Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  Movements in the white-robed section adjacent to the illusionists seemed to become more frantic then, the healers, as Orli recalled. The pitch of their songs rose, and the weaving of their hands grew faster and faster, making it seem as if they stitched something together in unison through the air.

  Someone else cried out behind her, somewhere above. She stood and looked, saw that a transmuter had also slumped forward in his seat.

  Two more went down in the enchanters section, and a teleporter near where she stood, seated nearest the aisle, fell out onto the stairs. The woman’s body slid down the steps until she bumped against the wall, her robes pulled up so far as to expose her to her underclothes. Orli stared at the woman’s stomach and chest, willing the movement of breath. She watched the taut flesh below the mage’s ribs, waiting for it to rise. It did not. The woman was dead.

  She looked frantically back to Altin, but he remained motionless upon his stool. The conduit too remained exactly as he was, seated on his ottoman, rotating in the dim light cast by the illusion of Mars still above him, its moons and the Hostile floating there. Nothing was changing. The only thing happening was people were falling out of their chairs. Dying.

  Orli wanted to scream. She wanted to run to Altin and shake him out of the spell. Did he even know people were dying out here? Was he so lost in the magic he didn’t know? She knew better, though. If she touched him, they might all die.

  Three more shouts. Another teleporter and two more purple-robed illusionists. An orange-robed conjurer after that.

  Time continued to pass. A ridiculous amount of it. Four more mages slumped like melted things as what had to be another hour passed. Orli was frantic now. The Hostile was still floating above Mars, looking exactly the same. What could possibly be taking them so long?

  She’d known that it would take time. She understood that mass and distance mattered somehow in doing this thing. But this long? She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there since it began. Many hours at least. If this was the time it took, it was going to be too late anyway. Crown City was probably already overrun.

  And then the Hostile was gone. She knew it because the light in the room changed, the red light of Mars suddenly brightened in the absence of the darker Hostile. The wall beyond where the Hostile had hung in the air suddenly lit up with the glow coming off the illusionary red world, its glowing light no longer blocked by the intruding orb in orbit above.

  As one, the entire room gasped as they came out of the spell. It was as if the lot of them had just come up from beneath the surface of some horrible lake, all rising out of the water in need of a single collective breath. A teleporter right behind Orli stood, looked as if she were going to say something to Orli, then fainted, her eyes rolling up into her head and her body pitching forward over the long brass rail. The railing worked like a fulcrum, and her feet flipped up, and over it she went, tumbling toward the floor where Orli was.

  Orli caught her as best she could and lowered her to the ground. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the healers section and saw a white-robed mage jump the rail and come running toward her. Others were making their way to the rest of the wounded magicians lying around the room, and even the conduit went to see what he could do to help. Orli had expected him to gloat.

  Orli gave the healer room to work with the fallen teleporter and turned back to see if Altin had come out of the spell. He had, though he sat rubbing his temples and shaking his head. She looked back to the healer, who nodded that the woman would be all right, and then she went to Altin’s side.

  “So it worked,” she said. It was only half a statement, the other half made inquiry by the rising lilt in her voice.

  “Yes. It did. I think we lost a lot of magicians though.” He squinted as his eyes played through the room. Several of the wizards in the rows above were weeping now, standing in small knots around fallen comrades. He nodded. They’d lost more than “some.” The count would be twenty-one dead when it was done. Twenty-one dead, eleven magically blinded and unable to ever cast spells again—for some a fate worse than death—and four more unconscious but otherwise relatively unharmed.

  “So, did it go all the way into the sun? Is it dead?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I could actually sense the heat when the spell released. That’s never happened before.”

  “But it’s dead. So we did it. I can call the director and tell him to start helping Crown?”

  “Yes,” said Altin sounding weary. “Call him and tell him it is done. One of them anyway. To be honest, I’m not too sure we can do that again.”

  She nodded and pulled the tablet out from her waistband. She could only hope the public feeds at Mars base Victoria or on one of the orbital stations were still operational.

  Chapter 34

  Director Nakamura’s face was all condescending smiles and faux friendliness, his eyes flashing like storefront glass as Orli appeared on his monitor. “Ensign Pewter, I wondered when I was going to hear from you again. It’s been six hours. Captain Asad reports Crown City’s southern wall fell twenty minutes ago. I’m surprised Her Royal Majesty took this long to recognize—”

  Orli cut him off, forcing herself to keep anger and revulsion in check. “Her Majesty isn’t here. I am. Altin and the Citadel mages have discovered the source of the Hostile attack. They’re sending the small orbs to Earth from giant feeder Hostiles hiding behind Mars, Venus and Mercury. Altin saw them himself. The magicians have killed the one at Mars. You can check with Victoria to verify.”

  “We know what they’re doing. And we haven’t heard from Victoria in sixteen hours, so I can’t have them show me anything.”

  “There must still be a video feed. I’m using their relay. How about Armstrong station? Are they still up?”

  “Armstrong was the first thing to go. But I can pull up the telescope at the water plant. Give me a second.” The screen went blank, leaving her to stare impatiently at the NTA crest for an interminable seeming length of time. Finally the director came back. “It appears you are correct. It is gone. Or at least, we cannot see it anymore.”

