Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals (25 page)

Assuming he managed it, of course.

Slowly the line made its way through, one by one, some of them joking casually with the woman, none of them with the man. But each in turn passed through the line without incident or fuss. Soon there were only three miners left before Black Sander would be able to pass. He was going to need the man with the helmet monocle and the detection wand to step aside, but he hoped that he would as soon as the visible miners passed.

The woman chatted with the next miner in line while the soldier passed his device over the fellow’s arm and face. As they scanned the worker, Black Sander moved to the desk and chanced a glance over the top of the picture frame. To his horror, he could see himself peering over it.

The discovery jolted him, but his reflexes were those of a thief. In the time it took the woman to look from the soldier to the miner and back to her screen, Black Sander had, by the grace of Sobrei the Swift, patron deity of crime, managed to dart back into line behind the rest. It was an act of conscious effort to still his breathing, so unexpected had his surprise been. How could they see him?

Suddenly the bright lights in that white hallway seemed blinding. It was as if he stood naked beneath a bloated sun, the whole world watching him. He felt entirely exposed. He could not fathom how it was possible. His cast had been flawless. He’d been casting illusions since he was thirteen. His ability was W ranked. He did not make mistakes, and there were no holes in his illusions. Ever. Not once in all his life.

He looked down at his hands. Of course
he
could see them.

He backed away down the hall some, not so far as to be suspicious, but trying to get back as close as he could to the teleportation room, to the place where twitters in the electricity were expected and ignored by security.

He gently rechecked his spell, pushing his mind into the mana and carefully watching his weave. It was intact, a perfect core of sensory magic and a great radius of groping strings, all those threadlike ends reaching far and near, searching like twitching roots for minds to touch and to deceive. He could see them all, and there were many where the guards at the table were, many, many of those strands, each reaching into the minds of the others and painting the waking dream, coating their own ideas with his contrived reality. They should not see him without having reason to disbelieve. They could not. And yet there he’d been, in that woman’s image machine, as plain as if he’d simply walked up to her with no magic at all. Something was terribly wrong. And now there was nothing he could do.

The last miner was being waved through.

The woman looked up at him and beckoned him. “Come on,” she said. “You’re next.”

His mind spun, whirled, as he groped for what next to do.

“Don’t be shy. It’s just a formality. You’re new, aren’t you?” She glanced up at her fellow soldier, who nodded, not recognizing Black Sander either.

“Yes, I am,” he said, quelling the urge to run back into the teleportation room. It was still an option, though. He could simply tell them he’d changed his mind. By treaty, the space between that checkpoint and the TGS depot behind him was still the territory of the Kingdom of Kurr.

“Well, don’t worry. None of this stuff hurts. It’s all safe. Our people have been using these for centuries.”

Black Sander walked as casually as possible back up to the desk. The situation wasn’t entirely alien to him, despite it being, well, entirely alien. This wasn’t the first security check he’d had to lie his way through. But still, it was with some effort that he had to put down the shock of discovering his illusion had completely failed.

“What’s your name?” she asked. It seemed as if she was making an extra effort to be nice. He let go a long, calming breath as he heard it. He would be fine here.

“I am Stamon Farplain,” he said. “Jeweler to Lord Gideon Dovenstake of Dae.”

She looked up, her eyes bright and curious. “Jeweler, eh? I didn’t think you were dressed for digging down there. Did they find something valuable in that hole besides iron and titanium?”

With practiced stoicism, and equally practiced conviviality, he kept himself from frowning during the moment of his confusion. Then he laughed. “Oh, hah hah, don’t we all wish, my dear? No, I’m afraid there’s no such luck as that.” He glanced up at the man standing there, as if about to share a great secret, then leaned down to the woman. In a low yet jovial voice, he said, “At least not as we know, but who’s to say what these fellows are sneaking out in the bottoms of their boots, you see?”

She laughed and leaned back in her chair. “Oh, and we don’t even screen for it. They could be making a killing off of us, couldn’t they?”

