by John Daulton
“Pewter, get back to your post. We can’t help him if you don’t do your job. Sit down, damn it,” barked the captain.
Vaguely, she felt Roberto’s arm slip around her waist, gripping her firmly, but pulling her gently away from the enormous viewing screen. “He’s right,” Roberto was saying from somewhere far away. “Come on. Sit back down.” He half dragged, half carried her back and pushed her down into her seat. “Come on, Orli. He needs you now more than ever. Snap out of it. Focus. We can still save him.”
His words came to her dimly, as if he’d whispered them from the opposite end of the ship. But she heard them, reluctantly, and suddenly the horrified lethargy was gone, or at least suspended for a while.
Twenty orbs remained, and of the original eighteen ships, seven still survived—three of them enchanted with Altin’s Combat Hop. The Hostiles had apparently figured out early in the fight that some of the Earth ships had been magically enhanced, and they had made a point of going after the unenchanted ships in force, perhaps intent on thinning the fleet’s numbers down. But whatever the reasoning, assuming the Hostiles did any reasoning at all, the effects were devastating to those who’d been too intimidated or too skeptical to let the wizard come aboard their ships. Nonetheless, the Aspect and six others were still alive. Victory was possible now; it was still a long shot, but at least they had a chance. Altin had given them a chance. But it seemed the Hostiles had decided now was the time to go after the enchanted ships instead.
A wave of eight orbs was coming at them now. “Focus,” she heard Roberto say again. “Bring up Pegasus.”
She tapped up the Echo squadron ship and could see the weapons officer’s face in profile as the link came up on her screen. “Here,” the man said, a long cut on his cheek marking where his face must have hit the console following one of the Hostile’s “lucky” shots.
“Pegasus, on my mark, lasers on the top two, left. Stagger missiles at intervals of a hundred feet,” Roberto said once the link was made.
“On it,” said the man.
“Not too close on the near side. I’m not in the mood for friendly fire.”
“No worries, Aspect. I got you, mate.”
The orbs came in, always with that impossible speed, and, as expected, in came a barrage of giant, pulverizing shafts, eight of them, primitive granite slabs capable of decimating all this modern technology while irony had a laugh. Roberto fired lasers into the sandy spots of the uppermost pair just prior to the release of stony shafts, and he sent a battery of missiles off in a scatter all around the pair, anticipating their infuriating dodge abilities. He barely got them fired before Combat Hop went off, sending the ship into momentary darkness and the navigation computers into temporary disarray.
Used to the sequence of events by now, Orli and her bridge mates waited impatiently as the computers recalculated their position from readings taken from nearby stars and as the other systems came back online. Though it seemed like hours, the systems restored themselves in seconds and finally they could look to see if their counterattack had had any significant effect.
“Fuck yeah,” Roberto shouted. “Got them both.”
And he was right, for both orbs were bleeding spouts of glowing goo as they moved away from the ship. One was totally ruined, broken open like an oil drum blown up from inside, and the other, while not completely destroyed, didn’t appear to have enough glowing guts remaining to carry on with the fight. It retreated, moving back to hover at a distance behind what remained of the Hostile host, trailing a thin line of the luminous ichor as if unraveling a spool of red-hot copper wire.
“Bring it on, bitches,” Roberto bellowed at the monitor on the wall. “You brought this shit on yourselves.”
Another wave, ten this time, was hurtling at the Lima in the group of Bravo squadron ships, and Roberto was instantly retaken by the gravity of the fight. “Lima,” he barked at Orli before the captain could get the same word out. Orli tapped it up. “Which one you want?” Roberto queried to their weapon’s officer. “Lower left,” came the woman’s voice.
“On it,” Roberto said. “You want to call it, or on my go?”
“You’re the only one hitting anything out here,” the woman said. “On yours.”
“Roger,” he said. “Lasers on the shafts, spread the missiles wide.”
“I know what to do,” the woman answered. “It’s the goddamn timing I can’t get down.”
“Who’s got another pair?”
“Pershing’s got the top one on the starboard side,” came a voice over general com. “I’ll do my best to make it count.”
“Just let them have it on my mark, most of them release at the same damn time. We’ll leave the laggers to magic and some luck.”
“Roger,” came the Pershing’s reply.
“Here they come. Be ready…,” Roberto said, his voice somehow calm and charged all at once. “Now.” He jammed his fingers into the glowing lights on his console that would fire both lasers and a pair of missiles from the Aspect’s arsenal to help with the Lima’s defense.
Again Roberto was right on target, and another of the orbs broke open and sprayed the surface of the Lima with its phosphorescent blood. The Lima’s own weapons did some damage to the second as it whistled past, though it was not a killing blow. Still, from the cheer that came across the channel, she was happy with her shot. “Goddamn,” she said. “I finally hit one.”
“Nice. Now focus. California has incoming too.”
Orli had already tapped them up.
