Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Page 31

  She skidded and bounced along the rough surface, collecting abrasions like mad. The wind was lessened some as the turn of the duct slowed both it and her. She tried to brace herself between the edges as she might have trying to climb a chimney, but the duct was too wide to reach across—not to mention her hand was throbbing worse than her leg and about as bad as her ribs.

  She reached for the Higgs prism as she was drawn deeper into the shaft, bouncing along the upward curve, carried by the wind. Dim light now came from above her, along with a frightening increase in the volume of the machinery sounds. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. Much closer.

  “Shit,” she muttered just as she blew up and around what was essentially a long horseshoe curve. She fumbled for the Higgs prism frantically. She tried at first with both hands, and the pain in her left nearly blinded her. With her right, she dialed up gravity hard and slammed herself to a stop, pinning herself to the bottom with a full four Gs.

  She lay panting, her whole body aching everywhere. She stared up at the rough ceiling of the duct and waited for her heart to slow. She was fit, and it did so right away. She let go a steadying breath, then turned down the Higgs prism to one and a half. She lifted her left hand and examined it in the dim light. It looked terrible. Three fingers broken for sure, and at least a few carpals opposite her thumb. Mangled, basically. Blood ran freely into her left eye from a cut on her head. Her elbows and knees were waterfalls, the blood and sweat mixed to rivers. She laid her head back down and sighed. “Don’t I look lovely for my honeymoon?” She almost laughed.

  A painkiller or ten would have been nice, but she had none, so there wasn’t much to be done about it but grit her teeth and go on. Even after resting for a time, breathing still made her ribs ache. And she really did need to find Altin.

  Looking in the direction of the airflow, she saw that, forty feet from where she was, the duct came to another vent, which opened out into the ship proper again. Between her and the dim lights of the distant stack of decks beyond was a series of valves, enormous and long, opening and closing sequentially, each slamming in turn with thunderous regularity. There were at least six of them, giant things that squeezed laterally like a digestive act, forcing air through them and out into the ship.

  Somehow she had to get out of there and back to looking for Altin.

  With an effort that was so fraught with agony from what felt like literally every source possible in her body, she rolled over onto her hands and knees. Her left hand, braced on the heel of her palm, shook as if with palsy. It throbbed. She had to wait for dizziness to pass. She stood and leaned into the air flowing by. There wasn’t any way she was going to try navigating her way through the mashing brutality of those valves, so she had to go back out the way she’d come in.

  She bent into the wind and marched back through the duct, having to jump down into the horseshoe curve with some added gravity to overcome the wind. That did little for her battered body, but soon enough, she was around the bend and back on a level surface. Shortly after, she was back at the intake vent she’d blown through, and upon which she’d mangled her hand. She peered at it and shook her head. She was damn lucky it was just her hand.

  After being in total blackness coming round the bend in the duct, the ambient light coming through the vent seemed brighter than it had been. It reflected wetly off the slickness of the steam that coated everything, though she thought perhaps a bit of that sheen was her blood.

  She climbed through the vent, bracing herself against the wind, and looked out over the abyss toward the layers of grates far beyond. Glancing up, she gauged it had to be nearly a mile to the upper hull. The bottom was so far away she couldn’t see it at all. Seven or eight miles at least. Maybe more. She shook her head. He could be anywhere.

  Something scuffed and scuttled to her left. It startled her, and she ducked back through the vent. It passed along the edge of the vent and then moved down below, its course marked by the huffing sound it made, like something trying to intentionally hyperventilate. She risked looking out after it.

  It was one of the little aliens, the ones with the three-tentacled faces and the hooks on their behinds, like the one that spat the ecstasy-inducing bubble that nearly got her killed. She shuddered.

  It crawled along the bulkhead, oblivious to her. She wondered where it was going. More huffing sounds had her glancing up again. Two more were coming down.

  She ducked back inside. What if they caught her? What if she was lunch? The big ones had ignored her, but these little freaks might not. They could blast her with their orgasmic sauce, and she’d be done for. Not one damn thing she could do.

  They didn’t. They moved along just as the first one had. She looked out once they were beneath her and watched them go.

  She thought about following them. Maybe they were going somewhere useful. But doing so would be as random an action as not following them.

  Think, Pewter!

  She caught herself. Smiled a forlorn little smile as she shook her head. Think, Meade! Lady Meade. “Get it together, Lady Meade.” Saying it made the smile a little wider.

  She needed to gather the facts that she had. Which weren’t many. The air streams blew through vents. That much was obvious. There were lights marking air columns for up, down. The aliens spoke with lights on their bodies, or at least she was fairly sure that was what they were doing. They used machines, maybe—probably—built them, which meant they were smart. The fact that they had lights to mark things meant they needed some kind of guidance to get around the big ship, much like human ships had signage, too—meaning the creatures weren’t perfect, and, therefore, not infallible. It also meant there might be a master schematic of the ship. That’s what humans did as well, and, all in all, this ship wasn’t so much different than a human one: decks, atmosphere, and machines.

