A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (33 page)

“And it’s not even the 
right
 New Jersey!” Darryl said. “It’s New Jersey 
now!
 Look over there.” He pointed. Off to their right, across the street, was a big handsome blue building with a long, peaked roof. On the opposite side of the road in front of it stood a pole with road signs that said ROUTE 629 and TO NJ TURNPIKE. Farther down the pole were posted a laserprinted ad for an Internet café and a faded picture of somebody’s lost dog. 

Darryl was looking at the big blue building. “Bet you that was the mill once,” Darryl said. “Look, I was right! There’s the old millstones. They’ve got ’em sunk into the ground so cars won’t ruin their lawn when they turn the corner. There’s where the water came out past the mill. 
But no Martians!
” He started laughing again. 

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Ronan said, very quietly. 

There was something about the way he said it that stopped Darryl’s laughter. He and Kit both looked up at where Ronan was pointing among the trees behind the old mill building. Half-obscured by a stand of big old trees that surrounded it stood what looked like some kind of elderly, jury-rigged water tower. The part that had held the water, like an upended bucket, was suspended between four narrow iron uprights, all rusty with time. 

Darryl peered at the vessel, which had individual wooden staves like an old bucket, held together with rusty iron hoops. “Are those 
bullet holes
 in that?” Darryl said, still amused: but now there was some unease to the amusement. “Can’t you just see it? People around here were listening to that radio broadcast, the night before Halloween, and some of them really bought into it, and they ran outside with their guns when they heard that Martian war machines were landing in 
their town,
 and some of them saw that thing in the dark, looking all tripod-y, and they shot it up—” 

“Darryl,” Kit said. 

With a long, low moan of bending metal, the water tower 
moved.
 

“Bad,” Ronan said, sounding utterly conversational, “this is very bad. We had TV shows like this back home on Saturday afternoons when I was little. This is the part where I always hid behind the couch.” 

Against the cold, hard stars of the Martian sky, among the trees of a suburban New Jersey that had no business being where it was, the water tower lurched to one side, then lurched the other way, hard. It shook itself like a creature trying to rid itself of some kind of impediment: and the fourth upright fell away, leaving it standing on three. The water tower shook itself again, picked up one of those legs and jerked it back and around somehow until it was balanced evenly on all three of them. Then the water tower started getting taller against that blackness, rearing up past the tops of the highest trees. Up near its top, a red glow started to develop into an eye that Kit felt was looking right at him. 

“Anybody got an idea that doesn’t involve us all bailing out of here and completely disgracing ourselves as wizards?” Kit said. 

“Uh...” Darryl’s head tilted back as that red glow slowly grew a stalk that raised it higher and higher above the trees, and those legs got longer and thicker, and the water vessel started to develop itself into something far more massive. “Who was it said ‘discretion is the better part of valor’?” 

“Doesn’t matter, ’cause we’ve got no time for it now,” Ronan said, and pulled out his light-rod weapon. Kit heard the soft singing sound it started to make. “Running won’t help. What about 
Spirit
? Poor beastie’s gonna get stomped if we don’t stick around and do something. And what’ll NASA think if that happens?” 

“Or Irina,” Darryl said. 

Kit’s sweat went cold on him at the thought. 

“You carrying?” Ronan said to Darryl as he lifted the light-rod. 

“Don’t be hasty! Got a couple of things handy,” Darryl said. He pulled the WizPod out. “Need to concentrate on this, guys, so if someone wants to buy us a moment—” 

Ronan leveled his light-weapon, fired. A narrow line of blinding yellow-white light ravened out of it and struck the still-forming war machine in its underbody.

The stalk on which that red light had formed was now stretching toward them entirely too flexibly, and the light was going a far deeper and deadlier red. “No, you dope,” Darryl shouted, “I meant something 
passive,
 like a force field!” 

“Leave it with me,” Ronan said, and held up one hand. The air above them shimmered as the force field went into effect. Kit was relieved to see it, as away above the force field, the Martian war machine took its completely realized form. Gleaming in the rusty light, the bronzy body hoisted high up over them on its cabled tripod legs, metal groaning ominously as the great mass paused, the roving eye deadly red at the end of a long, gooseneck stalk as it sought them out, focused on them— 

“Here it comes!” Ronan shouted. Above them, the sunset was washed out by a wall of fire as the heat ray hit the force field and splashed away like water. By that awful light Darryl pulled out a page from his WizPod, muttered under his breath, threw it glowing to the ground, and pulled out another one— 

The ray stopped: the war machine above them wailed, an earsplitting howl of rage and frustration. Out beyond it, over the suburban New Jersey rooftops, a second red eye appeared, and then a third. 

“You want to hurry up with that!” Ronan shouted at Darryl. “The force field was already starting to give just then—” 

“What, do we need to kick the power up?” Kit said, reaching into memory for a different force-field spell of his own. He hurriedly recited the words in the Speech that brought it shimmering into operation above the three of them, then stood there panting for a moment with the reaction. 

“No!”
Ronan yelled as a second war machine started to move toward them. “Whatever’s making these things appear is
learning
from what we do. I could feel the war-machine spell solving the shield while I was holding it—” 

Another furiously concentrated line of fire came splashing down from the first machine and its approaching compatriot. Kit, looking up, saw Ronan’s shield fail while his own held: but now he, too, could feel what Ronan had described, that sense of his own wizardry being frayed at, pulled apart, with dreadful energy and persistence. “He’s right!” Kit shouted at Darryl. “What have you got?” 

“Gonna trip this closest one,” Darryl said. “Watch out for which way it falls—” 

“One is what you’re gonna get,” Kit said, feeling his force field continuing to fray.
“Dammit!
Ronan?” 

