Something struck Nita hard in the head. She jerked sideways, dazed for a moment, and just got a glimpse of the thing as it floated away on the rebound. It was a nickel-iron meteorite about the size of a walnut. Aurilelde, recovering too quickly from Nita’s blow, had snagged it in passing and slung it at her.
Nita put her hand up to her head, pulled it back and saw the blood, and went queasy. Better quit being so nice and put a stop to this real quick before she hits you with something bigger. Like Deimos!
Fortunately Mars’s lesser satellite wasn’t in the neighborhood, but there were other asteroid fragments nearby, and Aurilelde threw a number of those at Nita, missing as Nita dodged. Then she started using the weak Martian magnetic field itself on Nita. Strange lights started sparking at the back of Nita’s eyes, and her ears started ringing as her nervous system complained about the abuse by the locally accelerated fields—
Would you please cut that out?! Nita said to the magnetic field: and as usual, preferring courteous wizardly persuasion to the crass ordering-around that Aurilelde was inflicting on it, the knots of magnetic flux assailing her dissolved.
But by the time Nita’s vision and sense of balance were back to normal, Aurilelde was trying the hardened-air exploit on her again, this time simply sliding a block of it up under Nita and accelerating it. Whoa! Nita thought as the acceleration sharply increased. Not good, we’re heading for escape velocity here— !
Nita angrily pushed sideways off the block to drift free again in the microgravity: then spoke the phrase that would undo several vital strands of the antigrav spell she was wearing. I’m trying to help you out here! she said in the Speech to Mars’s gravity well. A little pull here, please? You’ve got some gravitational anomalies to spare—
Her acceleration away from the planet slowed, ceased, then reversed direction. Nita dropped toward the planet’s surface with increasing speed; she doubled over into a dive, straightening as she fell faster. Doing end-runs around the kernel by sweet-talking local forces isn’t going to stop this, she thought. Got to get my hands on that thing fast! “Bobo, how’re her energy levels holding up?”
She’s strong, Bobo said. She’s got a whole planet to draw on.
“Can’t you do anything about it?”
Not without getting the kernel dissociated from her, Bobo said. For the time being, she is Mars—
Don’t remind me, Nita thought, for down on the surface the dust was kicking up. So how the heck do I get her to stop being Mars? If only for a few minutes… Another of those blocks of hardened air hit Nita and clouted her hard up into the borders of the atmosphere again.
As she recovered and plunged downward once more, Nita could see the destruction continuing, the desolation spreading as some old volcanoes woke up and new ones broke out like a fiery rash as the crust ripped and lava thrust up from the depths. Fueled by the power Aurilelde’s kernel-connected rage was feeding to the wizardry running loose on the planet, whole oceans were coming real out of the past; even Valles Marineris was running over with ancient water beyond its ability to drain out into the northern ocean basins. Mars was tearing itself apart in fire and water. “Stop it, Aurilelde!” Nita shouted at her as she got close to Aurilelde again. “You can’t do this!”
“I can!” Aurilelde yelled back. “And I will! If only to teach you what I can do and you can’t. What I can have and you can’t! Khretef is mine! He was always mine! We don’t need this world! Yours will do just as well. When this world’s gone, and we’ve taken yours, we’ll live there and he’ll be mine again, mine forever—”
Nita kept heading toward her. Angry isn’t working! Just tell her the truth— “Nothing’s forever, Aurilelde!” she shouted. “You may not be a wizard, but Kit is, and Khretef is, and they both know that entropy’s running, and sooner or later, everything dies.” Nita’s eyes started to sting. “The people you love die, and love may be enough to slow down the death sometimes, or even reverse it for a while— but not every time, and not forever!”
She thought of her mother, of Ponch, and had to wipe her eyes. Oh, damn it, I thought I was through with this! I guess not for a while yet. “It won’t work. Kit will die someday, yeah! I may be there to see it: I’ve already almost seen it once or twice.” She wiped her eyes again, but anger was getting the better of her now. “But that’s more than you can say. Because where were you when Khretef died? Off somewhere safe. Let him handle the danger, huh? Not your business, Princess? That’s not how love works!”
Aurilelde laughed scornfully as she arrowed toward Nita again. “As if you know anything about love! Your idea of physical intimacy is punching Kit in the arm.”
Nita flushed hot. “Well, looks like I know more than you do, because I don’t have to keep my boyfriend in a cage! That’s what you’re trying to build for Khretef. You’ll stamp out all your enemies, meaning his people, mostly, and then rule Mars or Earth or whatever with him at your side. Chained there! Because the life you’re awake in now scares you too much to ever let him go. He’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. It’s not love holding you to him now: it’s fear! And Khretef knows that! But he means to stay with you anyway, because he’s sorry for what the fear’s turned you into—”
The completely stricken look spreading across Aurilelde’s face told Nita that this was all the truth, her visionary talent perhaps picking up on something Kit knew. Nita shivered.
“No! He stays with me because he loves me—”
“Oh, he’ll let you think that,” Nita said, angry. “Because Khretef’s a hero, like Kit, he’s willing to be locked up in that cage with you forever. He wants to be there? Then that’s your boyfriend’s business. But I’m not gonna let mine stay locked up in there with him!”
Aurilelde slowly dropped her hands and just hung there on the borders of space, a look of increasing horror spreading across her face. Nita, watching, hardly dared to breathe, even to move.
It was hard to just wait and give Aurilelde this one last chance to get it right, even with the memory of that voice screaming, I don’t need this world: yours will do as well! It was so easy to think, You’re a hopeless case: nothing to do with you but throw you out of the game!
But the Rede had said, To wreak aright | she must slay her rival— And that had to mean the scared and angry Aurilelde who was ready to tear a planet apart to get her way. She has to have the chance to reject that option, or this won’t work.
The moment stretched as Aurilelde drifted, and the back of Nita’s mind became an uproar of her own fears, for Earth, for Kit. We’re wasting time. She’ll never turn! Just put her out of her misery while she’s off balance and get on with saving one world if not two!
Nita swallowed. Bobo, she said silently, this is it. Let’s have that routine for getting a kernel out of a living matrix against its will.
The peridexis showed Nita the structure of the spell. And as it did, Aurilelde raised her arms, her face shifting into a mask of fury, and launched herself toward Nita. A moment later her hands were around Nita’s throat, squeezing.
Nita reeled back in shock bizarrely tinged with embarrassment, since her personal force field was presently keyed toward protecting her from vast impersonal forces, not the kind of playground stuff that she might have expected from Joanne and her crowd back in the bad old days.
But Nita had learned some techniques back then that still worked fine. She reached out and snaked her right arm over one of Aurilelde’s and under the other, then angled the arm up to twist her attacker’s arms free. Aurilelde tried to get another grip, but before she had a chance, Nita grabbed both her wrists in one hand, then described a quick line of hard light around them with one index finger. The thin strand of force field knotted itself tight.