“Zeke is right,” Dr. Roop said, though his expression made me think he hadn’t bought my explanation. “Our first order of business is to get away from this place.”
The computer I’d tapped into had identified a docking bay across the compound, and I began to lead the others in that direction. There were a few more obstacles I had to get rid of, such as a small platoon of guards, some mechanized death turrets, and a few robotic sentries armed with dark-matter blasters. I had the gang hold back while I handled these minor issues.
Outside the docking bay, there were no guards. Either every guard in the facility was now unconscious or recovering from broken bones, or there was a last stand waiting for us inside. I couldn’t even bring myself to hope it was the first option. I told everyone to hold back. Tamret was reluctant, but she’d seen what I could do and was willing to try things my way while she and Steve peered around the corner, holding PPB pistols just in case.
Bracing myself, I hacked the electronic lock and opened the double doors that led to the hangar. It was massive—large enough to hold a few long-range ships as well as a number of smaller, shorter-range shuttles. The huge ceiling made it feel like a cathedral. I did a scan for life signs, but determined it had been completely abandoned, so I waved everyone forward.
We made it halfway to the nearest ship before we saw Ardov.
He stood fifty feet in front of us. I had no idea why I hadn’t been able to see him when I scanned the room. Maybe he had some sort of cloaking device, like the one the Phandic renegades used. Maybe he hadn’t been inside yet and had just entered from a door I couldn’t see. It hardly mattered. He was here, and I was going to keep him from hurting anyone.
Ardov stepped forward, wearing dark pants and a dark shirt, and a long coat that flared villainously. He grinned at me as he placed the tip of his finger on his tongue. Then he opened his hand and tossed something high into the air.
It was a twenty-sided die.
In the blink of an eye, I went through all the ways that this was completely terrible news. If Ardov was taking the time to roll a die, it wasn’t because he was trying to get in a quick game of Pathfinder. He had the Former military tech upgrades. I was about to fight a guy who could do everything I could do—except he was a lot meaner than I was.
That was the immediate problem. In terms of the big picture, it meant that this technology wasn’t just for those of us who had unlocked it in the Hidden Fortress. The Phands had figured out a way to reverse engineer Tamret’s hack of the tech tree. When I’d fought Ardov back on Earth, I’d more or less handed our greatest enemies the tools they needed to conquer the galaxy. Now I understood what Investigator Kossnarian-iz had been saying about the tests she was conducting. Months, she’d said. The Phands would have complete control of the Former tech tree, be able to distribute it to all their soldiers, in months. If we didn’t get the Confederation out of Junup’s hands soon, there would be nothing to stop the Phands from expanding as quickly and as mercilessly as they wanted. It would be the end of the Confederation forever. I wasn’t even sure that the renegades’ plan of destroying Confederation Central would be enough to stop the Phands from getting these abilities.
That was the situation I was facing: beat a guy who had every advantage over me—who had those advantages because of me—or allow the galaxy to enter a potentially endless era of bleak oppression. Not too much pressure.
I slowed time so I could think. How could I defeat Ardov? I couldn’t simply slug it out and hope for the best. I had to figure out some angle, or everything I cared about would be lost. Tamret and Steve and the others could die, right here, if I didn’t come up with a plan.
One option would be to share my abilities with some of my friends. Ardov might be tough and evil, but he would be no match for an augmented team including Steve and Mi Sun. It was a nice thought, but I didn’t have the time to explain to the others about eating powder and rolling a die. Even if I weren’t so rushed, I wasn’t about to ask one of them to risk death. If the throw didn’t come up high enough, I would be responsible for one of my friends dying, and I couldn’t handle that.
The only other thing I could think of was to manipulate Ardov’s throw. The wacko Phand scientist had told me that nothing I did to the die would change the outcome—the actual number was determined the moment the die left the thrower’s hand—but maybe Ardov didn’t know that. If I messed with this throw and he thought I’d doomed him, it might distract him enough to make him vulnerable.
