A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (34 page)

“We’ll be fine!” Kit said. “The spell puts a stasis on everything in the area but the ‘forward arrow’ of time itself—” 

“You sure physics lets you do that?” Darryl said, sounding twitchy, too. 

“The manual says so,” Kit said, glancing up at the war machines, which were now unsettlingly close, “and I think so does Stephen Hawking. That’s good enough for me!” 

He ran one finger down the manual page and found the words he needed to recite. “You two ready?” Kit said. “Dar, better grab hold of us. The spell won’t mind, and if we do have to jump—” 

Darryl reached out to Ronan and Kit, grabbed one shoulder of each. “All set!” 

The war machines lowered over them, stepping into the outer circle. Their long necks reached down. As Kit began to read in the Speech, fire spat from the two terrible eyes— 

—slowed in midair, slid to a halt, and hung there right above them, frozen in place. 

The machines froze, too, held still by the spell. All around them, kicked-up dust in the air was holding its position: smoke, billowing from where the machines had burned trees or buildings while heading toward Kit and Darryl and Ronan, lay unmoving on the air as if painted there. Inside the shell of space around the war machines, though, Kit could feel time speeding up, faster and faster: could hear its rising whine inside his head, scaling up, nearly unbearable, as the spell circle inevitably passed back to him the neural side effects of the abuse he was inflicting on the time trapped inside the circle. All Kit could do was finish reading, squeeze his eyes shut, and try to bear up under the screech of pain of the space itself, miserable at having to endure being pushed into the future faster than the normally mandated one second per second— 

The spell ran out: the circle went dark. Dust started to move again; smoke started to drift. “That way,” Kit said to Darryl, 
“quick!!”
 

The world blacked out, went bright again as the war machines’ beams hit the ground where they had all been standing until a moment ago. But then, slowly, one of the machines started to sag forward, the other one sideways toward them— 

They scattered as the machines fell with a tremendous crash: one of them onto a frame house nearby, a second right onto the hapless Grover’s Mill Company building, which flew up in a little storm of timber and roof shingles as the machine crashed into it. Both machines cracked open as they came down, and the smell that poured from them afterward was truly impressive. 

The three of them drew together again, breathing hard. “Wow,” Ronan said. Kit bent half over, trying to get his breath back: the spell was still taking its toll on him. Around them, though, the New Jersey suburbs were already fading away, leaving the cratered Martian landscape again. Last to go were the shattered war machines, dead from the microorganisms for which their inhabitants were no more prepared on this planet than they would have been on Earth. 

“Now 
that,
” Darryl said, “was great thinking.” 

“Thank you,” Ronan said. 

“I meant Kit,” Darryl said, as Kit managed to straighten up enough to look around. 

“Oh, really. If you remember, he said that
I—” 

“Some more of the shutting up, please?!”
 Kit yelled at them. “Because we have another problem now!” 

Darryl and Ronan stared at him again. “What? 
Spirit
?” Ronan said. “What now? I thought you said you could—” 

Kit pointed across the crater, not at 
Spirit.
 Boiling up out of the sand all around them were what looked like streamers and ribbons of green metal. 

Darryl’s eyes widened. “Those are the exact same color as—” 

“The superegg,” Kit said. “Yes, they are. And if they do what the superegg did—” 

“Uh-oh,” Darryl said. 

“You’d better pull out some more wizardries you haven’t used yet,” Kit said as the ribbons of metal started writhing and knotting together. “Because I don’t think you’re gonna be able to do your micro-bilocation trick again.” 

Darryl frowned. “I could try—” 

“If it doesn’t work,” Ronan said, “we’re going to find out about that just as something new stomps us flat! So don’t bother! We need something else—” 

Low shadowy shapes were starting to form all around them, out in the dust and sand, surrounding them in a triple ring. They hurriedly placed themselves back to back. “What about the rover?” Ronan said. 

“She can’t see this,” Darryl said. 

“I wish 
I
 couldn’t,” Kit muttered as the metallic shapes twined and conjoined into their final shapes, gleaming in the dull sunlight. 

“Bloody ’ell,” Ronan said, disgusted. “Giant robot scorpions. Why is it always giant robot scorpions?” 

Kit rolled his eyes. “You sure they’re not alive?” he said to Darryl. 

“Not even slightly.” Darryl raised his hands and said one quick sentence in the Speech. 

Four or five of the nearest scorpions blew up. “Don’t let them get near the rover!” Kit shouted to Ronan as the fighting heated up. “We don’t have time to spend repairing her right now if something happens!” 

“Got that,” Ronan said. He threw his bar of light into the air, spinning: as it came down, he caught it by one end and waded into the scorpions, using the dissociator like a sword. 

But he wasn’t able to cut down more than a few of them. Within a few strokes, his light-rod was simply bouncing off them, and though Darryl threw another destructive bolt at another gaggle of the scorpions, it had no effect. Ronan was backing up, and as he did one of the scorpions got behind him: he tripped over it, went down— 

The dome of wizardry over 
Spirit
 wavered and went down at the same moment. 
Oh, no,
 Kit thought. 
He started holding the wizardry in place by direct intent, from moment to moment!
 It was one of a number of ways a wizard could save energy when doing a spell, but it required you to have your attention on it to keep the spell running.
Falling over was one thing too many—
 

“Darryl,” Kit yelled, “grab him, we’re gonna jump!” He turned his back on 
Spirit
. 
Sorry, baby, we’ll brainwash you or something later, but right this minute—
 

“But if we fail the test—” 

“We won’t. We’re not jumping that far! We need to get them away from the rover, draw them off—” 

“Using what?” Darryl said as he helped Ronan back onto his feet and the three of them backed away from the scorpions now advancing with raised claws. 

