Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  They flew back hoping for a killing blow. Taot swooped down on silent wings as the air whistled through Orli’s ears. They came up level as they sped toward their quarry, then Taot stretched his neck out before them and blew his dragon’s breath into the hole that Altin and Orli had made, a long, roaring spew of infernal heat, so bright it made Orli shield her eyes. The fire blasted back, some of its heat bouncing off the demon’s shell, and Orli couldn’t help the reflex that had her pressing hard against Altin’s back as well. She could hear the fire crackle as they flew the length of the monster’s body, the sizzling noise of its fluids being brought to heat. Unlike Altin’s magic, dragon’s fire was real enough, and the demon had naught to do for it but boil and burn. The heat and gas from Taot’s expulsion filled the cavity the ice lance had opened, burning into the soft innards of the demon mercilessly, and as the momentum of Taot’s pass carried them by the demon, the dragon kept up the flames. He curled his long serpentine neck back and downward as they flew past, still blowing fire as they began to rise. When the yellow tongues of flame were no longer concentrated enough to inflate the beast effectively, the dragon cut off the spew, but it was enough, for in the moments after Taot’s terrible breath stopped, the demon burst apart. The explosion of superheated flesh and expanding gas blew fragments of its hard black armor everywhere, the shrapnel of its demise breaking windows and snapping balconies into twisted smiles of splintered wooden teeth on both sides of the street. It was messy, but it worked.

  When it was dead, the remaining guardsmen stood up from where they’d been crouching behind their shields, shouting up at the dragon and his riders, their grateful expressions obvious even though their voices could not be heard over the triumph of Taot’s roar. The cry of the dragon had been reverberating across the city for hours, at first frightening the populace, but later the cause for cheers—cheers from all but the gryphon riders anyway, who now had to work twice as hard to stay in their saddles whenever Taot flew near.

  Altin did his best to give the Queen’s men their space, but the fact of the matter was that Orli’s laser and the dragon’s fire were the best weapon the city had for fighting in the streets, picking up the demons here and there as somehow a few them continued to find ways into the city despite the tremendous effort at defense. Orli cut them open, and Taot steamed them to death from the inside. Altin’s ice lances were merely the lever to simplify things a bit.

  “There’s another one coming over the wall. Look, over there.” Orli had to shout to be heard over the wind of Taot’s flight as she pointed to guide Altin’s eye. “See it? To the east, like a giant lobster.”

  “A lobster that’s half melted and has a second head growing out of its back, maybe,” he said even as he directed Taot with the pressure of his knees toward the giant, misshapen oddity.

  He sent a message to Taot not to get too low, pointing out through an image and sense of dread that the demon’s second head came with a second pair of claws that could grope up and snatch them out of the air. The dragon’s thoughts returned impatience, a mental growl, annoyed that Altin felt inclined to tell him, a natural born aerial killer, how to fight.

  They swept across the cityscape then, just above the chimney tops, and came in range of the demon that had managed to get over the walls. Orli could see white robed medical mages busily casting healing spells on the men who had fallen where the lobster-demon had jumped up and landed atop the battlements. If the airborne trio could kill the thing, the soldiers and mages down there might be able to hold the expanse of wall again.

  If there were anything good about fighting demons from Orli’s point of view, it was that they were almost impossible to miss with laser fire. She aimed down for the monster’s uppermost head, intent on trying to cut a line at the back of its neck, maybe even deeply enough that Altin’s ice lance could break it off. She missed badly, however, when Taot swerved around a four-story inn, and instead she cut a line down the creature’s side, just above the line of its several projecting legs.

  Altin conjured an ice lance ten spans long and two spans thick as Taot swept past the monster and soared out over the wall, over the battlefield, in a long, banking arc that would ultimately bring them back round to confront the lobster-demon again. Orli still couldn’t believe how many of the monsters there were down there, so many throwing themselves against the wall now that it seemed impossible they could ever hold them off. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them. It was a miracle of the magical prowess of Crown City that the walls hadn’t yet been overrun. Only a few of them were occasionally able to breach the great height and powerful enchantments on the walls. At least for now. The city was still, all things considered, relatively safe, at least as long as the dragon and his two riders could keep up with the demons that did get through.

  The tragic sight of Her Majesty’s armies in the field was less encouraging. The orcs and humans, strangely isolated on the field beyond, continued to fight, the combatants now climbing over the dead, orc and human alike, knee deep in gore as they battled on. She knew that someday, if she lived through this, she would never forget the carnage that she had witnessed on this awful day.

  Altin loosed his ice lance and two more slightly smaller ones, sending them streaking down and smashing into the seething mass of darkness pressing against the walls. The first burst against the humped back of one monster, shattering uselessly and flying in all directions like so many thousand bits of hail. The second had even less effect on another demon, but the third managed to find a purchase between two sliding plates of boney hide near what might have been the neck of a smallish demon that had been trying to climb the wall. The shaft of ice didn’t kill it, but it did knock it off the wall. It fell at first onto the heads and backs of those beneath it, and for a moment it lay atop them, bobbing and surging with the movement of the invaders, its legs upward and thrashing like a great upturned beetle floating on a stormy sea, but then it slipped sideways, sunk down into a momentary space between its fellows, where it ended up trapped beneath their tromping feet and unable to rise. Orli hoped that would be the end of it, but she had no way to tell. It seemed unlikely, given what she’d witnessed thus far that day. And it was worse for Altin. All his great power, and yet that was the best he could muster, one shot out of three, and that barely enough to flick one small demon off the wall.

