Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  “You would face alien worlds alone and yet quake before one small cat that becomes a girl.” She made a tsk-tsk sound with her teeth. “It makes more sense that I would tremble before you. You and your world gift.” Her eyes, brown now, flicked in the direction of his ring. “What could I do that you could not stop anyway?”

  “I do not tremble, nor did I come to fight or challenge you. But you already know that. So, if it is directness that you are looking for, you should stop wasting time.”

  She giggled then, a sound that seemed natural in the body of the gangly girl she had become. She took the teakettle off the fire, its handle gripped in a thick handful of large dark leaves. She moved through the dim confines of her house, the wind blowing through the places where centuries of rain had washed away the mud that had once sealed her home and kept the elements at bay. She filled three small cups, none of them matching, one with no handle, and brought them back to the fire on a tray made from a single piece of bark. She set it on an upturned log that matched the one the doctor sat upon and took the cup with no handle as a courtesy, once more employing the fistful of leaves.

  “Go ahead and drink it,” she said, nodding in the direction of the steaming cups. “If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making tea.”

  Altin looked to Doctor Leopold, for the man was well versed in herbal brews and their like, being a medical man and all, but the doctor, while calm enough now and curious enough normally, shook his head adamantly side to side. Definitely not.

  Ocelot sighed and sat on the floor near the hearth, the chair and the two logs making for a third of the hovel’s furnishings. She turned her back to the wall, leaning against the hearthstones and pulling her knees up nearly to her chin. She leaned against the stonework, and the long bones of her shins could be traced through her flesh, set to high relief by the shadows the fire made. She took a long sniff of the steam coming off of her tea then balanced the cup on the flat of a bony knee.

  “So you know why we are here,” Altin said after a time. “How much do I need to add to what you know before you will tell us if you are going to help?”

  “I need him to drink my tea,” she said simply, pointing at the doctor. “I must see the spell he cast exactly as he saw it. Otherwise, there is little you can tell me that I have not already seen.”

  Altin looked to the doctor, who suddenly sat bolt upright. “I won’t do it,” he protested. “I have not lived to my fine age by trusting every wild concoction thrust at me. If there is anything you learn as a doctor, it is that half the best medicines in the world do twice as much damage as they do good, and all the half-baked remedies are worse. I’ll be having none of that brew, whatever it is. If this child is a Z, let her be a Z without poisoning me.”

  Ocelot shrugged and went back to watching the steam rising from her cup.

  “Doctor, please,” said Altin. “You can’t possibly mean to come all the way out here, endure all of this, travel to other worlds, witness the attack on Orli’s planet—Orli who is your patient, mind you—only to falter now at a spot of tea.”

  Doctor Leopold shrugged in much the same way Ocelot had.

  Altin nearly panicked, horrified by the idea that everything hung upon the outcome of this childish standoff. He scowled at the doctor then swung his frenzied gaze to Ocelot. She smiled and said, “Don’t worry. He drinks it.”

  “No, he does not drink it, young lady,” protested the doctor, “and I’ll thank you not to speak of me as if I were not in the room.” Doctor Leopold tugged at his lapels, as if straightening his now filthy coat might somehow ameliorate the amount of scrutiny he was getting from Altin just then.

  “I can’t believe you,” Altin said. He tipped forward in his chair and nearly snatched one of the teacups off the thick slab of bark. It was too hot to drink, so he conjured a small ice lance, barely the length of his middle finger, though somewhat thicker around, and stuck it into the tea, stirring with it until the cup nearly overflowed. He threw the remainder of the diminutive weapon into the fire and poured the whole cup down his throat, swallowing as infrequently as possible and trying not to taste it at all.

  It was remarkably good, despite his expectations, slightly bitter but with a hint of mint. He leaned back, anticipating the worst, and waited. The left leg of his chair gave way with the tipping and resettling of his bulk. It snapped with a dry crack, and he slid off onto the floor. The suddenness of the chair leg buckling startled him more than it might have as he fell, given the tense rigidity with which he sat, expectant of some horrible effect of the tea. He cried out, one short bark of surprise, just before he hit the ground. Ocelot watched him, clearly amused.

