by John Daulton
Altin sent another nudge, letting go the first and trying anew, this time more urgently. He still had to wait for a reply, but finally one came. “Tidalwrath’s fits, Altin. It’s about time. Her Majesty has ordered us back. The fleet stopped helping, and Crown is about to fall. I’ve been trying to contact you for over an hour. We cut down tons of the Hostiles above Earth. Another hour or two and we would have had them all. Half a day at most.”
“What are you doing out there? Why didn’t you answer? What if I needed you?”
“I’m transmuting these harpy-spawn demons,” he snapped back. “They aren’t as resistant to stone as they are the elements … so long as you don’t mind getting close enough to touch one anyway.”
Altin could feel the pulse of Aderbury’s battle rage in the message as it came.
“I’m sorry,” Altin said afterward, imagining his friend running around, unarmored, dancing between the crushing footfalls of those giant demons, muttering transmutation spells that would turn them to stone, but only if he lay a hand on one. Brave. And insane.
“So who is in command of Citadel?”
“Peppercorn,” sent back Aderbury. “There’s not much an enchanter can do down here, and all the available conduits are already working with the Enchanters Guild to keep up the supply of arrows with transmutation spells. Not that it’s really helping much.”
“All right. So do you still have teleporters ready to go? Can I contact her if the time comes?”
“Yes, they’re all still up there waiting. They’re working with the seers and dropping broken columns and pieces of the wall on the demons. Most of our healers have gone, though. They went down into the Temple of Anvilwrath with the Liquefying Stones. They’ve got some kind of spell down there to help with mana flow into the city, so we decided to give a hand. It was running pretty low.”
“That’s good. But please, make sure the teleporters are ready.”
“They are. We didn’t send the redoubts out.”
“I saw.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Calico Castle. Orli and I found Red Fire.”
“Who is Red Fire?”
“The other Hostile world.”
There was a long pause and Altin knew Aderbury was working through it and forcing himself not to ask. He was as much aware of the time constraint as Altin was, perhaps more so given his circumstance. Altin hoped he wasn’t putting his friend’s life at risk distracting him, even as he realized he clearly was. So he cut it short then. “Be safe, Aderbury.”
“I will if you hurry up and do whatever you are going to do.”
“I will.”
“Mercy be with you.”
“You too.” And then Aderbury was gone.
When Altin turned back to Orli, she could see how pale his face had gone. She asked immediately what he had learned.
“Aderbury and the rest of the transmuters are fighting on foot at the Palace walls. Peppercorn has Citadel. The teleporters are waiting for us, but I’m not sure to what end. I don’t even know where to go. Ocelot was useless, and the Palace is going to fall.”
A wave of emotion overcame him, and he stalked away, trying to force himself to think, but with no direction to think in.
Orli watched him, could sense the feelings of impotence and rage.
“Altin,” she said, giving him only a minute to deal with himself. “I need you to get me back to Earth.”
He stopped his pacing, straightening stiff as a stick, his back still to her. She saw by the movement of his shoulders that he drew in a breath. He turned back, his cheeks puffing as he let the breath back out. “Where?”
“Back where you found me, back at Fort Minot.”
He let the admonitions, the warnings, the comments about the risk of her being retaken, die on his tongue. He nodded. “Where? The room I found you in?”
“No, that’s too far down. We need to get to a supply depot.”
“How?” He was going to need a diviner to make sense of where she wanted him to go. That place had made no sense to him at all. Everything about it looked the same.
“Just get me there.”
“And then what? We run around?”
“No. I can find one from the air. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it.”
“I can’t fly. It will take too long to learn the spell.”
“Taot can.”
“I don’t have time to cast all the enchantments we need to hide us from the heat eyes your people have. The invisibility enchantment that we would need. I’ll have to find more perfume to coat the dragon, or they’ll see us.”
“Then they see us.”
“We’ll be fired upon.”
“We’ll fire back. You said yourself our war machines are ‘in the box.’ That’s the big vulnerability. So, teleport them. Isn’t that what you do? Let’s go!”
“Orli, do you realize what you are asking me to do? To your own people?”
“They’re not my people, remember? And you already know the rest.” The look she sent him was so severe, so frightfully determined, that he knew she was right. He would do what had to be done.
He nodded and sent a message to Taot that was not really a request. The urgency of it was enough to get the mighty beast’s attention, and he agreed, though he hadn’t cared much for Earth the last time they were there.
In the span of five minutes, the three of them were soaring between the upthrust buildings of Fort Minot’s uniformity, winding through the low-slung cityscape of black mirrors and blinking lights. They didn’t even have the advantage of darkness to cover their approach, the sun high as they swooped in. Not that it mattered much, for the air defenses of the base were busily engaged with the Hostiles swarming all around. There was some luck in that.
