Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (2 page)

“We’re in some kind of bubble,” he said. “The mana, it curves all around. I can’t cast anything.”

“Shit.” She looked up at the grate high above. It too was five hundred spans away. “Shit,” she repeated. “We have to find him. We have to get out of here.”

It was true, but truth means little enough sometimes. He looked into her helmet, waiting for her to look back. In a few moments, she did. She was breathing more easily.

“God, Altin, what have we done?”

He was afraid she was about to say, “I told you so.” She hadn’t wanted to go out into the storm and look at the alien spaceships with them. He and Roberto were the ones who had wanted to leave the safety of his tower, now known as “the boot,” standing safely at a distance from the alien vessels. But they’d talked her into it. The aliens hadn’t made any hostile moves on them, and, well, adventure was practically Roberto’s middle name. So they goaded and teased and ignored her warnings. And now here they were, at least the two of them. And Roberto MIA.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He noticed sweat beading on Orli’s upper lip. He could feel it running down his own temples too, down his ribs inside his suit. “It’s awfully hot in here,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s really bad,” she remarked, watching as a puff of steam blew past. “We’ve got to get moving.”

“What about those? Do we dare try to remove them?” He pointed to the three tubes in her suit. He traced the lines of them snaking off into the dimness across the crisscrossed beams.

She took note of them, seemingly for the first time, and tried to turn in her helmet to see where they attached. She looked back and acknowledged the ones in his own suit, which he hadn’t seen but knew were there for the dragging weight of them.

She turned him carefully around and studied them for a time.

“Well, this one probably explains why we are still breathing,” she said. He could feel that she touched something at the back of his spacesuit, presumably the lower of the three. “But these two, I’m not sure. Given that we aren’t dead yet, I’m thinking these are feeding tubes of some kind. Or maybe some kind of anesthesia or tranquilizing gas. Maybe both.”

“That was my thought as well. So do we remove them, or does that kill us instantly?”

She let him turn back around. “Your guess is as good as ….” She let that thought die as her mouth fell open. She tilted back, upright on her knees, and gaped. “Oh no.”

“Oh no, what?” he said as he turned to see what she was staring at.

Looming above him was the strangest and most enormous creature he had ever seen.

Chapter 2

R
oberto walked along the edge of the huge ramp. It curved out of an opening in the giant spaceship like an arced, extended tongue. There were no buttons or levers at the end of it where it touched the ground, nothing to indicate a means of operation or communication as he had hoped there might be. There weren’t even any letters or other symbols on it, nothing to suggest an enchantment or some kind of magic was in place, some useful spell like the sort of thing Altin’s people might put in place of a com station or even just as a doorbell.

Altin and Orli had gone up to the belly of the ship. They looked really small from where Roberto was. It was pretty mind-blowing how big this damn thing was. Thirty-one miles long was a whole lot of ship. This damn ramp was three-quarters of a mile to the top.

“I wish I could take my glove off,” Altin was saying to Orli over the com. “This stuff has a really strange look to it. It’s not wood, but it kind of looks like it. Or maybe bone.”

He was talking about the weird stuff the ship was made out of. The two of them were all the way over by the ship itself, messing with the hull, but Roberto dropped to a knee when Altin said that and verified that the ramp was indeed made out of the same kind of stuff. It looked rough, a texture like the outside of an avocado.

Whatever it was, what was more important was what was up there. The aliens hadn’t sent out a welcoming committee, but they also hadn’t sent out troopers to kill or capture them. Given the latter, Roberto figured they were on pretty safe ground at this point. He had to believe that not everything in the universe was going to be violent. And any culture capable of developing technology on the scale of this massive ship must have learned how to work together. And besides, Roberto was a glass-half-full kind of guy.

He started up the ramp again. He considered saying something to Altin and Orli, but he knew as soon as he did, Orli would start in on him about him being a dumb-ass or something. Which he was well used to, coming from her, but there was no sense bringing it on needlessly. Besides, he just wanted to have a peek.

“It’s some kind of protein,” Orli was saying to Altin as Roberto climbed. She said something else, but Roberto couldn’t focus on it given that something was coming over the arc of the tonguelike ramp and rolling his way.

“Hey,” he managed to get out. “Something’s coming.” He took a couple of steps backward down the ramp, glanced at the surface of the planet, and decided six feet was close enough. He jumped off.

“What is it?” Orli asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted as he landed. He moved farther away from the ramp. His heart was pounding. “But whatever it is, it’s really big.” He sure hoped that whole “learning to get along with each other” thing came true, and he was really rooting for a half-full glass.

The object continued to roll down the ramp, still at least a quarter mile away. It was a round-bodied thing, a vehicle of some kind, with an egg-shaped central portion and two enormous hoops on either side as wheels. There was something in the egg shape, but he couldn’t make out what. He assumed it was one of the aliens, finally coming out to say hello.

He tore his gaze away long enough to raise his arm. He tapped up the video controls for his helmet’s visor. He set it to record. It was pretty thrilling to think he might be the first guy in history to video these things. If they didn’t eat his face off or blow him up with some kind of titanic anal probe, he’d be famous for all of time.

The vehicle had a light, which it held on a flexible sort of boom, or maybe tentacle. The light grew brighter and brighter as it approached, so bright it lit up the dust in the air.

Roberto zoomed in the camera as close as the helmet’s optics would allow. There was definitely something inside of the vehicle. “Whoa,” he muttered under his breath, then, louder, “What the hell is that?”

“I can’t see it from down here,” Orli said.

Roberto glanced over to where they were and saw the two of them shuffling back, leaning back and trying to see the top of the ramp, which he knew they couldn’t from that angle.

