Wizards At War

There is a high probability that the smothered reaction will interact unfavorably with matter in the immediate vicinity.

Will our shield hold?

Yes.

Then let’s start getting unfavorable!

Nita started speaking the words of the spell, feeling the power build. This wizardry felt less like a thrown weapon than a squeezing fist—like a gauntlet into which she’d thrust her own hand, pressing the power of the mobile weapon’s tightly controlled fusion reaction into a smaller and smaller space. The reaction wasn’t built to take such punishment. It started to strangle. Nita held the pressure, squeezed tighter, feeling the hot bright little light in her “hand” burning her, but nonetheless starting to go out, fading, failing—

The magnetic bottling around the little fusion fire inside the weapon, responding to the fusion’s own loss of energy, lost its balance and stepped down to match it.

Nita smiled and quickly opened her hand.

Every Tawalf anywhere near the mobile weapon turned to stare at the slow, threatening glow of light beginning to burn through the weapon’s metallic fabric. Suspecting what was coming, Nita hastily told the control structure’s force field to go opaque itself. Almost the last glimpse she got was of Tawalf scattering in every possible direction. Then came the sudden blinding burst of repressed starfire as the magnetic bottle in the mobile weapon failed.

The force field was opaque to light, but not noise or vibration. From outside came a roar, and the floor under Nita and Sker’ret rocked: things crashed and clattered all around them. After a few seconds the ruckus started to die down. Nita let the “gauntlet” of wizardry vanish, and let the control console’s shield go transparent again.

Outside was a billowing cloud of smoke and dust, slowly dispersing. There were no Tawalf to be seen.

Sker’ret’s eyes were staring in all directions, except for the one that was still trained on the self-destruct console, ready to guide the four or five legs that were poised over it. “Do you think—”

Nita, too, peered in all directions. “I don’t see any of them here.”

Sker’ret stretched his mandibles apart in what Nita knew he was using to approximate a human grin. “Hey!” he said, holding up a foreclaw.

Nita held up a hand, too, and had to keep it there until it stung; high-fiving a giant centipede can take a while. “Not bad,” Sker’ret said when he was done. “We should apply to get that one named after you. ‘Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation,’ or something like that.”

Nita grinned. Having a spell named after you was beyond an honor: it suggested that the wizardry was both unique to your way of thinking and useful in a way that no one else had thought of before. “It can wait,” she said. “Let’s make sure the place is secure.”

Sker’ret glanced over his consoles, looking annoyed. “My scan facility’s down.”

Nita reached for her otherspace pocket to get her manual. “I’ll do a detector spell. At least now we have a specific life sign to scan for. We can—” She blinked. “Sker’, GET DOWN!”

The intuition hadn’t even come as not-hearing that time: it was as if it bypassed Nita’s brain and went straight to her muscles. She threw herself on top of Sker’ret again and took him out of the line of fire, and once more she got her personal shield up just in time—a good thing, as the control console’s shield was suddenly struggling under the onslaught of several fusion beams like the one that would have come out of the first mobile weapon if Nita hadn’t destroyed it.

“They’ve got two more of them!” Nita shouted over the noise. “No, make that three! One behind us, two on either side. They came out of one of the cross-corridors farther down. And they’re bigger ones!” The three sets of beams now crisscrossed relentlessly over them.

Oh, God, Nita thought. I can’t do more than one of the “unfavorable” wizardries at a time, and while I’m doing that, the other big guns are going to blow the main shield away. Even now she could start to see places where the cubicle’s shield was dimpling inward, no matter how much wizardry Nita poured into it through the peridexis. “Sker’, we can’t stay here, the shield’s giving! We’ve got to do a personal gating out of here to somewhere else. Hang on!”

Sker’ret’s eyes waved in wild distress. “No! There’s too much energy in the air around us! It’ll derange your wizardry, and you’ll come out at your transit point as half a thwat of powdered Nita!”