Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (5 page)

“Hether,” he called out in a voice loud enough to be heard but not startle. “It’s Altin. I’m sorry to intrude.”

“Altin?” she called back as the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor came nearer with each passing heartbeat.

“Yes, Hether, it’s me,” he replied and pushed open the bedroom door. “It’s really something of an emergency—and yes, Aderbury is fine, it’s my emergency. I need a homing lizard.”

Her surprise at seeing him transformed to curiosity at the abrupt nature of his request. She stammered for a moment, thinking to ask, but seeing in his eyes that haste was in order, she moved immediately to oblige. “Why yes, of course. What’s happened? Why not telepathy?”

“You mustn’t say anything to anyone. You truly mustn’t. But it’s all gone horribly wrong.” He quickly rattled off a truncated version of what had happened as they made their way to Aderbury’s cluttered study and the small cage where the couple kept their homing lizards. He told her of his capture, the Queen’s outrage, the rescue led by the royal assassin, and his subsequent work with Blue Fire to send the fleet home to Earth. Altin brushed past Hether the moment they entered the room and threw open the lid to the homing lizard cage, reaching in and grabbing the first one that came within reach.

Without a backwards glance at the confounded and increasingly frightened woman standing behind him, he went to Aderbury’s desk and scribbled out a note.
Where are you? I will come for you.

He hastily wound the scrap of parchment around the lizard’s slender abdomen, its soft white throat calmly pulsing with each breath, no more excited by such treatment than it might have been by the touch of the wind upon its black and yellow speckled skin. Altin tied the note in place with string, a bit roughly, and almost tossed the lizard down. He realized that, wherever she was, she might not have anything to write with, so he took a bit of drafting charcoal from Aderbury’s desk, snapped off a quarter of it, and stuffed that under the string atop the note, which gave the lizard quite a squeeze. He tossed the lizard down, nearly barking Orli’s name as he did it. In the time it took for the lizard’s little feet to touch the ground, it was gone.

He turned back to Hether. “I’m sorry for the rush, and I promise I’ll explain in more detail at another time. Aderbury is fine, though I know not what the Queen has in mind for him after what has happened. And remember, you must not speak a word of this to anyone. The Queen may not want this news out just yet. I fear it doesn’t make her, or any of us, look very good.”

Hether could only nod and bat her long lashes over a still-bewildered pair of bright blue eyes. A smile creased her pretty round face as she nodded the promise of her silence. “Be careful,” she said, but he was already gone—once again causing her to marvel at another unanticipated event. Never before had she seen anyone do magic without so much as a single uttered word.

Altin appeared in sick bay on the
Aspect
again, near where Orli’s bed had been. The room was still empty. His bare feet allowed him to move silently across the floor, and he peered through the open doorway to where he’d seen Doctor Singh not all that long before.

The doctor had moved from the desk and was treating a man whose skin was blackened and crisp looking all across his upper arm, shoulder and part of his neck. Altin reflexively cringed upon seeing it, the jagged black edges and the shine of fluids glazing the angry red wounds. Fortunately the man appeared to be unconscious, which was a good thing, for such an injury could be nothing but unbearable.

Altin watched for several minutes as the doctor worked, the nurses in assistance moving in perfect synchronization with the skilled physician as his treatment progressed, their gloved hands darting in and out methodically, slapping tools precisely into his waiting grip, barely a word uttered in between. Eventually, it was done, and the patient was rolled away by one of the nurses, and Altin couldn’t help but wonder if he were going to be put into one of the pink-fluid tanks like the one in which his arm had been regrown. The injury certainly would require something on that order if it were ever going to heal.

Altin waited until the other nurses left, a matter of several minutes, before he entered the ward. His hands were held out, open, clearly unarmed. “Doctor Singh, please don’t call the guards. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to find Orli.”

