Free Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) by John Daulton Page A

got no reply from her either.
    “Orli, are you all right? Have they taken you for inspection too?” He looked about as best he could, which incited the tentacle tip to clutch his head more tightly and hold him still.
    Orli did not answer. He hoped she wasn’t doing something reckless. She wasn’t much different than Roberto when it came to these sorts of things, and she was as likely to start shooting as her friend was if other options did not present themselves right away.
    “I would also like to warn you,” he said to the alien, “that if you hurt my wife in any fashion, your best option right after will be to kill me straight off. For if you let me live, and if I manage to get out of this mana hole you’ve built around us here, I can assure you, I’ll put you and your gods-be-damned ship straight into that mountain you’ve parked beside. And what sort of diplomacy will that be, eh?”
    Neither of the aliens appeared to be much concerned with his threat. And so, for some ridiculous length of time, he lay there waiting to either die or be released.
    He thought for one brief moment that he heard Orli cry out, the sound startling him, piercing like a rapier through the heart, but then it passed. He strained to hear it again for quite some time, but nothing came. He told himself it was the wind.
    That wasn’t so much of a stretch. There was a lot of wind. It was nearly as windy in this infernal ship as it was outside on the surface of Yellow Fire.
    He wondered how Yellow Fire might be doing just then. He wondered why these aliens were here. Why were they digging for Blue Fire’s poor, unlucky mate, digging for Yellow Fire’s newly rekindled heart? After perhaps millions of years lying dormant, his planet-sized wife bereaved and mourning for all that time, the moment he is brought back to some semblance of health, along come more aliens going after him. The poor Hostile chap hardly had time to hug—or whatever constituted a hug—rapturous Blue Fire, and now it was all on thin ice again.
    Not that anything like ice could survive in a steam bath like this ship.
    He wasn’t sure if he’d dozed off or been hallucinating, but all of a sudden he was flipped on his face. Something rough happened to the back of his spacesuit, and he saw the three tubes slide away, apparently under their own weight. All three open ends went right off over the edge of the table, two of them leaving trails of liquid, one trail clear and watery, the other not far from the hue and texture of the ochre jelly he’d been in. Something made a snapping sound right after, and then something jarred him at the back. The alien snatched him off the table, and for a time he was being waved about in the air as if he were being held by a pampered noblewoman trying to dry her freshly painted fingernails. The motion was not frantic or violent, but it did seem at least careless to treat him so. At least at first. It turned out that the creature was moving, shifting and unwinding the tentacles that locked it to the grate upon which the machine sat and heading off for somewhere else. The next thing Altin knew, he was flying. He and the alien.
    It happened so fast Altin hardly had time to realize what was happening. First, the creature, which had apparently swallowed the ballooning billow into a smaller bulb near the top of its body while it worked, reared back and, well, spat the thing back out. It blew out like a giant bubble, much in the way children on the islands of Angrost and Pengrost blew them with chewed-up wads of hgat leaf. But this one was so large, and it blew to full size so quickly, that the violence of the inflation filled the air with a thunderous noise, loud even over the roar of the wind. In the instant that followed, the creature was snatched off the grate, and Altin snatched with it. It occurred to Altin in the moments right after that he might have been hurt by such sudden velocity, but somehow the tentacle that held him did a fair job of