And so began a dance of death that went on for nearly half an hour. She and Roberto, driven by their reactions to what had happened to Altin right before their eyes, became a force that was a magic of its own. Together they brought ship-to-ship communication that had been chaotic and laced with fear prior to Altin’s downfall into something more like a finely tuned machine. Computers might not be able to anticipate the magic–using orbs, but human instinct could. Roberto had been coordinating a lot before, but now, as Orli’s whole body and soul worked only for the battle’s end, her focus was supreme. She had the links to the various ships open before Roberto could tell her which one he wanted her to call. Pretty soon, he was barking orders to the weapons officers with no more thought for hierarchy or command. He simply knew what had to be shot, when and by whom. Even the captains realized right away that Roberto was on his game, and soon the airwaves were silent but for his singular voice and the occasional victory cry as one orb after another burst into a gush of glowing orange.
And finally it was done. The last of the orbs, the only two that remained, went crushed and leaking off into the night.
Orli didn’t even wait for the sound of cheering to finish in her com speaker before she was down the lift and sprinting through the corridors headed for an emergency pod. Never had there been such an emergency in all her life. She could hear the captain’s voice on her com link ordering her back to her post, but there was nothing he could say. He could sooner command the Andalians back from extinction than he could have gotten her to stop.
She stabbed the hatch release at the pod dock at least twenty times, mashing its infernal blinking button over and over with her finger, breaking a nail and violently bending her slender fingertip backwards against the joint. “Open goddamn it,” she shouted at the console as the hydraulics slowly pushed the hatch outward from the pod. Finally a space opened wide enough for her to squeeze through, and she wriggled inside, jamming the pod’s hatch button again with her palm. She threw herself into the seat and waited for it to close, breath coming to her in ragged pants. The six seconds it took to release the tiny escape craft from the launch tube was an agony of years, and Orli could hardly see the controls through an impatient mist of tears. “Hurry up,” she screamed at it again.
Once out of the ship, she engaged the throttle and quickly closed the distance between her and Altin’s tower, which was now drifting slowly away from the fleet. It turned slowly as it moved, tumbling gently, end over e
nd, as if it were falling through a dream. The tower’s shield shimmered as it spun, flickering as if it might wink out, and it was no longer invisible as it had been when Altin had first arrived. She stared through Altin’s shield, seeking him out with frantic eyes. But there was such a mess. The inside of his enchanted dome looked like some macabre medieval snowglobe robbed of festivity, its snowflakes transformed to misery and the nightmare of Orli’s breaking heart. As she drew closer she spotted him lying amidst the debris, and she brought her tiny craft right up to the tower’s flickering energy field. It wasn’t until the pod’s docking hatch window was bumping gently against the shield that she realized how little there was that she could do, how helpless she really was. All she could do was watch. The tower had no docking bay, no way to get inside.
But she could see him there, only a few feet from where she was. She could see him lying in a crumpled pile, wedged horribly amongst a jumble of giant stones and ivy that seemed to stir as if caught in an inexplicable breeze. A flow of crimson issued from him, from a wound she could not see, and painted the flat surface of the granite block over which he lay with red lines that branched as they ran, tiny rivers that carried his life away. The dark blood flowed from him steadily, spreading like a scarlet shadow being cast, and she could tell from the volume of it, as much as from her time in sick bay, that he could not hold out for long.
What was worse, as she stared at him she realized that his back had been broken when he fell. Broken in two. From the way his body was folded over the edge of the granite block, an acute angle like a towel tossed over the back of someone’s chair, she knew she had no chance of saving him at all. Even if she could get inside the dome, there would be nothing she could do.
She screamed again and tears began to run as freely as did Altin’s blood. She couldn’t just sit out here and watch him die. She needed to go to him. To be with him so he didn’t have to die alone. Alone out here in this awful empty place.
Frantic, she steeled herself again, forced herself to think. She searched the pod’s instrument panel, seeking anything that might get her in. The laser! she thought. I’ll cut my way in. She began tapping at the keys. Almost too late, she realized through her frenzied grief that even if the laser did cut through his shield, she would only freeze him where he lay. She stopped only a keystroke from having begun to cut.
The last gasp of hope left her on the sigh that followed. Tears came again, burning from her eyes as she sobbed and pressed her face against the pod’s bubbled window glass, fogging it with her breath as she watched, helpless and overwhelmed with grief.
Then a movement coming from around a still upright portion of the tower wall caught her eye. At first she thought it was just the ivy, moving in that incoherent breeze, but as she sought the movement out, she saw the most unexpected thing. A child had arrived.
She watched in a hazy dreamlike state as a little blonde girl came out and picked her way carefully across the rubble of giant broken stones. The going was slow, for the gray blocks were much bigger than the girl, and she had to stop occasionally to shake off tendrils of ivy that kept catching at her feet. But the child was resolute and continued to work her way steadily over and around the heap of decimated stone.
Orli stopped crying, her tears in check as the impossibility of what she saw caught somewhere in her chest. For a time she could no longer breathe.
