Five minutes later, he’d regained full range of movement in his arms. He shifted slightly to let the blood flow more smoothly, then focused his attention on the additional restraints bolting him to the chair. He worked his “saw” on each restraint out of the sight of his captors. He just hoped they didn’t figure out what he was doing, not just yet. He needed a few more minutes. Delaney glanced up and over at him. Roddy had forced his face into a bored expression; after all, he didn’t have much to do at this point other than wait. Delaney watched for a moment before shrugging and returning his attention to the images on his desk. Roddy suspected they were the same images Silver had shown him aboard the space station, images revealing the current state of the planet’s surface in selected areas. They were looking for Deirdre, would move east toward a place called New Venice where they suspected she’d seek both other survivors and refuge from the swarm.
Another band severed.
Then another.
And then his body was freed of the restraints. He could move now. He tensed and relaxed his muscles, trying to get blood flowing to relieve the stiffness. He’d need to move at some point.
He could start a physical fight against the four men aboard the ship with him. But four on one wasn’t exactly fair. What he wanted was a one-on-one fight. Him against Delaney.
He needed to eliminate the others.
He thought back to Silver’s mental probe. If his previous efforts involved projecting those mental waves out in broad strokes to push objects, or narrow, sharp waves for severing them… how might he replicate the effects of the probe? If he could knock Delaney’s team out cold…
He thought of the gun he no longer had. Could he fire a mental “bullet” into the minds of the three men, effecting such massive pressure that they’d black out?
Only one way to know for sure.
He shaped the now familiar waves of thought into the form of a bullet. Focusing his gaze on the nearest man, Roddy took aim and fired, sending the thought waves in compact form at the man’s head and directly into his skull. He felt the impact as the energy wave crashed into the man’s brain, pushed it further and deeper into his head, ignoring the piercing screams of agony as the man grabbed his temples and fell to the ground. He kept twisting until the screams stopped. Roddy wasn’t certain if the man was unconscious or dead… and unsure if he cared.
Delaney peered at the man who lay still on the floor, startled.
Then he glanced at Roddy. His eyes lit with understanding.
Delaney stood. “I need to make a course correction. Figure out what’s wrong with him.” He pointed at the unconscious man, then nodded at Roddy. “And then knock Light out cold, please.” He turned and sprinted up the steps to the pilot’s room.
The two men watched Delaney depart and slam the pilot’s room door. After glancing at their colleague and quickly recognizing that they could do nothing to help him, they rose from the meeting table and moved toward Roddy.
Roddy didn’t need any special mental powers to interpret the looks on their faces. They had their orders. Roddy wouldn’t survive the encounter still conscious. If they suspected he’d knocked their colleague out cold, well… he knew he wouldn’t survive at all.
He formed another mental bullet and fired it at the man to his left. The bullet struck the man just above the right eye, and his hands rushed to the wound as he sucked in a deep breath and bent at the waist, clearly in excruciating pain.
The second man glanced at his colleague, baffled. “You too? Was it something we ate?” He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, as if trying to taste any poison or foulness left in the residue of his most recent meal.
Roddy fired the next mental bullet directly into the man’s abdomen.
Shocked, the man glanced up at Roddy, eyes watering, a pleading look on his face. Roddy could feel the emotion and hear his thoughts. He did this. I don’t know how, but he did. Is he going to kill me?
Roddy fired a broad energy wave at the man and smashed it against his head. He crumpled to the ground, unconscious. The first man, still writhing on the floor after taking a “bullet” to his eye, received similar treatment. Roddy checked his first victim and found him already unconscious, his skin pale, his breathing faint, almost to the point of being nonexistent. Roddy swallowed. Had he killed the man? He hadn’t meant to do that.
But this was war. Death was inevitable. Kill, or be killed.
He glanced up at the pilot room door. One more. If he couldn’t corral Delaney, none of this mattered. He jogged to the steps and lifted his foot above the first tread.
