Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (22 page)

She couldn’t right the spinning, and she could barely glimpse the grates whipping across her field of view. She couldn’t even tell which grate she was looking at when she saw flashes of crossbeams spinning in her vision. Was that the one above or below?

The sound changed right next to her head. The wind faded some, echoed differently off something close. She saw a streak of the green-and-brown protein whistle past. The lull in the wind lasted a breadth of a second, then,
wham
, she was hit by a new blast of hot, steamy air.

She used it to stop the spinning. She flattened out again. The next grate was coming fast. She could see an end to it. An edge of the grate, like the rim of some great black chasm beyond it. She glanced out over the darkness. Way off in the distance, maybe a mile or two away, there were lights. Other grates in the distance, other levels. From here she could make them out fairly clearly. They were decks. Platforms one above the next. She could see below, like staring into a black abyss, that there were more going down into the darkness. Many more. Miles and miles of them.

The one immediately below her was coming up fast. She couldn’t tell if she was going to clear the edge or not.

She wasn’t. The wind was blowing her back over it, not out over the abyss.

She dove, got her angle right. She made it through another gap, three sections shy of the edge.

“God damn,” she muttered as she passed through.

She turned and started angling back the other way, anticipating the change of wind. It came, just as she expected. It blasted her back the other way. At least that much was predictable!

She got her body under control right away, and fanned herself out enough to let the wind carry her out over the abyss. She looked up and saw that she must have just missed the edge of the grate above that last one. Maybe there was a God. Maybe just blind-ass luck.

She managed to get herself a good forty feet beyond the edge of the next platform, trying to get herself as far out over the abyss and away from the grate edges as possible. She wanted some space to work with so the next level’s wind wouldn’t blow her back over them again. She wasn’t sure she could keep diving through the eye of the needle, so to speak.

She shot right by the platform, plenty of room to spare. She gritted her teeth. Some small measure of victory.

She rotated as she fell, staying flat and steering with the wind against her palms. She was ready for the next change of the wind.

It hit her just as she expected it to. She made an arrow out of herself, tried to knife through it as best she could, trying to avoid dealing with the grate.

No luck. It blew her back over the edge of the next level. She ended up having to dive through a gap again. But she made it, and only one gap from the edge. The next air current change would get her much farther out over the open space. She was sure she could prevent having to dare those damn gaps again after that.

The wind change hit her, and she was totally ready for it. She managed to angle almost two hundred feet away from the grate she was falling toward. Now she had it down.

She managed to be almost four hundred yards over the abyss by the next sequence of alternating winds.

She stayed that way over the next two after that.

How long was this going to last? How long could she possibly fall?

She looked into the depths as she fell, able to focus on something other than what was immediately in danger of flattening her. The wind was roaring in her ears. Tears mixed with the condensation of steam, all of it running up her body in hot streaks that blew off in her wake like the dust from a comet’s tail.

The steam was getting thicker as she fell, and hotter, which hardly seemed possible. She could see the lights of the layered grates come to an end. Seven layers left.

What now?

Another alien shot past her. Again a glancing blow, cushioned some by the inflated nature of the soft flesh. She spun out of control again. Darkness, little rows of light from the grates. A tentacle hit her and spun her the other way, a powerful slap that sent her spinning farther out over the abyss.

An updraft hit her like a battering ram, and for a moment she felt as if she were rocketing upward again.

She wasn’t. She was just falling slower now. Not much slower, she quickly realized, still plummeting at what had to be eighty miles an hour or more.

She got her spin under control and flattened herself into the updraft. The steam coming up in it, the heat, was unbelievable. She wondered if she was blistering. By God, it was hot.

Now what?

A waggle in the wind made her shift her arms. The buffet stopped, but her new body position caused her to knife sideways.

She shot out of the updraft and was suddenly hurtling downward at full speed again.

Shit
.

She angled back, trying to find the updraft. But where was it? She wasn’t a goddamn bird.

Then she saw something fluttering.

She squinted into the darkness. Did she see something fluttering? Maybe she was going mad right before she hit the bottom deck. There was going to be a bottom deck. She could see the platform lights coming to an end on either side of the abyss, rows of lights on the grates, which together looked like ladders climbing to the top of the ship from its dark, unseen bottom regions. The last rung was twenty seconds away. She supposed madness was the best way to enter into death. No fear that way. She could die thinking she was a bird, fluttering amongst the rest.

The flutter came again. More of a shadow against the darkness. Light bouncing off a puff of steam shaped it in relief. It was man shaped.

A headless man. Tumbling in the wind. Perhaps madness was upon her in full.

It zigged and zagged wildly. It puffed and shot up above her. Or she shot past it.

Something in the updraft. The air column was right there!

She leaned, yawed her body again. She swerved to her right.

Bam, there was the updraft again. It rippled the skin of her face with the violence of slowing her. She felt like she was shooting skyward again. Though she knew she was not.

The man shape fluttered to her left. It was cartwheeling past her now. Spinning back out of the column of air.

It was her spacesuit.

Shit!

She rotated and flattened, took as much braking effect as she could get out of the updraft. Now she was a bird. A bird of prey. She watched that fluttering object fall. She waited until it passed the grate it was falling by. She watched it. Watched for which way the wind blew.

The spacesuit spun in the new layer of air. It swooped up, came back toward the updraft. It nicked the edge of the updraft and ballooned, it whirled and spun up, then, leaflike, it fell away again, turning slowly and bouncing along the column of air like some bewildered tumbleweed.

She angled her body and shot down at it. She knew she was going to eat up what little space she had left to fall.

