Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (56 page)

They flew down several more streets, trying to use the buildings as some sort of cover, hoping not to be discovered by any more Earth ships. But those were not their only enemy.

As they crossed over a series of small hangars, headed into another section of taller structures, Taot suddenly went into a roll, a long corkscrew maneuver, as he dodged an incoming Hostile. It was an orb nearly as wide as the avenue over which they flew, plummeting at them from above, coming in at a long, shallow angle.

Taot’s roll wrapped them around its passing, his wingtips brushing the glass of a building on one side of the roll and his talons breaking through on the other as he pushed off. The orb just missed Altin’s head, and had he thought to, he might have reached up and touched the thing as it passed through the tube formed by Taot’s evasive flight. They felt the wind of it as it rushed by, and they watched as it crashed into the base of a building to their left. Taot righted himself as he flew through the shrapnel of its impact, and once again they were showered with bits of glass.

As they flew free of the row of buildings, Altin looked back to see that the lower part of the building struck by the orb was brutally smashed in, so much so that the building began to tilt, sagging on that side and considerably off from vertical. He was sure it was about to fall.

“There,” Orli cried above the wind as Altin watched the reflection of the three of them diminishing in the mirrored glass of the falling building far behind. He turned to see her pointing toward a long flat expanse of black glass that he guessed must be a thousand paces long and perhaps a third that wide. It was perfectly rectangular and recessed from the surrounding area by several spans, like a strange dark pool had been built there waiting to be filled. Lights coming from ragged holes in its surface, however, showed where Hostiles had punched through and gotten inside. Altin didn’t know if it had once held water, but if it had, it would now all be drained away. “Take us through one of those openings,” Orli said.

“There are Hostiles in there.”

“This is what we need.” She motioned into the air all around them, at the fighters and the missiles and Hostiles plunging down from everywhere. “Do you really want to keep looking for another one?”

“No. I suppose not.” He sent the message to Taot.

The dragon banked hard and swooped in low, rolling over backward as he dove into a large hole that had been bashed through the massive hangar door by the Hostiles. It was a hard and sudden roll, and the arc and twist of the maneuver had them both free falling for the briefest moment before the maneuver completed itself in time to catch both riders again. Altin was used to such things, but Orli suddenly gripped Altin about the waist like a docking clamp.

Taot swooped down toward the floor of the hangar some five hundred spans below, he and Altin conferring on where it would be best to land.

Altin saw Hostiles spreading themselves out over a half-built spaceship of some kind, three of them, and another was oozing itself out flat like spilled liquid upon the floor. Several people in uniform were busy shooting at the latter one with various forms of weaponry. Streaks of laser light and the concussive blasts of ballistic rounds echoed from the thick concrete walls. Busy in their fight, and far across the hangar, they appeared not to have noticed the dragon flying down.

Taot’s head snaked back and forth as they came in, and he blew several blasts of fire into the air, seemingly at nothing.

Altin found a place clear of the fighting and far enough away from all the Hostiles, to which he directed Taot with a thought. The dragon landed so rapidly and so heavily that the impact knocked gasps from both riders as if they shared the same set of lungs.

They slid off immediately, and the moment they were clear of him, the dragon stalked off and began blasting fire into the air all around again, just as he had done during the descent. He sniffed and rumbled and blew, his head moving up and down at the end of his long neck, swinging high and low, side to side. He growled and the floor shook beneath his feet. Altin sent him thoughts to warn him from getting too close to the Earth men with their weapons, but on and on went the searing of the air. First here, and then there, all around them in the air. Altin sent a quick query to his friend then, asking if he’d been hurt, hoping that he hadn’t come unhinged from the pressure of flying through a battle-torn alien atmosphere.

Altin got back an image of rotting flesh, of an animal, a moose he thought, in the throes of some wasting disease. Taot sent that to him and then went back to blasting the air again and again and again, pacing about like a mad thing in its lair.

“I think I should send him back,” Altin said. “He’s going to blow one this way by mistake and then we’re all in trouble.”

Orli had been looking for something and turned back to Altin only long enough to say, “That’s fine. We can get what we need here anyway. Send him back.”

Altin prepared to send the dragon home, sending him a warning that the teleport was about to come. He saw as he looked back to Taot that the Earth people had spotted the dragon by the brilliance of his fiery display. He spent the instant it took to make sure Taot’s cave was unoccupied, and then sent the dragon back to Prosperion. The last licks of his most recent fireblast, curling upward in the moment before he was gone, were sucked down by his sudden absence, the remnant flames forming a twisting yellow sheet as the air rushed in to fill the space where the massive reptile had been.

“We’re going to have some more of your friends over here,” Altin said as he looked through the last vapors of Taot’s breath.

“Come on,” Orli replied, grabbing his hand and dragging him at a run. “Over here.”

They ran across the hangar as the sounds of shouts and the splash of laser beams upon the wall in front of them announced that the others were now in range. Altin felt the heat of one beam on the back of his neck, and knew from the smell that hair had been more than singed.

Orli came to a door and tried the handle, but it would not open. “Hold them off,” she shouted as she drew her blaster and started firing into the door.

Altin spun back and sent a huge fireball, big as a house, flying across the room at the fleet people running at them. He directed it just over their heads, but close enough to fill their noses with the smell of their own burning hair. See how you like that, he thought. They stopped, and even fell back a step, but another lance of red light shot by, just missing Orli.

A more powerful weapon than hers, the soldier’s shot actually finished the work of opening the door, and Orli practically dragged Altin through it by the back of his robes as bullets ricocheted off the metal doorframe. Another three rounds cracked the heavy glass window that looked out into the hangar from where they were inside, smashing white impact marks like spindly stars into it.

