Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read online

  “The Earth forces had the entire Palace full of magicians helping them, and all the mages on Citadel.”

  “As will we, if your intent is to go help Her Majesty extract herself from the war she has gotten us into.”

  “My intent is none of your concern.” She turned away from them, toward the mirror in the carved bone frame. She gazed into it at the image of Sir Altin Meade and his new bride. They seemed to be staring back at her, their vacant, unblinking eyes watching sightlessly through the amber they were in.

  Black Sander and all the rest waited in silence for whatever came next.

  “I want the golems,” she said at length. “I want the armor that is a fighting machine. That’s what the Earth forces had. More than mages, that was what gave them victory.”

  “The mechs, My Lady?” Black Sander flashed a look to Vorvington, who made a face that said the earl was as surprised as Black Sander was.

  “Yes, if that is what they are called. I’ll have no more of these small arms. I might as well be paying you to bring me crossbows with flame-enchanted bolts.”

  “Oh, now please,” said the earl. “Don’t you think that might be a bit in excess? We have no one to operate those contraptions. They need riders! Which means you are suggesting we start bringing in Earth men as well. Mercenaries, no less. All those wandering minds for Her Majesty’s diviners to find. All those drunken idiots. You can’t possibly have thought this through.”

  “You forget yourself, Vorvington. Remember your place.” That seemed to wound him more than a flame-enchanted crossbow bolt would have.

  “My Lady,” Black Sander suggested, his voice low and lubricated. “His Lordship is correct in that. I do not think bringing Earth men here is a good idea just yet. The sort of men and women who are trained in the use of those armor machines are not the type who will take to slavery, nor are they likely to be easily contained. And even if they are, at some point you’ll have to let them into those machines. Which means, as Lord Vorvington suggests, to employ them and their mechs to our advantage, they must be free—free enough upon our world to tip your hand before the time has come. Unless you intend to pay for them and leave them on Earth. And if so, I must remind you how limited our teleporting capabilities are just now.”

  She turned from the mirror, straight and calm, her mouth a fault line of thin, cracked lips. He saw in her eyes a look of power, a sense of it, a variety that comes with storied blood and the kinship of kings. “You will get them, and you will do it now. You will bring them here. If you cannot do it, I will find someone who can. If your friends on Earth cannot handle the request, then you will find new friends. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Have you any idea of the cost of such things, My Lady?”

  “I have more gold than that royal warmonger does. A whole mountain’s worth. And it’s been waiting for just this moment. So be silent and do as you are told.” She turned back to the mirror, and because in it could only be seen the faces of Sir Altin and Lady Meade, no one in the room saw her smile.

  Chapter 31

  Orli couldn’t be sure how many levels she had plunged after the aliens had tossed her away. She thought it had to have been at least ten, but perhaps closer to fifteen. The problem with hurtling through a dark spaceship at meteoric speeds while being blasted with scalding steam and trying not to hit protein beams thicker than oak trees was that, in doing so, she lost her ability to count how many oak trees she hadn’t hit. Somehow, avoiding becoming a red stain on a numberless alien deck took precedence over tallying grates on her way into the boiling nightmare at the bottom of the ship. So, it was only with her best guess that she reached a level she thought might be fifteen levels above where she’d first discovered the column of dead air. She decided this was the one she would use to send herself into the wind again.

  One major advantage of this level over the ones she’d just come up through was that she was well above where she’d encountered the aliens with the orgasmic mist—or whatever the hell that stuff the little alien spat was. That little accident had nearly gotten her completely lost, if not worse, and if there were any forces of mercy in the universe, she would not encounter that stuff again. What she needed to encounter was Altin. But damn, the ship was big.

  She pulled herself along the edge of the grate, out of the dead-air column, and back into the wind. It pulled at her with increasing strength as she went along. The Higgs prism set at zero gravity made movement easy, so long as she maintained her grip.

  Sure that there were no aliens swooping toward her—as sure as she could be, given how fast they came and how suddenly they appeared out of the darkness and steam clouds gasping all around—she adjusted her makeshift spacesuit sail around her ankles and hoisted her feet up into the air.

  The wind caught it and puffed it full, and whoosh, she was on her way. She angled her arms out behind her and tilted the flats of her hands, gently guiding her flight as she soared out over the vast divide that separated the layers of grates across the abyss. It was only a matter of a few minutes before she crossed the dark expanse and was once again flying over a grate. She set herself to searching for Altin as soon as she was above it, flying high and glancing ahead warily, leery of being blown into some massive hunk of alien machinery. If she hit one of those constructs at sixty or so miles per hour, she’d still end up being little more than a steamy red smear somewhere.

  She must have flown for five minutes before she came to the end of that grate. The dark sprawl of another black span yawned in front of her. If her guess was right, that was the one she’d ultimately ended up falling into after being tossed away by the alien.

  Thinking of it made her glance behind, wary of aliens overtaking her. All was clear as far as she could see—which wasn’t saying much.

