Kit said the four or five words in the Speech that reclaimed the air inside his outer shield into compressed storage, then the half-sentence that killed his outer force field. Off across the big crater he’d been peering into, the simulated nuclear explosions were being decommissioned—the dust that had been the only physically real thing about them now snowing gently back down onto the lunar surface. Shortly, even if any other people besides wizards had been up on the Moon right now, there would be no sign that anything unusual had happened here.
Kit carefully bounced up the slope behind him to where Lissa had just killed her own outer force bubble, this making it a lot easier to jump around in triumph without interference. Lissa might look somewhat tall and gangly under normal circumstances, but up here in the low gravity her bouncing acquired an unusual grace that made it seem like second nature—an effect assisted by the orange jumpsuit she always wore to these sessions, which made her resemble an escaped astronaut. Her short fair hair crackled and stood up a little with static as she bounced and waved her arms in the air.
It was hard not to get caught up in such sheer evil glee. As Kit came up with her, Lissa put up one hand for a high-five: both their shields flared with the impact, so that though there couldn’t be any sound, there was at least a brief flash. “They were useless,” Lissa said, and spun around about a meter off the ground in a one-sixth gee dance of triumph. “Useless beyond words! They had nothing and we saved their butts. Or if they did have anything, they left it way too late. Oh, are they going to hate us!”
“Not if we don’t gloat too much,” Kit said, hoping earnestly that she’d take the point just this once. But even as he said it, the moondust on the ground around Lissa flared blue-white with the wizardry of the personal transit circle she’d dropped around her as she came down, and she vanished.
He sighed and glanced around, watching the way the dust thrown up by the explosions out in the middle of the crater continued sifting silverly toward the lunar surface. The effect was like watching delicately fluffy snow come down, since the bright-side static tended to make the falling dust clump when there’d been a lot of local activity. Ronan had scheduled this session for relatively late in the two-week lunar “day,” both in an attempt to keep the dust from being a problem and to make sure there were plenty of shadows, which made it a lot easier to see surface details when you were running around shooting at things. The dust, as usual, had its own ideas, but the view couldn’t be otherwise faulted, now that the action was over and there was time to appreciate it. Above the far crater wall, Earth hung gibbous, a cloud-streaked, wet blue jewel three-quarters full, and its dazzling brilliance was ever so slightly fuzzed around the edges by the faint, faint haze of high static-propelled dust that the first astronauts had been so surprised to see—
Is it possible that you’re still hanging around there sightseeing, crater boy? said the ironic voice inside his head. Can we please get on with this? Matt’s pitching such a fit, and I’d hate for you to miss it.
Kit grinned. Meaning, he thought, that he’s giving Ronan a lot of grief, and Ro doesn’t want to have to soak it all up himself . . . “On my way,” Kit said.
His own “beam-me-up-Scotty” spell had long since had the coordinates for the assembly point in the middle of the sprawling Hipparchus crater complex plugged into it. Now Kit said the words that brought the spell to life in a circle on the ground around him, turned once to scan the white-glowing symbols and make sure the Wizard’s Knot that completed the circle was tight, and then said the activator clause out loud.
In the airless environment, the normal silence that fell around a working spell—the sound of the universe listening to what you wanted—was much harder to detect. It became more something you felt on your skin, the protecting force field having no power to shield you from the basic forces that powered both it and everything else in existence. Kit could feel the universe pushing in around him as he spoke: paying attention, bearing down on him the way the overshooting missile had pushed down on his force field before. At its greatest pressure, everything went dark—
Then everything flashed bright again as Kit came out in the middle of another patch of pale dusty terrain. Here a gravel-strewn plain stretched away to the foreshortened horizon in every direction, with only the occasional hump or low rille to break the bright-streaked flatness. This was normal for Hipparchus, which was a very old crater and very beat-up because of its age. Its rim was mostly flattened down to low hills by meteor strikes; its main basin had long ago been flooded by black basalt lava, then cracked into gravel over many millennia by countless micrometeorite impacts and the extremes of heat and cold. The only feature of interest anywhere nearby was a low cloud of dust a few hundred yards away and to Kit’s right. In it half-seen human shapes were moving around fast, while hard bright lines of colored light zapped up out of the cloud. Theoretically this group had come up here as spectators, but with some of the people involved—particularly Darryl—Kit had always suspected it wouldn’t take long before a session of laser tag broke out.
Much closer, off to Kit’s left and near a cluster of big grainy gray boulders, a small crowd was gathered. Most of them were talking hard, though there was no way to be sure what they were saying outside the bubble-thin skin of the communal force field dome that was holding in their shared air. Kit had his suspicions, though.
He bounced over to them in the shallow jumpwalk that astronauts and wizards passing through learned in a hurry on the Moon. Leaning against the biggest boulder, in the middle of the group, was Ronan Nolan, tall and dark and angular in his usual black leather jacket and black shirt and faded black jeans. Lissa was there, laughing and shaking her head at Matt Kingston, who was wearing one of his trademark loud Hawaiian shirts and long baggy khaki shorts. He was holding his open wizard’s manual under Lissa’s nose and pointing at something on the page with an aggrieved expression, but Lissa wasn’t looking at it, just waving Matt away and laughing. Ritchie was there, too, leaning against Lissa’s boulder and looking short and dark and a lot less dead than he had ten minutes before. Also gathered around were some of the rest of Matt’s team—tall, thin, dark Ahmed, and those two blond girls who always turned up together, one tall and broad, the other short and skinny. Which one is Heléne and which one’s Jeannine? I can never remember—Kit lifted a hand in greeting and glanced around. “Where’s Walt?”
Ronan gestured toward the nearby dustcloud. “He got bored with being dead,” he said in that south-Dublin drawl of his, “so he’s off getting that way again with the laser tag crowd.”
“Glutton for punishment,” Ritchie said, pulling off his jacket and shaking it in what looked like the most recent of many attempts to get rid of the moondust that had buried him when the next-to-last missile strike took him out.
Ronan waved away the dust. “So listen, Kit: Matt’s having some trouble with your solution—”
“Not with the solution, that worked okay, more than okay, who could miss the way everything in sight blew up? But you ran over the time limit!” Matt was a little abrasive at the best of times, but in situations like this the Aussie in his voice sometimes got so sharp and shrill that when he talked fast it was tough to follow him. “Ronan said that once the scenario hit the T-minus-five point, everybody had to either enact their solution or hand over to the next team—”