“It probably wouldn’t have been, though,” Nita said. “Who uses ships for interstellar travel if they can avoid it? When worldgating tech’s so widespread, it’s just silly.”
“Yeah, well, no accounting for taste, is there? Anyway, it turned out that the buried spaceship was just an optical illusion. Something to do with the angle of sunlight the day the satellite took the picture. But then the Aussie group thought this would be a great place to come down and party, where no one could see, and it was close to them.”
“A thousand miles is close?” Carmela said.
Dairine shrugged again. “It is if you’re Australian. So they did a tectonics study and an environmental assessment and they checked out the stability of the ice shelf, and it turned out to be okay for use as a temporary facility. So they built this.” She looked around in admiration. “Or hollowed it out, anyway. And then the artists got loose . . .”
“Kind of amazing,” Nita said.
“If you’ve only been in this part, you haven’t seen anything.” Dairine looked as smugly delighted as if it had all been her own work. “There’s a whole laser tag complex a level down. They’ve duplicated some of the sets from Alien, there’s a Hall of Statues . . .”
“I’ll make a note,” Nita said. “Listen, have you seen—”
“Neets?”
The familiar voice brought her head up, and she looked around, not seeing him—
And then she saw him, and her mouth went dry. Kit had broken away from the crowd and was heading toward them. It’s just a blazer, she thought. And he had those jeans on yesterday—But now there was a white shirt open at the neck, and when did he get this tall, how have I been missing this, and he’d done something with his hair, and—
Nita swallowed, dry. “Hey,” she said.
Dairine, however, burst out laughing. “Kit, come on,” she said, “don’t you think the antenna sort of spoils the line?”
Kit, who had looked very cool and tall and unruffled until then, broke the spell by turning to look over his own shoulder at his own butt, or at least he tried to. His Edsel-antenna wand was sticking out of his pocket. “Yeah, well. Think of it as an icebreaker.” He looked over at Nita. “Didn’t mean to be late. I had the dryer set wrong, had to pull the jeans out and give them some help . . .”
Dairine snickered. “So domestic,” she said, and headed away. “I’m gonna hit the buffet until they start things going.”
“Wait for me!” Carmela said. “I missed my lunch!”
The two of them made their way back toward the crowd, vanished into it. “So how does this go now?” Nita said, eager to talk about something that would get her away from the subject of how tongue-tied she’d nearly gone just now at the sight of someone she’d seen nearly every day for years. I have got to manage this somehow, it’s all gotten so weird . . .
Kit shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels a little. “Well, I saw from my manual that you’d signed off on reading the orientation pack, so I thought you’d be ready to lecture me on what to do first . . .”
“Lecture!” Nita laughed at him. “Don’t push your luck.”
He grinned at her. “Okay. We know his name, we’ve seen his picture, we’ve read the title of his spell project—”
Nita smiled, unimpressed. “Don’t think I’ve seen a longer string of jargon in the Speech since I first cracked the manual,” she said. It had taken her nearly ten minutes of brain-bending effort and a bemused consultation with Bobo The Very Offended-Sounding Voice Of Wizardry to come up with a rough translation of their mentee’s project into English: An innovative approach to subversion of magnetohydrodynamic periodicity spikes in solar peak periods, with attention to robust crisis intervention in coronal oscillatory periods and spectrum tweaking, damage inhibition in Earth’s upper ionospheric layers, and LEO-inclusive derangement prevention. Bobo’s comment regarding some of the compound-word neologisms in the title when they’d finished working it out together had been succinct: You get a feeling he doesn’t think the Speech has long enough words.
Kit made an amused “Hmf” noise. “Like it’s not a tactic everybody tries once when they’re in a science fair. Or maybe twice.”
Nita threw him a look. “You’re never going to let me off the hook about that wind turbine thing, are you?”
“Not after what it did to Mr. Vasquez’s toupee,” Kit said, “nope.”
Nita snickered. “So what next then? Do we go hunt him down and accuse him of overstating his case, or wait till he finds us?”
“I don’t know about accusing him of anything just yet,” Kit said. “But the overview made it sound like they wanted us to wait on the introductions until the Powers That Be had had their say.”
Nita’s eyes widened. “You’re not saying that they’re—”
“What?” Kit grinned. “Going to be here? Hardly. Just the Planetary. After all, she’s the door prize . . .”
“Then come on and let’s go talk to some of these people.” Nita was starting to get her composure back. “Maybe we’ll see someone we know.”
They wandered around and did indeed find here and there a few people they knew: mostly other younger wizards the two of them had run into last year during the Pullulus crisis, when older wizards had lost their power and the business of running and saving the planet had devolved abruptly onto the “next generation.” During this process Nita had briefly misplaced Kit while in the act of picking up a bottle of some mysterious fruit-flavored mineral water from a buffet table (Pitanga flavor? What in the Powers’ name is a pitanga?) when behind her she heard a pair of voices that she recognized immediately both from their extreme similarity to each other and because half the time they were talking over each other and the rest of it they were speaking in near unison.
She grinned and turned. “Is that Tu and Ngu?!” Nita said, turning to find the twychild arguing cheerfully and enthusiastically over a plate of some kind of alien hors d’oeuvres that was hovering in the air between them. (At least it seemed likely these were alien: Earth was short on blue food. And the minute Kit finds these here, it’s going to be even shorter on it . . . !)
Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet had each shot up by about a foot, and where the last time she’d seen them they had been in a sort of tunic-like Vietnamese casual wear, now Nguyet had gone for a hoodie-and-skirt-over-jeans look, and Tuyet was wearing a suit (though apparently just a T-shirt under it, and a tie just vaguely knotted and thrown over his shoulder). Their heads came up in unison and the two of them swung toward Nita with broad smiles on their faces.
“Is that Nita?!”
“Powers That Be in a bucket, are you mentoring?”
“You ancient thing!”
“Look at all her gray hairs.”
“Well, look at yours then,” Nita said, laughing, and there was some truth to it, since Nguyet had installed a prominent and showy silver streak in her long dark hair above her forehead and off to one side of her part. The hors d’oeuvres plate was waved away to drift lonely in the air while the twins grabbed her and hugged her, and Nita hugged them back. “Come on, you two are such babies, I thought you’d be competing!”
“Hah!”
“Nope, none of that for us.”
“We’re mentoring a group—”
“A set of quadruplets from Chile, would you believe?”
“—not twychild-twins, of course, they don’t do the augmentative-wizardry thing—”