Her acceleration away from the planet slowed, ceased, then reversed direction. Nita dropped toward the planet’s surface with increasing speed; she doubled over into a dive, straightening as she fell faster. Doing end-runs around the kernel by sweet-talking local forces isn’t going to stop this, she thought. Got to get my hands on that thing fast! “Bobo, how’re her energy levels holding up?”
She’s strong, Bobo said. She’s got a whole planet to draw on.
“Can’t you do anything about it?”
Not without getting the kernel dissociated from her, Bobo said. For the time being, she is Mars—
Don’t remind me, Nita thought, for down on the surface the dust was kicking up. So how the heck do I get her to stop being Mars? If only for a few minutes… Another of those blocks of hardened air hit Nita and clouted her hard up into the borders of the atmosphere again.
As she recovered and plunged downward once more, Nita could see the destruction continuing, the desolation spreading as some old volcanoes woke up and new ones broke out like a fiery rash as the crust ripped and lava thrust up from the depths. Fueled by the power Aurilelde’s kernel-connected rage was feeding to the wizardry running loose on the planet, whole oceans were coming real out of the past; even Valles Marineris was running over with ancient water beyond its ability to drain out into the northern ocean basins. Mars was tearing itself apart in fire and water. “Stop it, Aurilelde!” Nita shouted at her as she got close to Aurilelde again. “You can’t do this!”
“I can!” Aurilelde yelled back. “And I will! If only to teach you what I can do and you can’t. What I can have and you can’t! Khretef is mine! He was always mine! We don’t need this world! Yours will do just as well. When this world’s gone, and we’ve taken yours, we’ll live there and he’ll be mine again, mine forever—”
Nita kept heading toward her. Angry isn’t working! Just tell her the truth— “Nothing’s forever, Aurilelde!” she shouted. “You may not be a wizard, but Kit is, and Khretef is, and they both know that entropy’s running, and sooner or later, everything dies.” Nita’s eyes started to sting. “The people you love die, and love may be enough to slow down the death sometimes, or even reverse it for a while— but not every time, and not forever!”
She thought of her mother, of Ponch, and had to wipe her eyes. Oh, damn it, I thought I was through with this! I guess not for a while yet. “It won’t work. Kit will die someday, yeah! I may be there to see it: I’ve already almost seen it once or twice.” She wiped her eyes again, but anger was getting the better of her now. “But that’s more than you can say. Because where were you when Khretef died? Off somewhere safe. Let him handle the danger, huh? Not your business, Princess? That’s not how love works!”
Aurilelde laughed scornfully as she arrowed toward Nita again. “As if you know anything about love! Your idea of physical intimacy is punching Kit in the arm.”
Nita flushed hot. “Well, looks like I know more than you do, because I don’t have to keep my boyfriend in a cage! That’s what you’re trying to build for Khretef. You’ll stamp out all your enemies, meaning his people, mostly, and then rule Mars or Earth or whatever with him at your side. Chained there! Because the life you’re awake in now scares you too much to ever let him go. He’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. It’s not love holding you to him now: it’s fear! And Khretef knows that! But he means to stay with you anyway, because he’s sorry for what the fear’s turned you into—”
The completely stricken look spreading across Aurilelde’s face told Nita that this was all the truth, her visionary talent perhaps picking up on something Kit knew. Nita shivered.
“No! He stays with me because he loves me—”
“Oh, he’ll let you think that,” Nita said, angry. “Because Khretef’s a hero, like Kit, he’s willing to be locked up in that cage with you forever. He wants to be there? Then that’s your boyfriend’s business. But I’m not gonna let mine stay locked up in there with him!”
Aurilelde slowly dropped her hands and just hung there on the borders of space, a look of increasing horror spreading across her face. Nita, watching, hardly dared to breathe, even to move.
It was hard to just wait and give Aurilelde this one last chance to get it right, even with the memory of that voice screaming, I don’t need this world: yours will do as well! It was so easy to think, You’re a hopeless case: nothing to do with you but throw you out of the game!
