“What, right now?” Nita said.
Ronan threw her one of those of-course-you-dummy looks that Nita had hated so much until she came to understand that they were caused by impatience, not cruelty. “There are other kinds of ‘now,’” Ronan said, “but, yeah, that was the one I meant.” He looked around at the others. “How about it?”
Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun exchanged glances. “If the Powers That Be want to send us on the hunt,” Sker’ret said, “it seems foolish to refuse.”
“I have some issues at home that will have to be handled,” Roshaun said. “But after that”—he looked over at Dairine—”I have never yet worked directly with one of the Powers That Be.” He smiled. “It should be interesting. For the Power, of course.”
Dairine shot Roshaun a look that he entirely missed, but Nita didn’t. She had to cover her mouth to keep from snickering.
Filif rustled. “I am with you,” he said at last.
Kit turned to Nita. “What do you say?”
She let out a breath. “I say we go,” she said.
Half an hour later, they were on the Moon.
4: Engagement
At the far left edge of the face of the Moon, as it’s seen from the northern hemisphere, about halfway between the Moon’s equator and its south pole lies a vast triple-ringed crater—the remnant of a huge impact in ancient times when the Moon’s surface was still just a thin crust of stone over seas of seething lava. Whatever hit the Moon did so with such awful force that three consecutive ripples of lava, each as tall as Everest, roared hundreds of kilometers outward across the surface before they froze in place. They became the Inner Rook, Outer Rook, and Cordillera mountain ranges, all surrounding Mare Orientale—the Eastern Sea.
The mountain rings have themselves over time become pocked with countless big and little craters. One of these, at the one o’clock position on the Cordillera ring, is too small and unremarkable to have a name on any astronomer’s map. But others familiar with the Moon know it for its unusually dark crater floor, its spectacular view across the vast expanse of the Sea, and the short, sharp impact spike sticking up sheer out of the middle of it; and today it was remarkable for other reasons, too.
“Wow,” Nita said under her breath. “It’s full of wizards.”
The normal darkness of the crater floor’s basalt was obscured by what, in the pale blue-white light of the setting near-full Earth, could have been mistaken for gigantic soap bubbles. But they were really force fields full of air—hundreds of them, big and small, scattered right across the near-perfect kilometer-wide circle of the little crater that wizards call Lake View, after the nearby basin of Lacus Veris, Spring Lake. The force-field wizardries gleamed blue on one side with Earth-light, where the crater’s Earthward shadow fell over them, and on the other with the light of the Sun, now nearly halfway up the jet-black sky over the Eastern Sea; and about them all was a little shimmer or tremor of a most delicate silvery fog, as the force fields shed out frozen “waste” carbon dioxide into the lunar dusk.
Inside their own bubble of air, which Kit was handling for the moment, Nita looked down at that gathering with a strange feeling that was half excitement, half reluctance. “Anybody down there we know, you think?” she said to Kit.
He glanced at her and laughed. “Like it matters,” he said. “We’d better get to know at least some of them, and fast, if we’re going to pull this off.”
Nita glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, Ronan and Roshaun and Sker’ret were already separating off their own smaller force fields to make the passage through vacuum less of a chore. Filif stood looking down at the gathering, his fronds rustling all over, so that even his baseball cap jiggled.
Nita gave him a look. “You okay, Fil?”
Filif kept on rustling, gazing down with all those red eye-berries at the wizards massed there down in the crater, human and otherwise. “So many,” he said at last.
Nita let out a long breath. “I just hope it’s enough,” she said. Following Filif’s gaze, she spotted a force field down below that seemed a lot larger than many of the others, and it didn’t seem to be a group field, either. I’ll bet I know who that is!
Nita reached out to her group’s force field, rotated her own part of the field-spell around to her in a whirl of glowing symbols, and bounced forward as she spun off her own part of the spell. The sphere of air budded out in front of Nita, closed up behind. She paused for a moment to make sure that this smaller segment of the main wizardry had her personal information correctly laid into it.
As she did, Ronan came up behind her and paused with his own “bubble” touching Nita’s. Knowing she could be heard while their two fields were in contact, she said, “What do we tell the other wizards about what we’re really going to be doing?”
“Nothing,” Ronan said. “The odds are better than usual that at least a few of them are overshadowed.”
He might be right, Nita thought, uneasy. But what’s going on inside his head? “But we can at least find out what some of them are doing.”
“Sure.”
Ronan headed down the slope. Nita looked over her shoulder at the others, who were now clustering their own force fields up against hers and the one that contained Kit and Ponch. “Come on down,” she said to them. “Houseguests, watch the gravity, it’s about a sixth of what it is back home—” She turned and started to astronaut-bounce down the slope, kicking up silvery moondust behind her. The others followed after.
Kit caught up with Nita quickly, which was no surprise: he was expert in light gravity. As he bumped his bubble back up against hers, Nita got a look at the expression on his face. It was strange. “What’s up with you?”
“Oh, you know. Carmela…” Kit was looking downslope at the bottom of the crater with an expression that suggested his ears were still ringing; their departure from his house had not been a calm one. Carmela had taken it very badly that she was being left behind.
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Kit, relax. She’ll get over it.”
“Well, I still feel like pond scum. I didn’t have all day to stand around being oh so tactful.” He sighed. “Now I wish I had.”
Nita let out a breath. “Look, before we go away, see if you can find time to sit her down and explain it all in detail.”
“You’ve never had to explain something to Carmela,” Kit said. “The universe’s life span might not contain enough time…”
The others caught up with them. They continued down the slope into the flatter area of the crater floor. The biggest of the bubbles was not far ahead of them, and inside it a huge long figure floated, slightly curved, graceful; the long double-lobed tail of a humpback whale swung upward in greeting as she spotted them, and the tiny eye came alive with a smile to match the artificial one of the great long mouth. Nita bumped her own bubble up against the bigger force field, felt the wizardry that ran it analyze her own and adjust itself to include her personal parameters for oxygen requirements and respiration rates. A moment later she was inside. Nita trotted over, bouncing a little, to throw her arms as far as they’d go—not very far—around S’reee. “Dai, big sister!”
“And dai stihó to you, hNiii’t!” S’reee said, folding a long forefin partially around her in a friendly gesture, one that made her bob up and down a little where she hovered. “Didn’t think you’d have too much trouble finding me.”
“With the kind of air supply you need for a run like this,” Nita said, “it wasn’t going to be that hard.”
The humpback glanced toward the others following in Nita’s wake. “Busy up here today. And everyone’s well loaded with spells, I can feel.”