  She also knew from extreme personal experience that they threw things away. And not just her. They’d thrown out her spacesuit and helmet. They’d done likewise with Altin’s helmet. Although, as she thought about it, he’d gotten that back. She’d seen it fall, and yet, when she was trying to cut him out of the jelly blob, he’d been wearing it. Something or someone had gotten it back for him. Or gotten another one.

  Maybe they didn’t throw things away. That made her glance back up again. Nothing was coming.

  The fact that they had retrieved or recreated Altin’s helmet suggested they understood how it worked or at very least why he had it. The fact that they threw it away to begin with suggested either that they hadn’t understood that at first or that it was broken and they had to make another one. Or else that they might even have had an extra one.

  It occurred to her that they might have encountered humans before. It was certainly possible. The humans of Earth had discovered there were humans on the planet Andalia, and after that, they discovered more humans on Prosperion. That made it very likely that there were more humans other places too. Blue Fire had said that humans were like dandelions, and the seeds of humanity—and maybe the seeds of Hostiles, for that matter—blew across the stars. So if that was true, then humans might be everywhere. And Hostiles. Maybe these alien assholes too.

  Whatever they were, they were damn sure more advanced than humans were. That rift they’d opened up, that was something else. The ships might be largely similar for all their differences, but the humanity she was familiar with wasn’t anywhere near opening up rifts in space. Hell, her people had barely mastered the gravitational wave. Without Altin and the Prosperions, Earth ships would still be crawling around at cosmic glacier speeds.

  So these aliens had probably already been all over the galaxy. Maybe all over the universe. Humans were probably old news, and the aliens might have a whole ship full of human technology, much of it likely far more advanced than anything she or Altin had. But if that was the case, why had they been so interested in examining Orli and Altin? Why the table and all the weird microscope machines?

  Then it hit her. They’d had Alti
n’s brain imaged up on the monitor. His, not hers. She’d been the one they threw away. They weren’t interested in examining her at all. Not anymore. But him they kept. Maybe humans were old news. But perhaps magic humans were not.

  The humans on Andalia hadn’t had magic. Just like the people of Earth, the Andalians had relied entirely on technology.

  Orli wondered if these aliens relied solely on technology, too, though she thought they likely did not. How else could they have so easily shut Altin down? That didn’t bode well for the chance of escape. If they wielded magic, she and Altin were in trouble. And it was certainly possible that they did. The Hostiles used magic, so the precedent for magic use was well established in the universe. Perhaps it was just not common in humans.

  Which meant they might view Altin as an oddity. That would explain why he was the one they were going to keep. Perhaps they planned on putting him in some specimen jar like a rare butterfly or some grotesquely diseased organ. Orli they didn’t need. She was just a dumb old primate, a cosmic cockroach to be tossed down into the boiling bottom of the ship.

  She couldn’t prove it, but that seemed plausible. And it was all she had to go on. She’d seen the image on the monitor. So, if she was a cockroach, and Altin was a collector’s edition human, then where would they take him? Where was the teaching lab? Or the museum?

  She looked out over the abyss and shook her head. She still didn’t know. Her theory didn’t mean jack.

  So where would a cockroach go?

  She looked up, then down. The little aliens—if fifty-yard-long creatures could be called “little”—had gone down. A cockroach would go down and get under things. A cockroach would be down where the garbage was. Maybe she could find something down there that would help. Some evidence of Altin they’d cast off, or maybe some rocking hard-core weapon from some other alien species they’d collected. Something with which she could blow a hole through the ship or take some hostages and demand Altin back.

  That was her best strategy, bad as it was, because it was her only strategy. It wasn’t much, but it was something. So, with a sigh, and a wince as her ribs protested it, she set the Higgs prism to half Earth’s gravity and dove out into the wind, a cockroach headed for the sewers and hoping for some luck.

  Chapter 42

  The Glistening Lady appeared in orbit above the huge red world. Battery power came up right away, and the crew set itself to the familiar routine of a five-hour post-teleport restart. Roberto did his part on the bridge while Tytamon and Squints, the newest member of the crew, watched.

  “So you are sure you will be all right without me?” Tytamon asked once the initial flurry of activity had passed.

  “You have your own work to do,” Roberto replied as he reinitialized the navigation computer. “Get that divining thing cast, and then get to Little Earth and send the general and however many mechs he can get for us into the cargo bay I showed you.”

  “You are rather defenseless out here just yet,” Tytamon observed, glancing about the bridge and taking in the blank screens and flashing warning lights all around him. “A measure of prudence while I wait, perhaps.”

  “It’s only five hours. Maybe less if we don’t jack around. Besides, you said you can talk to this kid telepathically. As long as you are sure his little A-class pea brain can shoot that far—you know, and so you don’t close the mind gate or whatever you guys do—then go do what you need to do with Doctor Leopold.”

  “Yes, I will be available to the boy,” Tytamon assured him. “And to put your mind at ease, we’ll confirm it the moment I get back.” He turned to Squints and nodded, which the youth returned in kind, though his was openmouthed and wide-eyed. The pedigree of his circle of friends had just gotten a serious upgrade. Soon after, Tytamon began chanting the words that would take him home.

