Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (45 page)

Whatever they were, they had to mean something, though she had no way to know what. It didn’t look like anything. It wasn’t shaping images like the aliens that had examined her and Altin had done.

The wall upon which the colors were projected, the wall around the tank itself, was soft and white. And for the first time since coming onto the ship, she realized it wasn’t rough in the way of the hard protein from which everything else seemed to have been made. This was rough in a different way, like sandpaper or, given the pale white color, maybe more like the belly of a shark.

The thing in the tank, the creature, shone its prismatic display on the pale wall for a time, and then the pattern went away. Then the creature was simply black and gray and rather golden for a time. It had a luster to it, as if it were polished and very smooth. She thought it was beautiful, though for some reason it terrified her too.

She watched it and finally noticed that inside the giant boiling fish tank there were hook aliens as well. Several of them crawled around along the bottom, apparently gobbling up small blackish objects that had fallen down there. She thought they might be excrement.

They opened up their little puckered protrusions and, with their tentacles, handed the round globules into themselves. Lots of them were doing it.

Others were crawling around on the flesh of the undulating mass, the big thing inside. Seeing them crawling around on it, looking like larvae or little bits of wriggling rice, gave her a sense of scale for the monstrous thing. She set her Higgs prism to zero and pushed off from the ground, wanting to get a better look at the colossal thing.

When she was nearly a mile off the ground, she was high enough to see that the little ones were blowing bubbles of something syrupy and brown. She had a feeling she knew what that was. Others were blowing bubbles of pink or gray. She wondered what those did, but she was pretty sure she didn’t really want to find out, at least not firsthand. The bubbles clung to the giant alien’s skin, placed there upon it like stitched-on beads. Orli had no idea what was going on.

From this height, however, Orli got a better idea of the sheer enormity of the alien within. Suddenly the long, tentacled aliens with their billows and bulbous cores seemed like nothing, bare wisps of stringy servitude. Drones, entirely insignificant. That thing in there was at least three miles across at its thickest parts, though it was hard to say for sure. Its soggy form kept changing, stretching and globing about, making it impossible to estimate.

She pulled herself up the surface of the tank, making great time at zero gravity using her hand and both feet. As she did, she angled herself around it as well. When she got perhaps a quarter of the way around the tank and just past the halfway point, around the widest of its bubbled bulge, she saw that the big alien had a tuft of tentacles growing out of its top, almost like a patch of hair. It reminded her of the writhing threadlike roots on a garlic bulb, the alien one monstrous bulb of shifting color, turned bottom up and reaching out of the water with all those filaments. There were thousands of them. She knew they were not threadlike, though. She was sure the tentacles were no less thick than those of the long, billowy aliens, but by comparison to its sheer mass, they seemed delicate fibers—at least from this distance.

Whatever their size, they waved up into the heights above the creature, out of the boiling water, where they vanished into steam coming off the surface. The steam concentrated itself at the top of the chamber, thick like smoke, and shaped into a whirling disc like a massive hurricane cloud viewed from space. She had no idea what the creature was doing with all those arms reaching into it, for its purpose within the steam cloud was entirely obscure.

She also couldn’t say how any of this was going to help her find Altin.

She continued to pull her way around the tank. It was widest at the midway point, so she was able to adjust gravity a little and make even better speed with some help from it sloping upward now.

She pushed herself along with her feet, just enough gravity to give her contact, but not enough to slow her down. Her runner’s legs gave her speed, and eventually she rounded far enough to count herself on the back half of the tank.

She watched more of the oil-cloud alien’s light shows on the wall for a time, wondering if she might maybe translate it somehow. She’d learned the common tongue of Kurr easily enough. Maybe she could figure this language out.

That’s when an image of the
Glistening Lady
appeared.

It came from the big garlic-glob alien in the fishbowl, a projection that was obviously Roberto’s ship, for it could be no other, the slender, silvery ship clear as it could be backed by a field of star-speckled black.

Orli wondered why it was beaming that. Roberto’s ship was on Prosperion, wasn’t it? Was that, like, a recording? Or was Roberto out there somewhere? Perhaps he really had gotten away.

And come back.

Hopefully that wasn’t an image of the ship they’d captured.

She pulled her way closer to the prismatic light show playing on the sharkskin wall. She wanted to call out. To wave.

The lights went out.

She could still see the ship.

She panicked. Was that a damn window, or just an image left there now? The alien hadn’t done that with its other projections.

She ran along the curve of the tank toward the image. She ratcheted down gravity and launched herself up at the wall, rolling the Higgs prism back again to brake her speed, and then set it to zero when she got there.

It was a window. A huge one, deep. She was looking through a half-mile-thick pane of window glass, or something just like it. But that was the
Glistening Lady
. There could be no doubt. She waved. She did shout this time. “Roberto! God damn it, get us out!” She pounded on the glass. It felt rough like the protein of the hull and grates. She pounded anyway.

She turned back, faced the big alien with its onion hairs all rising up into the steam.

“Let us go, God damn it. We haven’t done anything to you.”

She saw as she looked back across that there was another image on the far wall. It was so far away she could hardly make it out, even though it was probably a mile wide. It looked like Yellow Fire. The red world. The planet viewed from orbit.

“No,” she said, realizing what was happening. “No!”

The
Glistening Lady
moved out of view, laterally, as with the motion of this ship, not Roberto’s. Orli screamed Roberto’s name. The window went away. She was staring at the white wall again.