  She shifted her feet and hands, directing her flight diagonally across the wind. She had to get back as close as possible to where she thought she’d been when last she’d seen Altin, trying to reorient herself after the lateral shift she’d made when she’d pulled herself toward the orange light.

  Soon she was over it and flying across another grate. She looked for anything familiar, hoping she’d gotten a good enough look at the machine upon which she and Altin had been placed, as well as at those others that she’d seen on the level below. So far there’d been nothing familiar: nothing similar to the big tanks resting in the woven tubes like nests, nothing with a big platform of bright light beneath a pronged protein microscope. In a way, that might be cause for optimism. If those machines were unique, then when she did come across them, she would know she’d at least returned to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

  She angled back and forth as best she could, her eyes darting back and forth and her heart pounding. Twice she nearly collided with giant piping that ran up through the grates, seeming to lunge at her out of the darkness before plunging into darkness again on the level above or below or both. As she flew and searched, she tried not to worry, to panic, to fear for what might be happening to Altin right now. What might have already happened. She told herself it was as possible that he had escaped, or been discarded too. He might be drifting about looking for her this very moment. She could even hope that he had somehow managed to get home.

  The updraft hit her without warning. She was closing in on the edge of the grate, a little over four hundred yards away, and then, wham, like a volcanic blast of steam, she was blown upward. It hit her so hard it snapped her head back and sent jolts of pain through her ribs. For a moment her vision swam for the brutality of it, but she blinked her way to clarity as she gritted her teeth and waited out the pain.

  She was rocketing into the darkness like an insect pinned to an invisible windshield. Up and up she went, so suddenly that she lost count of how many decks the updraft carried her past. Orange lights at the edge of them flickered by one after another in a vertical line. She was dimly aware of the fact that she ought to have noticed herself approaching that line.

  It also occurred t
o her that she ought to look up.

  She did so with exactly enough time to utter, “Shit,” before she hit the upper reaches of the ship. A bright violet oval ringed another type of grate, the cross members narrower and closer together. She struck the intersection of two of these at speed. Not so fast as free fall, nor so fast as the crosswinds between levels, but hard enough to knock her out.

  When she came to, moments later—minutes? hours?—she was lying against the vent pinned to it right where she had struck.

  She lolled her head from side to side, assessing her situation. She was on a vent, pressed firmly there by the updraft, which now seemed from the sound of it to be more like an in-draft, drawn in by whatever it was that was making a tremendous roar. Though her whole body ached from the impact, it quickly became apparent that if she’d not hit the grid and instead gone through, she might be hamburger right now.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said, trying to get her bearings. She had no idea what level Altin might be on now.

  She forced herself to calm and looked around. The violet light glowed brightly all round the vent. Off to her right was another oblong ring, shaped just like the violet one, but this one dull and gray. It too encircled a sprawling vent.

  Making sure to keep herself pressed against the narrow crossbeams of the one she was on, she rolled onto her stomach and crawled toward the edge. She realized as she did that she’d lost her spacesuit sail. Not much she could do about it now.

  She made it to the edge. The violet light came from a raised ring of protein, looking rather like the humped bead of a giant weld. It was rough to the touch, slightly different from the rest of the hull. Definitely not like any light source she’d ever seen. She crawled over it, clinging to the ceiling like a fly. Immediately on the other side of it, the airflow that had held her to the surface was gone. Once again she was drifting in zero gravity.

  A much gentler wind blew lengthwise along the hull, so gentle she was barely moved by it at all. She bounced lightly against the hull like a helium balloon along a ceiling after the birthday party has gone. She got herself closer to the other vent, which was encircled by the light ring that didn’t glow. There came from that vent the same roar of machinery blowing air. When she was near enough to reach her hand over the edge of the lightless light mound, her suspicions were confirmed. “The down elevator,” she muttered to herself.

  If she pulled herself into it, she wondered if she could get out again at the time and place she wanted to. It was either get in there and try it, or try to descend on her own, using her Higgs prism … while dealing with the alternating crosswind. Without the help of her spacesuit sail.

  She swore and pushed herself into the downdraft.

  She plunged downward at a steady clip, braced for a wave of terror that never came. Being prepared for it made a huge difference, and she wasn’t in free fall. She counted down five levels ahead of her, a guess at how far she’d come, and angled out of the air column.

  The wind blowing over the deck snatched her immediately, and she fought to straighten out. She’d just gotten level with the deck when the gray smear of an alien soared right over her.

  The air swirled beneath the edge of its billow as it blew past, and it spun her wildly. The lazy waves that ran the lengths of its tentacles caught her twice as it continued by, the second knocking her almost to the grate. She saw the gridwork coming up at her and managed to get her foot down in time to absorb the impact some. A glancing blow, the pain in her ribs made her head spin, and the wind caught her and blew her along the grate, tumbling along it like a bit of trash down an alien road.

  Her vision cleared in time for her to spot a huge triangle of light looming out of the darkness at her. It came from the top of a massive machine at which she was being blown. Fifty yards away tops, and she was going to hit it dead center and at high speed.

