by John Daulton
“They’re different,” observed the captain, his eyes moving back and forth from the image on the screen to the distant view now fading out of sight through the window.
“What are?” asked Roberto.
“These Hostiles. They’re red. And they’re smaller.”
“These must be the ground assault version.”
“I expect they carry the disease.”
“If they do, then NTA better have been cranking out vaccines for a while already. If not, those people back there are screwed.” Roberto wrinkled up his face as a shudder ran down his spine, the memory of the ravaging disease on the Aspect still all too fresh, the shouts of madness and screams of agony, people he’d known and cared for, friends now gone forever.
He tried to bring up a local satellite news feed, but there wasn’t one. After a moment of searching, he discovered that well over a hundred of the major entertainment and news satellites were not responding to his queries. He finally found one he could connect to, and he put it on a secondary display.
… Coast cities are overrun, and the West Coast isn’t doing any better. Mexican President Domingo Rios-Muñoz reports major urban areas in his country are seeing twenty percent infection rates from as far south as Mexico City to as far north as Portland ….
“Guess that answers that,” said Roberto as both watched the gaunt-faced woman on the screen. The reporter stood before the easily recognizable Manhattan skyline, the familiar scene of the gondolas moving through the canals giving a false sense of serenity to the obviously besieged city. A closer look showed that the boats were all empty behind her. There were no tourists lounging in the lazy comfort of the automated craft, no one enjoying a day on the water as they floated down Broadway or Fifth Avenue taking in the sights. Not while the same scene Roberto and the captain had witnessed in Winnipeg played out in the skies above.
Director Nakamura announced this morning that only NTA associates with health care access ratings over five hundred will be given vaccination codes. All others are advised to stay indoors until further notice. All travel is prohibited and NTA security forces have been authorized to prevent the spread of disease with “all necessary rigor.” So, stay at home, folks.
The feed went to commercials right after that, which brought another round of profanity from Roberto, who could hardly believe they would break for advertising at a time like that. He looked through several other channels, and in the ten minutes it took them to get to the Fort Minot spaceport, they had confirmed that most of the major cities around the globe were under Hostile attack, and that the Hostile disease had been detected in all of them. One anchorman proclaimed, “It seems they’re like insects, attracted to the lights.”
Roberto didn’t know if Hostiles could see light, but the map graphics being shown by the various stations all confirmed general bad news for the largest population centers everywhere. He stared at the most recent graphic and shook his head. “The Hostiles sure did all that fast,” he said. “And the disease thing, how did that happen? It didn’t set in that fast on the ship. It took several days before anyone showed symptoms before. How can it be manifesting so quickly now? It hasn’t even been a day.”
“They’ve been studying us all along, Commander, of course they have improved it. And the Hostiles arrived fifteen hours before we did. This is why I have been summoned to speak to Director Nakamura in person. And why we were ordered to bring your pal Pewter along.”
Roberto couldn’t ignore the real sense of fear that settled in his gut as he flipped off the television feed. It was hard to believe how wrong everyone had been about the Prosperions. Especially him. He’d been sucked in almost as bad as Orli had. It made him feel gullible, and stupid, and worse, it made him feel responsible for what was happening now, almost as responsible as everyone thought Orli was.
The shuttle came up on Fort Minot then. He stared out over the massive hundred-foot walls as they approached, marveling at how so much concrete could be stacked so high. The walls, as thick as they were tall, marked off a massive space covering seventy square miles, and passing over the wall seemed to bring them into another universe, a universe of severity, a place where strict dedication to function was not only the rule, but the absolute totality of all things. Other population centers they’d been flying over as they came in, or looking at on television during the flight, were largely vertical settings, vast land-locked islands of mirrored monoliths, majestic feats of engineering where buildings thrust skyward like great fingers of delicate-seeming glass, bejeweled by lights and shimmering architectural artistry reaching proudly toward the stars. But not Fort Minot. By comparison, Fort Minot seemed squat and surly, a seventy-mile expanse of low buildings, few more than ten stories high, and almost entirely covered in the same black solar paneling. While these too gave a glassy effect, the uniformity of it all seemed to smother any chance the place had at beauty. Not even the play of sunlight upon the surfaces could change the numbing devotion to function there. It was as if the panels themselves knew they weren’t pretty, weren’t even all that important in the scheme of things, given that these surface structures, the buildings, the massive hangars, all of them were built over a bunker so enormous, dug so deep into the Earth, that the solar panels were counted as merely an ancillary power source. Even still, there was a brute magnificence to it that Roberto couldn’t help admire, if for no other reason than for its role in history. Had it not been for Fort Minot, the lion’s share of Earth’s technology would have been lost in the three centuries of chaos that followed the third world war.
Only a few minutes passed before an octagonal section in what seemed a veritable plain of solar paneling opened like the iris of some great fortified eye, and the shuttle was drawn inside. The small ship settled to the ground, and shortly after, the sound of the roof panels locking back into place vibrated through its frame. They were officially back on Earth.
