The wand’s silver fire gleamed and slid down skin like green metal as the creature moved forward. It looked very like a scorpion: but it was almost the size of a Shetland pony. It had entirely too many legs and claws, and blank, cold polished-jade eyes.
The scorpion moved slowly out of the darkness toward the three of them, the front two pairs of its claws lifted. Pouring along behind it out of the shadows came about fifty more like it, all their front claws scissoring together softly, making a grating, echoing whisper in the room of stone.
“We are on errantry,” Nita said, trying to keep any tremor out of her voice, “and we greet you!”
The scorpions did not pause, did not slow: they came on, cold-eyed, claws working.
Nita lifted the wand…
7: Stokes
Kit, Ronan, and Darryl came out of transit to find themselves standing at the dark far edge of a distant blue dawn. In a gauzy wrapping of atmosphere just above the edge of the world, a blue-white Sun hung still and small under a dome of pale blue haze, not yet too bright to be dangerous to look at. All around, under a sky only a few shades of violet from black, lay the flat, dark rock-scattered surface of the little crater called Stokes. Away to the east, the shadow of the crater’s rim lay in a sharp black crescent between the three of them and the morning; and from every least rock and pebble, a pointed finger of cold, dark shadow lay long against the ground.
First Darryl, then Ronan, stepped to the edge of the force-field bubble that surrounded them and gazed out, not speaking. Kit knew why. Full day on Mars can seem matter-of-fact once you get used to it; just another panorama full of beige-brown sand and rubble, just another dusty amber sky, sunlight seeming as dimmed by the blowing dust as by a Sun that’s fifty million miles farther away and twenty percent dimmer than it ought to be. But there was no making the same mistake at dawn or sunset, when because of the dust and lack of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere the light went blue instead of red. Then the surroundings became both bleak and beautiful in a way that was possible only here. That faint, thin hiss of wind, hardly to be heard; that sense of absolute, pristine barrenness, empty, but not in any of the usual ways— it all got under your skin, made you hold still and listen for some hint of the secret that was hiding from you, the real reason why this landscape seemed so studiedly unconcerned about your presence. It seemed to be saying, “This isn’t your place: you have no business here. Do whatever you like. It doesn’t matter.” But it does. It does. All we have to do now is find out why...
Ronan turned away from the sunrise and looked toward the northwestern horizon, where the crater wall was closer and the cracks and ravines running down it glowed a dull dusty cyan in the blue fire of dawn. He glanced back at Kit, the sunglasses gleaming indigo. “Like it’s whispering to itself about us,” Ronan said. “Not so easy to hear when there are a lot of other people around—”
“Yeah,” Kit said.
Ronan looked over at Darryl, who was still gazing at the brightening dawn. “As for you, don’t know how you’re doing that.”
Darryl looked at him. “What?”
“Being completely normal,” Ronan said. Kit had to agree. Darryl might as well have still been standing in Kit’s backyard for all the exertion the transit seemed to have cost him. “Every wizardry’s supposed to have a price. And here you just hauled yourself and two other people fifty million miles without breaking a sweat! Seems like cheating.”
“I am not cheating!” Darryl said, looking injured. “It’s not a transport: it’s a bilocation. Why should I pay some big price for going fifty million miles from Earth when I’m still there?” He brushed dun-colored dust off him. “You’re just jealous because you can’t pull the same stunt. Waste of time, if you ask me, because I may not be able to do this forever! So right now I plan to enjoy it. And so should you, because you’re riding free.”
“Okay, fine, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”
“Well, you do. But I forgive you, ’cause I’m nice that way.” Darryl grinned, turned to Kit. “Where’s the spot the first signal went to?”
“Over there.” Kit pointed to the northeast. “A few hundred yards.”
The three of them headed for the spot using the half-bounce, half-walk that worked best in this gravity. Ronan was humming under his breath as he bounced along, and after a few bounces, he started to fill in the lyrics. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars... are a million to one, he said...”
