Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (3 page)

“Oh no,” she said as she watched it emerge from the shadows.

“Oh no, what?” Altin asked, turning and following the direction of her gaze.

Up rose a billow of gray material, looking rather like a colossal parachute made from a film of mucus. It bloated with the prevailing wind, and it followed the tendril upward for a time, growing larger and larger as it drew near. Soon it was high above them. From within it, descending out of the space inside the gray, filmy dome, came a long body, at least three times longer than the billow was deep. She thought immediately that the creature looked like a soft, lumpy-stemmed mushroom made of snot—with lots of tentacles.

It was enormous. The billow, inflated and massive as it spread wide above her, had to be at least a hundred and fifty yards across, and nearly as deep inside. And the body that came out of it was a mucous gray tube that couldn’t be any less than three hundred yards long. It had two bulbs, a small one up inside of the billow and another at the center, and at the end of its very long, cylindrical body it narrowed, like the tapering of an insect’s thorax, though soft and seemingly malleable. An odd puckering of flesh at this terminal end reminded her of someone about to spit.

The large central bulb seemed to recommend itself as the creature’s head and face, or at least something approximately so, despite being located where it was. It swelled at the middle of the long, tubular body, not much below the line of the billow’s edge, and appeared as if the creature had swallowed something enormous and oblong in the way of a python that has just had a meal of something extremely large. Around the equator of this bulbous area blinked three large, silvery eyes, massive half spheres that bulged out of black eye sockets, each of which were formed by concentric rings of black flesh like stacked rings embedded in the soft flesh.

It was also from this bulbous central part of the creature’s body that the tentacles came. One of them, the first tendril she had seen, emerged near the top of the protuberance and now stretched taught like a guy-wire up to the grate above, holding the creature in place despite the wind. Several other tentacles waggled freely, loose and streaming like smoke plumes in the currents blowing by. Five sprouted from the bulb above the eyes, spaced evenly around, and five more emerged from beneath those blinking orbs, also equally spaced all around, ten tentacles in all.

The creature snaked a tentacle down at the two of them, Altin and Orli standing there. Once again it flattened a few of its discs out to guide the tentacle toward them. It came waggling down, its tip flexing, not quite sharp, and it tapped once against the back of Altin’s head.

“Oh God,” Orli said as Altin muttered something profane and entirely Prosperion.

The tendril tapped twice more on Altin’s helmet, then right after, and quick as a dart, it dove down through the grate beneath him. It threaded its way back up and wrapped itself around the beam several times, while yet another tentacle came down and slithered around him, wrapping him up in a stack of coils.

“I can’t imagine this is going to end well,” Altin said, though he sounded more curious than afraid.

Orli could hardly believe he was so calm. She jumped up and tried to pull the tip of the tendril away, intending to unwind it. She couldn’t budge it. It might as well have been three-inch rebar. She reached for her blaster. It was gone.

“I think it’s trying to do something,” Altin said, still remarkably restrained. “I can feel pressure all over my suit. It’s like a thousand fingers all over me, squeezing and prodding me everywhere.”

He was jerked up and away before she could reply. She screamed his name. The tendril curled up into the blowing mist. Another tendril came down, this one having been first sent up to the platform above, wound through it, and sent back down. It locked together with the tip of the one that had Altin wrapped up. Both went taut between the two grates, with Altin like a joint in the middle of them.

There followed a loud, sucking sound, and in that moment the creature sucked its puffy parachute-like billow in. The massive dome of shimmering flesh vanished almost too quickly to be seen, settling into the smaller bulbous area that she’d noted near the top of the creature’s body, situated up inside the billow earlier. That bulb became pregnant with the billow’s mass and now matched the central one for size, the whole thing together looking like two scoops of snot-flavored ice cream on a mucous cone—a five-hundred-yard-long one with tentacles and eyes.

From the larger, central bulb a light came on, emitted from one of the creature’s eyes. It shone down on Altin, the beam bright and tight, as focused as any spotlight could be. It beamed into Altin’s face, and she could only guess how blindingly bright it must seem to him, being that he was at least two hundred yards closer to it than she was.

The beam changed colors, from white to blue, then green. The tentacles around Altin flexed. Gaps opened up here and there between the coils. Still the light shone. Orli shouted up to him, but she knew he couldn’t hear her over the infernal wind and all the other noise, the roiling rumble from down below and all the thumping and hissing coming from everywhere.

Altin was upside down now. Another tentacle had been brought to bear and was prodding at him again. It was too dim to make out his features in the darkness, with the distance and with the misty wind, but she was sure he must be terrified.

Then he was coming down again. The tendril that had been wound through the grate above elongated, stretching and thinning some as it lowered him down. Orli realized as it did so that there were colors flashing all up and down the creature’s body now. All the colors of the rainbow, dappled with gray, making patterns on its skin. The lights flashed on the puffs of steam that blew by, painting them to ghosts of rainbows. Orli realized the steam was rising up through the grates.

The added illumination from the enormous creature revealed more of the area around her. She could see that the grate they were on was indiscernibly long. She was sure she could see for a half mile in either direction at least, and yet there was no sign of a terminal wall in any direction. Just blowing mist. And strange alien machines.

Huge formations of the rough, green-brown protein rose up from the grate, the material shaping the alien constructs. They were blocky and towering, dotted with enormous glowing bulbs. The nearest had long flutelike chimneys, or so they seemed to her, which rose straight up and disappeared through the grate above. Levers thrust out thrice as long as she was tall. Holes were sunk into it as well, perfectly round and, by her best guess, about the perfect diameter to stick a tentacle inside.