  Altin collected himself and then pushed the remnants of the chair away, settling himself there on the floor with his legs crossed beneath his robes. He would not give her the satisfaction of his indignity. He sat waiting for the impact of whatever it was he’d just drunk.

  Nothing happened.

  Ocelot’s grin subsided as she observed him over time, the firelight glinting in her luminous, still slightly-feline eyes.

  Finally Altin turned to the doctor. “There, you see? It’s perfectly fine. And I doubt that log will buckle like my chair did, so let’s be on with it.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the portly doctor said, his brow now glistening with the sweat of nerves. “Come here.” He pointed to the area of the floor between his feet. “Sit here.”

  Altin scooted to where he’d been directed, and Leekant’s greatest healer took the young magicians face in a pair of soft, fleshy hands. He spent the next several minutes working his way through Altin’s body magically, inspecting his mouth, throat, intestines and various arteries, capillaries and veins for signs of any malignancy. There was nothing to be found. He even spent time poking through the maze of Altin’s brain, feeling for currents that should not be, for pressure that grew or moved tidally, but there was none of that either. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. Finally he was forced to conclude that there was, perhaps, no poison in the cup.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if I die, I’ll have you know I’ll be waiting for you in hell, even if I have to climb down eight levels to find you and plague you for all eternity when you finally do get there. Do you hear me?”

  “I can live with that,” Altin said. “Now please, Doctor, Orli doesn’t have time for all of this, and a divination like we need is going to take eons as it is.”

  Again came the long nasal sounds of a thick and irritated exhale, but Doctor Leopold accepted the teacup Altin handed him. He would not be rushed and declined Altin’s offer of a tiny ice lance with which to cool it. He blew on it and made his own reluctant time about getting it done. But eventually he drank it all.

  Altin watched as he tipped the cup up and drained the last bit of it, then looked anxiously to Ocelot who still sat by the fire with her legs still pulled in to her chest like an accordion. “Well,” Altin said. “Now what?”

  She dipped a finger into her own tea, wincing a little at its heat, then set a drop of the liquid on her tongue. She waited only a moment or so. “The dragon must find her,” she said. “He is the only one that can see.”

  Altin frowned, looked askance at the doctor, then back to Ocelot. “Dragon? What dragon?”

  “Yours.”

  “Taot? Why him? What can he see?”

  “Animals see in ways humans cannot. Your lover’s world will be a mural of nothingness to you. A landscape of alien shapes where structures are as numerous as leaves, as grass, as snowflakes in a storm. They are a chorus of sameness that your eyes will make nothing of, a song sung upon a single note with nothing to memorize. I can show you, but you will not see. The dragon must do it for you.”

  “Show me then. Show me what I am looking for, and I will convey it to his mind.”

  “I will show you, but he already knows.”

  “You’ve already spoken to him?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

>   “Trust him. He will smell the girl when you are in the right place.” She placed another drop of tea upon her tongue. “You must find her then, deep in the dungeons. She will be in the rainbow web. The web of death. You must be there before the venom reaches her heart.”

  “A spider has her? What spider? They don’t have spiders like we have, like you have here in Great Forest. Orli told me they no longer have great creatures on her world. The great creatures of her world are all dead.”

  “I have seen her there. In the rainbow web. You must get her before it is too late.” She looked at the doctor and frowned some. She dipped out another drop of tea. “Get to her in time, and she can help you seek the red world.”

  Altin groaned. “What red world? What happens on the red world?”

  “It is the one you must find or everyone will die.”

  “Everyone who? Everyone on the red world or everyone, as in all of us?” He pointed around the room, then turned his hands over, palms up and out at his sides, his gesture encompassing Prosperion, or perhaps even the universe. He already had a pretty good idea which one she meant.

