Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read online

  “Oh shit,” she said, as the second one popped. Then the third. Then the last. The air hissed out of it. So it had still been pressurized. That was interesting. She heard the helmet bounce across the tabletop and then heard it no more.

  The creature mashed her down on the flat glass, rolled her onto her back. Lying that way was beyond uncomfortable because her back bent over the bottom edge of the suit’s bulky dorsal unit. The light behind her glared.

  The contraption with the cylindrical prongs began lowering toward her. It rotated with a whirring and clicking sound, and a larger bulb was brought to bear on her. She knew it was examining her somehow. She hoped it wasn’t gamma radiation or something worse to barbecue her guts. She didn’t feel anything. It moved closer. More whirring. Then the first prong, with the smaller black glass dome, rotated back. It lowered all the way down to within an inch of her face.

  “Fuck you,” she snarled. She spat on the glass. The black semisphere remained there for a while. She saw the creature’s color shift to various patterns, most of them the color of peach flesh, with the faintest hint of red. She could hear the bulk of the machine whirring above her.

  She rolled her head around trying to get a better look at it. She wondered if another alien had come along. They moved so silently. None had. But the one that was here pushed another tentacle into the space beneath the lens—she was confident that’s what the black glass was—and held her head in place.

  “I hope I give you some terrible disease, asshole,” she said.

  The alien colored some. She could see it in the tentacle around her. Redder, a slight shift toward the color of a fine Prosperion wine. It gripped her a little tighter.

  Had it understood her threat?

  “That’s right, you heard me. I’m going to infect you with some little pathogen your people have never heard of. Some virus I got from Earth or Prosperion. Maybe something from the Hostiles. You’re going to rot in horrible agony.”

  No response came that time.

  Of course it was stupid to think it had understood.

  The lens whirred and moved down her body some, stopping just below her waist. It made more whirring sounds, and it pulled away almost a foot. Another lens rotated into place, this one rather brownish glass, and it moved within inches of her pelvis. Clicks and whirring sounded again. She hoped they weren’t irradiating her ovaries. She still planned on making babies with Altin, God damn it. If the universe would stop screwing with them.

  She thrashed and tried to break loose. The tentacle grew redder still. She wanted to believe that meant she was hurting it, but she knew she was not.

  The machine made more sounds and moved back up, once again right over her head. It clicked and rumbled for a time. Then the first lens, the smaller of the black ones, rotated back into place. It drew so close it just touched her skin, right between the eyes. It moved down her face, mashing the tip of her nose as it passed. It went sideways, first left, then right. It pulled back a few feet, and the tentacle flipped her over and slapped her back down, face-first. This time far less gently than it had at first.

  She could hear the machine whirring and clicking again. It touched her hair, twice, which sent shivers down her spine both times.

  There followed a longer period of whirring sounds, growing dimmer with distance. She turned her head to look. She could see the alien full on. It wasn’t red anymore. It was fading from a pale blue back to the mucous gray.

  Something felt like it was crawling all over her suit. Like a thousand fingers prodding and squeezing her. There was a lot of thumping and clicking. Something tore loose back there. The pressure around her body lessened for a moment, followed by an upward, sequential squeezing. The dorsal unit of her spacesuit thumped onto the table, all the jet packs, main computers, and, worse, her oxygen. Another tentacle snaked down, grabbed it, hauled it up near the alien’s eye. It looked at it, turned it over a few times. Then it hurled it out over the side of the machine. It flew out, caught briefly in the wind, then plunged out of view.

  The coils were twitching and groping all around her again. All the little finger-sensations crawling all over her. She was rolled onto her side. Some of the tentacles at her chest and abdomen rose away. She could see the little discs along the bottom of the tentacle working dexterously, opening up her suit, spreading the front access wide. Another tentacle snaked inside of it and wrapped around her waist. Its flesh was astonishingly hot. And wet. The discs were hard like plastic, with burrs that poked her skin. The first tentacle, the one that had coiled around her, spread the spacesuit apart so wide it ripped at the crotch, while the new tentacle pulled her out of it like a banana out of a split down the center of its peel. The tentacle that had been holding her head actually shoved her head under the helmet ring to get her out.