There were other machines beyond it. The largest were giant melon-shaped things that sat upon the grating, braced in place by what looked like woven nests. The melon-things she thought might be reservoirs of some kind, tanks perhaps, but whatever they were nesting in was translucent, a dull seaweed brown, and having the look of coiled hose. Light pulsed dimly from inside of the strands, suggesting they were hollow and contiguous, and perhaps filled with something liquid moving inside.

These structures, reservoir and brace, were also attached to long chimneys, which again ran straight up and vanished through the grate above. More bulbous lights glowed here and there along their length.

There were other machines, many others. All of them massive and impossible to define. In some ways, they seemed very familiar, obviously equipment with functions like any other machine. But the sheer scale of them made function impossible to guess.

Altin was taken to one of them.

The creature traveled across the grate by hauling itself against the wind. One tentacle was locked to the grate Altin and Orli were on, the same grate with the machine it was heading toward. Two more tentacles were stretched up to the grate above now. The titanic being pulled itself against the gusting wind with these taut lines, its limbs like ropes, and with yet another tentacle, it laid Altin down upon the flat surface of a machine that was some quarter mile from where Orli was.

Orli couldn’t see him anymore. She could only see the enormous creature at work. She gathered up the three tubes that were plugged into her suit and ran as quickly as she dared along the grate, making right-angle turns to zigzag her way to him over the crisscross network of beams.

A puff of steam came up from below, thick like fog, and as it blew over her, she thought she might be in danger of heatstroke if such occurred too often. Her spacesuit wasn’t cooling at all that she could tell, and sweat ran from her in rivers. Worse, the steam made it hard to see, forming droplets on the helmet glass and making traversing the grate dangerous at best.

The light above grew brighter as she approached. She paused long enough to look up.

Another of the massive alien creatures blew into view, coming from the opposite side of the machine that Altin was on. It simply appeared out of the darkness like a phantom on the wind. It caught itself with tentacles wrapped around the grate above, stopping its flight abruptly, then sent more tentacles down toward the grate in places around the machine. Soon it had guy-wired itself in place beside the machine as the first alien had done. The two creatures began flickering and flashing back and forth, prismatic colors sliding up and down their lengths. It added a little extra light to help Orli run.

And Orli was a runner, her conditioning supreme, but the damn spacesuit and the damn tubes attached to it and the damn crisscrossed beams of the grate made movement agonizingly difficult. And then there was the wind.

As she neared the machine, she quickly realized that it was so huge that she couldn’t possibly see what was happening on top of it. She’d have been better off staying where she was. At least back there she’d had some kind of angle. All she could see up close were the three tubes that had been plugged into Altin’s suit hanging down the side of the machine like lengths of coarsely made rubber hose. “Altin,” she cried out, knowing it was pointless. It was.

Something was being lowered from the darkness high above the upper deck of the machine. A light came on, glaringly bright. It came from the surface that Altin lay upon, shining upward and illuminating whatever it was that was coming down.

The object was a three-pronged device with long and thick tubes like fingers protruding from a blocky central mass. Attached to the blocky section of the device were lengths of the same hose-like material Orli had seen the melon tanks nesting in. These hoses, or pipes, or whatever they were, ran upward through the grate and attached to some other very large device mounted on the underside of the grate above. She could see it well because of how bright the light was shining up from the machine Altin had been set upon. These tubes, sinuous as they were, appeared to be the lone source of support for the large, three-pronged device, suggesting they must be tremendously strong.

The fingerlike prongs themselves, and the central mass from which they came, were made from the same green-brown material that seemingly everything else on the ship was. But the tips of them were different. On each was a black half dome that shone as if made of glass or some kind of semisolid liquid. None of them were quite the same size, nor were the prongs themselves identical in thickness or in length. Whatever they were, the shortest, thickest of them was being lowered right down at what had to be where Altin lay.

First she thought he might be crushed. Then she wondered what they might be doing … or emitting. She hoped he wasn’t being irradiated to death.

She considered climbing up one of the tubes jammed into his suit, but thought better of it. What if she pulled it out and it really was his only source of air?

She needed to do something.

Think, Orli, God damn it, she told herself. Think. Take a breath and do something.

She turned her gaze downward. Looked through the grate at what was below. The ship was huge. She and Altin couldn’t go up easily, but they could go down. What was down there?

The light from the machine was blasting upward, but there was still enough bouncing back from above, plus the prismatic color coming from the two massive aliens, to reveal quite a bit below, though often the light bounced off streaks of blowing steam, which turned white and still reminded her of spirits streaking past. Some were very large, and their passing obscured everything in blinks of ghoulish mist on a field of darkness.

The platform below her was identical to the one she was on. The machines were different. But there were many of them.

The ballooning billow of an alien streaked into view from her left, barely twenty yards beneath her. It came so quickly it startled her. None of its body lights were on. Or at least, not very brightly, not like the two doing whatever was happening to Altin glowed. This one had little flickers of color that shimmered here and there on an endless field of mucous gray as it blew past. It took nearly half a minute for it to glide by.

She watched after it, hoping in the dim luminescence that she might spot the silhouette of one of those chimneys coming up nearby, something she and Altin could shimmy down.

Of course there were none.

There were no wires, no ropes, no pipes, tubes, or that weird, glowing nest material anywhere in sight. The only distinguishing anything at all was a triangular bit of prismatic light probably a half mile away, ironically pretty and optimistic in color, but nothing hopeful in the end. If it had wires or pipes she could climb, she damn sure couldn’t see them from here. Which meant there was nothing. Just a five-hundred-yard drop at least. With what had to be a fifty- or sixty-mile-per-hour crosswind in between. Not good.