The Galactic Mage (24 page)

“Well, it’s your project,” said Altin. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. But, before you try again, do you have a few raven feathers that I could have?”

The ancient sorcerer crinkled up his already wrinkled face as he considered where he might have some raven feathers stashed away. After a few long moments he shook his head. “No, I haven’t got a one.” Then he added, as if an obvious afterthought, “Just go get one.”

Altin rolled his eyes and, thanking Tytamon for his time, went back down and out into the courtyard. The afternoon was wearing thin. So was his patience. But he had to make another try. Or else he had to go to town. He really didn’t want to take the time for that.

He set his jaw and strode back out into the meadow beyond the gates. He scanned the area for any signs of black but saw only Pernie playing near the creek. He watched the tow-headed child as she raised her slender arm and spun round a tattered, homemade sling. Whoosh, whoosh, two times round, and then she shot a frog that was sunning itself upon a rock. Altin was mildly impressed by her marksmanship but was not inclined to comment lest he be drawn into another rambling conversation with the excitable little girl. He had almost turned away when a glint of sunlight caught his eye.

Pernie had pulled a small knife from her belt and was running towards her prey. Altin watched, recoiling a bit in surprise, as the little girl went to work neatly slicing off the frog’s legs where the thigh bones met the hips. Slice, slice and it was done, just as neat as you please. His expression shadowed with disgust. She seemed too young to be fond of such ghastly play. But then he saw her run the two bloody limbs back to where she’d made the shot and drop them into a basket that he hadn’t noticed earlier, hidden by the grass. Of course. Kettle sent her out here when it was time for her famous frog leg stew.

He harrumphed and put his mind back to his own hunting task. But as he turned and headed for the woods an idea struck: Pernie. Pernie would be perfect for this type of grisly work. Clearly she had no qualms about blood, and she seemed an excellent shot. Not only that, this was a great way to proceed with his commitment to acting nicer to the girl. Maybe he could kill two birds with just one stone. He chuckled at his cleverness then turned back and called out to the miniature hunter stalking frogs along the creek.

She came immediately, grasping her basket in one hand and her sling in the other as she bounded through the waist high grass, leaping like a little two-legged deer. Her first thought was to proffer the basket to Altin, that he might see the enormity of her catch. “Look what I got,” she said proudly.

“Good gods, child,” he said peering into it and remembering to sound impressed. She’d certainly gathered enough to feed them all tonight. “Did you save any for the birds and snakes to eat?”

She grinned proudly. “They have to catch their own.”

He wanted to be friendly, so he pressed on a sentence more. “You certainly are a good shot with that.” He pointed at the sling dangling in her fist. “How’d you get so good?”

She held it up for him to see. It was just two lengths of frayed rope and a pouch made from a piece of burlap. “Made it myself,” she beamed. “Practice all the time in case a orc comes out of the hills to get me like Kettle always says they will.” She looked genuinely afraid.

“You know Kettle is only trying to scare you into being good with all that orc talk, right?”

“Nuh-uh,” said the little girl, glancing furtively up at the peaks behind the castle’s granite walls and looking as if she might actually start to cry. “There’s orcs up there. Nipper says it too. And Gimmel.”

“Well, yes,” Altin said, forcing a smile and nodding patiently. “Technically, there are. But they haven’t attacked the castle in over four hundred years. Think about it. Would you attack a castle where Tytamon the Ancient lives?”

She had to think about that. “No,” she said after a moment, shaking her head. Then she added, “And you.”

He let out a breath of relief, satisfied that tears were no longer an issue to be feared. “All right. Good. So, Pernie, being that you use that sling so well, have you ever shot a bird?”

“Oh, all the time, Master Altin, sir. I get quails an’ pheasants all the time. Even got a dove right out of the sky. Nipper says I’m Nordark in human form, come up from a fourth level a hell I shoot so good. Says it’s unnatural for a girl, but I don’t care. Girls can shoot good as boys if they want.” She looked tentatively back at Mt. Pernolde and the surrounding peaks. “Never shot an orc though.”

“Well, that could work out for both of us then,” said Altin leaning down towards her and bracing his hands against his knees. He ignored the part about the orcs. “How about I give you another job for that sling of yours besides shooting frogs? I’ll even pay you for it. I’ll give you a silver piece if you can find me a raven and bring it down.”

“A raven, Master Altin, sir?”

“You know, the black ones that fly around sometimes and make that awful sound.”

“The ones with the red spots on their wings?”

“No, not those. It has to be a raven. The bigger ones, no red spots. I need the feathers from a raven’s wings. Do you know the ones I mean?”

She was nodding now. “Is that the only thing you need, Master Altin, sir?” She stared up at him, and he could see she was breathless with anticipation for the task.

“Yes, that’s all. Just a raven’s wing,” he said. “And if you bring it quickly, I’ll pay you two silver pieces for your time. He added the second part as an afterthought, but she was already gone before he spoke, sprinting for the woods as if money meant nothing to her at all.

