Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 32

  “They’re strange plants. Cultivating them is more art than science,” Tea told them with a shrug.

  Roberto hadn’t noticed that much bean density variation before, but when Altin shrugged it off—the Prosperion wizard knowing little about the harvesting or processing of Goblin Tea—Roberto let it go. The next two crates were more in line with the weights of the early ones, and Roberto would have forgotten it all had not the last crate been underweight by nearly three hundred pounds.

  Roberto looked to the woman working the gravity sled and raised the question with his eyebrows. She tapped one icon on the screen, and got the total cargo weight. “Twenty-four thousand six hundred and fifty-eight,” she said.

  Roberto’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he did the math. They stayed that way when he was done. “Listen, Master Fallowfield, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but that makes us shy by about three hundred and forty pounds. That’s several thousand NTA credits, and I understand you’ve already been sent the gold.”

  “I have,” confirmed the tea master, looking displeased himself. “That is a bit lighter than I’d call an allowable variance.”

  Roberto nodded and sent a relieved look to Altin, clearly glad that this wouldn’t degenerate into an argument.

  “Let’s open that one up,” said the tea master. “Zoie, get that ladder over here.”

  The young teleporter and her coworker quickly dragged the ladder off the wagon and set it up against the huge wooden crate. The young man handed the tea master a pry bar, and the plantation master went up himself to pry open the box. It took him some time, and two more trips down and back up again after moving the ladder, but finally he had it open. He lifted the lid with obvious effort and then propped it open with a practiced placement of the pry bar. He leaned over the edge and peered into the crate, and immediately began shaking his head. “Shifted,” he said. “There must have been a wet clump in there that broke apart. They’ve been rushing back there since we started packing for you. You can blame me for that. I should have hired a few extra hands. I’ll have a word with the house manager about it, though. There’s no excuse. This should have been shaken before it was sealed.”

  “So what’s that mean in English?” Roberto asked.

  “I’m sorry?” asked the tea master. “I’m not sure what you mean?”

  “He means in common tongue,” Altin said.

  “It means we’ve shorted you three and a half sacks of beans because I’ve put my crew in a position where they are in too much of a hurry to do their work properly. We will get you another crate at once. Give me some time to have one reallocated. I’ll have it shaken myself.”

  The level of his dismay was obvious, and the faint reddening at his cheeks showed that he was genuinely mortified by how the shortage made him and his business appear.

  “I truly apologize,” he went on, but Roberto cut him off.

  “Look, just get me three and a half bags like you said. I just want what I paid for. I don’t care about the box. It’s all good.”

  “No, it really should be just as it shows on the manifest. I prefer to keep things neat. I can have another ready in less than an hour. And besides, the bags won’t keep as well.”

  “Throw the bags in the box before you close it up,” Roberto said, trying to be agreeable. “Like I said, we are going to seal it back up and keep it all refrigerated the entire time. The bags will be fine, and if they are inside the box, well, then it’s still only ten crates, right?”

  The man frowned, still clearly flustered by the apparent lack of integrity, but he agreed. “Very well.” He turned to the two young workers standing nearby. “Go on, then,” he said. “Get them fresh off the line. Four of them. They better still be warm by the time you bring them back.”

  They both nodded and ran off at full speed.

  “Shall we see to the paperwork while they fetch them?” Master Fallowfield asked.

  “Sure,” said Roberto. “Altin, you want to come watch me sign papers, or do you want to stay here and log those bags in for me?” He said it with a barely discernible twitch of his eye, which Altin easily recognized.

  “No, I think I should be bored by paperwork. I’ll verify the last of your shipment while you do that. Orli will be wanting me back soon anyway; we’ve got a few things to do to prepare for that transmute I have coming up. Efficiency is in order here.”

  “Roger that,” Roberto said. “Let’s go sign me out, Tea.” He clapped the man on the back, a warm gesture meant to prove there were no hard feelings about the discrepancy. But the tea master turned back to Altin before he left.

