Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (59 page)

The tower settled heavily onto the ground of that alien world, sent straight from Prosperion to this place where, by comparison, the gray stone of that now distant planet seemed bright plumage. The tower thrust itself up amongst the jagged landscape like a rude gesture to Red Fire’s oppressive monochrome, the singular monolith of otherness. In the next instant Altin cast the anti-magic spell on Orli’s space suit. “Taking down the Polar Piton’s shield now,” he said right after. He spoke urgently, his breath quick. “This must be fast, before he finds me again.”

“Wait. I’m still trying to get a reading for the Higgs prism,” Orli said. “It’s not showing anything. It’s showing no gravity at all. We should be floating if that was true. Which it can’t be.” She fiddled with the dials on the gravity prism for a moment more, growing anxious and hating every moment Altin stood there without the anti-magic spell on his suit. “It should be reading something.”

“One of my students mentioned once that gravity might be an incidental element of the shield. Perhaps that is affecting your machine.”

“It might be. I don’t know.”

“Well we are about to find out. What happens if the gravity is as you feared before, very high?”

“We get flattened.”

“Can we test it? Maybe I can teleport something out there.”

“Like what? It would have to be something sort of vertical, like us.” She looked frantic. Her voice trembled as she spoke. “We don’t have time. He’s going to find you.”

Altin cast about the room, looking for a surrogate to test the gravity. He spotted the little palm trees on the table nearby. “Here, this is vertical.”

“It’s too light, it will just blow over. And it’s made of glass. Altin, quit messing around. He’ll find you.”

Altin teleported the decanter away, beyond the tower and the Polar Piton’s shield, setting it in view on the ground outside the window. The little palm fronds on its stopper began to spin. They spun so fast they became a blur. Surprisingly, it didn’t blow over. Had there been more time, Altin might have marveled at that. He did have time to notice, however, that it didn’t break. It neither crumbled nor got pulled flat. That would have to be good enough.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not being ruined out there. So let’s roll the dice, shall we?”

She sighed, the sound of it a tinny rasp in the speakers inside Altin’s helmet. “Take it down. Please hurry.”

Altin reached out into the protective shielding he’d become so used to casting around buildings that he brought into space and, with a grimace, dismissed the spell.

A scouring wind blasted through the tower’s windows the instant the magic shield was gone, nearly hurricane force. Books and parchments and bits of everything began whirling about, the wind circling and collecting violence in the round walls of the room. He immediately felt a tremendous weight upon him, he became that weight, had to fight to remain standing with all his might. His legs trembled and his spine felt as if it might compress. He felt a wrenching pain in his back where it pulled, and his abdominal muscles mashed together as his body began to fold, the very structure of his bones suddenly inadequate. He tried to push up against it, to fight it, but could not for long. For a moment he thought it might actually be an attack from Red Fire, but he saw Orli was folding too.

Her fingers feverishly worked the controls of the contraption she held, and just as Altin was forced to his hands and knees, the pressure was gone.

“Shit,” gasped Orli, breathing as hard as if she’d run a sprint. “Five g’s. That was close.” He could barely hear her over the roaring of the wind.

“I should say so,” Altin agreed. He stood and tried rubbing his aching back, but the boxy unit on the back of his spacesuit made it impossible.

“Get that spell on your suit,” Orli demanded. “Now.”

The great slam of Red Fire’s recognition struck him the moment she said it, and once again Altin went down to his knees, the interior force greater than mashing gravity. He clutched at his head, grasping for his ears reflexively despite their being buried inside the bulky helmet.

Orli was at his side once more, the click of her face plate against his, her mouth and eyes wide. “Cast the spell,” she yelled, so loud it made the speakers crack. “Cast the fucking anti-magic.”

Die
, came the fury of Red Fire, a death weight of incalculable mass.
Die
.

Altin fought with all his will to focus long enough to cast the anti-magic spell. His hands shook with the palsy of his weakness and fear, but he placed it on the control panel of his suit and, finally, barely, enchanted it.

Red Fire was gone again.

“Tidalwrath’s teeth,” he exclaimed breathlessly, looking up into Orli’s worried face. Bits of debris bounced off her visor. He could hear other bits ticking against his own when they struck. “I’m not sure I’ll manage even a minute fighting down here, not this close to the source. That was worse than before.”

She was already tugging him up to his feet. “Can you still go?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Orli watched him for a moment, expectant in her posture and attitude. He looked back at her, shifting his weight to compensate for the gusting wind. He realized she was waiting for the teleportation spell that would take them out. He realized it because he’d thought about casting one.

“We have to take the stairs,” he said. He reached out for her hand and together they made their way down the stairs, moving as quickly as the bulky suits would allow. The descent was interminable and Altin cursed himself for not having thought to just bring the top portion of the tower. Experiments in space made opportunities for the strangest oversights.

Soon enough, however, they were outside in the full force of the wind. Altin walked to where the little palm tree decanter was, leaned down and looked at it, searching for cracks or signs of fatigue. It seemed fine, though. Its fronds whirling furiously, but otherwise looking as it always had.

“So where is it?” Orli asked.

“Over there,” he said, pointing beyond the decanter to a huge formation of dark red stone that was roughly eight hundred paces away. He started off immediately, once more pulling her along. The buffeting force of the wind had them staggering like drunks as they clambered over and around the rocks and boulders of the hostile landscape. Altin couldn’t help the instinct that had him shielding his eyes with his hand against the blowing dust and grit as they made their way toward the dark tumble of piled rocks, a great mound of them, enormous stones that seemed to have collapsed together, like a fallen temple from some ancient time, though scoured clean of any remnant grandeur by the merciless sandblasting wind.

