The Galactic Mage Read online

The mouse was just sitting there in the bottom of the cup, a small puddle of wine still sloshing beneath its red-stained feet as its little sides heaved in the effort to catch its breath. Its gray coat was stained purple now, and it gazed up at Altin through eyes that were cloudy and glazed, the once alert black dots now dull, apparently by the fact that the mouse had had far too much to drink.

  “You’re drunk,” Altin laughed. “How perfect. This solves my ‘elevated will’ problem after all, assuming that’s what you were going to try to do.” He raised the goblet into the air. “Here’s to you, my plague-ridden little friend. You and your trip up to the moon.” He looked once more into the cup, but the mouse no longer seemed concerned. Altin was glad of that. He really hadn’t wanted it to suffer, physically or emotionally, and intoxication was a splendid piece of luck.

  For security’s sake, he placed a book over the cup anyway then retrieved the tome that held the spells for protecting the mouse from the extremes of heat and cold. Despite the mouse having a fur coat of its own, Altin decided that spells for both ends of the thermometer were the safest bet. He would have to tone them down some—he’d practiced last night with a sheep or goat in mind—but it didn’t take him long to make the adjustments, and after a little less than an hour he was ready to make the casts.

  He uncovered the anesthetized rodent and poured it out onto the table, prepared to catch it with the cup again if it tried to run away. It did not. It stared blankly into nothingness, and Altin felt that it was safe to begin. He put the cup down and began the chants that would lay the protective spells upon the mouse. First he cast the Sunscreen spell, which was, at its core, the same simple spell that every mother with B-class enchanting skills or better had cast on every child at every beach during every summer since the Magical Revolution began, and probably even before that. Only this particular version had been beefed up for workers at hard labor in the desert quarries and for some polar expeditions as well. On top of these augmentations, Altin had made a few adjustments of his own, based on his suppositions about Luria’s proximity to the sun.

  When he was done casting that one, he cast the Winter Warding spell he’d found—a lucky reference to it listed in the same book that had discussed the Sunscreen spell’s application as protection even in icy climes. It took him a bit longer to cast that, it being slightly more complex, but after just a few minutes of preparation, the mouse was ready to go.

  Altin took the time to dry the mouse’s fur a little on his robes before he started the cast that would send it on its way. Its body was limp and warm beneath his fingers, and Altin could not help thinking how delicate it seemed as he felt its little shoulders and tiny hips shifting beneath its skin as his thumbs worked the cloth of his robes against the grain of sodden fur. He dried it a bit more thoroughly, just in case. No sense putting the Winter Warding spell to unnecessary stress.

  When the mouse was satisfactorily dried, Altin took it and the book containing the Teleport Other spell up to the battlements to make the cast. He went up there not because he needed to, but because it seemed the right place to be. Casting had an emotional center too. Once up in the fresh air, he placed the mouse on the parapet, away from the wooden bowl and the Liquefying Stone. He was certain he did not need the Liquefying Stone for this since he knew exactly where he intended the mouse to go. The mouse began to stir, and Altin knew the wine would not keep it “willing” for very long, not after so much preparation time. The moment to send it on its way had come.

  He glanced once more through the Teleport Other spell in the book, making sure he had it correctly in his mind and, turning slightly to get the sun out of his eyes, he began the chant. The spell was not difficult for a Z-class teleporter, and it wasn’t long before the mouse vanished with a minuscule hiss of air. Altin could tell by the feel of it that the mouse had landed where he’d planned, just near the first seeing stone, and he practically leapt to the scrying basin to get an instant view of how the mouse’s trip had gone.

  It was only a few seconds before the image in the water came into view. And Altin nearly staggered back in shock. The mouse lay broken in the red Lurian dirt, turning grey in the wan light of the seeing stone with its skin split open and little crystals of red, like garnets, floating away from it in the oddest sort of way, slowly, almost drifting as would something in a dream. Its tiny black eyes were broken, ruptured like fine caviar poked with the tine of a fork and then forgotten by some distracted party guest. The insides of its body, protruding through rents in its fur, seemed as if they’d been frozen hard as stone, a monument in miniature to an eviscerated mouse.

