Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  Altin waited until the other nurses left, a matter of several minutes, before he entered the ward. His hands were held out, open, clearly unarmed. “Doctor Singh, please don’t call the guards. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to find Orli.”

  The doctor spun on him, and for the first time in Altin’s memory, there was anger there, a deep, simmering anger, controlled but reflective of the great sense of betrayal that the gentle doctor felt. “She’s probably dead, Altin. They took her down to the planet, or at least they are trying to, and when she gets there, she is going to be tried for treason and executed, just like in the good old days.”

  “They what?”

  “Don’t you dare act surprised now, Altin. Don’t you do it.” He moved to a nearby nurse’s station and picked up a tablet. He tapped it to life with a finger, and called up a video feed from outside the ship. He spun it around to where Altin could see the chaos of activity. The explosions, the streaking laser light, the broken husks of ships and the oozing orange strands of ruptured Hostile innards. “She’s flying through that, Altin. Right now. And if she somehow happens to make it down alive, she’ll be dead in a few days at best. And it’s because of you.”

  “I know how it appears just now,” Altin said. “But I assure you, things are not as they appear. We were manipulated too.”

  Doctor Singh stepped toward him, thrusting the tablet forward at Altin, his large brown eyes glistening with the tears of impotent rage, held barely in check by the kind fibers that made him the man he was and prevented him from the violence he so desperately wanted to act out. “You said you loved her, Altin. That’s what you said. And she believed you. She trusted you. We all did. So congratulations. You win. Yours is the greatest deception of them all, and you can stop the game now. Victory is at hand, just look and revel in what you have done.”

  At first Altin wanted to defend himself again, to try to explain it, to make the doctor see. But he knew it would be pointless; he could tell by the severity of the doctor’s gaze. So instead, he went back to his original query. “So where is she? You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to believe me about the Hostiles—and I can hardly blame you for that—but you must believe I love Orli. I love her more than anything. Than everything. Tell me where she is, and I can get her out.”

  Anger swelled inside the doctor again, a pulse of it that had his lungs expanding with the breath that might have unleashed another wave of his truest sentiments, his fury, his frustration, his grief. But instead he let it go wordlessly. His head fell, his chin to his chest, resting on the white coat, now marred by the browning smears of the burned man’s blood. “I have no idea where she is. She’s in there somewhere.” He handed Altin the tablet and then went to the nurse’s station where he took a chair. He buried his face in his hands and Altin thought he might be crying, though it might just as easily have been simple weariness and frustration that left him so.

  Altin lifted the tablet and watched the battle playing out upon its glowing screen. Earth, bright and blue, dressed in the same livery as Prosperion, the wisp of clouds and the armor of hard brown and green continents. These were the colors of humanity, serving as the backdrop for what was a seething mass of motion, bright lights moving like dust motes beaten out of an old couch near a sunlit window, the frenzy and random violence of their movements making no apparent difference to the movements of the next nearby. Randomness in action. No pattern and no recourse. A dance with no choreography, only the whirling step-stepping toward death.

  Orli was in that somewhere.

  He turned to the doctor, who looked to have recovered a bit. “I’m sorry,” Altin said. “It never should have come to this.”

  Doctor Singh only shook his head.

  “I have to find her,” Altin pressed again. “Show me how.” He stepped over to where the doctor sat and presented the tablet to him. “Show me how to find her in this. With the chip in her arm, like the one I had.” He pulled up the sleeve of his robe and showed the bright pink line where his chip had been removed, a fading mark that might have been gone all together had he allowed Doctor Leopold time to finish the work.

