Wizards At War

Sker’ret looked confused. “Hardly an hour of your time,” he said. “Oh, I see, you’re worried about the irregular transit times. Don’t be. I’ve corrected for them—for the moment, at least. When you transit again, if you lose time, it’ll be hours, not days.”

“But you’re going to have to keep correcting—”

“Yes. And it’s going to get harder,” Sker’ret said. “The Pullulus is affecting our local space now.”

“Right,” Nita said, looking around at the frantic activity going on around her. “You find out anything more about who was behind our little friends the Tawalf?”

Sker’ret waved some of his upper legs in an I-don’t-know gesture. “It doesn’t seem to have been the Lone Power, at least not directly. The Tawalf’s aggression contract was bought by a crime syndicate somewhere in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. There are two or three species involved, all from economic or political groups that have had disagreements with the Crossings in the past. The Rirhait law-enforcement authorities are following that up.”

“Well,” Nita said, “that’s good.” She smiled, a little ruefully. “I guess it’s a nice change of pace to be dealing with common crooks.”

“But all this is driving me crazy,” Sker’ret said. “We have to get back to Rashah! The others—”

“Yes,” Carmela’s voice said, “the others.” She came ambling over from the other side of the command console, and the various Rirhait she passed all reared up in that respect gesture. She smiled. “When do we go?”

Nita looked around her, and then back at Sker’ret. “I don’t know about ‘we,’” she said after a moment. “Sker’, what’s the local situation? Have you got things running again?”

“It’s going to take a while,” Sker’ret said. “The defense systems still aren’t secure enough to make me happy. I want to make sure we’re not vulnerable to a second strike. And there’s a lot of gating that ought to be passing through here routinely that hasn’t been. Then there’s the emergency traffic—”

Nita was becoming more expert at reading Sker’ret’s expressions and body language, and right now he looked as if he felt like tearing a few of his eyes out by the roots. “What about your ancestor?” she said a little more quietly.

“We don’t know,” Sker’ret said. He held still for a moment, and that, too, struck Nita as something of a danger sign: it was rare for there not to be something about Sker’ret that was moving. “When the aliens took him and my sibs prisoner in the initial attack, they shoved them all onto a pad and sent them to a portable gate target somewhere in the Greater Magellanic. The first storming team that went to that planet looking for them didn’t find anything. The target had been dismantled and taken somewhere else, possibly through another gate. The law-enforcement people are looking into that, too.”

Nita sighed. “Sker’, you can’t just leave all this and go back to what we were doing. This is where you’re needed.”

Sker’ret sighed out of all his spiracles, and sagged a little where he stood. “If even just a few of my sibs were here,” he said softly.

“But they’re not,” Carmela said, getting down beside him and rubbing the top of his head segment. “I don’t think you have any choice.”

“And there are plenty of us working on you-know-what,” Nita said.

“Ooh, mystery,” Carmela said. “This is more fun every minute.”

Sker’ret looked troubled. “I dislike letting the others down—”

“You’re not,” Nita said. “What you have to do now is not let this whole part of the galaxy down! You can’t walk away from this.”

“Even though I’ve been trying to for so long,” Sker’ret said, and gave Nita a wry look out of several eyes.

The ironic tone that had come back into his voice reassured Nita. “Well, things are different now,” Nita said, “but it looks like when you walked away that last time, that was a good idea. If you’d stayed here then, whatever happened to your ancestor and all your sibs could have happened to you, too.”

Sker’ret sighed. “We can’t ever be sure,” he said. “Anyway, here I stay. In the meantime, I can gate the two of you back quickly enough. You’ll want to warn Ronan that you’re incoming.”

He and his partner know, the peridexis said in the back of Nita’s mind as Carmela got up to stand beside her. The One’s Champion left a stealth routine in place. You can safely direct-gate straight in.

“They’ve got it handled,” Nita said. “All we have to do is go.”

“Take the closest gate there,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll send you out.”

He turned, then, looking with all his eyes at the bluesteel racking of the Stationmaster’s control area. All around, the Rirhait who had been taking Sker’ret’s orders drew back a little and watched. “It was just a little hut, once,” Sker’ret aid. “A little hut outside a cave.”

“It’s a lot more than that now,” Nita said. “And it’s all yours.”