  “Don’t take it if it isn’t warm,” he said. “It should be almost too hot to touch. That’s as fresh as it can be. It will clump a little, but that’s fine so long as they make weight.”

  Altin promised that he would check, and the Spaniard moved off with the Prosperion farmer, chatting away merrily about the chain of stores he was opening back on planet Earth, finally, after nearly a year of being “jammed up by bureaucracy.”

  In the absence of the tea master and his two assistants, Altin immediately cast the magic detection spell he’d recently memorized, placing himself as he cast it into a quasi-mana-channeling state, pushing a wide and tall wedge of the misty pink stuff out before him like an open hinge. He could imagine how unwieldy the spell might have been channeling mana normally, but with his ring, the gift from mournful Blue Fire, he was able to shape a very neat device. He pushed the angled opening of the construct over the open crate before him, moving slowly into the same space occupied by the object, and watching for the misty mana to react to other magic in the area. He enveloped the whole thing and watched for a time, but nothing shimmered or shifted on the surface of the wedge. There was no magic at work in or on that one.

  He climbed up the slope of the loading ramp that had been lowered to accommodate the large crates, and entered into the bottom of the ship. Purple-corseted crewwomen were already at work strapping the big boxes down with wide yellow straps, and each crate was being fitted with a round metal device that monitored its structural integrity as well as its location at all times. “Excuse me, ladies, but would you be too put out if I asked you to turn those devices off for a moment?”

  They readily obliged, and soon after, Altin had swept through the whole area with the magic detection spell. There was no magic on or in the crates, and the cargo hold was clear.

  By the time he was done with his pass and had returned to the singular crate, waiting still upon the dormant gravity sled, the two plantation workers were returning with heavy bags of Goblin Tea beans draped over their shoulders. They approached Altin, and as promised, he felt all four bags, confirming they were still quite warm from the roasting house. In a matter of minutes, all four were added to the open crate. It required a little mashing and packing, but they got them all in; then the box was shut up tightly again. He thanked them both, then nodded to the busty crewwoman operating the gravity sled, who turned it on, logged the weight, and then pushed the sled up into the ship.

  In less than a half hour, they were done with the transaction. Soon after, thanks to Altin’s teleportation spell, the Glistening Lady was drifting darkly in space midway between Mars and Earth.

  “Hah, man, I’m so glad to be out of there,” Roberto said shortly after the ship’s backup lights came on. “Thanks for coming with me for that. It got so weird last time.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Altin said. “And if you’d like, I’ll make one more sweep of the ship with the magic detection spell before you power it all back up.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Roberto said. “Might as well, since your damn teleport shut everything down anyway. You really do need to figure out a way to cast that without turning off my ship.”

  “I agree. And I have. Or at least, the TGS has, and I’ll be borrowing the idea. Orli and I would like to have our own transport platform at Calico Castle as well. It’s not as if I don’t have the time. We’re still waiting on Y
ellow Fire’s crystal bed, and, strangely, I am certain Her Majesty is avoiding me. So my time is my own. I’ve already begun gathering what I need to prepare the engasta syrup for the tiles. I will have one for you soon.”

  “Yeah, you and Orli both keep saying that,” Roberto said, but he grinned. He knew perfectly well having something of a personal teleporter was an extraordinary piece of luck, with or without a big black box. A few hours for restarts meant nothing in the greater scheme of things, especially now that there was no need to worry about some angry Hostile swooping in ready to bash in the ship like a tin can. Although, he had hopes that the Glistening Lady could take it, if it came to that.

  Altin went off to do as he’d said and check the ship for any signs of magic, augmenting in his way what the heat and surge detectors would be doing constantly once main power came back on. In the end, however, all of Roberto’s worries were unrealized. There wasn’t a jot of mana being channeled, stored, or radiated anywhere aboard. And certainly not after Altin teleported himself back home.

