then what is the director waiting for? Why are your warriors on standby? What could be the bluff?”

“He’s waiting for the orb count to go down. He says when his people aren’t dying by the thousands, he’ll give the go-ahead.”

Altin nodded. He thought that was a stingy interpretation on the director’s part of the deal he’d made with Orli, but there was nothing to be done about it for now. He sent Aderbury a quick telepathic nudge. His longtime friend and the acting captain of
Citadel
answered right away.

“You’re alive,” said Aderbury. “Thank the gods. So tell me, are we sending teleporters somewhere down on Earth to get their warriors to Crown? We need to know where to go. My seers tell me the sand is running out.”

“Not yet. The director is stalling, insisting on significant reductions in the Hostile count. But be ready for those directions when they come.” If it comes, he thought, though he kept that part to himself.

“We’re ready. We’re making hay with these Hostiles too. Conduit’s team had an easy time of the last of the big ones, so they’re pretty confident downstairs. Give us a few more hours and that director will have his ‘significant reductions in the Hostile count.’”

Altin looked out over the smoke filling the city. There were three more fires in the west. A few hours would be disastrous. The city would be overrun.

Altin cut off the contact with Aderbury and turned back to Orli. “So what do we do? What do you think about all that stuff Blue Fire said, the seeds and orbs and all of it?”

“The dandelion seeds are the orbs,” she said. “I’m thinking that either one of Red Fire’s orbs needs to find one of Blue Fire’s, or one of Red Fire’s orbs needs to find Blue Fire herself.”

“These … beings are millions of years old. You said it yourself. How could they not have found each other by now?”

“Space is big. And who knows, maybe there’s some kind of territorial thing with these creatures, whatever they are. It’s hardly unprecedented. Maybe the red one never came over here because Blue Fire already had a mate. Maybe out of respect, maybe out of fear. I mean, all we can do is guess.”

Altin listened and tried to convey what Orli said as best he could to Blue Fire. He tried to construct images and send emotions that got at the heart of Orli’s ideas, throwing it all at her like a plate full of food, hoping that somehow she might catch at least one morsel in her mouth.

She did.
Truth
, she sent.

Which part? The territory part, the orbs—seeds—finding-each-other part, or the part where his seeds find you?

All truth
.

All of it?
He showered Orli with a look of pleasant surprise.
So what then? If you get one of your orbs to Earth, the red ones can find it? Then you can talk to him, to Red Fire?

Truth
.

That’s it?

Altin looked as if he might get mad, his gaze playing out over the city, over the carnage and death, the destruction. He fought back the tide of it, and glared down at Orli instead, venting some, “All Blue Fire had to do was send an orb to Earth to start the conversation with the red one. It’s that easy.”

Fear came to him then, first a little, then more and more, heated to a boil. The emotions weren’t his.

Orli saw it on his face. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. Now she’s afraid.” He was clearly irritated, despite the emotions Blue Fire pushed into him.

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t go talk to him. Maybe she’s shy.”

“Shy?” He looked incredulous.

“I’m only guessing,” Orli said. “But maybe that’s how her species operates.”

“Well how many people have to die for that?” He was shouting, though he didn’t realize it until it had already come out.

“Don’t yell at me,” she said. “Your people have some pretty strange customs when it comes to male and female relationships,
Sir
Altin.” She put a heavy emphasis on the title to make her point. “You waste lots of time on ‘honor’ and ‘propriety’ while life ticks by. Look around, the universe doesn’t always give us time.”

He started to respond, but thought better of it. He knew he wasn’t angry at her anyway, just at the circumstance. Besides, she had a point. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. We have to keep it together. Both of us.”

Orli nodded.

Altin let go what remained of his tension and spoke in a calmer voice, filtering Blue Fire’s feelings as best he could. “Fine. But if Blue Fire is shy, now is the time for her to get beyond such things. She needs to go talk to him.”
You need to go talk to him
, he thought, directed toward Blue Fire.

No nest
.

“What?”

The hole in the desert known as the Great Sandfalls appeared before his mind’s eye.
No nest
. He saw a series of images after, creatures building nests and burrows, animals in caves, some of the animals unrecognizable, others recognizably Prosperion.

You don’t need a nest
. If thoughts could be spat, that would have been, exasperation propelling it.
Just talk to him. We’re not asking you to marry him, just tell him to stop attacking Earth. Explain what you did at Andalia. Why it was wrong
.

Fear came again, much greater than before, so great it drained the color from his face. He could only filter so much.

“Stop!” He thought it and shouted it aloud. “Stop.” The fear abated some. “Why are you so afraid?”

There was a long pause, so long he thought Blue Fire had cut off the communication, pulled herself out of his mind. He actually checked beneath his ring to see if the green light still pulsed there.

No love
, she sent at last. Then fear came back. Intimidation and helplessness that somehow filled a space he knew as forever.

He thought he knew what that meant right away, but he clarified anyway.
So if your orb and his orb
, he paused and shaped the thought that went with it into dandelion seeds, …
if the seeds meet, are you saying you are stuck with him, even if you don’t love him? Is it like a mating ritual or something?

Truth
.

