Wizards At War

Sker’ret waved his upper body from side to side, his version of a human shaking his head. “There are a couple of things I still need to try,” he said. “But there’s no other information on what happened here. Everything’s been left on auto, and no station staff have logged in since that last transit spike.”

“So you don’t know where your ancestor is.”

“Or any of my sibs.”

“You don’t think that these guys could have—”

“They could have done a lot of things,” Sker’ret said, sounding grimmer every moment. “What’s that?”

The pace of fire against the shields had started to step up again: Nita was having trouble seeing through it, there were so many impacts now. “They’re covering for something,” she said. I need better visibility! she thought.

Once again the wizardry constructed itself in her head, ready to go. Yes! Nita thought, and just briefly the shield cleared in front of her, showing her, far down the concourse, a very large, very heavy piece of machinery being floated out from a place of concealment.

“Uh-oh,” Nita said. “They’re rolling out the big guns. What about those defense systems?”

“I can’t get them up again!” Sker’ret whacked the console in frustration with most of his forward legs. “Now I wish I remembered some of the things about their basic programming that my ancestor kept on boring me with.”

“Forget it,” Nita said. “We’ve got other problems!”

The lens in her shield gave her a much better view of that piece of machinery as it came drifting toward them, being guided with some kind of remote by a Tawalf who was dashing from the cover of one kiosk to the next. The weapon had a muzzle of impressive size, and some kind of massive generating apparatus hooked to the back of it. Can we stop that? she said silently to the peridexic effect.

There was no immediate answer.

This in itself was answer enough for Nita, and a flush of pure fear ran straight through her. Apparently, there were limits to what even the present power boost for wizards could do—or what she could do with it.

“Make or break, Sker’!” Nita said over Sker’ret’s shoulders. “We’ve gotta make a choice in about a minute. Run for it, or make a stand.” And if we do, I have this feeling it’ll be a last stand.

“If we run,” Sker’ret said, “this place will be lost to us and won by those Tawalf. They, and whoever is behind them, will have free run of my planet, and this whole part of the galaxy. Since whether they know it or not they’re doing the Lone One’s business—” He growled again. “No way I’m leaving them here! I will not let the Lone Power have the Crossings.”

“But what can you do?”

“The one thing they’re sure I don’t want to do under any circumstances,” Sker’ret said. “And therefore the one thing they didn’t sabotage completely enough to keep me out.”

He reached sideways and hit a control that caused another small console to appear from nowhere. This tiny console had some very large, alarming-looking Rirhait characters glowing on it. Nita looked at it and swallowed hard again. “Self-destruct?”

“At least,” Sker’ret said, suddenly sounding worried, “I don’t think they sabotaged it that completely.”

Sker’ret started speaking urgently to the console in the Speech, while hammering on the keypad beneath it with what seemed every available foreleg. Nita was keeping power flowing to the central structure’s own shield, but she couldn’t keep her eyes away from Sker’ret. “Sker’ret, you live here!” she said. “You’re going to blow up your own home?”

“Believe me, there’ve been some times I’ve wanted to,” Sker’ret said. “I just never thought this would be the way I’d get my chance.”

He kept working furiously at the console. Finally, the display on it changed. “All right,” Sker’ret said. “I think I can make this work.”

Nita looked at that slowly oncoming weapon, and gulped. “Give me ten seconds first,” she said.

Sker’ret swiveled almost all his eyes at her except for the one that was watching the self-destruct console. “What? Why?”

Nita ignored him and shut her eyes for a moment. What kind of energy are those things using? she thought.

The peridexis gave her the answer as if it were the manual itself, laying it out in graphics and the Speech with blinding speed. Nita scanned the diagram it showed her. It’s fusion, she thought. And there are ways to damp that down. If you just mess with the magnetic bottle a little—

Nita shivered. Once upon a time, the Lone Power had done something similar to the Earth’s Sun. And then she smiled just slightly. To turn Its own trick against It, but with just a little extra twist—

That fusion reaction right there, Nita said to the peridexis, let’s snuff it.