“So how come you got up so late this morning?” Kit said.
Ronan threw him a sideways look. “Because I was out late last night, nosy boy.” And he snickered. “While you’re at it, you might look into trying some kind of social life for size! I had a date to go clubbing with my mates. Why would I dump them just because something admittedly exciting happened up here? You start acting that way all the time, pretty soon no one invites you out anymore.” And Ronan turned his attention back to the landscape. “Oh, the chances of anything coming from Mars... are a million to one... but still they come ...!”
“Okay, message received,” Kit muttered after Ronan, “but you didn’t have to jump down my throat about it.”
“Yes, he did. Dirty job, but somebody has to do it,” Darryl said, bouncing briefly higher to get a better view of where they were headed. “Everybody heard Miss Neets’s reaction to how you just dumped her yesterday. When she’s pissed off, her voice kind of carries—”
Kit flushed red. “I thought we said we were going to leave her out of this.”
“Heh,” Darryl said. He bounced high again. “How far now?”
Kit checked his manual. “A hundred yards—”
Darryl came down. “No outcroppings here. If there’s another egg, it’ll be underground.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. The crater wall was two miles away. The rest of the impact area was the usual rubble-strewn Martian landscape— sandy ground littered with rocks of all sizes, shattered by the summertime contrast between bitter cold and surprising warmth, and wind-worn afterward. Kit kept an eye on his manual, where the spot was highlighted on the map now showing their approach vector. Finally their path and the target’s location converged. “Right here,” Kit said, and stopped.
Darryl and Ronan stopped, too, staring at the ground under Kit’s feet—just sand, a scatter of pebbles, a few fist-size rocks. “Okay,” Darryl said, “dig we must. But not just on a hunch. We need ground radar.”
“Now, it’s funny you should mention that,” Ronan said, and held his hands out in front of him, starting to speak softly in the Speech.
“Ooh, magic gestures,” Darryl said, nudging Kit. “This should be cool.”
Ronan threw Darryl a withering look. “It’s to help me target, you plank,” he said. “Now shut your tiny gob and watch an expert at work.”
Kit and Darryl watched as Ronan started reciting his spell again. Within seconds, the ground faded to transparency under their feet. It was like standing on a bumpy glass floor, the “glass” apparently about a hundred feet thick beneath them, full of shadowy flaws and striations illuminated sourcelessly by the spell itself. “Look at that,” Ronan said, sounding abstracted as the wizardry penetrated the surface more deeply and he peered down into it. “See how those layers are piled up? Looks like there was water here once.”
“A lot of places,” Kit said, as Ronan walked slowly around the spot where Darryl and Kit were standing. “There’s enough water ice at the south pole to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep. But how it got down there, and when...” He shook his head. “You need me to split this air bubble for you so you can walk further out?”
“Not yet,” Ronan said. He kept walking. Everywhere he moved, for about ten feet in front of him and to the sides, the ground went transparent. The Sun had climbed higher as they’d come, and the light continued getting better as the blue dawn shaded into the pale amber of early morning; but there was nothing unusual to be seen under the ground. Finally Ronan paused. “How accurate was your tracking on the sp
ot that signal targeted?”
“Within a meter,” Kit said. “At least that’s what the manual said.”
“Might be something else going on,” Ronan said. “Maybe something cloaking whatever’s down there? I tweaked this scan so it includes the detection routine that Síle and Markus came up with. However—” He peered down into the unrevealing depths. “If whatever’s here was alerted by the egg that the cloaking routine it was using had been broken—”
“Could be,” Darryl said, pulling out his WizPod and touching it into manual function. “Let’s see if any other wizardries are working around here. Maybe with different cloaking routines. I’ll tell it—” and he pulled a glowing page out of the body of the Pod, stretching it out on the air and writing on it in the Speech with one finger— “to look around for the material the egg was made of.”
