by David Liss
She stepped forward. “Let me do it.”
I wasn’t about to let her take my place. Before she could take a second step, I put a few grains of powder on my tongue and tossed the heavy die on the table. It landed with a hard crack and rolled a few times. I turned away, hardly daring to look. Then I felt a sting of pain as Tamret punched me hard in the shoulder.
“Sometimes you really deserve a smack,” she said.
And that was how I knew I’d made my saving throw.
• • •
I was grinning. I was in my happy place, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I had survived my toss of the die—lucky number thirteen!—and now I was running an infrared image of the entire complex through my bracelet to create a 3-D visual. We not only had the layout of the facility, but we knew how many people were inside and what kinds of weapons they had.
We were on the thirty-seventh floor. The control center was on the sixty-eighth. To get there we needed to pass through two security checks. It was no big deal.
Tamret and I strolled down the mostly empty corridor until we got to the elevator bank. Three human guards sat at a station there, looking bored.
“Aura scan,” one of them said, not bothering to look up.
Then he did bother to look up, and he saw two kids standing in front of them, one being a cat alien.
Approximately 1.8 seconds later, he and his two companions were unconscious. I used my forging tech to examine and duplicate their security auras, and then pressed the button to call the elevator.
Tamret sighed. “You like showing off, don’t you?”
“If everything goes the way it’s supposed to,” I told her, “I’ll never get to use these powers again. Let me enjoy myself. But to answer your question: Yes. Yes, I do.”
The elevator opened up on our floor with the second security check. There were ten guards here. It took almost three seconds to deal with them. Then, while Tamret watched, annoyed that there was nothing for her to do, I gained security access for the main control room.
My infrared scan only told me what to expect in the first chamber—another ten guards in there, as well as a couple dozen technical workers. The actual control room, which was basically a giant safe, was beyond that, and would contain more security.
I showed Tamret the projection of what we’d be facing. “There are still some unknowns, but we can expect things are going to get messy. I’m going to hit the EMP as soon as we enter. Be ready to start stunning people. Guards and any other Phands first, then human workers.”
She had her pistol out and was activating the anti-EMP insulation that would allow our tech to continue working while the rest of the planet went dark. “Ready.” She leaned in and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. I thought she was being sweet, though I later learned she was trying to distract me.
“Don’t blow it.”
I opened the door, and it was already blown. I knew that the minute I felt the punch in my face. There was only one hand that could hit me that hard. Also, the furry fingers were a giveaway. It was Ardov, and he was at full power.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
I don’t know if there is a standard list of things you should be thinking about when you’ve been sucker-punched by a supervillain, but here’s some of what went through my head as I was flying backward, crashing into a wall. First, I’d checked the physiology of the beings in that room, and I’d seen only humans and Phands. Ardov must have known we were coming. The Phands clearly had monitoring systems we hadn’t anticipated, and Ardov had cloaked himself. Second, he was powered up, which meant he had taken the time to risk his life by tossing the die—another clue he knew we were coming. Third, if you can’t get rid of a guy by knocking him off a spaceship and into the waiting jaws of a giant eel, then you are pretty much never going to get rid of him.
I came to a halt with a sudden, painful crunch as the metal beams in the wall stopped my momentum and kept me from ending up in another office. I shook off the pain and dizziness and tried to get to my feet. Phands and human workers were fleeing from the room, not wanting to get in the way of the cat-alien Hulk. Tamret raised her hand to fire her pistol at Ardov—a useless gesture—and he batted her aside with a swipe of his arm. It was Tamret’s turn to fly into the wall, and she didn’t have the advantage of augments.
Now I was angry.
My upgrades included bioscans, so I took a few milliseconds to review Tamret’s vitals. Had she been human, she would have suffered at least a few broken bones, but her Rarel physiology had saved her from any serious harm. There was no guarantee she’d be so lucky the next time, though. I had to do everything I could to keep his attention off her.
And that meant it was time for another fight with Ardov. I’d taken some blows the last time, what with him beating my face, literally, to a pulp. I’d come out on top, though only because my friend had run him over with a space shuttle. The bottom line was that he was the one, not me, who had ended up eel food. Victory had not been easy, but it had still been mine. I could win again. I just had to be smart.
“I’m not dead,” Ardov observed with a grin. He was wearing loose pants and, inexplicably, an I ♥ NY T-shirt. Maybe he’d taken the time to see the sights.
“Nothing gets past you,” I told him as I moved toward him.
“I should have died from the die roll, but I lived,” he snarled. “Nothing can kill me.”
He seemed to have taken the wrong lesson away from that incident. Instead of realizing I’d been messing with his head, he now thought he was indestructible.
“Not even a giant eel, apparently,” I said.
“That?” he asked with a smug grin. “That was nothing. I just forced my way through its digestive tract and made my way out through its—”
“Too much information!” I interrupted. “We’ll just say you managed to outsmart a huge fish and leave it at that.” I was playing for time, trying to work out what strategy was going to give me the advantage I needed.
