Skill points. Okay. That was an explanation, sort of. But then, not really. She was only level eleven, so there was no way her healing could be so significantly augmented. “You can’t have put everything into healing. You’ve obviously put a lot into other things.”
“I’ve spread things around pretty well,” she said.
“But your heart,” I said. I couldn’t get a handle on how she had come through this. I thought she was dead, and now she seemed almost fully recovered. “It went right through. Dr. Roop said that it was one of the few injuries the nanites couldn’t fix.”
“Boys don’t pay attention to anything,” she said, shaking her head at my foolishness. She took my hand and put it on the right side of her chest. Her fur was sopping wet with her blood. “Can’t you feel that?” she asked. “I’m a Rarel, Zeke. My heart is on the right side.”
I buried my face against her soft, soft neck. I didn’t care that it was covered with blood. I only cared that it was her, that she was alive. Tamret was alive.
After a second, she said, “I saw you go after him. You were angry.”
“I was,” I admitted.
“That was some leap. You were practically flying.”
I thought I had imagined that. I looked at her, smiling at me in that knowing way of hers. There was something she wasn’t telling me. “I really did that?”
She nodded. “I told you. You can do anything. We both can.”
I suddenly felt like there was something more to her words than Tamret’s bravado. I had done things I ought not to have been able to do. Tamret was healing incredibly rapidly on her own. “When you say you can do anything, what exactly do you mean?”
She winced in pain, but then managed to grin at me, a full-on wicked Tamret grin, and I knew she’d been up to something clever and unexpected and almost certainly against the rules.
“I hacked your account,” she said. “Just before we left. After you leveled up yourself, since I thought that way you wouldn’t notice. I did it with my account right after the fight with Ardov. At that point I’d already added a few points here and there, but after he almost killed me, there was no way I was about to let anyone mess with me like that again. And now no one is going to mess with you. Zeke, you are maxed out in all the branches of the skill tree, even the final, theoretical skills. Just like I am. You’re the skill equivalent of level ninety-seven. You have Former skills in all categories.”
I quickly called up my personal skill tree on my HUD. She was right. My experience points had gone up since I’d last looked—raiding an enemy prison will do that—but I had no empty skill slots. “But I’m still only level sixteen.”
“I had to decouple your skill points from your experience points, otherwise everyone would see your real level and we’d be caught. This way you can still gain experience like you normally would, but you won’t gain skill points because there’s no place left to apply them.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe this. I’m a superhero.”
“Almost as much as I am. Your brain isn’t wired to sense electromagnetic fields the way mine is. I’m an equivalent level one hundred and eight.”
Incredible powers. Incredible disregard for the Confederation’s most sacred rules. I couldn’t process this. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you might get mad at me for tinkering with the system.”
“This is totally illegal!” I protested. “They’ll kick us out for this!”
“See? That’s why I didn’t tell you.” She rubbed her hands together. “Time to move on.”
“What are you doing? You can’t get up. You almost died.”
She lashed out, slicing the back of my hand with an extended claw. There was a moment of pain, and then blood pooled across my skin.
“What is wrong with you?” I shouted.
“Nothing is wrong with me. I just knew there was no way you’d believe me if you didn’t see it for yourself. Look at your hand.”
The blood was still copious and warm, but the wound she’d given me just seconds before was gone. No scab, no raised flesh, just gone.
“Next time, maybe give me the chance to believe you,” I said as I wiped my hand against my shirt. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Then I realized what I’d forgotten, what had gone out of my mind the instant I saw the point of the sword emerge from her chest. We hadn’t cleared our third floor.
“We need to go,” I said.
We ran down the stairs and entered the third control post. It was empty.
Anything might have happened. The guards might have run past us while I was considering beating the life out of the man who had stabbed Tamret. He might have signaled the Phandic cruiser in orbit right now. I stood there, still and terrified and furious with myself. The entire mission could be blown right now, because of me.
Then I heard the whizzing sound of weapons fire coming from farther down. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the worst news possible.
We ran down the stairs, and now that I was aware of my augmentations, I knew immediately how to exploit them, like I had always been this strong, this perceptive, this agile. I was leaping six or seven stairs at once, and it was easy. It was easier than taking them one at a time. I vaulted over the last fifteen stairs and landed on the final level, illuminated by the intermittent flash of weapons fire. Steve and Mi Sun were crouched behind a bulkhead, firing down a long corridor at a Phand, or maybe several. I couldn’t see because they were taking cover behind a corner where the hall branched off.
“I think you might have missed a couple, mate,” Steve called out to me.
“We ran into some trouble,” I said.
“I know the feeling,” he said. “Also, just so you know, the armory is not the only place on the planet where they store PPB pistols. These two took some from a strongbox. Live and learn.” He glanced around to see Tamret, still dripping with her own blood. “Everyone all right? You don’t look too good, love.”
“I’m fine now,” she said. “But thanks.”
