Wizards At War

10: Friendly Fire

THEY CAME OUT INTO the dimmed light of evening at the Crossings, and Nita let out the breath she’d been holding since Sker’ret’s transit spell started to work. At a time when wizardry was acting peculiarly, any successful gating was a triumph.

Beside her, Sker’ret hadn’t moved off the transit pad. He was looking around him with all his eyes, every one pointed in a different direction. “Did you hear something?” he said.

“No,” Nita said. And then that struck her as strange. Nita walked off the gating pad and stepped out to where the hexagon of the enclosure met the corridor. She looked up and down the length of that bright, shining space…

…and shivered.

“This is really weird,” Nita said.

Very quietly, Sker’ret came up beside her and looked up and down the broad corridor. There was no one to be seen, absolutely no one at all.

“Okay,” Nita said, thinking aloud, and glancing over at the nearest information standard, which was showing its default display of Crossings time. “It’s the middle of the night…”

“The middle of a Crossings night,” Sker’ret said, “doesn’t look like this. Somewhere in fifteen or twenty thousand worlds, it’s always the middle of the day for somebody. Somebody is always passing through.”

Nita shivered again. “You did say when we left that the reduced traffic was a symptom of something that was going to get worse.”

“Yes.” Sker’ret sounded unnerved. “But not this much worse, not this fast. And there’s still…”

He trailed off.

The feeling of alarm in him was suddenly very pronounced. Still what? Nita said silently. She felt oddly unwilling to make the silence around them seem any louder by speaking into it.

Something wrong, Sker’ret said. He turned and flowed back to the information column by the gate cluster’s transit pad, rearing up against it to trigger the extension of its command-and-control console. Sker’ret brought up a display on the floating console and tapped at the control pad beside it. The display brought up a number of paragraphs in the dot-patterns and acute angles of Rirhait, but the bar graph beside the figures and annotations told Nita enough about what was going on here. That’s showing recent transits through the Crossings? she said.

In the last three standard days, Sker’ret said. The bar graph showed the number of travelers passing through the Crossings’ worldgates in a standard hour. Every bar was shorter than the one before. Then, in the last standard day, there was a brief shallow spike in both incoming and outgoing transits, after which all of them stopped completely. No one’s come through for some hours, Sker’ret said. Absolutely no one.

They stood there looking at each other in silence. Then Nita said, You don’t think that’s possible, do you?

Sker’ret looked back toward the corridor with several of his eyes. I want to have a look at the central management station, he said. And I want to find out where my esteemed ancestor is!

Come on, Nita said silently.

Walking through this emptiness, with the gating-information standards silently changing minutes on their digital readouts all down the concourse, felt to Nita just like it would have felt to walk down a main street in Manhattan that had no one in it at all. She found herself staring into every gating-cluster alcove that they passed, but there were no people anywhere: not the briefest glimpse of a tentacle, not a glimmer of an alien eye. Down the corridor, Nita could just make out a portion of the shining rack that was part of the Stationmaster’s office. Normally there would have been people passing by it in all directions, making their way to one gate or another. Now the rack stood there all by itself, and Nita and Sker’ret made their way toward it, through the silence, through the emptiness—

Nita’s eyes went wide; without actually hearing anything, she felt a sound go blasting past her ear. “Sker’!” she cried, and threw herself on top of him, knocking him down flat against the floor.

And then the actual sound came, and a blast of energy just above her head—a moment too late, for Nita had just said that fourteenth word in the Speech, and her personal shield-spell had gone up around her and down to the ground on either side, covering Sker’ret as well. It’d better work right this time! she thought furiously, and felt around in the back of her head for that shadowy presence that she was now expecting to find, half double serpent of light, half backbone of wizardry. Are you there?

Here, the peridexic effect said. Nita could instantly feel the extra flow of power go rushing through her into the spell. Several more energy bolts splattered into the shield, gnawed at it, and splashed away.

You carrying anything offensive? Nita said to Sker’ret.