The ship veered, halting its descent and moving sharply back toward the sky, angled so the pilot’s room pointed up and the rest of the ship pointed toward the ground. Roddy was startled. The ship had been designed to remain “level” at all times. Delaney hadn’t just changed course, he’d changed the ship’s angle relative to the surface. Startled at the loss of levelness, Roddy tumbled backward, rolling across the room toward the rear of the spacecraft. He braced himself for impact as he slammed into the wall, then shook his head to remove the disorientation.
What was Delaney doing? Why would he turn the ship around?
Understanding came in an instant. Delaney recognized Roddy’s outburst of power within the planet’s atmosphere, a place where only Roddy could operate such power. Roddy held the advantage now… and Delaney knew that.
But Delaney manned the ship’s controls. And he’d set the craft on a vertical course straight up. Once they escaped the atmosphere, Delaney would regain the use of his own mental powers, which were far more developed than Roddy’s.
Roddy knew he’d never survive that encounter.
He needed to get to the room. He doubted he could affect Delaney if he couldn’t see him. And that might prove impossible. The staircase was now directly overhead. It wouldn’t be a problem to reach the steps once gravity vanished, but by then it would be too late. He needed to get there… and quickly.
He snapped his fingers. The sliding chair. They’d built the chair to help the pilot maneuver around the ship in situations where gravity was nearly zero; strapped to the seat, the pilot could slide along tracks in the walls to critical parts of the craft. He walked along the wall to the chair and fastened the restraining harness, testing it for security.
He wouldn’t fall out of the chair, but if he couldn’t get to the new “ceiling” and the staircase it wouldn’t much matter.
He grabbed the track and pulled himself to the vertical wall. Using various items fastened to the wall, he pulled himself up, fighting against gravity the entire way. He couldn’t let go for even an instant; if he did, he’d slide back to his starting point and lose precious minutes trying to regain lost ground.
His arms and fingers ached, the tips of his fingers rubbed raw from maintaining his grip on the often small, often awkwardly shaped improvised handholds. It took nearly ten minutes, time he didn’t think he had, but at long last he rolled himself around the bend and onto the ceiling. He took a deep breath, relieved, and then rolled himself along the track to the stairs. He grabbed the rail with his left hand while unstrapping with his right. The track ran up the steps, but the angle would prove a similar challenge to that he faced reaching this spot. Instead, he pulled himself up one tread at a time, until he arrived at the landing in front of the pilot’s room door.
Roddy used the railing atop the stairs to keep himself level with the door, turned the handle, and pushed it open. He grabbed the side of the frame opposite the hinges with both hands and pulled himself into the room, feet first, kicking the door in just as Delaney tried to slam it shut on his fingers. Roddy rolled against the inside wall near the door and kicked the door closed. Then he ducked, avoiding the fist Delaney hurled his way. He slid to the opposite side of the pilot’s room as Delaney’s fist smashed into the wall. The man howled with pain.
He debated taking Delaney out now, but he needed to course correct. They were getting too high now, too close to Delaney’
s advantage. He grabbed the edge of the work surface surrounding the instrumentation on the perimeter of the room and pulled himself up toward the controls. He grabbed the knob used for altitude changes and dialed it back down, feeling the ship reverse course. He pulled himself up a bit more and spotted a control he’d never used before bearing the label “attitude control.” He noted the sharp upward angle and twisted it back to level. The ship nestled back to its usual stable position, and Roddy’s arms, exhausted from moving him to and keeping him in this part of the vessel, welcomed the relief.
Delaney’s boot swept him off his feet. Roddy, though startled, recovered quickly. In this part of the world, where Delaney’s powers remained dormant, the wrestling match tested two fighters of equal ability and equal desire. Roddy knew that his best chance to end this fight before Delaney found the odds to be in his favor involved invoking his newfound powers, perhaps another bullet, and use that to knock his foe unconscious. He knew he’d need to work on his ability to perform such mental multitasking.