I looked at the die, now spinning in midair. I calculated its trajectory and determined that it was going to land on the number twenty. Wow. Good for him. If he were on offense, he’d get a critical hit.
I then tracked its arc, calculated the exact angle and pressure required to produce the result I wanted, and executed. I darted forward, and before Ardov had time to realize what I was up to, I had gently tapped the die, altering its spin. It landed on the floor, bounced twice, and came to a stop—on the number one.
He paused, looked at the die, and looked at me. He blinked in disbelief. There was a moment of utter silence. We all stood, staring at the die. No one besides me and Ardov understood what it meant, but they still somehow recognized that something important had just happened.
“You just killed me,” Ardov said, his voice hushed.
“Sorry, Ardov.” I shrugged, going for the stone-cold-killer effect. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off in general, but it helped that Ardov thought we were discussing something I’d already done. “You keep messing with our plans. Things will be a lot easier when you’re out of the picture. No hard feelings, right?”
Maybe this was cruel, making light of his doom, but I figured he had it coming. He’d tried to kill, capture, or humiliate me enough times. A few hours would go by, and he’d realize he wasn’t dead. Besides, the only chance I had of beating him was to be smarter than he was.
“One of your stupid tricks,” he said, “and it’s killed me.”
“It’s actually a clever trick,” I said, “the sort that gets you every time. You never learn. And now you never will. Because you’ll be dead and all.”
His eyes turned dark and terrifying, and I began to wonder if, instead of evening the odds, I’d given him an edge. I’d just given this dangerous bully nothing to lose and every reason to want to hurt me and everyone I cared about.
The instant that thought crossed my mind, Ardov charged.
• • •
Tamret and Steve were firing their weapons on him, but he ignored the impacts like they were raindrops. I looked around, trying to find an angle, some way to survive the onslaught of an enraged Ardov who now appeared to want nothing so much as to avenge himself.
Maybe the trick with the die hadn’t been as smart as I’d thought it was, but Ardov had reminded me of something fairly important. Up until I’d faced him on Earth, he had always been bigger and stronger and more dangerous than I was, and I’d always found a way to get the upper hand. The only reason he’d gotten the better of me in our last two encounters was because he’d had the advantage of cleverness—even if it was cleverness supplied by Phandic scientists. On Earth he’d had the antinanite powder that had shut down my upgrades. On the ship he’d had the EMP device. Now he had nothing but pure power and rage, and that meant, historically speaking, that the odds favored me.
Even so, with him running toward me at almost a hundred miles an hour, I didn’t feel like the stats told the whole story.
“Scatter!” I shouted to the others. “Take cover!” He might try to hurt them in order to throw me off, so if they were in different locations, it would make things harder for him.
I leaped forward, planning to take him out at the knees. I could hit him with the force of a freight train, and it probably wouldn’t break anything. If it did, the injuries would heal almost instantly, but physics still affected us, and he would be knocked over, buying me a few seconds to work out a broader strategy. In our heightened states, seconds could seem li
ke hours.
The problem was that Ardov, while no genius, wasn’t actually stupid. He could project my movements as well as I could project his. More significantly, it had looked like he was coming to tear off my head, but I realized, an instant too late, that he wanted, instead, to tear out my heart. He was going after Tamret.
There was no point in her running. She knew that she couldn’t outpace him, so she turned and fired her gun into his face. The blast did nothing, but the light distracted him, just for an instant. It was the only advantage I would get, so I took it.
I grabbed him and leaped up into the air, moving like a rocket. I smashed his head into the ceiling, which erupted in a burst of dust and wood and metal.
He was, I realized, stuck. While he tried to pull himself out without separating his own head from his body, I hovered in the air, slamming his torso with punches that I delivered with lightning speed. This might seem like poor sportsmanship, but the guy had just tried to kill my maybe ex-girlfriend, and I was in no mood to play nice.
Ardov managed to wiggle free, and he tumbled to the ground with chunks of ceiling falling after him. Dust clung to the fur on his face.