  She angled upward, reached with her leg for another push off the grate. She gained altitude, but not enough. She was still going to hit it. Even if she cleared the edge, she’d likely hit pipes rising from the top of it.

  She looked down. No chance she could cut an angle fast enough to get through one of the gaps.

  She glanced down at the beam she was hurtling just above, her flight carrying her along its length, barely a foot above it. She’d only just managed to stop herself from glancing off it as she was blown along, the rough protein already having scratched her up all over. But she knew what she had to do.

  Twisting to center herself around, feet first again, she reached down and rolled the Higgs prism to one Earth gravity. She dropped right out of the wind, onto the grate, and skidded to a halt like one of those old-time baseball players sliding into a base.

  The surface was rough, and the abrasion that it made down the length of her hip and leg burned like fire. It stung so bad she had to wait for a wave of nausea to pass. When it did, she looked up. She was four yards short of the machine. Close, but far enough.

  Glancing back to her leg, she saw blood welling up like tiny rubies all up and down her leg. As they grew larger, they would run together, then simply run. She shook her head. That was going to be a mess. But there was nothing she could do. She had nothing. Spacesuit utility belts didn’t include medical kits.

  Looking around, she concluded that this definitely wasn’t the deck she and Altin had been on. But there was something familiar about the machine. It had a triangular bit of prismatic light on it near the upper edge. It was huge, perhaps thirty yards on a side. The colors in it whirled together in seemingly no pattern at all, but they were all there, the full spectrum of the rainbow along with many patches of lightless gray mixed in. She wondered if this was the same machine she’d seen while looking down through the grate shortly after getting out of the yellow gel herself. She hadn’t noticed the pipes, or shafts, or whatever they were, rising out of it before, but she also hadn’t seen a bright triangle like that anywhere else on the ship as she’d been flying around. It seemed like a long shot, but she had to hope it might be the same one. If it was, then she was close.

  She made her way to it. She had the advantage of the wind blowing her against it on that side, so a minor adjustment to the Higgs prism made scaling it easy and quick. Soon she was at the top.

  A bank of lights and a large oval patch showed her where the device’s controls were. Only a few of the lights were illuminated, and the oval thing, which she thought might be a viewing screen, was as blank as the rest of it was. Only the texture of it was different, smooth and slightly soft to the touch.

  Careful not to touch anything that looked like it might activate something, she climbed through the massive control panel and made her way up to one of the thick columns that rose from it like smokestacks. It was extremely hot, and it rattled. She could feel that rattle through it, like something gurgling inside, boiling or bubbling. She thought maybe it was a steam stack.

  She looked around for something to wrap her hands in, something insulating, anything at all. There was nothing. No cloth. No paper. No duct tape. Nothing like rubber or foam or even a damn tree leaf. She looked up at the grate above.

  There were aliens moving about up there.

  What if that really was the level she’d been on, the level where Altin was? Could she have that kind of luck?

  She grunted and set the Higgs prism to a tenth of Earth gravity. She just had to get up there. She told herself that the steam stack wasn’t so hot that she couldn’t touch it a couple of times on the way.

  She gritted her teeth and wiped her hands down the front of her thighs. They were slick with sweat and steam. She was soaked through and through.

  The wind cooled it enough that she hoped the moisture would work.

  She jumped upward, and half climbed, half ran up the column, trying to launch herself upward with the least contact possible, but needing enough contact to stave off being carried away by the wind.

  It burned. But it worked. She was up in under two minutes, and her hands and feet merely thro
bbed.

  She pushed herself off the stack and grabbed the beam downwind of where the steam stack went through. She panted and winced at how bad her hands hurt. She wasn’t sure how much more of this place her body was going to take. Her ribs threatened to black her out when she hit the edge of the beam, even though she’d timed the movement pretty well, and her right thigh along the side felt like there was acid burning the entire length.

  She had to wait until enough things stopped throbbing and burning and aching to see clearly. She looked around, hoping that somehow she’d actually find herself where she thought she ought to be.

  There was a blocky machine perhaps six hundred yards upwind of her that had three hoses coming out of the side. That was just like what she’d seen before.

  There were aliens beyond it; she could see the top half of them glowing in the steamy dimness. She couldn’t tell if they were the same aliens or different ones. They all looked the same.

  She crawled up onto the beam, her ribs screaming at her to stop. She set the Higgs prism to a click above Earth normal and turned into the wind.

  When she got to the machine with the three hoses on her side, she glanced to her right and saw rows of nesting melon-shaped tanks. Hope flared even brighter.

  She worked her way to the edge of the machine and peered around it toward the aliens. Sure enough, there was the work table with the brightly lit examination deck.

  One alien was just leaving, pulling itself against the wind. It dimmed with distance, maybe three-quarters of a mile or so. Then it apparently found the upwind edge of the grate. She could only barely make it out in the darkness as it climbed up and slipped away. The other was still working at something on the controls of the machine.

  Orli hoped it was Altin being examined like she had been. Maybe she could get up on the table unseen and … what? Use her utility knife to cut out the creature’s eye? The little flea could finally bite. But maybe that would buy her some time for … something.