Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 35

  “This won’t do anything to it,” the professor said. “We’ve been taking readings off these things since we got here.”

  “They weren’t infused with tissue-thin mana before,” Altin said. “I have no idea how your device works, but I should think if my channeling mana makes your equipment do strange things, then it is likely your equipment might make my channeled mana do strange things too, especially in a procedure as delicate as this. Given what’s at stake here, I think patience is called for.”

  “He’s right,” Orli said. “Put it away, Professor. Please. You’ve done amazing work here. The team has. But it’s time to let the stuff we don’t understand run its course.”

  The professor looked like he wanted to protest, but then the lines that were forming upon his brow suddenly reversed themselves. “You’ve probably got a point,” he said. “But we’re sure going to lose a lot of data about what’s happening, especially if it works.”

  “As a man of science, you of all people know how observation can alter things,” Orli said.

  “I do,” he said. “Which means there’s nothing left to do but have a drink and celebrate what I’m sure will be our incredible scientific victory.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rabin as he came to stand next to Professor Bryant and Doctor Singh. He stared like the rest of them down at the work that Altin had just done. It didn’t look any different than it had before. “What we did is cool and all, but it seems like maybe we should pray.”

  “Pray?” Altin asked. He could see the deep and gentle way that the young man was gazing down at Yellow Fire’s heart.

  “Yes,” the grad student replied. “We should ask God to help Yellow Fire find his way back. Maybe even ask Him to forgive Red Fire for what he had done, for his sins, you know? We could ask for Yellow Fire’s sins too. I mean, we don’t really know who he was before. Not that it matters. We should ask for all of us really, for what we might be doing now, meddling.” He paused, and looked around, watching them all stare at him as he somewhat lost track of what he was trying to say. He resigned himself to concluding, simply, “It can’t hurt. A little humility is all. And what can it hurt to ask?”

  “Nothing,” said Doctor Singh.

  When they began, even Altin bowed his head.

  Chapter 42

  Social stratification is a constant in the nature of human societies, and it is in the seams between those divisions that the criminally inclined find leverage. Location and patience are all that is required, and a carefully placed strategy can break apart any structure with a very small amount of effort. When water freezes in the tiny cracks of a castle, it can, with time, crumble the mighty thing. Black Sander knew it would be the case as much on Earth as it was on Prosperion.

  For the first three days on Earth, Black Sander and his men had struggled to stay out of sight, doing so the old-fashioned way, as it were, by ducking behind shadowy things and creeping along at night. He could not admit to his men that he was lost, but he was, and it took them some time to find their way out of the freight yard into which they’d been deposited as part of the Glistening Lady’s cargo. And that might have been acceptable to Black Sander alone, but it had then taken a considerable amount of additional time to locate the less well-manicured parts of town, the parts of town where people could go missing and nobody would care—or at least, where anyone who did care had enough issues with the authorities to keep their mouths shut anyway.

  Black Sander and his associates had had to snatch a few people off the streets for a time, and had to knock a few heads together for a while, but eventually they were able to sift through enough wanderers, transients, and prostitutes to find a few with enough wits remaining to be of use. It didn’t take them long after to learn that they needed what the Earth people called a “grid pass” or a “net ID.” In addition, to make any of it matter, they also needed an account in which to put and store NTA credits.

  Black Sander’s man Twane continued to grapple with the idea of how, on Earth, nothing actually served as money. “But how can we buy stuff if’n we ain’t got no coppers, silvers, or gold?” he’d asked.

  “They don’t use that here. There are no coins. It’s all done by the machines.”

  “What is?” Twane had asked, scratching his head. Black Sander would have ignored him, but the others were watching too. They had to be confident Black Sander was up to the task of being on an alien world.

  “The currency. It’s all in the machine. The net. The damned grid. It’s not that difficult to see.”

  “But that’s just it,” Twane argued. “There’s nothing to see. You give them a card and they give it right back when you buy something. Sometimes they just shine a light in your eye. I seen people buying things like that, just a light. Or even a fingertip. Where’s the money, then?”

  “There is no money. It’s all made up,” he said. “It’s all one big tally kept track of in the machine.”

  “So there ain’t no gold nowhere in the whole world?”

  “Good gods, man, of course there’s gold. They just don’t pass it around. You’re in an alien culture. You need to relax and accept things how they are. You’ll start to make sense of it in time.” Twane never could quite get that down. But Belor had, and Black Sander, of course. None of the others cared. As long as Black Sander had it down, they were content to follow along. Their ignorance did make them loyal, though. They knew they were in it very tight.

  With the help of a trembling young man who they found on the third night, they found a proprietor who sold generic citizen numbers and access to net accounts, which they paid for with lumps of gold that they’d made by melting down gold crowns from Kurr. Soon they had clothes, credits, and a small Earth device known as a “tablet” with which they could access the grid, though Black Sander was still frequently frustrated in his efforts to master it.