  “Everyone.”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  “I have seen the wind roaming two worlds looking for someone to give lyrics to the tune of its whistling. The birds know only harmony, and the stars cry in silence.”

  Rather than argue with ambiguities, he pressed on, growing impatient for something more concrete. “Fine. So how do I find Orli in this rainbow web? Where do I start? Surely you don’t expect me to take Taot to Earth and simply fly around hoping he sniffs her out randomly in Doctor Leopold’s three-hundred measure circle like some hunter’s hound. You have to give me more. Give me something I can use.”

  “Cold is your ally. Hide in it just as you will hide in invisibility. The alien machines see the warm blood in your veins. The heat from your body glows like a beacon to their eyes.”

  That seemed odd, but he did not question it. “Fine, I can do that. What else?”

  She took another drop of tea upon her finger, pressing it into her mouth, leaving the slender digit in there and sucking on it for a while. She looked back at the doctor, squinting. She took up the cup and drank from it directly. Twice. Then she threw the rest of it into the fire.

  She rose and walked to where Altin sat, the tattered wreck of her homespun dress barely enough for modesty. Dirt smears marred the pale skin. He had just looked up at her when she became the ocelot again. Her paw flicked forward, and she opened three parallel gashes along his forearm, each about the length of half his hand. “That is where you must go.”

  He saw it then, as a memory, as if he’d flown over it a hundred times before. A vast and sprawling alien metropolis, an unending expanse of black- and gray-mirrored buildings, similar beyond description, just as Ocelot had said. There were measures upon measures of these buildings, broken up here and there by a flat expanse of the dark mirrored stuff or the occasional tall, spindly construct, but only to resume the endless indecipherable pattern—a pattern without pattern—again. It was such sameness, such uniformity, an indescribably massive work of man obviously, yet conceived and executed with an incalculable absence of aesthetic design. Function in its most absolute. It was hard to contemplate what kind of people would go to such lengths to avoid beauty in any way.

  Orli was buried somewhere underneath all that, deep down and being preyed upon by … by a spider of some kind. At least that he could handle. He had no fear of such things.

  He shook himself out of the vision and stared down to where the spotted cat had been. The child was back, starting to move away from him, though she paused. She came back and leaned down near his ear. “Hurry,” she hissed. “The venom will have her before the day is done.”

  Chapter 18

  Twenty-four hours after the director’s order came, the forty-nine remaining ships of the original Andalia mission, the ships whose crews had spent over a decade light years from home, the ones whose crews had just, finally, returned home—albeit under circumstances out of their control—found themselves restocked and outfitted to go right back where they’d so recently been, right back to the Prosperion system, and this time, intent on bringing war to the War Queen.

  The sacrifice asked of these crews was beyond enormous, it was unfair, but remarkably, few among them had argued that it should be anyone else. The ships and the harbor stones the Prosperions had made were linked, and while it would have been possible to swap in new crews, those who had been on that long journey saw the attack on Earth as something personal. It wasn’t simply an attack, it was an insult, a betrayal, and so they agreed to return, many seeing it as finishing the task, or the sentence, they’d already committed or been committed to. Many, like Captain Asad, wanted vengeance.

  That said, there were a few new personnel going along as well: Marines. Lots of them.

  The Aspect, like the other ships, now had aboard troop carriers loaded with Marine mech units, two hundred of them on Captain Asad’s ship alone. In addition, in each of the Aspect’s two main cargo holds, were two small freighters carrying one planetary bomber and two inner-atmospheric fighters each. Between the forty-nine starships, they had plenty enough power to deal with the Prosperions.

  As always, Captain Asad volunteered to go first, and not for the first time since meeting Altin Meade, the captain was glad to have Prosperion “magic” at hand. With Director Nakamura on screen to watch, and all the other fleet officers waiting to hear from them if the harbor stone actually worked, Asad opened the small box that contained the Aspect’s harbor stone.