The girl was a scrawny little thing, no more than six or seven years old. And even through her horror and her grief, part of Orli’s mind could not help wondering what the child was doing there. Altin hadn’t mentioned anyone else; in fact he’d been quite clear that it was only he and the dragon that had come. She wondered if Altin was married, and if this girl was Altin’s child. But the thought quickly went away. He would have had to get an early start to have a child as old as this. Wouldn’t he?
She shook herself and realized that she had to get the child out. Concern for the girl broke through the trauma of her inability to prevent Altin’s death. They had to do something; they couldn’t just leave her out here alone. She found a moment’s composure and immediately called back to the ship. “Do you see her?” she asked.
“We see her,” came Roberto’s voice, doing double duty now and having to cover the communication’s com.
The girl, hair frosted grayish in places with dust from the collapse, and with a trickle of blood running down her cheek from where a stone must have grazed her head, picked her way to the place where Altin lay. She stared down at him and appeared to be speaking to him urgently. When he didn’t answer, she fumbled around inside the collar of his robes for a moment and then, placing two small hands beneath his neck, she gently lifted up his head. She pulled something from around his neck, slipping it over his head and then, struggling some with the weight of a grown man’s skull, momentarily dangled what she’d taken in the air.
It was a small red amulet hanging on a leather cord, and the girl regarded the gemstone only briefly before gripping it firmly between her fingertips. She looked up then, pausing, and stared right out at Orli staring back. She gave a tired little smile, waving once, and then, placing her free hand on Altin’s chest, she struck the amulet against the bloody stone upon which she knelt. And then they were gone. All of it was gone. The tower, the girl and the incredible green-eyed mage. Gone. As if it had all just been a dream.
Orli plunged her face into her hands and sobbed violently, her whole body convulsing and tears running down her wrists. All of her that mattered left when that tower went away.
Nearly twenty hours would pass before Roberto could finally coax Orli back aboard the ship. He tried to warn her that the captain was in a fit, that she shouldn’t have run out there in the pod without having at least gotten permission first. But Orli no longer cared. All she wanted was to die.
Chapter 44
Orli lay on the hard bunk in her cell in a state nearing catatonia. She had lost weight, down to a scant ninety-seven pounds, and her lean runner’s body now hovered on the brink of wasting away. Doctor Singh had been sneaking nutrient powder into her water for the last two months just to keep her alive, but it was difficult to sustain someone who had so completely given up.
At first he’d thought it was just a case of broken heart, for word got round shortly after the fight, and certainly after the trial, that Orli had fallen for the robed man from planet Prosperion. However, the pall that settled on her was more than just a case of lovesick lament. No, what Orli had was the total abandonment of hope. The loss of her newfound love had brought back the deep depression that she had only barely kept at bay, a malignant creeping darkness that seeped like oil from a ruptured tank and spread slowly into everything, smothering any positive emotion that it found. Losing Altin had simply been the final straw the way the doctor saw it, one tragedy too much. Orli was not cut out for living decades in outer space. She never had been; it just wasn’t in her genes.
Roberto and Doctor Singh were the only ones who saw her now, excepting her father, the colonel, who came by occasionally and sat before the Plexiglas cell in his bright yellow contamination suit and tried not to weep as his daughter lay unresponsive and in a state of emotional decay. Sometimes she would sit up and talk to him, but usually not. It was much the same for the doctor and Roberto too. When she did, the conversations were generally the same regardless of who was sitting outside her cell:
“Hey girl. You’re finally awake.”
“I am.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“You need to eat more.”
“I know.”
Usually an uncomfortable silence would follow, and then she would ask, “Is he back?”
The answer was always the same. “No.”
Generally at that point she would lie back down. That was it. Frankly, her hopelessness was too depressing for most, which was why there were no regular visitors left but the doctor and her Spanish friend. Only they had the stamina to endure her desolation anymore. H
er decline was enough to be almost as contagious as the disease she had helped them all survive.
Doctor Singh was sitting outside her cell on yet another uneventful visit, watching her through the glass, when he got a glimmer of hope that at least today might be one of Orli’s days to talk. Even a few words were better than none. But it turned out to be just a twitch, as her arm nearest the wall jerked up towards her ear as if she had an itch. He thought her attention to such stimuli was promising; it could mean a resurgent concern for the condition of her body, but after a while he gave it up as hope. She settled back into motionless, and Doctor Singh settled back into watching her, lost inside his thoughts. But then her arm twitched again, once more shooting up to scratch beside her ear.
She did it again, three more times. He assumed she must be dreaming, reaching up to where Altin had taken cuttings from her hair; she did that often enough, dreamt of Altin. He heard her speak the young man’s name from time to time in bouts of restless sleep. He felt so sorry for the girl. They never should have brought her into space. What had the colonel been thinking?
Her arm twitched again and then she sat up, flicking at her shoulder as if she’d woken to find a spider crawling there. Then she lay back down. But the doctor saw that she had knocked something away, and whatever it was came scurrying near the glass.
