Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (9 page)

Captain Eugene shook her head, her mouth and eyes drawing parallel lines of doubt across her face. “I don’t think anyone is going to listen to you people anymore,” she said at length. “I want to believe you. I do. In fact, I am convinced you believe what you are saying right now is true.” Some of the severity left her face then. She even smiled. “You are young. Look at you. Strong, hopeful, maybe even smart. But easily manipulated.”

“No,” Envette began, her hands coming down reflexively, reaching out into the air in front of her defensively as if she might hold back those words, as if she might stop them before they became reality. Three beams of red light streaked from weapons held in nervous hands. Only the captain didn’t shoot.

The crew all stared into the vacant space where Envette had stood, their brows in rows of consternation, the bulkhead blackened and smoking where the lasers had hit. They looked around warily, knowing the wizard didn’t melt that thoroughly or that fast.

“I’m over here,” said Envette, once again in her least threatening voice and with her hands held high.

Three more beams of energy cut across the bridge, and the ship’s weather station burst into sparks that sprayed brightly for a moment then dimmed to a low yellow flame.

“You can’t hit me,” Envette said, this time from a place near the lift at the back of the bridge. “And I’m not going to fight back. I only want to arrange talks. Please, ask your king, or your emperor, even a duke … anyone with the authority to rethink this thing. Please, just tell them that we need to talk. It’s a mistake. All of it.”

The lift doors opened then, and with the exquisite reflexes of their craft, the two Marines saw her standing there and knew immediately that she was why they had been called. One grabbed her around the neck, his arm darting out quick as a shooting star, while the other snatched her right arm back and twisted it into a brutal lever of pain that prompted her to yelp.

“Gag her,” ordered the captain to her men. “Get those necklaces off of her and whatever is in her left hand.” To Envette she could only add, “I’m sorry, kid. I know this was never about you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” replied the young mage. With her free hand she struck the fast-cast amulet she’d been holding since leaving
Citadel
against the edge of the lift’s door frame, leaving the Marines groping at thin air.

When Envette returned to the balcony upon which Aderbury stood, Aderbury was staring open mouthed into a section of
Citadel
’s inner dome. He’d activated a magnification spell in a two-pace area of its surface, calling up images within it of the space that would, for all practical descriptions, be considered behind them. “We’ve got incoming from somewhere out there,” he said, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb, but still looking up into the portion of the dome showing the expanded view. “Another fifty or so ships, and two of them are those giant ones.”

“Where’d they come from?” asked Envette, seeing no need to force the explanation of her failure into the moment. Her return surely spoke clearly enough of how that enterprise had gone. “Were they summoned from somewhere else?”

“I have no way to know,” he said. “But look.” He pointed out in the direction from which Envette had just returned. “There’s at least a hundred more coming out to join the rest.”

“They won’t be coming to talk,” Envette said. “Even the patient Captain Eugene is not inclined to help put together talks. I just spoke to her.”

“Then it’s tea time on Duador for sure,” Aderbury spat.

Aderbury had been given access to the secret whispers of the Palace telepaths, and in a matter of moments, he’d explained the situation they were in to a messenger of the Queen: the Earth ships, roughly two hundred of them, were spreading out around them, despite the assistance they’d already given in the fight against the Hostiles. Surely the commanders of those ships did not think the massive clumps of rupturing Hostiles were the work of their own weaponry. And yet, on came the ships anyway, peeling out of the defense of their own besieged world long enough to make war on
Citadel
.

“Do not engage them,” was the order he finally received. “Get out of there for now. Let’s not make things any worse.”

Aderbury could hardly believe they were retreating after only a few short minutes and nothing but victory after victory in the fight, but he knew well enough what Her Majesty’s orders meant, and it was the only thing they could do. For now. So, with a shrug, he sent down to Cebelle and told her to have the conduit take them home.