His eyes thrashed around underneath Nita. She levered herself up a little to let him squeeze them out to either side. Absolutely, Sker’ret said, sounding grim. Roll off and I’ll bring my shields up. Where’s the fire coming from?

She peered down the corridor. It was hard to see through the eye-burning brightness of the blaster fire, but Nita could just make out a number of tall, thin shadows down that way, leaning out from behind various outward-projecting kiosks to fire, then ducking back again. I think they’re a lot farther down this corridor, past your ancestor’s office.

Right. Roll now!

Nita rolled off Sker’ret to his left, and felt the bump on her side as his own shield came up and pushed her sideways. She scrambled to her feet as several more energy bolts hit her shield, then reached down to her charm bracelet, grabbed the charm that looked like a lightning bolt, and said the single word in the Speech that released the wizardry’s “safety.”

Instantly a shape of light formed in the air in front of her: a long slender stock, tapering down to an almost needlelike point. It was one of numerous wizardly versions of a blaster, this one being nothing more than a portable linear accelerator that pushed a thin stream of charged particles as close to lightspeed as they could go, and then (this being, after all, magic) just a little faster. The effects of being struck by a beam from the accelerator tended to be noticeable, and unfortunate, for the target. Nita grabbed the accelerator out of the air with the intention of making its use very unfortunate for someone in a big hurry if they didn’t stop shooting at her.

Okay, let’s see how loud I can be now, she thought, unnerved but excited, as she stood up in the midst of all that blaster fire. There are phrases every wizard knows he or she may have to use in the line of work, and doesn’t really want to. But most wizards nonetheless dream of using them, just once or twice, under the right circumstances … and this was Nita’s first chance to use this one.

“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.

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—”

“The TV showed you?”

“It’s real helpful,” Carmela said, “when it’s not being bossed around by the remote. Come to think of it, it’s been a lot more talkative the past few days.”

“And it made you a worldgate,” Sker’ret said, sounding bemused.

“It put it in the closet in my room,” Carmela said. She smiled sunnily. “I told Kit I wanted a magic closet! And now I’ve got one.”

“Oh boy,” Nita said, imagining what Kit’s reaction to this was going to be.

“I was going to do some shopping,” Carmela said, glancing around her regretfully at the trashed and blasted shops. “But when I got here, I heard all this noise, so I ran down this way. And what do I find but all these skinny purple aliens running around shooting at everything! Some of them started shooting at me, too. That was not very friendly of them.” Her tone of voice might have been used to describe the antics of unruly toddlers. “I told them to stop. They wouldn’t. And then after that, I saw them shooting at you. I thought maybe Kit was here, too, so—” She shrugged. “Nobody gets to blow up my baby brother while I have anything to say about it. Or his best friend! So I took steps.”

“Uh,” Nita said, and could think of absolutely nothing else to say.

“Where is he, by the way?” Carmela said.

This is not a place where I want to be overheard discussing what’s really going on. “Uh, there’s another planet where we’re doing some work.”

“Great,” Carmela said. “When we’re done here, let’s go.”

“Ah,” Sker’ret said. “Carmela, the situation there is—”

“‘Mela,” Nita said simultaneously, “look, we’re really grateful that you got here when you did, but—”

Carmela gave the two of them what Nita’s mom used to refer to as “an old-fashioned look.” “Yeah, right, don’t even bother, you two,” Carmela said. “I can hear it already. Blah blah blah for your own safety, blah blah blah don’t know what you’re getting into, blah blah blah forget it, Neets!” Her voice was casual, even cheerful, but she hefted the curling iron in a very meaningful way. “It’s really a good thing Kit didn’t void the warranty on this thing when he was putting the safety on it,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, because I figured out how to get the safety off, and then how to get the upgrade. I can figure out most things, given time. Juanita Louise, you take me home and it’ll take me about ten minutes to figure out where you went—and I’ll be right back. How much time can you spare to waste dragging me back home over and over?”

Nita’s mouth dropped open again. “Who told you about ‘Louise’?”