  But how could that be? What had happened to the winter ward? Could it really be that cold up there? The warding spell was supposed to make one “impervious to cold,” and it had been tested in the worst conditions Prosperion was capable of dishing out.

  Something had gone terribly wrong. Altin stared into the scrying basin and found himself suddenly going numb. He’d almost sent himself up here. He’d been planning to do it only a night ago, to go alone. Had Tytamon not suggested a surrogate, that would be him lying up there, broken open like a stomped gourd and spewing frozen agates of blood into a dreamlike night. And why did they float like that? What in a gorgon’s mirror was going on up there?

  Altin suddenly cursed himself for his lack of divination. He found himself wishing that he could do it, wishing that he had made himself try to learn that school of magic more often in the past, wishing he’d pushed beyond what he knew inside was just a block. He’d always written off his unwillingness to attempt the school to laziness, procrastination and perhaps to a bit of disbelief despite what the Sorcerers Council had concluded back when he was a boy of just eleven years. What did those old bureaucrats know? Half of them were has-beens anyway, washouts whose limited intellects denied them the ability to do anything with the gifts they’d been given, regardless of their class. Besides, divination was a bore. The answers were always so ambiguous, meaningless mostly, if they even came at all. It was such a waste of time.

  Except for now. He would really like the insight that a good divination might have brought him at this particular place in time. No one else knew the sequence of events like he did. No one had done and seen what he just had. No one ever could. But now he was going to have to get a Divination done, and done by someone else. And there was no room for error; he had to know precisely what had happened to the mouse, which meant that even Tytamon’s O-class Divination was not going to be good enough. And now was certainly not the time for Altin to try to learn, not when his life had a stake in the answers being right.

  There were only two diviners that he trusted with this task: Ocelot, a crazy witch living deep in the Great Forest was one, but she was too odd, and her eccentricity made Doctor Leopold, the other choice, the more desirable of the two. Though a couple of classes less than Ocelot’s Z, the doctor was an expert at medical things which gave him perhaps an edge on Ocelot for this particular cast. And, well, gazing into the water at the shattered remnants of the mouse, Altin concluded that this was a decidedly medical thing.

  He felt a pang of guilt as he looked into the basin, his fingers remembering how the tiny creature had felt not so long ago, gently stirring in his grasp as he’d dried it on his robes, its diminutive body soft and warm, still filled with life. He glanced down at the purple stain on his gray robes and his eyes misted for a moment as he realized what he had done. He’d wanted the mouse dead before, true, but that was different. This was an accident. An accidental death was not the same. An incredible sense of guilt began building in his guts, his mind started to whirl and fill with the strangest thoughts, images of fire and of a falling oak tree, of… was that Pernie in a pale blue dress? A voice in his mind cried, “Murderer! Incompetent!” and a wave of dizziness threatened to rise behind his eyes.

  He cleared his head with a violent shake, stomping his foot and willing the thoughts away with a grunt that rattled in his throat. What the hell was he thinking? It was just
a mouse. A mouse! Vermin. And he’d made progress with it too. That was the point of sending a surrogate after all. Wasn’t it? To discover and to learn. So the lesson was there. Now it was time for the next step.

  He cursed the weakness from his mind, forced reason slowly, thankfully, back to bear as he drove the absurd imagery away. He mumbled inside his head for stability. What did he know? What did he know? He knew now that he could teleport things to the moon without the Liquefying Stone. That was one. And he knew he needed work on the Winter Warding spell too. That was another thing. See? Some good had come from the cast in that. He just needed to focus back to calm. That, and he needed answers for the rest of what went wrong.

  After a few moments, he was himself again, free from unproductive emotions like guilt and insecurity. He took a deep breath and began the cast that would bring the mouse’s body back. Once it had returned, Altin wrapped it in a cloth and called to Taot for a ride. It was time to go to town.

