Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (31 page)

The force field was opaque to light, but not noise or vibration. From outside came a roar, and the floor under Nita and Sker’ret rocked: things crashed and clattered all around them. After a few seconds the ruckus started to die down. Nita let the “gauntlet” of wizardry vanish, and let the control console’s shield go transparent again.

Outside was a billowing cloud of smoke and dust, slowly dispersing. There were no Tawalf to be seen.

Sker’ret’s eyes were staring in all directions, except for the one that was still trained on the self-destruct console, ready to guide the four or five legs that were poised over it. “Do you think—”

Nita, too, peered in all directions. “I don’t see any of them here.”

Sker’ret stretched his mandibles apart in what Nita knew he was using to approximate a human grin. “Hey!” he said, holding up a foreclaw.

Nita held up a hand, too, and had to keep it there until it stung; high-fiving a giant centipede can take a while. “Not bad,” Sker’ret said when he was done. “We should apply to get that one named after you. ‘Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation,’ or something like that.”

Nita grinned. Having a spell named after you was beyond an honor: it suggested that the wizardry was both unique to your way of thinking and useful in a way that no one else had thought of before. “It can wait,” she said. “Let’s make sure the place is secure.”

Sker’ret glanced over his consoles, looking annoyed. “My scan facility’s down.”

Nita reached for her otherspace pocket to get her manual. “I’ll do a detector spell. At least now we have a specific life sign to scan for. We can—” She blinked. “Sker’, GET DOWN!”

The intuition hadn’t even come as not-hearing that time: it was as if it bypassed Nita’s brain and went straight to her muscles. She threw herself on top of Sker’ret again and took him out of the line of fire, and once more she got her personal shield up just in time—a good thing, as the control console’s shield was suddenly struggling under the onslaught of several fusion beams like the one that would have come out of the first mobile weapon if Nita hadn’t destroyed it.

“They’ve got two more of them!” Nita shouted over the noise. “No, make that three! One behind us, two on either side. They came out of one of the cross-corridors farther down. And they’re
bigger
ones!” The three sets of beams now crisscrossed relentlessly over them.

Oh, God,
Nita thought.
I can’t do more than one of the “unfavorable” wizardries at a time, and while I’m doing that, the other big guns are going to blow
the main shield away.
Even now she could start to see places where the cubicle’s shield was dimpling inward, no matter how much wizardry Nita poured into it through the peridexis. “Sker’, we can’t stay here, the shield’s giving! We’ve got to do a personal gating out of here to somewhere else. Hang on!”

Sker’ret’s eyes waved in wild distress. “
No!
There’s too much energy in the air around us! It’ll derange your wizardry, and you’ll come out at your transit point as half a thwat of powdered Nita!”

I wonder how much a thwat is?
Nita thought, scowling in terrified fury.
Thanks so much, mister hunch. Was that why I was in such a hurry to get here? Did I have an appointment to
die?

No answer came from the peridexis. Nita was getting more angry than scared.
It’s not supposed to end like this!
she thought.
If I’m going to die, it should be right in the middle of things, not out at the edge! And not until I know my universe is safe.

But suddenly this seemed untrue. Suddenly Nita began to understand the feeling she’d read about in books, but never really understood: the feeling that it was genuinely all over, that nothing further could be done… except to go out as well as you could. For a moment, the realization froze her rigid.

But only for a moment.
I’m on Their business,
Nita thought.
And I am going to go
out
doing Their business. I’ve been through this before. I’ve been ready to go. It’s just that now … now it’s going to happen for real.

“I’m gonna stop feeding power to the main shield, and feed it to ours, instead,” Nita said. “You ready?”