  “I can’t, Altin,” Doctor Singh replied. He looked completely worn out, like a man who hasn’t slept perhaps ever in the course of an entire life. Dark brown circles shadowed his face beneath his eyes, so dark he looked as if he’d lost a fight a few days before. The whites of his eyes were brown around the edges, with lines of bloodshot visible. He pushed his fingers through his hair in an exhausted way and repeated it. “I just can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” Altin insisted. “I know you can. Colonel Pewter found her at Northfork Manor using that chip when we were flying in. I can use it too.” He pushed the tablet forward, practically right into Doctor Singh’s face. “Do it. Show me. You don’t have to like me. But if you care for her, then you will show me. She has a chance for a life back on Prosperion. You said she is dead if she stays here, if she goes with them. What is there to lose?”

  But still the doctor shook his head, though for a moment appearing as if he might change his mind, as if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He stared into the small screen of the tablet and watched. Watched and shook his head. “You must think I’m a fool,” he said. “And I suppose it’s true. In the end I am, aren’t I? But even I am not that much a fool.”

  Altin nearly gasped in his impatience. “Just tell me how, damn it.” He thrust the tablet against the doctor’s hand, trying to jam it into his grip, but he would not take it. “Mercy’s sake, Doctor, I’m not here to fight with you. My people aren’t your enemy. It was a gods-be-damned mistake. Blue Fire has betrayed us all. She betrayed Orli. She betrayed me. She even betrayed Her Majesty and the priests of Anvilwrath. It was her. Can’t you see? If we’d wanted to do this, we would have just done it and had it on.”

  The doctor took the tablet from him. Altin could see in his tired face that he wanted to believe, but that he’d just run out of faith. His ability to trust was gone.

  “For her. Show me. Let me save her. Let me get her out, then I will go find Blue Fire and make her stop. I’ll make her call off the attack. If she won’t, I will carry one of your weapons to her heart chamber and stop it myself.”

  That made the doctor look up.

  “I’m serious. I know how this looks, but you are wrong. And I do love Orli. Help me find her. What possible deception could I have for your people in wanting to get one woman out of here? Think about it.”

  That was true, and the doctor’s head slowly began to nod. It was possible. But then, the Prosperion mage could simply be finishing the act, just as Captain Asad had said. This could be the last thing, the last bit of information. A way to follow her, and Captain Asad, into the heart of the NTA. Perhaps even in possession of a nuclear missile. But he wanted to believe it wasn’t so. He wanted to believe that Orli might still have a chance, that they might all still have a chance, especially as he stared into that vast cloud of death revealed in the tablet’s glowing screen.

  Altin leaned forward, hoping, trying not to seem so eager that Doctor Singh changed his mind. That’s when Doctor Singh let out a short portion of a laugh, the least part of it, the part that breaks when it discovers there is no humor there.

  “Really, Altin?” He sounded disgusted. He looked up at the practically panting mage and shook his head in a sad, resigned sort of way, as if he’d just discovered some essential missing detail. “You almost had me.”

  “What?” Altin gasped. “What now?”

  Doctor Singh handed the tablet back to him, rising from his seat. He said nothing more and simply walked away.

  Altin frowned at his back and then looked down into the image on the tablet screen. At Citadel. Which had just seconds before appeared.

  Chapter 5

  “Call them off,” Altin shouted into the green clump of stones, the patch of them glowing dimly, surrounded by the yellow crystals that filled the rest of the narrow chamber that was the heart of Blue Fire. He shout
ed straight into them, his red-flushed face leaning near, for he’d gone himself, straight there in his rage. Not just thoughts, but physicality for this confrontation. “Call them back right now, or I will see that you are destroyed, just like you should have been.” He was nearly breathless with the rush of his anger as he sent every last ounce of his emotions out in the wake of his words. All the rage, the terror—both for Orli and for what amounted to just about everyone—and, most of all, the sense of gullibility and guilt. “How could you?” he roared at her. “You were the one who went on and on and on about betrayal. About truth that is not truth. And now look at you. Look what you have done. All of that was emptiness and lies.”

  She sent back the sense of absolute bewilderment. Terror of her own. Terror of him. Her incredulity at how Orli Love had become so suddenly filled with hate. Hate for Blue Fire.