Carmela grinned.

“Did Kit tell you? I’ll kill him!”

Carmela laughed. “Kit doesn’t tell me anything.” Her look got, if possible, more wicked. “That’s gonna change.”

Sker’ret was staring at them both in good-natured confusion. “Look,” Nita said. “‘Mela, there’s something you need to know about where we’re going. You’re not real big on bugs—”

“Oh, I’ve heard this one before,” she said, and snickered, reaching down to yank in an affectionate way on some of Sker’ret’s eyes. “It won’t work, Neets.”

“No, listen to me. These are not cute bugs. These are big bugs! They —” It had taken Nita a while to come to terms with some of the things she’d seen about the Yaldiv in their précis in the manual. Now she simply said, “They eat each other, and anything else that’s alive enough. They’ll eat us, given half a chance! And we have to make sure that they do not know we’re there under any circumstances.”

“Kit’s there?” Carmela said. “And Ponch?”

“Yeah.”

“And my favorite Christmas tree?”

“Yeah.”

“And Dairine and Roshaun?”

“They might be there by now—”

“And Ronan?”

“Uh,” Nita said.

“That sounded like a yes,” Carmela said, and smiled a supremely predatory smile. “Let’s go.”

Nita rubbed her face, finding more dirt and more sweat … and a final annoying sting that told her her zit was still in residence. She sighed.

“Okay,” Nita said. “You can come with us! But I have to get back to Earth first. That was what this trip was all about.”

“You go right ahead,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret and I will tidy up here.”

Sker’ret looked up at Carmela, confused.

Carmela looked around at the burned and broken wreckage all over the place. “Sker’,” Carmela said, “Just think of all the stuff here you can eat!”

Most of Sker’ret’s eyes went very wide.

“It wasn’t allowed before,” Sker’ret said in a hushed tone, like someone suddenly presented with a landscape full of infinite possibilities. “I mean, I’m station staff, and we have to control our habits where Crossings property is concerned. My ancestor would—”

“Your not-so-illustrious ancestor,” Carmela said, disapproving, “isn’t here, is he?” She glanced around. “So don’t sweat it. If I were you, I’d just tuck in now; later on you can blame the mess on the purple guys. Assuming there is a later.” She glanced over at Nita. “I gather from the TV that that’s the problem? End of the world, everything’s on the table, a million-to-one chance of fixing it all?”

“Quadrillion,” Nita said, not wanting to later be caught in an understatement.

Carmela spun her curling iron around on what could have been mistaken for a hanging loop, and shoved it into its holster. “Sounds good,” she said. “Let’s go deal with it. I’ve got nothing here but solutions.”

They paused halfway down the corridor. Far down, at the end of it, Nita could see a lot of tall, thin, purple shapes crowded together. “Think we should put the shields back up?” she said.

“We won’t need them,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve put a damping field over this whole wing. No energy weapon will work. But the damper won’t bother wizardries.”

“You mean I can’t use my curling iron?” Carmela said, and produced a pout.

“‘Mela,” Nita said, “you won’t need it. If I’m reading these guys’ physical attributes correctly, you could break one of them in half like a pencil. They’re on the fragile side.”

“It’s why they like these big weapons so much,” Sker’ret said, sounding annoyed as he eyed the damage behind them. “I have a feeling that when I get at the system logs, the damping fields will have been the first things shut down.”

The three of them walked toward the crowd of Tawalf, in step, taking their time. The crowd clustered closer together as they approached. As the three of them got closer, Nita looked at the Tawalf and found herself feeling strangely sorry for them. They look kind of helpless and pitiful, she thought, without their big fancy weapons. Which is good for me, since now I have to make sure I’m not influenced by the fact that they would have blown me away without a second thought.

Sker’ret and Nita stopped; Carmela did, too, stepping a little away to watch what they did. The Tawalf glared at them.

“We are on errantry, and we greet you,” Sker’ret said.

“Not that you particularly merit greeting,” Nita said.