  Chapter 12

  No crew members were seriously injured by the impacts of the Hostile projectiles, and the ensuing hours that Orli spent at her battle stations post, in sick bay assisting the triage nurses in the infirmary, were primarily filled with sitting alongside the other medical staff watching the events outside the ship on the sick bay monitors. As events go, there wasn’t much to see, for the mysterious interstellar orb had made no more passes at the ship after Orli left the bridge. Apparently Roberto’s destruction of what appeared to be one of its only two projectiles had been enough to run it off, at least for now. But a few hours had to pass before anyone really believed that the orb had actually called off the attack.

  Called off, but not in retreat, the orb now hovered a few hundred kilometers off the starboard bow. Distress signals had gone out to alert the other ships, and orders were given to tighten the formation—the fleet having spread itself as they traveled to increase the chance of detecting Hostiles along the way. Obviously that strategy had worked, albeit a bit better than they had hoped, and the fleet was rushing to close ranks and come to the Aspect’s aid. It was clear that one-on-one was not the way to face the enemy… ships? Which was the latest debate taking place throughout the fleet, and particularly amongst the Aspect’s crew: what exactly was that thing?

  Orli sat amongst chattering nurses and her duty officer, Doctor Singh, as the lot of them argued possibilities back and forth excitedly. “It’s a spaceship, all right,” asserted one of the nurses as Orli stared at the image of the orb on a monitor mounted on the wall. “There’s probably some wicked little bastards inside of that thing right now, looking back out at us wondering the same thing. ‘What the hell is that chunk of metal out there?’ they’re saying.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Doctor Singh running long sinuous fingers down the sides of his mouth as if stroking a moustache that was not there. Bright cuticles stood out beneath his nails as he traced the lines of his dark face absently, pulling his lips into a scowl for a moment before thumb and forefinger parted and followed the lines of his smooth shaven jaw. “It might be a ship,” he said, “but I’m thinking it might be something else instead. An organism. An animal of some kind. Like a space mollusk or something similar to a tortoise or a snail.”

  “In space? Are you serious? It’s too cold. And there’s nothing to eat,” argued the nurse.

  “Maybe it replenishes its energy from nearby suns. We do. Why not it?”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s alive.”

  “True,” Doctor Singh agreed. But Orli could tell that he was not convinced. The idea of a creature living independently out in space did seem rather absurd. But nothing was impossible she supposed.

  A downgrade in alert status was ordered shortly after the fourth hour of the orb’s withdrawal. Level Orange was announced and, despite being endlessly on edge and prepared to return to her station in sick bay at any moment, Orli was compelled to go back to her normal post in her lab and nursery.

  Once there she was far too anxious to work, and she spent more time simply staring at the lab monitor watching the orb hover out in space, waiting. But waiting for what? She wondered if maybe it was hurt, too tired to move and suffering from the loss of its long mineral shaft. Maybe it was like a bee, she thought. Maybe having lost its stinger, it was doomed to die. She began to think Doctor Singh might have a point. She made a mental note to mention her bee theory to him the next time she was in sick bay, which she hoped would not be for a long, long time.

  In the meantime, she needed a distraction. Staring into the monitor at an unmoving object with no defining features beyond roundness and drab brownish gray coloring was enough to drive a person insane. Sometimes she felt she was close enough to losing her mind already, so, to distract herself, she decided to have another look at her little fungal spore—the one with three types of DNA, the discovery of which had brought her to the bridge at the same inconvenient moment that the orb had decided to attack.

  She’d been puzzling over the complicated DNA sequence for a day or two prior to her incident on the bridge. At first it just seemed odd, an expectedly unexpected alien kind of thing. But as she studied it closely and scoured every record she could find for something that would shed some light on the oddity that she’d found, she realized that her fungal DNA had three consecutive strands rather than one long and confounding alien one. That had been the epiphany. The fungus wasn’t defined by one freakishly long strand, but three separate ones, three that were totally shuffled up and assembled seemingly at random in a single strand. That’s what, in the end, she’d finally figured out. Which led her to discover further that her fungus was essentially three species and not just one as well: it was fungus, bacteria, and virus.

