Sac'a'rith (38 page)

Raquel smiled. “I could call home and ask Grandmaster Vydor, but I know what he would say.”

Zah’rak walked up and placed his hand on my shoulder. “You’re right, we’re family. All of us have troubled pasts; yours pales compared to Shira’s and you see how well she has worked out.” He paused and looked at Raquel, who smiled again. I was sure some silent communication had passed between them. “Welcome to the team, Marcus.”

“This intruder - did you get a good look at him?” asked Raquel.

“Yes,” I said and sent a copy of this memory to the ship’s primary monitor. “My implants couldn’t read him but my organic mind had no problem, even with the lack of power.” That was yet another reason I kept my organic brain. It could see and remember magi.

Raquel gasped. “Curetes.”

I awoke in my room on the Night Wisp, sore in a dozen places from the workout the previous day with Crivreen. I’d gotten much better at blocking his attacks, but he’d also greatly improved his attack skill. He must have singed off most of my hair; it had certainly smelled like it. I decided I wouldn’t look in a mirror for a few days until it grew back.

The computer had woken me with just enough time to get ready and have a meal before my shift on the bridge, so I knew I had to get up, but trying to swing my legs over the edge caused pain to shoot up through my body and out of my eyes. I screamed a curse and tried to stand.
You idiot! You could be in battle today!
I thought to myself.

In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face and tried to pull myself together. The room spun around my head in a strange up-and-down fashion, and whoever was staring back at me from the mirror looked like he’d spent the night drinking. The gaunt face and dark shadows under the bloodshot eyes told the tale as clear as day. I had to grab the sink to keep from falling over. I cursed some more, realizing I’d overdrawn on my resource pools while training my powers. Then I reminded myself that I hadn’t wanted to look in a mirror.

I fumbled around the room knocking over data pads and bruising my shins in a dozen places until I finally found a protein pack and ate it. I wasn’t hungry until I started eating, but as soon as the bland paste hit my tongue I became ravenous. I sucked down the paste as fast as I could manage without falling over, and forced myself to let that settle before trying to eat anything else. Then I attempted to take a shower.

The shower was an ordeal, as I was sure the walls moved when I tried to grab them for balance. The water hitting my body felt like swarms of tiny bugs crawling on my skin, but I knew it was all in my mind; I just had to push through it and hope it didn’t cause nightmares. I had read about this happening to magi, but I’d never been foolish enough to experience it myself until now.

Clean and dressed, I made for the mess hall to get something more substantial to eat. Rest and food were the only cure for this condition that I knew of. I found Crivreen there, holding his head and eating slowly. He looked disheveled, and I guessed that he had decided to skip the shower. I didn’t blame him; it had felt very dangerous when I’d done it.

“Man, that was one great party you threw,” I said as I took some food and joined him.

He cursed under his breath. “Purwryn, not so loud.”

I nodded and we ate in silence. We had both overdone it in training and burned through all our illuminescence stores. Once a magus runs out of illuminescence he begins to tap his own life force, which is extremely dangerous and foolhardy. It would be a day or two before we recovered, and we could easily have killed ourselves had we gone much further. This was foolish at any time, and absolutely insane on the eve of a battle. Eating and drinking helped a little, especially the natural sugars in the fruit that Shira had grown for us, but not as much as sitting and letting our bodies begin to regenerate illuminescence.

“We’d better put some limits on these practice sessions,” Crivreen said quietly. He was very pale and I doubted he would be much use today.

“You think?” I said.

The meal did help to relieve some of my symptoms, so I headed up to take my shift at watch on the bridge. I wasn’t sure I could handle it if anything actually happened, but I could at least hit the alarm button if necessary.

I cleaned up after myself and stumbled up to the bridge. As I entered, I saw on the screen the image of a man who I’d hoped never to see again. I froze on the spot and a chill passed through my body.

I heard Raquel gasp and say, “Curetes.”

“That’s him!” I called out.

Everyone turned and looked at me. My mind was suddenly crystal clear as my heart pumped blood faster and adrenaline surged into my bloodstream.

