Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Kit and Ronan and Darryl stood looking across the crater in three different directions. Darryl said, “Okay… now what?”

Ronan shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It’s fading.”

Kit looked around them. Right across the crater that light was already growing paler—not just because the Sun was higher and brighter in the amber sky. “So what was that? Another signal? Or just some kind of acknowledgment that we followed up on the first one?”

Darryl was looking at the manual page he’d extracted from his WizPod. “It was a limited-run wizardry. It triggered right when Ronan did his see-into-the-ground routine. The triggered spell blew all its energy in one big spike. The energy’s dropping right off the scale again.” Darryl shook his head. “It was a big spike, though. And there was something funny about the time stamp—”

Kit looked across the crater for any sign of life or movement. There was nothing. “Analysis,” he muttered. “Mamvish warned us we’d probably wind up doing a lot of it…” He pulled out his manual and opened it to the log pages for this trip. Among several charts showing what wizardries the three of them were carrying or utilizing, Kit saw the diagram that showed what wizardly energy was associated with this specific spot. Darryl hadn’t been overstating the size of the spike associated with their arrival. The graph had had to stretch itself to the top of the manual page to accommodate it. “What was the problem with the time stamp on the spike?” Kit said. “It looks okay to me.”

“Not the spike itself,” Darryl said. “The indicator showing when the spell was actually installed here. It looked earlier than the egg’s installation date—” Then Darryl made a little hiss of annoyance as the indicator vanished from the page. Kit shook his head. “Can you get that back?”

“I’ll let you know when I understand why it went away!” Darryl said. “Here—” But Kit was now distracted by his manual: its pages were flushing pink. He glanced up.

Atmospheric conditions could sometimes get very odd on Mars, but in all the times he’d been there, Kit had never seen anything like this. From where the three of them stood to the horizon, it was as if the Red Planet had suddenly taken the sobriquet personally and decided that for a change today it was going to get really, really red: not just rusty-colored, but positively crimson. Everything was turning that color— the ground, the sky— as if Kit was wearing red glasses.

“This could give you a headache after a while,” Ronan said. He sounded uneasy.

Darryl looked up and around. “Sky’s clear. Not a dust storm, then.”

“This is that new wizardry working,” Kit said. He started flipping through his manual to the defensive spells.

“But what’s it doing?” Ronan said, taking the sunglasses off to stare at the horizon. “I mean, if something’s going to…”

He trailed off. “Going to what?” Darryl said.

Ronan pointed and shook his head. Maybe a quarter mile away from them across the crimson sands, teetering unevenly along in their general direction, was something with four long legs and some kind of body hung in the middle.

They stared. “What is that?” Kit said. “A giant spider?”

Ronan squinted at it. “The legs look more, I don’t know, crabby. Look, they’ve got webs or something between the joints.” He paused. “Sorry, maybe I need to hit the optometrist when I get home, but does that look like it has the head of a bat?”

Kit shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. There’s a tail, too. Like a rat tail.”

“One of the original inhabitants, maybe,” Ronan said, “coming to say hello?”

Kit shook his head. The approaching thing unsettled him: it looked not just unlikely, but also somehow rickety and badly built. Kit flipped his manual to a bookmarked page where he’d set up a life-sign detector sensitive to all the kinds of life that wizards knew about—which meant quite a few. But the display showed nothing in the area but three dots labeled with the twelve-character code in the Speech that meant Earth-human. “Not alive,” Kit said.

The bat-rat-spider-crab came tottering toward them, only a few hundred yards away now. Ronan shook his head. “Illusion?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Kit. “There’s something physical there that wasn’t there before—”

“A construct,” Ronan said, frowning. “Great. If it’s real enough to get physical, it’s real enough to damage us. But since it’s not alive, if that thing starts getting too cozy, I won’t feel too bad about using this.” Ronan reached sideways into the air, grabbed something invisible, and pulled.

Something long, narrow, and blazingly bright came out of nowhere, following his pull. For a second Kit’s memory flashed back to the Spear of Light that Ronan used to carry: but that was in other hands, or claws, these days. The object Ronan held though, was definitely “of light”— a cylindrical bar of burning golden radiance an inch wide and three feet long. Ronan lifted it up and laid it over his left arm, sighting on the bat-spider thing as it came spidering hugely along toward them.

Kit recognized what Ronan held as one of numerous deadly weapons that a wizard could construct from the universe’s more basic energies. “You sure you want to do that?”

“Not at all sure,” Ronan said, sighting carefully. “Entirely willing not to have to do it if that keeps its distance. But my mam didn’t raise me to be bat chow, so you’re going to have to forgive me if I—”

He broke off short as with a distinctive crack! a bullet flew over them. The head of the bat-rat-crab thing came up, reacting to something off to their right. It stared— then turned and enthusiastically ran off in a different direction entirely.

Confused, Ronan lowered the energy weapon and peered past the fleeing bat-rat-crab thing. “All right, now wait just a fecking minute,” he said. “A rifle? Was that a rifle??”

Darryl started to laugh.

The sound made Kit realize that Darryl had been unusually quiet for the last few minutes. Now, though, he pointed out past where the bat-creature had been. “Will you get a load of that?”

Kit’s eyes went wide as he looked where Darryl pointed. Running toward them across the crimson sand, under the carmine sky, were human beings. They wore space suits, but not modern ones: these looked like crude versions of a jet pilot’s pressure suit. And bizarrely, they didn’t seem to be affected by Mars’s lighter gravity. They ran as if they were still on Earth.

Darryl was still laughing as the spacemen— there was no other way to think of beings so retro-looking— got closer. They slowed, took stance, and fired again, but not at the bat-rat-whatever: at the three astonished wizards. The bullets hit the force field holding in the wizardly air bubble and whined away. Ronan had lowered his weapon, looking perplexed at Darryl’s laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said to Darryl, “but is there something funny I’m missing about this? Those are bullets!”

“Yeah,” Darryl said, “but they’re movie bullets!”

Kit stared at him. “What?”

“This is all out of a movie!” Darryl said. “First time I saw it was when I was really little. It completely freaked me out, because I didn’t understand it was just a story. I thought it was the news from somewhere. Then I saw it again on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago, and when I recognized it, man, I couldn’t stop laughing; it’s so lame! It’s called The Angry Red Planet.”

“Well, somebody’s angry,” Ronan said, as the barrage of bullets continued.

“Somebody’s scared,” Kit said. “Look, let’s go talk to them.”

“They’re constructs!” Ronan said. “Barely a step up from illusions. You really think we’re going to be able to communicate?”