  And it was around this tablet that he, Belor, Twane, and the teleporter sat, their faces lit up and blue in its light as if it were the Earth equivalent of a campfire. He was flipping through slide after slide of satellite images, each depicting various coastal cities of nations within the NTA. They’d been at it for several hours now.

  Black Sander, frustrated, sent another telepathic thought to Prosperion, to the addled mind of the marchioness’ seer, Kalafrand. “I need to see it again,” he conveyed. “Think it back one more time.”

  “I’ve sent it a hundred times,” Kalafrand sent back. “Can’t you hold it in your head?”

  “I’m not a Z-class seer, idiot. Just do what you’re told.”

  “I’ll tell My Lady if you keep being mean to me.”

  Black Sander had no worries about incurring any wrath from the marchioness on Kalafrand’s behalf, not now, not on Earth. That was what she’d been desperately waiting for. But he let the man think the threat had won him some small victory. “I apologize. Please just think it back to me.”

  With a sense of smug satisfaction unfiltered from the thoughts, Kalafrand once more conveyed the images of the city from which the missing Annison had been trying to contact them for some time. According to Kalafrand, Annison tried to reach him every day. He did reach him, apparently, but every time the seer opened his mind to the telepathic nudge, Annison said nothing. In fact, rather than saying anything, he simply kept trying to open contact and nothing more. It was as if he had no idea he’d gotten through. It was an odd situation, one that was so odd and unaccountable that Black Sander suspected it might have more to do with Kalafrand’s oddness than any quirk of telepathy across all that space.

  On the positive side, however, the Z-class seer was able to track Annison’s telepathic footprints back, so to speak, and as before, he found where the magician lay, strapped to a barber’s chair with his head half hacked away. Apparently someone had opened up his head and pulled apart his brain. Kalafrand had conveyed images of it to Black Sander shortly after the discovery, images of Annison lying there with his skull but a bowl of bone and parts of his brain floating i
n liquid-filled trays. He’d also sent Black Sander other images, memories gotten when he pushed his magical sight around the complex in which Annison was held. He saw that, and eventually, he’d pulled his vision up as high as a gryphon flies, up through the rooftops and high enough that he could see the city all around. That was the city Black Sander was looking for.

  Though some of the buildings were tall and angular and looked to be made from mirrors and nothing more, most of the city was a collection of lightly colored structures that climbed up the hillside and looked down upon a bay. Black Sander found it oddly comforting to see another bay city like that, different from the crime hub of Kurr, but in a way, sister cities across the stars, connected by him. Or at least they would be once he found the damned thing.

  The trouble was, there were many bays on this planet, and too many cities, and they needed to find one that matched the images in Kalafrand’s mind. They needed to get the name. They were looking for one that had a series of strange towers jutting up from the water near the mouth of the bay, ragged and rusting. They’d been looking for it for three days already when he’d started up again today. Now nearly four days in, he was growing frustrated and losing patience.

  But still he looked, and it was nearing midnight on that same fourth day on Earth that Black Sander pushed one image aside in exchange for another in his tablet, and there it was: the city, its rusting red towers reaching skyward from the water and its hillside covered with plain, squat homes. “There!” he announced, pointing at the screen. “Finally!”

  He saved the image and immediately tapped up the corresponding data. “It’s called ‘San Francisco,’” he read aloud. “In an area known as California in the northern part of a country called ‘Mexico.’ It says here that its trade status is ‘friendly,’ but it’s not a ‘subordinate state’ of the NTA.”

  “Whatever that means,” Belor commented as Black Sander fell silent for a time, scanning through information about primary local resources, trade, population numbers, and the like. Eventually he found the feature their captive junkie had shown them that would allow the table to make a comparative map for them. When he called it up, he could see that they were on the wrong side of the continent—though he did count himself lucky that they were at least on the continent. Some luck was better than none.

  He stood and walked the tablet to where the junkie lay on a sagging mattress on the other side of their dark and filthy motel room. “Hey,” he said, prodding the junkie with his foot. “Wake up.”

  The youth, whose name he hadn’t bothered to ask, looked up through eyes so red they could have been hot coals. He slurred something in response, and the movement of his tongue pushed a rivulet of saliva out of his mouth and down the side of his face.

  “By the gods, how long does that confounded stuff addle them so?” Black Sander asked. “He’s useless to us like this. I told you we shouldn’t have given him what he asked for.”

  “It seemed like a good strategy at the time,” Belor replied, it having been his idea that they keep the man, since he’d seemed so willing to do anything if they’d just supply him with the money to procure the liquid he injected into his veins. He’d promised to do anything for them for that. It had seemed a very reasonable price to pay for a willingly complicit slave, but, as it turned out, not a particularly lively one.

  “I’ll go ask the innkeeper,” Black Sander said, and with it exited the room.

  The motel manager looked up over the stub of a foul-smelling cigar when Black Sander came in, but he did not turn down the volume on the net show he was watching on the big monitor hanging on the wall nearby.

  Black Sander laid the tablet on the counter before the man, turning it around so the man could see the map of the continent deemed “North America.” He pointed to the mark on the map where San Francisco was. “There,” he said. “How do I get there from here? Where can I book passage or post to carry me?”