“What’s it look like from over there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. It was pretty hard to explain. “Like two huge hoops rolling side by side around a giant glass egg.” Man, that sounded lame, and it was going to be recorded for all of history. “There’s some puffy balloon thing in the middle of it with a bunch of spaghetti arms. I’m getting it on video, though.” That wasn’t any better. The guys on the news feeds from Earth always sounded way cooler than that.

“Maybe this is the creature coming to greet us finally,” Altin was saying. Roberto wanted to agree, but he wasn’t so sure. The light was getting really bright, and the vehicle was right above the two of them now. Nothing about it seemed too warm and welcoming. The tentacle reached out toward the edge of the ramp. It clearly knew they were down there. It stretched over the edge and started down toward them. The glare was so bright Roberto could hardly see them in it.

A second tentacle shot out from the top of the vehicle right after, whip quick, and it arced over the edge of the ramp, bloated at one end, and ejected something globular.

“Oh shit!” he managed to get out.

The tip of the tentacle recoiled as if it had just spat something down at Roberto’s friends, and then they were encased in some kind of wiggly goo. A third tentacle came down right after, this one holding a large tubular device, with a sharp end like a probe. It jammed the probe into the jelly, and something sparked.

“Hey, Orli. Altin. You guys all right?” he asked.

No answer.

“Hey, Orli. Seriously, don’t screw around. Answer me.” He waited a half second. “Altin? You guys getting me?”

Still nothing.

Roberto ran toward them, into the wind. The sand blowing rasped against his helmet glass.

The beam of light from the tentacle changed colors. He looked up. A new tentacle was holding a different device. It looked to be made from the same avocado material as the ship and the ramp. The wiggly iceberg of jelly in which Altin and Orli were trapped began to rise.

“Shit. Orli!” he called. He ran faster. “God damn it, Orli, say something. Altin, come in. Jesus. This is Roberto. Altin Meade, can you hear me? Orli? God damn it.”

He drew his blaster and thought about blowing the light to hell. But the blob and his two friends were now over a hundred feet in the air. The drop would kill them.

“Orli?” he called again, but there was nothing coming back. Not even a crackle or a hiss. He saw that all the lights on their suit packs were out. That wasn’t good.

He ran back to the base of the ramp. This time he was with the wind, and it gave him speed, though he fell three times. The third time he actually leaped as he felt himself losing his balance and let the wind carry him that much farther before he bounced to a stop. He got to the base of the ramp and sprinted up it as best he could in the damn suit.

“Hang on, you guys, I’m coming,” he called. His blaster was still in his hand.

The spaghetti-armed monstrosity in the giant vehicle had them up on the ramp now. He could see them both hovering above it, still suspended by the dimmer light at the end of the tentacle boom.

A quarter mile had never seemed so far away. Up and up he ran.

He was close enough to take a shot. He stopped, dropped to a knee, and aimed carefully for a section of the tentacle from which the suspension light came, about a half yard from the tip. He fired. The tip bent downward, as if hinged, cut halfway through by the searing shot. The yellowish jelly holding his friends plopped to the deck. Roberto was up and running. “Take that, you spaghetti fuck,” he called as he ran.

They were only a hundred or so yards away. He pushed himself for speed.

Another tentacle came out through the top of the egg shape. It took up the device that the wounded tentacle had let go. Once again it lifted the jelly blob up. The vehicle turned and began to roll away, back up the ramp and toward the opening in the ship.

“Oh no you don’t. Eat this, bitch!” He dropped to his knee again and fired another shot. This time the laser beam struck some kind of barrier and angled off into the sky. “Like I didn’t expect that!” He switched to conventional rounds as he ran closer. They wouldn’t be any good from this far away. The vehicle was moving away too quickly. He had to shoot anyway.

He aimed and fired. He couldn’t tell if he hit anything or not. Nothing happened. He fired again, then three more after.

The vehicle stopped.

“Hah! Now you see how it is. Give me my friends back.” He ran farther up the ramp.

A tentacle reached out toward him. It held an oblong black device. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he didn’t like it, so he stopped and shot at it too. Three shots,
crack, crack, crack
.

Something happened in the air in front of him: it rippled, like barely visible smoke rings being blown at him. The force blew him backward eighty feet, and were it not for the slope of the ramp, the landing might have killed him. As it was, he struck hard and his breath was knocked from him. He slid another sixty feet before coming to a stop. He’d damn near slid off the edge of the ramp. The seventy-foot drop would have finished him.

He got up, realized his gun was gone, and immediately fumbled for the sharp pair of pliers in his suit’s tool kit. “This shit isn’t over yet!” That’s when he realized all the lights were off on his suit too. All of them.

He paused, thinking. He looked up and saw the vehicle was already getting up and over the hump in the ramp, heading into the black hole that would take it inside.

He refocused, looking at the blank glass inside his helmet. Nothing. No video, no temperature readings, no oxygen monitors.

“God damn it!”

He wouldn’t be any good to them dead.

Chapter 3

T
he creature snaked a tendril up into the steam-filled wind, a tentacle perhaps, for there were round structures along it like suction cups, though from the distance, and the steamy darkness, it was hard for Orli to be sure. The tendril flapped and fluttered as it rose, much as the mucus had when the ochre jelly was melting away, but it climbed steadily higher. Its ascent was guided by a number of the small discs, which flattened out like giant oval dinner plates, spreading out from the center of the tendril and angling here and there, some upward, some vertical to the direction of the wind, like the rudder and ailerons of an old-fashioned airplane.

She saw it rising in the distance behind Altin where he knelt in front of her, watched it climb right up to the large grate high above them. She followed its flight, saw it wind itself around one of the cross members of the grate, and then, right after, it seemed to haul the most colossal creature out of the darkness from down below.