  The gem was light blue, a sapphire, and lying next to it was a small iron hammer, not even a foot long, black as space itself. The captain reached into the box and took out the mallet, showing it to the director, whose head, giant on the display, nodded.

  “Patch in Commander Levi on Transport Nine,” the captain ordered Ensign Nguyen who was seated at the main console. The dexterous fingers of the young officer pulled up the feed from Roberto’s station, where the intrepid Spaniard sat in the pilot’s chair of the troop carrier designated Transport Nine. “Are you ready, Commander?” asked the captain when Roberto came on com.

  “Ready, Captain. Entanglement functioning normally.” With a quick motion of his hand, he switched the video feed from one showing his own round face to one that mirrored the image on the Aspect’s bridge, the image of the director looking on. “See, I have the director now. I’ll let him know when we get there.”

  Captain Asad glanced once more up at the director and raised the iron hammer.

  “Good luck, Captain,” said the director.

  Captain Asad struck the sapphire in the box. It shattered as easily as if it had been made of glass, and then everything went dark. Only a few months ago, such a thing would have sent a wave of tension rolling through the crew as bowels tightened and cold sweats began. But not now. Not this crew. They knew precisely what was happening. And it was with practiced calm that they set themselves to work.

  Captain Asad waited until his eyes adjusted to the red glow of the emergency lights, and then made his way to the lift. He opened the doors with the manual override and quickly climbed down the shaft using rungs mounted in the wall. It took him almost ten minutes to get to the hangar bay where Roberto was, but he got there just the same, nodding solemnly as he passed through the ship at the scurrying crewmen working in a controlled frenzy to get the ship’s systems back online. A glance out the small window in one of the massive hangar doors showed the bright green glow of the gas giant Naotatica, confirming they were, in fact, exactly where they thought they were.

  Roberto was in his final systems check when Captain Asad arrived. Seated next to him was a lean woman in her middle years, running through a checklist of her own. The vascularity of her forearms suggested she was fit and strong, a warrior to be sure. She turned to him as he approached and smiled. “We’re gonna pound them so bad,” she said. “They’re going to show up on horses and wave p
ointy sticks at us, and it’s going to go like shit for them.”

  “You may be right, Major, but don’t underestimate them. They will be more dangerous than you expect. We’ve seen what they can do.”

  “I know.”

  “Any word from the other ships?”

  “No, sir. Not yet, but I’m sure they’re here just like we are.” She leaned forward and tapped the communications panel to verify. Still no signals from other landing craft.

  “Systems are go,” said Roberto. “We just need someone to open the damn doors and let us out.”

  A moment later, the main hangar lights came on. “It looks like you’re about to get your wish, Commander.”

  “Captain, you either need to suit up or get out,” Roberto advised.

  “Good luck, Major. Good luck, Levi.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Roberto, sending the captain on his way.

  With the captain and all non-mission personnel out of the hangar, the massive doors were finally set to open, the power needed to do so having been made a priority as part of the attack plan. Soon they were moving apart, and the gap between them began to fill with Naotatica’s bright light. The white mist of escaping air hissed unheard out toward it as the doors opened further, and Roberto watched through the front window as someone’s unsecured toolbox got sucked out into space. They’d brought several new crewmen aboard to replace the Prosperions, who had been incarcerated back on Earth, and clearly some of the new folks were as green as the big planet when it came to such things.

  Roberto watched tools scatter and spin, glinting green as they tumbled slowly out of sight. He tapped the console impatiently, waiting for his chance. Eventually it came as the red lights along the hangar doors turned green. He tapped the controls to reverse gravity lock and lifted the ship off the deck. Soon after, Transport Nine was clear of the Aspect entirely.

  Seeing the mother ship floating as she was, its lights out, its towers invisible against the blackness beyond, was unsettling. The Aspect looked like a ghost ship, a derelict, an object that might have been discarded there more than a decade ago. There was vulnerability in seeing his ship in that condition that struck Roberto as unsettling, and he forced himself to look away.