“Pulse is weak,” she reported. “If you yank her out of there, a whole lot of other things could go wrong. We need to assess the damage first.”
Roberto looked horrified. “How the hell are we going to do that?” He winced with pain as his face contorted with the outburst.
“You don’t have a ship’s doctor?”
“Nobody answered my ad yet. And Liu Chun is a trained combat medic.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Roberto!” She turned back to Altin, looking just as horrified. “Can you get Leopold?”
Altin was already nudging the doctor telepathically. He found him napping, and it was some work to wake the man up. He quickly relayed the situation, and the doctor allowed himself to be teleported to the scene immediately.
Despite the urgency of the circumstance, Altin couldn’t help but note how much weight the doctor had lost. The last time he’d seen the man, he would have guessed him going nearly twenty stone, but there he was, likely just over ten or so. He hardly recognized the man.
The doctor assessed the situation instantly and was soon kneeling beside the woman trapped beneath the tank. He placed his hands on either side of her face and began to sing. He sang for several moments, and, while Altin was not a healer himself—the one school of the eight in which he had no power at all—he could tell that there was something wrong with the doctor’s chant.
A moment later the doctor shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said. “The mana is wrong.”
“What do you mean, the mana is wrong?”
“Look for yourself,” he said. “I have no idea how you were able to bring me here.”
Altin looked into the mana and found it as it always was, a vast, unchanging constant of pink mist. He realized immediately his mistake. He discreetly stuffed his ring into the band of his spacesuit’s utility belt and looked into the mana again.
He gasped aloud at what he saw. It was much like it had been when Altin had approached the planet Blue Fire for the first time. Except that, rather than a wide, flat plane of mana being pulled into the dark absence, the black anti-globe that was her essence in the mana stream, the mana here had gathered into a thick, long column. It ran straight through the center of the red planet that now housed the being they knew as Yellow Fire, as if the planet’s axis had been wrapped in the stuff of magic somehow. As if it were wrapping it up as he watched.
Altin knew immediately what was happening. He was looking at mana being channeled by a male Hostile. He’d never thought to look at the mana without his ring, not while he’d been at war with the now-dead Red Fire. Why would he?
He watched the strange phenomenon for quite some time, and dared to move his mind toward that rodlike mana solidity to examine it more closely. It was as if someone had run a great thick version of Master Sambua’s conduit pipe right through the center of the pitch-black sphere, and when Altin made the most gentle of taps against it, he found that it had, in the abstract way of mana, the absolute solidity of rock. Steel perhaps. Something harder, harder even than the surface of diamond-shelled
Citadel
. Where the flat mana streaming into Blue Fire had been taffy-like, an impenetrable pliability, this was as hard and round as any enchanted column in the Palace could ever be, although, as he watched, it seemed to flicker in places, cloudy perhaps, where it darkened and looked momentarily soft, as if it were sputtering.
“Harpy spit,” Altin swore. He didn’t know if there was time to teach the doctor how to draw mana with his ring. The doctor had never even used a Liquefying Stone before. The ring could kill him. It
would
kill him, Altin already knew.
“I’ll teleport the whole ship back to Calico Castle,” he said. “Unless there is some reason why I should not.”
Suddenly the whole ship launched to starboard, throwing all of them to the floor and sliding them toward the port side of the ship. The giant cylinder rolled off of Liu Chun and came toward them like a giant steel rolling pin. “Christ!” shouted Roberto. Altin tried to cast a teleportation spell upon it, intent on sending it down to the surface of the red world, but he could draw no mana at all. His eyes popped wide as he realized it was too late to grab the ring, and he braced himself for being squashed against the hull.
Something heavy and metallic clanked, loudly. The left side of the tank stopped rolling and the right side slowed, though it kept coming as the tank angled some. Orli reached for Roberto as he scrambled along the hull trying to stay ahead of it. The frostbite was agonizing, and he was moving slowly. Orli caught him by the hair and dragged him to her just as the end of the tank finally slammed into the wall, the four of them heaped together in the wedge of open space, cringing and expecting the end.
