by John Daulton
Chapter 21
Orli started when the loud pop sounded near her ear. She winced, and one eye closed reflexively. She had time to look up at the alien with its ass end pointed at her and realize the pop hadn’t come from it. She turned and saw Altin standing there. His eyes were closed. He drew in a breath. A splatty liquid sound erupted with a whoosh from the alien just as a furnace seemed to open up right above her.
Altin had cast a fireball, launched at the alien’s bulbous body like a meteor. She squinted in the glare of it, unable to help but watch. It all happened so fast she didn’t even have time to hope it incinerated her captor. She merely witnessed.
The fireball appeared to strike the alien full on, but in the half second after, Orli realized the flames were wrapped around some form of shield. Then the fiery tongues of yellow and orange blew back at her on the wind. She turned her head away, reflexively trying to cover her face with her arms but unable to for being stretched taut by the alien’s tentacles. The fire washed over her. It was almost like lying in Taot’s breath the day the dragon blew its fire over Calico Castle’s walls. Friendly fire, in the most literal of senses. Again.
This fire, unlike that day she fought against the orcs, was brief. The wind in the ship blew the flames over her quickly. She could feel her skin dry out, the sweat and the steam slicking her body evaporating instantly. But it was enough to spare her hideous burns.
She turned back to see if Altin was on fire. She dreaded seeing it. He was standing up. He would have been in the heart of the flames, unlike her, lying beneath the worst of it.
But he was not aflame. No, he was in a blob of the goddamn yellow jelly again. Just like when they’d first found themselves aboard the ship.
“Altin!” she called to him. She could see him calling back, through his helmet glass and through the goo. He looked heartbroken. And relieved. She smiled, wanting to comfort him. “Oh, Altin. I love you. We’ll figure it out.”
She saw him say something. She thought he was probably saying the same, trying to reassure her that they would get through this somehow. She saw him say, “I love you.” That was clear. She smiled again. Then he was swearing. She could tell not so much by the recognition of word shapes upon his lips as by the rage in his eyes. It agonized her. He would be blaming himself, wanting to save her. The helplessness would burn him worse than a fireball.
Another alien arrived. It drew itself up over the machine. It reached a tentacle down and moved Altin in his blob aside. It snaked more tentacles up, and once again the machine was lowering down.
The two aliens spent time going through the same processes that the lone alien had, running the machine back and forth over her. Orli was sure they were irradiating her to sterility this time. Machines that big could hardly be delicate enough for human bodies. It just didn’t seem possible.
The aliens flashed their light patterns back and forth, and she decided they had to be communicating in that way, probably talking about her like she were some rat in their lab. They were probably discussing who was going to cut her open or push the pin into her brain. Maybe they were congratulating themselves in anticipation of the accolades they would receive when they got back to their own world: “Why, look here at this new species that we’ve found. This one is a female. Just look at how she reproduces here. And look, a fine primitive brain.” The other aliens would all flash their lights and pat the new heroes of scientific discovery on the bulbs with lots of bulb-patting tentacles. Praise for their new great prize, Orli Pewter of planet Earth. She sighed, then realized she was wrong. At least in that. She would die Orli Meade of Prosperion.
The tentacle holding her right arm let it go, followed by the one holding her left. Then her left leg was free. She started to sit up, wondering if this was it, the moment they were going to drive the probe into her prizewinning rat brain.
It wasn’t.
With a great yank that felt as if it were going to jerk her leg right out of the joint, the aliens threw their prize away. Just like that, Orli was flying through the air.
She flew out over the edge of the machine and out over the grate—it reminded her of a waffle iron. It reminded her of looking down on the redoubts in Citadel.
The momentum of the toss carried her fifty yards or more, but soon she was falling down. She tried to expand herself, to catch the wind she’d been thrown into and glide, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t blowing hard enough to hold her up.
So she fell. The grate hurtled up at her. She was going to hit one of those thick protein beams, and that would be it.
