Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (51 page)

“And now we brought him here.”

Orli nodded as Altin began to catch up.

“Why can’t she fight him off?”

“He is too strong. Many times stronger than she is. She said there is nothing she can do.”

“Are you talking to her now? Is she in your mind?”

“No. I fell asleep. She cried out to me in my dream.” For the first time she turned to face him. “She cried out to me, Altin. She begged me to help her. He’s tunneling toward her right now, forcing his way through the surface of the planet, in search of her, in search of her womb.”

“Her womb? I thought they did something with the orbs. The whole gamete thing you were talking about.”

“They do. When they are being civil. When they are in love.”

It was Altin’s turn to stare out the window nearly paralyzed. He watched the thread of orbs streaming into her, a constant press of hostile intent sent to bore into the very core of Blue Fire’s body.

“So where is the womb? Maybe I can help her.”

“It’s where you took me when we got the yellow stones for
Citadel
, the cavern with the ledge.”

“Mercy’s sweet breath. Then I should go.”

“You’ll die.” She said it so bluntly, so matter of fact. There was no emotion, no emphasis, simply a statement of totality. “He is waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me? How the hell does he even know I exist?”

“He’s known about you since the first taint of you arrived near Earth, on the Liquefying Stone.”

He didn’t have to ask it, for she saw the question on his face.

“The one Maul carried to Earth when she first arrived, with the conduit. Huzzledorf brought her with him, and she had your Liquefying Stone. Your essence was in it, or on it, somehow, left over from using it or something. Your DNA maybe. But that’s how he knows. That’s how he found Earth. That’s how he found out about Blue Fire too. She’s the first he’s ever scented. His lust is ravenous.”

“She told you all of this?”

“It is her will.”

His face showed complete and total perplexity, his mouth open, dumb. “Her will? Will to do what? Orli, you’re speaking in riddles almost as bad as she does. There isn’t time for this.”

“Not her will to do anything. It’s her final will. A last will and testament. She’s going to die, going to let go. She doesn’t want to live through this.”

“But why?”

“Because, Altin. Because she can’t take another tragedy, another layer of it in her long life. You don’t know what utter hopelessness is. To be helpless and powerless. I do. I’ve seen it. She doesn’t have the strength to fight back. And she doesn’t have anyone to come and save her before it happens like I did. So she’s going to wait for it and then let it smother her, let the horror of his violation crush her until there is no more. She can finally be free.”

“We’ll save her. We’ll prevent it somehow.”

“It’s already begun.”

Altin frowned, furious, helpless in his own way. Frustrated. He paced away from the window and back. “I thought she couldn’t kill herself. That’s why she’s suffered so long as it is.”

“She can’t. But she can let him snuff her out.”

Altin leaned out through the window, watching the events unfold. His heart raced. His mind raced. His whole body trembled with rage layered atop the horror he felt from Blue Fire.

He screamed inside his head at her. Screamed for her to speak to him. To tell him what to do. But still there was nothing. He was beyond impotent to help.

“We have to do something,” he said. “Orli, we have to stop it.”

“He will kill you. His power is ten times greater than hers. A hundred times greater. She has no words for it, but it’s massive. He will kill you as easily as he did High Priestess Maul. If you let him find your mind as the Maul did, you will be killed. It will be quick.”

“If that’s the case, why can’t he find me now? I have this.” He held up the ring. “If my taint was on the Liquefying Stone that Maul had, and if he somehow … what, smelled it? Then why can’t he smell me on this?”

“I don’t know, Altin. I have no idea. I only know what she told me. He’s striving for her inner core. He means to take her seeds by force, since she would not give them up willingly. And when he does, when he finds her and breaks in, she is going to let her life flow out through the wound.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

She looked at him, something in the intensity of his tone sparking the tiniest bit of hope. He spun and stormed back into the teleportation chamber. He slammed the door. She heard the lock slide into place. Then she didn’t hear anything.

She turned back to look down upon Blue Fire, but she was gone. The window frame lit up with bright red light in that instant, the glare of it intense and coming so suddenly it startled her. She stepped back, and for a moment thought somehow Altin had transported them to the vile red world somehow. But then she saw the familiar shapes of rocky Phobos and Deimos. This was Mars. Of course he hadn’t brought them to Red Fire. How could he have?

Looking to the right, she saw that there was another of the giant Hostile orbs in orbit again. Not quite so large as the first one had been, but there it was nonetheless. Apparently Red Fire had sent another already to take the place of the one they’d sent into the sun. The new one, like the other, sent a trail of small orbs running off over the sun, toward Earth again. She sighed when she saw it. Director Nakamura would take the arrival of the new orbs as evidence of Her Majesty’s deceit. He’d call off the air support. No ground troops would be sent to Prosperion from Earth. Her father and Roberto would die. Everyone would die.

It really was all going to end. Even Blue Fire. And only the red world would survive. The ultimate victor, Red Fire.

Their last hope lay in whatever Altin was doing now. Whatever madness struck him. She knew him well enough to know he was up to something.

Then Mars was gone. She blinked, and it wasn’t there anymore. She blinked again, a few times, a quick fluttering, waiting for something else to appear in its place, the next great cosmic sphere. She knew it was foolish, but hoped that it might be Red Fire next. She hoped Altin was in that room, that teleporter’s room, doing what he did best, consuming vast distances with his potent genius. She hoped somehow he could cross a thousand light years in only a few moments’ time. That’s what she hoped, and she blinked and blinked, wishing Red Fire to appear.

