The Galactic Mage (21 page)

“I was just there. And I had a goat up there all day before I went. It’s fine. I promise.”

Tytamon sighed, resigning himself to curiosity and to fate. His weathered face burst into a grin, the cautious cabal amongst his features put to rest. “Then let’s go. Show me to the moon, my boy. By all means, show me to the moon.”

Altin, having the Teleport Other spell still fresh in his mind from working with the goat, wove it together with the self-teleport spell, and after a few moments of careful incantation, they both vanished with a sucking of air that left the candles on Tytamon’s bench flickering and alone.

They emerged upon the parapet of Altin’s tower, and it took Tytamon only a few moments before he let out a low whistle and a gasp of awe. Just as Altin had not so long ago, the great sorcerer stood transfixed before the bright enormity of Prosperion for some long time. When he finally could, he smiled beneath his beard and muttered, “So that’s how we look from way up here.”

“Indeed,” agreed Altin staring up at the great blue wonder above.

There came another long silence as both of them contemplated the nature of what they saw, its magnitude both in beauty and in size. “It’s as if we don’t even count,” Tytamon said at last.

Altin looked puzzled, but Tytamon was too busy ruminating within his ancient mind. After a while, and what looked to Altin as if the old man had wiped away some tears, Tytamon turned round and clasped him by the shoulders. “You’ve done something great here, lad. Do you realize that? You’ve done something that’s never been done before. A real discovery. I’m not even certain what it means just yet, but it means something significant I’m sure. This is a lifetime’s work fulfilled. Your name will be listed as one of the greatest magicians of the age. Queen Karroll is going to have a fit she’ll be so pleased.”

Altin smiled and basked in the praise. But something in Tytamon’s words checked his pride from glowing too blindingly. “It’s not a lifetime’s work,” he said, just to make the record clear. “It’s just a spectacular start.”

Tytamon frowned at him. “Really? A start to what?”

Altin turned away from Prosperion’s bright blue glow and pointed to the stars. “I’m going out there.”

Tytamon shook his head in disbelief. “For what, Altin? There’s nothing there but stars, pinpricks of heaven’s light. And likely not meant for us.”

“Well, to begin, there are seven more planets I can find. If there are no satyrs and dancing nymphs up here on Luria as the legends said there were, then perhaps they are on the other planets instead. And how do you know that the stars are not meant for us? The priests say we are the children of the gods. I’m sure the gods will want to see their son if they’re actually out there peeping through. They’ll be happy when I arrive.”

“You don’t believe in gods, Altin. Don’t invoke them now.”

“I don’t know what I believe. But I know that there is only one way I’m ever going to find out.”

Tytamon continued to shake his head. “There’s never enough for a Six.”

“Why must you always go to Six? You always do that. I told you I’m not a Six. And you thought I would be dead before I ever got this far, but here we are. Gods. Why ruin a perfectly good moment?”

Tytamon was taken aback by Altin’s sudden flare of rage. But the boy was right. Tonight was not the night for the never-ending debate. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s a bad habit, and one I’m trying to break. And this is a spectacular night. We should celebrate.”

“We should,” agreed Altin, his irritation settling once more beneath his skin. “Tonight. I think I should go get Aderbury and bring him up as well.”

“I’ve got a hundred-year-old bottle of elven wine that is begging to be the first one opened on the moon,” Tytamon offered. “I’ll go get it while you chase down your friend.”

“You mean you’re not going to warn me about teleporting into Crown?”

“Altin, I believe you’re well beyond listening to me just now. If you don’t know the rules by now, you never will. And besides, you’ve already broken the laws of teleportation as we know them anyway, just by getting yourself up here. Who am I to tell you what to do?”

Altin knew that Tytamon didn’t entirely mean that, but it was good enough to suit his mood. “Ok, I’ll be back with Aderbury, and you go get the wine.” He started towards the scrying basin, but stopped and turned around. “If you think your little U-class teleport can handle it that is. If not, the Liquefying Stone is over there in that bowl upon the wall.”

Tytamon conjured the illusion of a fireball and made as if to throw, then cast himself back to Calico Castle with a hiss of emptied air. Altin laughed as he went to the basin to find a vacant room in Aderbury and Hether’s house, into which he planned to teleport himself. Twenty minutes later found the four of them sitting round the ragged, half-burnt table toasting Altin and the moon.

“To the moon,” they cheered.

“And to the stars,” he answered back. “Maybe this time I’ll find someone out there besides myself.”

Chapter
21

T
he hours that followed the orb’s retreat were a mix of euphoria and angst. Half the
Aspect’s
crew were ecstatic about their recent victory while the other half were fighting off a sense of dread and shock. Only the flurry of activity that followed prevented either group from falling fully on either side of the fence.

Orli remained busy in sick bay for several hours after the orb had disappeared into space, but the flow of wounded they’d expected from the orb’s apparent attempt to board had never come to pass. They got a few more patients as one of the crews working to seal off the crushed cargo hold had a minor mishap with a ruptured welding tank, but beyond a broken bone and some stitches, there was no longer much to do.

