Wizards At War

But you are, the Motherboard said. No need to dissemble. I may be a mother, but you are mine. And you know that we never feel like we’re enough for our children, whose job is to surpass us. Ours is simply to make sure they work hard enough at it that they feel they’ve earned it when it happens.

There was a smile in the voice that Dairine would never have suspected. She grinned, too. You think we got the job done?

Without any possible question, the Motherboard said. Now let’s take on the next one.

“Okay,” she said, glancing up and over at Roshaun.

He had been looking a little blank; now he broke out of it, looked over at Dairine. “She is—quite something,” he said after a moment, sounding strangely out of breath.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Dairine said.

This wizardry must take place in two parts, the Motherboard said. We must first extract the information that our mother is carrying. After that, the implementation’s hers to direct: we’ll merely assist.

A wave of agreement went around the vast assemblage. Ready? the Motherboard said to Dairine.

Go, Dairine said.

The power started to build. Dairine felt “taps” from this world into other universes open up, spilling unimaginable amounts of force into the wizardry. Time began to stretch as the mobiles’ perception of what was happening swamped her own. Dairine started to see herself as the mobiles did—a life-form seemingly frozen in time, and as a spell diagram, tidily compartmentalized. The combined intention of the Motherboard and the mobiles sought down through her structure and focused on one of those compartments, an obscurely glowing area easily lost among other, brighter ones surrounding it in Dairine’s mind—

That compartment grew until every intricacy of its contents was made plain in a delicate lacework spattering of pale light, like nightside cities seen from space. The mobiles and the Motherboard spent what seemed like a long time examining the compartment and the data inside it. Finally, the Motherboard spoke. This is the information the Defender left, she said. It can’t be decrypted without breaking the container open.

Right, Dairine said. For the moment, she was part mobile, and could act at their speed. She reached out a hand. In this darkness all spangled with light, a hand of light reached out, laced fingers through the webwork of darkness surrounding the data, and pulled. It came away in her hand like a fistful of cobwebs. The data burst out of prison like a storm of silver bees—

The mobiles threw a net of Speech-words around them. The light of the data ran down the strands of the net, particles shifting, moving themselves into a different order. Then everything went dark again.

Logo’s voice seemed to come from somewhere far off. And now the information Spot was holding, he said. Distantly, Dairine saw another container’s contents trying to flee into the darkness—then being netted and contained, as her data had been.

The world came back. Dairine took a few breaths, stood up and stretched. It felt like she’d been sitting in the same place for an hour, though she knew it had been only a matter of seconds.

Before her, spread out in a new dark area that had opened up a couple of meters away, was a single long line of characters in the Speech. Dairine read them slowly.

“They’re coordinates,” she said then. “But not to a place. To a person. This’ll tell us who has the Instrumentality—the thing that’ll save the universe—”

“If we can find it in time,” Roshaun said. “And work out how to use it.”

“Let’s go,” Dairine said. “You guys ready?”

Show us what to do, said the Motherboard and the mobiles together.

“We need an imaging routine,” Dairine said, and knelt down in her circle again, sitting back on her heels. She put a hand down on the surface again, getting back into more direct contact with the Motherboard. In her mind a series of possible imaging routines presented themselves. Close-range out-of-atom, long-range out-of-atom—

That one looks about right, Dairine thought. She glanced down at the set of coordinates burning just under the surface before her.