Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals (63 page)

“But we didn’t die,” Roberto said. “And I am actually having fun. Aren’t you, Altin?”

“I am,” Altin replied. “It’s been a while since being the Galactic Mage was this exhilarating. It’s how it ought to be. Just fun without several billion lives at stake.”

“What about our lives?” Orli said. “And aren’t we supposed to be waiting for
Citadel
to arrive? Couldn’t we have more fun with them? You know, the more the merrier—but with a whole bunch of magicians and several regiments of cavalry in case ‘fun’ becomes screaming and dying all of a sudden.” She winced even as she said the last part, knowing full well what was going to come. Which it did.

“Cavalry will be of no use here,” Altin said. “And I’m still not convinced Liquefying Stone will be enough to channel with that great column of mana Yellow Fire has made of everything. I should think even with the Liquefying Stone, they’ll be fighting over the barest wisps. By comparison, Yellow Fire’s mana draw is a torrent to Blue Fire’s gentle stream. And he’s still convalescing. I can’t imagine what it will be like when he is at full health. I continue to be awed by the capacity of this universe to redefine my understanding of what the word ‘power’ means.”

“Come on, Orli, you’re an adventurer,” Roberto said. “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve never been a sissy inside girl. Now you sound like somebody’s mom. I was serious when I said you need to grow a pair.”

“I don’t want a pair if having them means I’m going to start climbing giant space tractors and getting blown to my death.”

“Hey, I didn’t die. Your boy had my back. And if I’m being honest, that was pretty damn fun. We could start a whole sporting industry out of that. Alien track jumping. We could make a fortune selling trips out here to adrenaline junkies.”

“As if these … whatever they are … are just going to park their equipment here for your amusement,” she said. “Besides, you have a coffee fortune in the making. I’d think you’d want to live long enough to spend what your Goblin Tea empire is going to pile up for you before you get yourself killed trying to make a second heap.” She looked to Altin for support on that, but he was already turning the vehicle around, Roberto having let him drive this time.

They lurched forward awkwardly as Altin got used to the controls, and Roberto helped him get it down over the course of the next several miles. By the time they’d gotten to where the tonguelike ramp seemed to loll out of the nearest ship, the Prosperion was nearly a master at it.

They came to a stop at the base of the giant, sinuous-seeming ramp. Roberto jumped out and went to the edge where it touched the ground. He knelt down and took what readings he could with the helmet’s sensors as Altin and Orli approached the side of the ship itself some two hundred yards away.

The body of the thing rose so high above them that, by the time they were close enough to the hull to touch it, they were well beneath an endless-seeming, upward-curving overhang.

“By the gods, this thing is enormous,” Altin said. “Every time I get a little bit closer to it, it seems to expand exponentially.”

“A ship that’s almost thirty miles long will do that to you,” Orli said.

He reached out and tentatively tapped the hull before she had time to tell him to stop. He tapped it like he might have tapped the handle of a pot that’s been off the cook fire for only a little while. Nothing untoward happened.

He touched it again, longer this time. “I wish I could take off my glove,” he said. “This stuff has a really strange look to it. It’s not wood, but it kind of looks like it. Or maybe bone.”

Orli pulled her tablet out of the pouch on her belt and scanned the hull closely. “It’s some kind of protein,” she said. “I’d need to get a sample and take it to a fleet ship to tell anything more.” She thought back to the last time she’d tried to take a sample from the surface of an alien thing, the plug that the first Hostile orb her people had ever seen stuffed into the hole it had drilled into the
Aspect
’s hull. That event had portended a deadly sequence of events.

“Hey,” said Roberto over the com. “Something’s coming.”

“Something what?” Orli asked. She turned to see Roberto jump down off the edge of the ramp, which he had apparently begun to climb. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, backing away from the ramp, looking up over the side as he did. “But whatever it is, it’s really big.”

A glow began to make itself obvious against the blowing storm, illuminating the dust in a way that promised whatever the source was, it was very bright. The glow increased, bouncing off the violently stirred airborne topsoil like a wide-beamed spotlight on clouds. A rumble became apparent both in the air and beneath their feet.

Altin and Orli began to back away from the hull, craning their necks back in their spacesuits as best they could, trying to see what it was that was coming down the ramp, though doing so was like trying to see what was on a bridge while standing underneath.

The light grew very bright, and then, like a small sun in the grip of a glimmering metallic tentacle, the light swung out over the edge of the massive ramp and dangled high above the two newlyweds.

“What the hell is that?” Roberto asked.

“I can’t see it from down here,” Orli said. She and Altin hustled backward all the more. “What’s it look like from over there?”

“I don’t know. Like two huge hoops rolling side by side around a giant glass egg. There’s some puffy balloon thing or something in the middle of it with a bunch of spaghetti arms. I’m getting it on video, though.”

“Well, maybe this is the creature coming to greet us finally,” Altin said, drawing up his courage. He raised his hand and waved, on the chance that the creature could see them by that bright light high above.

The light began to descend, and it became so bright he had to turn away.

“Green button on your sleeve,” Orli said. “Darken the helmet glass.”

Altin looked down to his spacesuit sleeve, seeing as he did that the light was so bright he now cast a shadow as black as pitch behind him, a short, stubby version of him like an ink stain.

He found the button, though its green hue was nearly washed out to white in the brilliance of the light.

“Oh, shit!” Roberto said.

Altin almost had time to ask him why.

The End

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