Chapter
24

O
nly a day after Orli was confined to her quarters, the first signs of illness became apparent among the members of the crew. On that first day, eleven people showed up in sick bay complaining of headaches, fever and violent diarrhea. The ship was put on lockdown immediately, and Orli found herself no longer the only one onboard restricted as to where she went. Nobody was allowed anywhere other than duty stations and quarters. Meals were to be combat rations only and anybody who wanted to go outside of one of these two places had to run the request directly through the captain himself.

But that suited Orli just fine. If there was some disease floating around the ship now, she was perfectly content to stay right where she was. Within hours after the first wave of illnesses were reported, rumors began to circulate around the ship that an alien contagion was on the loose, injected into the ship when the orb thrust its proboscis through the hull.

Through talking to Roberto on the com, and through the regular ship’s announcements, Orli gathered that the rumor was being taken seriously and that extreme measures were underway. White clouds of mist began to appear from every air vent on the ship as hundreds of gallons of antiseptic compounds were pumped out into every deck. Orli was glad they were taking decisive action, and she believed there was a chance that the rumors of alien infection were true, but she also had her own private fear as she glanced over at the plastic isolation tent she’d made around the cabinet on her wall. If it was an alien disease, she just hoped it was the orb and not her that had brought it to the ship.

She hadn’t checked on her little fungal spore in a few days, and it was with trepidation that she zipped herself into the isolation tent. Before, she’d been excited to look and see if the spore might actually grow, but now she dreaded what she might find. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and covered her face with a protective mask.

She opened the cabinet and pulled the petri dish out into the light. Looking through the clear plastic of its lid, she could see a grayish spot near the center of the dish. Her whole body tightened in a spasm of guilt and fear. She even felt dizzy for a moment as she realized that the spore had in fact started to grow. Of all the terrible times for success. Suddenly she had to fight back a wave of panic, and her breathing came in gasps as the reality of what she might well have done struck a nearly physical blow. She grappled with her emotions and finally regained some measure of calm, though panic flitted against it like a moth at a window trying to get in.

Replacing the petri dish, she zipped herself out of the tent and climbed onto the workbench beneath the air intake vent mounted in the ceiling. On tip toe, she reached up and opened the vent, pulling out the filter inside. She left the vent door swinging as she hopped back to the floor. Taking a scalpel from a jar against the wall, she cut out a small section of the filter and took it over to a microscope. She was afraid to look.

But she’d lucked out. The filter was clear of any signs of fungus, and she could at last allow herself to breathe. That was a relief. She took a few more samples from other parts of the filter just to be safe, but in the end the outcomes were all the same. There were no fungi to be found. The epidemic could not be blamed on her.

With that nearly exhausting set of minutes out of her way, she decided she might as well have a look at what it was that she actually had done, since her fungus had finally decided to grow. She zipped herself back into the tent and had another look. There wasn’t much to see with just the naked eye, so she scraped a bit of the growth onto a slide and set it in the microscope she’d put inside the tent.

Sure enough, her little spore had taken off and she had quite a colony going on. Her first concern, particularly given her recent scare, was to make sure that the fungicide she was using would actually do the trick in case this fungus decided it did want to get outside.

Using a syringe and the tiniest of needles, she squirted a little drop of fungicide onto the fungus sample on the slide. She looked back into the eyepiece to watch it take effect.

It did not. And the fungal cells were gone. In their place were several bacterial cells, which seemed quite happy to swim about as if they were fish in some microscopic pond.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said aloud, staring down at the scene upon the slide. “That did not just happen.” She pulled back from the eyepiece and squinted down at the slide with her own two eyes, as if somehow that might clear things up. There was no way that she had mistaken those cells for fungi when they’d been bacteria all along. No way.

She pulled the slide out of the microscope and scraped another bit of the grayish spot in the petri dish onto a new glass slide. She put it in the microscope and had another look. Sure enough, fungi. Just what she’d expected she would see. Just as she had known she would see.

She retrieved the syringe and dropped a bit of fungicide on this slide, as she had the first, and quickly looked back into the microscope to see if the fungi were still alive. The cells were alive, but once again there was no fungus to be found. Only bacteria. Same as the first.

She grunted, the corners of her mouth twitching. What could that possibly mean? She suspected the three types of DNA were at work. But could a creature, even a single-celled one as simple as these, remake itself as fast as that? Even with the genetic maps ready to go, an instantaneous shift seemed impossible at best.

But she had no more time to work on it, for it was then that she got Doctor Singh’s call. “Ensign Pewter, you are needed back in sick bay. Report immediately.” His tone was laden with stress, and Orli knew at once that things were getting bad. “And by immediately, I mean
immediately
.” Despite the firm command in Doctor Singh’s voice, there was an almost desperate undercurrent in the man’s normally unassailable calm. Something was really going wrong.

“Coming,” she said.

She tossed the two slides into an empty petri dish then closed it up and set it on the shelf. She capped the fungal sample as well, then, shutting the cabinet, zipped herself out of the tent after spending a moment in the fungicidal mist. Given what she’d just seen, she wondered if there was any point.

