Nita laughed weakly at the stinging feel of her face, burned by the overloading shields. She looked up and down the corridor to the smoking wreckage of the remaining three fusion weapons, and the walls and other structures that had been between them and Carmela. “How the heck did you do that?” Nita said.
Carmela smiled. From the holster, the kind that beauticians carry their hair dryers in, she pulled out a two-foot-long object that seemed to combine the features of a curling iron and an eggbeater. The beaters throbbed faintly with a threatening glow, like the one that had come from the first mobile weapon just before Nita blew it up.
Nita blinked. “That’s the thing you got off the alien shopping channel?” she said. “But that was just a laser dissociator—”
“‘Was,’” Carmela said. She grinned again. “I sent away for the free upgrade.”
Sker’ret clambered out of the control console’s rack and flowed over to the two of them. “And there’s my favorite bunch of legs!” Carmela said, and hunkered down to Sker’ret’s level. As he came up beside her, she reached out and yanked a couple of his eyes in a friendly way. “Hey there, cute-as-a-bug,” she said. “You okay? You look a little scorched around the edges.”
Sker’ret simply stared. After a moment, he said, “This is… unexpected!”
Carmela produced a pout. “You’re not glad to see me!”
“Oh, glad, absolutely glad, but you shouldn’t be—”
“Why?” Carmela said. “Why shouldn’t I? Really, why do you guys all think you have to be wizards to save the universe? You people get so grabby sometimes.”
Nita blinked. Did I say I thought the weird quotient in my life was going to start rising? Remind me to keep my mouth shut in future. “Forgive me if I take a moment to see where the people who were shooting at us are now,” Nita said, and got out her manual.
“Sure.” Carmela looked around her, admiring the architecture through the general destruction. “Hey, nice ceiling. Or is it really a ceiling?”
“What’s left of it,” Sker’ret said, since a lot of the ceiling was now on the floor.
Nita turned to her detector spells, found a favorite all-purpose one with a good range, and read it, inserting the name in the Speech for the Tawalf species, and the energy signature of the big fusion weapons. The silence of a working spell settled around her, while in the back of her mind she could sense the peridexic effect waiting to see if she needed extra power. Hey, Nita said silently, thanks for what you did back there.
You did that. As for the rest—Did it actually sound a little shy? It was my pleasure. And also a pleasure to see a spell I haven’t seen done quite that way before. That’s one for the book.
Nita smiled as the wizardry completed. Closing her eyes, in her mind she could see a swarm of little sparks, like thirty or forty bright bees, all seemingly orbiting one another in a tight swarm down one end of the main cross-corridor. There were no other Tawalf life signs present in the Crossings, and no further live-fusion signatures.
Nita opened her eyes. “Not many of them left,” she said. “They’re all down at the left-hand end of that corridor.” She pointed. “I think they’re trying to get out.”
“That they won’t do,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve cut power to all the gates, and instructed the master gating matrices to refuse any incoming gating. Let’s go have a word with the Tawalf and find out where my ancestor and sibs are.”
Or if they are, Nita thought. Suddenly, she felt very tired. “And you turned off the self-destruct?”
“No,” Sker’ret said. He reached up to the self-destruct console and pulled off what Nita had at first thought was a small protruding piece of the monitor panel. As he detached it, the little slick black piece of metal or plastic came alive with the same frozen figures that shone on the main monitor. Sker’ret opened his mandibles and swallowed it.
Nita’s eyes went wide. “Uh, feeling like a snack?”
“Not that much like one,” Sker’ret said. “This way it can’t be lost or taken from me, and if I have to destroy it, that option’s only a stomach or two away. Let’s go deal with the survivors.”
Nita climbed out of the rack while lifting the accelerator wizardry carefully to keep it from interfering with the local matter. As the three of them walked down the corridor, detouring around blasted pieces of Crossings and remnants of the destroyed fusion weapons, Nita put her free hand up to her face and found herself dripping with sweat and covered with dust. “‘Mela,” she said, wiping some of the sweat away, “how in the worlds did you get here?”
Carmela was ambling along on the other side of Sker’ret, gazing in idle interest at the general destruction. “Well, when you left, the TV and the TiVo and the DVD player were still in sync with Spot,” she said. “While I was changing channels, I found where the two of them were storing the coordinates of all the places you were passing through. And since I didn’t feel like just sitting around after you guys utterly ditched me, I used the TV’s browser to look up where you’d been. There’s a lot there about the Crossings. I thought, ‘Hey, I could go there! I know the address now.’ And the TV showed me how—”
“The TV showed you?”
“It’s real helpful,” Carmela said, “when it’s not being bossed around by the remote. Come to think of it, it’s been a lot more talkative the past few days.”
“And it made you a worldgate,” Sker’ret said, sounding bemused.
“It put it in the closet in my room,” Carmela said. She smiled sunnily. “I told Kit I wanted a magic closet! And now I’ve got one.”
“Oh boy,” Nita said, imagining what Kit’s reaction to this was going to be.
“I was going to do some shopping,” Carmela said, glancing around her regretfully at the trashed and blasted shops. “But when I got here, I heard all this noise, so I ran down this way. And what do I find but all these skinny purple aliens running around shooting at everything! Some of them started shooting at me, too. That was not very friendly of them.” Her tone of voice might have been used to describe the antics of unruly toddlers. “I told them to stop. They wouldn’t. And then after that, I saw them shooting at you. I thought maybe Kit was here, too, so—” She shrugged. “Nobody gets to blow up my baby brother while I have anything to say about it. Or his best friend! So I took steps.”
“Uh,” Nita said, and could think of absolutely nothing else to say.
“Where is he, by the way?” Carmela said.
This is not a place where I want to be overheard discussing what’s really going on. “Uh, there’s another planet where we’re doing some work.”
“Great,” Carmela said. “When we’re done here, let’s go.”
“Ah,” Sker’ret said. “Carmela, the situation there is—”
“‘Mela,” Nita said simultaneously, “look, we’re really grateful that you got here when you did, but—”
Carmela gave the two of them what Nita’s mom used to refer to as “an old-fashioned look.” “Yeah, right, don’t even bother, you two,” Carmela said. “I can hear it already. Blah blah blah for your own safety, blah blah blah don’t know what you’re getting into, blah blah blah forget it, Neets!” Her voice was casual, even cheerful, but she hefted the curling iron in a very meaningful way. “It’s really a good thing Kit didn’t void the warranty on this thing when he was putting the safety on it,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter, because I figured out how to get the safety off, and then how to get the upgrade. I can figure out most things, given time. Juanita Louise, you take me home and it’ll take me about ten minutes to figure out where you went—and I’ll be right back. How much time can you spare to waste dragging me back home over and over?”