Nothing appeared. They were nowhere. All was emptiness. Stars upon a black void. Billions of burning cores serving to heat something, or nothing, and destined to die one day. To die like everything else, like Blue Fire, like Tytamon, like her mother so long ago. There were only the good people to make it matter at all. Sweet, beautiful Altin, in there probably about to blow out his brainstem trying to save the universe. Her father, distant, aloof and brave, but he loved her too—for all the misery his decisions had made of Orli’s life. She’d never really thought much about what he’d gone through way back then, what had led to the decision to bring a little girl aboard a spaceship like he had—a shitty bit of parenting that was. But she understood. She could allow herself to now. His heart must have broken when her mother died. She’d never thought about it like that before, from his point of view, not very hard anyway. What wreckage a lost love like that must cause. The misery of Blue Fire stood as the galactic font of that kind of misery, the colossus of pain pouring fountain-like into the black veil of eternity, every star yet another tear. In a way, Orli thought Blue Fire might be better off dead. At least that torment, that eternal wound, would be over for her. Blue Fire seemed to lack the one thing humans had, hope. Blue Fire seemed to have nothing she hoped for, not survival, not the chance that tomorrow might be okay.

She thought of Roberto and a long list of other friends, old fleet friends and new ones on Prosperion, Aderbury out there in
Citadel
right now, thousands of magicians trying to defend a planet that wasn’t even theirs. It was all so beautiful in its love and human association, and so horrible in its irony. The beauty of humanity at war with the evil that it made.

For the barest moment, she wondered if maybe the universe might not be better off rid of humanity. At best it was equal parts good and evil. At worst something less favorable.

She knew even as she thought it that it wasn’t so. It wasn’t so because of those same people she’d been thinking of. As long as they lived, there was hope. They were the hope of humanity. She was.

The stars shifted noticeably outside the window, like a movement seen at the edge of vision, a phantom motion that, when caught, freezes to stillness again. She had to stare hard to decide if their position had changed. In the absence of planetary light, there were so many stars out there. She spotted a greenish nebula far off to the right and high above. She wasn’t sure if that had been there before. But she decided to use it for a landmark. She knew what Altin was doing in there. There could be nothing else.

She stared up at that nebula for a long, long time. It felt like an hour, though perhaps it was less. And then the nebula was gone.

Still there was nothing out there. She ran to a window on the opposite side of the tower and looked out through it. More stars. A binary system was very close, so close she instinctively feared for the radiation coming off of it, though she trusted in Altin’s shields. They’d preserved them much closer to suns than this. It was frightening though, for despite how much she loved him, she also knew that he was ignorant of so many things. He was the truest manifestation of the early explorer, daring to do what no one else had done, doing it out of courage, true, but also out of having no fear of things that, had he known them, might have given him cause to turn back. Although, probably not. Not Altin. He would have figured something out. That was who he was.

The binary system vanished sometime later, and Orli knew then that her assumptions had to be correct. Altin was chewing up the expanse of the galaxy, hell-bent on getting to Red Fire. But then what? What did he plan to do? Was he going to blink down to the surface and challenge the being to a duel? Blue Fire had told her that Red Fire was far more powerful than she was. Given how much more powerful Blue Fire was than Altin, Red Fire would be godlike by comparison.

She had to help Altin. If she knew the Galactic Mage as well as she thought she did, he was in all-action mode. Which meant he probably didn’t have a plan for what would happen when they got there. So she would make one for them. She would try to anticipate their needs.

Moving away from the window, she took her seat at Tytamon’s desk and thought through everything she knew. Everything Altin had told her about Blue Fire, everything she had seen and experienced in all her dream exchanges with the giant living world. She sat amongst the clutter collected by a once-great mind and willed herself to the same kind of exercise, the pooling of imagination, learning and discipline. She pulled out her tablet and went to work making her best guesses at what they would find if—when they found the distant star. If Altin could somehow get them there, they would not arrive without at least some kind of strategy.

Chapter 41

G
romf woke slowly, the sound of tearing flesh all around him now. He lay in a pool of mud, made runny with his own blood. Something heavy lay upon him. He lifted his head to see and saw that a horse had fallen across his legs. Its rider, a human female, lay dead nearby, her mud-splattered face looking at him, eyes wide, perhaps in shock that she had been slain. Her mouth was open in a scream that Gromf had not heard. He’d heard nothing since the strange human had shot him with the beam of red light. He touched his forehead where the light had struck, just above the bridge of his nose. His finger slipped into the hole that was there, two knuckles deep into the bone.

Someone had healed him again. He knew it had been God. Few shamans had the gall to conjure healing. It was a coward’s craft. Death was welcomed in the clans.

Looking about him, he saw scores of demons everywhere, the smallish ones, the ravenous ones who ate the bodies of the dead, slurped and gobbled all around. There were two near him, sucking the last marrow from a human skeleton.

One of them looked up from its meal and saw him. It flashed long and pointed teeth, a row of spikes like blackberry thorns grown half the length of Gromf’s arm. Gromf wondered if it would eat him next, though it should not be so. He was the opener of the gate. They should leave him alone. Respect him. But he knew that they did not.

There were worse deaths than to be eaten by the servant of a god.

The demon leapt across the field and landed upon the carcass of the horse. It tore into its new meal hungrily. Gromf tried to push the horse off of his legs, but he could not. He would have to wait.

In time, the second demon came, and Gromf thought that the two of them would have him free very soon, but the second one started on the human female instead. It snatched her up like a freshly caught fish and bit into her head. Gromf watched, testing the weight of the horse, and the course of the demon’s progress, in doing so. He could not move the horse off of himself yet. The demons scooped out the soft parts of their meals, sucking entrails into their mouths like strands of boiled salt grass.