As if on cue, his focus lapsed. Delaney’s elbow slammed into the side of Roddy’s head. His body felt numb, as if he’d suddenly fallen into a thick gel rendering his limbs and mind unresponsive. Delaney, sporting a number of bruises on a face featuring a bloodied nose and a black eye, stood over him, leering.
Gloating complete, Delaney moved to the door and left the pilot’s room, returning a moment later with the sliding chair. He locked the chair in place before grabbing Roddy and hurling him into the seat. Roddy knew his head snapped back, but beyond awareness that nothing broke, he felt nothing. Delaney clearly wanted to inflict pain, and Roddy was happy enough to be so numbed from the shot to his temple that he couldn’t oblige. His former friend, a look of cruel determination on his face, moved Roddy’s arms behind his back once more and fastened the harnesses, pulling them a bit tighter than necessary. His memory faculties were hazy, but he could sense Delaney’s thoughts well enough. He’d not kill Roddy, not yet at any rate. But Roddy had caused him more than enough misery in his life, and Delaney hated that. No, he wouldn’t kill Roddy. But as he’d said before their departure, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t make Roddy beg for death.
Delaney tested the harness once more, nodded, and moved to the controls, prepared to reverse course back toward the sky.
He never made the adjustment.
The sound of the crash deafened Roddy. He didn’t know if he’d set a faster velocity for the descent than Delaney for the ascent, or if they’d dropped faster by working with gravity. Whatever the cause, the airship had smashed against the ground; he felt smaller reverberations as the ship bounced along the ground before settling to a stop.
The left side of his head slammed into his shoulder, redoubling the haze brought on by Delaney’s earlier blow, straining the ligaments on the right side of his neck and generating immense pain in his ear. The restraints held him in place, but he was sure that the searing pain running through his body came from a snapped rib and ligament strains as his body absorbed the tremendous inertial force. The brake for the sliding chair snapped, and Roddy felt himself rolling to his left, in part due to the tremendous inertia, in part due to the slight forward tilt still evident in the craft. The rolling took away some of the power of that inertia, letting him and the chair move along until he stopped suddenly.
He stopped rolling when the chair hit Delaney’s body.
Nothing held his former friend and current foe back at impact. When the ship stopped moving, Delaney didn’t. The inertial forces that had strained his neck and snapped the chair brake had no dampering offsets for Delaney. He’d hurtled into the thick wall opposite the door of the pilot’s room. The impact had snapped his neck and a number of bones in his body. The front of his head was smashed back into his skull.
Roddy turned away and vomited, horrified at the sight of the pulverized remains.
He pulled his head back up, carefully avoiding the sight to his side, and tried to breathe deeply without retching at the scent of Delaney’s leaking body fluids and his own bile, fighting his body’s demand to sink into a deep sleep.
He recovered slowly. He felt the pain with greater intensity as his mental numbness subsided. As his ears cleared, he could hear a faint hissing sound. Pressure leak, no doubt; the crash impact had undoubtedly cracked the outer hull. He had to get out of this chair, get a status check, figure out what he could repair.
He called upon his newfound skills and minutes later the last of his restraints fell free. Roddy massaged his aching neck and rubbed his arms and legs to improve the circulation in his body until he could finally stand. The damage to his ear threw off his equilibrium, and he stumbled to the instrument panel on the opposite side of the room, leaning against the console to prevent a tumble to the ground.
The readouts confirmed his worst fears. Full hull breach. One of the engines had fallen off; the other had a severed fuel line. The internal pressure and air flow systems were minimally operable. He’d need weeks and a full complement of equipment and parts to get the ship off the ground again.
He didn’t have weeks, though.
Nor did he have the necessary supplies or equipment to make the repairs he’d need. And if this swarm of machines, the Ravagers, were inflicting as much damage as implied, he wouldn’t find anything to help him on the outside.