But the Rede had said, To wreak aright | she must slay her rival— And that had to mean the scared and angry Aurilelde who was ready to tear a planet apart to get her way. She has to have the chance to reject that option, or this won’t work.
The moment stretched as Aurilelde drifted, and the back of Nita’s mind became an uproar of her own fears, for Earth, for Kit. We’re wasting time. She’ll never turn! Just put her out of her misery while she’s off balance and get on with saving one world if not two!
Nita swallowed. Bobo, she said silently, this is it. Let’s have that routine for getting a kernel out of a living matrix against its will.
The peridexis showed Nita the structure of the spell. And as it did, Aurilelde raised her arms, her face shifting into a mask of fury, and launched herself toward Nita. A moment later her hands were around Nita’s throat, squeezing.
Nita reeled back in shock bizarrely tinged with embarrassment, since her personal force field was presently keyed toward protecting her from vast impersonal forces, not the kind of playground stuff that she might have expected from Joanne and her crowd back in the bad old days.
But Nita had learned some techniques back then that still worked fine. She reached out and snaked her right arm over one of Aurilelde’s and under the other, then angled the arm up to twist her attacker’s arms free. Aurilelde tried to get another grip, but before she had a chance, Nita grabbed both her wrists in one hand, then described a quick line of hard light around them with one index finger. The thin strand of force field knotted itself tight.
That second was all Nita needed. Frozen in it, the visionary gift showed NIta the tangle of light inside Aurilelde that was what she wanted. As Aurilelde struggled and screamed, “No!,” Nita finished saying the spell the peridexis had passed her, and plunged her hand straight into Aurilelde’s chest.
Aurilelde screamed. So did Nita, so close to the pain and so much in sync with it: for the kernel she gripped was all tangled up with Aurilelde’s soul. She could even hear Kit scream, too: through Khretef he was as caught up in this as Nita.
Not—much longer! Nita thought, panting with pain. At least— I’ve got hold of the kernel. Now all I need to do is get it out—
But that was going to be the hard part. She made sure of her grip on the tangle of hot, rusty light buried inside Aurilelde. This wouldn’t be easy: the wizardry that had implanted it there was complex, elegant, and very tough.
But so are you! she heard Kit say from somewhere. Go!
Nita grinned in triumph and desperate hope. She clenched her fist around the kernel, braced herself, spoke the final word of the spell’s second part, and yanked out what she held.
The kernel came free. Nita fell backward with the flash of pain that went through her opponent. Crying out in shock and anguish, Aurilelde plummeted toward the planet. But Nita had no time for her right now. All her attention was on the brilliant interwoven tangle of profoundly ancient wizardry that was the kernel of the planet Mars. The impression she’d gotten of it earlier, of reddish light, was correct: thousands of strands and cords of wizardry, all keyed to the planet’s gravity and mass and composition and construction, were writhing and glowing in the tangle of power as it flowered out to its full volume, a beachball-sized mass of rose and rust and blood and sunset colors. But they were in chaos, the tangle of terrible power now jittering and buzzing in fury that was a residue of Aurilelde’s.
Traumatized, Nita thought. And why not, after where it’s been stuck and what it’s been through? She threw a glance down at the planet. Half of it wa
s obscured now by the fury of dust being kicked up by the worsening quakes. Bad. Let’s go—
Nita took a deep breath, then sank her hands into the kernel, concentrating. One strand very deep in the kernel, near its nucleus, controlled geological and crustal activity, and that one was singing like a plucked string, resonating with Aurilelde’s rage.
Nita grabbed for it, tried to calm it down. But the kernel had already been locked too long in relationship with Aurilelde’s soul for the relationship to quickly come undone. Furious at having been mismanaged and now further enraged at being tampered with by yet another stranger, the whole kernel writhed and bucked in her hands, resisting Nita.
However, it was now in the hands of a wizard who’d gone through some difficult schooling in kernel management techniques— unlike Aurilelde, whose control over it had been strictly second-hand a matter of half-understood instincts, half-remembered advice, and wishful thinking. What you need with these things is understanding, Nita thought. And figuring them out always wins out over just plunging around feeling stuff.