Black Sander’s grin was wide beneath his long, long nose, and he set upon her his most charming and innocuous look. “Yes, but the boys work hard, and if your great empire doesn’t need all its small diamonds and rubies, and even its little moonstruck pittance of silver or gold, I imagine these lads could stand the extra pints of ale.”

She laughed again, and even the stone-faced man beside Black Sander had twitches of humor touching the corners of his mouth. Black Sander felt his feet, and his confidence, settle a bit more firmly on the floor. They were all, in the end, so easy. Toss a bone to the working man, and there they were, appeased. So honest and well-meaning. So easy to deceive.

She was tapping her fingers on a bit of dark glass lying upon the table then, and she frowned for a moment before looking up at him. “How do you spell your name?” she asked. “I’m not finding it in here.”

He spelled it out carefully for her.

She shook her head, clearly regretfully, as she tried entering the name again. She chewed briefly on the bottom of her lip before asking, “Did your people send a file to TGS central to be entered in? I’m just not finding you.”

Feigning confusion was not difficult for him then. “Why, no. Not that I know of.” He recovered quickly enough, and began in earnest to modify his plan. There was still a chance to salvage it. “Lord Dovenstake simply asked that I bring this gift to Captain Hawthorne of the
Lima
.”

He pulled the huge topaz out of his pocket and showed it to her. She let go a long, low gasp. “Holy crap,” she said. “It’s as big as a plasma grenade.”

“Well, I should think not quite so big as that,” he said with a humble smile, though he had no idea what the object she spoke of was. “But still, My Lord hopes that Captain Hawthorne will accept this small gift in gratitude for all she and her crew have done for the working men of Kurr.”

“Well, I can see why you don’t care much if anyone’s pulling a few little diamonds or rubies out of the mines,” she joked as she looked up from the topaz and winked at him.

He muttered the words to an illusion just for her, a low-level charming spell that would paint him in her eyes in a subtly gossamer light, a divine radiance that was just beyond her ability to see. With it he layered in an equally subtle pheromone, the scent of centaur sweat carried on a waft of cocoa and tea. It was all very deft and minor, and all for her. It was all on a bet, and risky, he knew, for it might fail just as the first one had, especially if the lights flickered for having cast it. Which they did, at least those in her monitor did, but she wasn’t watching it. She had eyes only for him.

“What’s that?” she said, unable to make out the words as he cast his spell.

“It’s a little song we sing in Dae, a sailor’s prayer begging the Goddess to forgive us our greed.”

She was all smiles then, like a little girl pleasing a favorite uncle on whom she’s always had a secret crush. “Well, don’t worry about that. We won’t start checking in their boots. But let’s see about getting you logged in. I can requisition paperwork from TGS in Dae and give you a temporary pass for today. Will that work? How long do you need to stay?”

He showed all his teeth as he smiled down at her. “Oh, you are such a sweet thing. Thank you, of course that will be fine. And I think an hour or two will be more than enough.”

Chapter 22

O
rli leaned over Doctor Singh’s shoulder, watching as he worked. She had to bend low enough so as not to hit her head on the thick pipe jutting from the machine. In the absence of an atmosphere, she couldn’t hear the roaring hiss of the water jet as it cut through the crystals near Yellow Fire’s heart, but the clouds of mist that whirled around them spoke volumes for what she might have heard had he been doing the work elsewhere.

“Suction, damn it,” the doctor said for the third time in less than a minute. “Rabin, what are you doing up there?” It wasn’t really suction anyway. That was simply the surgeon’s reflex. The baby-faced grad student was supposed to be blowing the mist away, angling an air jet at the end of the machine’s long arm.

“I’m trying,” came Rabin’s reply. “There’s a big difference between practice and reality.”

“Well, get it right. I can’t see.”

Orli could see the air nozzle move, and more mist came blasting back out of the nearly microscopic incision he had made. It sprayed all over the doctor’s facemask blindingly.