A few moments later Darryl stood back, leaving the Pod and its stretched-out manual page hanging in midair, and started whispering the words he’d written. The world went quiet around them as the spell “took” with unusual speed.But he really is still pretty close to his Ordeal, Kit thought. His power levels are way above either of ours. And on top of that, he’s an abdal: practically a living power conduit. No telling what he could do now if he wanted to. Assuming, like the rest of us, he can get enough of what he needs out of the manual to figure out how.
Far down in that abnormal clarity of Martian soil, Kit could suddenly see a green light glowing. He gulped, recognizing the color. “Got some action here, all right!” Darryl said, as under their feet the glow rose and spread like a slowly rising tide of liquid light. “Something’s awake! There are elements in this energy flow that’re part of the transmission from the egg in Nili Patera—”
“Is this wizardry hooked to anything physical down there?” Kit said.
Darryl shook his head. “Nope. It’s just linked to the terrain. Uh-oh—”
“Uh-oh” wasn’t something Kit liked hearing another wizard say. He was about to ask what was wrong when that green light boiled up from the depths, bursting against the ground under their feet like blood under skin, and then flowed lightning-quick away from them in all directions. The rush of light left itself burning in every rock and pebble it passed as it flash-flooded out across the crater’s bottom. Within seconds it washed up against the crater’s rim, flooded up it on all sides, splashed over the ragged crest, and vanished over the side—
Kit and Ronan and Darryl stood looking across the crater in three different directions. Darryl said, “Okay... now what?”
Ronan shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It’s fading.”
Kit looked around them. Right across the crater that light was already growing paler—not just because the Sun was higher and brighter in the amber sky. “So what was that? Another signal? Or just some kind of acknowledgment that we followed up on the first one?”
Darryl was looking at the manual page he’d extracted from his WizPod. “It was a limited-run wizardry. It triggered right when Ronan did his see-into-the-ground routine. The triggered spell blew all its energy in one big spike. The energy’s dropping right off the scale again.” Darryl shook his head. “It was a big spike, though. And there was something funny about the time stamp—”
Kit looked across the crater for any sign of life or movement. There was nothing. “Analysis,” he muttered. “Mamvish warned us we’d probably wind up doing a lot of it...” He pulled out his manual and opened it to the log pages for this trip. Among several charts showing what wizardries the three of them were carrying or utilizing, Kit saw the diagram that showed what wizardly energy was associated with this specific spot. Darryl hadn’t been overstating the size of the spike associated with their arrival. The graph had had to stretch itself to the top of the manual page to accommodate it. “What was the problem with the time stamp on the spike?” Kit said. “It looks okay to me.”
“Not the spike itself,” Darryl said. “The indicator showing when the spell was actually installed here. It looked earlier than the egg’s installation date—” Then Darryl made a little hiss of annoyance as the indicator vanished from the page. Kit shook his head. “Can you get that back?”
“I’ll let you know when I understand why it went away!” Darryl said. “Here—” But Kit was now distracted by his manual: its pages were flushing pink. He glanced up.
Atmospheric conditions could sometimes get very odd on Mars, but in all the times he’d been there, Kit had never seen anything like this. From where the three of them stood to the horizon, it was as if the Red Planet had suddenly taken the sobriquet personally and decided that for a change today it was going to get really, really red: not just rusty-colored, but positively crimson. Everything was turning that color— the ground, the sky— as if Kit was wearing red glasses.
“This could give you a headache after a while,” Ronan said. He sounded uneasy.
Darryl looked up and around. “Sky’s clear. Not a dust storm, then.”
“This is that new wizardry working,” Kit said. He started flipping through his manual to the defensive spells.
“But what’s it doing?” Ronan said, taking the sunglasses off to stare at the horizon. “I mean, if something’s going to...”
He trailed off. “Going to what?” Darryl said.
Ronan pointed and shook his head. Maybe a quarter mile away from them across the crimson sands, teetering unevenly along in their general direction, was something with four long legs and some kind of body hung in the middle.