She had to dive through one of the openings in the grate.
She angled herself and tried to use the wind that way. The grate grew closer.
She had to pick her target.
She could clear that one, she thought, spying one. Maybe.
No, she’d hit it. The one before instead.
She ducked, dove down, sliced through the air like a hurtling spear.
She made it under the farthest beam framing the square gap, but her heels clipped the lowest edge of it. Pain shot up her legs as she spun from the impact, her head flung up when her feet rebounded off the rough surface. The impact threw her into a sprawling backspin, and right after, she dropped into a blast of wind going in the opposite direction as the current above the grate. It struck her in the chest and straightened her, blowing her back the other way for twenty feet. But she was still falling.
Toward the next grate.
It was barely four hundred yards away.
Three hundred.
Jesus!
She tried to flatten out and slow the fall again. Nope. Not enough to mean anything.
One hundred yards.
Fuck me!
She angled down again, getting a small measure of control over her flight. She calculated which gap she would have to dive through.
That one. No, that one.
The beams seemed to be so much wider than the gaps now.
She shot through the square patch of emptiness cleanly this time. No impact on her heels.
The wind coming the other direction hit her like a bus.
With her head down as it was, the blast rolled her over, bending her at the waist and spinning her wildly. Now she was dropping like a rock. She had to turn, twisting in the air, trying to get her bearings. She was only a hundred feet from the grate.
Shit.
She dove straight down and gauged she was going to get pushed by the wind right into a crossbeam, so she angled at the last second. She nicked her toes on the way through.
A blast of steam hit her as she passed through this time as well, blinding her. Her toes burned like they were in boiling water after grinding down the beam at speed. But she wasn’t thrown off her trajectory, at least not until the switch in air current hit her again, blowing her back the other way. It flipped her over once more, but this time she adjusted more quickly and was soon angling down, plunging toward the next grate with the wind whistling in her ears.
There was a massive piece of machinery in the way.
She spread-eagled as best she could, made a sail of her slender body. A laser beam might have caught as much wind, at least so it seemed.
She tipped herself, yawing her body, trying to catch some help from the wind to blow her over the machine, give her a shot at a gap in the grate beyond it. She wasn’t going to make it. The machine was too big. She was going to hit that thing at 110 miles per hour.
A blur of gray shot past her, just below her. An alien streaking by. Its billow nicked her as it went past, spinning her wildly out of control. She spun and caught a blast of air churned by its passing, which rolled her as she commenced falling again. She hit one of its trailing tentacles—or it hit her, it was impossible to know. She bounced again. The sinuous limb gave beneath her weight, but even so, the blast of pain that followed told her she must have broken a rib. She hit another tentacle right after. God, that hurt. She was spinning wildly now. A third tentacle, barely the tip, whipped up
in the wind and smacked her across the back. The welt would be enormous if she lived.
She couldn’t right the spinning, and she could barely glimpse the grates whipping across her field of view. She couldn’t even tell which grate she was looking at when she saw flashes of crossbeams spinning in her vision. Was that the one above or below?
The sound changed right next to her head. The wind faded some, echoed differently off something close. She saw a streak of the green-and-brown protein whistle past. The lull in the wind lasted a breadth of a second, then, wham, she was hit by a new blast of hot, steamy air.
She used it to stop the spinning. She flattened out again. The next grate was coming fast. She could see an end to it. An edge of the grate, like the rim of some great black chasm beyond it. She glanced out over the darkness. Way off in the distance, maybe a mile or two away, there were lights. Other grates in the distance, other levels. From here she could make them out fairly clearly. They were decks. Platforms one above the next. She could see below, like staring into a black abyss, that there were more going down into the darkness. Many more. Miles and miles of them.
The one immediately below her was coming up fast. She couldn’t tell if she was going to clear the edge or not.
She wasn’t. The wind was blowing her back over it, not out over the abyss.