“And, additionally,” Sker’ret said, “I represent the constituted authority of the Crossings, an independent political entity of Rirhath B. I inform you that you are now to be placed in Crossings custody for a number of local and planetary infractions. You have the right to send to your homeworld through our independent travelers’ representative—when we manage to locate it—for whatever legal assistance you require. Meanwhile, we have the right to require of you all pertinent details concerning your presence here, your actions while here, and information concerning those of our station staff who were involved in attempting to prevent your access.”

There was a long silence. Then one of the Tawalf said, “There weren’t any.”

Knowledge of the Speech made the words understandable, but the sense was still ambiguous. “Weren’t any what?” Sker’ret said.

“Attempts to prevent our access,” the Tawalf said.

“Where are the station staff?” Nita said.

The Tawalf who had spoken looked at Nita scornfully, and then threw a strange look at Carmela. Maybe it’s the pants, Nita thought. They certainly made her eyes vibrate when she looked at them.

“We don’t know,” the Tawalf said.

“Somehow I doubt that,” Nita said.

“They ran off somewhere,” said another Tawalf, looking sullen—insofar as it was possible to look sullen with such expressionless eyes, like polished pebbles. “Probably hiding elsewhere on the planet.”

Nita glanced at Sker’ret. What do you think?

I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t seem in character. But then my ancestor wasn’t behaving as usual when I saw him last, either.

“Where did you people come in from?” Sker’ret said. “Who sent you?”

None of them would answer.

“Oh, come on,” Sker’ret said. “No Tawalf does something unless valuta‘s changed hands. You didn’t just turn up here with a pile of heavy weapons because you felt like it!”

The Tawalf glowered at him. “We’ve been bought once,” one of them said. “We can’t break our contracts.”

“And saying anything would be breaking them.”

Nita frowned. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said.

They all glared at her now, and Nita hoped her bluff wasn’t about to be called. Wizardries designed to get into people’s minds and take out information forcibly were almost as hard on the wizard as they were on the victim. But we have to get this place secure and running before we move on.

You have the power if you need it, the peridexis said in the back of her mind.

I know I do. But I really don’t know if I want it for this. Yet it seemed to Nita that she might have no choice, and time was flying.

The Tawalf who had spoken first had been watching Nita. Now it laughed, a nasty ratchety sound. “You won’t do it,” it said. “Wizards! Everybody knows you were always weaklings, afraid to lose your power by using it the wrong way. And now, after all these centuries of being so nicey-nice, you’re losing it anyway! So you’re finished running things in this universe! And your people are through running this place,” it said to Sker’ret, “and controlling all the wealth and power that flows through here. It’s up to the smart ones and the strong ones now to take what they want.”

“What we want,” said another of the Tawalf.

The rest of the crowd behind them started to join in that nasty snickering noise. Nita’s fingers clenched on the accelerator in anger.

“I dislike this necessity,” Sker’ret said. “But if psychotropic spelling is required to restore the Crossings to its normal function—”

“Sker’, let me,” Nita said. “I don’t like it, either, but maybe I have a way to—”

“Guys,” Carmela said. “Wait a sec.”

Nita and Sker’ret looked at her.

“You get more honey with flies,” Carmela said, and then paused. “Wait a minute, that’s not how it goes. Never mind. Here—”

She reached over her back into the little bag she was wearing, and felt around. The Tawalf watched her with some curiosity.

Then one of them, the one who had spoken first, made a strange sniffing noise—and so did its second-in-command. The two of them stared at Carmela with a sudden total concentration that made Nita raise the accelerator and get ready to fire.

Carmela withdrew something from her bag. It was thin and black, a long slim rectangle with a glint of gold at the ends. She held it up where all the Tawalf could see it.

“I have here,” she said in very clear and New York–accented Speech, “a new bar of Valrhona Caraïbe Single-Estate Grand Cru.”

Nita looked in astonishment from Carmela to the Tawalf. Their eyes, already prominent enough, actually started to bug out of their heads.