They stared. “What is that?” Kit said. “A giant spider?”
Ronan squinted at it. “The legs look more, I don’t know, crabby. Look, they’ve got webs or something between the joints.” He paused. “Sorry, maybe I need to hit the optometrist when I get home, but does that look like it has the head of a bat?”
Kit shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. There’s a tail, too. Like a rat tail.”
“One of the original inhabitants, maybe,” Ronan said, “coming to say hello?”
Kit shook his head. The approaching thing unsettled him: it looked not just unlikely, but also somehow rickety and badly built. Kit flipped his manual to a bookmarked page where he’d set up a life-sign detector sensitive to all the kinds of life that wizards knew about—which meant quite a few. But the display showed nothing in the area but three dots labeled with the twelve-character code in the Speech that meant Earth-human. “Not alive,” Kit said.
The bat-rat-spider-crab came tottering toward them, only a few hundred yards away now. Ronan shook his head. “Illusion?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Kit. “There’s something physical there that wasn’t there before—”
“A construct,” Ronan said, frowning. “Great. If it’s real enough to get physical, it’s real enough to damage us. But since it’s not alive, if that thing starts getting too cozy, I won’t feel too bad about using this.” Ronan reached sideways into the air, grabbed something invisible, and pulled.
Something long, narrow, and blazingly bright came out of nowhere, following his pull. For a second Kit’s memory flashed back to the Spear of Light that Ronan used to carry: but that was in other hands, or claws, these days. The object Ronan held though, was definitely “of light”— a cylindrical bar of burning golden radiance an inch wide and three feet long. Ronan lifted it up and laid it over his left arm, sighting on the bat-spider thing as it came spidering hugely along toward them.
Kit recognized what Ronan held as one of numerous deadly weapons that a wizard could construct from the universe’s more basic energies. “You sure you want to do that?”
“Not at all sure,” Ronan said, sighting carefully. “Entirely willing not to have to do it if that keeps its distance. But my mam didn’t raise me to be bat chow, so you’re going to have to forgive me if I—”
He broke off short as with a distinctive crack! a bullet flew over them. The head of the bat-rat-crab thing came up, reacting to something off to their right. It stared— then turned a
nd enthusiastically ran off in a different direction entirely.
Confused, Ronan lowered the energy weapon and peered past the fleeing bat-rat-crab thing. “All right, now wait just a fecking minute,” he said. “A rifle? Was that a rifle??”
Darryl started to laugh.
The sound made Kit realize that Darryl had been unusually quiet for the last few minutes. Now, though, he pointed out past where the bat-creature had been. “Will you get a load of that?”
Kit’s eyes went wide as he looked where Darryl pointed. Running toward them across the crimson sand, under the carmine sky, were human beings. They wore space suits, but not modern ones: these looked like crude versions of a jet pilot’s pressure suit. And bizarrely, they didn’t seem to be affected by Mars’s lighter gravity. They ran as if they were still on Earth.
Darryl was still laughing as the spacemen— there was no other way to think of beings so retro-looking— got closer. They slowed, took stance, and fired again, but not at the bat-rat-whatever: at the three astonished wizards. The bullets hit the force field holding in the wizardly air bubble and whined away. Ronan had lowered his weapon, looking perplexed at Darryl’s laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said to Darryl, “but is there something funny I’m missing about this? Those are bullets!”
“Yeah,” Darryl said, “but they’re movie bullets!”
Kit stared at him. “What?”
“This is all out of a movie!” Darryl said. “First time I saw it was when I was really little. It completely freaked me out, because I didn’t understand it was just a story. I thought it was the news from somewhere. Then I saw it again on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago, and when I recognized it, man, I couldn’t stop laughing; it’s so lame! It’s called The Angry Red Planet.”
“Well, somebody’s angry,” Ronan said, as the barrage of bullets continued.
“Somebody’s scared,” Kit said. “Look, let’s go talk to them.”