Red orbs, smaller than the planetary variety, draped themselves over buildings everywhere, flattening out and then oozing like melting wax down the sides. They clung to the mirrored surfaces and ran in long rivulets, dripping elongations of their substance, the once rocky and hard transformed into something different, something malleable, fluid and clearly corrosive in high degrees. Other orbs came speeding down from above and simply crashed through things, blasting into buildings or punching through hangar doors like meteors. In places, the dragon riders could see through the holes and observe the orbs flattening themselves out upon floors or over ships and equipment, forming undulations and lumps that marked where fighters and freighters and vessels of every type and size were being unmade by the oozing Hostile goo, the acrid smoke coming from them testimony to the materials being dissolved beneath.
Orli immediately set to looking for signs that would lead them to a central supply depot. “Take us lower,” she shouted into the wind of Taot’s flight. “So I can read.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Hangars,” she said. “Really big ones, big enough for ships like the Aspect. Or garage doors, lots of them, set up for large-scale delivery trucks.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Just take us lower.”
Altin guided Taot downward, and soon they were only a few spans above the lowest of the rooftops. Orli’s head pivoted quickly from side to side, her eyes scouring the fronts and backs of buildings down long streets, piercing the shadows of alleyways, seeking.
Meanwhile, Altin, in his nervousness, watched the skies for signs of pursuit, be they from Earth or another world. For the first several minutes, there was none, but soon enough, in came a long, angular flying craft with a bank of red and blue lights that flashed in sequence on its canopy. It fell in right behind them.
Altin sent the image of it to Taot, but the dragon did not need to be told to avoid it as best he could. He’d heard it coming long before Altin knew it was there.
“I knew they’d find us,” Altin called back to Orli, who glanced behind them nervously.
“Attention Prosperions. Land the … vehicle immediately or you will be fired on,” came the command fr
om the pilot of the hovercraft.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Orli said. “Is he even looking around?”
Altin only shrugged, hoping Orli could do something. Apparently she could not because she went back to looking down into the buildings below.
“Are you going to do something?” he asked anyway.
“Do what? You need to take him out. They probably won’t give you another warning.”
Reluctant to do such a thing, he pressed Taot to fly faster, knowing even as he did that the creature could never match the Earth machine for speed. The dragon dipped and wove through buildings, tilting sideways through the narrowest of openings, skimming surfaces by the barest margins, his agility incredible. But the pursuing craft simply moved above the buildings and followed from higher up. They could dimly hear it repeat the previous command.
“We can’t lose it,” Altin called back to Orli.
“No shit. Take him out before he gets a heat lock on us.”
“He wouldn’t shoot us down without provocation, would he?”
A stripe of blue light streaked through the air, just missing them. It struck the road beneath them, which exploded, a huge hole forming and a spew of black asphalt flying up and all around.
“How much more proof do you need?” she said as she drew her blaster and fired several shots at their pursuer.
“Dragon’s fire!” he swore. “But he’s not the enemy.”
She fired several more shots. “He is now.”
Taot swerved, banking so hard he nearly threw his riders off. A missile hissed past them and blew out the corner of the building Taot had barely missed himself. He roared in fury as shards of glass nicked them all, blown out from the blast.
Altin knew then that she was right. He still didn’t want to kill the pilot, though.
He turned back and, with a few moments to formulate a plan—and several more shots from Orli, one of which blew off one of the ship’s flashing lights—Altin teleported the hovercraft and its occupant into the execution chamber where Orli had once been. He was careful to make sure the cockpit ended up in the center of the room, but he had no time to really consider the relative space beyond that level of detail. With a thought the pursuit came to an end.
“About time,” Orli said. “That was cutting it pretty close.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Good.” She went back to looking for the main supply depot.
They flew down several more streets, trying to use the buildings as some sort of cover, hoping not to be discovered by any more Earth ships. But those were not their only enemy.
As they crossed over a series of small hangars, headed into another section of taller structures, Taot suddenly went into a roll, a long corkscrew maneuver, as he dodged an incoming Hostile. It was an orb nearly as wide as the avenue over which they flew, plummeting at them from above, coming in at a long, shallow angle.
Taot’s roll wrapped them around its passing, his wingtips brushing the glass of a building on one side of the roll and his talons breaking through on the other as he pushed off. The orb just missed Altin’s head, and had he thought to, he might have reached up and touched the thing as it passed through the tube formed by Taot’s evasive flight. They felt the wind of it as it rushed by, and they watched as it crashed into the base of a building to their left. Taot righted himself as he flew through the shrapnel of its impact, and once again they were showered with bits of glass.
As they flew free of the row of buildings, Altin looked back to see that the lower part of the building struck by the orb was brutally smashed in, so much so that the building began to tilt, sagging on that side and considerably off from vertical. He was sure it was about to fall.
“There,” Orli cried above the wind as Altin watched the reflection of the three of them diminishing in the mirrored glass of the falling building far behind. He turned to see her pointing toward a long flat expanse of black glass that he guessed must be a thousand paces long and perhaps a third that wide. It was perfectly rectangular and recessed from the surrounding area by several spans, like a strange dark pool had been built there waiting to be filled. Lights coming from ragged holes in its surface, however, showed where Hostiles had punched through and gotten inside. Altin didn’t know if it had once held water, but if it had, it would now all be drained away. “Take us through one of those openings,” Orli said.
“There are Hostiles in there.”