Realizing they weren’t dead, they all turned to see Roberto’s heavyset bodyguard, Chelsea, lying on her stomach, flat on the floor, her arms extended to fullest length and still gripping the ram-jack tool that she had jammed like a wheel block under the tank at the farthest end. From the way she was sprawled out on the deck and the trickle of blood that had just started on her chin, it was clear she’d had to dive headlong to get it there in time.
“Holy crap, that was close,” Roberto said. “I think I love you, Chelsea.”
“Just doing what you pay me for,” she said as she climbed to her feet. She wiped at her chin and shook her head to clear the spots of dizziness the jolt against the deck had set spinning in her eyes.
“Liu Chun,” Orli said, and immediately she and the doctor were running out of the angular space, around the tank, and to the ship’s weapons officer, who was now out from under it, though she had slid along behind it when it rolled and now lay pressed against it dangerously. Chelsea ran to get another ram-jack.
“Deeqa, what the hell was that?” Roberto demanded into his com link.
“I think another one just tried to fly through us,” she replied.
“It’s like the damn Hostiles all over again.”
“I don’t think so,” Deeqa said. “That one barely touched us, and we weren’t trying to move. It’s like they just don’t see us. I’m going to drop a probe into orbit and take us out to twenty thousand miles. We can watch from there.”
Altin looked to Roberto and shook his head. “How about Prosperion?” he asked, the question imperative in his tone. He extracted the ring from his belt and bent the cut halves of the band around his thumb as tightly as he could.
“Deeqa, scratch that last part. Just kill the engines. Altin’s taking us to Prosperion.”
“Roger that,” she said. There was a stretching quality to her voice, followed by the announcement “Probe away, shutting down now.”
Soon after, the
Glistening Lady
sat upon the meadow beyond the walls of Calico Castle, resting easily in the grass, which stirred lazily in the breeze.
Altin teleported everyone present directly to the doctor’s office. The doctor went to work, and the rest of them watched breathlessly as the skilled Y-class physician cast his spells.
For nearly twenty minutes no one dared to speak, not even Roberto, who was never without something to say, though he did occasionally let go a faint grunt as the pain in his arms and face began to work on him with the waning of adrenaline.
Orli, upon hearing one of those grunts, and finally realizing what they were, led him out of the room to the front, where Lena Foxglove sat at her desk, oblivious to the fact that the doctor had returned and was treating a patient in one of the examining rooms. A quick look at Roberto’s face and arms and Lena was all aflutter, but efficiently so, for in a matter of moments, she had another doctor on the scene, who set to work on Roberto in another room.
Orli sat with Roberto for a half hour, and found that the middle-aged woman casting spells on him was an excellent healing mage. When the woman took her hand away from Roberto’s right arm, the wounds were entirely repaired.
“You people sure are incredible healers,” Orli observed.
“Doctor Salmbalsam is incredible,” Lena replied. “You couldn’t have been in more capable hands, Roberto.”
Roberto nodded, clearly in agreement, and the woman smiled and thanked them for the compliments. After a few moments’ gratitude, the four of them went to check on Liu Chun. Doctor Salmbalsam moved to stand beside Doctor Leopold, where she chanted for a time, apparently looking in on what he was doing. After a few minutes of that, she went to stand opposite him and began to assist, the notes of her healing song weaving in and out of his in a tense yet beautiful harmony.
The rest of them stood quietly, no one even daring to breathe too loudly. Roberto winced and shuddered anytime one of the doctors’ rhythms changed too abruptly. From the sounds he made, it was as if he were still suffering the agony of frost burns. But eventually came reprieve, for finally Doctor Leopold looked up from the spell with a satisfied expression on his face.
“She’s stabilized,” he said. “She’ll make it. But we’ve got a lot of work to do if she’s ever going to walk again.” He looked up into Altin’s relieved green eyes and said, “Not so bad as you were that day Tytamon brought you back from the moon, but bad enough. I’ll need her for the next several weeks at least.” He turned to the doctor who had come to assist him and thanked her graciously.