She shot toward it. It came up faster than she thought. It was turning. She was going to miss it. It turned back. She dove right into it. Hit it hard. The plastic edge of a belt compartment cut her open above the eye.

She didn’t care. She fought to untangle herself from it. The roar coming from beneath her was incredible now. It was a roiling noise that was louder than the wind. The steam was unfathomably hot.

She fumbled for the back of the suit. A new blast of air turned her over, spun her around. She didn’t care. She felt a strand of cable in her hand. She slid her hand to it. Grabbed the small device dangling there. She clutched it, drew it to her. She couldn’t see what was on the little screen. She didn’t have to. She knew which way to turn the dial.

She turned it quick, all the way. The steam was so thick now she couldn’t see at all.

A blast of wind hit her. Blew her sideways. She was still falling. But she knew it was momentum now.

The roiling noise was like thunder, the steam scalding.

She hoped she could find the updraft again.

Something struck her hard. She bounced off it. Saw the shadowy form of an alien gliding past. She bounced along the curve of its billow, slowing some. Probably another broken rib. She rolled and tried to push off with her legs, but it was moving far too fast.

She pinballed around inside its trailing tentacles for a time. The upward whip of the last tentacle tip that struck her sent her spinning off vertically. She gripped the object in her hand like it was the very core of life.

It was.

She was alive. Drifting on the wind. Her Higgs prism in hand.

Chapter 22

T
he crowd of applicants, supplicants, and courtiers outside the throne room doors filled the grand hallway like a gilded fair. The costumes they wore—or at least they were costumes in Roberto’s eyes on this day—were gaudy and opulent. Their perfumes filled the air as loudly and anonymously as did the drone of their voices, all together in a lively mumble, punctuated here and there by the shrill noise of some woman’s laughter or the lecherous low undertones of men at lusty wit. To Roberto it all seemed one big party being thrown despite the teetering fate of his best friend and her new husband, Sir Altin Meade.

“You and I both know this is all bullshit,” he said as he pushed his way through the crowd. “Almost all of that was lies.”

Deeqa matched his pace easily with her long strides, but she said nothing. The courtiers paused as the two of them passed, most long beyond any awe at seeing people from another planet, but more than a few stricken by Deeqa’s dark, statuesque beauty. She was not a regular feature of the Palace, and so she at least was new.

“So why is the Queen lying to us? What is she covering?” he pressed. It was almost a private rant. “And what the hell were those three
Citadel
mages into? Did you see them? They looked like shit. Envette had blood all over her knees, like she’d been crawling in it.”

“You don’t know if it was hers or someone else’s,” Deeqa pointed out.

“I don’t, but I have a vivid imagination,” he said, shouldering past two men wearing matching coats of blue velvet. One of them turned with an eyebrow raised and his mouth opened, prepared to say something. But he saw who it was, the burly Earth warrior whom everyone in Crown recognized on sight for his role in saving the city during the war. That eyebrow lowered some, and when the fellow saw the feral look that flashed upon Deeqa’s face, his mouth shut as well, just before he turned around. He’d obviously seen something in her eyes, in the angles of her whole body, that promised she’d not learned to fight in rooms with climate control enchantments, taught by kindly instructors who spoke of honor as they explained point systems, trophies, and tournament rules.

“Fear is the child of imagination and ignorance,” she said as they cleared the worst of the crowd.

“I know. But that redhead is an X-ranked teleporter. I’ve worked with her. She’s a combat teleporter, the kind they send into dangerous stuff. What if they sent her in to get Orli and Altin out? What if that blood was her kneeling next to one of them? You know? Checking on them.”

“The child grows strong, and the parents are proud of what you say.”

Roberto frowned. It took him a moment to get it, and when he did, he forced himself to let the unprofitable what-ifs go. “Fine,” he said. “But it’s still bullshit. The Queen isn’t going to do anything. That much is obvious. She says to trust her, but when it comes to the lives of my friends, I don’t trust shit. We have to do something. We can’t just leave them to … to whatever. And don’t tell me I have a contract and job to do. You said that the last time we were here, over two weeks ago, and look what we’ve gotten—what Orli and Altin have gotten—for my efforts of
not
doing anything. If I thought I was getting the whole truth, I might be okay going back and hawking coffee for another few days. But right now, I feel like I’m drowning in lies.”

“Captain! Wait,” came a labored voice from behind them. “Captain, please, a moment.”

They stopped and turned back. The fat figure of the Earl of Vorvington was just pushing through the last of the crowd plugging up the hall. His cheeks were florid, and he was huffing as he approached. He wiped sweaty hands on his red-and-gold doublet, and then reached out to shake Roberto’s hand in the Earth-people style.

“Captain, I could not help overhearing some of what you were saying just now, as you passed through the assemblage there. I apologize for eavesdropping, but … well, it is a habit one acquires after a century or two at court.”

Roberto cocked an eyebrow to Deeqa, who shrugged and looked down at Vorvington, waiting for whatever came next. “Yeah, I get it,” Roberto said. “No worries. What can we do for you?”

“I am under the impression you are as concerned and frustrated by the lack of information regarding our incredible Galactic Mage as I am. And his sweet wife, of course, whom I understand is your old crewmate.”

Roberto knew perfectly well that Vorvington knew perfectly well that he and Orli were close. He might not know Vorvington at all personally, but he did know the man had been present for most of the goings-on here at the Palace since this whole Prosperion adventure began. Goddamn nobles. They were worse than the politicians back on Earth. If that was possible. “I am,” was all he gave as reply.