  “Don’t spread that offal on my plate,” he snarled in response. He pushed images of the combat taking place in the space around planet Earth up at her through his memories. He shoved them at her as if they were mud and he was smearing it, jamming it into her loathsome, lying face. “What are you?” he shouted. “What kind of duplicitous monster could do such a thing? You used our love against us, against everyone. That is the very soul of evil!”

  He forced himself to calm. Closed his eyes, regulated his breathing.

  More calmly, he repeated his earlier threat. “I will kill you if you do not call them back. Call off the attack.”

  Not mine, she sent. It came upon a sense of otherness.

  “Just do it. No more vagaries. No excuses. Call them off, and do it now.”

  Not mine, she repeated in his thoughts.

  “What do you mean, ‘not mine?’ How stupid do you think I am?”

  Not mine. Other.

  “There are no others. You are the others. There is only you. You told us so yourself. No others. Just poor sad Blue Fire floating out here all alone with the memories of a dead star to comfort her in between bouts of genocide.”

  Not mine. Other. Truth.

  “You don’t know what truth is.”

  Love is truth. Altin Love truth of love. Orli Love hate hate of Altin Love.

  “I don’t have time for riddles anymore. They are going to kill Orli because you lied. Now call them off, or planet Earth will not be the only planet with no life on it when this is done. You have my Truth on that.”

  He filled then with a sense of her fear. Not fear of him. Not even fear of death. Simply fear. It was as if he could feel her trembling in a way that, for some reason, struck him in the same way Pernie had trembled in his arms when he’d rescued her from the orcs. It was a childlike terror, a helpless, lonely, inconsolable sense of dread in the face of something out of one’s control.

  The rational part of Altin’s mind tried to fight it off. He knew now that she could convince him that any emotion was real. That was her best weapon. Making truth out of lies. She did it in a way that made falsehood feel in a whole-bodied way to be true.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “Then I must die.”

  That startled him. It was real. Actual sound. The sound came as an approximation of a voice, barely discernible as one, but one all the same. And it was loud. Cavernously so. It was as if thunder tried to shape words through the echo of itself, a great grating coming out of a deep and enormous cave. It was so enormous it threw Altin to the ground, the vibrations coming in the form of an earthquake, a violent rumble that tossed him against the wall and jabbed him full of shallow puncture wounds, his back and arms stuck first by the tips of the many crystals jutting from the wall, and then his palms and knees when he hit the ground.

  What in nine hells?

  “Then I must die,” rumbled the mighty voice again, the words more articulate this time, as if once was enough practice for that.

  “No,” he said, scrambling to his feet, his mind awhirl. When did she learn to speak? Had she always known? More of the ruse, the lie? “You don’t need to die. No one has to die. Just call them back. I beg of you. There is no reason to kill them all.”

  “Not. Mine.” Once again Altin was thrown to the floor by the shaking. The resonance of the consonant sounds moved the ground half a span vertically. Blood dripped from Altin’s hands, and he could feel it running in several hot rivulets down his shins.

  “Then whose? Tell me that, and explain. Make me believe.” He didn’t want to hear it. He knew it would be a lie.

  “Not mine.” This time he caught himself against the wall, though his hands were minced more just the same. Her voice came from everywhere. It was terrifying, but not more so than Altin’s fear for Orli.

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Not mine.” This time it barely rumbled beneath his feet. It came once more after that, only in his mind, gently, like a thing settling back into place. Then Blue Fire fell silent.

  Altin slumped against the wall. Exhausted. He looked at his palms, which gleamed wetly in the golden light coming from the walls around him. He could see, just visible as a faint line around the edge of his ring, the green pulse of the stone embedded in the silver. The stone she had given him. Blue Fire’s gift of heart stone, a bit of herself, a bit of the father’s gift, which was the dark green stone.

  Maybe he was wrong.

