Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  “What about Citadel? Did they get rid of the other big one? It’s been long enough; they could have done it by now.”

  “Yes, it’s gone.”

  “Then what is the director waiting for? Why are your warriors on standby? What could be the bluff?”

  “He’s waiting for the orb count to go down. He says when his people aren’t dying by the thousands, he’ll give the go-ahead.”

  Altin nodded. He thought that was a stingy interpretation on the director’s part of the deal he’d made with Orli, but there was nothing to be done about it for now. He sent Aderbury a quick telepathic nudge. His longtime friend and the acting captain of Citadel answered right away.

  “You’re alive,” said Aderbury. “Thank the gods. So tell me, are we sending teleporters somewhere down on Earth to get their warriors to Crown? We need to know where to go. My seers tell me the sand is running out.”

  “Not yet. The director is stalling, insisting on significant reductions in the Hostile count. But be ready for those directions when they come.” If it comes, he thought, though he kept that part to himself.

  “We’re ready. We’re making hay with these Hostiles too. Conduit’s team had an easy time of the last of the big ones, so they’re pretty confident downstairs. Give us a few more hours and that director will have his ‘significant reductions in the Hostile count.’”

  Altin looked out over the smoke filling the city. There were three more fires in the west. A few hours would be disastrous. The city would be overrun.

  Altin cut off the contact with Aderbury and turned back to Orli. “So what do we do? What do you think about all that stuff Blue Fire said, the seeds and orbs and all of it?”

  “The dandelion seeds are the orbs,” she said. “I’m thinking that either one of Red Fire’s orbs needs to find one of Blue Fire’s, or one of Red Fire’s orbs needs to find Blue Fire herself.”

  “These … beings are millions of years old. You said it yourself. How could they not have found each other by now?”

  “Space is big. And who knows, maybe there’s some kind of territorial thing with these creatures, whatever they are. It’s hardly unprecedented. Maybe the red one never came over here because Blue Fire already had a mate. Maybe out of respect, maybe out of fear. I mean, all we can do is guess.”

  Altin listened and tried to convey what Orli said as best he could to Blue Fire. He tried to construct images and send emotions that got at the heart of Orli’s ideas, throwing it all at her like a plate full of food, hoping that somehow she might catch at least one morsel in her mouth.

  She did. Truth, she sent.

  Which part? The territory part, the orbs—seeds—finding-each-other part, or the part where his seeds find you?

  All truth.

  All of it? He showered Orli with a look of pleasant surprise. So what then? If you get one of your orbs to Earth, the red ones can find it? Then you can talk to him, to Red Fire?

  Truth.

  That’s it?

  Altin looked as if he might get mad, his gaze playing out over the city, over the carnage and death, the destruction. He fought back the tide of it, and glared down at Orli instead, venting some, “All Blue Fire had to do was send an orb to Earth to start the conversation with the red one. It’s that easy.”

  Fear came to him then, first a little, then more and more, heated to a boil. The emotions weren’t his.

  Orli saw it on his face. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. Now she’s afraid.” He was clearly irritated, despite the emotions Blue Fire pushed into him.

  “Maybe that’s why she didn’t go talk to him. Maybe she’s shy.”

  “Shy?” He looked incredulous.

  “I’m only guessing,” Orli said. “But maybe that’s how her species operates.”

  “Well how many people have to die for that?” He was shouting, though he didn’t realize it until it had already come out.

  “Don’t yell at me,” she said. “Your people have some pretty strange customs when it comes to male and female relationships, Sir Altin.” She put a heavy emphasis on the title to make her point. “You waste lots of time on ‘honor’ and ‘propriety’ while life ticks by. Look around, the universe doesn’t always give us time.”

  He started to respond, but thought better of it. He knew he wasn’t angry at her anyway, just at the circumstance. Besides, she had a point. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. We have to keep it together. Both of us.”

  Orli nodded.