“For what?
Nita!
”

Nita stood up and turned to face the weapon that had come up behind them and was now the closest. The dimples in the main shield grew deeper and deeper as she watched. In a moment one of the weapons would punch through and it would be all over. Nita lifted her hands in the air, spread them out to either side, and said silently to the peridexis,
All right. Let’s go. You know what I need—

She closed her eyes. Perfectly clear in her inner vision hung and burned the words in the Speech that gave the Powers That Be the authorization to take the last thing you had, your life, and make the best possible use of it. You were, of course, allowed to make suggestions.
Take everything I have,
Nita said silently,
and clear all these creatures and weapons out of here so Sker’ret can do what he has to do to keep the Lone One from getting the Crossings.
For just a second she thought sadly of Kit: there would be no way to tell him what she was having to do, no way to say goodbye…

Nita squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and opened her mouth to say the first word of the wizardry, the first word of the last spell she would ever recite—

And then her eyes flew open at a sound she had not expected. A soft strange hum, scaling up, getting louder.
Where have I heard that before?
she thought.
Sker’?

Right in front of her, the bigger mobile weapon that was trained on them shuddered, strained itself apart, and blew up.

Nita hit the floor.
This is getting to be a habit!
she thought, as the breath went out of her with a
whoof!—
but as soon as she could, she struggled up, pushing herself free from a tangle of Sker’ret’s legs, and stared out to see what had happened.
How come I didn’t hear that one coming? What in the—

That hum scaled up again behind her. “Uh-oh,” Nita said, and once again went flat on top of Sker’ret. Behind them, the second weapon shuddered itself apart and destroyed itself in a huge blast of noise and fire.

“You really
do
want to become more than just good friends, don’t you?” Sker’ret said from underneath her, sounding rather squashed. “Don’t know how I’m going to explain this to my ancestor, assuming we ever find him.”

Nita put her head up, trying to see what was happening to the mobile weapons. That hum started to scale up once more. Again she ducked, and from much farther behind came yet another explosion.
Are they malfunctioning? Or is someone else doing that? Are they on our side? And what if they’re not?

“And don’t I get to throw myself on
you
sometimes?” Sker’ret said. “People will think you don’t believe I can take care of myself.”

“Sker’ret,” Nita said, “will you please just put a sock in it?” Cautiously, she peered around, trying to see through all the smoke.

Sker’ret put some eyes up, too. “I don’t wear socks,” he said.

“Just as well,” Nita said. “You’d bankrupt yourself.” Through the smoke of the second mobile weapon’s explosion, Nita could just see something moving.
Oh,
great,
she thought.
What did I do with the accelerator? Is it another of those—

But whatever was coming, it didn’t move like a Tawalf. Though it was still mostly hidden by the smoke of the last weapon’s destruction, Nita could see that it went on just two legs. Nita spoke the words of the spell that made the accelerator remanifest itself, then put it against her shoulder, sighted—

It’s a humanoid,
Nita thought, as the figure came toward them through the smoke.
What’s that hanging off its head? Humanoids don’t usually have tentacles there. And it doesn’t look like it’s armed.

It wasn’t a very big humanoid, either. It was only a little taller than Nita. As it came through the smoke, she could have sworn that it was actually human—the skin color was one of the possible ones, the eyes and other features seemed all to be in the right places, and the clothes—
Jeez, will you look at those,
Nita thought at the sight of the tight black T-shirt, the slightly-retro cargo pants in a truly eye-jangling hot-pink-and-green floral print, and the strappy little pink boots. And the “tentacle” wasn’t a tentacle at all, but, hanging down in front of one shoulder, a single long, thick, dark—

—braid?

Nita’s mouth dropped open as the girl came all the way out of the smoke. She had a light backpack-purse on her back, some kind of holster hanging at one hip, and a wicked grin on her face.

Nita shut her mouth, and opened it again.

“Carmela?” she said, in sort of a strangled squeak. “
Carmela?
”

She came striding over to them. “Hey,” ‘Mela said, “I’m glad to see you, too.” And she peered at Nita curiously. “Why’re you so red? You have
got
to start remembering the sunscreen, Neets. You’re gonna ; die of skin cancer or something.”

Nita laughed weakly at the stinging feel of her face, burned by the overloading shields. She looked up and down the corridor to the smoking wreckage of the remaining three fusion weapons, and the walls and other structures that had been between them and Carmela. “How the heck did you
do
that?” Nita said.

Carmela smiled. From the holster, the kind that beauticians carry their hair dryers in, she pulled out a two-foot-long object that seemed to combine the features of a curling iron and an eggbeater. The beaters throbbed faintly with a threatening glow, like the one that had come from the first mobile weapon just before Nita blew it up.