Roberto wiped at the corners of his eyes, his own relief so obvious he couldn’t wipe fast enough for a time. “God damn, Doc. You’re the best. Thank you. Whatever you need. No price is too high, you hear me? Whatever it takes. Give her everything.”
He smiled, the loose flesh around his jaws where he’d lost so much weight waggling like empty gloves. “She’ll be fine, my friend. I promise. Just need some time.”
Roberto let out a long, low breath and shook his head as if shaking off a blow that had dazed him for a time. He looked from the doctor to Orli and Altin standing there. “Thank you guys too,” he said. “Man, I don’t know what I would have done if—well, if this didn’t turn out like it did.”
“Well, you need to figure out why that tank came loose,” Orli said. “That’s inexcusable. I know you said this is only the fifth one of these ships ever made, but that is not acceptable. I thought the whole point of buying that ridiculously expensive ship was because it was so damn tough. ‘Bottom of the ocean without a creak,’ as I recall. ‘Hostile shafts bounce right off,’ you said.”
“Yeah, I agree with you on that, but if we’re being honest, whatever knocked that thing loose hit us so hard the ship spun around seventeen times in eleven seconds after impact. Think about that for a minute. And yet, here we are, not dead. Whatever hit us would have caved the
Aspect
in like a plastic canteen.”
Orli’s jaw moved side to side, but she nodded. “Still, I’d have a talk with the company.”
“Oh, I will,” he said. “I’ll bet they crap themselves when they see what they have to prepare for with these ships. It’s a whole new galaxy these days.”
“It is,” Orli said.
“So what do you think it was that struck you?” Altin asked.
“Do you people mind taking this outside,” the doctor said, not really asking by the way he said the words. “You can come back tomorrow night and check on her. I’ve put her into a deep slumber that will last at least that long anyway, and you’re just distracting me.”
Roberto looked uncomfortable with that, but the doctor made a shooing noise. “Altin, get them out of here, please. Every moment counts.”
Altin looked to his friends, and they both nodded, Roberto reluctantly, and a few moments later they were back aboard the
Glistening Lady
.
Roberto went immediately to the dislodged coolant tank and checked the braces where they had broken. Chelsea had already welded several temporary braces in place along the deck while they were gone, and she was in the process of strapping the tank in place right where it was on the deck for now.
“Won’t hold for another nightmare like that back there,” she said, “but it will take more than normal atmospheric turbulence to break it loose. It will work till we get it back to the plant and have them do something different. I’m still deciding if I’m impressed or disappointed in this.”
“You alive?” Roberto asked with a sideways kind of smirk.
She looked up from her work and smiled back. “Good point.” She patted the deck where she knelt. “Sorry, girl. No disrespect.”
“So,” said Altin, returning to his question of a moment ago, “what do you think it was that hit you? You mentioned it was similar to a Hostile attack. Do you really think Red Fi—Yellow Fire summoned something and set them upon you already, as fast as that?”
“Well, I don’t know what else to think.”
“I don’t think so,” came Deeqa Daar’s voice from behind them. She was coming down the ladder as she spoke. “I’ve run the continuity variances from the plasma shields. Whatever hit us was plasma, just like ours—well, basically like ours, but different. A lot better. If I make my guess correctly, whatever hit us was headed for the planet, and we were just in the way.”
“In the way? Twice?” Roberto said. “How bad does our luck have to be to get hit on accident two times in a row? Even if we were totally undetectable.”
“The objects are very large,” Deeqa said. “And both were on the exact same bearing. If you look at our position after the first impact and compare it to the model we came up with based on light fluctuations as the objects came through the rift, the second impact makes sense. We were hit by the wider part of the second one. So it was only one bit of bad luck with multiple events. And we were in full camouflage, so they couldn’t have seen us if they wanted to.” She came to stand beside him and handed him the small tablet that she’d been reading from.