  Altin let go what remained of his tension and spoke in a calmer voice, filtering Blue Fire’s feelings as best he could. “Fine. But if Blue Fire is shy, now is the time for her to get beyond such things. She needs to go talk to him.” You need to go talk to him, he thought, directed toward Blue Fire.

  No nest.

  “What?”

  The hole in the desert known as the Great Sandfalls appeared before his mind’s eye. No nest. He saw a series of images after, creatures building nests and burrows, animals in caves, some of the animals unrecognizable, others recognizably Prosperion.

  You don’t need a nest. If thoughts could be spat, that would have been, exasperation propelling it. Just talk to him. We’re not asking you to marry him, just tell him to stop attacking Earth. Explain what you did at Andalia. Why it was wrong.

  Fear came again, much greater than before, so great it drained the color from his face. He could only filter so much.

  “Stop!” He thought it and shouted it aloud. “Stop.” The fear abated some. “Why are you so afraid?”

  There was a long pause, so long he thought Blue Fire had cut off the communication, pulled herself out of his mind. He actually checked beneath his ring to see if the green light still pulsed there.

  No love, she sent at last. Then fear came back. Intimidation and helplessness that somehow filled a space he knew as forever.

  He thought he knew what that meant right away, but he clarified anyway. So if your orb and his orb, he paused and shaped the thought that went with it into dandelion seeds, … if the seeds meet, are you saying you are stuck with him, even if you don’t love him? Is it like a mating ritual or something?

  Truth.

  “Oh, for the love of Mercy,” Altin moaned, completely at wit’s end now. He turned a full circle atop the stairs where they stood, his arms out helplessly and his eyes to the sky. “We are doomed.”

  “What?” Orli asked. “What did she say?”

  “If she sends an orb to Earth, somehow that’s like a marriage proposal. Or the actual wedding. Something like that. All I know is she’s afraid and doesn’t want to send one of her orbs over there. Apparently they can’t just ‘talk.’ And she doesn’t love the new fellow, so she doesn’t want to go.”

  “Well, what about the other option?” Orli said. “About Red Fire’s orb finding Blue Fire’s world. What did she say about that? Is that any better? Maybe the orbs are like gametes, and if they meet, well, you know how it works. We know she thinks of them as her eggs.”

  “I have no idea what a gamete is, but I think I know what you are saying anyway. I’m not sure, however, why bringing one of the red orbs to Blue Fire would be any better than simply having two orbs meet.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t have to offer one of her own that way. Maybe he has to do something to impress her first. Some sort of intergalactic first date. If he isn’t a gentleman, then she doesn’t have to release an egg to him.” Orli wrinkled up her face in a way that acknowledged the speculative nature of what she’d said, but it was in keeping with much of what’d she’d read of other species in the world, at least her own.

  Altin let go a long impatient gasp, but he sent the gist of that along to Blue Fire. “So, is that it?” he asked, speaking the thoughts aloud now as well so that Orli might follow along. He sent that and tried to picture Orli in a room alone, but with Blue Fire’s world hovering near her in the air. He imagined Thadius walking in, and conveyed a sense of hate. Thadius went away. “If he co
mes to you, then you can decide if you like him or not?”

  Truth.

  Trying to preempt unexpected complications down the road, Altin added, “And what happens if you don’t like him? Or he doesn’t like you?”

  Blue Fire sent emptiness, not loneliness, just absence or vacancy.

  He frowned, but translated for Orli as best he could. “I don’t think she knows what happens. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. Maybe that’s the territory thing.”

  “Ask her if she wants another mate.” Orli said.

  “By the gods, she doesn’t need to mate with it. She just needs to get it to stop killing everyone.”

  Orli put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Just ask her.”

  He did. Blue Fire clearly did not want another mate. She sent waves of love back at Altin, carried on images of the blue sun that had once warmed her long-dead beloved.

  Altin would have laughed if it all wasn’t so cosmically ridiculous. “She says ‘no.’ She’s still in love with the dead planet.”

