Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (30 page)

“In Life’s name,” she shouted in the Speech, while the energy blasts kept striking her shield, “and for Its sake, I advise you that I am here on the business of the Powers That Be! Your actions toward me, and through me, toward Them, will determine the continuation or revocation of your present status.
Be warned by me, and desist!
”

Slowly, the blaster fire stopped.

Just as slowly, Nita started to grin—

—and all at once the blaster fire started up again, twice as ferociously this time, so that the multiple impacts against her shield made Nita stagger.

“Oh, really,” she said under her breath as she got her balance back and made sure of her shield’s integrity. “Sorry, guys, you blew it.”

Both angry and sad, she chose her first target with care—one of those thin shadows standing behind a particularly aggressive stream of energy blasts—aimed, and fired. Away down the corridor, across the central intersection of the Crossings, that source of the blaster fire failed. “Sorry,” Nita said under her breath, meaning it, though not hesitating to immediately choose another target. She fired again. “Sorry.”

Beside her, Sker’ret made his way down toward the central intersection. The closer he got, the more blaster fire hit his shield. It turned a fierce glowing red, mirroring itself in Sker’ret’s shiny carapace—and every bolt that hit it bounced instantly and directly back in the direction from which it had come. Any unshielded being standing in the same place after having shot at him suddenly found itself on the receiving end of a boosted version of whatever it had fired. Nita followed Sker’ret, not hurrying, choosing her targets with regret and great care. The fire from in front of them began to lessen, but now Nita felt some fire hitting her shield from behind. She turned and started walking backward, aiming carefully at more of those thin shadow-shapes who leaned out from behind cover farther down the corridor. “They’re behind us, too, Sker’!” she called. “How’re we planning to get out of here? I don’t want to get cut off.”

“I’m not going anywhere till I find out who these people are, and get them out of here somehow!” Sker’ret called back, making steadily for the intersection. “I’ll open you a gate and get you home.”

“Not the slightest chance!” Nita said, coming abreast of him. “If you think I’m gonna leave you by yourself in the middle of a firefight, you’re nuts!”

They paused together just before coming out into the open intersection. The central control structure was just within sight. Nita had half expected to see the Stationmaster’s body hanging there in the rack, but it was mercifully empty. Nita swallowed. “Okay,” she said, “you ready?”

“Let’s go.”

They ran out across the intersection together. As Nita had expected, both their shields immediately lit up with crossfire from both sides. They ducked into the control structure, and Nita got down behind some of the control surfaces while choosing more potential targets. Sker’ret’s shield kept up its active-defense role, and the rate of fire dwindled—but not nearly as much as Nita would have liked it to.

She popped up, aimed at a shadow that was getting too close for her comfort; it went down. Her stomach turned. While Nita hadn’t been able to clearly see the results of her own fire, self-defense had been easier. “Sker’,” she said, “what now?!”

“Give me a minute,” Sker’ret said. “I’m making this up as I go along.” He pulled himself up into the racking, enough to tap briefly at the main control console. The rate of fire at them increased, and Nita popped up once more, sighted on yet another shadow—they were getting bolder, getting closer, no matter how many of them she, or Sker’ret’s shield, took out. She fired again, and once again her stomach wrenched.
I hate this,
Nita thought.
But I’d hate it more if the weapon
stopped
doing that.

All around them, the blaster fire continued, but the impacts on both their personal shields abruptly ceased. Nita looked around and saw that a larger force field had sprung up around the central control structure. This one was invisible, but its hemisphere was clearly defined by the bright splatter of frustrated energy hitting the outside of it.

“That’ll give us a few minutes,” Sker’ret said.

“A
few
?” Nita said, alarmed.

“The console shield will cope with this level of fire all right,” Sker’ret said, sounding very grim indeed, “but how long do you think it’s going to stay like this? Whoever those people are, they plainly intend to take the Crossings by force. When they find they don’t have enough force, they’ll bring up some more. I give us maybe five minutes. By then I should be able to find out why the Crossings’ own defense systems haven’t come up, and either I can get them up again or… do something else.” His voice went perfectly flat in a way that Nita had never heard before. “But you need to keep them off my back. Stick some of your power into the shield, give it a boost. Here are the schematics—”

A glowing diagram full of lines and curves and weird symbols appeared in the air in front of Nita. She gulped; not even knowledge of the Speech could turn you into a rocket scientist between one breath and the next. “Sker’, I’m a wizard, not an engineer!”