Her hands were trembling as she removed all of her protective garb. She’d be donning more in a few moments, up in the hospital section of the ship. As she jogged through the empty white corridors on her way to sick bay, fear of contagion began to grip her in the guts. She couldn’t help thinking that she was running to the one place she never wanted to be, the place that had filled her nightmares only a short time ago, a place of screams and blood and fear, and now a place of contagion and possibly a gruesome alien death.

And her fears were not unfounded, for over the course of the next six days, it was in just such a horrible scene that Orli found herself immersed. The alien disease—and it was something alien because it was like nothing any of them had ever seen—had an awful progression. After the headaches, fever and intestinal trouble, came trembles and psychological distress. For many, the psychosis was a simple thing: weeping in corners or curling up in a ball beneath your cot. But for others it was violent and agonized.

The first patient to manifest this aspect of the disease was, no surprise, the first person that had reported his condition at the onset of the epidemic—and by day six, the existence of an epidemic was a certainty as over three hundred people were now infected with the mysterious disease. The first crewman, an older enlisted man normally stationed on deck seven, got his case of trembles near the end of the sixth day. He began sweating and shaking in his sickbed and did so for nearly five hours at which point, as Orli was changing sheets on a bed across the aisle, he suddenly leapt up and charged at her, screaming insane gibberish about aliens and tooth decay as he ground and gnashed his teeth. He slammed into her with his whole body, swinging his fists spasmodically. He was a large man, and Orli was thrown against the wall, crashing into a tray of instruments and falling amongst them to the floor in a metallic din.

The madman dove upon her and started pounding her with his fists, still screaming about the aliens and rotting breath. Orli was screaming too. It took her a few moments to recover from her initial shock, at first panicking and covering her head with her arms defensively, but finally gathering her wits enough to try to fight him off. She kicked and drove at him with her knees, scratching and punching with every ounce of her strength. His dementia was not conducive to effective defense, and she got several punches past his non-existent guard. Two times she palmed him in the nose, the second blow sending a gush of blood across his face and splashing down onto her, onto the front of her pale green scrubs. She realized as she saw the crimson streaks that she was now in a fight that could end with her in this man’s shoes next week. The realization caused her to scream even louder as she continued trying to fight him off.

By then, two nurses and Doctor Singh were there, and Orli saw Doctor Singh plunging a needle into the raving man’s shoulder as the two nurses fought to pull him back. The bloodied man collapsed onto her a moment later, limp and heavy as death, and Orli scrambled out from beneath him, swearing and trembling with rage and fear.

“Are you okay?” Doctor Singh asked, a dark hand on each of her shoulders and leaning his face down to study hers close up. His expression was one of fright and genuine concern. She nodded that she was, and the doctor ran a cursory inspection over the rest of her body. He saw the blood on her smock. “Did you get any in your mouth or eyes?”

She saw what he was looking at and shook her head, no. “At least I don’t think so.”

“Are you cut?”

She held out her bloodied hands, still trembling, and they both looked to see if she’d been cut by either the madman’s gnashing teeth or clawing nails, or cut by something sharp on the tray when she had fallen, a scalpel or a shard of broken glass. But she was fine. No cuts. Maybe she’d gotten lucky after all.

It wasn’t until she was back in her quarters, given a twelve-hour leave by Doctor Singh, that she allowed herself to cry. She sat on her bed and sobbed, shoulders heaving as she let the terror out. All of it. Terror of the patient who had attacked her, and terror for the one that was going to attack her next. Terror of the disease, of the horrible vomiting and diarrhea, of the headaches that made the people scream, of the raging fever and, now, apparently of the dementia that followed the body-wracking shakes. She felt terror of the anarchy that was fast becoming the ship, and terror of the orbs. Terror of death. And perhaps mostly, terror of misery.

“Orli,” came Roberto’s voice from the speaker on her small desk. “Hey, Orli, you there?”

She wiped her eyes on her blanket and tried to put on her regular face. She blew her nose and, after a moment, clicked on the monitor. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?”

“You don’t look fine. I just heard what happened. Pennington told me. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Just scared the crap out of me is all. Really. I’m fine.”

“Well good,” he said. He looked relieved. “You look like shit though.” He smiled.

“Thanks,” she said, sniffling. She heard the captain’s voice in the background, typically surly despite being too far off for her to make out all the words.

“Gotta run,” was all Roberto said before the monitor went blank.

She spent a few expectant moments waiting for the ship-rattling crash of another projectile from an orb, assuming the returning Hostile to be why Roberto had been called away. But after a time she decided Roberto’s abrupt departure was due to his having been caught sneaking the time to check on her, and she allowed herself to breathe. She didn’t know what she would do if Roberto wasn’t on the ship, wasn’t there to care. Probably shoot herself or go entirely insane. She sighed. No, it would have to be insanity for sure; she’d never pull the trigger. She didn’t have the guts. She sighed again. God, this was such an awful place. And the nightmare had just begun.