Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“What? A timeslide? Have you gone spare?” Ronan shouted, for mind-talk plainly wasn’t going to fool the machines now bearing down on them: they were already being targeted. “We can’t do that! We’d need ten million kinds of authorization—”

“Not for this!” Kit said, frantically hunting the page he needed. “I’m not talking about a slide! This isn’t about going backwards! What we want is a local acceleration, forwards. Not changing what’s going to happen, just making it happen a whole lot faster. There’s no way to damage previous causality, so you don’t need an authorization—”

Finally he found the page. “How long have you had this one under your hat?” Ronan said.

“Found it when I was doing some research a few months ago,” Kit said. “I was going to use it to age some metal under Martian conditions to see what kind of remains I’d be looking for from stuff left over from ancient times. But it was all long-duration aging. Didn’t occur to me it might be useful for this until you and the Squirt here reminded me.” He glanced at Darryl, grinned. “‘Took a few weeks in the original?’ It won’t take anything like that this time!”

Kit reached into his manual page and pulled the spell template out of it, a long elastic ellipse which he dropped to the dusty ground in front of them. “Hurry up, get in here,” he said, stepping into the center of it. “Stick your personal info into the empty circles! There— and there—”

Darryl and Ronan both jumped into the interior ellipse and got to work inserting their personal information into the vacant templates in the spell circle. “This’ll keep the altered flow clear of us,” Kit said, watching the machines as they slowly stalked toward them, howling. “Now all we have to do is wait for them to get close enough—”

Darryl had his eye on the war machines. “Uh, your Kitness— just how close is close?”

“This is gonna take a lot of energy,” Kit said. “Can’t kick the outer circle out too far. But once they’re inside, we’ll be good. They’ve been breathing the same air we have, and we’ve been breathing out lots of lovely germs and viruses—”

The secondary circle laid itself out as Kit spoke, maybe a few hundred yards distant all around them, glowing against the ground. “Is this safe?” Ronan said, sounding nervous. “If something slips and our personal space-time gets deranged somehow because these things stumble into the circle—”

“We’ll be fine!” Kit said. “The spell puts a stasis on everything in the area but the ‘forward arrow’ of time itself—”

“You sure physics lets you do that?” Darryl said, sounding twitchy, too.

“The manual says so,” Kit said, glancing up at the war machines, which were now unsettlingly close, “and I think so does Stephen Hawking. That’s good enough for me!”

He ran one finger down the manual page and found the words he needed to recite. “You two ready?” Kit said. “Dar, better grab hold of us. The spell won’t mind, and if we do have to jump—”

Darryl reached out to Ronan and Kit, grabbed one shoulder of each. “All set!”

The war machines lowered over them, stepping into the outer circle. Their long necks reached down. As Kit began to read in the Speech, fire spat from the two terrible eyes—

—slowed in midair, slid to a halt, and hung there right above them, frozen in place.

The machines froze, too, held still by the spell. All around them, kicked-up dust in the air was holding its position: smoke, billowing from where the machines had burned trees or buildings while heading toward Kit and Darryl and Ronan, lay unmoving on the air as if painted there. Inside the shell of space around the war machines, though, Kit could feel time speeding up, faster and faster: could hear its rising whine inside his head, scaling up, nearly unbearable, as the spell circle inevitably passed back to him the neural side effects of the abuse he was inflicting on the time trapped inside the circle. All Kit could do was finish reading, squeeze his eyes shut, and try to bear up under the screech of pain of the space itself, miserable at having to endure being pushed into the future faster than the normally mandated one second per second—

The spell ran out: the circle went dark. Dust started to move again; smoke started to drift. “That way,” Kit said to Darryl, “quick!!”

The world blacked out, went bright again as the war machines’ beams hit the ground where they had all been standing until a moment ago. But then, slowly, one of the machines started to sag forward, the other one sideways toward them—

They scattered as the machines fell with a tremendous crash: one of them onto a frame house nearby, a second right onto the hapless Grover’s Mill Company building, which flew up in a little storm of timber and roof shingles as the machine crashed into it. Both machines cracked open as they came down, and the smell that poured from them afterward was truly impressive.

The three of them drew together again, breathing hard. “Wow,” Ronan said. Kit bent half over, trying to get his breath back: the spell was still taking its toll on him. Around them, though, the New Jersey suburbs were already fading away, leaving the cratered Martian landscape again. Last to go were the shattered war machines, dead from the microorganisms for which their inhabitants were no more prepared on this planet than they would have been on Earth.

“Now that,” Darryl said, “was great thinking.”

“Thank you,” Ronan said.

“I meant Kit,” Darryl said, as Kit managed to straighten up enough to look around.

“Oh, really. If you remember, he said that I—”

“Some more of the shutting up, please?!” Kit yelled at them. “Because we have another problem now!”

Darryl and Ronan stared at him again. “What? Spirit?” Ronan said. “What now? I thought you said you could—”

Kit pointed across the crater, not at Spirit. Boiling up out of the sand all around them were what looked like streamers and ribbons of green metal.

Darryl’s eyes widened. “Those are the exact same color as—”

“The superegg,” Kit said. “Yes, they are. And if they do what the superegg did—”

“Uh-oh,” Darryl said.

“You’d better pull out some more wizardries you haven’t used yet,” Kit said as the ribbons of metal started writhing and knotting together. “Because I don’t think you’re gonna be able to do your micro-bilocation trick again.”

Darryl frowned. “I could try—”

“If it doesn’t work,” Ronan said, “we’re going to find out about that just as something new stomps us flat! So don’t bother! We need something else—”

Low shadowy shapes were starting to form all around them, out in the dust and sand, surrounding them in a triple ring. They hurriedly placed themselves back to back. “What about the rover?” Ronan said.

“She can’t see this,” Darryl said.

“I wish I couldn’t,” Kit muttered as the metallic shapes twined and conjoined into their final shapes, gleaming in the dull sunlight.

“Bloody ’ell,” Ronan said, disgusted. “Giant robot scorpions. Why is it always giant robot scorpions?”

Kit rolled his eyes. “You sure they’re not alive?” he said to Darryl.

“Not even slightly.” Darryl raised his hands and said one quick sentence in the Speech.

Four or five of the nearest scorpions blew up. “Don’t let them get near the rover!” Kit shouted to Ronan as the fighting heated up. “We don’t have time to spend repairing her right now if something happens!”

“Got that,” Ronan said. He threw his bar of light into the air, spinning: as it came down, he caught it by one end and waded into the scorpions, using the dissociator like a sword.