“Who?” asked Zah’rak.

“That’s the man who jumped me on the Paradise!” I said.

“Who’s Curetes?” asked Marcus.

“He is,” said Raquel as she pointed at the screen. “One of the most dangerous magi alive today.”

“Who is he?” I stared at the image of my tormentor on the screen. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. He was wearing the same liquid-looking metal armor, but it was the eyes that gave him away. It wouldn’t matter if every other detail about him had changed; those eyes would give him away every time. The fact that this was merely a still image did nothing to lessen the effect. I felt that those eyes could bore right through me, stripping away my body and laying my soul bare.

“The right-hand man of Henrick, who is
the
most dangerous man alive, outside of the Wizard’s Council itself,” said Raquel.

I stumbled over to navigation and sat down. I was still tired and weak and the adrenaline rush was fading, leaving me shaky and lightheaded. I had hoped never to see him again, and I was in no condition to process the implications of the fact that he was on our screen.

“What do they have to do with anything?” asked Zah’rak, who was obviously taken aback.

“It seems our enemies are multiplying,” Marcus said.

“Henrick is not exactly an enemy. We actually have a treaty with him, and he was involved with us in a recent war that the Wizard Kingdom fought for the survival of the realm. I wouldn’t call him a friend either, though. He has his own agenda and his own nation of sorts,” said Raquel. “If he’s active out here, then we know something big is happening; really big.”

“Wouldn’t his attack on Marcus be in violation of the treaty we have with him?” asked Zah’rak.

“No, because he could claim it was in defense. And before you ask, when he attacked Purwryn he wasn’t part of the Kingdom,” she said.

“When did he attack Marcus?” I asked.

“Yesterday Curetes jumped Marcus in his quarters and left him completely disabled,” said Zah’rak.

I didn’t like the idea that my attacker could reach Marcus here. “How did he get on board?”

“A gate or teleportation, most likely. If Shira and I had been here, we would have noticed his arrival and acted, but I imagine he deliberately waited until we were gone,” said Raquel.

I turned to Marcus and asked, “Why didn’t you call for help?”

He hesitated and then said, “If your arm was cut off and you were bleeding to death, what would you do first: stop the bleeding or call for help?”

“Well, I’d have to stop the bleeding or die, so that answer is obvious,” I said.

“When I was finally connected to power and could react on my own, he was already gone, so I concentrated on ‘stopping the bleeding’; that is, I told my station to repair and recharge my systems.”

I wondered about that; the analogy didn’t seem to fit because being connected to power meant he was already stable.
He was probably embarrassed that he got beaten by an unenhanced human
, I thought to myself. I remembered how annoyed he’d been during our short training run in the cargo bay. He was used to winning any one-on-one competition and had a hard time dealing with failure. “Next time, call for help. There’s no shame in it.”

“I agree,” said Raquel. “If Curetes returns, call me immediately. Don’t try to engage him; all of you combined wouldn’t even stand a chance.”

“And you would?” I queried.

“Maybe, maybe not; but he can’t attack me without risking the treaty, so it won’t come to that. The important thing is that if he’s here, then Henrick is at the very least interested in what’s going on in this system. That means we are probably heading for something big. We’ll all need to be at the top of our game, and I’d better try calling home. Grandmaster Vydor will want to know about Henrick’s interest.”

“When do we jump in?” I asked.

“Soon, but we’ll be holding at the system edge until probes can get in and give us some idea of what we’re up against,” answered Raquel, and then she sent privately,
“So make sure you rest and get your strength back. No more practice sessions for now. ”

“Yeah, I know, and you don’t have to tell me how stupid it was,”
I sent back. That seemed to satisfy her, as she didn’t bring it up again. Then I sent to Crivreen,
“Hey, we have at least a day, so lie as low as you can and recover. When we get into the system we could have a very interesting time, to say the least.”

“Why? What did you find out?”
he sent back.

I briefed him on the conversation.
“So Raquel figures we are heading into something big.”

“Great. Well, at least the Night Wisp is stronger than it’s ever been before,”
he sent.