  The tentacle holding her spacesuit whipped back, jerked forward, and threw the suit over the edge of the machine with the motion of a fly fisherman. The wind caught it, puffing it up as if it were a small, blocky version of one of the alien billows. It rose up into the airstream, spinning lazily higher for a moment as the wind blew it away, way out over the grate, where it began fluttering down. The alien manhandling her lifted her high enough as it flopped her over that she actually got to see her spacesuit fall down through a gap in the grate. Lost. Just like the backpack and helmet were. Like Altin’s helmet was. Like Altin was.

  She looked down as she was being rolled over and noticed the amethyst fast-cast amulet dangling from her neck. It bounced against her sternum and swung out again. She caught it and pressed it against her steam-soaked flesh. She couldn’t decide if she should let it go—so they didn’t realize she valued it—or keep holding on. She could rip it off and hide it in her bra. But if they took that from her, it would definitely be gone. She thought about using it now. She should go back to Prosperion. Get help. What could she possibly do for Altin here, at this point, this circumstance, all alone on a massive alien ship in her goddamn underwear?

  What would he want her to do?

  She knew immediately what that would be. He’d want her out of here. Right now.

  But she wasn’t going to leave him.

  But … she had to. She had to get help. Tytamon and her dad. These damn aliens were three hundred yards long. That was just one of them.

  God. What to do? What to do?

  The alien slammed her down on the examining table again. Her arms and legs were free this time. She kicked at it. She bit the tentacle. She might as well have tried biting through the insulation on a plasma coil.

  She didn’t want to leave him.

  He’d trusted her alone before. Down below this very spot. Down in the bowels of this planet when it was still Red Fire. He’d believed in her being on her own. He’d had no choice. He’d promised her.

  But she’d promised … they’d promised to die together before they’d ever separate again. She couldn’t just go.

  But they were already separated.

  She could find him, though. Maybe. God, no, she couldn’t. How in the hell could she find him on this ship? Not now. Not without the Higgs prism. She couldn’t even get off this goddamn grate.

  The alien was moving three more tentacles her way.

  Shit.

  She fingered the amulet in her hand.

  She had to do it. It was the only way.

  Two tentacles began snaking around her legs, one at each ankle, winding up nearly all the way to her knees. A third was moving straight for her hand.

  She yanked the fast-cast amulet off her neck, snapping it at the clasp. “I’m coming back, Altin. I swear I am. I love you.” She slammed the amethyst on the tabletop. It shattered like glass.

  Nothing happened.

  She was still lying there. She lifted the broken amulet up and stared at it. “No!”

  The third tentacle wrapped around her free hand, all the way to the elbow. The one that had been holding her around the waist withdrew and bound up her other arm. Another one came down and reach
ed out over her, out over the edge of the machine and down toward the grate. It anchored itself there.

  She saw another branch off and slither up above, out to the side. The alien was tethered in place by five of them now. Two above, two below, and one out to the side. Orli could only watch, increasingly terrified. Nothing was working anymore. There was nothing she could do.

  The creature hoisted its bulk up until the lowest portion of its long body was above the edge of the examining machine. It angled itself at her, directing the length of its body at her as if it were a rifle. She could see a small iris-like valve at the very end of it, like a sphincter. It began to pucker, and the flesh around it appeared to bloat. The color there changed to a dusky green.

  “Wow,” she snarled. “What are you going to do, shit on me?”

  She braced for something terrible, cringing and only barely willing to look. Whatever was about to come out of that thing was probably going to hurt.

  She waited for quite some time. So long that she grew tired of cringing. What the hell was it waiting for?

