Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5)

by John Daulton

  The Galactic Mage Series

  Book 1: The Galactic Mage

  Book 2: Rift in the Races

  Book 3: Hostiles

  Book 4: Alien Arrivals

  Book 5: Dance of Destinies

  Book 6: (in progress)

  Prequels

  Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy’s Wild

  Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Zombie Apple Collapse

  (in progress)

  John Daulton

  www.DaultonBooks.com

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  John Daulton

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  DANCE OF DESTINIES

  Book 5: The Galactic Mage Series

  The phrase “The Galactic Mage” is the trademark of

  John Daulton.

  Copyright © 2014 John Daulton

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9894787-8-6 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9894787-9-3 (Kindle Ebook)

  Cover art by Cris Ortega

  Interior layout by Fernando Soria

  DEDICATION

  To Max and Janice. How much I admire

  you both cannot be expressed in words.

  Chapter 1

  Altin could not tell how long he’d been in the ochre gel. When he woke up, the lights were out on his spacesuit. Nothing worked. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. Only his head swiveled, enabling him to look around through the glass of his helmet. Orli was there beside him, trapped in the same ochre blob as he was, but he couldn’t see her face. She was turned away just enough. She was alive, he knew. He’d seen a wisp of her hair on several occasions, the tips of a few blonde strands that swept into view as she moved her head around. He’d done the same, glanced about within the confines of the helmet, taking in what had become of them.

  What had become of them? Altin could hardly say. They were inside the alien ship. That much was sure. He and Orli were held in a blob of ochre jelly, or at least that is how it appeared to him, as if they’d been frozen together in some strange kind of gooey ice. The blob sat upon an enormous grate, one that spread out in all directions, its length and breadth lost in darkness, a distance Altin had no way of measuring. What he could see all looked to be made from the same green-brown material that the ship’s hull was made from, a substance Orli had described as “some kind of protein.” Long beams of the stuff crossed each other in a perfect grid, the beams roughly a pace wide, and the square gaps between at least six paces on a side. It was hard to say more about it because the jelly through which he looked made a hazy effect. Details were hard to make out.

  Looking up, he could see another grate, or at least he could see a section of one, high above. Here and there along its underside were dull, hazy lights, some green, some orange, some blue, all pale as if seen through a mist. They traced the lines of the beams that formed the grate, spreading out in all directions above him, and just as did the grate he and Orli were on, it stretched away until it vanished into hazy darkness. From where he was, it looked to be an island in the steamy black above him, a great grille with foggy edges all around, simply floating up there.

  There were other lights upon it as well. On top of it, not attached to the underside. These came from objects. Enormous things, bulky and dark mainly, but marked here and there by glowing patterns and shadowy protrusions that sometimes moved. Larger motion sometimes passed above them, streaks whipping by, smears of color like one sees in thin layers of oil floating on water. These objects would flash by, blurs like windblown clouds, lighting up the dark things on the platform above him, if only momentarily. Then they would be gone. Altin did not know what the colored things were, but he reckoned the bulky objects they illuminated in their passing were alien machines.

  He’d gone through a few spates of panic early on, stuck there as he was. When it occurred to him that Orli was there with him, that had been the worst. He’d reached out for mana to save her, and himself, but found none. He could see it. It was all around him, the same pink mistiness that it always was, or at least, that it had been since the day Blue Fire had given him the green stone, the pulsing green marble that was the Father’s Gift. That mana was there, but he couldn’t reach it. He was on the inside of a manaless bubble. An empty pocket, perfectly round, all around him. It was very large, though he had no way of measuring it in distances meaningful to a physical world.

  That had panicked him. Seeing her there, and seeing the mana all around, but unattainable. He’d spent some time shouting, nearing hysteria for a time perhaps, helpless as he was—as they were. First he shouted at her, that she might hear him, shouting so loud and so hard the skin of his face prickled and stung, sweat wrung from him by the force of his urgency. After he shouted in anger for a time, then, finally, came the frustration, which wore him out.

  When that had passed, it occurred to him that, with all the lights extinguished on his suit, he was probably going to use up all the air. He knew that much about how it worked. Which made him wonder about Orli’s air. He spent more time watching for that flick of blonde hair.

  Sometime after he’d fallen asleep. Woken up. Panicked some more. Grew angry again. Tried for mana several more times. Slept. Woke. And slept. He felt as if he were recovering from being drugged. He didn’t know if he’d slept for hours or days. It occurred to him then that he should probably be dead of thirst if it had been too long. He might be close to it now. Which meant Orli might be too.

  That was the first time he noticed the brown tubes thrust into the ochre jelly blob that held her, jammed through it and through her spacesuit. None of them were much thicker than his thumb. They ran like roots across the grate and disappeared into the darkness. One was pushed into the center of her suit’s heavy back panel. The other two went in at the top of it, one just behind each shoulder. He assumed he had the same.

  Whatever these aliens were, they at least didn’t want them dead. Not yet, anyway.