  The man frowned at him, glancing right back to the television show, which was now depicting a fiery crash between two vehicles, around which men were running and shooting at one another while noise that Earth people called music played loudly over it all.

  “Hey,” snapped Black Sander. “Answer me.”

  The fellow reached up and scratched at his shoulder, a big, round, hair-covered thing, with a hand that was just as hairy as the itch-afflicted joint. He moved his cigar into the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Take the eighty tube,” he said without peeling his eyes away from the battle waging around the burning wreck depicted on the screen.

  “What is ‘the eighty tube’?” Black Sander was forced to ask, holding his rising frustration in check.

  That had the man looking away from his television show. “What do you mean, what is it?”

  Black Sander wanted to grab a fistful of the curling black chest hair that crawled out of the low neckline of the man’s grimy, sleeveless shirt. He wanted to hurt him and cut the answer out of that greasy neck with a knife, but he did not. “I mean, as I told you when you asked about my accent a few nights ago, I am not from around here.”

  “Well, how far ya gotta come from to not know the eighty?”

  “Just tell me where it is, for the love of the gods, man. Where is it?” The feral nature of the Prosperion manifested itself fully in his eyes, and Black Sander didn’t even have to cast an illusionary red glint of fire in his eyes to augment the effect. A man operating a motel the likes of this one knew that look well enough, and danger was as obvious on Earth as it ever had been on Prosperion.

  “Hey, I just never seen anybody didn’t know is all. Maybe you got amnesia or something. Fried something with too much hooch. Not my problem. Eighty is upriver, on the other side of downtown. You wanna avoid people, go up the river through town till you see the tube. You can’t miss it. Follow it east until you find the station at Northwest Sixth.”

  Black Sander didn’t bother to thank the man.

  Chapter 43

  Watching them work on his brain was something of an out-of-body experience for Annison these days. He lay there in the loose wrap of his skin, which clung like wet muslin to the skeletal apparition he had become, and observed the proceedings with no emotion left. He had already tried to die several times, but it wouldn’t work, and the unfortunate efficiency of Earth medicine continued to find ways to deny him the relief of simply shutting down. So he lay there watching, numb, the molecules of fear and hope in him only rarely flickering to light these days. His captors no longer tortured him. They did still ask him each day as part of the routine to try contacting someone. And he did. He tried to contact someone, anyone—anyone he’d ever known on Prosperion—but it never worked. He did what he was told, but he’d long ago given up on getting a reply.

  The doctor they called Gaspar came to him as he watched her in the monitor, and she asked him to try making an illusion spell. They’d been very interested in that particular school of magic recently. “Go on,” she said, not gently but not with animosity either. She might have been talking to a potted plant. “Let’s see if we can’t get one of your mind tricks to work this time.”

  He didn’t resist. The electrocutions left him feeling exhausted now, yet they wouldn’t let him sleep, so it was best just to try.

  He closed his eyes and reached out for the mana. Even that familiar pink void was gone. He couldn’t see it anymore.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Keep going.”

  She always said that, and yet he never saw a thing. But, he knew how to channel it by long habit, so he did what he’d always done, moving through the spell like a blind man walking through a once visually familiar room.

  He thought it would be nice to see the Sansun River flowing by the pastures south of Northfork Manor, a place where he’d spent much happier times. He focused on the memory and set the illusion with a few muttered words, the air that passed through his lips barely shaping them, the sounds of them perhaps sapped by the desert dryness upon his tongue.

  Wit
h his eyes closed and his expectations buried in the darkness beside the corpses of hope and fear, he was mildly surprised to hear the women shouting happily. He heard them less by the rise in volume than by the presence of their glee. Nothing was gleeful here, and so it was that acidic emotion rather than the escalating pitch that had him open his eyes and see.

  Sure enough, he’d cast it. He found himself lying upon the riverbank. He could hear the water running past, even if, from where he lay, he couldn’t see that it was there. He looked up into a sunlit sky, and for a moment knew one small morsel of happiness. He pulled in a long breath, wanting to smell it all, the rich scent of the land, the wet, muddy riverbank, the faint hint of salt from the not-so-distant sea. But there was none of it. And he knew in that moment why.

  He’d never fallen for his own illusion before. He thought that was almost an interesting oddity, but he didn’t have the energy to be curious. He did, however, have enough knowledge of his own magic to recognize it for what it was, and just like that it was gone.

  “Awww,” both women moaned. “Did you get it all?” the one called Gaspar asked.

  “I did,” said the other. “Finally.”

  “Finally what?” came a voice from the window. Annison recognized it immediately.

  There followed a scraping sound, and something heavy hit the floor, followed by the breaking of glass when a rack of test tubes followed suit. And then Black Sander was before him looking down and shaking his head.

  “Don’t say no words,” said another voice Annison did not recognize, though it was thick with the accent of someone from the south of Kurr speaking in Earth English. He glanced up at the monitor and saw a large man with a handheld crossbow trained on the doctors.