“This is what we need.” She motioned into the air all around them, at the fighters and the missiles and Hostiles plunging down from everywhere. “Do you really want to keep looking for another one?”
“No. I suppose not.” He sent the message to Taot.
The dragon banked hard and swooped in low, rolling over backward as he dove into a large hole that had been bashed through the massive hangar door by the Hostiles. It was a hard and sudden roll, and the arc and twist of the maneuver had them both free falling for the briefest moment before the maneuver completed itself in time to catch both riders again. Altin was used to such things, but Orli suddenly gripped Altin about the waist like a docking clamp.
Taot swooped down toward the floor of the hangar some five hundred spans below, he and Altin conferring on where it would be best to land.
Altin saw Hostiles spreading themselves out over a half-built spaceship of some kind, three of them, and another was oozing itself out flat like spilled liquid upon the floor. Several people in uniform were busy shooting at the latter one with various forms of weaponry. Streaks of laser light and the concussive blasts of ballistic rounds echoed from the thick concrete walls. Busy in their fight, and far across the hangar, they appeared not to have noticed the dragon flying down.
Taot’s head snaked back and forth as they came in, and he blew several blasts of fire into the air, seemingly at nothing.
Altin found a place clear of the fighting and far enough away from all the Hostiles, to which he directed Taot with a thought. The dragon landed so rapidly and so heavily that the impact knocked gasps from both riders as if they shared the same set of lungs.
They slid off immediately, and the moment they were clear of him, the dragon stalked off and began blasting fire into the air all around again, just as he had done during the descent. He sniffed and rumbled and blew, his head moving up and down at the end of his long neck, swinging high and low, side to side. He growled and the floor shook beneath his feet. Altin sent him thoughts to warn him from getting too close to the Earth men with their weapons, but on and on went the searing of the air. First here, and then there, all around them in the air. Altin sent a quick query to his friend then, asking if he’d been hurt, hoping that he hadn’t come unhinged from the pressure of flying through a battle-torn alien atmosphere.
Altin got back an image of rotting flesh, of an animal, a moose he thought, in the throes of some wasting disease. Taot sent that to him and then went back to blasting the air again and again and again, pacing about like a mad thing in its lair.
“I think I should send him back,” Altin said. “He’s going to blow one this way by mistake and then we’re all in trouble.”
Orli had been looking for something and turned back to Altin only long enough to say, “That’s fine. We can get what we need here anyway. Send him back.”
Altin prepared to send the dragon home, sending him a warning that the teleport was about to come. He saw as he looked back to Taot that the Earth people had spotted the dragon by the brilliance of his fiery display. He spent the instant it took to make sure Taot’s cave was unoccupied, and then sent the dragon back to Prosperion. The last licks of his most recent fireblast, curling upward in the moment before he was gone, were sucked down by his sudden absence, the remnant flames forming a twisting yellow sheet as the air rushed in to fill the space where the massive reptile had been.
“We’re going to have some more of your friends over here,” Altin said as he looked through the last vapors of Taot’s breath.
“Come on,” Orli
replied, grabbing his hand and dragging him at a run. “Over here.”
They ran across the hangar as the sounds of shouts and the splash of laser beams upon the wall in front of them announced that the others were now in range. Altin felt the heat of one beam on the back of his neck, and knew from the smell that hair had been more than singed.
Orli came to a door and tried the handle, but it would not open. “Hold them off,” she shouted as she drew her blaster and started firing into the door.
Altin spun back and sent a huge fireball, big as a house, flying across the room at the fleet people running at them. He directed it just over their heads, but close enough to fill their noses with the smell of their own burning hair. See how you like that, he thought. They stopped, and even fell back a step, but another lance of red light shot by, just missing Orli.
A more powerful weapon than hers, the soldier’s shot actually finished the work of opening the door, and Orli practically dragged Altin through it by the back of his robes as bullets ricocheted off the metal doorframe. Another three rounds cracked the heavy glass window that looked out into the hangar from where they were inside, smashing white impact marks like spindly stars into it.
“They’re going to get through that pretty quick,” Orli said. “Do something.”
Altin thought about another fireball but decided against it. He thought about an ice lance, but that was just as bad. What he needed was an ice wall, but he didn’t know the spell. A bullet hit the window again, this time pushing the glass inward in a nearly perfect dome, cracks like spider webs covering its surface like a drapery of lace. The next one would get through. Improvising, he quickly conjured an ice lance that was ten paces long and five in diameter. Rather than throwing it, he flipped it sideways and let it drop across the front of the room. It landed with a heavy thud as several bullets struck it even as it fell into place. A laser did likewise, and he could hear the hiss of steam as it hit. He wasn’t sure how long the ice lance would hold, lacking the solidity and powerful cold of a true ice wall, so he cast a second one beyond the first, then cast a third stacked atop those two as if they were all little more than stacked ice logs. A grenade struck his barrier then, which shook the whole room. In the span of moments, he’d added three more, making the stack roughly fifteen paces thick. The laser fire and heat from the bullets and blasts would melt them together even as they blew apart. At least he hoped.