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

a shot. He stopped, dropped to a knee, and aimed carefully for a section of the tentacle from which the suspension light came, about a half yard from the tip. He fired. The tip bent downward, as if hinged, cut halfway through by the searing shot. The yellowish jelly holding his friends plopped to the deck. Roberto was up and running. “Take that, you spaghetti fuck,” he called as he ran.
    They were only a hundred or so yards away. He pushed himself for speed.
    Another tentacle came out through the top of the egg shape. It took up the device that the wounded tentacle had let go. Once again it lifted the jelly blob up. The vehicle turned and began to roll away, back up the ramp and toward the opening in the ship.
    “Oh no you don’t. Eat this, bitch!” He dropped to his knee again and fired another shot. This time the laser beam struck some kind of barrier and angled off into the sky. “Like I didn’t expect that!” He switched to conventional rounds as he ran closer. They wouldn’t be any good from this far away. The vehicle was moving away too quickly. He had to shoot anyway.
    He aimed and fired. He couldn’t tell if he hit anything or not. Nothing happened. He fired again, then three more after.
    The vehicle stopped.
    “Hah! Now you see how it is. Give me my friends back.” He ran farther up the ramp.
    A tentacle reached out toward him. It held an oblong black device. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he didn’t like it, so he stopped and shot at it too. Three shots, crack, crack, crack .
    Something happened in the air in front of him: it rippled, like barely visible smoke rings being blown at him. The force blew him backward eighty feet, and were it not for the slope of the ramp, the landing might have killed him. As it was, he struck hard and his breath was knocked from him. He slid another sixty feet before coming to a stop. He’d damn near slid off the edge of the ramp. The seventy-foot drop would have finished him.
    He got up, realized his gun was gone, and immediately fumbled for the sharp pair of pliers in his suit’s tool kit. “This shit isn’t over yet!” That’s when he realized all the lights were off on his suit too. All of them.
    He paused, thinking. He looked up and saw the vehicle was already getting up and over the hump in the ramp, heading into the black hole that would take it inside.
    He refocused, looking at the blank glass inside his helmet. Nothing. No video, no temperature readings, no oxygen monitors.
    “God damn it!”
    He wouldn’t be any good to them dead.

Chapter 3
    T he creature snaked a tendril up into the steam-filled wind, a tentacle perhaps, for there were round structures along it like suction cups, though from the distance, and the steamy darkness, it was hard for Orli to be sure. The tendril flapped and fluttered as it rose, much as the mucus had when the ochre jelly was melting away, but it climbed steadily higher. Its ascent was guided by a number of the small discs, which flattened out like giant oval dinner plates, spreading out from the center of the tendril and angling here and there, some upward, some vertical to the direction of the wind, like the rudder and ailerons of an old-fashioned airplane.
    She saw it rising in the distance behind Altin where he knelt in front of her, watched it climb right up to the large grate high above them. She followed its flight, saw it wind itself around one of the cross members of the grate, and then, right after, it seemed to haul the most colossal creature out of the darkness from down below.
    “Oh no,” she said as she watched it emerge from the shadows.
    “Oh no, what?” Altin asked, turning and following the direction of her gaze.
    Up rose a billow of gray material, looking rather like a colossal parachute made from a film of mucus. It bloated with the prevailing wind, and it followed the tendril upward for a time, growing larger and larger as it drew near. Soon it was high above them. From within it, descending out