  They passed back over the fray and into the city’s air space. Altin’s next ice lance formed quickly as Taot dove down toward the lobster-like creature again. He guided the dragon’s angle with the press of his heel, causing Taot to tip his right wing. The massive ice spear flew true again—Orli had noticed that they seldom missed—and once again a large rent opened in the demon where her laser had cut through its armored outer shell.

  As before, Taot’s long, sinewy neck curved down and stretched for the opening, but the creature saw them coming and shot out one of its thick pinchers, which snapped at the dragon’s head. Taot jerked his head out of the way, a powerful reflex, which sent a surge of energy up his spine like a wave running up a rope, and the force of it nearly flung Orli off. It would have, too, had Altin’s arm not wound around behind him, whipped back in anticipation and reflex of his own as he caught her and kept her pressed firmly to himself. She clutched him tightly about the waist with her left arm, her fingernails nearly digging through his robes as terror chilled her thoroughly.

  Meanwhile, the S-curve that had formed itself in Taot’s long neck with his defensive retraction now worked like a wound-up spring for his counterattack, and in the instant following the demon’s defensive move—almost the same moment Orli heard the loud snap of the demon’s closing claw—Taot’s open maw darted forward again and nipped that claw off right where it formed at the end of the demon’s leg, removing it as easily as if he’d clipped a rose bud off its stem. The warm spray of the demon’s reeking fluids spewed out from the severed opening, splashing across Orli’s leg and down the dragon’s flanks as they flew past and then up and out of range.
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br />   The dragon, with two powerful flaps of his wings, drove them even higher than at first it seemed he needed to, much higher, almost straight up and yet angling sideways some. Orli continued to clutch Altin about the waist and craned her neck to see around him, looking for a reason for the sudden and precipitous quest for altitude. Then she saw it, a rising spire, the dragon’s efforts meant to avoid collision with a needle-sharp minaret. Still they struck it, though they missed most of the stonework from which it emerged. They ran up against it at an angle, and the dragon’s huge talons reached out to absorb the shock, though in doing so, he squeezed Altin and Orli together in the curve of his back. The impact was jarring, and both Altin and Orli gasped as the breath was knocked almost entirely from their lungs. The minaret snapped off, breaking clean and sending down a jumble of large stones. They gasped, the three of them sounding off together, but the break in the minaret and the dragon’s noble efforts took enough off of the collision to avoid calamity for them all.

  Taot pushed off against the stump of the spire with his powerful back legs, sending more bits of broken stone down into the courtyard below, and in four more mighty strokes of his wings the climb was done. He let the upward momentum die off—at the peak of it they were all weightless for that one half heartbeat—and then he folded his wings and let gravity call them back toward the ground. His broad head, with its long curving teeth shaping the very grin of death, was at one moment high above his riders, seeming to lead them up, but then, in that moment of weightlessness, he curled it down from the apex of the ascent and let it fall past his riders, its downward arc shaping the turn that would lead them back down and back into the fight.

  Orli gasped at the suddenness of the ordeal, the pass by the demon, the minaret and the sudden altitude, all in the span of a few breaths. In doing so, the cold air of the lofty moment filled her lungs with chill as she clung to Altin like a sweater all through the stomach-churning turn. Plummeting down, she could see the city spreading beneath them like some huge holographic map. She might have marveled at its myriad styles and mottled disparity of architecture had she not been so afraid that they were now going too fast to pull up.

  They weren’t, but barely, or at least so it seemed to her. The g-forces she endured as the dragon pulled out of the dive felt like they would grind her into the dragon’s spine, splitting her in half. It was all she could do to lift her chin off her chest and turn and watch as the streak of Taot’s flames filled the split in the demon’s side as they shot by again. They were already soaring out over the battlefield when the monster blew up, its guts painting the inside of the city wall in disgusting pus-colored hues.

  Orli saw spots for a moment as Taot banked, caused more by the last turn than this one, and again they were headed back toward the city’s heart, Altin sending spears of ice down into the demons as they flew past the wall, and, like before, it seemed they had very little effect.

  There came a sound through the wind then, a high-pitched tone, accompanied by a sensation upon her back. At first she attributed the sound to internal ringing in her ears, a pressure effect as she continued to recover from Taot’s rapid shifts in altitude and hard-grinding turns. She attributed the touch upon her back to the movement of her new Prosperion clothing in the wind; she was hardly used to her new attire yet. But the tone came again, three short, equidistant beeps, and the vibration this time was definitely pressed against her back. Where the tablet was tucked into her waistband.

  Quickly, she holstered her blaster and pulled the tablet out. A pair of taps and her father’s face appeared.

  “Orli, girl,” he said. “Thank God you are still alive.”

  “I am. We both are.” She had to shout to be heard over the rushing air.

