The Galactic Mage (32 page)

“Damn it,” Altin cursed, which set Pernie to giggling again. Altin cupped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s a bad word.”

Pernie was still giggling.

Now what was he going to do? Getting food for Taot was going to take forever at this rate. He debated going back and demanding that Nipper slaughter the hog anyway. He did have the authority if it actually came to that. However, he really was not in the mood for another argument. Yesterday had really worn him out.

“Master Altin,” Pernie asked innocently, “why don’t you just use your magic?”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Because why?”

“I just can’t, that’s why.”

Pernie watched him for a long while. He could tell she desperately wanted to ask him why again, but was managing to hold her tongue.

“Come on; it’s going to get away.” He got up and trod through the knee-high grass, stooping as he moved and trying to stay downwind. Pernie waded along merrily behind him, arms out and grinning as the blades of grass tickled the soft skin on the undersides. Once they were in range, they crouched down again. Altin pulled another arrow out. He glanced over at Pernie who returned his look with a happy smile. He sighed, and then took another shot.

He got the doe this time, only he hit her in the hind leg, high and in the middle of the thigh. She let out a screech and took off in full flight, her fawn once more following behind.

“Damn it,” Altin cursed again.

Pernie didn’t giggle this time; she just stood up, watching the deer run away and waiting for Altin to make another move. When the pair was almost out of sight and Altin still hadn’t done anything, she looked up at him with wide, expectant eyes.

“What?” he said, pinned down by those blinking blue irises and feeling somehow very small.

“Aren’t you going to chase her down?” she asked. “So she don’t die a horrible death, all sick and miserable, oozing pus and dying torture-like?”

He groaned. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“Gimmel says you got to chase them down if you make a bad shot like that. He says the goddess gets mad if you make them get sick and die on their own, all hurt and stuff.” She paused and then added, “Plus, yer supposed to be a better shot. That’s why I practice all the time.” She patted the length of rope tied around her waist, which Altin realized was her sling.

“Well we’re not going to catch them now,” Altin observed as the doe, while limping noticeably, still managed to diminish into the distance at quite a clip. She was headed for the woods.

“Use your magic then,” Pernie said as if it were such a simple thing, though with urgency in her voice that spoke to her belief that there was something huge at stake. “You’re not supposed to let them die.”

“I told you I can’t. I’m not using magic anymore.”

Incredulity filled her little face. “You mean never?”

“That’s right. Never.”

She clearly didn’t understand. “But what about the deer?”

“Forget the deer. I’ll just tell Nipper I need a hog. Let’s go.” He turned and started back towards the horses on the hill.

Pernie didn’t follow; instead she took a few steps closer to the woods. Altin figured she would come if he just pressed on, but when he was half the distance to the horses and she had still not caught back up, he stopped and turned around. She continued watching the deer as they ran towards the trees.

“Pernie,” he yelled. “Come on. It’s time to go.”

She did not come, and he was forced to go back to where she stood. When he got close to her, he realized that she was crying, the sound of it carrying to him on the wind as he approached.

“What?” he asked, frustrated and desperate all at once.

“I don’t want the goddess mad at me,” she managed to say between sobs of increasing severity. “Gimmel says the Great Huntress will gut you in the night if you treat her creatures mean. I don’t want to get gutted, Master Altin. Gimmel says it’s a terrible way to die.”

He wanted to tell her that Gimmel was a twit and that there was no such thing as a Great Huntress anyway, but it was clear that that particular tactic probably wouldn’t work. His mind churned as he sought a way out of his predicament. “Listen, Pernie, the goddess will understand,” he said at last. “Maybe she’ll even come down and pull the arrow out. The gods do things like that sometimes. The doe will be fine.”

He caught himself even as he spoke, realizing that he was doing it again, setting the world to revolve around his needs, centering everything on his beliefs. Forget anyone else. Do anything, say anything, just so long as everything moves his way. And once again he’d managed to make Pernie cry. He was getting good at that. Making girls cry.

