Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (17 page)

The embedded outline of the largest hex came alive with a clear fierce blue. Sker’ret turned to Kit. “What have you got for me?”

Kit looked at Ponch. Nita could feel something of the communication between them; it was like watching someone whisper to someone else, while not being able to hear what they were saying. And still, at one remove, it smelled of cocoa and motor oil.
Weird,
she thought, as Kit turned to Sker’ret.

“I’m not sure I can handle this keyboard,” he said.

“Just speak it to me in the Speech,” Sker’ret said. “I can do the input.”

Kit recited a long string of words, numbers, and variable statements to Sker’ret. Sker’ret’s little end-of-leg claws danced over the keypad.

“Done,” Sker’ret said. “Everybody into the zone, please. Thirty seconds to the transit.”

He pushed the keypad away from him; it vanished into the column. Sker’ret headed into the middle of the biggest hex, and they all followed. Nita was half amused, half scared to see how everybody put themselves as far into the middle of the hex as they could, so that at the end of the exercise three humans, a dog, a centipede, and a Christmas tree all stood back to back, facing outward against whatever might come at them.

“Twenty,” Sker’ret said. “Ten.”

Nita looked around her at a section of the Crossings that had no one in it but them, no one at all. It gave her the shivers.

“Five.”

Her heart was pounding. She glanced over at Kit.

“Zero—”

Everything went dark.

Nita had to blink a couple of times to get used to the darkness. There was air, at least—Crossings gateways had a vacuum-guard on them, so they wouldn’t dump you out into an inimical or absent atmosphere without warning. As usual, she looked up first at the sky.

There wasn’t one.

They stood on a small, arid, empty world, and Nita had known it was empty the moment they came out of nowhere. The lack of life has a specific feel to which any wizard past Ordeal quickly becomes sensitive, a sensation of something missing that ought to be there, but isn’t, like a pulled tooth. Above them, there should have been stars.

But there weren’t.

Nita tried to make sense of what she was seeing as she looked up. It was like when you stare into the dark for a long time and start imagining that the dark itself is moving. But this movement was real. It was as if the darkness was heaving with small shapes, no bigger than grains of rice—but all darker even than the blackness where they grew.

Nita had a sudden thought of the mealworms she’d once found all through a bag of bad flour—heaving, rustling against each other, like a live thing that was also a lot of little live things. The darkness of space above them stirred and heaved with little darknesses. They were
there.
And Nita very much did not want to think what they would start to be like when they were bigger.

She swallowed, fighting the thought of being sick, which wouldn’t have helped. Before this, space might have been inimical, bitterly cold, airless, arid, but it was at least clean. Suddenly that innocent, unself-conscious deadliness had been taken from it. Something was trying to squirm through the crevices of reality and fill that calm dark emptiness, void of everything but stars, with something heavier than starstuff, darker than the longest night, and horribly, mindlessly alive … with no interest in any other kind of life except squeezing it out, pushing all the native life more and more apart, filling everything so full with itself that there was no room for anything else. This was what the dark-matter expansion looked like, up close and personal. But the dark matter, innocent enough in itself, had had something added to it… something terrible.

She looked over at Kit: his expression was as shocked and horrified as hers must have been. She wondered how all the wizards there were could possibly stop such a thing.
And we don’t even
have
all the wizards there are. Old age and experience can beat
youth and power every time, Dad always says. Now all we’ve
got
is youth and power. Is it going to be enough?

And what if it’s not?

Kit put out a hand and said a few words in the Speech. A moment later, a small bright spark of wizard-fire materialized above his hand. Nita followed suit, telling hers to hover over one shoulder and just behind her. Around them, the others brought light about as well—Sker’ret’s carapace came alive with it, and all of Filif’s berries blazed. Ronan took that clip-on ballpoint pen out of his pocket and gave it a shake. A moment later he was holding the Spear of Light in its full form—the seven-foot spear shaft glowing softly, the head of the Spear wreathing itself in a chilly white-golden flame.