She dove, got her angle right. She made it through another gap, three sections shy of the edge.
“God damn,” she muttered as she passed through.
She turned and started angling back the other way, anticipating the change of wind. It came, just as she expected. It blasted her back the other way. At least that much was predictable!
She got her body under control right away, and fanned herself out enough to let the wind carry her out over the abyss. She looked up and saw that she must have just missed the edge of the grate above that last one. Maybe there was a God. Maybe just blind-ass luck.
She managed to get herself a good forty feet beyond the edge of the next platform, trying to get herself as far out over the abyss and away from the grate edges as possible. She wanted some space to work with so the next level’s wind wouldn’t blow her back over them again. She wasn’t sure she could keep diving through the eye of the needle, so to speak.
She shot right by the platform, plenty of room to spare. She gritted her teeth. Some small measure of victory.
She rotated as she fell, staying flat and steering with the wind against her palms. She was ready for the next change of the wind.
It hit her just as she expected it to. She made an arrow out of herself, tried to knife through it as best she could, trying to avoid dealing with the grate.
No luck. It blew her back over the edge of the next level. She ended up having to dive through a gap again. But she made it, and only one gap from the edge. The next air current change would get her much farther out over the open space. She was sure she could prevent having to dare those damn gaps again after that.
The wind change hit her, and she was totally ready for it. She managed to angle almost two hundred feet away from the grate she was falling toward. Now she had it down.
She managed to be almost four hundred yards over the abyss by the next sequence of alternating winds.
She stayed that way over the next two after that.
How long was this going to last? How long could she possibly fall?
She looked into the depths as she fell, able to focus on something other than what was immediately in danger of flattening her. The wind was roaring in her ears. Tears mixed with the condensation of steam, all of it running up her body in hot streaks that blew off in her wake like the dust from a comet’s tail.
The steam was getting thicker as she fell, and hotter, which hardly seemed possible. She could see the lights of the layered grates come to an end. Seven layers left.
What now?
Another alien shot past her. Again a glancing blow, cushioned some by the inflated nature of the soft flesh. She spun out of control again. Darkness, little rows of light from the grates. A tentacle hit her and spun her the other way, a powerful slap that sent her spinning farther out over the abyss.
An updraft hit her like a battering ram, and for a moment she felt as if she were rocketing upward again.
She wasn’t. She was just falling slower now. Not much slower, she quickly realized, still plummeting at what had to be eighty miles an hour or more.
She got her spin under control and flattened herself into the updraft. The steam coming up in it, the heat, was unbelievable. She wondered if she was blistering. By God, it was hot.
Now what?
A waggle in the wind made her shift her arms. The buffet stopped, but her new body position caused her to knife sideways.
She shot out of the updraft and was suddenly hurtling downward at full speed again.
Shit.
She angled back, trying to find the updraft. But where was it? She wasn’t a goddamn bird.
Then she saw something fluttering.
She squinted into the darkness. Did she see something fluttering? Maybe she was going mad right before she hit the bottom deck. There was going to be a bottom deck. She could see the platform lights coming to an end on either side of the abyss, rows of lights on the grates, which together looked like ladders climbing to the top of the ship from its dark, unseen bottom regions. The last rung was twenty seconds away. She supposed madness was the best way to enter into death. No fear that way. She could die thinking she was a bird, fluttering amongst the rest.
The flutter came again. More of a shadow against the darkness. Light bouncing off a puff of steam shaped it in relief. It was man shaped.
A headless man. Tumbling in the wind. Perhaps madness was upon her in full.
It zigged and zagged wildly. It puffed and shot up above her. Or she shot past it.
Something in the updraft. The air column was right there!
She leaned, yawed her body again. She swerved to her right.
Bam, there was the updraft again. It rippled the skin of her face with the violence of slowing her. She felt like she was shooting skyward again. Though she knew she was not.
