Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series)

by John Daulton

  “That’s only going to hold them for a while,” he said as he turned back into the room.

  He saw Orli running between long rows of shelves, spindly metal units filled with boxes of various kinds, all with writing on them that Altin could not read. The place was very organized, and Altin could tell every box and crate was in its proper spot, part of a systematic storage plan.

  “What is this place?” he asked running down a long row of shelves after her.

  “Supply locker. Parts and supplies,” she said. “There will be others nearby. We need suits. And a Higgs prism.”

  “Suits? Like the ones your warriors wear?”

  “No. Spacesuits. For breathing where there is no air. You don’t think we’re going to be so lucky as to find a nice comfy climate on Red Fire, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it quite that far,” he confessed.

  “Well, I did,” she said. “While you were jumping us across the galaxy, I came up with a list of what we might need. It’s going to be a big world if it’s like Blue Fire at all, so gravity might be really bad, maybe more than we can handle.”

  “But it wasn’t a problem on Blue Fire.”

  “I think she was doing you some favors.”

  He nodded and followed her like a dog, tailing along and feeling somewhat useless. He paused long enough to cast a seeing spell out into the hangar. Two of the fleet people were trying to melt through the ice with lasers, but the others had gone back to shooting the Hostile spreading out across the floor.

  “Here,” Orli called out triumphantly. “Just right for us. Except there’s only one.” She held a box that was roughly the size of both his fists pressed together.

  “What is it?”

  “Higgs prism. Small. Low power consumption, too, way better than the ones the Aspect uses—twelve years is a long time.” She looked up, a grim smile of satisfaction on her face, but she saw that he still didn’t know what it was. “It redirects gravity. We can stay at Earth normal no matter how bad Red Fire is. We’ll just have to stay together.”

  “We will.” He had no intention of leaving her side. Ever. Not until this was all done or they were all dead.

  “Good. Now come on. If there are any suits, they won’t be in here. We need an equipment locker. There will be one somewhere close.” She took his hand again and ran toward the back part of the room, through several unlocked doors, and out into a large, dimly lit central corridor. They looked both directions, but the length of it, as far as they could see, was empty. “Just as I thought. Everyone is up there fighting. Let’s go.” She took off running again, dragging him along.

  “How do you know where we are going?” he asked as he struggled to keep up with the athletic Earth woman tugging at his arm.

  “It’s the upside of boring fleet uniformity. I spent my childhood on a base like this. They’re all the same.”

  They ran for some time, Orli reading the placards on the doors that had them, until finally they came to a place where she started trying some of them. The first two were locked, so she kicked in the third when it wouldn’t open either.

  Altin practically ran into her back right after, assuming she’d charge straight in as she had been, and he intent on following. But she didn’t go in. She glanced into the room, made a quick survey of the sorts of equipment she saw inside, then turned away. “Not this one,” she said.

  Apparently boring fleet uniformity was only so uniform, Altin thought.

  She kicked in four more doors and finally found what she was looking for, a room filled with rows and rows of strange, stiff-looking suits. They went in, and Altin, out of curiosity, reached out to touch one, but she called back to him as she ran down a long row and turned right and out of sight. “Not those. They’re too thin. We need heavy ones, with big-time power packs.”

  He didn’t ask why and simply ran in the direction she had gone. He found her by the sound of her shuffling through some very dense-looking suits, stuffy and thick like they were made from several layers of heavy hide, or whatever served for hide on this strange world, a substance seeming almost metallic, though soft and just off white. Each suit had a panel with colorful buttons on its front, another on the left sleeve, and a bulky, box-like apparatus on the back that was a convolution of alien objects too complex for Altin to bother trying to take in. On a shelf above them, each suit had a bulbous helmet to go with it, big cumbersome things with rounded face plates of dark mirrored glass.

  “These,” she said as she made her way down the row of them, her hands touching the sleeves of several, turning them to reveal tags attached and dangling from each. “Come here.”

  He stepped toward her, and she held one of the suits up to him, pressing it against his chest.

  “Close enough.” She pushed it at him, obviously intending that he take it, which he did. It was heavier than he expected it would be, much heavier. They wouldn’t be able to move very fast in them, he thought.

  She went down the row a bit farther and grabbed another that seemed to satisfy for herself. “Now all we need is the kaboom,” she said.

  “What?” Altin felt lost. They’d been moving so quickly through such completely alien space it unsettled him, adding to his anxiety. He had no idea what the end of this running about looked like; nor did he know when it would end. They needed to get to Red Fire and do something soon. He had faith in Orli’s ideas, but this was taking a great deal of time.

  “We need mining charges.”

  “All right.” But he couldn’t help asking, “What is that?”

  “Explosives. To kill Red Fire when we find his heart.”

  “I thought we would use one of your missiles. The big ones like they were going to use to destroy Blue Fire’s planet.”

