Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (4 page)

She turned back to look up at the, well, the examining table Altin was on. What else could it be?

She saw that a longer, narrower cylindrical prong of the three was rotating into place above Altin, or where he had to be—for what else would that machine be pointing itself at? The first one, short and fat by comparison, rotated away as the mass twisted. It ended up sticking out like the pinky of some posh Prosperion noble drinking tea. The new cylinder locked into place with an audible thud. It was so loud Orli could feel it through her spacesuit boots. This prong also had a black dome at the end, slightly smaller than the last.

The newcomer alien drew itself up and looked into something on the far side of the protein mass above. Whatever it was cast a blue light that reflected in two of its giant eyes.

It watched for a time, then lowered itself again. And then, to Orli’s absolute surprise, an image of Altin appeared upon its body, as if projected from the back side of a bulbous white sheet. The image was huge, Altin’s face clearly visible beneath the helmet glass, eyes wide but his expression calm. She could tell he was trying to control his breathing. That was good. He was still keeping his head.

The rest of him, the image of him, showed itself down the length of the alien’s long body. Altin’s head appeared broad and distorted across the bulbous part, and the rest of him, somewhat elongated, stretched down a forty-yard segment of the narrow, lower part of the alien. It was as if the creature itself were a video monitor, or at least, nearly so. The image was a little hazy, but not much, and she hardly knew if that was the effect of the image itself, the steam in the air, or the fog coming and going on her own helmet glass.

Patterns of light and color flashed over the image. Dark patches too. The first creature responded with colors of its own. Altin’s face appeared on its bulb too, then grew and got so large it vanished, replaced with only the metal ring around the seal at the base of Altin’s helmet.

The second alien reflected that image back. More colors and dark patches mottled the helmet seal depicted on their bodies. The alien that had been looking into the device pulled itself back up toward the big mass out of which the prongs and all the translucent hoses ran. It stared into the dim glow coming from up there again. Three of its tentacles were moving about on the top of the machine where Altin was. Orli had no way to know what they were doing to him.

Then the alien’s whole body turned blue, bright blue like the sky on a clear Prosperion day. It flashed three times, and right after, the first alien did the same.

Altin’s spacesuit helmet came bouncing over the edge of the machine a moment later. Orli barely had time to realize it—she hardly noticed something so small moving in such a place of massiveness. She saw it as it fell, realizing what it meant. She ran for it, jumped the corner of two gaps in the grate, trying to catch it. It bounced on the beam directly across from her, rolled down its length, and spun there. She jumped the corner of that gap and dove for it just as a gust of wind blew it over the edge. She watched it fall until she lost it in the darkness.

Chapter 4

R
oberto appeared in Calico Castle, near an old suit of armor on a pedestal. It was placed in the corner of a massive dining hall, in which he’d eaten numerous times before. The high vaulted ceilings above him were lost in darkness, as was the long table at the center of the room, most of it, anyway. The double doors across the way were open, and light came in from the hallway beyond, illuminating the high, arcing backs of three chairs at the end of the table and making pitchfork silhouettes of the candelabras near that end, none of which were lit.

He let go the breath he had held back on Yellow Fire’s new red world, a long and potentially final one drawn as he had pulled his helmet off. It was nice to know that it hadn’t been his last. He glanced to the shattered remnants of what was once a pale sapphire and shook his head. Altin called them “fast-cast amulets,” enchanted gemstones that held a single teleportation spell. Roberto called them lifesavers. He only hoped his would be enough to get Altin and Orli help. He didn’t think they were going to be in a position to use the ones they wore right away, not while being stuck in some kind of alien goo.

He ran out of the dining hall, helmet still in hand, and headed out into the courtyard. He cast his gaze about, but there was no one there. He called for Tytamon as loudly as he could. The doughty old kitchen matron, Kettle, came waddling out of the castle, wiping flour from her hands on equally flour-dusted skirts.

“What’s with all that racket, now?” she asked, looking ready to scold him for it regardless of the contents of his reply.

“Where’s Tytamon? I need a ride to … I need … crap, I don’t even know where I need a ride to.”

Who could he get to help that could do anything about Altin and Orli’s predicament? He could go to Little Earth, a forty-acre base that the War Queen had provided for the Earth fleet’s use when it first arrived on planet Prosperion. But then what? It’s not like the fleet had any way of getting to Yellow Fire—not without a wizard. Not without many wizards now, given Altin’s circumstance.

“Calm down, lad,” Kettle said. The frenzied look in his eyes had turned her irritation into something more useful to them both. “Think a bit, now. Where is it ya need ta go? Tell me now, an’ we’ll see ta gettin’ ya there quick as ya like.”

“
Citadel
,” he said. “I need to get to
Citadel
. Those aliens that landed on Yellow Fire have captured Altin and Orli. They took them into the ship.”

“Oh, sweet Mercy, not again,” Kettle cried. “Do ya all got nothin’ else ta do than go about the stars tweakin’ the nose of ever’ new creature ya run across? Weren’t it enough what nearly done fer us last year?”

Roberto let out a long, slow breath. He could see Kettle working herself up into a fright, which wouldn’t serve anyone. It was his turn to strive for calm.

“You’re right,” he said. “But it’s too late to do anything about that part now. We’ve got to get help.”

“Are they all right? Are they hurt?”

“Well ….” He paused and had to think about that. He didn’t think they were hurt. But he hardly knew. “No,” he told her. “They were unharmed last time I saw them.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. “But I didn’t get to talk to them before they went into the ship, so I think it would be best if we had
Citadel
there. You know, in case the … uh … the meeting doesn’t go well.”

“I dinna just bounce off the potato wagon and inta the pot, young man,” she said, “and this here ain’t potato-me boilin’ fer mash.”