A blinding flash of light shot out from the alien in the tank, rolling over her. She had to turn away. It passed over her and played on the wall a few hundred meters left of where she was. It sparkled and glowed, and then there was the rift in space, visible through it, a great black rent with a pale pink flicker at the edges like fire. The stars around the rift were like the flesh of space, making the tear itself seem a bleeding gash.

It was growing bigger. Or for a moment, at least, she thought it was growing. Then she realized what was really happening. The ship—with her in it—was moving toward it.

It was huge, widening as they drew nearer and nearer, yawning darkness. The fiery pink flickers of its rim disappeared beyond the edge of her window’s view. Total blackness.

Then the alien ship was through.

Chapter 46

S
ensors came online shortly before navigation did, weapons right after. They were just over the four-hour mark on the restart and making great progress. The specter of the four alien ships Roberto and Squints had seen coming through the wormhole had given the crew a forty-five-minute bump in efficiency that none of the crew would have thought possible prior. And that accomplishment might have been met with appreciation by the
Glistening Lady
’s captain had it not been for the fact that the first thing he saw when the sensors came up was a ship lifting off the surface of the planet. From its position in the formation around the dig site, he knew instantly that it was the same ship Orli and Altin had been taken into.

The great craft rose steadily up from the rocky red soil. Roberto could barely see it through the camera relay on the surface, due to a particularly nasty storm blowing down below, but between its shadowy shape rising above the rest, and the confirmation via other wavelengths, there was no doubt: it was leaving. The only question was, was it
leaving
leaving or coming the
Glistening Lady
’s way?

“Deeqa, get up here,” he called. “We may need to kick some ass in a minute.” He turned to Squints. “Strap yourself into that seat back there, junior. Do it now.”

The redheaded youth did immediately as he was told.

Roberto’s ship only carried four nukes, but he armed them all. The ion cannon and both lasers were charging by the time Deeqa slid into the copilot’s seat. She only needed a minute to assess what was happening. “Well, this will be fun. You sure it saw us?”

“Planet rotated us into range just before I got camo up. Be surprised if it didn’t.”

“It’s going to read our heat signature anyway.”

“I know. But you never know.”

The alien vessel took its time about breaching the clouds, and in the twenty minutes it did so, the
Glistening Lady
had prepared itself should the vessel decide to attack.

The alien ship took a position just above the upper atmosphere and stayed there, its orbit in perfect synchronicity with the planet itself.

“What the hell are they waiting for?” Roberto asked.

Deeqa swung her chair around, stretched her long body to the navigations computer, and tapped something into that console. She retracted herself and tapped in more commands. “Not picking up any scans on us,” she said. “Not saying I could if they didn’t want me to, but not seeing anything coming this way. Maybe they still don’t see us, just like last time.”

“Yeah, they didn’t seem to pay any attention to us down there on the planet either … until they did. Then Altin and Orli were gone. I never should have talked them into it.”

“The last time you told this story, Sir Altin was eager to go as well.”

“He was. I’m just whining. I hate not knowing what they are up to.”

Tracy came briskly in and took up her place at navigation. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said, and quickly set herself to assessing the situation, as Deeqa had.

“So are we going to fight them?” Squints asked.

Tracy turned back and looked as if she’d forgotten they’d gotten a new crewman. She looked back to Roberto after, though. It was a fair question.

“Not if they don’t screw with us,” he said.

“What if they take off like those other ones did?” the young Prosperion asked. “We gonna chase them down?”

“If we have to.”

Tracy grimaced, but Squints looked eager for the fight. “I need one of those light-beam rifles you guys carry,” he said. “And a sword. I’ll fight. Wouldn’t be my first.”

“I’ll holler if it comes to that,” Roberto said. “Now be quiet. We need to think. Tracy, what’s the depth on the dig now?”

“Eighteen point six miles. The heart chamber is breached.”

“Shit. I knew it. They probably pulled him out of there. God damn it. What if he’s dead?”

“It just opened,” Deeqa said, pulling up the readings. “It’s still hot around the edges where the diggers were going at it. They’d have to have worked pretty fast to get him out, and even more so to harvest all the Liquefying Stone.”

“Are we going to go save him?” Squints asked. “Whoever he is.”

“Shut up, kid.”

“If we’re going to save him, we need to go now,” Deeqa said. “You know Putin is sitting there right now ready to push his button, even if the general and the director aren’t.”

Roberto couldn’t help being glad that at least the ship Altin and Orli were on was off the surface now. He felt guilty for it, for, in a way, not caring about Yellow Fire like that, but, well, Yellow Fire—Blue Fire, for that matter—was an intangible. A bunch of glowing rocks that Altin and Orli said was alive and in love. Roberto loved love, but, he loved his human friends more. And he loved his crew. He wasn’t going to risk them for some damn Hostile world. He’d feel guilty about it forever, of that he was sure, just as he would never forget how it felt to blast the doomed spaceship
Liberty
into oblivion. But he wasn’t going to go down there for Yellow Fire. He couldn’t. Not with the other ship in sight. What if they did try to get away, shoot off after the other four or, God help them, even back through the goddamn rift?

“Tracy, see if you can detect the gravity wake on those four that left. Deeqa, you’re watching that one for the same, right?”

“I am.”

“You guys with me if we have to chase that fucker into that wormhole?”

Deeqa turned to him, her expression stoic and, by her tone, the question not rhetorical. “Are you being serious?”

“As a heart attack. Orli and Altin are on that thing.”