Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals by John Daulton

locked into place. She made sure the suit’s dorsal unit was secure, then checked the control panel on his chest and the other on his sleeve. “All good,” she said. “Let’s go. And don’t forget to take it down slow. Let the air out of here easy first, or we’ll be picking up Tytamon’s stuff from halfway across the solar system.” She pointed to the heaps of things around them to make her point.
    Altin nodded, then closed his eyes. He let his mind slip into the mana, the place of magic, which for Altin was a constant pink mistiness, like a cloud had settled upon all the universe and no wind stirred. Most magicians saw mana differently: as currents, rising tides, waves, and undulating whorls of chaos. But Altin had a ring—he had the stone within the ring, really, hidden underneath—given to him by Blue Fire. It was a piece of herself and a piece of the Father’s Gift, a part of that which had given her life. The ring smoothed out the tempest for Altin, gave him mana that was nearly as instant as his thoughts. He no longer had to speak the words that shaped ideas and formed the constructs of spells as other humans did.
    And so, with that quickness afforded by the ring, he plunged into the mana and, with it, into the magic dome he had cast around the tower, the dome known as a Polar Piton’s shield. He reached out with his thoughts and found the thread of magic that wove the dome together, holding in the air they breathed, maintaining the steady temperature, and even sustaining the very gravity that held them both comfortably to the floor. He found the thread, tugged at it gently, and, heeding Orli’s warning, unraveled the invisible protective shell slowly so as not to send all the air beneath the dome blasting through the windows in a rush. He let it leak out through small openings until it was all gone. The air he could manage; the gravity he could not.
    He braced himself as he opened his eyes, awaiting the crushing mash of gravity that had smote him when he’d dropped the shield on the planet Red Fire, a great weight that felt as if ten thousand smashing bricks had fallen upon him. But it did not come. Intellectually he’d known it wouldn’t. Orli told him this moon was much smaller than Red Fire was. Smaller than planet Prosperion even, if not by much. But still, the mind and memory do their work, and it was a matter of several moments before the tension left him and his taut muscles could relax.
    “I confess to having been nervous there,” he said by way of letting her know that it was done. For without saying so, there was no other evidence that the dome was down.
    Orli turned and looked out the window. “It looks kind of like our moon on Earth.”
    Altin, having never been there, couldn’t say much to that. “Well, let’s be on with it, shall we?”
    Orli picked up a large tool kit and slung the strap over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said, “let’s go.”
    Not long after, the two of them emerged from the tower’s stairwell and stepped out onto the dusty surface of the moon. Orli looked around, tapping the optical controls on her sleeve to get a telescopic view of the horizon all around. She scanned a long, slow arc. Only the mountainous area ahead broke the monotony of the vast gray plain. “Nothing,” she said. “Looks pretty dead.”
    “Well, hopefully it’s not all dead,” he said. “Let’s go see if he’s still alive down there somewhere.”

Chapter 6
    P ernie stood amongst the hunters again, just as she had yesterday and the day before and the day before. Twenty-four days in a row, to be exact, all exactly the same. The hunt would gather here outside the cave that had become her home on Fel’an’Ital ; they would wait for Seawind, who was always last to arrive; and when he did arrive, they would all run off and leave her to run pointlessly into the trees.
    Her admiration for their killing craft had begun to wane by the seventh day of trying to run with the hunt, which had