As first I thought the hallway was completely silent; then I realized there was a sound, just on the periphery of my perception. I understood at once that it was something I could never have heard before Tamret had hacked my skill tree. It was the low, rhythmic rasping of the two Phands breathing. Almost the instant I understood what I was hearing, the sound changed to distant footsteps, boots hissing against the hard floor.
“They’re taking off,” I said.
“I hear it too.” Tamret was checking something on her data bracelet. “That corridor isn’t on the schematic. Zeke, this is bad. We can’t let those guys get away.”
“Why?”
“Because, if my sense of direction is right, that corridor leads right back to the bunker where we started. If they get back there, they’ve got a straight shot to the shuttle hangar, and I don’t have a whole lot of faith in Charles and Nayana being able to stop them.”
This was my mess, and I was going to clean it up. “I’m going after them,” I told Steve and Mi Sun. “You guys go find Captain Qwlessl. Get her, anyone from the Dependable, and whoever else she vouches for.”
Steve cocked his head at me. “You sure you have this? I don’t want to hurt your feelings, mate, but me and Mi Sun are both faster, stronger, have surer aim, and are generally so much better at this sort of thing than you that it’s silly for you to even think of going.”
“Thanks for soft-pedaling it,” I said as I reviewed my new skill tree on my HUD, “but we’ve got this.”
They looked at each other, and Mi Sun shrugged as if to say it was my funeral. Then they ran off.
Tamret gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Let’s be careful,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Cover me.”
I ran out, pistols firing.
• • •
I don’t tend to think of myself as a terribly frightening person, but my team had taken out virtually every other Phand in the compound, and here I was, running at impossible speeds, legs bounding off the floor, as I erased the distance separating us from the fleeing Phands. I had enhanced strength, enhanced speed, enhanced endurance. I moved more quickly than I would have thought possible, and each step, each bound, was pure joy. The two Phands saw me coming, and they fled.
You can’t dodge a PPB blast the way you can dodge a blaster bolt in Star Wars. You can, however, evade the yellow laser light. If the light isn’t on you, you can’t be hit. It’s as simple as that.
Before Tamret had turned me into Captain America, I probably could not have run at top speeds, fired my own weapon, and kept an eye on two laser dots to make certain neither of us was about to be hit. I don’t want to suggest it was effortless, because it required all my concentration, but I could do it. PPB lights flashed ahead, and Tamret and I dodged and ducked and evaded and fired. It was nearly impossible to hit the enemies, who were moving as erratically as we were. Our shots were suppressing fire, nothing more, but they did the job of keeping the Phands off balance and, best of all, slowing them down. We were faster than they were. In fact we were much faster, though I suspected that Tamret was slowing herself to keep pace with me.
We ran and closed the gap, racing past dark junctions in the hall, but the guards never wavered. Neither did we. My legs pumped and my lungs filled with air, and I sidestepped one of the yellow laser sights as the guard turned and fired, and I heard the sound of the rubber of his boot skidding sideways on the floor as he lost his balance, just for a second. I saw it all happen, not in slow motion, but clearly, as he stumbled and righted himself. He held his breath as the pistol began to slip from his fingers, and he reached out to catch it in midair. It all happened over the space of a second, but it left him vulnerable. I raised my PPB pistol, placed my laser aim at the center of his mass, and fired.
One of the guards was neutralized. That’s right. Neutralized. Because that was how I was rolling. I had my space pistol, my space coat, my space nanite augmentations. It was a bad idea to mess with me.
Without missing a beat, I aimed at the other one. He threw himself against the wall, which was not going to save him. However, he must have pushed a button or activated a panel, because a metal bulkhead shot up from the floor, completely cutting him off.
Being separated from us, and having access to a shuttle, was going to save him. It might also be the end of us.
• • •
We turned to run back to the last junction. We had no map, no idea of where it might lead, but I had to hope there was some kind of alternate route and that I had a chance of cutting him off. Tamret, who seemed to have a directional sense that humans lacked, said she was sure we were going the right way. That was good, but if it took us to a dead end, the right direction would be of limited value.
The next junction seemed to loop around to head toward where we wanted to go. The bad news was that we were sloping downward. I didn’t like it, but I liked the idea of backtracking and trying to find another path even less.
After about maybe a quarter mile of running, we came to an open circular ditch maybe sixty feet across. It was illuminated with floodlights and littered with excavation tools: scaffolding, ropes, ladders, and a few workstations covered with a heavy coat of dust. This was clearly an archeological dig, a deep one, and seemingly long abandoned. I couldn’t see the bottom, and I had no interest in finding out how far down it went.
Tamret shoved me against the wall, pushing me out of the way of the laser aim. The wall exploded with dust as it was struck with PPB fire. She’d probably just saved my life. I’d have to thank her later.
I looked up. There was a makeshift bridge about thirty feet above us. The guard had used it to cross the chasm and was now standing at a doorway, firing at us. He was talking into his data bracelet.
“Not good,” I said. “Who is he talking to? Can he communicate with the Phandic cruiser?”