Sker’ret pointed an eye at the diagram. “Right there,” he said. “Energy conduit. Put whatever spare power you’ve got right into that.”

Nita let out a breath and started to think of how to hook a power-feed wizardry into the energy conduit. In the back of her mind, instantly, the peridexis showed her the spell. Nita hurriedly spoke the words, and a few seconds later felt the built-up power inside her flowing into the shield. “Okay,” she said to Sker’ret, “I’ve boosted it maybe five hundred percent.”

“Let’s hope that’s enough,” Sker’ret said.

Down at the far end of the Main Concourse, Nita could see more clearly the shadowy figures that kept darting out of cover to fire at them. The shapes were tall and angular, and very thin; it was hard to tell their bodies from the weapons they were carrying. “It’s like being attacked by a bunch of praying mantises,” Nita muttered. “What
are
those things?”

Sker’ret chanced a glance up through the blaster fire. “Sort of tall, skinny creatures?” he said. “What color?”

Nita peered at them. “Red,” she said. “No, kind of purple. Magenta, I guess.”

“How many heads?”

Nita couldn’t tell.
If I could stick a lens into the shield,
she thought.

She felt the peridexis once again suggesting the wizardry that was necessary, needing only her approval.
Okay,
she thought, and started to say the words in the Speech, except it was almost as if they said themselves, leaping out of her as if they, too, were weapons. The force field in front of her suddenly went sharp and clear, as if Nita were looking through binoculars.
I could get really used to this,
she thought, grim but also triumphant.
Is it like this when you’re really a Senior out on errantry? Does the power just flow to you on demand?

She got a view of what she was supposed to be looking at. “Just one head,” she said to Sker’ret, whose handling claws were still tapping frantically at the console. “What’s the matter?”

“They’ve taken the defense systems completely offline,” Sker’ret growled. Nita was startled. She’d never heard him sound so furious before. “Sabotage. Or an inside job, and somebody on our own staff betrayed us.” He hissed. “Never mind now. Just one head? Those are Tawalf.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Wish
I
never had,” Sker’ret said. “They’re a very… mercantile people. They’d buy anybody from anybody, and sell anybody to anybody, if the price was right. Looks like someone on our staff decided that our security was merchandise.” He growled again. “The Tawalf sell themselves, too. They make some of the best mercenaries in this part of the galaxy.”

“Looks like somebody went out and bought them in bulk,” Nita said, as more and more of the Tawalf came into sight, every one of them armed with at least a blaster, and every one of them firing at the shield surrounding the rack. “Can you turn the defense systems on again?”

Sker’ret waved his upper body from side to side, his version of a human shaking his head. “There are a couple of things I still need to try,” he said. “But there’s no other information on what happened here. Everything’s been left on auto, and no station staff have logged in since that last transit spike.”

“So you don’t know where your ancestor is.”

“Or any of my sibs.”

“You don’t think that these guys could have—”

“They could have done a lot of things,” Sker’ret said, sounding grimmer every moment. “What’s that?”

The pace of fire against the shields had started to step up again: Nita was having trouble seeing through it, there were so many impacts now. “They’re covering for something,” she said.
I need better visibility!
she thought.

Once again the wizardry constructed itself in her head, ready to go.
Yes!
Nita thought, and just briefly the shield cleared in front of her, showing her, far down the concourse, a very large, very heavy piece of machinery being floated out from a place of concealment.

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “They’re rolling out the big guns. What about those defense systems?”

“I can’t get them up again!” Sker’ret whacked the console in frustration with most of his forward legs. “Now I wish I remembered some of the things about their basic programming that my ancestor kept on boring me with.”

“Forget it,” Nita said. “We’ve got other problems!”