“You’ll stop joking when your girlfriend is dead,” he sneered.
Ardov turned toward Tamret.
So, yeah. Pretty much any rational thoughts or strategies I was cooking up were out the window. I charged Ardov. It wasn’t until the last second that I realized I’d fallen into his trap.
I didn’t slow time, but it felt like I did. Ardov turned to me, and I thought he meant to land another punch, but his hand was open. He reached out to grab me, and I saw it—the injector in his other hand. I’d been thinking about our fight on Planet Pleasant, when he’d mashed my face. I should have been thinking about our fight in Central Park, when he’d neutralized my upgrades.
That’s what he did. Again.
He stepped back and allowed me to move past him as he spun one arm around and slammed me in the back of my neck with the injector. The blow was hard enough to send me sprawling to the floor while the neutralizing agents took effect. My HUD switched off, and I felt myself deflate like a punctured balloon. I hadn’t noticed the sensation the first time, being distracted by falling through the air, but I noticed it now. It was like I’d shrunk, turned insubstantial, in just the blink of an eye.
Ardov was standing over me, grinning. I was just an ordinary kid now, and he was a deranged, jacked-up monster. There was nothing I could do to protect myself. Nothing I could say. He had all the power, and I was sure he meant to kill me.
But first he meant to do a whole lot of talking. I’d forgotten about that. He seemed to have become very fond of his own voice. Maybe I could use that to my advantage.
“That stupid scientist at Planet Pleasant required a little convincing,” he told me, holding up the injector, wagging it back and forth like the sight of it might make me faint. “She didn’t want to give me another anti-upgrade injector, but I convinced her. I knew I’d run into you again.”
“I’m flattered you spend so much time thinking about me,” I said.
“Oh, I did,” he said. “I was ready for you, so I c
ould use this.” He held up the injector. A tiny drop of my blood glistened at the tip. “I couldn’t wait to find you and turn you into a nothing before I killed you.”
“And why is that again?” I asked. “I keep forgetting why you dislike me so much.”
He paused to think about it. “Beings like you have always stood in my way. Beings who aren’t smarter or stronger, but somehow end up getting everything they want.”
“What I’ve mostly wanted from you is for you not to hurt me or beings I know.”
“That’s what you tell yourself,” he said with some bitterness. Clearly this was something he’d spent a lot of time thinking about. Really, it was nice to see him working through his feelings. His therapist and I were very proud of him. “What you don’t understand is that beings like you represent something that’s just unfair about the universe. There are beings who deserve to be on top, and beings who should be on the bottom, and when that order gets switched around, everything is thrown out of balance.”
“That’s very philosophical,” I observed.
“Even now, you think mocking me will get you out of this?”
“Seriously, I just want to understand,” I said. “I mean, maybe you’ll kill me, and before I die, I’d like to know why you hate me so much. What did I do wrong?”
He peered over me as though I were a curious specimen in a tide pool. Then his eyes went wide with shock.
“He didn’t used to talk so much,” Tamret said. “It’s tedious, but hey, I won’t argue with whatever gets the job done.”
While I’d been asking Ardov to talk about his feelings and explain his grievances about how bullies throughout the galaxy were being undermined by the beings they tormented, Tamret had snuck up behind him. Lightning quick, she’d grabbed the injector from his hand and jabbed it into his shoulder. She had, in other words, stabbed Ardov with his own neutralizing agent.
Ardov stared, stunned. He looked down at his body, like he was expecting it to do something interesting or surprising, but it was just an ordinary, unpowered Rarel body wearing a touristy T-shirt. In an instant he’d gone from unstoppable to doomed. Having been down that road myself, I knew it was an unpleasant feeling. I also hoped that on some level he could appreciate the irony. He’d been blathering on about how people like me and Tamret undermined him, and, well, that was exactly what we’d done.
Now he had the additional problem of being at our mercy. “Listen,” he began.
Tamret shot him with her PPB pistol. With no tech at all working inside him, a single blast on stun should have kept him out for hours, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. As soon as we had a moment to spare, I would cuff him, lock him in a room, or do something. Until this guy was shipped off to the penal colony at Rura Penthe, I wasn’t going to breathe easily, and maybe not even then.
I held out my hand. “Let me hold onto the injector. You never know.
“Sure thing,” Tamret said, dropping the injector into my palm. She was smiling, but there was something sad in her expression. I knew a few things at once: She had lifted the powder and the die off me and used them.
I also knew, could see in that smile, that she hadn’t made her saving throw.
“Tamret, what did you roll?”
“We’ll talk when we’re done,” she said.
“Tamret.”
“A three,” she said, looking away. “I rolled a three.”
I stared at her, unable to speak, unable even to make my mind work. Tamret had gotten out of more scrapes, had come up with more last-second solutions to unsolvable problems, than anyone I’d ever known. How could the luckiest, most resourceful being I knew have rolled a three? Tamret was going to die. What kind of a stupid system was this, anyhow? Who were these Formers, and why had they designed their technology with these obstacles and hoops to jump through? What pleasure did they get from watching inferior beings like us run around like rats in a maze for their entertainment? They were gone, millennia gone, and we were still putting on a show, like actors forced to perform a play with no one watching.