  He saw no sign of Roberto, which he counted a good thing. To count it otherwise was not something he was willing to consider. And he supposed Roberto might just be on the grate behind him out of view. He could not know.

  What he did know was that now, some indeterminable number of hours or days or … years ago, after being captured, he was awake. He wondered why. And then the ochre jelly began to melt away.

  At first he thought it was some trick of light. The air beyond the jelly did seem to move in a way, but soon after, it turned clear. The thickness of it diminished. Shadowy ripples of viscous fluid flowing marked where the jelly ran like melting fat, though it ran sideways, not straight down, as if gravity came from the left. It slicked away in strands to his left, stretching like mucus being blown off in a strong wind, long stringy lines of it flapping in the air. Bulbous ends of these tacky ropes would flap onto the crossbeams, stick there, then bow in the middle, bent by the wind again until they would break off and ooze down through the grate. Upon seeing the force of what blew it so, Altin wondered if perhaps they were still outside on the surface of the stormy red planet, the planet he’d once thought of as Red Fire, now a world he hoped would become a healthy, living Hostile being named Yellow Fire.

  As he watched the ochre jelly melting and blowing away in front of him, the edge of the ochre jelly blob thinned and got nearer and nearer to exposing Orli inside. Soon it melted enough that part of her suit was out, like she’d been carved from it and the excess had blown
away. Then the rest of her was free, the last of the goo blowing off her like a thin sheet carried off in a hurricane. She staggered forward, slightly right, one step that nearly took her off the edge of a beam, then, buffeted by the wind, she staggered a step back the other way, where she collapsed onto her hands and knees less than a half hand shy of falling through the grate at the other edge of the beam.

  Altin cried out as he watched it. Horrified. His hands wouldn’t move, though he tried to reach for her.

  The ochre jelly was melting around him, the edges nearing as it thinned.

  Soon he was partially free. He could hear the wind against his helmet. And other sounds. The thuds and pulses and hissing of massive machinery. Something roared in a dull, distant way. He prepared to brace himself against the impact of the wind. The remaining ochre jelly melted and blew away.

  He leaned into the wind. Staggered like Orli had, overcompensating right, the effects of whatever had been put in him making balance difficult, and something pulling at him from behind. The wind caught him and shoved him left. He fell to his knees to prevent himself from stumbling over the edge. Just as Orli had.

  She turned, still on hands and knees, and saw him. Their eyes locked. Hers moved with the gasp of her relief. She was crying immediately. She hadn’t had the luxury of seeing him there behind her all that time.

  “I’m fine,” he shouted, not sure if she could hear him over the noise all around, not to mention through his helmet glass.

  They crawled to one another and clutched each other tightly. He didn’t dare take his helmet off, though he wanted to so desperately it burned in his chest.

  “Are you okay,” she shouted, like him, neither opening her helmet’s visor nor removing it entirely.

  “I am,” he shouted back. “I’m fine. Confused, a little frightened, but fine.”

  She smiled. So beautifully. The tear streaks on her cheeks reflecting the lights on the grate above them in a dim, pearlescent line. “I was so afraid,” she said. “I thought you were dead. I knew you weren’t. I kept telling myself you weren’t. But I was so afraid.”

  “I had the advantage of seeing you there,” he admitted. “But I too panicked more than once.”

  “Where is Roberto?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They both turned about, still on hands and knees, balanced there precariously on the pace-wide beam, peering into the darkness. Everything was hazy. Droplets of liquid that looked like water formed on their helmet glass. Streaks of steam fogged it and cleared in places.

  “Can you cast a seeing spell?” Orli called through the wind. She pointed downward through the gap in the giant grating, her thick-fingered glove directing Altin’s gaze to a platform below them like the one they were on and the one he’d seen above them. It was just visible through the steamy, windblown darkness. It had to be at least a five-hundred-span drop.

  “We’re in some kind of bubble,” he said. “The mana, it curves all around. I can’t cast anything.”

  “Shit.” She looked up at the grate high above. It too was five hundred spans away. “Shit,” she repeated. “We have to find him. We have to get out of here.”

  It was true, but truth means little enough sometimes. He looked into her helmet, waiting for her to look back. In a few moments, she did. She was breathing more easily.

  “God, Altin, what have we done?”

  He was afraid she was about to say, “I told you so.” She hadn’t wanted to go out into the storm and look at the alien spaceships with them. He and Roberto were the ones who had wanted to leave the safety of his tower, now known as “the boot,” standing safely at a distance from the alien vessels. But they’d talked her into it. The aliens hadn’t made any hostile moves on them, and, well, adventure was practically Roberto’s middle name. So they goaded and teased and ignored her warnings. And now here they were, at least the two of them. And Roberto MIA.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. He noticed sweat beading on Orli’s upper lip. He could feel it running down his own temples too, down his ribs inside his suit. “It’s awfully hot in here,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s really bad,” she remarked, watching as a puff of steam blew past. “We’ve got to get moving.”