“Us!”
Kit said. “It’s us they’re attracted to.” 

Darryl and Ronan exchanged a glance. “Got a point there,” Ronan said. “Where’d you have in mind for our heroic last stand?” 

“Don’t say ‘last’!”
 Darryl said. 

Kit pointed. “The far wall of the crater, on the south side. The rover’s been there already: even if NASA manages to wake it up again and make it look back there, it won’t see the fine detail of what’s going to happen to the rocks. I’ll freeze the rotor gear on the camera pod for the next few minutes. If they do someday see the data, that won’t raise any red flags—they’re always having these little movement glitches.” 

“Let’s go,” Ronan said. 

Kit pulled his wand out and froze 
Spirit
’s gear. “Okay,” he said to Darryl, “jump us over there—” 

Darryl grabbed him and Ronan: things went dark, then late-daylight dim again. Within seconds the scorpions were already boiling up out of the ground around them again, closing in— 

Kit pulled out the little spherical wizardry he’d been hoarding and put it down at his feet. Very carefully he said the sixteen words that armed it. “Dar,” he said, “wait till the last minute. We need to take them all out.” 

“I hate this!” Darryl said as the scorpions poured toward them. 

“Wouldn’t be a big fan myself,” Kit said under his breath. “Just hang on!” 

Ronan’s hands were clenching on his light-rod. “Now, yeah?” 

“No,” Kit said as the scorpions ran closer. The foremost ones were scissoring their claws together in a way he found really upsetting, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off them. 

“Now?” Darryl said, twitching. “Come on, your Kitship, how sure do you have to be?” 

“Really, really sure,” Kit said. “Put us down on the other side of 
Spirit,
 okay? About the same distance. No, 
not yet!!
 Just be ready to—” 

“I don’t want to look,” Ronan groaned. 

“Don’t,” Kit said. “But I’m gonna rag you about it forever if you close your eyes.” 

Eyes were foremost in Kit’s thoughts at the moment: the hard, cold glint of the Martian day on the eyes of the approaching scorpions was unnerving. They were twenty feet away— ten— six— 

“Go!”
Kit said to Darryl. And as things went dark, he said the word that set off the exception grenade. 

When things went bright again, Kit turned to look back the way they had come. Many, many tiny sparkling bits of metal were turning and glittering high in the air, and the ground was completely obscured by a huge cloud of dun-colored dust, from which shot more shards and fragments of scorpion every second. And more, and more, as the explosion seemed to go on forever in the light gravity. 

Ronan was staring at the results of the detonation of Kit’s toy. “Janey mack,” he said, “
what
 did you make that out of?” 

“A pinhead’s worth of strange matter,” Kit gasped, doubling over as the completed spell finished pulling its energy price out of him. “And three syllables of the Denaturation Fraction.” 

“Whoa,”
 Darryl said. 

“Can we sit down for a moment?” Ronan didn’t wait, just picked a nearby boulder. “I have to get my breath...” 

Kit needed to get his, too, and for a moment couldn’t find any and just shook his head. Finally he managed to say, “Can’t wait. Got one more problem—” 

The other two stared at him: unbelieving in Darryl’s case, slightly wounded in Ronan’s. “You’re really enjoying being the bad-news boy today, aren’t you?” Darryl said. “What 
now?
” 

Kit pointed up into the sky, still gasping. “What?” Darryl said. “You said there weren’t any satellites due—” 

Kit pointed at 
Spirit,
 shaking his head. 

Ronan stared at it, then at Kit. “What? What’s the problem?” 

After another moment or so, Kit was able to straighten up again. “Everything that happened here just now,” Kit said, and took a long breath, “everything visible, is being transmitted back to Earth!” 

Ronan looked at him in bemusement. “But if there aren’t any satellites—” 

“There weren’t then. There is
now
. As of a minute and a half ago, we’re in
Odyssey
’s camera envelope! And if we tripped any situational triggers in
Spirit’s
programming,
it’ll have sent that to
Odyssey
for relay, and
Odyssey
’ll have passed the data back immediately. Either way, a data burst’s on its way back to Earth right now!” 

“Okay,” Ronan said, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s just mess with the antennas back on Earth or something—” 

Kit shook his head. “Won’t work. There are three Deep Space Network antennas spaced around the planet, and we’d have to waste time figuring out which one’s aimed this way. Our best bet’s probably to interfere with the transmission while it’s on its way. It takes about fifteen minutes for a signal to get to the DSN from Mars.” He looked at Darryl. “If you can jump back to, say, the Moon, and catch the wavefront on the way in, scatter it—?” 

“Then it’d just look like there’d been a hole in transmission,” Darryl said. “Got it. How big a hole do you need?” 

Kit turned to Ronan. “When did this whole ruckus start?” 

Ronan cocked an eye at the sky. “About twenty minutes ago?” he said. 

“Okay,” Kit said, and turned to Darryl. “Take it all out, to be safe. You can just beat the wavefront back.” 

Darryl nodded and vanished. “Now sit down,” Ronan said to Kit, “before you fall down!” He glanced around him, plainly not convinced that the excitement was over. “I’ll keep an eye on things...” 

Kit sat down and tried to breathe more easily. It was tough: the grenade spell had not been cheap as wizardries went. “Thanks.” 

“And that really was smart of you, the speeding-up-time bit,” Ronan said in a low voice. “Had to fight with Dar about that: he expects it.” 

Kit laughed under his breath. “You two should do standup,” he said. “Only thing that’s bothering me now—” 

Darryl reappeared a few yards away from them, moseyed over to them. “Done,” he said. “I caught the whole last twenty minutes’ worth of
Odyssey’
s transmissions and dissolved them to white noise.” He sat down on the rock and looked with concern at Kit. “So what were you bothered about?”