Диана Дуэйн - High Wizardry

"What do we need to find?"

"Stationmaster's office."; "Right." "f They checked out of Nontypical Transit, leaving their origin-and-destina tion information with the computer at the entrance, and set out across the expanse of the terminal floor, looking around them in calm wonder: for though neither of them had ever been there, both had read enough about the Crossings in their manuals to know what to expect. They knew there had been a time when the Crossings itself was only a reed hut by a riverside, and the single worldgate nearby only a muddy spot in a cave that the first Master stumbled upon by accident, and claimed for its heirs (after waiting several years on Ererikh for the gate to reverse phase so that he could get home). Now, a couple of thousand years' worth of technology later, worldgates were generated here at the drop of a whim, and the Stationmaster regulated interstellar commerce and transportation via worldgating for the entire Sagittarius Arm.

Its office was not off in some sheltered spot away from the craziness, but out in the very middle of the station floor: that being the spot where the hut had been, twenty-four hundred and thirty years before. It was only a single modest kiosk of tubular bluesteel, with a desk behind it, and at the desk, hung up in a rack that looked like a large stepstool, was a single Rirhait, banging busily on a computer terminal keypad and making small noises to itself as it worked.

Nita and Kit stopped in front of the desk, and the Rirhait looked up at them. Or more or less up: some of its stalked eyes looked down instead, and a few peered from the sides. It stopped typing. "Well?" it said, scratchy-voiced — understandable, Nita thought, when you've got a gullet full of sand.

"You're the Stationmaster?" Kit said.

"Yes," said the Rirhait, and the fact that it said nothing else, but looked at Kit hungrily, with its scissory mandibles working, made Nita twitch a little.

"We are on errantry, and we greet you," Nita said: the standard self-introduction of a wizard on business. Sir or Madam, one normally added, but Nita wasn't sure which the Master was, or even if either term applied.

"That too?" said the Master, looking at Picchu.

"Yes, that," said Peach, all scorn.

"Well, it's about time you people got here," said the Master, and left off what it was doing, standing up.

"Standing" was an approximation: a Rirhait is shaped more like a centipede than anything else, so that when it got off its rack and came out from behind the desk, its long, shiny silver-blue body only stood a foot or so off the ground, and all its eyes looked up at them together. "We had more of an untidiness here this afternoon than we've had for a greatyear past, and I'll be glad to see the end of it."

Nita began to sweat. "The wizard who came through here earlier was on Ordeal," Kit said. "We'll need your help to find the spot from which she went farther on, so that we can track her: there are too many other world-gates here, and they're confusing the trail."

"She didn't cause any trouble, did she?" Nita said.

"Trouble?" said the Stationmaster, and led them off across the bright floor, and showed them the place where several large pieces of the ceiling had been shot down. "Trouble?" it said, pointing out the places where the floors were melted, indicating the blaster scars in the kiosks, and the large cordoned-off area where maintenance people of various species were scraping and scrubbing coffee ground-smelling residue off the floor. "Oh, no trouble. Not really."

Picchu began to laugh, a wicked and appreciative sound.

Nita blushed ferociously and didn't say anything for several minutes. The Rirhait led them off to another area of the floor which was closed in on itself by an arrangement of bluesteel kiosks. This was Crossings security; various desks stood about inside it, with creatures of several species working at them. The Master led them to one of the unoccupied desks, a low flat table full of incomprehensible equipment.

"Here," it said, and reared up on its back ten legs to touch the machinery in several places.

Small and clear, an image appeared above the table: remote, but equally clear, sound accompanied it.

Nita and Kit found themselves looking at the Crossroads equivalent of a videotape, but in three dimensions, with neat alien characters burning in the lower corner of it to show the time and location at which the recording was made. They watched a group of toadlike BEMs make their way across the terminal floor, spot Dairine, head off in pursuit. They watched Dairine deal with the deinonychus, and afterward with the BEM that grabbed her. Nita gulped.

"They look like Satrachi," Kit said, astonishingly cool-voiced.

Nita's eyebrows went up. Alien species were her specialty: evidently Kit had been doing some extra research. "They are, as far as we can tell," said the Master. "The one of them whom we have in custody has valid Satra identification."

"We'll need to see this person, then," Nita said. The tape ran: Nita watched Dairine's dive into the bar, and from another camera angle, her sister's reemergence into the terminal and dash into the rest room.

Nita groaned, recognizing the room by the symbol on its door as a spawning room for any one of several species that gave birth to their young on the average of once every few days, and were likely to be caught short while traveling on business. Nita hoped that Dairine hadn't introduced one of the species involved to a completely new kind of birth trauma.

"That was the spot she left from?"

"Yes, Emissary." It was the first time Nita had ever been formally called by one of the twenty or so titles commonly used for wizards, but she was too busy now to enjoy it. She glanced at Kit. He was frowning at the image hanging in the air: finally his concentration broke and he glanced at her.

"Well?" he said. "You want the Satrachi?"

"I'd better," she said, though she very much wanted not to-the looks of the Satrachi gave her the creeps.

But dealing with live things was her department: the handling of machinery and inanimate objects was Kit's. "You go ahead and check the room out. Stationmaster, can you have someone show me where it's being held?"

"Step on that square there," said the Master, pointing one eye at a spot on the floor: "it's direct transit to Holding. Emissary, I'll show you to the room in question. . "

Nita stepped on the block quickly before she would have time to change her mind.

Fifteen minutes with it told her all she needed to know: the Satra was a dupe, it and its friends-a small paramilitary club-deluded into pursuing Dairine by some agent of the Lone One. It's the usual thing, she thought as she headed back to Kit and the Stationmaster. The Power never comes out in the open if it can find some way to make someone else do Its dirty work. Preferably an innocent: that way it's more of a slap in the Bright Powers' face. Unusual, though, that it used a whole group this time. Normally it's hard to keep that subtle a grip on a whole group's mind: one of them slips free, or perceives it as control. . and when that happens, odds are that the whole group is useless for Its purposes.

She strolled among aliens and their luggage and finally came to the little Grand Central-size alcove where Dairine's rest room was. Its door was frozen in the dilated mode. Nita slipped in and found Kit and Picchu and the Master off to one side, examining one particular birthing-booth. It seemed to have had its door burned off, and the back of the booth was blistered and pocked with an ugly rash of blaster scars.

For a good second or so her breath refused to come. "She jumped after that?" Nita finally managed to say.

Kit looked over his shoulder at her. "Neets, relax, there are no bloodstains."

"There wouldn't be, with blasters," Nita said. "They cauterize."