  She waited some more. At least a full minute. Maybe two. Maybe ten. She wanted to punch that thing right in its puckering anus. Or whatever that orifice was. And then something snapped beside her. Something big and loud, a tremendous crackle in the air. Something right beside her head. That’s when the orifice spat.

  Chapter 13

  “That’s correct, Miss Grayborn,” Mrs. Beckman said while staring at the board where Pernie’s drawing of an electrical circuit glowed. “And do you know why that is?”

  “Because it’s got extra lectrons,” Pernie replied. “And negative wants to run to positive.”

  “Correct again. You’ve got a gift for physics, Miss Grayborn. You’ll want to pronounce the E on the front of the word electrons, but I have to tell you, your English is coming along splendidly as well.”

  It ought to be, Pernie thought. That was practically all Sophia Hayworth ever did with her. They did English all afternoon when Pernie got out of school. She’d be waiting for Pernie there at the bus stop. They’d walk home, and then Pernie would keep learning again. She actually learned more from Sophia Hayworth than she did from school. At least some things. Jeremy was teaching her about robotics. He had a robotic arm that he was building just like a human one, and it actually worked. Or mostly it did. He said that the school wouldn’t let him have the parts he needed because they cost more than his grandfather Gabby could afford. But he didn’t mind. He told her he had an uncle named Crook, who was going to get him a synthetic frame kit. He told her he was going to build his own android and grow human skin for it. He told her that a well-made android could sell for three hundred thousand credits, which was enough to buy a townhouse by the park.

  Pernie didn’t know too much about townhouses or parks, but she’d learned enough about his android to think she might want one someday. He said they did all your cleaning and chores for you, and would even protect your house from burglars if they came in. The good ones looked just like people, but he said that was the hard part. “Most of them don’t move right. Sitting still, you can hardly tell the difference,” he said. “But once they start talking, they just never look the way a person does.”

  “Why not?” she’d asked.

  “I think it’s the wiring or something,” he said. “Even the NTA guys can’t do it, and they got the big bio-printers that just run androids right off. Theirs look perfect lying there, but there’s something about them too. I’ve seen them on the net. There’s a show called Synthlink that I love to watch. They show all the new ones. Someday I’m going to have an invention on there.”

  Pernie didn’t know too much about all of that, but she did know she’d rather be in the science lab messing with Jeremy’s robot arm than in here parroting lessons back to Mrs. Beckman. The class spent way too much time on stuff she didn’t care about. She didn’t care about Earth history, that was sure. Although some of the net videos from World War III were pretty fun. Especially the part where the United States almost fell apart, but then they killed everyone in some other country across an ocean, and then another country that was their ally did the same to a fourth country, and then everyone got scared that everyone in the whole world was going to die. She found out she was in the country called the United States, which was the country that won the war along with its allies. Although some of it did fall apart, but she couldn’t remember which ones—which states—left. Even though they won, they didn’t want to be part of the United States anymore. And someone else took some parts away, another country. Or they took some back. Axico was the name. Or something like that. Or Axis. Or maybe both. But that was the part of history that was boring, so she had trouble remembering it all. But she did like the big guns and explosives and especially the antigravity fighter planes. They were sleek and fast, with blue fire blowing out of them, and a fun shimmer underneath to keep them from falling out of the sky. The people who got to fly in them were powerful warriors who could kill as many people as they wanted to.

  Jeremy told her that if they wanted to, those pilots could drop one bomb big enough to kill a whole city. He said twenty of them could blow up the whole world and kill everyone.

  Pernie thought death was very interesting, but she wasn’t sure why someone would want to kill everyone. Then what? That seemed kind of dumb.

  Mrs. Beckman was asking another student about electrons, and Pernie found that she knew the answer too. The circuitry seemed simple to her, and even though her reading wasn’t so great, and her history was terrible, she could hardly understand how anyone couldn’t make perfect sense of that. It flows like water. What’s not to understand?