The collective groans of over seven hundred redoubt pilots greeted the great blue ball of Prosperion the moment it replaced the one of Earth. They all knew this wasn’t going to help anyone.

Chapter 8

A
ltin fumed as he left the Temple of Anvilwrath. High Priestess Maul wouldn’t even speak to him. He’d been brushed off, sent away by her assistant, Klovis, as if he were some foolish child seeking a healing spell for an injured cat. He hadn’t even been given time to explain what he was there to ask of them. They’d simply dismissed him. But such was the vanity of the Church sometimes, with its answers already in hand, its diviners full sure of themselves and often when curiosity would serve them best. But Klovis had told him they were working on the Hostile problem, which he supposed was hopeful. And she had healed his hands and knees, which he was grateful for.

While he was glad to know that the Maul was responsive to the request of the Queen and that she was working to get Blue Fire to call off the Hostiles, he knew it wasn’t going to happen. He knew it better than the Maul ever could, for he was certain Blue Fire would not open her heart to the priests any deeper than she had to him. Far less so, he surmised, and he’d been there physically. They’d never get that close. The love of Worship was not the same as the love of Love, and he knew with more than mere instinct that Blue Fire could sense the difference and would never allow the calculating nature of power, even in the background wisps of the Maul’s mind, into her private places, the deepest chambers of her heart, the vulnerable place where her life force was. And if the Maul didn’t have that kind of access, she wasn’t going to change Blue Fire’s mind and get her to call off the attack. Altin couldn’t prove it, but he knew it in the way one knows that rain has come by the petrichor.

However, his mission remained. The dismissal by Anvilwrath’s priests in Leekant merely meant he needed another diviner. He’d been confident that the combined power of the Maul’s circle of twenty-five could find anything for him, but that was no longer an option. They were busy. So his next best option, being that his own lowly level of divination was not worth the time it would take to try, not to mention the fact that he was already in Leekant, was Doctor Leopold. He made his way straight to the Guilds Quarter part of town.

He burst into the doctor’s office twenty minutes later, panting for having jogged the entire way. A few months ago, he might have risked teleporting into a back alley to expedite the trip despite such things being expressly against the law. But not now, not with the Orc Wars ratcheted back up. There were wards up and watchers monitoring the mana flow. The last thing he needed was conflict with the city guard, running was only slow, a delay with the guards could be catastrophic.

“Why hello, Sir Altin,” greeted the buxom and nearly-ever-cheerful Lena Foxglove. “I’m glad to see your arm has recovered so nicely, even though you didn’t let the doctor finish healing the incision.” Her smile was wide and white, her eyes sparkling, but he was glad to see she didn’t go to the great lengths she’d used to in displaying her cleavage to him every time he came by. He had Roberto to thank for that.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s fine. I need to see Doctor Leopold immediately.”

“Oh, you always need to see him ‘immediately,’” she teased. “I don’t suppose you have another mangled mouse for him, do you?”

He shook his head, impatiently. “Lena, I really need to see him right away. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“For you or for Taot? You know the doctor had nightmares for a month after spending that much time with the dragon that day. You really should make a point of acknowledging what he did for you. He still gets requests for veterinary services because of it, and he’s lost two good patients because he refused their pets.”

“Lena, please. It’s Orli. She is going to die if I don’t speak to him right now.”

“Oh,” replied the comely receptionist then, a thin film of ice forming over the lake of her loquaciousness. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?” She made a show of looking through some papers on her desk. “Let me see,” she mumbled as she rifled through them.

Altin went to the door leading back into the doctor’s office and examination rooms and tried to open it. It was locked.

“Your choice,” Altin warned. “You can open it, or I can blow it down. I don’t care which.”

“He’s with a patient,” she said then. “And if you break it down, I’ll have the constable on you.”