“Oh, for the love of Mercy,” Altin moaned, completely at wit’s end now. He turned a full circle atop the stairs where they stood, his arms out helplessly and his eyes to the sky. “We are doomed.”

“What?” Orli asked. “What did she say?”

“If she sends an orb to Earth, somehow that’s like a marriage proposal. Or the actual wedding. Something like that. All I know is she’s afraid and doesn’t want to send one of her orbs over there. Apparently they can’t just ‘talk.’ And she doesn’t love the new fellow, so she doesn’t want to go.”

“Well, what about the other option?” Orli said. “About Red Fire’s orb finding Blue Fire’s world. What did she say about that? Is that any better? Maybe the orbs are like gametes, and if they meet, well, you know how it works. We know she thinks of them as her eggs.”

“I have no idea what a
gamete
is, but I think I know what you are saying anyway. I’m not sure, however, why bringing one of the red orbs to Blue Fire would be any better than simply having two orbs meet.”

“Maybe she doesn’t have to offer one of her own that way. Maybe he has to do something to impress her first. Some sort of intergalactic first date. If he isn’t a gentleman, then she doesn’t have to release an egg to him.” Orli wrinkled up her face in a way that acknowledged the speculative nature of what she’d said, but it was in keeping with much of what’d she’d read of other species in the world, at least her own.

Altin let go a long impatient gasp, but he sent the gist of that along to Blue Fire. “So, is that it?” he asked, speaking the thoughts aloud now as well so that Orli might follow along. He sent that and tried to picture Orli in a room alone, but with Blue Fire’s world hovering near her in the air. He imagined Thadius walking in, and conveyed a sense of hate. Thadius went away. “If he comes to you, then you can decide if you like him or not?”

Truth
.

Trying to preempt unexpected complications down the road, Altin added, “And what happens if you don’t like him? Or he doesn’t like you?”

Blue Fire sent emptiness, not loneliness, just absence or vacancy.

He frowned, but translated for Orli as best he could. “I don’t think she knows what happens. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. Maybe that’s the territory thing.”

“Ask her if she wants another mate.” Orli said.

“By the gods, she doesn’t need to mate with it. She just needs to get it to stop killing everyone.”

Orli put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Just ask her.”

He did. Blue Fire clearly did not want another mate. She sent waves of love back at Altin, carried on images of the blue sun that had once warmed her long-dead beloved.

Altin would have laughed if it all wasn’t so cosmically ridiculous. “She says ‘no.’ She’s still in love with the dead planet.”

“Altin!” Orli snapped, her mouth and her eyes flung wide. “What’s wrong with you?”

He recoiled from the shocked expression on her face, and his hands went out helplessly to his sides. “What? This is absurd. And it’s taking a lot of time. And we’re not getting anywhere.”

“What’s absurd is that somehow you ended up being the one who can speak to her easily while I cannot. My God. How insensitive can you possibly be?”

“If you want to try, go ahead,” he said. He tugged off the huge silver ring and handed it to her.

Orli grimaced as she watched the light pulsing inside the curve of the ring, glaring at it as if it might burn her on contact. She well remembered what had happened to her when she’d touched the yellow Liquefying Stone that day long ago, the day she’d met Blue Fire and the day both she and Altin had nearly died. That stone had been far less potent than the green one in Altin’s ring. Altin had made it more than clear that this thing, this secreted part of Blue Fire’s very innermost self, was something more dangerous than the yellow stone alone. But she reached out and took it anyway. “Do you think it will work?”

“I doubt it, but I’m sure in the nine hells not getting anywhere on my own. She did find you when you were holding the Liquefying Stone, so who knows. You were a lot closer to her then, and sleeping, but it’s worth a try.”

Orli slid the ring over her thumb reluctantly. She cringed, waiting for the mental onslaught of Blue Fire’s inner voice. It did not come. They spent several more minutes waiting, but to no avail. Orli handed the ring back to him and shook her head. “Guess not.”

“Of course not.” Both of them were frustrated. Frustrated and tired.

Blue Fire’s fear came washing into him when he put the ring back on. It was fear and love and remorse.
Orli Love not leave Blue Fire. Hate alone
. His mind swelled with the immense loneliness that resided eternally in her, loneliness the size of a galaxy. But there was more to it, something penitent. He realized it was an apology.

What?
He sent back, confused by the rush of such anxiety.
What do you mean?

Orli Love not leave
. She had no word for “please” but it was clear that she was pleading with him.

It took him a moment to sort through the torrent of anxiousness and fear, the sense of abandonment, but finally he made it out. She thought he’d left her, cut her loose forever when he took off the ring.

No
, he thought back to her then.
I’m here
. He did not speak it, thinking it just to her. He showed her in his memory what he tried to do, how he’d tried to help Orli talk to her with the ring. He tried to explain. He could sense she mostly understood, but she was still shaken by the experience. And so quickly too.

Blue Fire talk Red Fire,
she sent then. It came on a wave of complicity, servile, though definitely afraid and filled with echoes of loneliness. He saw then an image of himself walking across the pond where the dandelions blew. In his arms was a red-hued orb. He carried it across the pond and placed it in the water where it floated next to the round globe of Blue Fire’s world. It was obvious what Altin had to do.
Blue Fire speak Red Fire. Orli Love not leave.