“I wish I could say I’m glad to be home,” said Roberto, “but I think we got here in time for it all to go to shit.”
“We’ll see about that, Commander.” He got up and went to the shuttle hatch, throwing a scowling glance Orli’s way. As he waited for the hatch to open and descend, he added, “Commander, do not be late for the court martial, and when you arrive, remember that while that foul mouth of yours is arguably acceptable on a ship, it has no place down here. Nor do we have time for any ill-conceived debauchery that might land you in court as well. Until this war is over, you are still a member of my crew, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Roberto said.
When the ramp was down, a pair of Marines saluted the captain, who directed them inside to the gurney upon which Orli lay. “You are to stay with her every second until she is in a cell. I don’t care if there are six hundred Minot doctors, nurses and interrogators with her, do you understand? You walk her into that cell, check the lock and make damn sure the cameras are on. That cell security needs to be armed and ready to go off at all times. Make it certain. And if they decide to move her, keep her drugged. If they need her awake, put a gag on her.”
“Yes, sir,” the two men replied.
“And listen close. If Meade or any other Prosperion shows up, you shoot them on the spot. To kill, do you understand that? No questions. No ‘hold it, mister,’ no, ‘freeze,’ just right through the heart, and a second through the head just in case. You have not seen what these people can do, or how fast they can do it. Especially Meade. Do not hesitate. Do you have that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Asad turned to look over his shoulder, toward the front of the shuttle where Roberto was finishing up the shutdown of the ship. “Commander, let’s go.”
Roberto set the ship into sleep mode and joined the captain at the hatch. At another time, he might have felt insulted by the captain’s comments regarding his behavior, like a chastened child, but not this time. Not while standing there looking down at his friend like she was, still and seemingly lifeless, strapped there helpless an
d likely to be set upon the whims of the great military bureaucracy. A sinking feeling came upon him as he looked into her face. It was eerily empty, vacant, like somehow they’d killed her already, and now she was just waiting to die. The captain had been cryptic in his answers about why they’d brought her down here from the start. They obviously thought she was a threat. They’d drugged her nearly to coma for fear that she might try something, might make an attempt to escape or use some secret magic whatnot that Altin had made for her and that she’d hidden on her person somewhere. Roberto shook his head ruefully. It had been a rough twelve years for her, most of it not her fault. She made some dumb choices there at the end, but he couldn’t really blame her, all things considered. And he’d liked Altin too.
He caught himself looking around the hangar then, thoughts of Altin sending his gaze darting into the shadowy corners, searching for movement behind the stacked crates and parked gravity-lifts. A flutter near a pile of boxes caught his eye, looked like the billow of gray robes, but he saw that it was only a tarp thrown over the boxes, one corner of it blown about by air coming from massive ventilation ducts high above. He shook his head and followed the captain out.
Altin wouldn’t come down here anyway. He couldn’t. He didn’t even know where “here” was. Roberto knew how that magic worked, at least a little bit. He was pretty sure that was the main reason they’d been ordered to bring Orli down off the ship: to get her away from Altin’s all-seeing magic eyes. Roberto felt a little better about that. His experience with Prosperion spell casting told him that was a real risk, Altin finding her. He knew the Prosperion would try. So it made sense to get her away from the ship, which was a thing, a place, Altin was familiar with. Teleporters couldn’t go somewhere they’d never been before, or at least that they hadn’t seen with their magic sight. Roberto had worked with enough teleporters to understand that fact very well. But thinking about it still made him shudder. What if Altin had already found her? He was the most powerful sorcerer they had. What if he was watching right now, spying on him, planning … whatever he had next in mind, the next move in the great betrayal?
Suddenly he could feel Altin’s eyes crawling on him like a thousand tiny insects, the small hairs on his arms prickled with the sense of it. He turned back and looked around again, searching everywhere, even up into the rafters high above. Altin could easily be up there.
There was nothing to see, but still the feeling clung to him. He shook his head as he peered up into the vacant space. “Fuck you, Altin. I thought you were my friend.”
Chapter 4
Altin had exactly enough discipline to do two things before going to the Aspect in search of Orli. The first was to teleport himself to his old friend Doctor Leopold and insist the doctor remove the tracking device the Earth people had implanted in his arm. He had no intention of letting that thing be his downfall this time as it had been on the Aspect the day he got caught visiting Orli. The second thing he did was cast a version of Combat Hop on himself that would keep him out of danger from both the laser beams and the projectiles that the fleet weapons discharged. He accomplished both in just under an hour.
From there his plan was simple: get Orli out, and not get shot. If he could talk to them and try to explain things, he would, but even then, he would slip Orli the fast-cast amulet the moment he arrived, just in case something went wrong. That way, no matter what happened, she could get out of there. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
He cast a seeing spell directly into the sick bay of Orli’s ship, right where he knew her bed had been. It occurred to him as he did it that he might be able to simply send her the amulet secretly. That could make things very easy for them both. Unless her hands were bound.