In Nita’s grasp, the kernel kept on jumping and struggling, indignant at the sudden change of control, trying to leap away and return to where it had been moments before. “Oh no,” Nita said softly. “You are not going there!” She clutched it, hanging on, working her right hand in to close around that one shrieking string of the kernel through which she could feel the earthquakes rippling across Mars’s crust.
She gripped that string hard, damping it down. “Stop being so angry!” she told it. “There’s no point in it. It’s all over now. Just calm down—”
It ignored her. “Just stop it,” Nita told it. “It’s going to be all right! Let go of it and calm down!”
And slowly, slowly, under force of mind, under furious intention, and right through Nita’s fear for Kit, the vibration gradually began to settle down, fading, letting go. The string stopped singing.
Nita glanced down at the Martian surface. It would be a long while before the dust settled. But under the surface, she could now feel the residual transverse waves of the earthquake dying away, going quiet. She let out a long, scared breath.
Twelve minutes, Bobo said. Meanwhile, don’t you think you’ve forgotten something?
Nita glanced down. Bright in the light of the Sun behind her, like a falling star, a tiny figure was accelerating toward the planet’s surface. For just a moment, thinking of what Aurilelde had intended for Kit and for the Earth, a nasty, satisfied anger flared up in Nita. If she does land a little too hard to survive, well, maybe she had it coming. The Rede did say, yet to wreak aright, | she must slay her rival—
And if she didn’t pull that off, then maybe I’m the one who has to...
Nita hung there, silent. No, she thought. Prophecy is fine, but it doesn’t have to happen. “Sorry,” she said to someone she was sure was watching. “Not today.” And she dived after Aurilelde.
The Shamaska was falling uncontrolled, tumbling. Nita easily beat her down to ground level at Argyre Planitia— now a sprinkling of islands in a broad, round sea slowly draining away through many outlets at its edges— and alighted on one to wait for her. Nita felt around in the kernel’s interior for the controls for local gravity and planetary mass. There they are, she thought, and made a couple of simple but significant changes.
High above her, Aurilelde’s fall began to slow. By the time she was perceptible as a body with arms and legs, several hundred feet up, she had decelerated to a slow drift. “Bobo,” Nita said, “I need the usual transit spell. Put the far end down inside the Scarlet Tower—”
Right, the peridexis said. Nine minutes...
“Until I collapse?” Nita said.
Unless you do it sooner.
Nita gulped. She was starting to feel those shakes again as the circle of the transit spell appeared on the tableland in front of her. Never mind, she thought. Not just yet—
Aurilelde was falling toward the center of the circle. Nita checked the integrity of her personal force field, making sure it was set for physical attack and weaponry now. “Collapse this after we’re both through,” she said to Bobo, and stepped in.
15: Meridiani Planum
Nita’s second step came down on the polished floor of the Tower. The Throne was empty. A hubbub of scared, angry voices was bouncing around inside, but it went hushed as they registered Nita’s sudden presence.
She headed for the Throne and the three men standing there, the kernel in her hands. They stared at her: Iskard in shock, Khretef in horror, Rorsik in rage. “That is ours!” Rorsik cried. “Give it back!”
Nita stared at him, then looked at Khretef. “You see what he cares about,” she said, jerking her head at Rorsik.
Khretef hurried toward her. “Where is Aurilelde?”
Behind Nita, Aurilelde fell out of the air and bounced gently to the floor. Khretef rushed to her.
Nita ignored those two for the moment. “This is not yours!” she said to Rorsik. “It belongs to Mars. And you haven’t done a whole lot today to prove that you ever ought to be given access to it, so if I were you, I’d just shut up. Especially since you put her up to this.”
Rorsik opened his mouth, shut it again.