  “Good luck finding one,” she said. “You left them all floating in orbit when you sent the fleet back to Mana’s Edge. And even if we had one, I have no idea how to set one off. You can’t just light a fuse on those things, you know? But that doesn’t matter. The charges will be fine. Remember, we dug a mile-deep mine on Tinpoa in a matter of months. If we can do that, I can dig out a tiny heart chamber that’s, what, barely as big as you are tall?”

  He nodded. Blue Fire’s heart chamber, the only one he had any experience with, hadn’t been very big, all things being relative. “So do they keep that sort of thing here too? In a place filled with spaceship supplies? Or will we be running around some more?” He glanced down at the heavy suit in his arms and didn’t think that was going to be a good idea. At least not for him.

  “They might, but I’m not willing to run around guessing. I already know where there are plenty of them.”

  “Where?”

  “Tinpoa.”

  “But your people abandoned it. I heard that they took it all. The machines that power everything, and the ones that make the air. There will be nothing there to breathe.”

  She slapped the suit folded over her arm. “Can you cast in one of these?”

  “I don’t see why I couldn’t.”

  “Then we’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to your tower. Unless you want to change in here. But I think we might be pressing our luck in terms of not running into anyone. Battle or not up there, someone is liable to find us. You don’t want another qualm of conscience, do you?”

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “Back to Tytamon’s tower then.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “It’s your tower, Altin.”

  The left side of his mouth twitched up as he nodded. “That is what Kettle said.”

  “Let’s go.”

  And then they were back on Prosperion.

  Chapter 44

  The trip to the Tinpoa mines went quickly. Orli, having spent so much time there, knew exactly where the explosives were kept: in a heavy vault in the supply locker. Altin was able to teleport them inside after a brief exercise with seeing spells and two blind trial teleports into the darkness with a pair of g
low sticks that Orli gave to him. Once inside, Orli filled a leather satchel with all the charges that would fit, then took him to the tool room where she got a rock drill that was so heavy she grunted when she lifted it. With that slung over her shoulder, she turned to face him and announced that she was ready to go.

  “Go where?” Altin said, still not used to the tinny sound of his own voice in the dome of the spacesuit helmet. At least Orli had shown him how to clear the dark tint so he could see. That had been a few moments of perplexity a few minutes earlier. “We still haven’t found Red Fire yet, not the world anyway. I have to admit, I’ve been sort of hoping some epiphany would strike while we were at this, but it’s been nearly an hour since we left Ocelot’s hut, and I still don’t have any ideas leaping to mind.”

  “I do,” she said. “Ocelot told us where it was. Or at least mostly. She said you were too close to the fire. So, obviously, you were too close to the sun. You need to back out.”

  He frowned at that for a moment, but then saw how obvious it was now, in hindsight. “Yes, but even if I do, that only widens the band of space around the sun we have to search. There has to be a better way.”

  “These suits have great optics. We can find it. Come on, let’s go. Clock’s ticking.”

  Altin stared down into her helmet, into her impatient, eager eyes. He saw such strength there. Such confidence. She’d rolled up her sleeves and set herself to work, as it were, and it was inspiring, even when it felt like all hope might easily be lost.

  Moments later they were back out at the farthest distance Altin had ever been from Prosperion, so far that the distance between Prosperion and Earth became inconsequential by comparison. There comes a point where a handful of light years starts to wither to nothingness, a new sense arises as new scales reveal themselves, and they’d found just such a distance as they approached the huge red sun.

  “So now what?” he asked, but she was already moving to the window nearest the table. As she tipped herself out through the window, her bulky suit, with its huge helmet and the clumsy-seeming cluster of strange Earth machinery, filled the opening almost entirely. Altin watched her, watched the suit back with all its blinking lights and its levers and dials, the function of it all completely alien, and marveled at her. He was so grateful to have her there, even if he had no idea what she had in mind.

  She turned back to him almost straight away. “I can’t see anything. You have to take us closer to the system. The helmet optics aren’t that good.”

  “He may detect us,” he said. “He may detect me. So, be ready.” Even as he said it, he knew that it was pointless. What should she be ready for?

  Orli didn’t call him on it. “If he does, you must fight him off. You have the ring.”

  “Maul had the Liquefying Stone.”

  “Did she? Was she using it in that black fog? You said she gave it over to some other priests, that there was a ritual preserving mana for the city somewhere. Would she have taken it back from that?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It seemed so important to reach Red Fire, I just assumed it would be in play. A tough decision that must have been, how best to use one stone to save so many people, but you’re right, she probably did not.”

  “Then you will be fine. And even if she did have it, you said yourself the ring is better.”

  Altin nodded. It might be true. He also recognized that Orli was playing the optimist now, far more than she was when she’d relayed the assessment of his chances from Blue Fire, which was essentially a promise that Altin had no chance to beat the powerful male Hostile at all.

  “Come on,” said Orli. “Go already.” She even managed a half-hearted smile.

  Altin closed his eyes and returned to the place where the last seeing stone was, in the empty space between the planets swinging around the red sun. He rotated his view in all directions to make sure that it was clear, and then he released the spell. A moment after, the tower was there as well.

