“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.
9: Gusev
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.