“Very aromatic,” Carmela said, waving the chocolate bar under her nose. “Long in the mouth… nice overflavors of candied orange and smoky vanilla. Maybe just a hint of cappuccino.” She waved it at them. “Sorry, guys, help me out here. I don’t know where your nose or whatever you smell with is. Are.”

The two foremost Tawalf each reached out a tentative, spindly magenta foreleg. Carmela waved the chocolate bar cautiously under each one.

The first Tawalf made a grab for it, but not quickly enough. Carmela had already snatched the bar back, and Nita had the accelerator trained on his head.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Carmela said. “Hasty hasty. This is yours, all yours… for a price.” She glanced sideways at Nita.

“Information,” Nita said. “You heard what we asked you.”

“Oh, they’re going to have to tell you a lot more than just what you asked them,” Carmela said, waving the chocolate gently under her nose and gazing thoughtfully at the Tawalf. “You’re going to answer all this nice Rirhait’s questions, aren’t you, boys? Or girls. Or whatever. And when you’ve done that, you can form yourselves a little syndicate, and I’ll give that syndicate free title to… this.”

She held up the chocolate bar.

Every single Tawalf stared at it. Nita and Sker’ret spared each other one sidewise glance.

“We can’t!” squeaked one of the Tawalf in the back.

“Our contracts!” moaned another.

“Oh, come on,” Carmela said. “Your ‘contracts’! Like you expect me to believe that somebody actually paid you this much to come in here and take this place over? I really doubt it.” She snickered. “If someone had given the whole bunch of you the value of even half of this, you’d be the highest-paid mercenaries the universe ever saw!” Carmela waved the chocolate bar in the Tawalf’s direction again.

They swayed toward it as if it had the gravitation of a micro–black hole. Nita raised the accelerator again. The Tawalf saw the look in her eye and swayed back. “But no one’s paid you anything like that much,” Carmela said. “So just think. You cooperate with my friends here, and I’m sure they’ll do what they can to see to it that the authorities here treat you fairly. And afterward, when you’ve paid your debt to society, or whatever your species pays its debts to, on the day they let you all go, they give you … this.”

There was a long, long silence.

Then the Tawalf leader said, “No.”

Nita and Sker’ret gave each other another glance at the sound of the scratchy muttering that started to go up from behind the leader.

“Oh, my,” Carmela said. “That’s too bad. Just think what you all could have had!” She glanced past the Tawalf leader to the others behind him. “But just because he got stubborn— Well. Now I’m just going to have to do… this.”

She moved the chocolate bar to her left hand, and very, very slowly, moved her right hand toward it. Carmela took hold of the outer black paper wrapper between finger and thumb. Ever so gently she started to pull on the paper, as if to unwrap it.

“No!” at least half the Tawalf screeched. And the second-in-command shouted, “You’ll ruin it!”

“Right here in front of you,” Carmela said. “While you watch. And with the greatest possible pleasure.” She smiled ever so sweetly. “I’m going to pull the wrapping off, and shred it. I’m going to rip off the foil and crumple it up into a little ball. And then I’m going to take the unspeakably valuable stuff inside … and I am going to break it up into those nice little squares… and I am going to eat… it… all.”

The leader of the Tawalf began to whimper. His second-in-command exchanged meaningful glances with the others.

“The information,” Carmela said.

The noise level among the Tawalf began to increase.

“You can have a moment to think,” Carmela said, and turned away. Nita and Sker’ret stayed as they were, facing the increasingly shaken Tawalf, though Sker’ret turned a few of his eyes toward Carmela.

“And without even laying a finger on them,” Nita said under her breath. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, well, it’s just the usual problem with aliens and chocolate,” Carmela said, very amused. “Is it a collectible, or a controlled substance? Or both? And whichever way the species sees it, it’s always worth a lot more in the original packaging.”

“This is cruel,” Sker’ret said. His tone, like Nita’s, was one of reluctant admiration. “I’m not sure you’re not speeding up entropy somewhat.”

“I’d say they had it coming,” Carmela said, “since they seem to have done a fair amount of speeding it up around here themselves.”