“Tamret,” I said again. My voice came out like a croak, something broken and jagged.
She forced another smile. “Let’s do what we came here to do. Let’s get these Phands off your world and then we’ll talk, okay?”
She only had a few hours left before the same technology that had allowed us to survive to this point killed her, and she didn’t want to waste it. She was not going to spend her last hours crying or complaining. She wanted to do something that mattered. I wanted to hug her, to cry, to forget about the stupid Phands and their stupid invasion, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t indulge. She needed to complete the mission, and I was going to make sure she did.
“Okay,” I said. I gritted my teeth and sucked in a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”
She smiled at me, and I saw the real Tamret. She’d dropped her guard, let go of her worries about our responsibilities to our worlds. It was just her—the tough, unstoppable, determined girl who had changed my life. I had to press my hand against the wall to steady myself, but I could not break down. Not when she needed me.
“Okay,” I said again. “Let’s mess up some Phands.”
The final, most protected chamber required another round of hacking to access, but Tamret made short work of that. We entered the control room, full of workers. Tamret took about half a second to turn them into unconcious workers. All around us were workstations and consoles beeping and flashing questions at us. This was the power hub of a Phandic colony. Everything that made their occupation possible filtered through this station. It was time to shut it down.
Tamret scanned the room and picked one of the workstations, shoving an unconscious Phand out of the way before she sat down. Her eyes glazed over for a second, and I could tell she was interacting with her upgrades. Then she began typing, her fingers moving in a furious blur over the keyboard.
“This is going to take a few minutes,” she said. “It’s incredibly complicated, even for me—even for enhanced me. They really, really don’t want anyone doing what we are about to do, and they actually bothered to get some programmers who knew their stuff to make it difficult.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure what she needed from me.
“If I have to stop, even for a few seconds, then everything I’ve done will reset and I’ll have to start over. If that happens more than once, the system will lock me out, and we’ll have failed.”
“You can do it,” I said, making an effort to keep my voice from wavering.
“You’re sweet to say so,” she said with a slight sneer as her fingers danced over the keyboard. “The main thing is you’re going to have to keep the security forces off me while I work. We triggered some kind of alarm. I shut down the elevators and put up some barriers, but they’ll be able to break through and start climbing the stairs any second.”
“How many are coming?” I asked.
“One hundred and thirty-seven,” she said. “And an infrared scan shows a small convex icosahedron. We have to assume one of these guards has got the Former military tech tree. You can’t let any of them get near me. You up for this?”
“Not a problem,” I said with entirely false confidence. This was, in fact, a huge problem.
Still, I understood what I had to do. There were missions like this in a million video games. Keep the enemies off an ally while she did something important. For the record, I hated that type of mission. It didn’t help that I no longer had any of my own augmentations, but I couldn’t let that slow me down. Tamret needed me. She was dying, and she needed me to protect her, so that was precisely what I was going to do.
I only had a few minutes to figure out how to hold off more than a hundred bad guys, including one who could wipe the floor with me, literally and metaphorically. I began to scan the space, figuring out how to make my stand. I grabbed several PPB pistols—I’d never had one fail on me, but I’d never had to stun more than a hundred beings before. I wasn’t tak
ing any chances.
“How is the one with the die moving?” I asked. “Walking, running, flying?”
“Normally, like a regular being. Just one of the group heading up the stairs,” she said. “And stop bothering me. I’m busy.”
This was useful information. If this guy was hoofing it up the stairs with a bunch of grunts, it meant he was new to his augments. He hadn’t figured out all the cool things he could do yet, and he was still thinking like an ordinary guy. Maybe I had a chance.
With the little time I had left, I overturned several desks, to use as barriers. I wanted to arrange a full set of them, making it necessary for any intruders to have to leap over an annoying number of desks to get close, but there simply wasn’t time. The best I could do was to set up barriers at both the main door and the inner door. That gave me two choke points through which no more than two enemies could enter at one time. As long as my aim was decent, I had a shot at pulling this off.
I hid behind a third desk slightly within the main control room. This gave me a good line of sight and a chance to snipe at both blockaded entrances.
I’d only just settled down behind my barrier and taken aim at the main entrance when the first enemies appeared. They were three Phands dressed in some kind of battle armor. They were tall, even for their species, with cruel expressions that suggested a lifetime of battle and violence. Without exchanging a word, all three pushed at the desk blocking the entrance and shoved it aside.
So much for my plan. This was going to be harder than I thought.
• • •
Or maybe not. I saw those three Phands and fired off three perfectly aimed head shots. Maybe I’d lost my augments, but I still had my own experiences of battle. I’d faced down bad guys before, and I’d walked away the winner. I’d captured battleships and conquered planets. I’d broken into and out of prisons. Time to show the Phand warriors what it meant to cross Zeke Reynolds.