  Roberto stood amongst his ten crates after Altin was gone, the robust and shapely figure of Betty-Lynn at his side, her hip-mounted laser cannon now stored away and both of them completely at ease. He laughed, and the dim auxiliary lights sparkled in his eyes as he surveyed his cargo. “God damn, I’m going to be rich,” he said. “So rich. And it’s about freaking time.”

  Chapter 39

  Pernie stood atop the cliff, gazing out over the sea. The wind blew beneath a dark and overcast sky, bending the knee-high grass and whipping her hair out behind her like pale golden flames. It was three weeks past the end of winter, and still the winds blew, though the air was warm enough. It always had been. She wondered if the island ever got cold beyond the mild chill of night. She peered down to the narrow line of sand that separated the tumble of black rocks at the base of the cliff from those that jutted up from the waves, the latter appearing here and there in the frothy blue tumult and looking like volcano seeds.

  As usual, there were no sargosaganti, the elven word for the horned, manatee-like creatures of String, and she began to despair, for they were her only hope of getting home on her own. Other options had been eliminated. She had no way to get to the southernmost tip of String, where Djoveeve said the swimming blue dragons were, and there was simply nothing else that would do. The whales were all stupid; she’d found that out already. Or at least, too stupid for telepathy. The sea turtles were twice as dumb as the whales; the ichthyosaurs were both stupid and mean like the sharks. She had held out great hope for the dolphins, but they were too small to be of any use even if they had had telepathy. Even if they had, she could hardly make a journey across that open ocean on the back of a dolphin, though she had given some thought to rigging up some sort of chariot. Kettle used to read her stories of the great kings of Kurr and the chariots they’d driven into war, and old Nipper had even carved her one to play with when she was only three.

  But, she had no chariot, and no skill for making watercraft. She knew it perfectly well. So she’d given up on all of it, all but the manatees. But the trouble with the manatees was that the timid creatures were hardly ever here. She’d only seen them four times since first coming to this place, and in those four times only twice had she been able to get to the beach before they were gone, and on only one of those occasions had she made it far enough to even get her feet wet.

  She was just about to turn back, however, when fortune seemed to throw a favor her way. A movement upon a rock some hundred spans beyond the beach caught her eye, and she froze and stared with hawkish intensity. She could just see it, a tiny lump that seemed a bit too round along the top ridge of the rock. She watched it, placed the curve of it, and set it in comparison to the cuts and sharp protrusions of the dark rock face on either side. She watched for movement in the gaps between every crag and outcrop, anything dark shifting like the least shadow between fork tines.

  Sure enough, it moved.

  She muttered the words that would turn her invisible. With the wind stirring the dark clouds above her and the grass all around, her invisibility would work just fine. She cast the silent parts now too, put them into the magic naturally every time—Seawind’s spear butt thudding into her skull had set that lesson permanently. If he could hear her heartbeat, so perhaps could the sargosaganti.

  She remained motionless, even though she’d vanished magically, a long habit now with her time on String, and she watched. For the longest stretch of time nothing happened beyond the barest motion of that round shape, but eventually, the creature seemed satisfied that all was safe. It rose out of the sea, letting the rise of an incoming wave push it right up to the highest part of the rock, the surface of which it covered like a great fat sausage, if sausages grew to near the size of mammoths or the woolly rhinos that lived on the western steppes of the Daggerspines.

  It lay atop the rocks and spread out wide, grunting and shimmering with wetness as it seemed to ooze over the rock, eagerly extracting what remnant heat it could from the surface. It was a female, Pernie recognized, for it had small horns, barely a span in length. After some thrashing and worming about, it finally settled and lay still.

  Dark spots appeared in the water around it then, movements shadowy and graceful beneath the foamy lace of broken waves. And then, one by one, more of the great horned manatees swam up out of the water and flopped themselves upon the rocks, each taking its own rock in turn. In the beginning it was only the females, and soon all the rocks were covered with blotchy black-and-green sausages, lying this way and that like someone had carelessly knocked over a tray of fat links at some seaside buffet. Pernie might have giggled at this idea, or even longed for real food, which she so often did, but she was too focused on the task.