His mind returned to the conversation he’d mostly ignored at the start of the flight. They’d suspected Deirdre would head toward a place called New Venice, whatever that was, in search of refuge. It seemed odd; why would Deirdre head there? Roddy hadn’t heard the name before. He frowned. Deirdre was a key member of this Phoenix Group, the people who’d dropped the Ravagers on an unsuspecting world. If she was headed that way in search of refuge… then it must be a safe place. They’d intended to head to the surface within the former confines of the Lakeplex—Roddy bristled in anger at the idea of the city’s destruction—and then travel east, along the southern shore of the great lake, until they found Deirdre.
It wasn’t much. But he doubted they’d spoken about New Venice to give him a survival option in a scenario like this. He’d need to find New Venice, or die trying.
Then he frowned. Imminent death had a strange way of focusing the mind.
His ship was on the ground, resting upon the surface of a planet and continent on which these Ravagers were swarming, destroying everything. His aircraft had large cracks. Even if the ship had once been immune to Ravagers, it could offer him no protection now.
Panic set in. Roddy breathed deeply, trying for calm.
The suits.
They’d talked about that before he’d left, talked about Deirdre surviving because she’d have an armored suit made from Diasteel. Diasteel and water were immune to the effects of the Ravagers. If Delaney and his team meant to leave the ship in pursuit of Deirdre, they’d take no chances with the tiny, deadly, robots.
They’d have similar suits for themselves aboard this ship.
His body roared back to life, adrenaline coursing through his veins, and he raced out of the pilot’s room and down the stairs to the main cabin.
He had to find one of those Diasteel suits and get inside.
Or he’d soon be just as dead as Delaney.
—19—
WESLEY CARDINAL
SHOCKED AT THE sound of another human being’s voice, Wesley jumped back, startled. He flicked his eyes at the robot, but Whiskey remained still for the moment. Wesley turned around slowly toward the sound of the voice.
A man stepped forward, intelligent eyes making a quick scan of the room. Wesley’s own eyes narrowed. That wasn’t a curious glance of someone looking at an unfamiliar space. The wary set of the man’s face and the efficient darting of eyes… he was identifying exits, potential hiding spots, looking for signs of additional people lurking in the shadows ready to set an ambush. This man came prepared for trouble, and meant to ensure no trouble came. Wesley struggled to identify an age. Physically, he’d guess the man was in his m
id-thirties; the eyes and the lines furrowing his forehead suggested he might be older. The past few days hadn’t been kind; the man’s face was dirty, his clothing full of holes, his hair matted to his head. Wesley noted with interest the thick bandage wrapped around his right hand and wrist.
Three others followed the man. The woman had suffered similarly in the chaos of the past few days, and Wesley noted dried blood crusting on her hands. She focused on Wesley, her eyes deep and intense. Her gaze unnerved him, and he averted his eyes and took in the last two refugees. The boy and the girl looked to be of similar age, possibly twins, and hid behind the woman as best they could. Both eyed Wesley, not with wariness and suspicion, but with curiosity. Wesley instantly felt a strong affinity for both.
He didn’t have similar feelings toward the adults, presumably their parents. The timing seemed too… coincidental. He found it hard to believe they’d arrived at this island by sheer chance. His hand moved toward the knife on his belt, ready for an imminent attack.
Whiskey rolled forward. “Hello, unknown humans. Please provide your names. It is my responsibility to identify you as friends or foes.”
The adults exchanged wary glances before the woman replied. “We’re friends, of course. We despise Phoenix, and everything they stand for.”
“That is not an acceptable response. Please provide your names so that I may determine if you are friends or foes.”
“As I said, we are friends, and—”
Wesley gritted his teeth. “He won’t accept your assurance, and he can keep his questioning going indefinitely. I’d suggest you answer his question, or he may be forced to identify you as an enemy attempting deception.”
The man glanced at Wesley, startled. “Your voice sounds quite familiar. Do I know you?”
Wesley shook his head. The statement was no doubt an attempt to create a sense of rapport, trying to establish friendship without identification. “No, you don’t. I’d recommend that you answer his questions… or face the consequences.”
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