Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (44 page)

The heat grew.

She blew back toward the bulkhead, realizing as she did that she was, at some point, going to have to figure out how to stop without hitting the damn thing so hard she’d break the rest of her ribs and who knew what else.

As she got closer, she saw more of the hook-tailed aliens, “hooks,” as she thought of them. They looked like ants in a line. Most of them moved angularly, heading down into the dimness or coming up from below.

She paralleled a line of them moving downward toward the starboard hull, or at least what she thought of as the starboard hull. God knew how far off her bearings were at this point. After what seemed an eternity, she found it, a great dark expanse rising up out of the steam as if it were the end of some fog-filled universe. Soon she was sliding along the rough surface of it, braking her momentum with her left elbow and leg—agonizingly—and working the Higgs prism to lower herself down.

Finally she found the bottom, and, to her great relief, it was solid, at least along the hull. That was the only bit of relief, however, for it was so hot and the steam lay upon it so heavily that she started to panic. She crouched, prepared to leap back up, and fumbled frantically for the Higgs prism dial. The device had gotten so hot she could hardly handle it, and her hands trembled terribly. The broken one was useless.

She realized she was losing it, and closed her eyes, calming herself. Making herself breathe in long, hot breaths of all-but-liquid air. Agony, but not instant death.

She could still see, at least a little bit. The steam whirled around, thicker and thinner in wisps and whorls.

The sound of the boiling was incredible, like an avalanche rumbling from everywhere in the mist, under her feet and thrumming beneath her hand upon the hull, like a million unseen hammers were beating upon the bottom of the ship, up and down all its length. The noise filled the space all around her, although perhaps more so from off to her right.

A few more moments spent calming herself and she realized she could endure it for a bit longer, long enough to look for something that might help. Maybe she wouldn’t have to go back up just yet. Maybe there really would be a weapon she could find.

She knew that was a ridiculous hope, but that was what she was running on at this point. A wave of heat washed over her that nearly set her to panicking again. She looked to the flesh on her forearm, the soft, paler skin on the underside. It wasn’t blistering, but it was turning blotchy and pink.

Get moving, damn it.

She started along the hull, heading in the direction where she’d seen the hooks angling toward.

Something whooshed past her head. She felt the brush of it against her hair, and couldn’t tell if it was something physical or just a gust of wind.

A huffing sound accompanied it as it rustled past. She ducked reflexively and crouched down. She couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction through all the steam. More huffing was coming from above and behind her. She waited, staring into the mistiness. She was fairly sure she was being slowly cooked as she waited.

Something dark whooshed by, something curved. A hook. She just saw the shadowy arc of it coming at her and jerked her head aside. The alien huffed and hustled past. She shuddered. At the speed it was traveling, that hook could have taken her head off, or sunk right into the back of her head and hauled her off like a pig carcass in a slaughterhouse.

She shuddered a second time, then listened for more aliens coming. Silence. She had to keep moving; she didn’t have time to linger down here, or she’d be a cooked pig anyway. A cooked little human cockroach.

She headed in the direction of the bulkhead, the direction the hook that had almost hit her had just gone. She wove back and forth away from the wall a little, looking at the ground for something that might help. She didn’t know what. Anything. Altin’s helmet. His backpack unit. An alien ion rifle with a full stock of plasma grenades. Anything.

No such luck.

She came to the bulkhead and found nothing at all. Although she could hear the sounds of the hook aliens running around in the steam above. From the noise of them, and the way the sound shifted sometimes, a bit of an echo, she thought they might be running into some kind of corridor. Some of them sounded hollow, and she could make out little grunts as well.

She crept along the base of the bulkhead, moving toward the boiling sound. She crouched as low as she could, but the heat grew too intense. There was some shielding effect as long as she stayed low, so she knew she was nearing some kind of edge—she was on a ledge perhaps. She wasn’t about to discover where that edge was on accident, however, so she backed off. One thing was not hard to locate, however, for the roaring of a wind vent came from just above, loud enough to be distinct from the massive, rolling boil.

She backed away and listened to the sounds above her, parsing the noise of the hooks moving in and out of something from the rest. She looked at her forearms again. They were turning pinker, like a bad sunburn on the way. She had to get out of this.

She set the Higgs prism and jumped up along the wall. She hoped she didn’t fly right up into the path of one of the damn hooks. Might as well jump into freighter traffic. She didn’t.

She drifted up out of the thickest steam and found that her suspicions had been correct. There was a hole in the bulkhead: a big one, twenty yards across, roughly circular, as if it had been burrowed by the hooks themselves.

Hooks were coming in and out of it in a steady flow. The ant analogy worked almost perfectly. Some of them were angling up along the hull, heading back down the length of the ship. Others peeled off and angled up and across the bulkhead.

They ran along the vents and gripped the cross members as they went across, preventing themselves from being blown off the wall. The wind blew the length of their bodies out like shrimp-shaped flags, but their mustache tentacles held them tight and they traveled right along anyway. They’d get to the narrow horizontal bands of unvented protein that separated the levels and scurry along flat again, making the transitions from calm to windblown easily and without ever losing speed.

The vents ran the length of the bulkhead as far as she could see. Each layer of the ship was defined by this incredible wind factory. Impressive, but impossible to appreciate given the nature of her current agonies.

She turned back and regarded the opening in the bulkhead. If she went in, she could probably keep herself above the backs of the hooks traveling in and out of the corridor, like a cockroach crawling on the ceiling.