Tamret checked her own data bracelet. “No way. The comm is still jammed, and I set up an alarm to let me know if someone undid my lock. He might be trying to get help from someone on the surface.”
“There’s no one here to help him,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Tamret said. “It sounds like someone is talking back.”
I tried to concentrate on what they were saying. Before, I would not have been able to hear anything. Now, though I couldn’t make out the words, I detected a distinct voice coming over the bracelet. He was definitely talking to someone, and if the shore-to-ship comm wasn’t working, it meant there were more Phands on the surface.
While Tamret reviewed the schematics on her data bracelet, I returned the guard’s fire and tried to find some way to get across. There was a doorway at our level, but we had no means to get from one side of the pit to the other. I sensed that even with my augmented strength and power and agility I could not leap across, and I wasn’t up for falling to my doom.
I searched around for something, anything. Surely my enhanced brainpower ought to be able to come up with an idea. I looked up. There was a cluster of ropes toward the ceiling, retracted, held together by a thick metal cable. Before, I would never have believed I could do this, but my aim, my strength, and my stamina were all improved. It was possible, maybe even probable, and it was too perfect.
I looked at Tamret, who was done checking her bracelet. “You want to try something really stupid?”
Her eyes widened, and her lips turned up at the corners. “Absolutely.”
I didn’t dare fire a PPB blast at the cable holding the rope. It was too powerful and might damage the rope itself. Instead I took out my plasma wand and fired it up. The ejection of the metal rod prior to the glow of energy almost ruined the coolness of the effect. Almost.
I held it in my left hand, which was now much stronger and more accurate than my right hand had ever been before. With my pistol in my right hand, I fired off five quick shots at the guard above us. Then I aimed carefully at the metal cable high above us and tossed my plasma wand. It flew, spiraling in a perfect arc as it cut through the binding cable, leaving the rope unharmed. The wand landed against a far wall and tumbled into the pit below while the rope uncoiled and fell three feet in front of me. I reached out and grabbed it and pulled it tight, at a sharp angle.
Tamret was firing at the guard as I did this, giving me room to maneuver. I pulled harder on the rope, getting an even steeper angle and making certain it was securely anchored. I could feel the tension in it, feel the strength of its base. It would hold us.
I fired at the guard and moved over to Tamret. I put one arm around her waist and she put one around my shoulder. She looked at me and grinned, not for a second fazed by the insanity of what I intended. I could tell she loved the idea. Somehow, impossibly, she knew exactly what to do and precisely what to say. Of all her amazing powers, that was the most remarkable one of all.
“Good luck,” she said, and she kissed me on the cheek.
If she turns out to be my long-lost sister, I thought, I’m going to be extremely angry. And then I pulled on the rope and jumped in the air. Tamret and I were flying.
• • •
Once we hit the other side, we ran. Now I was hoping we might be able to circle around the guard entirely. Our corridor was sloping upward, which was a good sign, and ahead it merged with another corridor from the general direction the guard had been going. Also good. Farther beyond that was the hangar, which was only good if we got there first.
We didn’t. I pumped my legs, tearing up the ground in a dizzying whir, but I wasn’t going to make it in time. I could see the form of the guard approaching a shuttle, keying the access into the shuttle’s exterior panel. He was going to get inside in about three seconds. Once he was in, he would be on an independent c
omm line, and I knew without Tamret telling me that it would take maybe fifteen seconds for him to signal the cruiser. He didn’t have to explain the details. He didn’t have to explain anything. An unexpected communication from one of the shuttles would be enough to alert them.
I had one chance now. I threw myself forward and down. I wanted a static shot. I hit the floor and raised my pistol, feeling myself skimming fast across the floor. I didn’t care about the pain. I needed a good shot. And then I had it. The yellow light was at the center of his chest, but before I could squeeze the trigger, there was a flash, and the guard went down.
There, beyond him, was Charles. He was too far away for me to see the expression on his face, but I was sure he was smiling.
• • •
We tied up the guard, and then I checked the time. Just less than three hours until the check-in. With the hangar secured, Tamret, Charles, and I headed back to the main control room, where Nayana had her eye on the courtyard.
“No activity,” she said. Then she caught sight of Tamret. “You look totally disgusting.”
“You too,” Tamret said.
“Whatever,” Nayana opined. “I don’t even want to know what you were doing to get all that blood on you. The point is that everything has been quiet here.”
That was good. I was still worried about surprises, but so far there had been none. A few hiccups, like Tamret being impaled and a couple of guards almost escaping, but otherwise, smooth sailing.
Then, through the window, I saw the door to the prison facility open. Steve and Mi Sun walked out, hands over their heads. Behind them were eight Phands marching them toward us.
“Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know,” Tamret said. “We accounted for everyone in the database. There must have been guards in the compound who weren’t assigned here. Maybe they had another function.”
I tried to think, focus on what was important now. “Could they have contacted the cruiser?”