  Finally, as they had before, the males came in last. There were only three of them. Two young ones, and the patriarch, a great vast thing with a pair of horns nearly three spans long, each as thick as apple barrels where they came out of its head. It oozed and flopped itself up onto the beach looking as if it were the mutant offspring of a great green pig and a long black whale. It stretched and wriggled like a fat worm until it was halfway up the beach, where it blew out a blast of air from its fuzzy muzzle, sending clouds of sand and gravel flying up the beach to land in a patter upon the rocks and even the base of the cliff.

  That was the one Pernie wanted. The big one. She could pitch a tent on its fat back if she wanted to, and camp all the way across the ocean until she was home. She’d even have room to dance about and play. She could practice the death dances she’d learned over the course of eleven months, the flips and spins and vaults that the elves had taught her, maneuvers that had at one time seemed impossible, but that she could now do with some degree of competence. She could stay deadly and strong during her voyage, which would be important when she did finally get home. That big sargosagantis was her way home. She had no need of fighting the orc to prove anything. She’d fought orcs before—though she still shuddered when she thought about it, about their long teeth and wicked roars, their muscles moving beneath their thick green flesh, hands powerful enough to crush her small head. They were abominations in the shape of men. She knew they could be killed, but the thought of facing one again made the pit of her stomach fill with ash. She spoke bravely enough of it when Seawind was around, but as the days drew nearer to that combat, anxiety began to take its toll. Which was why she had to finish what she’d started long ago. She had to tame something to ride away from here. And that sargosagantis was going to be it.

  She gave it time to settle, watching its eyelids droop farther and farther down the round black domes of its eyes. Soon the shimmering round bubbles were draped in spotty black-and-green flesh, with pale eyelashes curving upward along the lowest edge like the warped teeth of a comb.

  Her plan was simple: she would jump down to the beach as she so often did here for fun, teleport as close to it as she could before she hit the ground—she gauged she could get within twenty steps o
r so—and then run right up its back. She would keep the words of her next teleport ready on her lips as she ran, and try to watch the mana as best as she could like Djoveeve and Seawind were trying to teach her to do—though it hardly worked at all like they said, at least not so easily. The creature would, just as she would, just as the elves would, try to blink away with its own animal teleport, but Pernie knew how far it could go. Not far. Barely enough to jump out of danger from predators, just enough to get free of their gnashing teeth. It was a defense she could appreciate, but also one she could do herself if she needed to, though she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Her plan relied on her belief that it wouldn’t jump until all the others were away. She’d seen that on her last two attempts to approach one. So she had a plan for after that. The real danger would be the horns.

  Once she got on its back, she’d jam her spear into its thick, blubbery hide and hold on for the ride, trying to find its mind in the same way she’d tried with all the other creatures so far, the way she had found Knot’s. She’d do it while watching in the mana, trying to beat it to its next teleporting cast. She’d stick it hard enough with her embedded spear to stop it before it could blink away. Timing would be everything, but pain was a very effective tool for training animals. It had worked well enough on Knott, if not for anything else. But she thought there was a chance she wouldn’t need it. The sargosagantis might be smart enough to communicate with directly, just like Master Altin’s dragon, Taot, was. It was hard to predict, though. She’d had such hope for the dolphins, and they had no magic at all. She’d tried other creatures, several just to see if she could carry it off. Her attempt to communicate with the creatures she’d come to call spider-apes had nearly got her killed, and trying to communicate with a stump-winged latakasokis was pointless. She supposed toadstools had larger brains than those dumb dragon cousins had. There had been many others throughout the months with equally unremarkable results, making Knot legitimately the only success she’d had. Nothing else had mind and magic in the right combination to be of any use, and those that had either hadn’t the sense to respond or didn’t notice that she was there. Or else she simply didn’t know how to get them to. Either way, this was her last hope. The sargosaganti were friendly with one another, protective, and seemed to communicate. And they definitely had magic. So this was her lone remaining option. And she was ready for it.