“And as for you,” Nita said, turning her attention to Iskard, “you really need some father lessons. I’m sure it’s nice for you to run the city! Maybe you even really do have your people’s interests at heart. But you let this guy talk you into endangering your daughter’s life so she could use the kernel to wipe out your enemies. You know what? She would have destroyed the planet doing it! She was halfway there already. And then you forced Khretef into doing things he wouldn’t otherwise have wanted to do, because otherwise you wouldn’t let him and Aurilelde hook up. Which was really nasty and sick. One wizard subverting another like that? One wizard getting another one to bend the Oath way out of shape for his own purposes? What got into you? Then again, I think I can guess.”
She was getting angrier by the moment, and shakier, but Nita was intent on seeing this through to its logical conclusion before she fell over. “You don’t understand!” Iskard said to her, coming toward her. “We dared not allow the Eilitt to obtain an advantage over us! Their wizards were doing exactly the same kind of thing, seeking control of the kernel, trying to—”
“You stop right there,” Nita said, holding up the kernel, “because I’m just about ready to hose you and your city off the face of Mars like dog poop down the driveway!”
Iskard froze where he was. “I’m sick of your excuses and your fighting!” Nita said. “And I’m sick of wizards who’re so blinded by how much they’ve hated each other for umpty million years that they’re willing to forget that they took an Oath never to do crap like this! So you’re about to get a taste of your own medicine.”
Nita staggered, straightened again. “There’s a full implementation of a transoceanic passthrough hanging over your heads right this minute, and I’m in a mood to use it if I don’t get my partner back right this minute. If I go, too, when the hard rain comes down, big deal, because life without Kit doesn’t look so hot right now! And I’m betting I’d be doing the universe a service in getting you people off the books. For Kit and me, ’cause our Oaths are in place, I’m betting there’s always Timeheart. Whereas for you, the Lone Power only knows where you’ll wind up, and I can’t bring myself to care. So?”
Iskard looked back toward where Khretef was helping Aurilelde up. He sat down dully on the Throne with a thump, like a man defeated. “It cannot be undone,” he said.
“Wrong answer,” Nita said softly. “Try again.”
In her hands, the kernel flared with furious fire, now reflecting her own mood quite clearly in an eyehurting carmine blaze that made the Shamaska around her wince and flinch away. Nita turned around and looked back toward Khretef and Aurilelde. “Well?” she said to Khretef.
Aurilelde, slumped again Khretef, wouldn’t look at her. Khretef, kneeling beside her, was doing his best to hold himself stra
ight, but his shame was evident. “I could hear his voice inside me before,” he said, miserable, “but I can hear him no more. If I had known that another wizard would die because of me…”
“Your problem was that you didn’t think he was another wizard!” Nita said. “Rorsik talked her into believing that he was ‘just’ another version of you. And she talked you into believing it.” She glared at him, wobbling again. “I’m sorry for you, but right now that’s not going to be good enough!”
In her hands the kernel flamed even brighter. The Shamaska standing around the room began to flee for the exits: one of them was Rorsik.
Nita stood there with the kernel, feeling the big backlash from the passthrough and the smaller ones from her other exertions inexorably catching up with her. I’m out of ideas, she thought, as the shaking got worse. They really can’t do anything. I don’t know what to do! Where do we go from here?
How about we start with not panicking? Kit said inside her head.
Nita’s head snapped up. And quite abruptly there was a multicolored dinosaur standing in the middle of the room—and next to her, a young blond woman with a baby in a chest sling and a parakeet sitting on her head.
“Mamvish!” Nita said. Then she sat down on the ground, quite hard, even considering the low gravity. The surroundings started to blur. No—! “Mamvish, they’ve got Kit, what about Kit—?”
The massive head swung toward her. Suddenly Nita could see clearly again: energy poured into her in a rush, and she got to her feet again, though unsteadily.
Colleague, hold your nerve! Mamvish said way down inside her. I think I got the one thing we needed before they threw me out.
From beside Mamvish, Irina looked over at Nita with an extremely neutral expression— but Nita thought she could see an edge of amusement on it as Irina’s eyes fell on the kernel. At least you didn’t drop it, Irina said.