A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (31 page)

Nita shook her head. Carmela was plainly fascinated by the mystery of where the inhabitants of the lost planet had gone: but Nita was thinking, 
And what if this is the species that Kit and his team are so excited about waking up?
These 
people, who went thousands of years without having any time they
 weren’t 
having a war, might wind up being our new next-door neighbors?

Oh,
 boy.

“Mela,” Nita said after a moment, “you saw how they were with each other on their original world. Maybe the ones who made it here didn’t learn the lesson. Maybe they finally wiped each other out... and this is all that’s left.” But as soon as she said it, Nita somehow knew right down in her bones that this was not the case, and the situation wasn’t going to be anything like that simple. She frowned. 
I
 hate 
feelings like this,
 Nita thought. 
Even though they’re going to be useful later...

“There’s something else that strikes me as strange,” S’reee said. “All through that, we never saw an image of what
they
 looked like, the people of the First World.” She swung her tail. “It’s true enough that there are species that don’t or won’t make images of themselves. But they’re in the minority.” Her voice went wry. “Most species can’t get enough of looking at themselves.”

Carmela shook her head. “Maybe they were making a clean break?” she said. “If they did actually change themselves to suit another planet— this planet— maybe they didn’t want to be reminded of what they had to abandon? Seems like they thought it was a failure to have to change at all.”

She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around her at the dome, at all that unread writing. Then Carmela turned back to Nita and S’reee. “I’ve got to work on this,” she said. “It’s gonna drive me nuts. I need to go get a notebook. Do you want me to give you guys a lift back home?”

“You might take me back with you,” S’reee said. “But does this mean that you’re not going shopping?”

“It can wait.” Carmela turned back to gaze around the dome with an odd look on her face. “There’s something going on here.”

Another one gets bit by the bug!
 Nita thought. She glanced at S’reee. “You just may have heard history in the making,” she said, “whatever kind’s recorded here. Carmela said she was 
not
 going shopping somewhere.”

S’reee whistled with laughter. Carmela ignored them both as she looked down at the design under their feet, following one long, tangled thread of writing. She pointed at it. “That bit,” Carmela said, “that’s a poem. Can you see it?”

Nita and S’reee looked at each other. “No,” they said in unison.

“Well, I can. And I want to see what it says!”

Nita sighed
. So much for getting her safely out of here and off to the Crossings!
 “I’m not sure I’m wild about you being by yourself up here...”

Carmela gave Nita a look. “Even Mamvish said there was no reason I should be excluded from this stuff. What’re you worried about— our little scorpion buddies? They let me alone before when they came through. If they were interested in chewing on me, they’d have done it then. And they haven’t been back.”

“As far as I can tell,” S’reee said, glancing around the vast round chamber, “that wizardry’s now defunct. A one-time assessment, I think.”

“See that?” Carmela said. “Neets, when I come back, I’ll have the remote. And I’ve got my ‘curling iron.’ If anything jumps out at me, it’s not going to get anything for its trouble but a real big hole straight through it, and I’ll be gone before it can do anything else.”

Nita looked over at S’reee. S’reee just shrugged her tail. “Recent events suggest that K!aarmii’lha can take care of herself. She’s armed, she can get away quickly if she must, and if she has a cell phone, she can call you for help if she needs it, yes?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. 
Bobo, is the wizardry here really done running?

Yes. I doubt it could be reactivated now no matter how we tried.

“Okay,” Nita said. “I’m gonna try again to get at that spot where Kit and the guys are working... or at least try to find out why we couldn’t transport there.”

Carmela pulled out her remote and got busy punching its buttons. “And you, cousin?” S’reee said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right without backup?”

Nita nodded. Unsettling as her experience with the scorpions had been, it had left her with a sense that she had been examined and found nonthreatening: she was safe enough on Mars. 
Until some new weird thing happens.
But the moment of foresight Nita had had, and correctly read, now left her feeling less concerned about coming up against something completely unexpected. 
As long as the universe keeps those helpful hints coming...

“Go on,” Nita said, patting S’reee’s side and pulling out her manual again. She flipped it to the page describing wizardries ongoing in the area, glanced down it to the description of the life-support spell that S’reee was running, and laid a finger on the written version: it glowed as Nita took over its management. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything.”

She looked past S’reee to Carmela. Mela waved the remote at her, punched a button. She and S’reee vanished. The air inside the support spell imploded in a brief, sharp breeze toward where they’d been, then settled again.

Nita stood there in the silence, the rowan wand in her free hand now the only light. “Okay, Bobo,” she said. “You have Kit’s first set of coordinates? This crater—” She peered at the manual. “Stokes—”

Got them.

“Are they still blocked?”

Not precisely. Conditions there are ...peculiar.

It wasn’t the most reassuring thing to hear wizardry itself saying to you. Nevertheless, Nita shrugged. “Let’s go find out how peculiar,” she said.

The transit circle laid itself out glowing around her. 
Transiting now.

Around Nita, the world went dark again.

Pale peach-colored dust fluffed away in the gust of wind that accompanied the three human forms who appeared atop the low, rounded ridge. It wasn’t a particularly sharp or edgy piece of terrain— just a rough escarpment of beige and cream-colored rock, with dust and sand spilling down in little rills, almost like water, from cracks in the low cliff’s edge. To the south and west spread a vast, shallow, circular depression, itself dimpled and cratered with the remnants of newer, lesser impacts. Level with the old crater’s rim, the surrounding landscape to the north and east, more brown than red, was strewn with nondescript boulders well into the distance.

“Here we are,” Kit said, glancing around to get his bearings. 

“Wahoo,” Darryl said, ironic. 

“Nope. De Vaucouleurs.” 