  None of the three distinct species, when the strands were reassembled in her computer models anyway, came out exactly like anything found on Earth, but they were similar, much as many other Andalian samples had been. Many of the plants Orli had taken from Andalia had been some exact matches to species from Earth, like the Azaleas had been, but there were many completely new species on Andalia as well. But even amongst the new species, none were so alien and dissimilar that they might not have evolved on Earth at some point given a few different random mutations along the way. The DNA strands in the spore were in keeping with this idea, similar, but not exact. However, the fact that the spore had all three sequences mixed up in one long strand was entirely alien, and there had been nothing else in her samples from Andalia to establish such a precedent. This spore was, in itself, unique from all other species she had seen, whether from Andalia or from Earth.

  Granted her Andalian samples were limited in scope, but the concrete evidence from Earth supported the bulk of the Andalian genetic trends as well: things either were what they were, or they were something else, but they were never both, and certainly not a combination of three. Gender switching amphibians and cocoon-morphing insects were about as shifty as anything ever got, and it had been with considerable delight that Orli had chanced upon this discovery and felt it significant enough to bring to the captain’s eye as well. She’d even been foolish enough to think that he would praise her work and maybe, just maybe, even offer a promotion or at least some token of respect. Given that scowl she got as the elevator closed, however, she was fairly certain her news would not impress him in the least. Particularly not now. Not while they were under attack. Not while they were maybe even currently at war with the Hostile race—assuming the orb even turned out to be a Hostile at all.

  She shuddered to think of that. What if they were at war? What if she was? And what if that thing wasn’t a Hostile ship, or even a Hostile mollusk like Doctor Singh had said? They were certainly in a war with it now; that was sure. Hell, they could be in two wars now if that thing turned out not to be a Hostile in the end. What a horrible thought. Her whole short adult life had been an unwillingly military one, stuck on this ship and with little choice in the matter. She couldn’t even be on the same ship with her dad because of the stupid fleet prot
ocols. Everything was just military now. Military, military, military. There was no such thing as a civilian anymore. Even those who’d originally signed up as civilians had eventually succumbed and joined the corps. Like Doctor Singh. He was just a doctor when he signed on to go, but in time they told him he was a captain too. He still laughed at that. But eventually he went along. All of them did. Ten years was a long time to buck a trend. And now they were at war in keeping with that trend, going along, almost as if they’d brought it on themselves.

  With little else to do, and no longer willing to be mesmerized by the monitor and fear, she shook herself and decided to continue working on the mystery of her single fungal spore. Maybe there was more to find now that she knew that there were three separate things to see. And besides, the captain had much larger concerns for now.

  Cursing herself for having thought to seek his praise, she brought her tiny sample out and put it under the microscope again. It still looked like just about every other fungus she’d ever seen. Unique in its own way but, still, a fungus just the same. So where was the evidence of the other parts of its DNA? Where were the other traits? How could two-thirds of this spore’s genetic programming be so entirely masked from microscopic view. She was tempted to hit the damn thing with fungicide just to see what it would do. But she had no second sample and was reluctant to destroy her only source. She realized she had no other choice but to try to grow some in the lab.

  Fungi could be tricky things, so she would have to be extra careful with this particular experiment. First of all, such a thing required that her immediate supervisor, Doctor Singh, and Captain Asad both sign off on the project before an alien species replication could begin. Those were fleet regulations. Which were boring and which she abhorred.

  However, she had not elected to become a fleet officer on her own, and therefore, in this particular instance, and given the particular nastiness of Captain Asad’s most recent scowl, Orli felt that it was entirely acceptable for her to bypass those protocols, especially because she knew how to grow a fungus properly and how to keep it safe, and because she already knew what the captain was going to say.