Kit was looking up into the darkness, and to Nita’s eye, he looked faintly unwell. “That has to be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, his free hand resting on his hip, his shadow lying pooled black behind him from the Spear’s radiance. It might have seemed a casual stance at first. But as Ronan gazed up into that unhealthy, seething dark, Nita started to sense how tightly he was controlling himself, like someone working hard not to run away. His face was very still, though, and Nita for the first time actually saw someone else look out of Ronan’s eyes. The expression was one of recognition coupled with a very controlled anger. The one who looked out had seen something like this before.

She went over to him. “Something familiar about this?” she said.

Ronan nodded. “From a long, long time back,” he said. “When the Lone One first revealed that new thing it had invented, entropy. This was one of the early side effects.”

“And the Champion stopped it?” Kit said, coming over with Ponch to join them.

Ronan shook his head. “No. It’s weird, but when the Pullulus first began to occur, it was the Lone Power Itself that stopped it.”

Nita found that bizarre. “Something too dangerous for even It to manage?”

Ronan shook his head. “I used to think I knew My brother’s mind,” said the Champion with Ronan’s voice, “but that issue was never clear to Me or any of the other Powers. Whatever, this perversion of dark matter hasn’t been seen since. To see it again now … I find that troubling.”

“Troubling” didn’t come close to describing Nita’s feelings. “I am really not wild about the idea of sleeping here,” Nita said. She looked down at Ponch. “Couldn’t you walk us a little way, just enough to get us out of here?”

I’m tired,
Ponch said. And he lay down and put his head down on his paws, though Nita saw him watching the sky with an expression of concern.

Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Look, we’ve got our pup tents,” Kit said. “We’ll be comfortable enough for a few hours.”

Nita nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”
No point in making a scene about it. I’ll cope.

Sker’ret and Filif came over to them, getting out their pup-tent interfaces. Sker’ret reared up on his rearmost legs, hung the silvery rod of the spell interface on the empty air, and pulled on the little string of characters in the Speech that hung down from the rod. A subtle shimmer of wizardry a few feet wide followed it down, like a roller shade following its pull cord. Sker’ret “fastened” down the spell-surface that acted as gateway to the room-sized pocket of space, waggled a few eyes at Nita and Kit, and poured himself inside, vanishing. Past him, Filif was doing the same; he slid in through his own doorway and was gone.

Nita let out a long breath. “Ronan?” she said.

He shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “My partner’s got energy to spare. We’ll stand guard.”

Nita set up her own pup tent, then glanced at that awful unstarred sky again. For some time now she had been getting into the habit of trusting her hunches, and her hunch right now was to be worried.
What’s going on back home?
she thought.
What’s going on with Daddy? And Tom and Carl? And Dairine, what’s she getting into? Is she under a sky like this someplace?

And is she as freaked out as I am?

Nita stepped into her pup tent and looked around, checking out the space that had become her home away from home while she and Kit had been away before. Everything was as it should be. There were a few pieces of spare furniture from home—a TV table and a spare desk chair, along with a beat-up old sofa that had been down in the basement until her dad had it recovered and suggested she move it into the pup tent; over the back of the sofa, a multicolored wool throw that her mom had crocheted a few years back; off to one side, some boxes of dry snacks and cereal, some six-packs of fruit drinks and mineral water. A pile of books to read at bedtime, some notebooks and assorted school supplies. It all should have been very comforting … except it wasn’t. She couldn’t get rid of the image of the darkness outside.

Then suddenly Nita got angry.
I may be freaked, but I’m not going to just roll over and let the fear run the way I act!
She turned around and put her head out through the interface again, staring defiantly up at that evil sky. Above her, the dark Pullulus seethed and heaved against itself, blocking away the stars. Looking at it a second time didn’t make it any easier.
It probably isn’t ever going to be easy,
Nita thought.
And I don’t care.

She glanced to one side and saw Kit leaning out through his own pup-tent interface. Past him, Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, looking up at the darkness. He, too, turned his gaze away from it now, looking at Nita.