  The dim lights dimmed further in the moment Tytamon disappeared, then brightened again following the sucking sound of the great magician’s absence snapping in the air.

  Squints looked around himself then, as if finally realizing where he was. He crept across the deck to the forward window and stared out into the stars and down at the big red planet beyond. “Wow,” he said. “So we really are all the way up in the night sky.”

  “We’re a hell of a lot farther than that,” Roberto said as he shifted to the copilot’s chair and started up the sensors and weapons system reboots. “That ain’t Prosperion down there.”

  “So who lives down there, then?” he asked. “Are there more people like us?”

  “No.” Roberto’s answers were necessarily short as he worked through the access codes. He glanced once over his shoulder to see if the kid was trying to see them as he typed, but recognized immediately that the young Prosperion didn’t even know there was such a thing. He didn’t think it would take the thief long to figure it out, though—being as his “gift,” after all, was “noticing things.”

  “So whose ship is that?” the boy asked as Roberto worked.

  Roberto didn’t hear him until he asked again.

  “Do we know those people? Or are they pirates?”

  “Who?” Roberto asked, annoyed, and having to retype the code to access the satellite orbiting the red world of Yellow Fire.

  “Those guys.”

  Roberto let out an irritated sigh and turned to tell him to shut up until the restart was finished, but he saw that Squints was pointing outside, toward the wormhole.

  He looked up and out. An alien ship had just come through the rift. It was moving away, its invisibility function inactive and therefore perfectly, worrisomely visible. Worse, right behind it, he could see a shift in the flickering pinkish fringe of the rift, indicating that another ship, this one invisible still, was slipping into local space. Roberto watched as the invisible smear blurred the pink line and the stars beyond it; then it too was free of the tear and, for a moment, seemingly gone. Like the first, it became visible shortly after. A third ship was coming through right behind.

  “Damn it!” Roberto cursed. He tapped his com badge. “Speed it up. We got company. Three more alien vessels just came through.”

  “We’re going as fast as we can, Captain,” came Deeqa’s response.

  “Just letting you know,” Roberto said. “Get me power to hide us at least.”

  “On it.” That was Liu Chun. Roberto was glad to have her back aboard. He just hoped it wasn’t simply in time to get her mashed by the next set of ships passing by.

  A fourth ship slipped out of the opening and, shortly after, joined its three companions in visibility. Roberto watched, his hands numbly moving across the controls, but there wasn’t much he could do without power. If the aliens came at them, it was over. He was about to tell Squints to get Tytamon back when the ships began to move away.

  Unlike the original alien ships to come through, which made their way straight down to the planet, these new arrivals began to glow, and after a few moments of it, a blinding white glare appeared near the split tail section at the back of each of them. There was a slight blur that followed, and then the four of them shot out of sight, too fast to be seen.

  “Whoa,” said Squints, the sound pouring out as if his tongue had melted. “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah,” said Roberto. “I did.”

  The lad looked at him then, his attention drawn by the foreboding tone in Roberto’s voice. “So who are they? Pirates? Something else? Like invaders or something? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because I don’t know, man.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “Look, you want to help?” Roberto paused long enough to look at him. His expression was dire serious. The boy nodded. “Then shut up. When Tytamon contacts you, you tell him to get word to General Pewter at Little Earth. Tell him there might be aliens on the way to Prosperion. Or Earth. Can you do that?”

  “I can.” He actually had sense enough to look scared.

  Chapter 43

  Pernie ran around the outside of the spear-shaped bu
ilding, looking for a door or window she could get in. They were all boarded up, all the way around, and she couldn’t find a single crack or knothole to look through.

  Ten spans up she saw a ledge wide enough to stand on. There were windows above it all along the wall. Most of them were broken. She wasted no time and teleported to the ledge near one of them. She looked inside. The dull glow of the streetlights cut an angle across the darkness. Broken glass and a few rocks and bottles lay inside.

  She used her own bottle to break out the jagged teeth of glass along the windowsill and stepped inside. Turning back, she peered out toward the street. She saw one of the black-and-white Reno police cars floating by on its antigravity, barely a span above the ground. There were others higher up in the air, police aircraft like the one that had captured her in the woods three nights ago after she’d escaped from the pet-on-file’s van. They were everywhere.

  She’d been reading about the flying machines, and she knew that they could see heat through walls, so she quickly made her way deeper into the building so that her heat wouldn’t give her away. She didn’t know how much heat they could see, or through how many walls, but she had to try.

  She made her way to what she hoped was the very center of the place. She wished she’d read more than she had. There was just so much to learn. So many weapons, so many fighters and spaceships. So much technology. It was going to take a long time to know more than Orli Pewter did.

  She wondered if that was possible. Orli Pewter was older than Pernie by more than ten whole years. That was more than Pernie’s whole lifetime again. How could she ever hope to catch up? It would never be possible. She would always be over a decade behind.

  Although, she had learned about percentages, and it was true that while twenty was twice as much as ten, ninety was only ten percent less than a hundred. Maybe she could catch mostly up in time because of math. And if Orli Pewter wasn’t working as hard as Pernie would, then maybe Pernie could know more by then that way too.