“Pedant,” said Ronan, looking around with the expression of someone eager not to see any more giant bat-crab-spider creatures. 

Kit rolled his eyes. “We’re in the right spot, anyway. There’s Kayne, over that way.” He pointed: another crater’s low rim was just visible, looking like a low line of hills maybe ten miles away. “Shawnee, Bok...” He peered further away to the south. “Hamelin—” 

“I take back what I said before,” Ronan said, concerned. “You don’t need a social life later. You need one 
now
. How long have you been staying home nights memorizing crater names? They’re holes in the ground, Kit! There’s nothing but rocks in them! Set yourself free! 
Life’s too short!
” 

Kit turned to Darryl. “Doesn’t seem to be much going on here at the moment. What’ve we got?” 

Darryl brought out his WizPod and pulled out a wide, semitransparent page that he studied for a moment. He shook his head, holding it up for Ronan and Kit to see. “Okay, look. The wizardry you triggered is getting ready to spike here. Two or three minutes. But before it goes off, you can still see some indications of how old it is and where it came from. Look quick—” He pointed at one long line of symbols. “See that? The power to fuel this wizardry wasn’t locally sourced.” 

Kit shook his head. “What?” 

“The energy didn’t come from this planet, originally! It came from—” Darryl looked up, pointed. “Somewhere up there.” 

Kit and Ronan looked up into the empty Martian sky. “Nearby?” Ronan said. “One of the moons, maybe?” 

“Don’t think so,” Darryl said, studying his readout. “Nope. Much further. Maybe thirty million miles. Actually, make that fifty.” 

Ronan and Kit stared at each other. “What’s out that far?” Ronan said. 

“The asteroids?” Kit said. “I mean, I’m not sure about the distances.” 

Darryl was still looking at the wide page of manual that he’d pulled out of the WizPod. He shook his head, looking perplexed. “There’s something wrong with the timing, too,” he said. “I can’t get a clean read on it. But, look, if the wizardry’s running and about to go off, it’d make more sense for us to deal with what it’s about to do right now than get too hung up about who emplaced it and when...” 

“Yeah. Meanwhile,” Ronan said, glancing around him, “what’s the satellite situation? That last jump was biggish, to judge by how high the Sun’s up now.” He had a point: Kit glanced up and saw that it was almost noon. “The schedule’s got to be pretty different here. And
where
exactly is this wizardry going to go off? Not right underneath us this time, I hope—” 

“No way,” Darryl said. “I factored in a nice big offset. Off that way.” He looked east and south. “In the middle of the next big crater over. About fifty miles, as the wizard jumps.” 

“Uh,” Ronan said softly, “maybe time to jump, then—” 

They looked where he was looking. Kit gulped. From beyond the low crater rim to the east, a pale green glow was rising. 

Darryl grabbed them each by an arm. “I’ll put us down on the far side,” he said. “The view’ll be better.” He took a deep breath. 

As the momentary darkness of a bilocation transit shut down around him, Kit was trying to visualize the orbit of the
Mars Express
 orbiter in his head. But something else was niggling at him. The name of the crater they’d come down on the edge of meant something besides being just the site of one of the active wizardries. 
De Vaucouleurs,
 he thought. 
De Vaucouleurs. There was something special about that area, I could have
 sworn
—
 

The darkness gave way once more to daylit Martian landscape. They were standing on the rim of yet another crater, but this rim was far higher and better defined than the last, and the crater seemed much bigger: the two arms of it ran straight to the foreshortened horizon and vanished. 
For it to look this big, it’d have to be a hundred miles across,
 Kit thought. 
And the surface down there is maybe two miles deep.
Or so it seemed where it wasn’t being rapidly overrun by the green glow of a working alien wizardry. That emerald light was flooding outward from a spot off to their right and about halfway across the visible portion of the crater, making the whole area look bizarrely like a reverse-action film of water going down a drain. 

“If the action this time’s going to be anything like it was back at Stokes,” Ronan said, “I think I prefer the view from up here.” He looked down at the outward-spreading light. “Look at it go!” He shook his head. “What about the satellites?” 

“Yeah,” Darryl said. “If something comes over now, it’s not just going to see our infrared signatures. At night the guys back at NASA or ESA might think we were just a transient hot spot, a meteorite impact or some such. But in the daytime, when they have something overhead that can see us in visible light, too? And not just us. 
That!
” 

Kit was going through his manual in a hurry. “Obviously we can spoof them,” Ronan said. “Mess with their machinery somehow.” 

“If it can figure out the right way!” Kit said. “Spoof ’em, sure, it’s easy to say. But how do you do it so the rocket-science guys don’t 
notice?
 They’re not dumb! Take one of the satellite’s cameras out of commission? Sure, but how? Make a piece of the machinery fail? Better make sure you’re not failing out something you can’t fix right away when you don’t need the fault anymore. And you’ve got to pick something to interfere with that’ll seem to make sense when it stops working 
and
 when it just starts up again for no good reason—” 

“You’ll figure something out!” Darryl said. “This is your specialty. You haven’t done anything but think about this stuff for weeks now!” 

Kit held his manual up right in front of Darryl’s face to show him the orbital diagram he’d been looking for. “But not
this
 exact situation! Here comes the 
Mars Express
 orbiter. Eighteen minutes and ten seconds from now. Either we stop 
that
—” and Kit pointed at the spreading green glow— “or the 
Express
 sees a lot more than just our own hot spots. Those we can hide, sure. Put a stealth shell over us that mimics the local temperature. But what about 
that?
” He nodded at the oncoming tide of green light. “No way they’re going to believe
that’s
a dust storm! We can’t let them see it; it’ll screw up their science! And we don’t have enough power to hide it even at the size it is now. If it spreads much further…”