A few hours after the orb vanished, the alert level was once more lowered to Orange, sending Orli back down to the nursery and her lab. When she arrived, exhausted, she went straight through her lab and into the tiny room that was her quarters, barely four by nine, and threw herself atop the bunk that folded out from the wall. Closing her eyes and resting a forearm across her eyelids to block the glare from the light fixture mounted directly above, she tried to breathe the stress away with carefully measured breaths. God, she was tired. After a while she started to tremble, and eventually to cry.

She’d never seen so much blood in all her life. And the tension was horrible, the fear. And that poor woman. Dead. She couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. Orli suddenly wished she’d thought to learn the woman’s name. She seemed so young to die, and to not even have Orli know her name was a tragedy. To die alone and anonymous out here, so far away from anything alive and warm that might have cared, to die in the arms of someone who didn’t even know your name. The injustice was too enormous for Orli to let go. The whole of this existence was an injustice too enormous to let go.

Everything out here was so sterile and cold. So black and dark and absent of a shining sun. So white and clean and absent of a warming sense of home. It was hell. It had to be hell. Orli thought of the descriptions she had heard and read about hell, descriptions of a hot place burning; a place of endless fire and sulfur’s stench; of craggy, undulating ground, filthy and writhing with crawling, hideous misshapen souls in every stage of torture and decay. But that was a joke. Whoever had invented those stories had no idea what hell was really like. Not like Orli did. There was no rot or stench in hell, no filth or heat of fire. There was none of that. Hell was a cold hospital room on a sterile ship. It was a meticulously clean place of recycled air and water that was filtered through a thousand kidneys and six large machines and then kidneys and then machines, over and over and over until it lost all taste—or gained it depending on one’s state of mind. Hell was isolation on a ship where people died for stupid things and nobody knows their names. Hell was right here where Orli was.

She shuddered and tried to push the faces of the mangled men and women out of her head, to clear her mind of depressing thoughts about life aboard the ship. A futile task. And the images continued to plague her even as she dropped into a long and sorely needed sleep.

When Roberto finally woke her with a rough shake, she actually felt better despite the nightmares that had plagued her rest. “Wake up. Wake up,” he was almost pleading. “Jesus woman, the captain is going to have you freakin’ skinned.”

“What?” She was groggy.

“Didn’t you hear him call? He’s been trying to reach you for the last half-hour. I thought he was going to come down here and shoot you he was so pissed. That’s why I volunteered to come. They need you up on seven-deck. Now.”

“What?”

“Deck seven. Get your botany kit. They need you now. They needed you half an hour ago. Hurry. Jesus. You’re so fucking busted.”

She resisted the temptation to ask “what?” again and shook herself fully awake. She went to a cabinet and pulled out her field kit as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. “Why do they need me?” she asked as she headed towards the door.

“Not sure,” he said. “Something the Hostile left sticking in the hole. You better run. You can tell me about it at dinner. I’m on a timer too.” He patted her on the cheek and then turned and ran away.

She sprinted out after him and went to the elevator at the other end of the hall. A few minutes later found her nearing a large storage room on the ship’s uppermost deck. The corridor leading up to the room’s entrance was bustling with activity and was cordoned off and guarded at either end. She approached the two marines guarding this end and told them who she was.

“About goddamn time,” said one of them, a middle-aged sergeant she recognized but did not know by name. His counterpart, a younger woman, perhaps in her mid thirties, turned her face to the com-link on her shoulder and announced to someone that Ensign Pewter was on her way.

Orli shrugged at the burly sergeant and went through, passing groups of armored marines bristling with weapons of every size. They were clearly ready for a war. As she approached the double doors leading into the storage room they opened and out came a heavy-set man who introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Gray. “It’s this way, Ensign. I assume you’ve been briefed.”

“Nope,” she said, a bit nervous with all the guns and the very martial feel that was heavy upon the hall. “I haven’t been told a thing.”

“The Hostile deposited a substance in the hull breach before it released itself from the ship. Doctors Singh and Salvator have already had a look and neither can make a positive I.D. That’s why they sent for you.”

Orli could see the familiar faces of both Doctor Singh and Doctor Salvator as she and the lieutenant commander approached. They were standing amongst a group consisting of the captain, a handful of other officers and a few enlisted men situated near a scissor-lift parked beneath a large hole some twenty feet above. The hole was circular and had a very smooth edge, looking as if the orb had been extremely careful in its work before it went away. In place of the steel that would normally have filled the space was a dark greenish brown substance that appeared soft and marginally smooth. She caught herself staring up at it while she approached the group and had to force her attention to the officers as she gave a barely acceptable salute.

Orli exchanged warm smiles with the two doctors and one of the crewmen whom she knew from poker games on the recreation deck. “And this is how we found it when we came in,” the Lieutenant Commander was saying as they came upon the gathering of crew. “Sealed tight just like that. We didn’t lose a molecule of air.”

“You’re late, Pewter,” snarled the captain. “You screw this up and your court martial begins in the morning, you hear me?”

Captain Asad was always such a joy. She smiled meekly back at him. She really wanted to tell him to die in a fire, but she knew that probably wouldn’t do much good.