The lens in her shield gave her a much better view of that piece of machinery as it came drifting toward them, being guided with some kind of remote by a Tawalf who was dashing from the cover of one kiosk to the next. The weapon had a muzzle of impressive size, and some kind of massive generating apparatus hooked to the back of it.
Can we stop that?
she said silently to the peridexic effect.

There was no immediate answer.

This in itself was answer enough for Nita, and a flush of pure fear ran straight through her. Apparently, there were limits to what even the present power boost for wizards could do—or what she could do with it.

“Make or break, Sker’!” Nita said over Sker’ret’s shoulders. “We’ve gotta make a choice in about a minute. Run for it, or make a stand.”
And if we do, I have this feeling it’ll be a
last
stand.

“If we run,” Sker’ret said, “this place will be lost to us and won by those Tawalf. They, and whoever is behind them, will have free run of my planet, and this whole part of the galaxy. Since whether they know it or not they’re doing the Lone One’s business—” He growled again. “No way I’m leaving them here! I will not let the Lone Power have the Crossings.”

“But what can you do?”

“The one thing they’re sure I don’t want to do under any circumstances,” Sker’ret said. “And therefore the one thing they didn’t sabotage completely enough to keep me out.”

He reached sideways and hit a control that caused another small console to appear from nowhere. This tiny console had some very large, alarming-looking Rirhait characters glowing on it. Nita looked at it and swallowed hard again. “Self-destruct?”

“At least,” Sker’ret said, suddenly sounding worried, “I don’t
think
they sabotaged it that completely.”

Sker’ret started speaking urgently to the console in the Speech, while hammering on the keypad beneath it with what seemed every available foreleg. Nita was keeping power flowing to the central structure’s own shield, but she couldn’t keep her eyes away from Sker’ret. “Sker’ret, you
live
here!” she said. “You’re going to blow up your own
home?
”

“Believe me, there’ve been some times I’ve wanted to,” Sker’ret said. “I just never thought this would be the way I’d get my chance.”

He kept working furiously at the console. Finally, the display on it changed. “All right,” Sker’ret said. “I think I can make this work.”

Nita looked at that slowly oncoming weapon, and gulped. “Give me ten seconds first,” she said.

Sker’ret swiveled almost all his eyes at her except for the one that was watching the self-destruct console. “What? Why?”

Nita ignored him and shut her eyes for a moment.
What kind of energy are those things using?
she thought.

The peridexis gave her the answer as if it were the manual itself, laying it out in graphics and the Speech with blinding speed. Nita scanned the diagram it showed her.
It’s fusion,
she thought.
And there are ways to damp that down. If you just mess with the magnetic bottle a little—

Nita shivered. Once upon a time, the Lone Power had done something similar to the Earth’s Sun. And then she smiled just slightly. To turn Its own trick against It, but with just a little extra twist—

That fusion reaction right there,
Nita said to the peridexis,
let’s snuff it.

There is a high probability that the smothered reaction will interact unfavorably with matter in the immediate vicinity.

Will our shield hold?

Yes.

Then let’s start getting unfavorable!

Nita started speaking the words of the spell, feeling the power build. This wizardry felt less like a thrown weapon than a squeezing fist—like a gauntlet into which she’d thrust her own hand, pressing the power of the mobile weapon’s tightly controlled fusion reaction into a smaller and smaller space. The reaction wasn’t built to take such punishment. It started to strangle. Nita held the pressure, squeezed tighter, feeling the hot bright little light in her “hand” burning her, but nonetheless starting to go out, fading, failing—

The magnetic bottling around the little fusion fire inside the weapon, responding to the fusion’s own loss of energy, lost its balance and stepped down to match it.

Nita smiled and quickly opened her hand.

Every Tawalf anywhere near the mobile weapon turned to stare at the slow, threatening glow of light beginning to burn through the weapon’s metallic fabric. Suspecting what was coming, Nita hastily told the control structure’s force field to go opaque itself. Almost the last glimpse she got was of Tawalf scattering in every possible direction. Then came the sudden blinding burst of repressed starfire as the magnetic bottle in the mobile weapon failed.