Those concerns I’d had about not wanting to kill my attacker were swirling down the drain. I raised my hand and projected a stream of metal-eating nanites at his hoverboard. He saw the blast coming and leaped off, somersaulting in the air and landing safely on the ground. Junup had illegally maxed out Ardov’s Confederation skill tree, and that made him like Captain America. I, on the other hand, had the Former skills, and that made me like Superman. I didn’t even care if I was mixing Marvel and DC—I was going to kick his butt from one continuity to the next, and there was nothing he could do about it. His hoverboard was gone, and it was now a fight, plain and simple. He was sure he had the advantage in a straight-up brawl, but he was in for a nasty surprise.
Alice was on her feet, looking battered but not seriously hurt. Her hair was a wild mess of tangles and twigs. Her glasses were crooked on her face but still intact. Did she even need them with her upgrades? I’d have to ask her that later.
“Zeke, forget him!” she called to me. “He can’t hurt us. You need to grab Villainic and get out of here.”
“You’re still pathetically trying to make everything in the universe work out just right,” Ardov said to me, planting his feet like he was ready for me to charge him. “Don’t you get it? Even if you were to get everything you want, then what? You bring Tamret back here, where she’d be a bigger freak than she is on Rarel. How do you think your fellow humans will take to having an alien criminal living among them? No matter what you do, you’ll still end up miserable. I get a certain satisfaction out of that.”
I was about to launch myself at him, but Alice blasted me with another communication, this time through my HUD. The words Go! I’ll cover you! appeared before me in gigantic glowing letters.
She was right. It would have been nice to deliver a superpowered punch to Ardov, sending him flying over the tops of trees. I knew he could survive it, and I had no doubt the memory would keep me happy for years to come. Even so, I turned away. I’d just risked my own skin, and Villainic’s, too, I suppose, because I’d let Ardov get to me. Escaping from Earth was our priority. Maybe I’d get a chance to humiliate Ardov in the future. Hopefully I’d never have to face him again, though. Making sure he was on the losing side would be revenge enough, I decided. The most important thing was getting everyone out of here.
I turned to help Villainic up, but my HUD detected another incoming weapon. I raised my new shields, but this wasn’t an energy attack. It was a physical weapon. A projectile, like a bullet, though the readings I was getting made it clear it was something much more advanced.
I realized, too late, that the defenses we had might not be good enough. The projectile was partially phased, cycling rapidly from energy to matter and back again, and it pierced through the shields as though they weren’t even there.
It hit Alice in the shoulder.
She spun around and hit the ground, rolling as the momentum of the blow knocked her across the blackened grass.
I’m okay, she messaged me almost instantly. It’s not serious. You need to move.
Even with just the Confederation skill tree, a bullet wound to the shoulder would mean nothing. The nanites would already be working to expel the bullet and repair any damage. Nothing short of a direct hit to the brain or heart would be deadly. I tried to suppress the rage coursing through me. He’d shot my friend, someone I cared about. Maybe he was trying to goad me into a fight. I had to find the will to resist taking the bait.
I would have, too, if it weren’t for the readings I was getting from Alice. My scan showed me that her wound wasn’t healing. The damage to her cells was spreading, defying the ability of the nanites to repair the damage. That was bad enough, but there was more. Whatever Ardov had shot her with, it was transmitting data somewhere, cutting through our communications blackout.
When they’d had Tamret in the lab, she had been able to conceal her nanites to keep the Phands from figuring out how they worked. Now they’d devised another way to try to get that information. They’d had to hurt Alice to do it, but I had a feeling both Ardov and Nora Price were perfectly fine with that.
While I’d been showing off, reveling in what I could do, the Phands had been using the time to figure out how to study our abilities. If I was right, they were getting detailed information on how we had hacked the Former tech tree. Alice was hurt, maybe dying, and the Phands were learning everything they needed to know in order to eliminate our advantage.
There was one person who could tell me what I needed to know to stop all of this, and he just happened to be the being I hated most in the galaxy. Or maybe second most. Definitely top three. It was between Ardov, Junup, and Nora Price for sure. I stopped worrying about the rank, and I charged him.
There was nothing Ardov could do about it. He grinned when he first saw me coming, but then he noticed my speed. He might have observed that I was glowing and that fire was shooting down my legs and away from me like rocket exhaust. I was creating these effects intentionally—while they didn’t actually make me any more dangerous, they looked menacing, and I figured they had to intimidate him. If he wanted to mess with me, he was going to see what he was up against.
He not only held his ground, but he charged me. He was slow by my standards, but he shifted from a tackling stance to something more aggressive, and he took me by surprise. He swung at me, and while I managed to avoid the full impact of the punch, his fist clipped my nose, which sprayed an alarming amount of blood. I expected Ardov to press the attack, but instead he rushed past me. He had my blood on his hands, and he was wiping it on a piece of cloth, which he quickly deposited in a plastic bag that he placed in his pocket. Having then finished this bizarre process, he turned to face me again.
My nanites were already healing my nose. There was nothing left of the damage now but some drying blood. It wasn’t what he had done to me, but to Alice, that fueled my rage.