The word “menace” flitted hauntingly through his mind, and he felt the rage begin to boil once again, filling him with its heat and its necessity to act. “Fine,” he said, snarling, and he then began to chant. A moment later he appeared right between the doe and her fawn just as they had come into the edge of the shelter of the woods. Before they could leap away, he reached out and placed a hand on each of them, calling up the still-familiar lightning spell in his mind and releasing it with a word. In an instant, the deer and her fawn writhed and died as the powerful currents burnt their flesh and turned their blood to steam inside their veins. Finally they fell motionless to the ground, smoking heaps of sundered meat, as Altin ground his teeth with the anger of feeling trapped. And he was trapped too. He knew it now with palpable certainty. His magic was a curse, an inescapable reality. He could feel the truth of it with all his heart and soul, and he realized that he could never be rid of its effects; it would find him even if he didn’t want it to. Which meant he had no other choice, he had to be rid of himself instead; he had to go away.

Still angry, he teleported himself and both deer corpses back to where Pernie stood. She clapped giddily and jumped up and down. “I can’t wait till I’m old enough to do that,” she said, tears forgotten and drying on her cheeks. She stared down at the two charred corpses, smoke still coming off of them with the scent of fresh burnt hair. “Magic is going to be so much fun.”

“You can wait,” he said. “And it’s not fun.” With that, he stooped and slung the doe across his neck, a mighty heave that sent pain like lightning jolting through his already aching back. He groaned, feeling as if mountains could not weigh as much as this damnable doe now did. He wheezed under the weight as he staggered through the grass, headed towards the horses on the knoll.

Pernie followed a few paces behind, dragging the fawn along by its hind leg and humming the tune to “My Cat’s Paw” with a contented smile upon her face. She didn’t even mind that Altin never spoke another word the whole way home. That was fine. She could be happy enough for two.

Chapter
33

T
he vaccine made by the
New Guinea’s
crew proved efficacious, and just in time too, at least for those who were still alive when it arrived. Captain Asad survived, if barely, as did Orli and Doctor Singh. Of the ship’s one thousand twenty crew members, only one hundred and forty-six remained alive. So, while the vaccine was seen as something of a victory by those who survived the disease, for the rest of the fleet, the events aboard the
Aspect
were a terrifying example of a battle horribly lost and one that gave the measure of their enemy as well. And the worst part of it was, the enemy had returned.

Orli had particular familiarity with this latest development as she had been reassigned to the position of first-shift communications officer and was now stationed on the bridge. Unfortunately, the reassignment had less to do with her skill in the area of communications than it did with her being one of the nine remaining officers on the ship. When the calls had gone out to the rest of the fleet for volunteers to re-crew the
Aspect
, few had taken the offer up. Despite the vaccine having proved successful, there just weren’t many people willing to take a chance in exposing themselves to an alien disease that had proven itself capable of wiping out nearly an entire crew, particularly one that could shift its own genetics seemingly at will. Most expected it was simply a matter of time before the organism adapted to the new vaccine and came at the crew again, although there weren’t many willing to say such a thing out loud just yet. The bottom line, however, was that there had been a few who had agreed to come: a handful of nurses and some engineering folks willing to help out under the condition that they could go about in hazardous material suits at all times and that they were given triple pay, which they were allowed on both accounts. All told, the
Aspect
was now running on roughly a quarter of its crew and everyone was pulling double shifts and, apparently, would be for a long, long time to come. What couldn’t be done by those onboard or by remote from another ship simply wasn’t done at all.

The captain, in a live address to the assembled crew, and one that completely violated fleet protocol for it was neither recorded nor transmitted to the rest of the fleet, assured everyone that once enough time had passed, the rest of the fleet would see that the disease was in fact gone and would eventually “find their collective balls.” Then relief would come. The address helped a little, but the truth was, nobody believed anyone would come aboard the
Aspect
now, not in the bottoms of their hearts anyway, likely not even the captain himself. For most though, there was a strong sense of being “in it” together now, and that was something new; they were in it and in it for the long haul. The survivors shared a bond that was stronger and much deeper than what had existed aboard the
Aspect
prior to the disease. Before, they were simply shipmates—stuck together for over a decade, true, but not so stuck that there hadn’t always been, at least lingering in the backs of their minds, some possibility of a getaway. The occasional inter-ship transfer promised the option of a change of scene, or at least a change of faces, if anyone ever really had some pressing reason to find another place to be. Transfers were an option even though they were rarely done. But now it was different. Nobody was going anywhere, and everyone knew it. Including the captain.