  “Altin!” Orli snapped, her mouth and her eyes flung wide. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He recoiled from the shocked expression on her face, and his hands went out helplessly to his sides. “What? This is absurd. And it’s taking a lot of time. And we’re not getting anywhere.”

  “What’s absurd is that somehow you ended up being the one who can speak to her easily while I cannot. My God. How insensitive can you possibly be?”

  “If you want to try, go ahead,” he said. He tugged off the huge silver ring and handed it to her.

  Orli grimaced as she watched the light pulsing inside the curve of the ring, glaring at it as if it might burn her on contact. She well remembered what had happened to her when she’d touched the yellow Liquefying Stone that day long ago, the day she’d met Blue Fire and the day both she and Altin had nearly died. That stone had been far less potent than the green one in Altin’s ring. Altin had made it more than clear that this thing, this secreted part of Blue Fire’s very innermost self, was something more dangerous than the yellow stone alone. But she reached out and took it anyway. “Do you think it will work?”

  “I doubt it, but I’m sure in the nine hells not getting anywhere on my own. She did find you when you were holding the Liquefying Stone, so who knows. You were a lot closer to her then, and sleeping, but it’s worth a try.”

  Orli slid the ring over her thumb reluctantly. She cringed, waiting for the mental onslaught of Blue Fire’s inner voice. It did not come. They spent several more minutes waiting, but to no avail. Orli handed the ring back to him and shook her head. “Guess not.”

  “Of course not.” Both of them were frustrated. Frustrated and tired.

  Blue Fire’s fear came washing into him when he put the ring back on. It was fear and love and remorse. Orli Love not leave Blue Fire. Hate alone. His mind swelled with the immense loneliness that resided eternally in her, loneliness the size of a galaxy. But there was more to it, something penitent. He realized it was an apology.

  What? He sent back, confused by the rush of such anxiety. What do you mean?

  Orli Love not leave. She had no word for “please” but it was clear that she was pleading with him.

  It took him a moment to sort through the torrent of anxiousness and fear, the sense of abandonment, but finally he made it out. She thought he’d left her, cut her loose forever when he took off the ring.

  No, he thought back to her then. I’m here. He did not speak it, thinking it just to her. He showed her in his memory what he tried to do, how he’d tried to help Orli talk to her with the ring. He tried to explain. He could sense she mostly understood, but she was still shaken by the experience. And so quickly too.

  Blue Fire talk Red Fire, she sent then. It came on a wave of complicity, servile, though definitely afraid and filled with echoes of loneliness. He saw then an image of himself walking across the pond where the dandelions blew. In his arms was a red-hued orb. He carried it across the pond and placed it in the water where it floated next to the round globe of Blue Fire’s world. It was obvious what Altin had to do. Blue Fire speak Red Fire. Orli Love not leave.

  “Orli Love not leave anyway,” he said to that last fearful thought, trying to comfort her. But, though he didn’t say what came next, the thought rose unbidden in his mind. Altin Love will be dead soon, but he won’t leave you until then.

  And with that, she conceded to meet Red Fire and speak on their behalf. Altin would have been relieved by that, but he couldn’t shut off the fear that came from her after giving in. He tried to calm her, thought soothing thoughts at her, promised to keep her safe any way he could, but all to no avail. Blue Fire was simply terrified, a great colossal fear that seeped into him across all that space and despite his best efforts to filter it.

  “Well?” Orli asked, once again lost given the absence of many spoken words during the last exchange.

  Altin’s hands still trembled from the ferocity of Blue Fire’s anxiety, and his voice shook as he replied. “She says she’ll do it. But I have to bring a red Hostile to her.”

  “You what?”

  “You were right, or at least I think you were right, about it being better if the red orb finds her planet before it finds one of her orbs … her eggs. So she basically asked me to go get one of Red Fire’s ‘seeds’ and bring it to her. After that, I guess we’ll just have to find out.”

  “Do you think it will work? Do you think she can get Red Fire to stop the attack on Earth?”

  “I hope so. If she can’t, then we just wasted ten minutes that we should have spent trying to get to him ourselves.”

