“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 mak
e 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.”