The muttering among the Tawalf got louder. Nita, watching the leader and his second-in-command as their subordinates pressed in around them, got the idea that greed, fear, and peer pressure were operating among the aliens in entirely too human a manner. Finally, the noise began to die down a little. Nita glanced at Sker’ret. “Well?” Sker’ret said.

The Tawalf leader’s voice, when he spoke, was surprisingly small. “All right,” he said. “We’ll tell you what you want to know. If we have your word as wizards that you will comply with the agreement as it’s been presented.”

“Oh, yeah, all of a sudden the nicey-niceness of wizards becomes a good thing,” Nita said, though not so far under her breath that she couldn’t be heard.

The look that Sker’ret flashed her was equally ironic, but they were of the same mind. “In the Powers’ names, and the Name of That which They serve,” Sker’ret said, “and as the Crossings’ legal representative present, I give my word.”

Carmela carefully handed Sker’ret the chocolate bar. “Don’t crease the paper!” she said, as he delicately took it in a forward handling-claw. “So. All you guys behave now,” she said to the Tawalf. “If you don’t, I’ll hear about it, and I’ll refuse to relinquish title.”

There was a lot of broken-spirited muttering from the Tawalf. “I’m going to transfer you to a secure holding facility,” Sker’ret said, moving over to the nearest gate-cluster standard and tapping at it so that it extruded its own control console. “We’ll be along to see that you have nourishment shortly, and to start your questioning. Everyone into the zone, please.”

A pad came alive, glowing red. The Tawalf spidered their way onto it and huddled there. A moment later they vanished.

Nita and Sker’ret looked at each other. Nita let out a long breath. She could hear the tiny multiple hiss as Sker’ret pushed a sigh out of the little spiracles all down the length of his body.

“You should get on home to do what you need to,” he said. “I’ll pop a gate open for you now.”

Nita looked around her, concerned. “Are you going to be able to manage here?”

“I’ll call the planetary authorities,” Sker’ret said. “They’ll send me plenty of staff until I can get the systems back up again, and get a clearer sense of what happened here. The logs should help me figure it out. And assuming that my ancestor is all right—”

He fell silent.

“I’m sure he is,” Nita said. “He’s too mean to—” She stopped herself. “I mean—”

“I know,” Sker’ret said, amused. “Go find out where your own ancestor is. I’ll meet you here afterward, and we can go back together.”

“Yeah,” Nita said.

She turned to Carmela. “One thing before I go,” Nita said. “Are your pop and mom okay?”

“They’re just fine,” Carmela said.

“Do they know you’ve left?”

“Sure. I left them a note on the fridge, the way Kit does.”

Nita was uncertain what the Rodriguezes’ response to that was going to be, but right now she had other concerns. “Look, I don’t think I’m going to have to be gone long. Are you sure you’re going to be okay here?”

“Haven’t I been okay so far?” Carmela said.

Even in her present stressed-out condition, Nita had to grin. “Just possibly you have,” she said. “Keep an eye on him, okay? Help him out however you can.”

“Now you know I live to do just that,” Carmela said.

“Got a gate for you,” Sker’ret said, training one eye on Nita while another one gazed at the red-lit hexagon of one of the pads in the nearest cluster. “There’s that spot out at the far end of your backyard that’s seen a lot of traffic—”

“Perfect,” Nita said. She headed for the pad.

“Better lose the accelerator,” Sker’ret said. “If anybody in your neighborhood’s sensitive enough to see the wizardry, they might talk.”

Nita nodded, tossed the accelerator up into the air, snapped her fingers at it; the spell resolved itself into its component words in the Speech, a long tangled drift of words and symbols that hung wavering in the air like glowing weeds in water. Nita snagged the spell, wrapped it back around the charm on her charm bracelet that usually held it, and made sure it had sunk into the charm’s matrix again before she stepped across the boundary line into the gating hex. “Go,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

Sker’ret hit a control on his console, and Nita vanished.