The man shape fluttered to her left. It was cartwheeling past her now. Spinning back out of the column of air.
It was her spacesuit.
Shit!
She rotated and flattened, took as much braking effect as she could get out of the updraft. Now she was a bird. A bird of prey. She watched that fluttering object fall. She waited until it passed the grate it was falling by. She watched it. Watched for which way the wind blew.
The spacesuit spun in the new layer of air. It swooped up, came back toward the updraft. It nicked the edge of the updraft and ballooned, it whirled and spun up, then, leaflike, it fell away again, turning slowly and bouncing along the column of air like some bewildered tumbleweed.
She angled her body and shot down at it. She knew she was going to eat up what little space she had left to fall.
She shot toward it. It came up faster than she thought. It was turning. She was going to miss it. It turned back. She dove right into it. Hit it hard. The plastic edge of a belt compartment cut her open above the eye.
She didn’t care. She fought to untangle herself from it. The roar coming from beneath her was incredible now. It was a roiling noise that was louder than the wind. The steam was unfathomably hot.
She fumbled for the back of the suit. A new blast of air turned her over, spun her around. She didn’t care. She felt a strand of cable in her hand. She slid her hand to it. Grabbed the small device dangling there. She clutched it, drew it to her. She couldn’t see what was on the little screen. She didn’t have to. She knew which way to turn the dial.
She turned it quick, all the way. The steam was so thick now she couldn’t see at all.
A blast of wind hit her. Blew her sideways. She was still falling. But she knew it was momentum now.
The roiling noise was like thunder, the steam scalding.
She hoped
she could find the updraft again.
Something struck her hard. She bounced off it. Saw the shadowy form of an alien gliding past. She bounced along the curve of its billow, slowing some. Probably another broken rib. She rolled and tried to push off with her legs, but it was moving far too fast.
She pinballed around inside its trailing tentacles for a time. The upward whip of the last tentacle tip that struck her sent her spinning off vertically. She gripped the object in her hand like it was the very core of life.
It was.
She was alive. Drifting on the wind. Her Higgs prism in hand.
Chapter 22
The crowd of applicants, supplicants, and courtiers outside the throne room doors filled the grand hallway like a gilded fair. The costumes they wore—or at least they were costumes in Roberto’s eyes on this day—were gaudy and opulent. Their perfumes filled the air as loudly and anonymously as did the drone of their voices, all together in a lively mumble, punctuated here and there by the shrill noise of some woman’s laughter or the lecherous low undertones of men at lusty wit. To Roberto it all seemed one big party being thrown despite the teetering fate of his best friend and her new husband, Sir Altin Meade.
“You and I both know this is all bullshit,” he said as he pushed his way through the crowd. “Almost all of that was lies.”
Deeqa matched his pace easily with her long strides, but she said nothing. The courtiers paused as the two of them passed, most long beyond any awe at seeing people from another planet, but more than a few stricken by Deeqa’s dark, statuesque beauty. She was not a regular feature of the Palace, and so she at least was new.
“So why is the Queen lying to us? What is she covering?” he pressed. It was almost a private rant. “And what the hell were those three Citadel mages into? Did you see them? They looked like shit. Envette had blood all over her knees, like she’d been crawling in it.”
“You don’t know if it was hers or someone else’s,” Deeqa pointed out.
“I don’t, but I have a vivid imagination,” he said, shouldering past two men wearing matching coats of blue velvet. One of them turned with an eyebrow raised and his mouth opened, prepared to say something. But he saw who it was, the burly Earth warrior whom everyone in Crown recognized on sight for his role in saving the city during the war. That eyebrow lowered some, and when the fellow saw the feral look that flashed upon Deeqa’s face, his mouth shut as well, just before he turned around. He’d obviously seen something in her eyes, in the angles of her whole body, that promised she’d not learned to fight in rooms with climate control enchantments, taught by kindly instructors who spoke of honor as they explained point systems, trophies, and tournament rules.