Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition Read Online Free Page B

connected,” Tom said. “Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it’s been appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where ‘new’ dark matter is being found, local space is beginning to expand much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster.”
    “So everything’s getting farther and farther away from everything else,” Kit said.
    “Right. Now, that’s bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones, and effects that go deeper than the merely mental.”
    Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif’s branches.
    “The expansion isn’t just affecting space itself,” Carl said. “It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on—the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn’t slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion.”
    “How?” Filif said.
    “That’s going to vary from species to species,” Tom said. “In our case, the case of more senior wizards—and I don’t mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence—it’s going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness. We’re going to start finding it hard to care, even hard to believe in what we’re all doing. And then our wizardry will vanish.”
    Nita looked at Tom and thought, with a sudden twisting in her gut, how very tired he looked.
    “Yes,” Tom said. “It’s already begun.” He let out a long breath. “Now of course this is something we’d try to derail. Most Seniors and Advisory-level wizards from this part of the galaxy were involved this past week with an intervention that was meant to deal with the problem, at least in the short term, for our galaxy.”
    Nita thought of Tom and her dad sitting in her dining room and talking, some days back, when they’d thought no one was listening. We have a fighting chance—actually, a lot better than just a chance, Tom had been saying to her dad, about something the Senior Wizards had been contemplating.
    “So that’s where you were when nobody could get through to you, even with the manuals,” Nita said.
    Carl nodded. “None of us was sure when the necessary forces could be completely assembled. When the call finally came, we had to drop everything and go. There was no time for explanations.”
    “Or interruptions,” Tom said. “To say we were busy would have been putting it mildly… not that it made any difference, in the end. Because we failed. After that we were all sent home to our homeworlds to start organizing their defense.”
    Nita went cold in a rush, as cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head.
    “Why now?” Kit said. “Why is all this happening now?”
    “Not even the Powers are sure,” Carl said. “Someone’s going to have to find out, though, because the ‘why’ may be the key to solving the problem. If it can be solved.”
    Kit had a very uneasy look on his face. “So, if you guys are going to lose your wizardry for a while… who’s going to take over for you as Seniors?” he said. “Who’s going to be running the planet?”
    Tom and Carl looked at each other, then at Nita and Kit.
    “You are,” they said.

2: Force Support
    Kit sat there and came to terms with what it felt like when all the blood drained from your face. It was a feeling he really didn’t like.
    “You’re kidding, right?” he said after a moment.
    Tom shook his head. “I know this is a terrible thing to dump on you,” he said. “But in a very short time—certainly within a couple of weeks, possibly within days—we adult wizards are not going to be able to do our jobs anymore.”
    “We hoped we could head it off,” Carl said.