“You, too, huh?” Kit said.

Nita looked at him for a moment, then gave him a quick, angry smile, and vanished back into her own space… feeling, once again, not quite so alone.

DAIRINE BECAME CONSCIOUS THAT she was lying curled up on a chill, smooth surface. She then became conscious that she had been
un
conscious, and had no idea for how long.
Ohmygosh, the shields!
she thought. But as she took an involuntary breath, she realized that the force field protecting her and Roshaun was running exactly as it should. Otherwise, the two of them would have been freezing cold, not to mention smothering in a next-to-nothing hydrogen atmosphere.

She opened her eyes and blinked to get focus. The only thing to be seen at the moment was the ground on which she lay: almost perfectly smooth and flat, shining like a polished floor, softly dappled with subdued shades of gold and rust underneath the slick surface.
Well, we’re where we ought to be,
Dairine thought.
But how come every time I arrive here, I do it flat on my face?

Dairine found that she had her arms wrapped around Spot.
You okay?
she said silently.

No problems.

Good.
She pushed him carefully away from her onto the planet’s surface and rolled over onto her stomach. Then she immediately wished she hadn’t; her stomach rebelled. Dairine lay there and started to retch, thoroughly miserable.
It’s not fair! I thought I was done with this kind of thing. I didn’t think a subsidized worldgate would act this way.
But the tremendous difference between the vectors and accelerations of Wellakh and this extremely distant world was just too much for humanoid bodies to take no matter how sophisticated or powerful the worldgate was.

Dairine was distracted from the sickness, though, by an upscaling sound in the back of her mind—a muted roar of life lived at a three-quarter beat, rushing, as quick and strong as a waterfall in spate.
I’m back in circuit with the Motherboard!
It was an astonishing sensation, after having become used over time to the faint rumble of trinary data that was normally all that reached Dairine down her linkage to the mobiles’ world.

She also realized that her clothes had changed again, back to her T-shirt and jeans.
What happened to that dress?
Dairine said.

I replaced it with your normal clothes while in transit,
Spot said.

Okay.
However, Dairine put a hand up to her throat and found that big emerald still there; she smiled slightly.
Good call. Come on.

She levered herself up on her hands and knees and looked around, holding still again because her stomach was still roiling. “Roshaun?”

He had come down on the surface behind her, sprawled; now he lifted his head, and winced. “That was not,” Roshaun said, “the usual sort of transit.”

“Nope. You all right? Besides your injured dignity, I mean.”

Roshaun rolled over and slowly sat up, grimacing—then looked ashen all of a sudden, and had to put his head down on his knees. Normally such a sudden show of vulnerability in Roshaun would have delighted Dairine, except that she was too busy keeping herself from throwing up.
I am not going to barf a
second
before he does,
she thought, breathing deeply.

Roshaun, however, did not throw up. Very slowly he straightened again, looking up and around… and then let out a long breath of wonder. Dairine got up on her knees, looking up at the vista she remembered so well.

It was worth looking at, even in the daytime. Halfway up the sky from the high and strangely distant-seeming horizon was a small, dull red star, so dim that you could look at it directly. But beyond the planet’s sun, undimmed by it, standing high and spreading across half the sky, was the delicate shimmer of a barred-spiral galaxy, the wide-flung arms richly gemmed in the soft golden gleam of an immensely old stellar population. Roshaun sat looking up at that still splendor for a good while before he stood up.

“Transits by subsidized gate are normally instantaneous,” Roshaun said, still looking up at the distant glory. “We seemed to be in that one for quite a long time. How long?”

Dairine glanced at her watch. It said eight thirty, but she’d forgotten to set it to handle gating-transit time, and now its second hand wasn’t moving. “I’ve got to reconfigure this thing,” she said. “I’ll get a reading off Spot and let you know in a while.”

“How far from your own world is this one?”

“At least forty trillion light-years,” Dairine said. “Maybe more, but I’ve never done the math. I don’t know about you, but when I start getting into the trillions, I find that forty and forty-five look pretty much alike.”