“Orli,” the doctor said even as she was reaching out with a towel and wiping off his mask. He cut the order short and thanked her instead. They’d worked together long enough on the
Aspect
a few years past, when the first encounter with the Hostile orbs had brought devastating disease to the crew. It was strange how much of that chemistry came right back.

“Move it left, Rabin. Now I’m getting a double shadow from the spotlights.”

The large, fine-toothed gears moved across the rack that supported the machine, a long strip of steel with a serrated upper edge running parallel to the wall. The whole rig sat atop a sequence of these tracks, each mounted atop a row of steel columns set ten feet deep in the ground, the ground, of course, being the bottom of the thirty-by-thirty-yard hole that they’d excavated in the bottom of Yellow Fire’s cave.

Much of the machine was tank, a twenty-foot-long cylinder, domed at both ends, and wide enough that Orli could have walked the length of it inside without having to duck her head. But the essence of the machine was the enormous sequence of pumps, three of them, each linked to the previous by pipes that looked to Orli more like cable mesh than pipe. From one to the next, the pipe-cable got smaller, and the pumps got squatter, fatter, and thicker of casing. Together, they rammed the water and a few tiny particles of a coolant chemical through the jet that the doctor guided with a pair of specially fitted gloves. Every motion of his hand, every twitch of his fingers, sent signals to the machine. The barest movement of his eyes inside his helmet could move the heavy nozzle in increments too small for Orli to see.

“How’s that?” Rabin asked from his place in the water saw’s cab, a small, boxy compartment with a seat, three monitors, and the controls that operated the pumps and moved the body of the machine up and back along the tracks.

“A little more; I’m still getting a double edge on this.” The steel frame vibrated for a moment after, followed by the doctor’s grunt. “That’s better. Leave it there.” Once again the clouds of mist thrown off by the water jet resumed.

Orli watched breathlessly as the practiced hands of the skilled surgeon eroded away the barest layers of crystal around the velvet-purple pulse of Yellow Fire’s heart. Her own heart pounded so loudly she could hear the blood coursing through her ears. She couldn’t imagine having to be the one to do it, to actually carve out Yellow Fire’s heart. What if she messed up? A cough? A little tremble of a muscle or a nerve?

What if Doctor Singh did?

It wasn’t a matter of culpability; it was a matter of death and misery. And guilt. Lifelong guilt. This was all her idea. So much was riding on its success. So much more now, given Altin’s promise to kill Blue Fire if it didn’t work. Just thinking of that made her temper rise, even though she’d had several months to come to terms with it. She just couldn’t. What had he been thinking? So she watched and she fretted. There was so much more at stake. Two lives now. Doctor Singh had nearly refused because of it and, well, because Altin had been with her when she asked.

“So killing comes easily to you now, does it,
Sir
Altin Meade?” That’s what the doctor had spat at Altin when he and Orli explained what they wanted, and what was at stake. The way he spoke Altin’s title dripped with irony. “Well, I won’t do it. I took an oath to do no harm, and your gross willingness to kill anything that inconveniences your road to glory has rendered my help impossible.”

Altin had tried to argue, of course. And Orli had as well. “Why impossible?” she’d asked, once the two men had finished their own emotional exchange.

“If I lose a patient trying to save them in earnest, and they have understood the risk, that is one thing. A weighing of risk and reward. That is what you have done, Orli, in asking Blue Fire to approve this procedure you want done. A reasonable conclusion to try the surgery. What harm if he has already been dead, or nearly dead, so long? Only Blue Fire knows how that all plays out long term. So that risk I call acceptable. No harm done. But now this, what you ask, what your … fiancée asks, is another thing entirely. Now I do harm by simply trying. The attempt is not about risking a patient already all but dead. The attempt is risking another being entirely. The probability for doing harm is now extremely high. Far higher than the chances for success. And all for a death promise from the Galactic Mage. Galactic Assassin, I say.” He’d turned such a bitter look upon Altin then, such absolute contempt, and said to his face, “You are in good company with that elf.”