“They’re going to get through that pretty quick,” Orli said. “Do something.”

Altin thought about another fireball but decided against it. He thought about an ice lance, but that was just as bad. What he needed was an ice wall, but he didn’t know the spell. A bullet hit the window again, this time pushing the glass inward in a nearly perfect dome, cracks like spider webs covering its surface like a drapery of lace. The next one would get through. Improvising, he quickly conjured an ice lance that was ten paces long and five in diameter. Rather than throwing it, he flipped it sideways and let it drop across the front of the room. It landed with a heavy thud as several bullets struck it even as it fell into place. A laser did likewise, and he could hear the hiss of steam as it hit. He wasn’t sure how long the ice lance would hold, lacking the solidity and powerful cold of a true ice wall, so he cast a second one beyond the first, then cast a third stacked atop those two as if they were all little more than stacked ice logs. A grenade struck his barrier then, which shook the whole room. In the span of moments, he’d added three more, making the stack roughly fifteen paces thick. The laser fire and heat from the bullets and blasts would melt them together even as they blew apart. At least he hoped.

“That’s only going to hold them for a while,” he said as he turned back into the room.

He saw Orli running between long rows of shelves, spindly metal units filled with boxes of various kinds, all with writing on them that Altin could not read. The place was very organized, and Altin could tell every box and crate was in its proper spot, part of a systematic storage plan.

“What is this place?” he asked running down a long row of shelves after her.

“Supply locker. Parts and supplies,” she said. “There will be others nearby. We need suits. And a Higgs prism.”

“Suits? Like the ones your warriors wear?”

“No. Spacesuits. For breathing where there is no air. You don’t think we’re going to be so lucky as to find a nice comfy climate on Red Fire, do you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it quite that far,” he confessed.

“Well, I did,” she said. “While you were jumping us across the galaxy, I came up with a list of what we might need. It’s going to be a big world if it’s like Blue Fire at all, so gravity might be really bad, maybe more than we can handle.”

“But it wasn’t a problem on Blue Fire.”

“I think she was doing you some favors.”

He nodded and followed her like a dog, tailing along and feeling somewhat useless. He paused long enough to cast a seeing spell out into the hangar. Two of the fleet people were trying to melt through the ice with lasers, but the others had gone back to shooting the Hostile spreading out across the floor.

“Here,” Orli called out triumphantly. “Just right for us. Except there’s only one.” She held a box that was roughly the size of both his fists pressed together.

“What is it?”

“Higgs prism. Small. Low power consumption, too, way better than the ones the
Aspect
uses—twelve years is a long time.” She looked up, a grim smile of satisfaction on her face, but she saw that he still didn’t know what it was. “It redirects gravity. We can stay at Earth normal no matter how bad Red Fire is. We’ll just have to stay together.”

“We will.” He had no intention of leaving her side. Ever. Not until this was all done or they were all dead.

“Good. Now come on. If there are any suits, they won’t be in here. We need an equipment locker. There will be one somewhere close.” She took his hand again and ran toward the back part of the room, through several unlocked doors, and out into a large, dimly lit central corridor. They looked both directions, but the length of it, as far as they could see, was empty. “Just as I thought. Everyone is up there fighting. Let’s go.” She took off running again, dragging him along.

“How do you know where we are going?” he asked as he struggled to keep up with the athletic Earth woman tugging at his arm.

“It’s the upside of boring fleet uniformity. I spent my childhood on a base like this. They’re all the same.”

They ran for some time, Orli reading the placards on the doors that had them, until finally they came to a place where she started trying some of them. The first two were locked, so she kicked in the third when it wouldn’t open either.

Altin practically ran into her back right after, assuming she’d charge straight in as she had been, and he intent on following. But she didn’t go in. She glanced into the room, made a quick survey of the sorts of equipment she saw inside, then turned away. “Not this one,” she said.

Apparently boring fleet uniformity was only so uniform, Altin thought.

She kicked in four more doors and finally found what she was looking for, a room filled with rows and rows of strange, stiff-looking suits. They went in, and Altin, out of curiosity, reached out to touch one, but she called back to him as she ran down a long row and turned right and out of sight. “Not those. They’re too thin. We need heavy ones, with big-time power packs.”

He didn’t ask why and simply ran in the direction she had gone. He found her by the sound of her shuffling through some very dense-looking suits, stuffy and thick like they were made from several layers of heavy hide, or whatever served for hide on this strange world, a substance seeming almost metallic, though soft and just off white. Each suit had a panel with colorful buttons on its front, another on the left sleeve, and a bulky, box-like apparatus on the back that was a convolution of alien objects too complex for Altin to bother trying to take in. On a shelf above them, each suit had a bulbous helmet to go with it, big cumbersome things with rounded face plates of dark mirrored glass.

“These,” she said as she made her way down the row of them, her hands touching the sleeves of several, turning them to reveal tags attached and dangling from each. “Come here.”

He stepped toward her, and she held one of the suits up to him, pressing it against his chest.

“Close enough.” She pushed it at him, obviously intending that he take it, which he did. It was heavier than he expected it would be, much heavier. They wouldn’t be able to move very fast in them, he thought.

She went down the row a bit farther and grabbed another that seemed to satisfy for herself. “Now all we need is the
kaboom
,” she said.

“What?” Altin felt lost. They’d been moving so quickly through such completely alien space it unsettled him, adding to his anxiety. He had no idea what the end of this running about looked like; nor did he know when it would end. They needed to get to Red Fire and do something soon. He had faith in Orli’s ideas, but this was taking a great deal of time.