Which is not to say, in giving his address—or in his acceptance of the fact that things aboard his ship were no longer going to be as neat and tidy as he’d always kept them in the past—that he was about to give up his strict sense of military discipline. The realization that the human dynamics aboard the ship were different now did not, for Captain Asad, change anything at all where discipline was involved. In fact, for him, discipline was the very thing that was going to make their new circumstances work. However, he was more willing to forgive past transgressions, and it was with very little hostility that he accepted Orli as an officer on his bridge.

In fact, in the first few days of her reassignment, the captain had been very patient in helping her learn, or relearn, various elements of her new post—elements that she had been thoroughly trained on during her time as a student in the Fleet Academy. Unfortunately, no help that he gave, nor any coming from Roberto, could make her stop wishing she hadn’t spent the entire semester of her coms class flirting with that damnably gorgeous Cadet Fogart rather than paying attention to what was being taught. Besides the fact that Fogart had turned out to be a total jerk, leaving her broken hearted and feeling like a fool by semester’s end, she was now stuck struggling with the results of that distraction, fighting to remember just what the hell it was she was supposed to have learned and what she was supposed to do at this station now that she was here. But the operations were coming back. Slowly. Just not fast enough to make her feel comfortable in the role if the orbs attacked again. If the fight got hot, she did not want to be the one stuck coordinating communication between the five ships currently on the scene. She was still too clumsy for that.

And an attack could come at any time as three new orbs hovered out beyond their ships, clustered together roughly a hundred kilometers away and waiting. Neither Orli nor Roberto was able to determine if one of them was the same one that had run off before, but the captain suspected that the smallest of them was in fact that very one. He said he could “feel” it, and Orli had no reason to doubt that he was right.

“Find out if engineering can muster another missile battery if we use up one that’s loaded now.” The captain’s order came unexpectedly and caught her staring absently at the image of the orbs hovering on the screen.

“Yes, sir,” she said, punching at her panel reflexively.

“Maintenance,” came the voice on the other end.

“Oh. Crap,” she stammered, blushing. “Not you. Sorry. Wrong button.” She killed the link with a stab of her index finger and glanced out of the corner of her eye to see if the captain had noticed. Maybe he hadn’t.

But Roberto had. He leaned near enough to whisper, “God, you suck,” with an evil grin. He straightened himself and went about pretending to study trajectory charts taken from the last encounter with the orbs. Orli knew better than to think he needed those now. She knew full well he’d already analyzed every last movement that the orbs had made and had done so at least a hundred times. He could recite from memory their speed at every moment from beginning to end on every pass, how many milliseconds between surface shifts, the angles—and lack of angles—of each maneuver they made, and the distances maintained from the ship and between one another for every pass. In short, there was nothing he did not know about how they had moved. And yet, even he admitted that “we’re screwed if we get more than three orbs to a ship.” “I can take two,” he’d said. “Three if I have to. Maybe. But four, forget it.”

He’d already given seven ship-to-ship conferences to the fleet’s bridge crews regarding the strategies he’d figured out. “The bottom line is, you need to have multiple attacks going off in perfect unison,” he told them. “You need lasers and nukes in the same place at the same time, so regardless of whether the orb goes soft or hard, you have something nasty to shove right up its ass. And it’s still going to need some luck.” Roberto’s simple sounding plan was much like Doctor Singh’s design for the “three-legged vaccine,” formulated to hit simultaneously whichever organism the disease tried to manifest, disallowing it the opportunity to avoid one through becoming another. The difficulty of Roberto’s strategy, however, was that it could not be computer controlled due to the impossible movements of the orbs, shifting as they did in flight as if not ruled by physical law, and so the gunners were on their own to place their shots. Which was also why Roberto insisted he could only get three.