I charged him again, more quickly this time, and grabbed him before he could evade me. I was done messing around, and, operating purely on instinct, I created a localized gravity-dampening field, the sort of technology I’d been examining when I’d proposed making the van fly. I pressed my feet against the earth and shot up into the air.
I really was a superhero now. It would have been so amazingly cool if my friend weren’t lying on the ground below me, possibly dying, while nanites in her body recorded and transmitted data that would doom the Earth and the galaxy to tyranny.
“What did you do to her, and how do I stop it?” I asked Ardov when we hit about three thousand feet.
“Maybe I misjudged you,” he said. “Have you lost interest in Tamret already? The novelty of another species has worn off?”
“Tell me what you did to Alice!” I demanded.
If he was afraid, he hid it well. “I’ll never tell you anything,” he said with a sneer.
“Then you’re no good to me,” I told him. And so saying, I let him drop.
• • •
Watching a guy you really hate—who has bullied you, hurt your friends, and become a foot soldier in an evil empire’s war—fall a thousand feet, screaming and limbs flailing, is very satisfying. It’s an experience every decent person should have. I was in no mood to enjoy it, though. The clock was ticking.
I cut off the antigravity effects and dove down and plucked Ardov out of the air, directing my energy field to stabilize his skeletal structure from the sudden halt in velocity. I needed him alive, and I couldn’t afford for him to go the way of Gwen Stacy.
“Let’s try this again,” I said. “How do I stop what you did to her?”
He laughed at me. I was flying him hundreds of feet above the ground. I’d just let him fall almost to his death, and he thought it was funny. This guy didn’t easily lose his cool. “You showed me that you care about the human girl more than Tamret. Better yet, you showed me you won’t kill me. I know all your weaknesses. Why should I tell you anything?”
It was a good question. I had to think about it for a se
cond. “Because I can pull your arm right off your body. You will heal in seconds. You won’t die, but that arm won’t be coming back. And keep in mind, you’ve got four limbs. Maybe you won’t tell me what I want to know after the first arm, but you will when I go for the second one. You’ve got three seconds to decide.”
Then I saw what I was looking for. Fear. He needed to be important, vital, active. I’d come up with a way to get what I wanted without risking his death. I could keep him alive, but hurt him enough that he would be useless to Junup—and he seemed to fear that more than death.
Was I actually going to tear off his arm? I have no idea, but Alice did not look good, and the data was flowing fast. Hesitating was not an option.
I was distracted by a ping from Tamret. Forget him. We need to get out of here. Once we hit tunnel, the data stream will cut off.
That was a good point. There was no way to transmit data across the vast distances of space, only physical objects. Smacking Ardov around had been satisfying, but maybe a waste of time. There was still the matter of Alice’s health, but he could tell us about that on the way. As much as I hated the idea, Ardov was coming with us.
Get Alice in the ship, I sent back. I’m coming in, and I’m bringing a prisoner.
I touched Ardov’s neck and injected him with a sleeping agent. I then turned toward the ship and began zooming toward it.
I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I had allowed my hatred for Ardov to cloud my judgment, and I’d been lured into making what was pretty clearly a tactical error. We’d lost time, maybe for Alice and maybe for all of us, and I hoped that I hadn’t just handed Ardov his biggest victory over me yet.
I flew toward the ship, the air stinging my eyes. Maybe there were some tears of rage and frustration there too. I’d been an idiot. I’d put it all on the line so I could show off, so I could make Ardov see that I wasn’t a victim.
Then, suddenly, I was no longer thinking about my mistakes, because I wasn’t flying. I was falling. I’d lost all ability to control my flight. My HUD was offline and I was looking through normal, human eyes. With no warning I’d gone from being a superhero to a guy who just happened to be a thousand feet in the air, gripping a cat alien he hated. And we were both tumbling toward the ground.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
Tamret saved me. She leaped up and plucked me out of the sky. She probably could have saved Ardov too, but she didn’t bother. Maybe she knew that Steve was going to grab him. Maybe not.
“I’ve got you,” she said, but her voice lacked the glee I’d come to expect when she saved me from one of my stupid mistakes. Maybe she was angry with me for getting drawn into Ardov’s trap. Maybe she was worried about how much danger we were in. I was worried about all those things too, but I was relieved she’d been there for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank me later.”
She landed hard on the ground and unceremoniously rolled me out of her arms. I found my footing, just barely. I felt wobbly, like after a carnival ride that spins you around.
Charles was at the entrance to the ship, waving us in. “Alice is on board. We must go.”
I felt like vomiting and passing out, and I was more than a little freaked out about not being able to activate my HUD, but I managed to propel myself forward.
Steve was at the controls, and he didn’t wait for me to stop staggering, or even for the doors to close, before he began to lift off the ground. “Everyone not strapped in might want to grab something,” he said.
I managed to take hold of a metal ring, possibly designed for that exact purpose, just as I was thrown to near horizontal, like a flag in the wind. Steve simultaneously turned hard and accelerated. The dampening fields had not yet kicked in, and without them travel at these speeds was going to feel like being flung through space inside a hollow cannonball. The effect didn’t last long, though. We began to level out around the time we exited the atmosphere. I looked over and was relieved to note that the door was now closed.