The doctor spun on him, and for the first time in Altin’s memory, there was anger there, a deep, simmering anger, controlled but reflective of the great sense of betrayal that the gentle doctor felt. “She’s probably dead, Altin. They took her down to the planet, or at least they are trying to, and when she gets there, she is going to be tried for treason and executed, just like in the good old days.”

“They what?”

“Don’t you dare act surprised now, Altin. Don’t you do it.” He moved to a nearby nurse’s station and picked up a tablet. He tapped it to life with a finger, and called up a video feed from outside the ship. He spun it around to where Altin could see the chaos of activity. The explosions, the streaking laser light, the broken husks of ships and the oozing orange strands of ruptured Hostile innards. “She’s flying through that, Altin. Right now. And if she somehow happens to make it down alive, she’ll be dead in a few days at best. And it’s because of you.”

“I know how it appears just now,” Altin said. “But I assure you, things are not as they appear. We were manipulated too.”

Doctor Singh stepped toward him, thrusting the tablet forward at Altin, his large brown eyes glistening with the tears of impotent rage, held barely in check by the kind fibers that made him the man he was and prevented him from the violence he so desperately wanted to act out. “You said you loved her, Altin. That’s what you said. And she believed you. She trusted you. We all did. So congratulations. You win. Yours is the greatest deception of them all, and you can stop the game now. Victory is at hand, just look and revel in what you have done.”

At first Altin wanted to defend himself again, to try to explain it, to make the doctor see. But he knew it would be pointless; he could tell by the severity of the doctor’s gaze. So instead, he went back to his original query. “So where is she? You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to believe me about the Hostiles—and I can hardly blame you for that—but you must believe I love Orli. I love her more than anything. Than everything. Tell me where she is, and I can get her out.”

Anger swelled inside the doctor again, a pulse of it that had his lungs expanding with the breath that might have unleashed another wave of his truest sentiments, his fury, his frustration, his grief. But instead he let it go wordlessly. His head fell, his chin to his chest, resting on the white coat, now marred by the browning smears of the burned man’s blood. “I have no idea where she is. She’s in there somewhere.” He handed Altin the tablet and then went to the nurse’s station where he took a chair. He buried his face in his hands and Altin thought he might be crying, though it might just as easily have been simple weariness and frustration that left him so.

Altin lifted the tablet and watched the battle playing out upon its glowing screen. Earth, bright and blue, dressed in the same livery as Prosperion, the wisp of clouds and the armor of hard brown and green continents. These were the colors of humanity, serving as the backdrop for what was a seething mass of motion, bright lights moving like dust motes beaten out of an old couch near a sunlit window, the frenzy and random violence of their movements making no apparent difference to the movements of the next nearby. Randomness in action. No pattern and no recourse. A dance with no choreography, only the whirling step-stepping toward death.

Orli was in that somewhere.

He turned to the doctor, who looked to have recovered a bit. “I’m sorry,” Altin said. “It never should have come to this.”

Doctor Singh only shook his head.

“I have to find her,” Altin pressed again. “Show me how.” He stepped over to where the doctor sat and presented the tablet to him. “Show me how to find her in this. With the chip in her arm, like the one I had.” He pulled up the sleeve of his robe and showed the bright pink line where his chip had been removed, a fading mark that might have been gone all together had he allowed Doctor Leopold time to finish the work.

“I can’t, Altin,” Doctor Singh replied. He looked completely worn out, like a man who hasn’t slept perhaps ever in the course of an entire life. Dark brown circles shadowed his face beneath his eyes, so dark he looked as if he’d lost a fight a few days before. The whites of his eyes were brown around the edges, with lines of bloodshot visible. He pushed his fingers through his hair in an exhausted way and repeated it. “I just can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Altin insisted. “I know you can. Colonel Pewter found her at Northfork Manor using that chip when we were flying in. I can use it too.” He pushed the tablet forward, practically right into Doctor Singh’s face. “Do it. Show me. You don’t have to like me. But if you care for her, then you will show me. She has a chance for a life back on Prosperion. You said she is dead if she stays here, if she goes with them. What is there to lose?”

