The Galactic Mage Page 21

  Everything out here was so sterile and cold. So black and dark and absent of a shining sun. So white and clean and absent of a warming sense of home. It was hell. It had to be hell. Orli thought of the descriptions she had heard and read about hell, descriptions of a hot place burning; a place of endless fire and sulfur’s stench; of craggy, undulating ground, filthy and writhing with crawling, hideous misshapen souls in every stage of torture and decay. But that was a joke. Whoever had invented those stories had no idea what hell was really like. Not like Orli did. There was no rot or stench in hell, no filth or heat of fire. There was none of that. Hell was a cold hospital room on a sterile ship. It was a meticulously clean place of recycled air and water that was filtered through a thousand kidneys and six large machines and then kidneys and then machines, over and over and over until it lost all taste—or gained it depending on one’s state of mind. Hell was isolation on a ship where people died for stupid things and nobody knows their names. Hell was right here where Orli was.

  She shuddered and tried to push the faces of the mangled men and women out of her head, to clear her mind of depressing thoughts about life aboard the ship. A futile task. And the images continued to plague her even as she dropped into a long and sorely needed sleep.

  When Roberto finally woke her with a rough shake, she actually felt better despite the nightmares that had plagued her rest. “Wake up. Wake up,” he was almost pleading. “Jesus woman, the captain is going to have you freakin’ skinned.”

  “What?” She was groggy.

  “Didn’t you hear him call? He’s been trying to reach you for the last half-hour. I thought he was going to come down here and shoot you he was so pissed. That’s why I volunteered to come. They need you up on seven-deck. Now.”

  “What?”

  “Deck seven. Get your botany kit. They need you now. They needed you half an hour ago. Hurry. Jesus. You’re so fucking busted.”

  She resisted the temptation to ask “what?” again and shook herself fully awake. She went to a cabinet and pulled out her field kit as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. “Why do they need me?” she asked as she headed towards the door.

  “Not sure,” he said. “Something the Hostile left sticking in the hole. You better run. You can tell me about it at dinner. I’m on a timer too.” He patted her on the cheek and then turned and ran away.

  She sprinted out after him and went to the elevator at the other end of the hall. A few minutes later found her nearing a large storage room on the ship’s uppermost deck. The corridor leading up to the room’s entrance was bustling with activity and was cordoned off and guarded at either end. She approached the two marines guarding this end and told them who she was.

  “About goddamn time,” said one of them, a middle-aged sergeant she recognized but did not know by name. His counterpart, a younger woman, perhaps in her mid thirties, turned her face to the com-link on her shoulder and announced to someone that Ensign Pewter was on her way.

  Orli shrugged at the burly sergeant and went through, passing groups of armored marines bristling with weapons of every size. They were clearly ready for a war. As she approached the double doors leading into the storage room they opened and out came a heavy-set man who introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Gray. “It’s this way, Ensign. I assume you’ve been briefed.”

  “Nope,” she said, a bit nervous with all the guns and the very martial feel that was heavy upon the hall. “I haven’t been told a thing.”

  “The Hostile deposited a substance in the hull breach before it released itself from the ship. Doctors Singh and Salvator have already had a look and neither can make a positive I.D. That’s why they sent for you.”

  Orli could see the familiar faces of both Doctor Singh and Doctor Salvator as she and the lieutenant commander approached. They were standing amongst a group consisting of the captain, a handful of other officers and a few enlisted men situated near a scissor-lift parked beneath a large hole some twenty feet above. The hole was circular and had a very smooth edge, looking as if the orb had been extremely careful in its work before it went away. In place of the steel that would normally have filled the space was a dark greenish brown substance that appeared soft and marginally smooth. She caught herself staring up at it while she approached the group and had to force her attention to the officers as she gave a barely acceptable salute.

  Orli exchanged warm smiles with the two doctors and one of the crewmen whom she knew from poker games on the recreation deck. “And this is how we found it when we came in,” the Lieutenant Commander was saying as they came upon the gathering of crew. “Sealed tight just like that. We didn’t lose a molecule of air.”

  “You’re late, Pewter,” snarled the captain. “You screw this up and your court martial begins in the morning, you hear me?”

  Captain Asad was always such a joy. She smiled meekly back at him. She really wanted to tell him to die in a fire, but she knew that probably wouldn’t do much good.

  Lieutenant Commander Gray looked to Doctor Salvator, indicating that his portion of the briefing was at an end. Doctor Salvator picked up where the lieutenant commander left off, pushing her glasses up on her pale and lightly freckled nose. “He’s right. Tight as a wine cork and sealed up good. But they’re welding new hull plates on as we speak just in case. I’m sure you’ve seen what happens to champagne when the cork comes out. We’re not trusting that thing for a second.” She pointed up at the strange substance filling the hole.

  Orli cringed as she thought of herself being sucked outside, an unwilling surfer on a wave of escaping air. No thank you. She sent thoughts of gratitude up to the men who were tromping around on the hull outside. A spacewalk was always a dangerous thing, even more so with a Hostile orb lurking somewhere.