  Orli set herself straight away to scanning with the spacesuit’s long-range optics. She spent a long time leaning out all three of the room’s windows and finally turned back to Altin, looking irritated. “Can you turn this thing a little bit? Like a quarter rotation? I can’t see all the way around it.”

  Altin obliged and once again Orli set to staring out each window in turn.

  “I still can’t see anything. It must be on the other side of the sun.”

  Altin shook his head and grumbled. “Just the same as it was with Mars. I swear it’s an ogre’s fortune we’ve got out here.”

  Right as he said it, something came crashing into his mind, crushing the sad telepathic blocks he’d put in place, not just blocks to keep out distracting thoughts from fellow magicians while he was out here, but strong blocks meant to stave off just such an attack. He thought he’d come prepared, thought he’d taken the warning Blue Fire had given him to heart, but in that instant his vision filled with a blazing red heat and the seismic force of anger that wasn’t his, a force like a thousand tons of rock being dropped on him all at once.

  Reflexively he reached out for more mana, and had he not been wearing the ring, his mind would have been torn asunder, even physically blown apart just as Maul’s had been. But the ring was there, and the mana was there, all of it, no channeling required, in the instant that he needed it.

  He staggered back under the press of the assault, his mind gulping down mana in quantities for which there was no measure, fighting to push back against the crushing magnitude of all that fury, but still the onslaught came and mashed down at him. He saw hatred in the red heat, could feel it in the core of his being, hatred and the most unspeakable rage and, shockingly, inexplicable jealousy. There could be no doubt that this was Red Fire.

  Altin tried to shout back at the attacking entity in his mind, tried to speak to it with the brute force of his own will, blasting back against the currents of Red Fire’s hostility with a sense of peace, an offering of friendship. We don’t have to be enemies.

  There came in response a veritable blast of contempt. It felt as if the whole universe shuddered with revulsion, disgusted by that pathetic, simpering suggestion that there might be anything other than absolute mortal combat. Revulsion added itself to the press of anger and jealousy, and with it came even greater confidence. Red Fire knew now that Altin was weak.

  And then Blue Fire was there.

  Altin felt her terror open up in his mind, the familiar sense of her presence that he’d had before, though now awash in fear and agony. She came into his mind with a feeling of furtiveness, like she was hiding, like she’d had to sneak out to be here. But mostly fear and trembling concern, worry even, all of it woven together with the great strains of resignation and pain, and exhaustion, a great bruising sense of utter fatigue and battery. Together it all played in his mind like a symphony of awfulness. But, through it all, despite it all, she was there. She came because she was afraid for him.

  Get away, she sent. Her voice filled his mind like a child’s cries carried upon a distant wind. Leave. Orli Love not die. There came a sense of pleading. Begging.

  He’d never experienced a sensation like that before. Not from her. Not in such a way. How could he possibly be so important to her as that? Humbling wasn’t remotely enough to describe it. It was almost horrifying. To imagine someone so desperately in need of him as that.

  Red Fire knew that Altin was speaking to her. He could hear everything they had to say. His mind engulfed them both. The crush of his wrath dropped Altin to his knees. Though he could not feel it, blood had begun to run from his nose and ears. He was too caught up in greater miseries to notice such things.

  Orli noticed, she’d seen it all, and she’d run to him, stood before him in that moment watching the blood run free, screaming for him to let go, to take them out of range. She pleaded for his safety like Blue Fire had.

  We are going to help you, Altin sent to Blue Fire, an effort requiring all his strength. If we can find his hea
rt. Everything was in the open now.

  And then he knew where it was. And why she’d taken such a risk. He saw it all. The red planet, the heart chamber, all of it. He knew, because she knew.

  She’d seen it in Red Fire, took it from him as he invaded her, the assault requiring by its very nature that he expose himself, that he open up and make himself vulnerable. Red Fire had no reason to fear, however, no reason for caution, for she had not the strength to repel him. They both knew it. Red Fire could see into her mind as easily as she could see into his, as easily as she saw the way into his heart. He saw that she’d seen, and he even saw as she gave the memories to Altin. If Red Fire had known what laughter was, he might have mocked them both. She could do nothing to him. She was too weak. And Altin would be dead in moments. And nothing would stop him from getting what he wanted.

  Altin was vaguely aware of Orli screaming at him as well, the dim noise of more chaos beating on the exterior walls of all that agony and rage. He could open his eyes and almost make her out, right there in front of him. Her mouth was moving and making sounds. What was she saying? It looked like, “Get out.”

  “Get us out,” Orli shouted at him. Over and over. “Altin take us away, please.”

  Get out, echoed Blue Fire, forcing her own thoughts into the round shapes of Orli’s cries. Get out. Get away.

  Altin tried to do something with it. But none of it made sense. He recognized the words, but he couldn’t hold on to them. He had to keep pulling in mana, more and more and more. He knew, at least some silent part of him knew, that if he didn’t, they would die.