Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

And the world upended itself around Nita and dumped her on the ground…

In desperate cold and freezing vacuum. Nita had just sense enough to instantly close her eyes and let out the breath she was tempted to hold. Then she got her life-support force field working again, just before something else happened all around her: a shudder, a strange feeling of change and negation—

She took an experimental breath, found that there was air, opened her eyes. She was sitting on red-brown dirt, out under an early morning sky. Why does this look familiar? she thought.

She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. Morning, and still pretty early in the sol, she thought. That puts me, let’s see—

Nita glanced toward the southern horizon and froze. Between her and the pale, pinky Sun, something was rising up that filtered and dimmed that light. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, and easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, taller by far now than the mountain, even at that distance leaning up over Nita, leaning farther out, the great sparkling arch of it stretching out over the top of the crater basin and shadowing the mountains in it like a vast, downward-curving smoked-glass roof. The distant Sun was caught in the oncoming wave, flickering, flaring brighter briefly as the water sporadically lensed its light. When the water burns—

But the Sun was struggling to shine now, the thickness of the wave obscuring it as it grew, putting it out.

From what seemed a million years ago, she heard a scratchy bird voice, the voice of a scarlet macaw, saying: Fear death by water!

Oh, no, Nita thought. Oh, no. That dream… it wasn’t a dream.

It’s now.

14: Aurorae Chaos

Nita looked southward across the vast impact basin at the oncoming wall of water. There’s enough water frozen on Mars to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep, she remembered Kit telling her so many times that she had to threaten him with whacking to make him stop.

Now you could repeat it fifty times in a row and I wouldn’t care, she said to Kit, wherever he was, as long as it was really you saying it! But right now she had a more serious problem, because a significant portion of that water was apparently coming right at her. “Bobo,” Nita said. “What is this I’m standing on?”

Oceanidum Mons, Bobo said. It’s not far from where you were before: toward the southwestern side of Argyre Planitia—

Oh, no, Nita thought. Then I didn’t come here because the kernel had been here before. I came here because this was going to happen, and I saw it was coming. Because I was going to be here. Or supposed to be here. If there’s a difference—

And something else that was going to be here? Nita thought. Or supposed to be here? The lake that was here before. Well, here it comes!

“Screw it,” Nita said. “If she thinks I’m going to hold still for this, boy is she wrong!” She reached down to her charm bracelet for a transit spell, started to recite it with some changes—

— and found herself being blocked.

Okay, Nita thought. Shield-spell! She started to enact her usual one—

It was blocked, too. Nita blanched. “Bobo, what’s going on?!”

Someone managing the planet’s kernel, Bobo said, is disallowing the wizardry locally.

“Can she do that??”

Unfortunately, yes.

Nita went hot with fury. She wants me dead! she thought. And she wants me to stand here and watch it coming. That complete and total bitch!

It wasn’t that various Powers and principalities hadn’t tried to kill Nita over time. But this was somehow much more personal, much more offensive, because she’d really been trying to understand this other person, only to have the understanding completely rejected, or used against her. Now Nita’s rage was starting to boil over, and she did her best to get control of it— because it would be really useful, just so long as she did stay in control.

Nita breathed out and tried to get a grip. “Where’s Mamvish?” she said.

Not on the planet, said Bobo. She appears to have been forcibly removed. Possibly her return is also being blocked.

She swore under her breath. I’m on my own, then, Nita thought. But boy, if I’d realized kernels were this powerful, I’d have studied them even harder than I did…

Nita watched the water coming, lifting higher, the wavefront bulking up and up as the water flowing into existence behind it pushed it higher in the light gravity. She shook her head, awed. This would be one of the coolest things I ever saw, Nita thought, if it wasn’t going to kill me. She had maybe two minutes to figure out what to do, find a spell that would do the job, implement the spell, and turn it loose. And then, ideally, recover from it and get the hell out of here.

The wave was closer, climbing the sky. “Bobo, she can’t disallow all wizardry here, can she?” Nita said.

No. That would require power levels similar to Mamvish’s. The blockage involves any transit or defensive spell.

“Okay, let’s go on the offensive. Water magics…”

I have the ones you’ve been researching recently, Bobo said. And all the other ones there are.

Some of which probably look real impressive but might not work for me. The sweat was breaking out on Nita. Where do I begin?

And then she remembered sitting on the jetty with S’reee the other morning, which now seemed about a million years ago. You should talk to Arooon, S’reee was saying. He knew Pellegrino…

Nita gulped. “Bobo,” she said. “The Gibraltar Passthrough wizardry—” Because yes, the idea is insane. But with all the insanity running around already, what’s a little more?

There was a pause. A big piece of work, the peridexis said. And the conditions here are very different.

“Yes, they are,” Nita said, “because the gravity’s way less here! And look at it. All these highlands!” She stared around her. “This is perfect. It’s like the underwater terrain where Pellegrino designed the spell to be used! And I don’t have to control the whole body of water, just what’s coming at me!” She grinned, briefly feeling fierce. “Aurilelde thinks I’m stuck here; she’s sure I can’t gate out; she’s counting on me not to be able to react in time.”

Another pause. Fueling it, Bobo said, is going to cost you.

“Being dead is going to cost me too!”

Point taken. But Bobo still sounded extremely concerned.

“This is what you’ve been wanting to do for me,” Nita said, “so get on with it. It’s a big spell diagram. Lay it out!”

A second later the diagram was burning in lines of light all over the top of the massive tableland where Nita stood. “Big” didn’t begin to sum it up. But Nita didn’t let the size of it freak her: there was no time.

She looked it over quickly and located the control nodes, as well as the specific lines and chords of the spell that needed her own name information written out along them. As she went to them, stepping carefully so as not to interrupt the design, Nita saw her name and other personal information flash into fire along the lines. She stooped to check them: found them complete.

Nita straightened up, saw the gigantic main wavecrest thundering closer. Lesser waves were running and splashing hugely along either side of the tableland. The memory of her previous visions of that wave was making her shiver.But remember the cave, she thought then. You saw the scorpions get you once. And then you did something different, and it didn’t turn out that way. Let it be that way now—

The water kept coming, vast, roaring low. The frontal main wavecrest was still miles off— but not for much longer: the low gravity meant it could move a lot faster than it could on Earth. Maybe another minute, Nita thought. Let’s go.