  “So,” went on Doctor Salvator with her slight Texas drawl, “we’ve been up to have a look, and we have no idea what the hell it is. It’s not mineral and it’s not organic either. At least not exactly. We tried them both. I’ve got degrees in geology, chemistry and biology and I can’t even make a guess. If you asked me which one it is, I’d have to say ‘yes.’” She leaned over to Orli and, gesturing with a shoulder towards the captain, whispered in her ear, “I reckon my psych degree will do me more good than any of the other three; he’s going to lose his ever-loving mind if we don’t figure out what it is soon.”

  Orli looked over at Doctor Singh who only shrugged as his reply. This was definitely not his specialty.

  “Ensign Pewter,” said Lieutenant Commander Gray, “if you could step onto the lift. We’d like to get your examination underway.” He touched her lightly on the back of the arm and nudged her towards the scissor-lift.

  She moved with him to it and smiled patiently as the pimple-faced petty officer who operated the lift grinned at her with a smirk too smarmy to qualify as professional. She clamored up into the basket of the lift, and the Lieutenant Commander handed her field kit up after her once she was inside. She gave the petty officer a nod to let him know that she was ready to go up. He grinned lasciviously at her again and made no attempt to conceal the play of his gaze up and down her slender frame. She rolled her eyes and looked up at the hole above. How could he be thinking about sex at a time like this? They were all like this, the ones that weren’t serious and stern anyway; some things never changed.

  The scissor lift jolted as the young man activated the control, and in the space of moments she was lifted to the hole. Snapping latex gloves in place, she reached up tentatively and pressed her fingers against the substance that was plugging up the gap. It gave slightly, like an industrial rubber mat. Only this one was six feet thick. And it was smooth. Not smooth like glass or plastic, but smooth like vinyl generally was.

  She spent a few moments just studying it with her fingers and her eyes before deciding to try scratching a sample off its surface for a closer look. She took a scalpel from her pack and a sealable plastic sample bag and reached up to give it a cut. A voice in the back of her head, the o
ne she never listened to, was telling her that this was a horrible idea, and her heart was pounding like a psychotic drummer as she reached up to make the scratch. The instant she did, the strange object went from dark tones to mottled white and gray. There was no sound or motion or jolt of energy, just a color and texture shift across the surface. Just that. But still it scared her half out of her palpitating wits.

  “What the hell are you doing, Ensign?” barked the captain, accompanied by a collective gasp from everyone else below.

  Her defenses came reflexively to bear as her heart continued to spasm in her chest. “I’m examining the goddamn thing like you told me to. What am I supposed to do, use ESP?” She cringed immediately and wished she could take the comment back, but the unexpected shift of the material had frightened her just as much as it had the rest of them. Adrenaline did the rest. The scissor-lift was already coming down.

  She reached up to touch it again before it was out of reach. It was now hard as rock, and rough like rock too. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it was rock, likely granite or some other kind of quartz just like the Hostile projectiles were. But how could that possibly be? It hadn’t been that when she went up. She looked in her sample bag to see what she’d scratched off. There was a small piece, barely a crumb, but it looked like granite too. She tucked it into her bag and quickly zipped the sample up.

  “Ok, that’s enough for now, Pewter,” said the captain. “Before you kill us all.”

  Once she’d climbed out of the basket and was once more on the deck, she found herself confronted by several pairs of wide and eager eyes.

  “Well?” said the captain for all of them, impatient but apparently recovered and still willing to hear if she’d learned anything despite having given them all a start. “What did you do? What did you find out?”

  She’d expected him to berate her for the ESP remark. “It’s turned to stone now, if I haven’t missed my guess. At least the part that I can see. I tried to scratch it with a scalpel and then it turned to rock. Just like that. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “What do you think it was before?” asked Doctor Salvator. “Before it made the change?”

  She had to think about it for a bit. “It looked like an organic compound, but it might just as easily have been petroleum based. Somewhere between sap and plastic. I honestly don’t know.”

  “You’re using different words to say the same things we couldn’t say,” Doctor Salvator joked, though the tension hadn’t quite left her doughy frame. She started to add something else but the captain cut her off.

  “That’s fine, Ensign. You’ve been remarkably little help. And you are confined to quarters until I have time to figure out what I’m going to do with you. Orange alert and you are half an hour late responding when I call. You’re done. Dismissed.” He turned to his science team standing near and added, “You may still have access to her if, for some reason, your work requires her—specialty.” The last word was accompanied by a sneer.

  Chapter 22

  After celebrating the discovery of landing on the moon, Altin turned over to Aderbury the project of announcing that progress to the Queen. He figured including Aderbury in the event, and using Aderbury’s access to the stoic monarch as an excuse to avoid having to deal with her himself, he could guarantee Aderbury’s position as lunar amusement park project-director should that idea pan out. And with that task underway, Altin began the work of moving beyond Luria and out into the night.