But still the doctor shook his head, though for a moment appearing as if he might change his mind, as if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He stared into the small screen of the tablet and watched. Watched and shook his head. “You must think I’m a fool,” he said. “And I suppose it’s true. In the end I am, aren’t I? But even I am not that much a fool.”

Altin nearly gasped in his impatience. “Just tell me how, damn it.” He thrust the tablet against the doctor’s hand, trying to jam it into his grip, but he would not take it. “Mercy’s sake, Doctor, I’m not here to fight with you. My people aren’t your enemy. It was a gods-be-damned mistake. Blue Fire has betrayed us all. She betrayed Orli. She betrayed me. She even betrayed Her Majesty and the priests of Anvilwrath. It was her. Can’t you see? If we’d wanted to do this, we would have just done it and had it on.”

The doctor took the tablet from him. Altin could see in his tired face that he wanted to believe, but that he’d just run out of faith. His ability to trust was gone.

“For her. Show me. Let me save her. Let me get her out, then I will go find Blue Fire and make her stop. I’ll make her call off the attack. If she won’t, I will carry one of your weapons to her heart chamber and stop it myself.”

That made the doctor look up.

“I’m serious. I know how this looks, but you are wrong. And I do love Orli. Help me find her. What possible deception could I have for your people in wanting to get one woman out of here? Think about it.”

That was true, and the doctor’s head slowly began to nod. It was possible. But then, the Prosperion mage could simply be finishing the act, just as Captain Asad had said. This could be the last thing, the last bit of information. A way to follow her, and Captain Asad, into the heart of the NTA. Perhaps even in possession of a nuclear missile. But he wanted to believe it wasn’t so. He wanted to believe that Orli might still have a chance, that they might all still have a chance, especially as he stared into that vast cloud of death revealed in the tablet’s glowing screen.

Altin leaned forward, hoping, trying not to seem so eager that Doctor Singh changed his mind. That’s when Doctor Singh let out a short portion of a laugh, the least part of it, the part that breaks when it discovers there is no humor there.

“Really, Altin?” He sounded disgusted. He looked up at the practically panting mage and shook his head in a sad, resigned sort of way, as if he’d just discovered some essential missing detail. “You almost had me.”

“What?” Altin gasped. “What now?”

Doctor Singh handed the tablet back to him, rising from his seat. He said nothing more and simply walked away.

Altin frowned at his back and then looked down into the image on the tablet screen. At
Citadel
. Which had just seconds before appeared.

Chapter 5

“C
all them off,” Altin shouted into the green clump of stones, the patch of them glowing dimly, surrounded by the yellow crystals that filled the rest of the narrow chamber that was the heart of Blue Fire. He shouted straight into them, his red-flushed face leaning near, for he’d gone himself, straight there in his rage. Not just thoughts, but physicality for this confrontation. “Call them back right now, or I will see that you are destroyed, just like you should have been.” He was nearly breathless with the rush of his anger as he sent every last ounce of his emotions out in the wake of his words. All the rage, the terror—both for Orli and for what amounted to just about everyone—and, most of all, the sense of gullibility and guilt. “How could you?” he roared at her. “
You
were the one who went on and on and on about betrayal. About truth that is not truth. And now look at you. Look what you have done. All of that was emptiness and lies.”

She sent back the sense of absolute bewilderment. Terror of her own. Terror of him. Her incredulity at how Orli Love had become so suddenly filled with hate. Hate for Blue Fire.

“Don’t spread that offal on my plate,” he snarled in response. He pushed images of the combat taking place in the space around planet Earth up at her through his memories. He shoved them at her as if they were mud and he was smearing it, jamming it into her loathsome, lying face. “What are you?” he shouted. “What kind of duplicitous monster could do such a thing? You used our love against us, against everyone. That is the very soul of evil!”