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.”