  The student was struggling with the idea of open and closed circuits, arguing with the teacher that it didn’t make sense that a closed circuit was how you let the electricity through, when an open one made more sense. “How can anything get through if it’s closed?” he asked. Pernie thought he must be dumb, too.

  She looked up at the clock. Only five minutes until lunch. Lunch was boring. Nobody did anything but stare into their tablets or net visors, or maybe, a few of them anyway, would talk.

  The bell that was really a buzzer went off. Pernie closed her desk computer down. She was pretty familiar with it all now, but she was still the last one done. Jeremy was standing there beside her when she was finished.

  “Want to work on my robot after we eat?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  They walked together down the hall toward the cafeteria. Pernie looked around as they walked, but nobody looked back at her. Nobody looked at anything. Everyone looked at their tablet screens or into the lenses of the small plastic visors that they wore. That was the first thing everyone did when she and her classmates left the classroom. The bell rang, and out came five tablets and thirteen visor sets. The kids with the tablets all walked along, staring down into their devices, smiling and laughing at them sometimes. Tapping this or that, as if they were doing work. But they weren’t, Pernie knew. They were just talking. Writing notes back and forth like people on Prosperion did with their homing lizards sometimes. Although these kids never stopped. Some were playing games, though mostly the boys.

  The kids with the visors made Pernie want to laugh. At first she’d thought they all looked very strange, but now, after almost two full weeks, she thought they were funny. They rolled their eyes up to look into the narrow little visors of plastic that jutted out from above their eyebrows. Sometimes she could hardly see the color of their eyes. They reminded her of the stories Kettle used to tell her of zombies brought back to life by necromancers in the olden days. Pernie had always thought the stories of zombies were made up, but she laughed and thought they must have all moved to planet Earth.

  The upside of having an entire hallway filled with people who weren’t paying attention to anything was that she and Jeremy could hustle right on through them all and get very close to the front of the lunch line.

  “There she is,” said the lunch
lady with the wide, fat cheeks and the smiling eyes. “How’s my tough little Prosperion darling doing today?”

  “I’m not your darling,” Pernie corrected her yet again. She corrected her every day. She was fairly sure this round-faced woman was trying to be nice, but Pernie didn’t have time for it. If she stopped and tried to talk to the lady, the people in the back of the line got mad. They made snide remarks, and then Pernie wanted to break their legs. She couldn’t, though, because Djoveeve and Seawind had made her promise a hundred million times.

  “Now why you gotta say that every time?” the lunch lady asked. “You all need to learn to be nice to folks when you come down here.”

  “I am nice,” Pernie told her as she held up her tray. The lunch lady flopped a heap of white stuff on her plate that the menu on the wall said was supposed to be potatoes. Pernie didn’t know if potatoes on Earth were supposed to be the same thing as the word translated to for potatoes on Prosperion, but she sure knew that mashy stuff didn’t taste like anything that Kettle had ever made. The meat was worse, and the vegetables had no flavor at all. Pernie thought that someone during the war must have dropped a bomb that killed flavor from everything.

  “Well, you go on, then, darling,” said the lunch lady. “You keep on being nice, and I’ll keep on doing likewise. Have a nice day now.”

  Pernie stopped and frowned at her, and considered telling her again to stop calling her darling. Jeremy was just pulling back his tray. “Go on,” he said, seeing the look on her face. He’d only been her friend for twelve days, but he could already spot the little storms that got to brewing sometimes. “She’s just trying to be nice,” he repeated for the lunch lady, who was already talking to the next kid in the line. That kid pushed up against Jeremy with his tray.

  “Get going, dipshit,” the kid said. “You’re clogging up the line.”

  Jeremy didn’t look back, and tried to urge Pernie on.

  Pernie turned her little brewing monsoon on the boy who’d pushed her friend. He saw her look at him and glared right back. She slapped the tray out of his hand so fast neither he nor Jeremy saw more than a blur of her hand. It clattered noisily to the floor.