Maybe he had not figured out how to fly yet. He had the same abilities I did, but he still had to explore them and discover what they were. I’d had more time to tinker. This was not an advantage I was going to squander. I turned around and, with one fist extended in the classic Superman pose, I sped toward him like a rocket. He leaped out of the way in time to avoid the impact, but I was still able to grab him by his shirt. I spun rapidly, twirling like a discus thrower, and tossed him across the hangar so he landed hard against the wall. The wall dented but did not break.
I used the momentary lull to look around. I didn’t see any of the others. That was good. If I didn’t see them, then Ardov didn’t. I was going to scan for life signs, but I held off. Maybe he didn’t know how to do that yet either, but he might be able to detect what I was doing. I didn’t want to teach him any new tricks—especially now that he seemed to have picked up on flying. I realized this because he was zipping through the air, coming directly toward me.
“I’m going to make you watch me kill them!” he screamed, his face twisted with rage.
I waited until the last second and super-sped out of the way. Ardov tried to stop, but he ended up colliding with the hull of a shuttle. I knew from my own experiences that the Former tech didn’t dull the pain of a blow like that, but it made it easier to deal with, like you could put it in a box and forget about it until later. Pain aside, a blunder like that was humiliating, and I could see that Ardov was taking it kind of hard.
“That was fun,” I said. “Let’s do that a couple more times before your bad die roll kills you.”
He howled and came at me again. This time I went low, under his reach, and rolled like a ball into his legs. He toppled like a bowling pin. I grabbed his ankle, leaped into the air, and spun until we must have looked like a whirling propeller. I let him go, and he crashed into the wall again. This time he did go through it.
“I could do this all day!” I shouted. “Up until you’re dead, I mean. Tossing your corpse around won’t be as much fun.”
By the time I finished speaking, he was back and almost upon me, moving through the air like a missile. I tried dodging left, but he anticipated me this time, and he pulled me up by the arm.
Even with the tech repairing damage almost the instant it was inflicted, the pain was incredible. It shot up my arm and through my whole body. I hardly had time to call out, because he was tossing me against the wall. I hit with a solid impact, and everything went white and hot for an instant before the nanites dulled the pain and restored the damaged tissue.
No serious harm done, but it was a lot more fun being on the other side of the toss.
Ardov was on me again, lifting me up and hurling me back into the center of the hangar. I landed with a heavy thud, and I had hardly lifted my head off the floor when he came at me and punched me in the face. My head knocked against the hard floor and bounced up back into his fist. He hit me again.
This was bad. The punches were coming fast—too fast for the fraction of a second my nanites needed to compensate for injury and pain. It was like in a video game where you corner an enemy into a wedge in the landscape and you keep hitting or shooting him each time he tries to make a move. I was in a feedback loop, and I could not get out.
“If I’m going to die, you’re going to die first!” he shouted as he punched me. My head kept hitting the floor. It felt like my face was turning into a hot mash. My arms and legs twitched, and I couldn’t control them.
Everything started to recede. Maybe I was losing consciousness. Maybe the nanites were tinkering with my brain so the pain wouldn’t make me black out, but the world felt like it was floating away. It was almost like falling asleep, but with a lot more face-pummeling.
This was really it. Ardov was going to kill me, and even if one of the others had been willing to use the powder to save the Confederation from the Phands, they would never be able to because I hadn’t told them about it. In losing to Ardov, I had just lost the war.
I needed to find a way to turn this around, but I couldn’t. It was like my body didn’t belong to me anymore. I was this passive thing that watched through a red haze as Ardov’s furry fist cocked back and then came at me again and again. It was an endless repetitive motion, like a mechanical piston, firing away, destroying me. And it continued until something big and metal hit Ardov in the side and he went flying off of me.
I looked up to see a shuttle now parked inches from where I lay. Steve had to be piloting it. He’d hit Ardov with a shuttle.
Arms were grabbing me. I couldn’t see who it was—my vision was too foggy—but the arms weren’t hitting me, so I was going to assume they were friendly. I was set down somewhere, and there was a vague sensation of movement. I heard gasping. It was Alice, maybe, and from somewhere far away I heard Tamret telling someone to shut up. And then I passed out.