  If the astronomers were right, the planets should be the closest lights up in the sky and therefore the most obvious places to target next. There were seven planets besides Prosperion, and Naotatica was not the nearest one. But, according to the Church, Naotatica was the planet upon which the elves had originally evolved. As the story went, Melgon Tidalwrath, a second-generation and upstart god, had angered the older Prosperion gods with an act of selfishness and had been banished to Naotatica as punishment for a span of five hundred thousand years. Apparently, again according to myth, when the young god got there, he found the haughty race of elves, for whom he grew an instant hatred, and subsequently banished them to Prosperion, to the islands known as String, where they have lived ever since.

  Altin wasn’t sure he believed the story, but at least it gave him a place to start, more hope than the other planets had. Given the inhospitable climate and lack of breathable air here on Luria, it made sense to seek out a world that had a surface usable by an elf. If the elves could breathe on Naotatica, Altin could breathe. So, with that bit of logic behind him, he began the work once more of casting seeing stones blindly into space.

  At least this time he had the Liquefying Stone and some small concept of the distances involved. He figured that the other planets had to be much farther from Luria than would be convenient, just as Luria had been from Prosperion. So, with that as a starting point, he cast his first stone out in the direction of Naotatica’s tiny green speck of light, casting it twice the distance between his planet and its moon. He knew the planet would be farther than that, but it was a distance he could hold in his head better than just trying to cast it out with nothing shaping his thoughts at all. Going to the scrying basin in his familiar routine, he was a bit disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to see that Naotatica’s light was no larger than it had been a moment before. Perhaps skipping a few of the solar system’s other planets on the way to Naotatica was not such a good idea, he thought. Still, the hope of the elven origins kept him at the task, and he spent the remainder of the night trying to improve his casts.

  He repeated the process for the next several nights: exhausting blind casts, sleep, a nibble from his diminishing loaf and starting over again, casting stones as far as he could make them go. His skill at casting into the unknown, despite the prohibitive nature of such a thing in teleporting spells, grew with each successive cast. He was actually doubling and tripling his range by the end of every working night as his mind began to conceive of distances that never in all his life had he imagined could possibly exist. And by using the skipping stones technique along with the Liquefying Stone, he could really cover a lot of interplanetary ground.

  By the end of his sixth day trying, he finally had Naotatica clearly in the scrying basin’s view. He stared down into the water, panting from the effort of several hours of casting against the winds of no-known place, and grinned as he saw that Naotatica had grown from a spot like all the rest of the stars into a round light roughly the size of a grape and just about the same shade of green. “Hah, there you are,” he said into the water, rippling it with his breath. “I finally found you. I’m coming to get you next.”

  Energized by his new success, he resumed his casting of the seeing stones. He launched his next stone at the last, intending to skip this one off of that, and have it hop twice again the distance he’d just made. He checked it in the basin and sure enough Naotatica had once more increased noticeably in size.

  He repeated the process again, this time skipping off the farther stone. Naotatica was now half the diameter of the basin. He cast another stone. This one had the planet’s bright green face filling the basin from edge to edge. Altin was ecstatic. He was going to land on Naotatica tonight.

  He cast another stone, this time his excitement giving him strength as if this were his first cast of the night. His seeing stone shot way out past the previous one, and when Altin checked in the water, hoping that he had landed there at last, he found himself staring into a basin filled with glowing green.

  “What in the nine hells?” he muttered.

  He decided to cast a full seeing spell on the location of the seeing stone and immediately went into the chant that would bring his vision to the little rock. Once there, he looked about and dropped his jaw in awe. Naotatica was enormous.

  He could tell that his seeing stone was still very far away from the planet, now that he was here and could move his view about. By tilting his view up or down, or wide to either side, he could see the black of space a
round Naotatica, but looking straight at it, it completely filled his vision, peripheral and all. But regardless of how large it loomed, the angles required to see the stars behind told him that he was still extremely far away.

  He released the seeing spell and decided to cast another stone. He’d try to double the last distance and see where he ended up. He figured he might go right past the monstrous planet, but he was anxious to get there pretty soon. His strength was quickly giving out.

  He cast the stone and returned to the basin to see where it had gone. Once again the water was filled with glowing green. This time, however, there was a slightly different look to the color in the water: it had an element of mist, a visual texture of a sort. He quickly chanted the improved seeing spell and once more joined his sight with the actual location of the seeing stone. He immediately felt that he was falling, and, for the first time since seeing anything out here in space, he actually heard some noise.

  The stone was apparently falling through a cloudy, windblown mist, and Altin allowed his vision to fall with it, retaining his visual anchor on the stone and feeling as if he were there. The wind was violent up there, and Altin could see the stone, a rather good-sized chunk of rock, being buffeted easily about as it continued to fall through the blinding mist. And everything was green and seemed to glow. Everything. Or nothing. There was not one dash of another color anywhere to be found. Just green. There was enough gradation of texture within the whirling blasts of mist to give him the sense of downward motion, but nothing more. And the volume of the wind was incredible. He had to adjust the auditory portion of the spell after a while as the intensity grew painful in his head. And so he fell.