She got herself to the opening, drifting over the top of it. She reached down to feel for any wind. There was none. So her plan might work.

Except she didn’t know what her plan was now.

What was her plan?

Hell if she had a clue.

She waited to see if any of the aliens coming and going paid any attention to her.

They did not.

She wondered if they could even see her. It was possible that the big aliens with the billows were too big to notice a puny human, but it seemed like these smaller creatures ought to.

Or else they really didn’t care. Maybe cockroaches didn’t bother them.

Maybe there were poisoned traps somewhere. Or an exterminator.

Ugh. She could be running right into one.

She shrugged. She had to do something, so she was committed now.

She lowered herself down into the corridor. No more than eight or nine yards separated her from the back of an alien running in, but as long as she moved carefully, she could pull herself along the top and stay above the scuttling traffic of them all.

She peered down into the darkness. There were no lights ahead, no round rings of violet or ovals of orange light. The hooks themselves, they glowed a little, though. The farther into the tunnel they got, the more they did, a pale gray light that formed a line in the distance. From the way the light of their wide bodies turned to a thread in the darkness, the tunnel was very long.

She looked back into the long stretch of the ship behind her, at the stacks of grates climbing up out of the steam and out of sight. One guess was as good as another.

She pulled herself along the ceiling, heading deeper into the tunnel. The going was slow, and she had to do it with only one hand. It was very dark. The aliens didn’t throw off much light. She was tempted to pull the small flashlight out of her utility belt, but decided against it. If the damn things communicated with light—at least the big ones did, she didn’t know about the hooks—she didn’t want to turn it on and announce that she was here. They were doing a fine job ignoring her still, and she didn’t want to ruin it.

She pulled herself along. She must have done so for a half hour or more. Finally she came to an intersection. Hooks were crossing … on the ceiling.

Of course they were, the bastards.

She made her way carefully to the intersection and looked left and right. The aliens stayed on the ceiling as they traveled down that one. That wasn’t so troubling. And there was something glowing in the distance to the left.

She inched across the ceiling and waited for three aliens to scuttle past. She pushed in after them and rotated the dial on her Higgs prism. Soon she was standing on the floor.

It is hard to appreciate simple things like walking and gravity until one has done without them for a very long time. Improvised travel along ceilings and through wind-blasted deck levels gave her a new respect for simply being on her own two feet.

She looked back and saw another hook coming her way. Her first instinct was to run, but instead she crouched down and let it run past. It never slowed at all. Not even the twitch of a tentacle or the dip of its hook as it ran past. She might as well have been invisible.

She tried to jog along in its wake, but the jolt of each step was too much for her ribs, sucking the wind right out of her lungs. She wouldn’t be any use to Altin lying there unconscious for an hour. So she had to walk.

She went toward the distant glow, ducking each time an alien scooted past even though she didn’t quite need to.

The light grew steadily brighter as she went along. She thought she must have walked well over an hour that way, until eventually she discovered that it came from a corridor branching to her right. She peered down that one and saw that it ran another several hundred yards ahead. Something was very bright beyond.

She crept toward it.

A massive chamber opened out above her. It reached well up into the distance, several miles at least, and in its center, filling almost the entire space as far as Orli could see, was what appeared to be a giant bubble. It was filled with a clear fluid, like water, as clear as any she’d ever seen. She couldn’t be certain it was water, but there was no odor in the vast chamber, so she thought it likely that it was. That and the fact that there were plants growing inside, long, sinuous vines reaching upward like a kelp bed, though these were brighter shades of green, and some were red or orange or black. They grew in wide clumps, and were illuminated by the brilliance of the blue light that filled the chamber and the giant … well, tank, for that’s what the bubble seemed to her. In fact, the longer she looked into it, the more it reminded her of the giant fish tank her mother had kept back on Earth when Orli was a child. Except this one had to be ten miles wide and at least three or four high, and of course all the water was boiling.

She glanced around the outside of the tank, suddenly aware of how long she’d been looking into it. Nothing was coming at her. There didn’t appear to be anything inside looking at her either, though from her current location, she couldn’t see much for all the long ropes of green and orange and black.

A narrow space ran around the edge of the tank on either side, no more than ten yards separating the massive liquid-filled vessel from the chamber wall. She touched the side of the tank as she peered around its edge, tentatively testing its temperature with the palm of her hand. There was very little heat coming off. It was softer than she’d expected it to be as well, like it was made from a membrane, something grown, and perhaps even alive.

She moved around the tank a little ways, trying to see deeper into it through the forest of long, ropy plants, waggling their way upward and out of sight. She got to a wide gap between a clump of them and discovered that, more astounding than the giant tank, or even plants that could grow in boiling water, there was a monster floating in the middle of it all.

Filling perhaps a quarter of the tank’s total volume was a great spotted blob, its flesh awash in black and gray and yellow. It looked like a dirty oil cloud churning beneath the sea. The colors of its skin moved around as if independent, the shapes of each cellular, like hundred-foot-wide microbes crawling around on it. They flattened or grew oblong as they squeezed around on it, pinching together into figure eights sometimes or stretching out into long, gooey-seeming strands. They’d shift from black to yellow to gray, none of them staying the same for long. Every so often one of them would flicker with light, then several nearby would follow suit, and then a prismatic blast would follow for a time, beaming out of the tank against the chamber wall, painting it in rainbow colors and patches of gray. Orli thought the patches of gray might actually be colors she just couldn’t see.