Kit’s mouth dropped open. “What are— Why are— Since when are you supposed to be here?”
His sister smiled her sunniest and most infuriating smile at him. “Since I got hold of the manual,” Carmela said.
Kit’s heart simply froze.
“But this is all just too much for you right now, isn’t it?” Carmela said. “Never mind, I’ll go talk to someone I’m much more interested in. Oh, Ronan…” And she headed away.
Not even if the Lone Power Itself had walked into the cavern right then could Kit have done anything whatever but stand there in shock. Oh no, Kit thought. No, no, no, this is worse than bad, so much worse. What did I do to deserve this?
He turned back to Nita. To his complete astonishment, she was still hugging Dairine. “I was so worried about you.”
“I was worrying, too. What about Dad?”
“He’s okay.”
“Uh, Neets,” Kit said.
She glanced over at him, smiling. “Oh, and your pop and mama,” Nita said, “they’re okay, too, my dad says.”
“That wasn’t what I was worried about.”
Nita gave him a look. “You weren’t?”
He looked over at Carmela. “Neets, what happened with her?”
Nita’s expression was both bemused and appreciative. “She showed up on Rirhath B and blew six kinds of crap out of a bunch of alien invaders,” Nita said. “We didn’t get too much further into the details: there wasn’t time.” She paused and looked at Memeki.
Her expression appeared shocked, but somehow not in a way Kit had expected. It was almost as if she was seeing something she’d half expected. She let go of Dairine at last, and pushed her hair back on one side as she looked at the Yaldiv.
“This is Memeki,” Kit said.
Nita and Memeki exchanged a glance. “Yes,” Nita said slowly, “she is.”
Okay, this is getting weird, Kit thought, but I should be used to that by now. “We can’t stay here long,” Kit said. “More of these guys are probably coming; we should find somewhere else to be.”
“Okay,” Nita said, “but before anything else happens, I really need something to drink. Has she stolen all my sodas yet?”
Dairine looked innocent. “She would have,” Kit said, “except I stole some first and stuck them in my pup tent.”
Nita punched him gratefully in the shoulder. “Knew I could count on you,” she said, and headed that way.
Kit watched her go, then turned and let out a long, frustrated breath as he saw Carmela prattling away to Ronan. This is going to take forever to sort out, he thought as Ponch came trotting back toward him. Not that we’ve got that much forever left. “You all right?” he said to Ponch.
I’m fine! It’s so great that Nita’s back!
“No argument,” Kit said.
And Carmela! I wondered when she’d get here. I missed her! And everybody else was here, so she needed to be here, too.
Kit rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” He turned to Memeki. “Memeki, how are you feeling?”
Memeki appeared to be finding it hard to speak. Ponch nosed her. She was a little nervous at first, he said, but I knew you’d save us.
I wish I’d been that certain, Kit thought. Memeki was watching Filif lower the mochteroofs back into place, and Kit saw, to his satisfaction, that at least her trembling had stopped. “I was afraid,” she said. “But you protected me as you said you would.” She sounded troubled. “Yet why did the warriors try to kill me? Has my scent changed? I am one of the Favored; no warrior should dare to touch me!”
“I don’t know,” Kit said. He patted her carapace. “We’ll try to find out. Meanwhile, I think we’re going to have to get out of here pretty quick. Ponch, stay with her and take care of her, okay?”
I will.
He headed over to where Roshaun and Dairine were talking to Nita. “Roshaun,” Kit said, “that was a sweet one.”
Roshaun looked startled. “‘Sweet’?”
Kit laughed. “An idiom,” he said. “What you did, whatever that was, it was terrific!”
“I did a location-to-location matter transfer,” Roshaun said. “It was… surprisingly effective.” And he smiled.
“You find a volcano on this planet somewhere?”
“Oh, no. I borrowed some stellar metal from the system primary: iron, mostly.” Kit’s eyes went wide. “It’s a novel technique,” Roshaun said, and glanced over at Dairine.
Kit raised his eyebrows. The thought that Dairine had been not only practicing fast-deployment routines for pulling white-hot atmospheric iron out of stars, but also coaching someone else in it, freaked him out slightly. But then Roshaun’s good with stars. Maybe I shouldn’t worry.
In the meantime, there were two other things Kit was going to have to handle in a hurry, and it took him several moments to figure out which of them he disliked more. He sighed and went over to where Ronan was taking down his pup-tent interface. “Are you okay?” he said.
Ronan nodded, the usual curt gesture.
“Then do you mind telling me what just happened here?” Kit said. “I thought you said the Champion could cover for us!”
“I thought he could, too,” Ronan said. “But he’s on it again, reinforcing the safeguards that slipped.”
“And how long’s he going to be able to hold them in place this time?” Kit said. “If they slipped once, they’re likely to do it again. It’s the Pullulus, isn’t it? It’s affecting even him now.”
Ronan nodded. “Or his presence inside time, inside me. He didn’t feel it happening at first, and now he’s getting worried.”
“He’s getting worried!” Kit rubbed his face. “So when we get out of here, is he going to be any use to us?” Kit said. “And what about you? What—” The temptation to say What good are you without him? was considerable, but Kit restrained himself. “What’s it going to take to get him back into shape?”
“Getting rid of the Pullulus would do it,” Ronan said, grim. “And while there is one other way, it’d probably take another sixty or seventy years to finesse, so maybe we’d better concentrate on taking care of Memeki.”
“That’s another problem,” Kit said. “They sure wanted to take care of her.” He looked at the few fragments of Yaldiv warrior that had not been completely vaporized or blasted to other kinds of nothing during the attack. “Someone’s realized that she’s important. But not important enough that It came Itself.”
It’s still not here in a completely embodied avatar, the Champion said. That, I would feel immediately. It remains partly unaware … for the moment.
Kit held his breath at the sound of the Champion’s voice speaking through Ronan. It seemed to have lost a lot of the power he normally heard in it. “I guess we should be grateful,” Kit said. “But I don’t think it’s gonna last. Anyway, have the others all take their pup tents down pronto. We won’t stay here a second longer than we have to.”
He turned, then, and let out a long, annoyed breath. This couldn’t be put off any longer. Off by the former crevasse, Filif and Roshaun were checking over the mochteroofs, and Ponch had run over to them and the slender figure who now stood by Filif and was fluffing up his fronds. “Just look at you!” said Carmela. “You wore your hat all the way here!”
“It has become a personality thing,” said Filif, reaching up with one frond to adjust his Mets baseball cap. Kit had to smile slightly, as Filif’s sense of which part of the cap should face forward tended to change from hour to hour.