“Hey, I’m good, but I’m not a magician,” he’d said when Orli tried to encourage him that four orbs were still within his realm of expertise. “Three tops. We only have two lasers. If three come at once, well, we’re going to get hit by one as it is. We can take one hit, if it’s not too hard. And if we can take one orb out right away, then we’re down to just a pair. Then I’m golden. But four just gives them too much opportunity.”

It seemed that perhaps the orbs knew this too, for they continued to hover in the distance for several days after initially showing up. Apparently they were waiting until two more came, which they did. And a sixth showed up the day after that.

“Now I’m worried,” said Roberto as they both watched the recent arrival moving in to join its friends. The Hostiles made no attempt at a formation, and they arranged themselves loosely with nothing to give evidence of structure or hierarchy amongst the group.

“We have four other ships with us,” Orli reminded him. “We should be fine.”

“Those guys have never done this,” he said.

“They’ll be fine. Have faith.”

“I have faith that those orbs are assholes. Everything else is still up in the air.”

“Necessary chatter only,” ordered the captain, pointing at the blinking orange light above the main console on the forward wall. “We’re at orange, remember?”

“Aye, sir,” they said together. Orli could hear Roberto mutter “asshole” again under his breath.

“Get the admiral’s ship, tell them we have six now,” the captain said. By the time she’d pulled up the channel, he changed the message to “seven.”

Pleased that she actually called the right ship this time, she relayed the message as two more orbs were slipping into view.

“Holy shit, man,” said Roberto. This time the captain did nothing to rebuke him for the unessential remark. Roberto figured he agreed.

“We’re sending Echo squadron,” came the reply from the admiral’s ship a moment later.

“Tell them to hurry; now we’re up to nine,” Orli said before realizing she was technically putting words into the captain’s mouth. Still, it seemed like they should know.

“That’s still two days out,” said the captain. “The Hostiles are reinforcing too fast. Faster than we can. Tell the admiral to get Delta moving too. Frankly, tell him I’d advise gathering the fleet.”

Orli relayed the message. It was ten minutes and two more orbs later that the reply came across the speaker. “Delta on its way. Bravo too. Rest of fleet holding for now. Keep us posted.”

Captain Asad shook his head but nodded grimly. He wasn’t happy with the news. Orli confirmed receipt of the message and terminated contact. The three of them sat in silence staring at the screen. An hour later another orb showed up.

“Damn,” muttered Roberto as it came into view. “That’s a big one.” Orli zoomed the main sensor in on the newest arrival to give them a closer look.

It was indeed huge, at least twice as large as the largest they’d seen before. It almost looked like a small moon. She grimaced as she looked at it and shook her head. Even the captain let out a grunt.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” Roberto asked. “All things being relative, the shaft that comes out of that thing is really going to stick it to us. Seriously. Our lasers aren’t going to push that thing’s projectiles anywhere. No way.”

“You’ll have to use missiles to do it too.”

“They’re too slow. They’ll never make it. Not for the push.”

“Plan ahead.”

Roberto rolled his eyes. “Right,” he said. “I’m on that.” He made no attempt to mask the sarcasm in his voice.

“Lieutenant Junior Grade Levi, if you don’t wish to be an ensign again, I suggest you stow the attitude and focus on your work.”

Orli could tell Roberto was about to pop as he tried to hold back some remark regarding the worthlessness of rank when one is dead, but despite bulging eyes and a screwed up left corner of the mouth, he managed to keep it in, if narrowly.

Two more orbs arrived.

Roberto groaned. “Well, let’s hope they don’t attack until Delta and Bravo show up. Maybe with enough extra lasers we can still coordinate pushing them aside.”

“I’m more concerned that these things stop reinforcing soon,” said the captain. “If they bring many more we’ll have to tell Delta and Bravo not to bother coming at all.”

“Well I hope they don’t attack
and
they stop reinforcing,” said Orli, agreeing with them both and trying to lighten up the mood. What was the point of being surly and negative in a time like this? It wasn’t like they hadn’t faced death already just a few days before. This was just another round.

“Good call,” said Roberto. “I’ll vote that way with you.”

“Focus,” said the captain a moment later. “Here they come.”