In the end it didn’t matter because Orli was not there. And not only was she not there, the bed was not there. No one was there.
He pushed his sight into the next room and found Doctor Singh sitting before a monitor, staring into it, at the battle taking place outside his ship, and slowly shaking his head. Altin spared a moment to watch the activity in the monitor as well before shoving his sight through the rows of beds looking for Orli. She wasn’t anywhere he could find.
He pushed the seeing spell right through decks, bulkheads and machinery, darting furtively into chambers and bays, hangars and loading docks, spaces set up for work about which he had no inkling. He looked everywhere, up and down as he made his way through the ship. He didn’t know his way around it very well, but he knew he was moving toward the bridge. She might be up there. They might have put her back to work. She was not. He pushed his way down through the floor, through several more decks, speeding his way down in search of the Aspect’s brig. That’s where she had to be. But there was still no sign of her when he got there. For several more minutes, he chased his fear down the lift tube and through a few random corridors before realizing he’d never find her that way. He let go of the spell.
“Minotaur’s horns,” he growled, stuffing Orli’s amulet into a pocket of his robes. “I don’t have time to divine.”
He cast another seeing spell, this one to Aderbury’s house in Crown City. He knew it was an invasion of privacy, but he didn’t have time to worry about such things. Fortunately, Aderbury’s wife, Hether, was home and not in a state that would make her indisposed toward company. He quickly searched out an empty room and with a thought that barely allowed him time to release the seeing spell, teleported himself into their home.
“Hether,” he called out in a voice loud enough to be heard but not startle. “It’s Altin. I’m sorry to intrude.”
“Altin?” she called back as the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor came nearer with each passing heartbeat.
“Yes, Hether, it’s me,” he replied and pushed open the bedroom door. “It’s really something of an emergency—and yes, Aderbury is fine, it’s my emergency. I need a homing lizard.”
Her surprise at seeing him transformed to curiosity at the abrupt nature of his request. She stammered for a moment, thinking to ask, but seeing in his eyes that haste was in order, she moved immediately to oblige. “Why yes, of course. What’s happened? Why not telepathy?”
“You mustn’t say anything to anyone. You truly mustn’t. But it’s all gone horribly wrong.” He quickly rattled off a truncated version of what had happened as they made their way to Aderbury’s cluttered study and the small cage where the couple kept their homing lizards. He told her of his capture, the Queen’s outrage, the rescue led by the royal assassin, and his subsequent work with Blue Fire to send the fleet home to Earth. Altin brushed past Hether the moment they entered the room and threw open the lid to the homing lizard cage, reaching in and grabbing the first one that came within reach.
Without a backwards glance at the confounded and increasingly frightened woman standing behind him, he went to Aderbury’s desk and scribbled out a note. Where are you? I will come for you.
He hastily wound the scrap of parchment around the lizard’s slender abdomen, its soft white throat calmly pulsing with each breath, no more excited by such treatment than it might have been by the touch of the wind upon its black and yellow speckled skin. Altin tied the note in place with string, a bit roughly, and almost tossed the lizard down. He realized that, wherever she was, she might not have anything to write with, so he took a bit of drafting charcoal from Aderbury’s desk, snapped off a quarter of it, and stuffed that under the string atop the note, which gave the lizard quite a squeeze. He tossed the lizard down, nearly barking Orli’s name as he did it. In the time it took for the lizard’s little feet to touch the ground, it was gone.
He turned back to Hether. “I’m sorry for the rush, and I promise I’ll explain in more detail at another time. Aderbury is fine, though I know not what the Queen has in mind for him after what has happened. And remember, you must not speak a word of this to anyone. The Queen may not want this news out just yet. I fear it doesn’t make her, or any of us, look very good.”
Hether could only nod and
bat her long lashes over a still-bewildered pair of bright blue eyes. A smile creased her pretty round face as she nodded the promise of her silence. “Be careful,” she said, but he was already gone—once again causing her to marvel at another unanticipated event. Never before had she seen anyone do magic without so much as a single uttered word.
Altin appeared in sick bay on the Aspect again, near where Orli’s bed had been. The room was still empty. His bare feet allowed him to move silently across the floor, and he peered through the open doorway to where he’d seen Doctor Singh not all that long before.
The doctor had moved from the desk and was treating a man whose skin was blackened and crisp looking all across his upper arm, shoulder and part of his neck. Altin reflexively cringed upon seeing it, the jagged black edges and the shine of fluids glazing the angry red wounds. Fortunately the man appeared to be unconscious, which was a good thing, for such an injury could be nothing but unbearable.
Altin watched for several minutes as the doctor worked, the nurses in assistance moving in perfect synchronization with the skilled physician as his treatment progressed, their gloved hands darting in and out methodically, slapping tools precisely into his waiting grip, barely a word uttered in between. Eventually, it was done, and the patient was rolled away by one of the nurses, and Altin couldn’t help but wonder if he were going to be put into one of the pink-fluid tanks like the one in which his arm had been regrown. The injury certainly would require something on that order if it were ever going to heal.