Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

She floated there with her eyes closed for a few seconds, apparently waiting for her inner ear to get the news about where they were, and then cracked one eye open, taking in the view.

“Okay?” Kit said.

“Okay.”

Kit reached into his otherspace pocket for his manual and flipped it open, pulling up a spell that he normally kept ready and partially executed for situations like this. He spoke the last five words of the spell, and the inside of the forcefield came alive with a heads-up display of the most prominent bodies within range.

The image of Thesba’s inner structure in the display was seriously unnerving. Peculiar stresses and striations revealed themselves in the moon’s inner mantle—numerous many-forked streaks of pulsing red light in the display, running outward through the upper mantle and radiating toward the crust from the thin, deformed boundary regions outside that peculiar lumpy triple inner core. The outer crust was a patchwork of restless magma leakage, broad wounds torn through the outermost discontinuity level and bleeding giant lakes of superheated molten stone and metal up to the surface, where they cooled fitfully to stone and then tore and bled again.

Kit stared at all this in fascinated horror. “What a mess.”

“Scenic,” Nita murmured. “But not for long.”

Kit just laughed and ran a hand through his hair, which as usual when he hadn’t put anything on it to keep it in line, his hair stood up a bit in the almost-zero gee. “Definitely not the kind of moon you’d want to go up to and sit around on, watching your home planet…”

Nita shook her head, her hair immediately rising in a cloud around her in the microgravity. She pushed it back. “Not unless you wanted to burn your butt right off. And assuming you could even see it through that atmosphere.”

“Yeah.”

“But then the whole thing’s pretty much of a write-off. All the flows in the dynamo layer are changing, which means Thesba’s magnetic field’s going to be completely screwed up real soon. Meaning Tevaral’s magnetic field will get screwed up too, and if radiation starts getting into the lower atmosphere from space, that’ll be bad for everybody on the Tevaralti surface pretty quick…” Nita sighed. “Possibly one of the reasons that the cousin down there wasn’t very happy about the idea of us coming up here.”

“Or else he took a look at our personal profiles and got worried that we might be coming up here to start messing around with it on our own.”

Nita had to snicker at that as she pushed her hair out of her face again. “Yeah,” she said, “guess that might have been an idea that could’ve occurred. But…”

“I am absolutely not going any closer to that than this,” Kit said. “Right here’s close enough. It looks like it’d blow if you sneezed at it.”

“Like other things might,” Nita said, glancing upwards and away from Thesba, over Tevaral’s dark limb. Distant in the deep sky but not nearly distant enough, a pitiless, red-burning eye, Erakis laid crimson highlights over everything it touched, filling in shadows that should have been quite dark with an uneasy, bloody glow. As Nita pressed a hand against the forcefield to turn herself so she could look at Erakis more directly, her hair fluffed up again and got in her face, and the red giant’s light set all the tendril-ends of it on fire.

“This is getting to be such a nuisance,” Nita muttered. She pulled the hair back with one hand, twisted it together, and stuffed the end of the attempted ponytail down the back of her shirt. It promptly came out again and fluffed up in all directions like a dandelion head gone to seed.

Kit didn’t comment, having noticed over the past couple of months that Nita had been letting her hair get longer, and uncertain about both why, and what would be safe to say. Is it because Dairine started getting hers cut shorter, I wonder? But then again, who knew if there was even any connection? Maybe this was all in his head.

“Why did I not bring a scrunchie?” Nita was muttering. “Oh God, Bobo, make a note for me. When in space, always have a scrunchie!”

Kit didn’t hear any response, which again left him feeling strangely relieved. “Was this the thing you were trying to remember before we left?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and paused. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

There was a moment’s quiet as if she was listening to something, and then Nita frowned. “Yes, fine, I’ll try that memory routine when we get home, but for the moment will you do me a favor and just make my hair lie down?”

Kit tried not to look as if it was at all funny that Nita was annoyed enough to be having this conversation out loud. “I don’t care,” she said, “a touch of localized gravity will do just fine if it’s not too much trouble!”

Kit knew that tone of voice, and winced. Nita’s hair very quickly laid itself down flat.

“Thank you,” she said, and blew out a breath.

“Better?” Kit said.

She nodded, pushing against the force field with one foot to turn back toward him. “Yeah. …But not just that. Being up here, seeing this this way… that’s better, too.”

“You lost me.”

“Don’t ask me why. It ought to look worse.” She was gazing down on Tevaral now. “But after popping out down there, I needed to recover a little before we get down to work…”

“Not just you,” Kit said under his breath. It wasn’t an admission he’d thought he was going to make just yet, but… Too late now.

“Oh good,” Nita said, sounding relieved. “I didn’t know if it was just me. I could feel that…” She glanced at Thesba. “Just leaning on me.”

Kit nodded. “But there’s something else,” he said. “This isn’t how we’ve worked, usually. Mostly it’s been small teams, little groups, except for the Pullulus War.”

“Yeah. Except for that, never a big deal like this,” Nita said, gazing down at Tevaral. “It could throw you off.”

It already has, Kit thought, but he had enough control over himself to avoid saying that for the moment.

“And we’re so used to doing this on our own terms,” Nita said. “Getting called in on a Wizards’ Right declaration… you don’t really want to even think about refusing. They’re too important. The last time…”

“The Song of the Twelve.”

Nita sighed. “Yeah. Well, I don’t think this is going to be anything like that. There are a whole lot more participants, for one thing. The odds of us winding up in any situation even remotely similar to that seem…” She waved a hand.

“Remote?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, there are how many thousands of us here just from Earth? And a whole lot from all kinds of other places.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, and couldn’t help twitching. Nita looked at Kit for several long moments, apparently having picked up on this.

Then she burst out laughing helplessly. “…Oh God. Have I just doomed us?”

Kit had to laugh too. “Yeah, probably.”

“Oh great, well, that’s out of the way…” Nita turned her attention back to Tevaral. “Then it doesn’t matter that I really, really wish there was nothing wrong with mindchanging some of those people so we could get them all out of here.”

Her voice had gone a lot quieter. Kit sighed, shook his head. “You heard Mamvish… Troptic Stipulation. We have to let them do what they’re going to do.”

“We don’t have to like it, though,” Nita muttered. “I’m not wild about it and I haven’t even started doing what we’re here for yet. And I can just imagine how Dairine’s going to be after a few days.”

Kit could imagine too, and almost wished he couldn’t. The subject of fatality and what one would dare doing to stop it was sensitive enough even just between the two of them, in the wake of Nita’s mother’s death. The thought of how those tensions could wind up playing out here between Nita and Dairine was less than pleasant. “Let me know if she starts getting on your nerves…”