Altin rolled his eyes and was about to argue when he heard the doctor’s voice coming down the hall. The door opened a moment later, revealing the tremendous bulk of Leekant’s top physician and the well-dressed figure of Lady Falfox, the self-proclaimed nobility of Leekant, though in truth merely the wife of one of its more prosperous citizens, Bucky Falfox, proprietor of the Patient Peacock Inn.

“And so, Madame, I’ll have the alchemist mix you up some tom-tom and willow powder and bring it by this afternoon. Mix it in tea twice a day, and you’ll be as good as gold by the end of the week,” the doctor was saying as they emerged.

“Oh thank you, Doctor,” she exclaimed. “You have no idea how much your work means to me. You cannot imagine how I do suffer, and my husband could not care less about all my agonies. He’d rather write another campaign speech than spend the tiniest bit of energy on sympathy for me.”

“Yes, I’m quite sure,” agreed the doctor as he opened the front door and gently guided the woman outside.

She dabbed a soft palm up to the long feathers projecting from her sparkling turban as she stepped out into the breeze. “Oh yes, it’s quite true,” she began, but the doctor, smiling, politely cut her off.

“Goodbye. Don’t forget to take your medicine.”

He turned to Altin once the door was shut and exasperation flared his features for a heartbeat or two. “If I were Bucky, I would have hung myself years ago.”

Altin didn’t have time to empathize. “I need a divination,” he said in lieu of greeting. “Orli is going to be executed if I don’t find her. She’s being taken somewhere on planet Earth, and I have to get to her. Her execution is certain after what has happened now.”

“Whoa, slow down,” demanded the ponderous physician. “What are you talking about? What has happened?”

The frustration that gasped from him was nearly as loud as a gorgon’s rasp, but he knew he’d have to explain it all in detail before the doctor could divine. Divination was about what the caster knew as much or more than it was about what they might find out.

Altin grabbed the doctor by the upper arm, his hand not even wrapping around half of the doughy girth, and nearly dragged him back to his office. The doctor was wheezing by the time he made it to the creaking chair at his desk.

“The Earth people tried to attack the Hostile world. I found out, or Orli did and then I did, that the planet is alive. It has a name, Blue Fire, and apparently it is female. The extermination of the people on the Andalian world was a terrible mistake. Blue Fire, through Orli, tried to explain, to apologize, but the fleet wouldn’t listen. They’ve lost too many ships and too many people. So, I, with permission from the Queen, helped her to thwart the attack from Earth, in hopes of getting it all sorted out. But, well, they took me captive, and then Her Majesty took that as an affront—you know how she is—and, so words were exchanged, the fleet was getting ready to fire on us, so, well, Blue Fire and I used a seeing stone Conduit Huzzledorf’s people sent to Earth the day before to locate the planet for ourselves, and then we, Blue Fire and I, sent the whole fleet home. Which didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time, but then, it turns out Blue Fire sent a bunch of her minions—eggs she calls them, but orbs in the eyes of the fleet—and, well, it seems she is bent on taking out Earth in the same way she took out Andalia, although she denies it entirely, which I know, because I went to her and asked.” By the time he was done speaking, he was nearly as out of breath as the doctor had been from the effort of hustling through the hallways.

The doctor stared, his mouth open, his mind still processing Altin’s hasty summary a full half minute after Altin’s tale was told. His brows furrowed, then un-furrowed, then furrowed again. “So, you’re saying …,” he began, but stopped, and there followed another few sequences of wrinkles forming upon his brow.

“They’re blaming Orli for it,” Altin said as he watched the doctor trying to work it out. “Or at least for part of it, and after all that’s happened between us, they think she is a traitor and that I, that all of us, everyone on Prosperion, have been in league with Blue Fire all along.”

That much the doctor could grasp easily enough. “I can’t say as I blame them,” he said. “From where they stand, that’s surely how it appears.”

Altin nodded. “But it’s not true, and Orli must not die for their misapprehension.”

“No, she must not,” the doctor agreed. “But what about this Blue Fire? That seems a larger problem, don’t you think?”