Three days had passed since Shira, Raquel and I had returned from Alpha World, and the data from the probes had finally arrived. The captain of the Phareon fleet and his three advisors joined us via the comm as Raquel, Marcus, Ragnar and I tried to work out a plan of attack. Crivreen and Purwryn were still on mandatory rest after their foolish training session. Raquel figured they would be fully ready for combat in another day’s time
, and I hoped we could give that to them.

“Captain,” said Raquel, “according to the data you sent, they have no interplanetary probes, no orbital defenses and apparently no anti-aircraft protection on the surface?”

“As strange as it sounds, yes. None of our probes detected anything of the sort on the way in, and all three are now safely in orbit over the target. As of last report, these appear to be undetected by the ground forces.”

Displayed before me on our tactical screens was an image of the target. It was a modern military base with all the normal trappings, including the standard multiple perimeters created by blast walls, and patrol routes. There were numerous nondescript buildings throughout the complex which were all designed to take a beating from above, and locations for artillery placements. The one major difference was that the base had no artillery in the mounts. There were places to mount them, and even mounting equipment, but nothing actually mounted. There were no modern weapons of any kind visible in the imagery. That didn’t make sense, since this used to be a military base and would have been equipped with plenty of firepower. The only logical conclusion is that they had taken down the weapons, but I couldn’t think of a reason to do that. Even if they couldn’t work them, it would have been simpler to have left them up.

Also clear in the images were the sorcerers’ forces. These were made up of some kind of creature which was a nightmarish mixture of man, machine and beast. They looked half-formed and ready to fall apart, but when the Phareon military had fought them at the last station they’d proved to be extremely resistant to damage and utterly fearless. They were milling aimlessly around the complex and didn’t seem to be serving any function other than discouraging a direct ground assault. Looking at them made me sick to my stomach. They were unnatural, and I couldn’t wait to see them destroyed.

“I don’t get it. They have all the pieces in place to harden the target against any assault, but they aren’t utilizing them at all,” I said.

“Zah’rak, you aren’t thinking like a Korshalemian sorcerer,” said Ragnar.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Remember, they don’t have spacecraft or probes where they come from,” he said.

“Sure,” said Raquel. “But they’ve been operating in our realm for a while now, so it’s not like they don’t know about such things.”

“Yes, but they wouldn’t defend against them in the same way that a Vydorian military force would. They have other tools,” he said.

“What are you getting at?” asked the captain.

“I think I see,” said Raquel. “They don’t have artillery set up because they won’t need it.”

“Exactly,” said Ragnar. “If we try a simple attack from above, the sorcerers will reach out with their magic and destroy us in orbit. Failing that, they’ll simply abandon the base and move the operation elsewhere. Either way we lose.”

“I see,” said the captain. “Then what’s our plan?”

Raquel looked down at the map thoughtfully and said, “Captain, the only way we’re going to take out that base is to eliminate the sorcerers. They know that as well as we do, so we’ll have to put ground forces into play. I suggest that the Night Wisp lands here, and we move directly on the fortress. I request you to drop your ground forces about an hour behind us to land here and here. The goal will be for your attack to draw the sorcerers out from cover. When they show themselves, we’ll engage them directly. When they are defeated everyone pulls out, and you bomb the base into oblivion from orbit.”

The captain conferred quietly with his advisors and turned back to the screen. “What about air support?”

“You’ll need it. I’m sure the sorcerers will have some of their own,” said Raquel, “but I don’t yet know what it will be.”

“They will summon elementals, at the very least,” said Ragnar. “Hopefully nothing worse, but they are sorcerers so it’s possible.”

“What are elementals?” asked the captain.

“Zah’rak, can you display some of the elementals from our database for them to see?” asked Ragnar.

“Sure,” I said. Thanks to the datapad Master Spectra had given us, we had an extensive database of all the basic creatures elementalists could summon. None of us could summon them, but the information was great to have at times like this. I suspected our little ship contained the most extensive database of magic in the region, apart from Hospital Station.