Wizards At War

DAIRINE BECAME CONSCIOUS THAT she was lying curled up on a chill, smooth surface. She then became conscious that she had been unconscious, and had no idea for how long. Ohmygosh, the shields! she thought. But as she took an involuntary breath, she realized that the force field protecting her and Roshaun was running exactly as it should. Otherwise, the two of them would have been freezing cold, not to mention smothering in a next-to-nothing hydrogen atmosphere.

She opened her eyes and blinked to get focus. The only thing to be seen at the moment was the ground on which she lay: almost perfectly smooth and flat, shining like a polished floor, softly dappled with subdued shades of gold and rust underneath the slick surface. Well, we’re where we ought to be, Dairine thought. But how come every time I arrive here, I do it flat on my face?

Dairine found that she had her arms wrapped around Spot. You okay? she said silently.

No problems.

Good. She pushed him carefully away from her onto the planet’s surface and rolled over onto her stomach. Then she immediately wished she hadn’t; her stomach rebelled. Dairine lay there and started to retch, thoroughly miserable. It’s not fair! I thought I was done with this kind of thing. I didn’t think a subsidized worldgate would act this way. But the tremendous difference between the vectors and accelerations of Wellakh and this extremely distant world was just too much for humanoid bodies to take no matter how sophisticated or powerful the worldgate was.

Dairine was distracted from the sickness, though, by an upscaling sound in the back of her mind—a muted roar of life lived at a three-quarter beat, rushing, as quick and strong as a waterfall in spate. I’m back in circuit with the Motherboard! It was an astonishing sensation, after having become used over time to the faint rumble of trinary data that was normally all that reached Dairine down her linkage to the mobiles’ world.

She also realized that her clothes had changed again, back to her T-shirt and jeans. What happened to that dress? Dairine said.

I replaced it with your normal clothes while in transit, Spot said.

Okay. However, Dairine put a hand up to her throat and found that big emerald still there; she smiled slightly. Good call. Come on.

She levered herself up on her hands and knees and looked around, holding still again because her stomach was still roiling. “Roshaun?”

He had come down on the surface behind her, sprawled; now he lifted his head, and winced. “That was not,” Roshaun said, “the usual sort of transit.”

“Nope. You all right? Besides your injured dignity, I mean.”

Roshaun rolled over and slowly sat up, grimacing—then looked ashen all of a sudden, and had to put his head down on his knees. Normally such a sudden show of vulnerability in Roshaun would have delighted Dairine, except that she was too busy keeping herself from throwing up. I am not going to barf a second before he does, she thought, breathing deeply.

Roshaun, however, did not throw up. Very slowly he straightened again, looking up and around… and then let out a long breath of wonder. Dairine got up on her knees, looking up at the vista she remembered so well.

It was worth looking at, even in the daytime. Halfway up the sky from the high and strangely distant-seeming horizon was a small, dull red star, so dim that you could look at it directly. But beyond the planet’s sun, undimmed by it, standing high and spreading across half the sky, was the delicate shimmer of a barred-spiral galaxy, the wide-flung arms richly gemmed in the soft golden gleam of an immensely old stellar population. Roshaun sat looking up at that still splendor for a good while before he stood up.

“Transits by subsidized gate are normally instantaneous,” Roshaun said, still looking up at the distant glory. “We seemed to be in that one for quite a long time. How long?”

Dairine glanced at her watch. It said eight thirty, but she’d forgotten to set it to handle gating-transit time, and now its second hand wasn’t moving. “I’ve got to reconfigure this thing,” she said. “I’ll get a reading off Spot and let you know in a while.”

“How far from your own world is this one?”

“At least forty trillion light-years,” Dairine said. “Maybe more, but I’ve never done the math. I don’t know about you, but when I start getting into the trillions, I find that forty and forty-five look pretty much alike.”