Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (48 page)

“Orli Love not leave anyway,” he said to that last fearful thought, trying to comfort her. But, though he didn’t say what came next, the thought rose unbidden in his mind.
Altin Love will be dead soon, but he won’t leave you until then.

And with that, she conceded to meet Red Fire and speak on their behalf. Altin would have been relieved by that, but he couldn’t shut off the fear that came from her after giving in. He tried to calm her, thought soothing thoughts at her, promised to keep her safe any way he could, but all to no avail. Blue Fire was simply terrified, a great colossal fear that seeped into him across all that space and despite his best efforts to filter it.

“Well?” Orli asked, once again lost given the absence of many spoken words during the last exchange.

Altin’s hands still trembled from the ferocity of Blue Fire’s anxiety, and his voice shook as he replied. “She says she’ll do it. But I have to bring a red Hostile to her.”

“You what?”

“You were right, or at least I think you were right, about it being better if the red orb finds her planet before it finds one of her orbs … her eggs. So she basically asked me to go get one of Red Fire’s ‘seeds’ and bring it to her. After that, I guess we’ll just have to find out.”

“Do you think it will work? Do you think she can get Red Fire to stop the attack on Earth?”

“I hope so. If she can’t, then we just wasted ten minutes that we should have spent trying to get to him ourselves.”

“She’ll convince him,” Orli said, finding confidence. “She understands the gravity of what she did on Andalia. They aren’t evil creatures, you know. Look how sensitive she is. It’s going to work.”

“We’re about to find out.” He looked grim as he said it, but the expression was more a product of his continuing efforts to at least mute some of the throbbing terror Blue Fire was pumping into his head. He forced a grin. “Let’s go catch a Hostile.”

Orli nodded, her expression as bleak as his. She really didn’t want Blue Fire to get hurt.

Chapter 38

C
alico Castle’s tall central tower appeared above planet Earth, another chunk of lifeless debris to the sensors of the Earth ships, which was fortunate for Altin and Orli. Despite the director’s suggestion that there wasn’t a significant reduction in the number of Hostiles around Earth, to the eyes of the tower’s occupants, the swarm seemed noticeably diminished. It was still a swarm, and in large patches above the continents there still hung hazy gray clouds that could only be Red Fire’s orbs.

“He’s such a liar,” Orli snarled. “There are obviously less of them.”

“He’s a politician,” Altin said. “That is what they do. Now help me find a little one so we can get this underway.”

“Can you get us closer?” she asked, knowing that he could. “I can’t see well enough from here.”

A moment after, and they were closer. “How’s that?”

Startled by the suddenness of it, the instantaneous expansion of the planet beyond the window, she nodded. “Better.”

They leaned through the window together, shoulders touching, each of them scouring the frenzy of Hostile orbs, tens of thousands of them still shooting and darting through space. Some had ships chasing them, missiles streaking in between the weaving movements of their flight and lasers striping the space with crisp bright lines. Others dive-bombed fleet squadrons, sending their pulverizing shafts of stone hurtling down at the ships in hopes of bashing them open as easily as if they were simply ceramic things.

Despite the overwhelming numbers, however, several of the massive Juggernauts remained, and the smaller starships coupled with the little groups of low-orbit fighters managed to continue to fight effectively among them, the network of all those computers synchronizing gravity pulses and popping open Hostiles like so many lanced boils. It couldn’t be said that the battle was under control, but a case could be made for the fleet holding its own. For the most part. Explosions now and again marked where practice and light-speed computations still weren’t good enough.

“There,” said Altin pointing. “That one, chasing that gray ship.”

She saw the orb he was referring to and nodded. “Yes, that’s small for a Hostile. Get it quick before it catches them.”

Here it comes
, he conveyed to Blue Fire in his thoughts.

With that, he plunged his mind into the mana, the serenity of its new consistency, a purplish vapor that filled everything thanks to his ring, like a fog with no wetness, no temperature. It was simply everywhere, waiting for him. He shaped the link across the space between himself and the Hostile chasing the ship, a thought only, no words, no gestures, and as easily as that, he had it. He thought then of the space around Blue Fire, the place where once the fleet ships had been, where they’d rained down their mighty missiles at her, where they’d unlocked the power in the tiniest of things, unspeakable power stored in the smallest bits of less than a molecule. It was there that he sent the little Hostile, in an instant, fast as the flick of a hummingbird’s wing.

“Do you see it?” he asked Blue Fire, sending his thoughts after the Hostile across that space and once again speaking them for Orli’s benefit as well. “Is it there?”

He saw in his mind that it had arrived, like watching it through a seeing spell, but the image put there by Blue Fire. Her entire being seemed to tremble around it, her thoughts quaking like the ground beneath an army’s marching feet.

“Does she see it?” Orli asked.

He nodded. “Let’s go in case she needs our help.” Almost as soon as he’d said it, the tower appeared above Blue Fire’s enormous world. The blue disc of Earth vanished and the brown mass of Blue Fire’s filled the view, a nearly waterless planet capped at the poles by huge oceans upon which seemed to float the tiny continents where life went on, where plants and animals were blissfully unaware of the cosmic events unfolding just about everywhere else but there—happily ignorant like Altin had been but a scant two years ago.

“Should I say something to her?” Altin asked. “Or leave her alone to talk to him?”

“How should I know?” Orli asked as she leaned out the window and looked around.

“I’m no matchmaker. You’re the one with the perfect grasp of what is going on.”

“I wouldn’t call it perfect,” Orli said, leaning even farther out the window and looking left and right. “And where is the orb? I don’t see it.”

Altin looked too, though he couldn’t lean out to do it now, given that Orli had climbed up into the windowsill to get a better view. “I don’t know. Should I ask her? It’s the same question really. I don’t want to interrupt.”