  “Then tell Asad to help them. Please, hurry. And my father says he needs at least a hundred thousand Marines, suited up and cleared for street-to-street fighting in the capital. If the wall has fallen, he probably needs more than that, since it’s been this long.”

  “Easy there, Ensign. I think you are getting ahead of yourself. I said we can’t see it anymore. I don’t have any way of verifying it’s really gone. If we’ve learned anything about your medieval friends, it’s that they know how to make things invisible, that sort of thing. For all I know, they’ve just … I don’t know, maybe tossed a cloak of invisibility over it or some other trick out of the storybooks.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Director, please. People are dying. They’re still dying, six hours later.” She spun the tablet around, panning across the room, showing one by one the groups of wizards working to help those who had fallen. She showed him the mage who’d fallen down near the base of the wall, showed the white-robed magician still chanting over her. Then she went right up to the rail and showed him the lifeless teleporter, lying so indisposed in the heap of her ignominious demise, limbs askew, her Prosperion modesty as dead as she. “Look at her, Director,” Orli hissed at him, letting him stare at the dead woman for a time. “Look at what you are doing. These people are real. This isn’t a joke. They came here, they died here, for us, for our stupid, arrogant, ungrateful world.” She spun the tablet back around and leaned right down into it. “So stop fucking around and help them already.”

  Her gamble appeared to have worked, at least in part, for the director did look somewhat mollified. “All right, Pewter, I’ll give the order to Asad and the other starships to strafe the walls. But our Marines are defending our cities. Here. The Hostiles are everywhere, and I’m not pulling even one mech out to go save Crown City. Not until the skies above Earth are clean. The Aspect and the rest, that I’ll do, but that’s it. I
don’t believe that Queen you so worship is as innocent as you want me to. Not for one second. I want the orbs gone. And don’t make me regret this gesture I’ve just made.”

  “Well, we just killed the big one here at Mars, so you’ll see the last of the regular Hostiles from this direction pretty soon. And as far as gestures go, Altin said he will send some of the redoubts to help with the fight above Earth once he knows you guys aren’t going to shoot them down. So, if he sends them, will you give the order not to fire?”

  “And if they decide to start … turning our ships into pixie dust, what then? Should I just apologize to everyone and tell them we’ve made the mistake of trusting that Prosperion woman’s word again? Trusting your word again? That’s a lot to ask, all because you showed me one dead wizard.”

  “Tell them whatever you want. It doesn’t matter whose word it is. If the redoubt mages turn on you, you’ll just be dead that much sooner. What difference could that possibly make to me or the Queen? Dead is dead. Wake up, Director. Go look out the goddamn window at what is happening. Does it really matter who kills you at this point?”

  He laughed, or at least half of his mouth laughed. “You grew into your father’s daughter, that’s for sure,” he said. “Fine, I’ll give the order not to shoot … first. But we aren’t going to tolerate any funny business up there. One false move and you’ll see what we developed while you were gone. I don’t think Her Majesty’s little crystal ball is ready for what my new Juggernauts can do.”

  “Yes, Director. Yours is the biggest one. We’re all in awe. Now tell the ship captains around Earth that the redoubts are on the way. I’ll talk to Altin about what can be done with the other big Hostiles at Venus and Mercury. And let those Marines know they need to be ready to teleport. Crown City isn’t going to hold out forever.”

  The NTA insignia came back, and Orli looked up into the concert hall. Several of the downed magicians were being carried off, others were being teleported directly to the hospital floors below.

  Altin saw that she had finished speaking to the director and came over to see how it had gone.

  “Not good,” she said, “but better than I expected. He said he’s going to order the fleet ships in orbit over Prosperion to help defend the walls, but he also said the south wall fell, which means … well, you know what it means.”

  Altin nodded grimly. “It means we need to hurry up.”

  “He cleared you to send the redoubts, but he wants us to get rid of the other orbs before he’ll send any ground troops to Crown City. The big Hostile here disappearing doesn’t make him believe. He said we could just as easily be hiding it somehow. He says he wants the skies above Earth cleared first. But I know he’s watching the numbers of the incoming orbs, so if we can cut them off as proof that we are for real, I think we can get him to send the battle suits sooner than that.”

  Altin nodded again. “If I were him, I’d probably be doing the same thing. They don’t trust us, and as infuriating as it is, that is the reality of it. We have to get to the next planet and see if we can repeat this little trick of ours.” The way he shook his head as he spoke didn’t bode well for his expectations in that regard.

  “But you’ve lost so many people. You said you probably can’t pull it off. Do you think maybe you can?” She had to hear it anyway.

  “I’ll pull some teleporters from the redoubts. I doubt a handful fewer of them will make much difference in the fight around Earth just yet anyway.”

  “Will those magicians be strong enough?”

  “They will be. We’ve got a lot of pretty high-ranked wizards up there. We tried to keep the rank-balance even between upstairs and down. We’ll just have to undo that for now.”

  It was her turn to look grim, and her bosom heaved with the magnitude of the breath she drew. He watched it and smiled. She saw and smiled back. “If we get out of this …,” she said, but she didn’t finish.

