Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read Free

of titanic anal probe, he’d be famous for all of time.
    The vehicle had a light, which it held on a flexible sort of boom, or maybe tentacle. The light grew brighter and brighter as it approached, so bright it lit up the dust in the air.
    Roberto zoomed in the camera as close as the helmet’s optics would allow. There was definitely something inside of the vehicle. “Whoa,” he muttered under his breath, then, louder, “What the hell is that?”
    “I can’t see it from down here,” Orli said.
    Roberto glanced over to where they were and saw the two of them shuffling back, leaning back and trying to see the top of the ramp, which he knew they couldn’t from that angle.
    “What’s it look like from over there?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said. It was pretty hard to explain. “Like two huge hoops rolling side by side around a giant glass egg.” Man, that sounded lame, and it was going to be recorded for all of history. “There’s some puffy balloon thing in the middle of it with a bunch of spaghetti arms. I’m getting it on video, though.” That wasn’t any better. The guys on the news feeds from Earth always sounded way cooler than that.
    “Maybe this is the creature coming to greet us finally,” Altin was saying. Roberto wanted to agree, but he wasn’t so sure. The light was getting really bright, and the vehicle was right above the two of them now. Nothing about it seemed too warm and welcoming. The tentacle reached out toward the edge of the ramp. It clearly knew they were down there. It stretched over the edge and started down toward them. The glare was so bright Roberto could hardly see them in it.
    A second tentacle shot out from the top of the vehicle right after, whip quick, and it arced over the edge of the ramp, bloated at one end, and ejected something globular.
    “Oh shit!” he managed to get out.
    The tip of the tentacle recoiled as if it had just spat something down at Roberto’s friends, and then they were encased in some kind of wiggly goo. A third tentacle came down right after, this one holding a large tubular device, with a sharp end like a probe. It jammed the probe into the jelly, and something sparked.
    “Hey, Orli. Altin. You guys all right?” he asked.
    No answer.
    “Hey, Orli. Seriously, don’t screw around. Answer me.” He waited a half second. “Altin? You guys getting me?”
    Still nothing.
    Roberto ran toward them, into the wind. The sand blowing rasped against his helmet glass.
    The beam of light from the tentacle changed colors. He looked up. A new tentacle was holding a different device. It looked to be made from the same avocado material as the ship and the ramp. The wiggly iceberg of jelly in which Altin and Orli were trapped began to rise.
    “Shit. Orli!” he called. He ran faster. “God damn it, Orli, say something. Altin, come in. Jesus. This is Roberto. Altin Meade, can you hear me? Orli? God damn it.”
    He drew his blaster and thought about blowing the light to hell. But the blob and his two friends were now over a hundred feet in the air. The drop would kill them.
    “Orli?” he called again, but there was nothing coming back. Not even a crackle or a hiss. He saw that all the lights on their suit packs were out. That wasn’t good.
    He ran back to the base of the ramp. This time he was with the wind, and it gave him speed, though he fell three times. The third time he actually leaped as he felt himself losing his balance and let the wind carry him that much farther before he bounced to a stop. He got to the base of the ramp and sprinted up it as best he could in the damn suit.
    “Hang on, you guys, I’m coming,” he called. His blaster was still in his hand.
    The spaghetti-armed monstrosity in the giant vehicle had them up on the ramp now. He could see them both hovering above it, still suspended by the dimmer light at the end of the tentacle boom.
    A quarter mile had never seemed so far away. Up and up he ran.
    He was close enough to take