  Altin looked back, startled and fearing she’d been injured, but she turned the tablet briefly so that he could see. He nodded and sent instructions to Taot to maintain altitude.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when she’d turned the tablet back around. “It’s a disaster here. More and more demons are getting over the wall.”

  “We’re not good. But we’re holding them off. The Aspect and a few other ships are in orbit now. More are coming.”

  “Tell them to use the ships’ lasers to clear off the city walls,” Orli shouted over the wind. “Tell them they need to hurry or Crown City is going to fall.”

  Director Nakamura’s face appeared in the lower left quarter of her screen, Captain Asad’s in the lower right. “That’s actually what we wanted to talk to you about.”

  Orli had to turn the volume all the way up, and even then she had to bend right down near the tablet to hear, hiding in the relative calm to be found at the base of Altin’s back. “Save the city, Asad, you prick,” she said as she leaned in. “Do one decent thing in your whole goddamn life.”

  The director nodded as he spoke. “That is exactly what he will be doing, Ensign, the moment you get your friend the Queen to call off the Hostiles attacking us here on Earth.”

  “It’s not her attacking! For the love of God, how blind can you possibly be? Look at the fucking city.” She held the tablet up, tilted down so they could see the battle taking place beyond the city walls. “Do you really think she’d be using any of her power anywhere other than here right now if she had a choice?”

  “We know all about the situation there,” said the director, perfectly calm, as Orli hunched once again into the shelter of Altin’s warm body. “We are prepared to burn the area around the city clear the moment the War Queen does what we ask. Have her call her ally, Blue Fire as you say, and demand that she withdraw her orbs. The moment they leave our system, Crown City will be ready for picnics in the park again.”

  “They’re in the city,” Orli pleaded, anger giving way to desperation. “Right now. Look.” She held the tablet out again as Taot’s flight carried them over a large courtyard near the center of town. The twisted shape of a demon, a crooked mass like a bent bit of lumber, was pulverizing a warhorse as they flew by, its rider already dead, lying in three pieces on the ground not far away. Several townspeople were fleeing down a nearby street, brooms and wood axes in their hands, no longer willing to fight with the loss of the knight. Orli turned the tablet back and looked down into it. “They don’t have time for this, Director. Don’t do this. Don’t play this game. People are dying. Innocents.”

  “Tell it to the War Queen,” he said, once again putting emphasis on the bellicose title. He sounded exactly like Captain Asad.

  Orli’s frustration and helplessness came out in one long scream. Altin turned back, as did the dragon whose head rose up and peered down at her over Altin for a moment.

  “What do I have to do to convince you Blue Fire has nothing to do with the attack on Earth either? She didn’t send the orbs. She’s not working with the Queen. Are you really going to let a million people die here just to make a point?”

  “Billions of people are going to die, Pewter,” spat Captain Asad. “And it’s your fault, you and your friends on Prosperion and your pal Goldilocks. You are going to get those people killed if you insist on clinging to naive fantasies while ignoring the obvious truth. We all agree this isn’t a game, but it’s your powerful friends who are playing one anyway. We never asked for any of this.”

  “There’s no goddamn game,” Orli screamed. This time all the volume was in the service of her rage. “What possible benefit is there to killing absolutely everyone? Nobody is that stupid. Not even you, Asad. Clear off the fucking walls. Help those people out there in the fields. They are dying. This is real.”

  The director’s face seemed to pinch in for a moment. Clearly he was thinking. For the barest moment, Orli had hope, but Captain Asad’s face was stern as stone. The director saw it, seemed to waver for an instant more, then shook his head negligibly. “When the orbs leave, it will be done,” he said, though with perhaps the barest note of regret. “Not before. Talk to the Queen. This channel will remain open for her reply. Hopefully it will come before both planet
s are destroyed.” The director’s quarter of the screen went blank.

  Captain Asad started to say something, but Orli cut the power to the tablet, uninterested in what he had to say.

  “We have to get to Her Majesty,” Orli shouted to Altin then. “We have to figure out what to do.”

  “Her Majesty is out there,” he replied, pointing over his shoulder toward the battle raging out in the fields beyond the city gates. “Assuming she’s still alive.”

  A long growl rumbled in her chest, her whole body quaking with the ferocity of it, until it finally released itself in a howl of impotent fury. “Fuck!” she screamed after, as a point of emphasis. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  Altin, growing used to the alien word, nodded. He’d only snatched bits and pieces of what had been said out of the rushing wind, but from what he had heard, there was little he could do but agree with the sentiment she so violently expressed.

  “We have to stop them,” she said.

  “Stop who?”

  “The other Hostiles. The other Hostile world.”

  “I agree. But how? How many will die if we abandon the streets now, given that the fleet isn’t going to help?”

  “They’re going to die anyway.”

  Altin grimaced at that bit of cold logic. But part of him knew it was likely true. There was so little time. “We should go find Ocelot. Though I fear how long that might take.”

  “Why don’t we just do what she already told us, do like you said before, go with what we know, what I know: Mars.”

  “You said there’s nothing there. We can’t go off hunting around on hope. How many red worlds, how many red suns, did you say there were again? Millions? Billions?”