“Might not be able to trip one,” Ronan said, pulling his light wand out to full length, almost five feet. “But chop one down, yeah—” 

“Save it
for a moment!” Kit said. 

Darryl was muttering under his breath in the Speech. Then he made a huge, expansive gesture with both arms, and from them sprang what at first looked like a jet of white mist. It wrapped itself around the legs of the closest war machine as it was rearing that flexible neck back for another attack on the force field. Then with another groan of metal the mist knotted itself tight, yanking the legs together at their “knees.” The first machine leaned, tottered, and fell even as it fired. The bolt it shot went high over their heads, but as it went down, Kit felt his force field fail. 

The second machine targeting them strode closer. Darryl threw another jet of mist at it, but this time as it knotted tight, the machine broke through it and strode on. “Bad, bad, bad...” Kit muttered, reaching into his otherspace pocket and pulling out the little shining sphere he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to use, especially as once he used it, no second one would work. “Darryl?” 

He was backing away, along with Kit and Ronan. “This is getting us nowhere!” he said. “Stay close if we have to jump out of here—” 

“Don’t want to jump!” Ronan said. “If we do, we’ll fail this test!” 

“Yeah, well, how do we ace it?” Darryl said. 

“What kills these things?” 

“Germs!” Kit said. 

“That took a while in the original!” Ronan said, backing up and looking thoughtfully up at the legs of the walker that was stalking closer by the moment. “Couple of weeks, wasn’t it?” 

“I think what we’ve got is a couple of minutes,” Darryl said. “And to buy us a little time—?” 

He pulled another page out of his WizPod and started reading hurriedly. Kit kept backing up, in tandem with Ronan, as above them the walker peered around, looking for its prey. Darryl stood right where he was and kept on reading. Then, in what seemed mid-sentence, he stopped, took a deep breath, and shouted one last word, making a sweeping downward gesture with one hand. 

Then he paused, looked behind him. 
Hold still!
 Darryl said silently. 
Don’t move!!
 

Above them, the walker loomed up, stepped down toward them. Kit saw the great trilobed metallic foot come down at them, right on top of them— and then 
through
 them, past them. Fleetingly he saw the interior of the foot, the biocabling and mechanisms of its interior, as they slid down past his eyes like too-solid ghosts and stopped against the ground. 

Ronan and Kit stared. 
What was
 that, 
exactly?
 Kit said silently as the great foot lifted again, and the creature stalked away. 

Micro-bilocation,
 Darryl said. 
I might not be able to move us away from here, but I
 could 
stay here and bilocate
 it. 
I just let it slip through the empty spaces in our atoms. It thinks it stomped us, so keep quiet!
 

They watched the walker stalk away across the suburban darkness, toward the green-scummed pond. “And 
this,
” Ronan whispered to Kit, looking at Darryl approvingly, “is why it’s fun to play with the little kids every now and then. You never know 
what
 they’re going to pull.” 

“Oh,” Darryl said, very soft, “so all of a sudden I’m not the super-powered brat anymore?” He chuckled. “Well, good, because I’m gonna yell at you now. If 
you
 hadn’t lost it and started shooting—” 

“Yeah, well if you’d just tell people when you—” 

“If you two would please just shut up?”
 Kit whispered. 

Astonished, Darryl and Ronan both fell silent. 

“This is not the moment,” Kit said. “Okay?” Because yet another war machine was now coming toward them, and in the distance Kit could see yet another. “Brute force and random wizardries aren’t gonna solve this! We have to do this by the book. Literally.” He pulled out his manual, looking up nervously at the machines approaching. 

“Which book?” 

“The one they came from,” Kit said, starting to flip through his manual. “So there’s only one thing we can do. Mess around with time.” 

“What? A timeslide? Have you gone 
spare?
” Ronan shouted, for mind-talk plainly wasn’t going to fool the machines now bearing down on them: they were already being targeted. “We can’t do that! We’d need ten million kinds of authorization—” 

“Not for this!” Kit said, frantically hunting the page he needed. “I’m not talking about a slide! This isn’t about going backwards! What we want is a local acceleration, 
forwards.
 Not changing what’s going to happen, just making it happen a whole lot faster. There’s no way to damage previous causality, so you don’t need an authorization—” 

Finally he found the page. “How long have you had 
this
 one under your hat?” Ronan said. 

“Found it when I was doing some research a few months ago,” Kit said. “I was going to use it to age some metal under Martian conditions to see what kind of remains I’d be looking for from stuff left over from ancient times. But it was all long-duration aging. Didn’t occur to me it might be useful for this until you and the Squirt here reminded me.” He glanced at Darryl, grinned. “‘Took a few weeks in the original?’ It won’t take anything like that this time!” 

Kit reached into his manual page and pulled the spell template out of it, a long elastic ellipse which he dropped to the dusty ground in front of them. “Hurry up, get in here,” he said, stepping into the center of it. “Stick your personal info into the empty circles! There— and there—” 

Darryl and Ronan both jumped into the interior ellipse and got to work inserting their personal information into the vacant templates in the spell circle. “This’ll keep the altered flow clear of us,” Kit said, watching the machines as they slowly stalked toward them, howling. “Now all we have to do is wait for them to get close enough—” 

Darryl had his eye on the war machines. “Uh, your Kitness— just how close is close?”

“This is gonna take a lot of energy,” Kit said. “Can’t kick the outer circle out too far. But once they’re inside, we’ll be good. They’ve been breathing the same air we have, and 
we’ve
 been breathing out lots of lovely germs and viruses—” 

The secondary circle laid itself out as Kit spoke, maybe a few hundred yards distant all around them, glowing against the ground. “Is this safe?” Ronan said, sounding nervous. “If something slips and our personal space-time gets deranged somehow because these things stumble into the circle—”