Lieutenant Commander Gray looked to Doctor Salvator, indicating that his portion of the briefing was at an end. Doctor Salvator picked up where the lieutenant commander left off, pushing her glasses up on her pale and lightly freckled nose. “He’s right. Tight as a wine cork and sealed up good. But they’re welding new hull plates on as we speak just in case. I’m sure you’ve seen what happens to champagne when the cork comes out. We’re not trusting that thing for a second.” She pointed up at the strange substance filling the hole.

Orli cringed as she thought of herself being sucked outside, an unwilling surfer on a wave of escaping air. No thank you. She sent thoughts of gratitude up to the men who were tromping around on the hull outside. A spacewalk was always a dangerous thing, even more so with a Hostile orb lurking somewhere.

“So,” went on Doctor Salvator with her slight Texas drawl, “we’ve been up to have a look, and we have no idea what the hell it is. It’s not mineral and it’s not organic either. At least not exactly. We tried them both. I’ve got degrees in geology, chemistry and biology and I can’t even make a guess. If you asked me which one it is, I’d have to say ‘yes.’” She leaned over to Orli and, gesturing with a shoulder towards the captain, whispered in her ear, “I reckon my psych degree will do me more good than any of the other three; he’s going to lose his ever-loving mind if we don’t figure out what it is soon.”

Orli looked over at Doctor Singh who only shrugged as his reply. This was definitely not his specialty.

“Ensign Pewter,” said Lieutenant Commander Gray, “if you could step onto the lift. We’d like to get your examination underway.” He touched her lightly on the back of the arm and nudged her towards the scissor-lift.

She moved with him to it and smiled patiently as the pimple-faced petty officer who operated the lift grinned at her with a smirk too smarmy to qualify as professional. She clamored up into the basket of the lift, and the Lieutenant Commander handed her field kit up after her once she was inside. She gave the petty officer a nod to let him know that she was ready to go up. He grinned lasciviously at her again and made no attempt to conceal the play of his gaze up and down her slender frame. She rolled her eyes and looked up at the hole above. How could he be thinking about sex at a time like this? They were all like this, the ones that weren’t serious and stern anyway; some things never changed.

The scissor lift jolted as the young man activated the control, and in the space of moments she was lifted to the hole. Snapping latex gloves in place, she reached up tentatively and pressed her fingers against the substance that was plugging up the gap. It gave slightly, like an industrial rubber mat. Only this one was six feet thick. And it was smooth. Not smooth like glass or plastic, but smooth like vinyl generally was.

She spent a few moments just studying it with her fingers and her eyes before deciding to try scratching a sample off its surface for a closer look. She took a scalpel from her pack and a sealable plastic sample bag and reached up to give it a cut. A voice in the back of her head, the one she never listened to, was telling her that this was a horrible idea, and her heart was pounding like a psychotic drummer as she reached up to make the scratch. The instant she did, the strange object went from dark tones to mottled white and gray. There was no sound or motion or jolt of energy, just a color and texture shift across the surface. Just that. But still it scared her half out of her palpitating wits.

“What the hell are you doing, Ensign?” barked the captain, accompanied by a collective gasp from everyone else below.

Her defenses came reflexively to bear as her heart continued to spasm in her chest. “I’m examining the goddamn thing like you told me to. What am I supposed to do, use ESP?” She cringed immediately and wished she could take the comment back, but the unexpected shift of the material had frightened her just as much as it had the rest of them. Adrenaline did the rest. The scissor-lift was already coming down.

She reached up to touch it again before it was out of reach. It was now hard as rock, and rough like rock too. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it was rock, likely granite or some other kind of quartz just like the Hostile projectiles were. But how could that possibly be? It hadn’t been that when she went up. She looked in her sample bag to see what she’d scratched off. There was a small piece, barely a crumb, but it looked like granite too. She tucked it into her bag and quickly zipped the sample up.

“Ok, that’s enough for now, Pewter,” said the captain. “Before you kill us all.”

Once she’d climbed out of the basket and was once more on the deck, she found herself confronted by several pairs of wide and eager eyes.

“Well?” said the captain for all of them, impatient but apparently recovered and still willing to hear if she’d learned anything despite having given them all a start. “What did you do? What did you find out?”

She’d expected him to berate her for the ESP remark. “It’s turned to stone now, if I haven’t missed my guess. At least the part that I can see. I tried to scratch it with a scalpel and then it turned to rock. Just like that. I don’t know what else to say.”

“What do you think it was before?” asked Doctor Salvator. “Before it made the change?”

She had to think about it for a bit. “It looked like an organic compound, but it might just as easily have been petroleum based. Somewhere between sap and plastic. I honestly don’t know.”

“You’re using different words to say the same things we couldn’t say,” Doctor Salvator joked, though the tension hadn’t quite left her doughy frame. She started to add something else but the captain cut her off.

“That’s fine, Ensign. You’ve been remarkably little help. And you are confined to quarters until I have time to figure out what I’m going to do with you. Orange alert and you are half an hour late responding when I call. You’re done. Dismissed.” He turned to his science team standing near and added, “You may still have access to her if, for some reason, your work requires her—specialty.” The last word was accompanied by a sneer.