Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

She looked past S’reee to Carmela. Mela waved the remote at her, punched a button. She and S’reee vanished. The air inside the support spell imploded in a brief, sharp breeze toward where they’d been, then settled again.

Nita stood there in the silence, the rowan wand in her free hand now the only light. “Okay, Bobo,” she said. “You have Kit’s first set of coordinates? This crater—” She peered at the manual. “Stokes—”

Got them.

“Are they still blocked?”

Not precisely. Conditions there are …peculiar.

It wasn’t the most reassuring thing to hear wizardry itself saying to you. Nevertheless, Nita shrugged. “Let’s go find out how peculiar,” she said.

The transit circle laid itself out glowing around her. Transiting now.

Around Nita, the world went dark again.

9: Gusev

Pale peach-colored dust fluffed away in the gust of wind that accompanied the three human forms who appeared atop the low, rounded ridge. It wasn’t a particularly sharp or edgy piece of terrain— just a rough escarpment of beige and cream-colored rock, with dust and sand spilling down in little rills, almost like water, from cracks in the low cliff’s edge. To the south and west spread a vast, shallow, circular depression, itself dimpled and cratered with the remnants of newer, lesser impacts. Level with the old crater’s rim, the surrounding landscape to the north and east, more brown than red, was strewn with nondescript boulders well into the distance.

“Here we are,” Kit said, glancing around to get his bearings.

“Wahoo,” Darryl said, ironic.

“Nope. De Vaucouleurs.”

“Pedant,” said Ronan, looking around with the expression of someone eager not to see any more giant bat-crab-spider creatures.

Kit rolled his eyes. “We’re in the right spot, anyway. There’s Kayne, over that way.” He pointed: another crater’s low rim was just visible, looking like a low line of hills maybe ten miles away. “Shawnee, Bok…” He peered further away to the south. “Hamelin—”

“I take back what I said before,” Ronan said, concerned. “You don’t need a social life later. You need one now. How long have you been staying home nights memorizing crater names? They’re holes in the ground, Kit! There’s nothing but rocks in them! Set yourself free! Life’s too short!”

Kit turned to Darryl. “Doesn’t seem to be much going on here at the moment. What’ve we got?”

Darryl brought out his WizPod and pulled out a wide, semitransparent page that he studied for a moment. He shook his head, holding it up for Ronan and Kit to see. “Okay, look. The wizardry you triggered is getting ready to spike here. Two or three minutes. But before it goes off, you can still see some indications of how old it is and where it came from. Look quick—” He pointed at one long line of symbols. “See that? The power to fuel this wizardry wasn’t locally sourced.”

Kit shook his head. “What?”

“The energy didn’t come from this planet, originally! It came from—” Darryl looked up, pointed. “Somewhere up there.”

Kit and Ronan looked up into the empty Martian sky. “Nearby?” Ronan said. “One of the moons, maybe?”

“Don’t think so,” Darryl said, studying his readout. “Nope. Much further. Maybe thirty million miles. Actually, make that fifty.”

Ronan and Kit stared at each other. “What’s out that far?” Ronan said.

“The asteroids?” Kit said. “I mean, I’m not sure about the distances.”

Darryl was still looking at the wide page of manual that he’d pulled out of the WizPod. He shook his head, looking perplexed. “There’s something wrong with the timing, too,” he said. “I can’t get a clean read on it. But, look, if the wizardry’s running and about to go off, it’d make more sense for us to deal with what it’s about to do right now than get too hung up about who emplaced it and when…”

“Yeah. Meanwhile,” Ronan said, glancing around him, “what’s the satellite situation? That last jump was biggish, to judge by how high the Sun’s up now.” He had a point: Kit glanced up and saw that it was almost noon. “The schedule’s got to be pretty different here. And where exactly is this wizardry going to go off? Not right underneath us this time, I hope—”

“No way,” Darryl said. “I factored in a nice big offset. Off that way.” He looked east and south. “In the middle of the next big crater over. About fifty miles, as the wizard jumps.”

“Uh,” Ronan said softly, “maybe time to jump, then—”

They looked where he was looking. Kit gulped. From beyond the low crater rim to the east, a pale green glow was rising.

Darryl grabbed them each by an arm. “I’ll put us down on the far side,” he said. “The view’ll be better.” He took a deep breath.

As the momentary darkness of a bilocation transit shut down around him, Kit was trying to visualize the orbit of the Mars Express orbiter in his head. But something else was niggling at him. The name of the crater they’d come down on the edge of meant something besides being just the site of one of the active wizardries. De Vaucouleurs, he thought. De Vaucouleurs. There was something special about that area, I could have sworn—

The darkness gave way once more to daylit Martian landscape. They were standing on the rim of yet another crater, but this rim was far higher and better defined than the last, and the crater seemed much bigger: the two arms of it ran straight to the foreshortened horizon and vanished. For it to look this big, it’d have to be a hundred miles across, Kit thought. And the surface down there is maybe two miles deep. Or so it seemed where it wasn’t being rapidly overrun by the green glow of a working alien wizardry. That emerald light was flooding outward from a spot off to their right and about halfway across the visible portion of the crater, making the whole area look bizarrely like a reverse-action film of water going down a drain.

“If the action this time’s going to be anything like it was back at Stokes,” Ronan said, “I think I prefer the view from up here.” He looked down at the outward-spreading light. “Look at it go!” He shook his head. “What about the satellites?”

“Yeah,” Darryl said. “If something comes over now, it’s not just going to see our infrared signatures. At night the guys back at NASA or ESA might think we were just a transient hot spot, a meteorite impact or some such. But in the daytime, when they have something overhead that can see us in visible light, too? And not just us. That!”

Kit was going through his manual in a hurry. “Obviously we can spoof them,” Ronan said. “Mess with their machinery somehow.”

“If it can figure out the right way!” Kit said. “Spoof ’em, sure, it’s easy to say. But how do you do it so the rocket-science guys don’t notice? They’re not dumb! Take one of the satellite’s cameras out of commission? Sure, but how? Make a piece of the machinery fail? Better make sure you’re not failing out something you can’t fix right away when you don’t need the fault anymore. And you’ve got to pick something to interfere with that’ll seem to make sense when it stops working and when it just starts up again for no good reason—”

“You’ll figure something out!” Darryl said. “This is your specialty. You haven’t done anything but think about this stuff for weeks now!”

Kit held his manual up right in front of Darryl’s face to show him the orbital diagram he’d been looking for. “But not this exact situation! Here comes the Mars Express orbiter. Eighteen minutes and ten seconds from now. Either we stop that—” and Kit pointed at the spreading green glow— “or the Express sees a lot more than just our own hot spots. Those we can hide, sure. Put a stealth shell over us that mimics the local temperature. But what about that?” He nodded at the oncoming tide of green light. “No way they’re going to believe that’s a dust storm! We can’t let them see it; it’ll screw up their science! And we don’t have enough power to hide it even at the size it is now. If it spreads much further…”