“I don’t know either. Maybe give her a few minutes first. Does she still feel afraid?”

“Terribly.”

“Well, she’s probably nervous. I was nervous when I first met you.”

Another time he might have smiled, but the thrumming of Blue Fire’s terror prevented such a thing. Still, the memory was a fond one. “I was beside myself,” he said, recalling the first time he’d seen Orli in person, standing before his hospital bed in the
Aspect
’s sick bay. “Never had I beheld such beauty.”

He couldn’t see it, but she smiled, hers unhindered by waves of someone else’s fear. “Yeah, you were pretty obvious.” She sighed, very briefly, even without receiving broadcast terror, she was unable to sustain pleasant thoughts for long. “Maybe that’s what’s happening to her. Maybe she is smitten by the big red hunk.” She climbed back into the room. “I sure hope so.”

“As do I,” he said. “But I’m worried. I’m not getting anything like that from her at all. It’s still just her afraid, like she was before we sent the red one here.”

They waited nervously for a while, but still nothing changed.

“I’m going to try to talk to her,” he said at length. “It’s been ten minutes at least.”

“It’s been longer than that,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Nothing.

“She’s not answering me.”

“Maybe they’re making love.”

He harrumphed, the sound deep inside, unconvinced. “If they are, she’s still horrified.”

“They do live for millions of years. Maybe courtship takes a really long time.” She turned and leaned back out the window again, peering down at Blue Fire as if somehow the raw desire to know would be enough to let her see.

“I should have asked, shouldn’t I? Should have found out more.”

“Yes. But we didn’t think of that. That’s usually how it goes.”

“What if we’re locked out now? What if that’s it? What if I can’t speak to her anymore, for … for years. Maybe tens or hundreds, even thousands of years.”

Orli bit her lip. A low sound rumbled in her chest now too. She turned back from the window and went to sit at the table that had so long served Tytamon as a desk. She ran her fingers through her hair, over her forehead, exhausted and frustrated. She stared silently into the wood grain, as if seeking the answers there, but there was nothing. She looked up at him, and shook her head. “Then that will mean we have made a very big mistake.”

She put her forehead in her hands as Altin turned back to the window, staring out at the silent world below, the world whose terror buzzed inside him like blood returning to a limb that’s gone to sleep. He spent several minutes trying to find the Hostile with seeing spells, but it was no use. It had moved. Rapidly no doubt, and who knew where it might be. Somewhere in orbit around the vast planet. Somewhere on the surface. Somewhere far below.

All he could do was wait. But for how long? How much time should they invest in this strategy? He should be moving off, trying to find Red Fire on his own. That was the only hope left if this plan failed. But if he left, what would happen if it didn’t work? Or only sort of worked. What if Blue Fire suddenly needed him? What if he exhausted himself trying to find Red Fire and couldn’t cast himself back again? Blind casting, even with the ring, could still do that to him, he knew. He hadn’t had much rest these last few days.

He watched the emptiness around Blue Fire for a while longer, but still no sign of the orb. He turned back to where Orli sat and saw that she had drifted off to sleep. She had to be exhausted. She’d only gotten a few hours’ rest after he’d snatched her out of the executioner’s grasp. She was in worse shape than he was when it came to that.

But he had to keep going, to keep moving. And there was some work he could do while they waited for this idea to play out.

With a thought, he was standing at the creek in the meadow beyond Calico Castle, the area strangely silent now in the absence of the army that had been encamped near the castle walls. Their tents were all still there, the outbuildings, he knew it by the thin lines of smoke rising into the air, the gray plumes snaking lazily up toward the clouds from fires that still hadn’t quite burned out. Total commitment, the Queen had said. And this was it.

He spent a nerve-wracking quarter hour searching out suitable rocks to use as seeing stones. He enchanted as many as he had patience for, stopping between each enchantment to cast a seeing spell back to the tower for a peek at Orli, who still lay slumped over the table getting a few moments’ desperately needed rest. He’d take an extra second after checking on her to peek out the window, hoping for some signs of blossoming planetary romance, whatever that might be, but there was nothing. Then he went back to work on the seeing stones. Find a stone, enchant, check on Orli. As quickly as he possibly could. And even with that casting regimen, with that furtive speed, he was only willing to make eleven of them. He had to get back and begin the work of finding Red Fire’s world. Eleven would have to be enough.

He quickly sent himself into the castle proper, to a storeroom below the kitchens where he found a basin, which he brought out into the courtyard with another teleport and began filling with water at the well. It was tedious work, but he wound the crank furiously and the physical exertion of several buckets full helped calm his nerves a little bit. Perhaps because it was a familiar task, a thing he’d done, here, in this place, so many times before, it was strangely soothing to do. After a time, midway through his task and, as he found himself staring down into the dark hole of the well watching the bucket slowly creep up out of that sloshing abyss, he began to fill with nostalgia again. How many times had he done this? How many hundred times? All better times, for sure, though he’d appreciated them little enough.

He brought the bucket out and looked at it, an old wooden thing, gray with age, its outsides soft with having been so wet so often over the years. Just then it seemed a familiar friend. An old companion of his youth. He turned and looked across the courtyard at the wooden scaffolding where the work had begun to rebuild his tower—the east tower, which he would always think of as his. No one was working on that now.

Definitely better times.

He heard a sound behind him, back the way he had come. He turned to see Kettle, who had just spotted him.

“I thought I heard someone a crankin’ at that old thing,” she said. She tried to look calm, but tears burst upon her face, and she came running to him. “Oh, Altin, ‘tis all gone wrong, hasn’t it?” She clutched him in arms made strong by the daily lifting of sacks of flour and grain, the toting of water pails and the mashing and chopping of vegetables and meat.