  “Yes,” he said. “If.”

  Twenty minutes later, all the seats in the concert hall were filled again, and the redoubts whose crews were not conscripted into service in the crimson room were sent off to aid in the defense of planet Earth. Altin spent the duration of that time locating Mercury and then Venus with a seeing spell, and by the time the conduit was ready to move Citadel again, Altin had seeing stones in place above both planets.

  “All right, Conduit, let’s get there and see if this will go better than before. I had a peek, and it seems we might be in a bit of luck. Both of these Hostiles are smaller than the one we just killed, so perhaps we’re on higher ground than we thought.”

  “I thought we did famously last time,” replied the conduit, the gangly mess of his hair radiating out from his head like frozen filaments of static electricity. He turned and looked up into the chamber at the magicians sitting there watching him confer with the Queen’s Galactic Mage. “What do you say, people? Did we not just hand the gorgon her head? I say that was a fine bit of magical work, don’t you?”

  A tentative, discordant variety of cheers broke out, half-hearted from some, absent in others, but a few, “Hell by hells, huzzah!”

  “We just killed a creature well over six hundred measures across,” the conduit went on, exaggerating its size some, but Orli wasn’t going to point it out. “Us. The people in this room, the people on Citadel. You are galactic mages, the first of Prosperion’s great space warriors. And you have struck the first great victory for Kurr. Raise your voices, people, and recognize your own cosmic authority. I say, Hell by hells, huzzah!”

  Much louder this time came a chorus in echo of his own.

  “Where are the children mousing about in this room,” he shouted at them. “I said gods-be-damned huzzah!”

  This time the huzzah that sounded rattled the concert hall seats. Orli could feel it in the bronze railing upon which her hand rested. She could feel it in the floor.

  “That’s what I thought you said,” shouted the conduit. His face was nearly as red as his tunic and matching pants for all the shouting, but he looked happy then. “And it seems that Sir Altin has found us another giant Hostile to kill. Granted this one is much smaller than the last, but I hope you won’t feel bad about killing it just as brutally as before.”

  Orli could see relief flicker on more than a few faces at that last part, tactically delivered as it was, and all voices once more raised the mighty huzzah.

  “Then to the lists, my friends. Cebelle, find Sir Altin’s seeing stone and let us be on our way.”

  A brief wave of muttering and whispers passed through the room as people who had leapt up in their fervor retook their seats. The newly arrived redoubt mages asked last questions about using the Liquefying Stones. A few others said prayers to favored gods.

  And then they were at Mercury.

  As they had for Mars, the seers and the illusionists worked together to get an illusion cast of the hot innermost planet, setting it once more in place in the air above the conduit’s head. Its light, set off by the brilliance of the bloated sun nearby, filled the room with a much brighter, almost ochre hue. It was less discomforting than the red light of Mars had been. This light felt like the fires of war, and most everyone in the room had a much better sense of what they had to do. While anxious hands wrung and nervous bowels churned and rattled like old wagon wheels, all were convinced this time would be a better go.

  Soon Orli found herself sitting quietly on the empty chest again, watching as the wizards worked in concert together, the diviners seeking to know who might fall first, the healers ready to get ahead of it, as many as needed, plunging their minds into the body of whomever it might be, healing in advance, willing health and growth in anticipation of the bursting tissues and burned-out minds. For the most part, it worked perfectly. Three of the newcomers, the redoubt mages, went down immediately, but the others managed very well. Nobody else went down, at least not right away. One of the diviners leapt up, screaming and clawing at his face, thirty minutes in. He threw himself down the stairs,
and Orli thought he was going to break his neck. But he did not. He got up and ran, screaming, out of the concert hall. The chamber filled briefly with a bright wedge of artificial daylight as he went out, the light an illusion in the next room, a warm summer sky on Prosperion beaming through the open doors like a slice of happiness, perhaps a promise of it, though it was devoured quickly as the doors swung shut again. They closed by their own enchantments, cutting off the man’s raving lunacy like something corked along with the illusionary sunlight. All that screaming and then, silence once again.

  She looked about, thinking that his noise would have broken the concentration of the other mages, but it had not. Everyone else remained rigid in their purpose even as their bodies swayed.

  After that, all was calm, and the time passed slowly like before. Not in the count of hours, for she had no clue how long she waited while the spell was underway, but in the helplessness of those hours. Time in that room was agony. She wanted to check her clock, thought about doing it many times, but each time decided it was too dangerous. Who knew what even her tablet’s small electronic pulses might do to a spell like the one that was being cast? So she sat. And sat. Until finally the giant orb above Mercury disappeared.

  Once again the sound of eight hundred people coming up to breathe, a single symphonic gasp, filled the hall.

  The conduit let out a loud and rapturous laugh. “Behold, oh gods of the universe,” he shouted up into the red, writhing ceiling of the room. “Your children have risen and come to show you how powerful they have grown.”

  Scowls and grumbles followed that, mutters of warning from the sections where the mages wore robes of white or black, the healers and the diviners, who were the most disturbed by the conduit’s words, near blasphemy if not right over the line. Even Altin shook his head at what he’d heard.