  “What about those? Do we dare try to remove them?” He pointed to the three tubes in her suit. He traced the lines of them snaking off into the dimness across the crisscrossed beams.

  She took note of them, seemingly for the first time, and tried to turn in her helmet to see where they attached. She looked back and acknowledged the ones in his own suit, which he hadn’t seen but knew were there for the dragging weight of them.

  She turned him carefully around and studied them for a time.

  “Well, this one probably explains why we are still breathing,” she said. He could feel that she touched something at the back of his spacesuit, presumably the lower of the three. “But these two, I’m not sure. Given that we aren’t dead yet, I’m thinking these are feeding tubes of some kind. Or maybe some kind of anesthesia or tranquilizing gas. Maybe both.”

  “That was my thought as well. So do we remove them, or does that kill us instantly?”

  She let him turn back around. “Your guess is as good as ….” She let that thought die as her mouth fell open. She tilted back, upright on her knees, and gaped. “Oh no.”

  “Oh no, what?” he said as he turned to see what she was staring at.

  Looming above him was the strangest and most enormous creature he had ever seen.

  Chapter 2

  Roberto walked along the edge of the huge ramp. It curved out of an opening in the giant spaceship like an arced, extended tongue. There were no buttons or levers at the end of it where it touched the ground, nothing to indicate a means of operation or communication as he had hoped there might be. There weren’t even any letters or other symbols on it, nothing to suggest an enchantment or some kind of magic was in place, some useful spell like the sort of thing Altin’s people might put in place of a com station or even just as a doorbell.

  Altin and Orli had gone up to the belly of the ship. They looked really small from where Roberto was. It was pretty mind-blowing how big this damn thing was. Thirty-one miles long was a whole lot of ship. This damn ramp was three-quarters of a mile to the top.

  “I wish I could take my glove off,” Altin was saying to Orli over the com. “This stuff has a really strange look to it. It’s not wood, but it kind of looks like it. Or maybe bone.”

  He was talking about the weird stuff the ship was made out of. The two of them were all the way over by the ship itself, messing with the hull, but Roberto dropped to a knee when Altin said that and verified that the ramp was indeed made out of the same kind of stuff. It looked rough, a texture like the outside of an avocado.

  Whatever it was, what was more important was what was up there. The aliens hadn’t sent out a welcoming committee, but they also hadn’t sent out troopers to kill or capture them. Given the latter, Roberto figured they were on pretty safe ground at this point. He had to believe that not everything in the universe was going to be violent. And any culture capable of developing technology on the scale of this massive ship must have learned how to work together. And besides, Roberto was a glass-half-full kind of guy.

  He started up the ramp again. He considered saying something to Altin and Orli, but he knew as soon as he did, Orli would start in on him about him being a dumb-ass or something. Which he was well used to, coming from her, but there was no sense bringing it on needlessly. Besides, he just wanted to have a peek.

  “It’s some kind of protein,” Orli was saying to Altin as Roberto climbed. She said something else, but Roberto couldn’t focus on it given that something was coming over the arc of the tonguelike ramp and rolling his way.

  “Hey,” he managed to get out. “Something’s coming.” He took a couple of steps backward down the ramp, glanced at the surface of the planet, and decided six feet was close enough. He jumped off.

  “What
is it?” Orli asked.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted as he landed. He moved farther away from the ramp. His heart was pounding. “But whatever it is, it’s really big.” He sure hoped that whole “learning to get along with each other” thing came true, and he was really rooting for a half-full glass.

  The object continued to roll down the ramp, still at least a quarter mile away. It was a round-bodied thing, a vehicle of some kind, with an egg-shaped central portion and two enormous hoops on either side as wheels. There was something in the egg shape, but he couldn’t make out what. He assumed it was one of the aliens, finally coming out to say hello.

  He tore his gaze away long enough to raise his arm. He tapped up the video controls for his helmet’s visor. He set it to record. It was pretty thrilling to think he might be the first guy in history to video these things. If they didn’t eat his face off or blow him up with some kind of titanic anal probe, he’d be famous for all of time.

  The vehicle had a light, which it held on a flexible sort of boom, or maybe tentacle. The light grew brighter and brighter as it approached, so bright it lit up the dust in the air.

  Roberto zoomed in the camera as close as the helmet’s optics would allow. There was definitely something inside of the vehicle. “Whoa,” he muttered under his breath, then, louder, “What the hell is that?”

  “I can’t see it from down here,” Orli said.

  Roberto glanced over to where they were and saw the two of them shuffling back, leaning back and trying to see the top of the ramp, which he knew they couldn’t from that angle.

  “What’s it look like from over there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. It was pretty hard to explain. “Like two huge hoops rolling side by side around a giant glass egg.” Man, that sounded lame, and it was going to be recorded for all of history. “There’s some puffy balloon thing in the middle of it with a bunch of spaghetti arms. I’m getting it on video, though.” That wasn’t any better. The guys on the news feeds from Earth always sounded way cooler than that.