Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“Well done, that woman,” Ronan said. “She always was the stubborn type.”

“Sometimes stubbornness pays better dividends than high power levels,” Irina said. “Well, shouldn’t we take a look at it?”

“This is your job, I think,” Mamvish said to Kit.

Kit suddenly looked abashed and shy. Nita had to hide her smile.

“Go on,” Mamvish said. “You’re the one who predicted the location. Pull it out of there and let’s see what it is.”

Kit nodded, knelt down in front of the outcropping, put his hands up against it, and very slowly and carefully recited the fourteen syllables of the Mason’s Word, which has power over stone and the mineral elements. Then he leaned inward. Slowly Kit’s hands sank in through the surface of the brown stone, up to the wrists, then up to the elbows. He looked absently upward, like anyone feeling around for something he can’t see, and then his eyes widened.

“It’s pretty big,” he said. “Round, I think. Kind of beachball sized…”

Very slowly he pulled his arms back. His face tensed. “It doesn’t want to come,” he said.

“The spell would resist,” Mamvish said. “That’s its job. Keep pulling.”

Nita watched as the sweat popped out on Kit’s forehead. She could feel his nervousness, catch a flicker of stressed-out thought: Please don’t let me drop it, don’t let anything bad happen to this thing, we’ve been looking for so long—!

Then Kit sat back on his heels, hard, gazing down at what he held. For a few seconds the ancient chameleon spell refused to entirely let go, so that what Kit held looked like nothing but a rounded, gritty, green-brown boulder. Then, gradually, the seeming fell away. Revealed in his hands was a shining blue-green metallic object, strangely shaped: a sort of blunt-ended capsule or stretched sphere, about two feet long.

“Wow…” Nita said, and then realized that her heart was pounding. All the others let out breaths of surprise and satisfaction as they peered over Kit’s shoulder. Only Kit was completely silent, kneeling there with the thing braced on his knees and staring at it in wonder.

And, way down in the pocket of her jeans, Nita’s cell phone rang.

Kit looked over his shoulder, his expression surprised and annoyed. Nita said a word that was not one she’d heard Mamvish using earlier and pulled her phone out, checking the ID on its display. It was her home number. If it’s Dairine, I swear when I catch her I’m gonna grab her and shove her head down the— But the phone, having had its caller ID tweaked with wizardry, helpfully added: DAD CALLING.

“Oh, no,” Nita moaned, for she suspected she knew what he was calling about. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, I have to take this…”

She flipped the phone open, acutely aware of everyone watching her, and flushed with embarrassment. “Hello?”

“Nita,” her dad said: and that was an immediate sign of trouble— both in terms of his tone of voice, which was annoyed, and the fact that he’d called her by her name rather than one of the usual nicknames or pet names he used. “Where are you?”

“I’m on Mars, Dad. Please, can this wait a little while? Because I—”

“No. I need you home right now.”

“Daddy, I—”

“Five minutes.”

She knew that tone of voice, and there was no arguing with it, not if you wanted life to continue in anything like a normal way. “Okay,” Nita said.

Her dad simply hung up.

Oh, he sounds so steamed about something, what can have him so mad…?

I bet I know.

She started to get mad herself as she folded up the phone and put it away. “This is so unfair!” she said.

Mamvish gave her one of those amused Senior-like looks that suggested that the concept of “fairness” was something Nita should have gotten past by now. Nita sighed. “I have to go,” she said to Carmela. “I’m really sorry—”

“Don’t be,” Carmela said. “It’s no problem. I’m sure Kit will drop me off as soon as he’s done here. Won’t you?” And Carmela turned on Kit one of those bright of-course-you-will looks that dared him to say anything different.

Nita saw Kit’s face work through annoyance, frustration, and an imposed calm that suggested he didn’t want to look like an idiot by protesting too much. Behind him, Ronan was gazing innocently at nothing in particular, and Darryl was watching all this with acute interest. “Sure,” Kit said.

Nita reached for her charm bracelet, feeling for the single charm, like a thin ring or empty circle, that held the preset transit spell that would take her home in a hurry. She said the few words in the Speech that took the “safety” off the spell, and as she pulled the bright line of light that was the transit spell out of the charm, Kit threw her an apologetic look. “I’ll log everything we do,” he said. “Get back as soon as you can—”

“Depend on it,” Nita said, dropped the transit circle glowing on the dusty brown-green ground around her, and vanished.

***

Kit let out another long breath as the others gathered around to look more closely at what he held. He looked up at Mamvish and Irina. “What is it?” he said.

“Well, as far as the shape goes,” Irina said, peering at the object, “it’s a superellipsoid. A superegg, some people used to call it, or a Lamé solid: the three-dimensional object you get when you rotate a superellipse around its axis. Not as resistant to force as a sphere, but it’s less likely to be mistaken for something natural.” She reached out a hand, touched it.

Bizarrely, Kit flinched, even though he’d touched the object already. But nothing happened. “It’s weird,” he said. “It looks like metal, but it’s not cold. Even with Mamvish’s environment field covering everything here now, it should still be cold…”

Ronan and Darryl and Carmela all came to crouch down around Kit and carefully touch the superegg. Kit got a sudden image of cautious ape relatives reaching out to a tall black monolith, and had to smile.

“Seems like it’s in no hurry to crack open,” Mamvish said. “But then some of these bottles have long-duration time locks on them, or routines that analyze the finders as carefully as they’d like to analyze the find.”

Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket, hanging near him in the air as it always was, and pulled out his manual, putting it down on the ground beside him and flipping to one of the sensing-routine pages in the rear section. He was shaking and couldn’t understand why. It’s not as if I’ve never seen anything alien before! Kit thought. But this is different. This is stranger. Isn’t that weird? The closer to home an alien thing is, the harder it hits—

He looked at the manual. It showed him a diagram of the superegg, but very little data appeared beside the image, and no information about whatever might be inside it. “It is made of metal,” Kit said. “But there’s plastic in it, too. And wizardry…”

Irina looked over Kit’s shoulder at his manual. She reached down to touch it, and a few extra lines of information appeared in the Speech, but nothing more. She looked surprised. As Mamvish, too, gazed down at the manual, her huge tongue flicked out, wavering over the superegg as if tasting the air around it. “This object’s cloaked,” Mamvish said.

“Even against someone with our authorizations?” Irina said. “That would take some doing.”

“So it would,” Mamvish said. “But we have little data on how powerful the wizards were who worked on this world.” Her tail lashed. “At least I don’t get any sense of this interference being something of the Lone Power’s doing…”

Irina frowned. “That’s an impression that could be faked.”

“Yes,” Mamvish said, “but as you say, against one of us? What are the odds?”