  “She’ll convince him,” Orli said, finding confidence. “She understands the gravity of what she did on Andalia. They aren’t evil creatures, you know. Look how sensitive she is. It’s going to work.”

  “We’re about to find out.” He looked grim as he said it, but the expression was more a product of his continuing efforts to at least mute some of the throbbing terror Blue Fire was pumping into his head. He forced a grin. “Let’s go catch a Hostile.”

  Orli nodded, her expression as bleak as his. She really didn’t want Blue Fire to get hurt.

  Chapter 38

  Calico Castle’s tall central tower appeared above planet Earth, another chunk of lifeless debris to the sensors of the Earth ships, which was fortunate for Altin and Orli. Despite the director’s suggestion that there wasn’t a significant reduction in the number of Hostiles around Earth, to the eyes of the tower’s occupants, the swarm seemed noticeably diminished. It was still a swarm, and in large patches above the continents there still hung hazy gray clouds that could only be Red Fire’s orbs.

  “He’s such a liar,” Orli snarled. “There are obviously less of them.”

  “He’s a politician,” Altin said. “That is what they do. Now help me find a little one so we can get this underway.”

  “Can you get us closer?” she asked, knowing that he could. “I can’t see well enough from here.”

  A moment after, and they were closer. “How’s that?”

  Startled by the suddenness of it, the instantaneous expansion of the planet beyond the window, she nodded. “Better.”

  They leaned through the window together, shoulders touching, each of them scouring the frenzy of Hostile orbs, tens of thousands of them still shooting and darting through space. Some had ships chasing them, missiles streaking in between the weaving movements of their flight and lasers striping the space with crisp bright lines. Others dive-bombed fleet squadrons, sending their pulverizing shafts of stone hurtling down at the ships in hopes of bashing them open as easily as if they were simply ceramic things.

  Despite the overwhelming numbers, however, several of the massive Juggernauts remained, and the smaller starships coupled with the little groups of low-orbit fighters managed to continue to fight effectively among them, the network of all those computers synchronizing gravity pulses and popping open Hostiles like so many lanced
boils. It couldn’t be said that the battle was under control, but a case could be made for the fleet holding its own. For the most part. Explosions now and again marked where practice and light-speed computations still weren’t good enough.

  “There,” said Altin pointing. “That one, chasing that gray ship.”

  She saw the orb he was referring to and nodded. “Yes, that’s small for a Hostile. Get it quick before it catches them.”

  Here it comes, he conveyed to Blue Fire in his thoughts.

  With that, he plunged his mind into the mana, the serenity of its new consistency, a purplish vapor that filled everything thanks to his ring, like a fog with no wetness, no temperature. It was simply everywhere, waiting for him. He shaped the link across the space between himself and the Hostile chasing the ship, a thought only, no words, no gestures, and as easily as that, he had it. He thought then of the space around Blue Fire, the place where once the fleet ships had been, where they’d rained down their mighty missiles at her, where they’d unlocked the power in the tiniest of things, unspeakable power stored in the smallest bits of less than a molecule. It was there that he sent the little Hostile, in an instant, fast as the flick of a hummingbird’s wing.

  “Do you see it?” he asked Blue Fire, sending his thoughts after the Hostile across that space and once again speaking them for Orli’s benefit as well. “Is it there?”

  He saw in his mind that it had arrived, like watching it through a seeing spell, but the image put there by Blue Fire. Her entire being seemed to tremble around it, her thoughts quaking like the ground beneath an army’s marching feet.

  “Does she see it?” Orli asked.

  He nodded. “Let’s go in case she needs our help.” Almost as soon as he’d said it, the tower appeared above Blue Fire’s enormous world. The blue disc of Earth vanished and the brown mass of Blue Fire’s filled the view, a nearly waterless planet capped at the poles by huge oceans upon which seemed to float the tiny continents where life went on, where plants and animals were blissfully unaware of the cosmic events unfolding just about everywhere else but there—happily ignorant like Altin had been but a scant two years ago.