  He thought about the look on Doctor Singh’s face only a few moments before. The hate and sorrow. The total lack of trust.

  Maybe he was doing it too.

  Truth. The thought came into his mind on a wave of sadness.

  “Then who?” he repeated yet again. “Is there another one? Another Blue Fire?”

  No other Blue Fire.

  “Then it has to be you.”

  Not mine.

  Altin exhaled so long and so deeply it made him see stars. Or perhaps those were on account of utter fatigue. The emotions coming off Blue Fire had been so intense, they sapped his strength just as water takes the heat out of newly forged steel. It had to be her. There was no one else. She was either lying or there was something wrong with her and she didn’t realize what she was doing. Either way, it had to stop.

  “I wish I could believe you,” he said. “I want to. But I can’t. If you can stop them, if this is some game, or some feeding mechanism for you … just stop.”

  Not mine.

  “If Orli dies, so do you. Or I will die trying to finish you. That’s a promise.”

  Orli Love live. Blue Fire die. The thought was demure. A pleading surrender. A willing sacrifice.

  Altin shook his head trying to block her from his thoughts. He needed her out of his head long enough for him to think.

  He stooped and picked up Doctor Singh’s tablet from where it had fallen when he was first knocked to the ground. He stared at his reflection in the blank space of its glassy surface. His dumb face looking haggard and helpless. He had no idea how to make it work. He had no idea how to find her. The homing lizard hadn’t come back. For all his power, he could do nothing right now. Orli was flying toward certain death, certain death that would claim her if the certain death of the flight didn’t get her first. If it hadn’t gotten her already. And there was not one thing Altin could do about it but pray. And prayer was not his way.

  Thinking was.

  With a thought, he teleported himself back to Prosperion. There was one other possibility.

  Chapter 6

  Kazuk-Hal-Mandik leaned out over the edge of the stone wall, peering down into the cavernous arena, down the face of the rock into the shadows below and around to the left. He’d seen where Drango-Kal’s killer had looked before he disappeared, before he’d vanished from the base of the mound of dead orcs. But now the teleporter was nowhere to be found, the light from the torches around the ancient shaman was too bright, spoiling his vision for the dark edges of the vast death pit below.

  He reached into a rabbit-skin pouch and pulled out a small fold of vellum. He opened it and extracted a silver ring, a thing of the humans. Small and fra
gile like they were. But smart like them too. He slipped the ring over the little finger of his left hand. It barely fit at the tip, squeezing tightly to the green flesh only midway down his yellowed fingernail. It was good enough.

  His vision shifted then, from his eyes to his hand, and in that instant it seemed as if he held his vision at the tip of his finger. This was the sight. Kazuk-Hal-Mandik had no magic sight, not by nature, not by the gift of God. But the ring gave it to him, the ring itself a gift of God, the one God who had appeared to them, the conqueror of the old gods, the God who brought them Discipline, the God that would lift them from the shadows and give them a rightful place among the races of Prosperion. Respect from Discipline. That was God’s promise.

  He pushed his vision down into the vast dark arena, slipping over the edge and sliding down the wall like a winged thing swooping for its prey. He descended and slipped into the shadows along the edge of the cavern, wending his way around boulders and stalagmites, seeking the new leader of the contest. Where had the teleporter gone?

  He ran his vision all the way down to the far end of the chamber where it began to arc around and head back on the other side. But there was no sign of the teleporting shaman with the stone. Kazuk-Hal-Mandik thought he must have missed him, Drango-Kal’s killer, crouched in the shadows somewhere. He had not seen any movement across the open center of the empty aquifer, the bloody grounds of this great contest. He lifted his vision some, gave himself a higher angle, this time two spans above the ground. He drifted slowly back along the wall, watching, listening. He had almost come back beneath Warlord’s suite where he’d started this search when he heard a sound, something faint, very small. He stopped. He stared down into the darkness, scanned every nook and crevice of the area nearby. He could see nothing. There was no one there.