His face crowded in around itself as he stared at her, his mouth half-open. “What do potatoes have to do with anything?”

“It means don’t treat me like a child, boy. Now if they’re in trouble, I need ta know.”

He straightened, looked her directly in the eye. “Kettle, they were alive the last time I saw them. I don’t know what’s happening to them now. But I do know the aliens had a chance to kill me—easily, I think, if they’d wanted to—and they didn’t. So, while I admit I don’t really know anything, that part I
do
know, and it’s all completely true. I think they are okay. Maybe. But I don’t like it, and I need Tytamon.” He watched her face for her reaction. She seemed satisfied.

“He was outside this mornin’, workin’ with them girls a’ yer crew on that fancy black floor you’ve got him and poor Altin makin’ out there.”

He knew where Altin’s teleportation pad was being built—a project Roberto himself had inspired—but he let her lead him across the courtyard and out through the gates. The armored guards looked back and forth between them as Roberto and Kettle ran through, sensing something amiss, but unable to detect anything to which they might put their halberds.

In his spacesuit, and with Kettle as agitated as she was, it was a bit of work for Roberto to keep up with her. Her stout frame and round, florid cheeks gave a false impression about her when it came to speed.

Soon they rounded the corner of the castle and were heading into the meadow to the east. There was a bulging section of the castle wall now, arcing out into the grass and made of lighter stone than the rest. It was a new construction, an extension Altin had added to accommodate the frequent absence of his tower, the boot, these days. Beyond its curve, another hundred paces out into the meadow, lay several large black stacks of tiles, nearly a yard square, piled five feet high. All around them were heaps of stone, barrels of pitch, wheelbarrows full of wisteria and blackroot, and mounds of various types of clay, some dry and cracked, others wet and glistening in the sun. Weaving around all of this were several members of Roberto’s crew, most having eschewed the glittering purple corsets of their
Glistening Lady
uniforms in favor of tank tops more suitable to heavy work under a springtime sun. Sami, Fatima, and Betty-Lynn were all pushing wooden wheelbarrows full of clay over to a frame staked to the ground, their muscular bodies leaning into them as the creaking wheels bounced over rocks and in and out of animal burrows. Roberto’s fourth brawny bodyguard, Chelsea, pushed a gravity sled from the other side of the site toward the frame, hers stacked with at least a half ton of stone, while his lean but lovely navigator, Tracy Applegate, singularly still in uniform, worked with an axe chopping down strips of wisteria to length. And there amidst them all, attired as always in his gray robes, was the ancient wizard, Tytamon, Calico Castle’s original tenant and a man approaching his eight hundredth birthday.

The great wizard heard them coming and looked up from his work. He set down a block of the black material he was making, a substance called engasta syrup, which he made from the ingredients all around. When formed into tiles and assembled together into a platform, the material could be transformed by transmutation magic into a box large enough to accommodate very large things. Objects and people could be teleported about in these boxes without troublesome accidents, and, in the particular case of the work in progress, spaceships could be sent across distances that were, prior to the advent of this magical device, impossible. A spaceship teleported in that way would not have its fusion core extinguished—as was the case when teleporting ships directly, “out of the box”—and it would not require a total restart of all the systems aboard. In the boxes operated by the Transportation Guild Service, Roberto’s own ship, the
Glistening Lady
, had gone back and forth between Prosperion and Earth a few times in what was little more than a blink in time. But without such a convenience provided by the TGS, a teleport by his friend Altin, unboxed teleportation, required a five-hour span of drifting helplessness while the ship was essentially rebooted from its very core. That time could be as much as several days for the fleet’s largest ships.

And so it was that Altin, and now Tytamon, were building their own private version of the massive teleportation platforms that the TGS was building in choice locations across the galaxy. The existence of this private platform was not public record just yet, but given how politicized the whole galactic transportation topic had become over the last year, it had seemed prudent to pursue in reality what had started out as just a casual idea. The whole point of having one at Calico Castle was help in situations like the one in which Roberto, Altin, and Orli now found themselves. A situation that Tytamon picked up on right away.

“Might I assume by the nature of your attire that my apprentice and his new bride are in some difficulty again?” Tytamon began as they approached. He said it with a nod toward Roberto’s spacesuit and the helmet in his hand.

“Yeah, you can assume that. They’ve been taken aboard a spaceship at the alien dig site on Yellow Fire.”

“Hmmm,” hummed the weathered old sorcerer. His thin lips pursed beneath the snowy whiteness of his mustache, though they were barely visible. “That does sound like them. How urgent is the danger? None of you seemed terribly concerned about the aliens when you took the tower back out there.”

Roberto couldn’t help rolling his eyes. He’d just done this with Kettle. “How urgent does it need to be? They’re on a damn alien ship, stuck in some kind of alien snot ball, and now I can’t get either one of them up on the com.”

“Hmmm,” hummed to ancient sorcerer again. He pulled gently on his long white beard as he thought about it.

Roberto tried to be patient. He knew the man was a genius. He knew the man was the only wizard on the whole planet able to cast spells in all eight magic schools, at least that’s what Altin called them: schools. Tytamon was an Eight. The only one in Prosperion history, apparently. So, it seemed reasonable to let the man think. But, well, what was there to think about? They needed to do something.

“Sir,” Roberto began, as politely as possible. “We need to get moving. Unless you think you can, you know, zip in there and zap some lightning, maybe a fireball or two, and then, well, get them out of there … it’s time to get to
Citadel
and get this rescue party moving.”

“Given how things went the last two times Prosperions encountered a new race of beings, I should think we might take a bit more care this time, don’t you?”

“Not when my best friend is frozen in some kind of jelly, and one of those giant spaghetti assholes tried to shoot me with … with a sonic blast or something.”