They got to it and quickly found some relief inside from the violent atmosphere. They moved deeper into the formation, carefully weaving through a veritable maze of giant, tilting stones, climbing over some, under others, and squeezing through narrow places carefully. In the process of doing so, Orli discovered, quite by accident and certainly to her surprise, that there were lichens there. It was a small patch growing on a rock, like cracked gray skin, and just the one spot of it, but there it was just the same. She took only enough time to lean close and turn on the suit’s video feed to record it as she passed, her botanist’s instincts coming naturally. “Well, there’s the life it needs,” she said. “At least some of it.”

“Here,” Altin said from up ahead, “down there.”

Orli came up behind him and saw that he was looking down into a pit.

“I didn’t think to bring any rope,” he said, kneeling down to look inside. “I can’t see very far down, and I doubt even an elf could climb the sides. Definitely not us in these suits.”

Orli clicked on her suit’s spotlight and shined it down into the hole. She could see the bottom. “About sixty feet,” she said.

Altin was fiddling with the suit controls on his left sleeve. “How did you turn the light on?”

She reached over and turned it on for him.

He added his light to hers, and they studied the bottom of the hole again. He looked back up, directly at her, blasting his light right into her face. He quickly turned away when he saw her face contort. “Sorry.” He felt so uncomfortable and out of place. Partly because he was in the suit, but mainly because being cut off from his magic left him helpless, unable to do anything for either of them now. “Somehow we need to find another way in.”

“Did Blue Fire show you another way in?”

“No. This was it.”

“Then we can use the prism. I’m not good with these because I never had any reason to use one before. They’re all automatic on the ship. But I think I can figure it out.”

Altin watched her face for a moment, then nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“Come here,” she said. “Get right up here and hug me as tight as you can. Don’t let go.”

“Gladly,” he said, trying to sound chipper. It only sort of worked.

He scooted up to her and wrapped her in a hug as best he could.

“Turn off your light,” she said, squinting again. “And don’t pull anything loose back there.” She gave him a very serious look at that, before adding, “And don’t cover the jet ports.”

He found the button she had pressed on his sleeve and turned off the helmet light. “What jet ports?”

“The little holes at the bottom, both sides and in the middle back. You should be able to feel the lip of them. They stick out a little bit.”

“I’ll try.” He looked left and right, saw the jet nozzles and repositioned his arms around her, gripping the corners of the suit’s blocky dorsal pack carefully and slightly lower than he had before. “That better?”

“Yes, except now I can’t see. Get sideways a little bit so I can see my controls.”

He scooted around so that he was hugging her at an awkward angle from the side, his right arm around the back of her neck and shoulders, his left across her chest. She lifted the gravity filtering device up to where she could see it, tugging it up by the short tether with which she’d tied it to her waist and contemplating its controls.

“Okay, on three, we’re going to try a little test. Just a gentle little hop with your toes. More like standing up on your tiptoes than jumping, actually. Got it?”

He nodded.

“One, two, three.”

They both lifted themselves up onto their toes, she with a little more force than he. They lifted into the air together, several inches off the ground and moving slightly sideways, then settled gently back down.

“Okay, I think that will do,” she said. “I’ll take a little more off while we’re falling, so we don’t pick up speed.”

Altin began to realize what she was going to do. He laughed.

“What’s so funny?” She squinted up at him through her helmet’s glass.

“You’re doing magic,” he replied. “This spell is called Falling Leaves.”

She smiled, but only until she blinked. “We can laugh later. Let’s go. On three, we jump up and over the edge. I’ll try to keep us from getting too wonky on the way down with my attitude jets, but don’t expect much. We’re kind of a mess like this.”

“I trust you,” he said, watching her through her visor. Even standing at the brink of death her beauty was radiant.

“On three. One, two, three.”

They jumped over the edge, him clinging to her like the lichens had the rocks, and her tapping her backpack thrusters just enough to keep the two of them from rolling over sideways as they fell. They picked up a little speed, but she arrested it with a click of the Higgs prism dial. And then they were down.

Altin let her go and turned to where the pit became a tunnel, a low cave leading into darkness. He switched his suit’s light back on. “It’s really dark,” he said.

“Altin, go. We have to hurry.”

They moved into the cave and found that it headed very steadily down into the surface of the angry red world. For a time, it was fairly narrow, more like a crack than a cave, but eventually it started to widen until it provided more than enough room to move easily, in places, much more than enough.

They passed through wide tunnels and large open caverns, the surface of everything was pockmarked with tiny holes like those left behind by bad acne. There were no familiar formations, nothing like stalactites or stalagmites that might suggest there was water on this world, or at least that there had been at some time.

Onward they pressed, Altin leading them through twisting passages and down steep declining chutes. He moved through it all like a creature who’d lived there his entire life. But still he grew anxious and afraid. What Blue Fire had given him was recognition of the way, not a map. He had no gauge of distance. He had no way to predict how far they had to go. All of that pertained to his own ideas, human ideas of movement and time, things that had no corresponding part in the information he had gotten from Blue Fire, who had in turn taken it from Red Fire, from this world they were now sneaking down into. Altin only knew when they came to a place where they should turn, a place where they should climb, a place where they should jump. He even knew where not to go. But not how far.

They were nearing the forty-minute mark as they headed down, and both of them began to fret. Forty minutes with the orcs and demons pushing at the gate that was already all but lost before they left. Forty minutes with Red Fire’s orbs draped all over Earth dissolving things, spreading disease. There wasn’t going to be time. Both of them could feel it, but neither wanted to speak it aloud.