Nita blinked.
“That’s
the thing you got off the alien shopping channel?” she said. “But that was just a laser dissociator—”

“‘Was,’” Carmela said. She grinned again. “I sent away for the free upgrade.”

Sker’ret clambered out of the control console’s rack and flowed over to the two of them. “And there’s my favorite bunch of legs!” Carmela said, and hunkered down to Sker’ret’s level. As he came up beside her, she reached out and yanked a couple of his eyes in a friendly way. “Hey there, cute-as-a-bug,” she said. “You okay? You look a little scorched around the edges.”

Sker’ret simply stared. After a moment, he said, “This is… unexpected!”

Carmela produced a pout. “You’re not glad to see me!”

“Oh, glad,
absolutely
glad, but you shouldn’t be—”

“Why?” Carmela said. “Why shouldn’t I? Really, why do you guys all think you have to be wizards to save the universe? You people get so
grabby
sometimes.”

Nita blinked.
Did I say I thought the weird quotient in my life was going to start rising? Remind me to keep my mouth shut in future.
“Forgive me if I take a moment to see where the people who were shooting at us are now,” Nita said, and got out her manual.

“Sure.” Carmela looked around her, admiring the architecture through the general destruction. “Hey, nice ceiling. Or is it really a ceiling?”

“What’s left of it,” Sker’ret said, since a lot of the ceiling was now on the floor.

Nita turned to her detector spells, found a favorite all-purpose one with a good range, and read it, inserting the name in the Speech for the Tawalf species, and the energy signature of the big fusion weapons. The silence of a working spell settled around her, while in the back of her mind she could sense the peridexic effect waiting to see if she needed extra power.
Hey,
Nita said silently,
thanks for what you did back there.

You
did that. As for the rest
—Did it actually sound a little shy?
It was my pleasure. And also a pleasure to see a spell I haven’t seen done quite
that
way before. That’s one for the book.

Nita smiled as the wizardry completed. Closing her eyes, in her mind she could see a swarm of little sparks, like thirty or forty bright bees, all seemingly orbiting one another in a tight swarm down one end of the main cross-corridor. There were no other Tawalf life signs present in the Crossings, and no further live-fusion signatures.

Nita opened her eyes. “Not many of them left,” she said. “They’re all down at the left-hand end of that corridor.” She pointed. “I think they’re trying to get out.”

“That they won’t do,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve cut power to all the gates, and instructed the master gating matrices to refuse any incoming gating. Let’s go have a word with the Tawalf and find out where my ancestor and sibs are.”

Or
if
they are,
Nita thought. Suddenly, she felt very tired. “And you turned off the self-destruct?”

“No,” Sker’ret said. He reached up to the self-destruct console and pulled off what Nita had at first thought was a small protruding piece of the monitor panel. As he detached it, the little slick black piece of metal or plastic came alive with the same frozen figures that shone on the main monitor. Sker’ret opened his mandibles and swallowed it.

Nita’s eyes went wide. “Uh, feeling like a snack?”

“Not
that
much like one,” Sker’ret said. “This way it can’t be lost or taken from me, and if I have to destroy it, that option’s only a stomach or two away. Let’s go deal with the survivors.”

Nita climbed out of the rack while lifting the accelerator wizardry carefully to keep it from interfering with the local matter. As the three of them walked down the corridor, detouring around blasted pieces of Crossings and remnants of the destroyed fusion weapons, Nita put her free hand up to her face and found herself dripping with sweat and covered with dust. “‘Mela,” she said, wiping some of the sweat away, “how in the worlds did you
get
here?”

Carmela was ambling along on the other side of Sker’ret, gazing in idle interest at the general destruction. “Well, when you left, the TV and the TiVo and the DVD player were still in sync with Spot,” she said. “While I was changing channels, I found where the two of them were storing the coordinates of all the places you were passing through. And since I didn’t feel like just sitting around after you guys utterly
ditched
me, I used the TV’s browser to look up where you’d been. There’s a lot there about the Crossings. I thought, ‘Hey, I could go there! I know the address now.’ And the TV showed me how—”