“We’ve got Phands on our tail, and it’ll be a minute before we can tunnel,” Steve shouted. “I need to keep them distracted. Zeke, you want to take the weapons console?”
I wanted to be able to step up, but I felt like I’d just been rattled around inside a jar for five minutes. Besides which, my upgrades were still not functioning. Anyone with the Former skills, even someone who had never seen a weapons console before, would be faster and more accurate than I could be right now.
“Can’t do it,” I said, shaking my head as I slid down to the deck. I was still nauseated and dizzy, and I put my head between my knees in order to keep from puking. Before I did that, though, I managed to catch a look cross Steve’s reptilian face. Concern? Disappointment?
Without a word, Charles sat down at the weapons station and began to lay down a barrage of suppressive fire at lightning speed. I glanced up at the monitor showing the aft view and saw Phandic cruisers spiraling wildly as they tried to avoid our PPB blasts. I wasn’t getting the job done, and that felt terrible, but the job was getting done, and maybe that was all that mattered.
In another few seconds Steve was able to open the tunnel aperture. The disorientation that accompanies dropping out of relativistic space was more than I could handle, and at the very moment our ship violated the laws of ordinary physics and we punched a hole into the fabric of reality itself, I barfed on my shoes.
• • •
One thing I will say for the Phands: As a species of recreational pukers, they know how to clean up their messes. Little robots appeared out of nowhere and scrubbed the floor while nanites broke my upchuck down into a molecular mist. A brief spray of something citrus-smelling misted from the floor. No harm, no foul.
By the time these machines had finished their work, my nausea had started to ease up, so it was time to take stock of the situation. I could now deal with exciting developments like Ardov being along for the ride. Hooray. He was currently unconscious, and his wrists and ankles were bound with blue plasma cuffs that someone had generated. I knew that even with his enhanced strength he couldn’t break out of them, but somehow that didn’t make me feel any better about having him around. I wouldn’t breathe easily until he was off the ship, preferably locked in the Phantom Zone, though I’d settle for a concrete bunker at the bottom of an ocean on a distant planet somewhere.
As bad as that was, there were even more serious issues to contend with. Alice was unconscious, lying on the deck of the ship, with Dr. Roop and Charles hovering over her, looking disturbingly doubtful. There was also the matter of my upgrades being offline, but I would deal with that later.
I went over to where they’d set Alice, some blankets under her head. Her eyes were closed, and her skin had become pale and slightly waxy-looking. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked. Besides all the other terrible things I was feeling, I could now add guilt. Alice had wanted out. She had been willing to see us to the ship, but then she’d planned to go find her dad. Now we were taking her away from Earth, against her will. We didn’t have much of a choice, but I still felt terrible about it.
Dr. Roop shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure. When Ardov awakens, he may be able to provide us with more information, though I doubt he will choose to be cooperative. As near as I can tell, the weapon disoriented the operations of Alice’s nanites while simultaneously transmitting data about their function back to the Phands. I do not know if the weapon was meant to harm her or if that was an unintended side effect. However, the projectile that struck her did considerable damage, and now her metabolism appears to be slowing at an alarming rate.”
“Is she going to die?” I asked.
“If the process does not stop, or if we do not find a way to stop it, then yes.”
“How long does she have?”
“A week, perhaps,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe less.”
That was not good. I told myself there was good reason to hope we could restore order to the cosmos with
in a week. We could get Alice to a friendly Confederation hospital and have the best medical minds in the galaxy working to help her. I hated the idea of putting her health on hold, but I wasn’t sure what else we could do. Until we solved some bigger problems, there was no safe harbor we could take her to—at least not that I knew about.
“How could they know how to do this?” Charles asked. “We haven’t even begun to understand our abilities.”
“It seems that they have begun to understand them,” Dr. Roop said. “Remember, Zeke’s father stole the code for the military tech tree after the Phands uncovered it. They have already had a chance to study it at length.”
“Then why did they need to get data from us?” I asked.
“Because we hacked the system and learned how to maximize the available abilities,” Dr. Roop explained.
Tamret, who had been working the navigation panel, turned around and held up her furry hands in protest. “Look, I know I’m good, but I’m just one girl. I can’t believe that in all of the Phandic Empire they can’t find someone who could pull off what I was able to do pretty quickly—and while under a lot of pressure.”
“I have no doubt that they tried,” Dr. Roop said, “but remember, Tamret, you hacked a particular version of the code, and you did it from a Former computer. There were almost certainly avenues and back doors available from that console that would not be found elsewhere. It is also true that, as adolescents, your brains are more pliable than those of adults. You see things differently, and that may have helped you to exploit elements in the Former code.”
“Then why do the Phands not use their own young hackers to crack the code?” Charles asked.
“They may not have any,” Dr. Roop said. “Theirs is not a society that tolerates beings such as Tamret, who do not flinch at breaking the rules in order to do what is right. And even if they did have hackers, using adolescents for such a purpose would not have occurred to the Phands. You will recall they regard young beings as barely even sentient.”