• • •
When I came to, my HUD’s chronometer informed me that I had been unconscious for eighty-seven seconds so that my body could perform some necessary maintenance. That felt like an understatement. The nanites had put those eighty-seven seconds to good use though, because I could see now, and it seemed like we were on a small Phandic ship—probably another long-range shuttle. I did not feel great by any reasonable standard, but I was feeling a lot better than I had been when Ardov was beating me into oblivion.
“Hey,” I heard Mi Sun say, “his face grew back.”
“It is an improvement over the pulp,” said Charles, turning around from his position at the navigation console, “if not a major one.”
Tamret was hugging me. “You looked awful. You looked like you shouldn’t even be alive.”
“I felt like that,” I said, trying not to think about the fact that Tamret seemed no longer to be angry with me. “But I’m okay now. Where are we?”
“There are orbital patrols,” Steve said from the helm station, “so I’m flying in atmosphere until Charles can calculate a safe path. Once he figures out a blind spot, we’re going to make a run for it.”
Tamret was still hugging me, and I wasn’t complaining. I had almost died out there. I had almost lost everything, and I would have if these guys hadn’t saved me. Steve had hit a bad guy with a space bus. That seemed like the height of friendship.
Then an alarm went off.
“We are experiencing hull degradation,” Charles said.
“What could cause that?” Alice asked.
“I have no idea,” Charles said. “I am putting it on the monitor.”
I’m not really all that good with the technical stuff, but I could see at once what the problem was. Ardov was on the top of the shuttle, holding a drill of some kind, trying to burn his way through the hull.
“We have perhaps seven minutes until he breaches,” Charles explained, “but only ninety seconds until he does enough da
mage to make the ship unsafe for space travel.”
I pushed myself to my feet. I felt a little light-headed, but almost as soon as I put a hand to the bulkhead to steady myself, I started feeling better. Now that I was no longer being beaten mercilessly, I was getting stronger by the second. “I’m going out there. I’ll get rid of him.” I might not have been at maximum capacity yet, but I was close, and someone had to stop Ardov.
“Relax, mate,” Steve said casually, as though having a guy on your hull with a drill was no big deal. “You don’t have to do everything. Just sit down, and everyone buckle up.”
We did as he said, and then as soon as we were ready, Steve simply rotated the shuttle. Ardov looked up, startled. He made a sudden effort to hold on, but he didn’t react quickly enough and simply fell off like a bean tipped out of a can. He fell toward the sea, still holding his drill. We watched in fascination and horror as he plummeted, limbs flailing.
Why wasn’t he flying? Had I hurt him too much in our fight? Was he too disoriented? Too distracted by his belief that I had doomed him with a bad saving throw? I kept expecting him to halt himself in the air and zip back toward us, but he didn’t. He fell.
I wanted to turn away—I didn’t want to see the impact—and yet I could not stop watching. I saw that, in the last instant, he seemed to stop struggling and relaxed, as though accepting his fate. Then there was a sudden gust of sea spray as a giant eel exploded out from the surface, its great jaws open. It let Ardov land softly against its massive yellow tongue, with barely a bounce, like he’d landed on a pillow. The eel then snapped its mouth shut and disappeared beneath the waves.
We all remained silent for a moment.
“I am attempting to think how this might qualify as poetic justice,” Charles said quietly, “but I can come up with nothing.”
“No poetry required,” Steve said. “He was a bad bloke, and now he’s eel food. Sometimes literal is best.”
No one else said anything. There was nothing left to say. I’d wanted Ardov out of my way, but not dead. Not that I questioned what Steve had done. He’d saved the ship, which meant he saved us. Maybe, in doing so, he’d saved the Confederation. I supposed Colonel Rage would say that this was war, and in war you have to do terrible things in order to stop worse things. Ardov had put us in the position of having to drop him into the ocean, but I knew this would haunt me later. I just hoped there would be a later in which to be haunted.