“Well, Mr. Rock Expert,” she said, “can’t HQ figure it out on their own? I mean, as bright as maintenance workers are, I’m sure they have people there who could figured things out in half the time.”
The damn buckle was just not cooperating. “Okay, Miss I-Care-More-About-the-Lives-of-Celebrities-Than-I-Care-About-My-Own-And-The-People-Who-Are-Actually-Around-Me,” I said through gritted teeth. “Maybe you’re right. But if that broadcast is legit and the Dominion has taken the capitol building, there’s a good chance the Peacekeepers haven’t found our enemy’s weak spot.”
I looked up and met Lopez’s glare. “Not that she was weak,” I said, nodding to Sinistra’s body. “I’m sure she was a strong, independent woman. I just happened to be stronger.”
Lopez rolled her eyes.
“We’ve got to get HQ our intel, even if we have to do it in person,” I said. “And besides—for all we know, I’m the only one who can use one of their own stones against them.”
I went back to the buckle, which finally came free. I stifled a cry of triumph, and instead went to regally sheath my weapon. After a bit of a struggle with the too-tight sheath, I managed to shove my rod-sword in. I slung it over my shoulder and fastened the belt diagonally across my chest, nodding my readiness majestically.
“Walker is right,” Kovac said. “Hiller would agree.”
We all stopped for a moment and looked over at our colonel’s body, which was still laying on its side. My eyes started tingling, so I quickly looked away.
“Well,” I said. “It looks like we’re stealing another shuttle.”
As I stood up, the room dimmed and seemed to shrink. I staggered a bit and before I knew it, Rand was propping me up.
“Careful, soldier,” he said. “There is certainly no need to lose consciousness.”
The adrenaline had finally worn off, and now I could feel how exhausted I was. “I’ll be fine. I just need to eat a little something.”
I found one of my emergency nutrient rations from the first shuttle and, suppressing a gag, shoved the whole mushy thing into my mouth. Almost immediately, I felt my strength come back. Actually, I felt like I’d grown a little bigger inside and could now hold more energy or something. I wasn’t sure. But what I did know was that if I was going to keep using these stones, I was going to need a lot more food. Even, God forbid, if it was just more compressed brain-like rations.
“Okay,” I said as I straightened and rolled my shoulders. “Let’s take our chances with the six-headed monster.”
“Excuse me?” Lopez said.
Dammit. I said the wrong thing out loud again. “I mean, let’s lock and load, soldiers—before this thing blows up.”
As we quickly reloaded our plasma weapons, Rand was busy repacking his tools and closing his rolling crate. Any other day, I would have yelled at him to leave his damn toys behind, but he had just delivered on getting us access to that comm channel.
“And my hammer?” Kovac said slowly.
“Present and accounted for,” Rand said, smiling and patting the top of the rolling crate.
I took one last look at Hiller. It might have been a trick of the brightening light, but his face looked peaceful. I glanced down and saw his plasma canon nearby, so I picked it up. Hurrying to my fallen hero, I placed the iconic weapon gently on his chest and folded his arms over it.
I turned to face the door. Rand nodded approvingly as I walked to my crew. We all pulled on our suits’ face masks and activated our anti-grav boots before leveling our weapons.
“Wait,” I said to my crew after tapping the built-in comm unit on my suit.
The heroic sound of trumpets and trombones began to rise inside my head—the same sound I’d heard when I’d taken the violet stone from Sinistra’s staff.
“Can I try something?”
When Lopez hit the control panel and opened the door, I was the only one standing there, front and center, with my arm raised and my right glove glowing a faint purple.
The Dominion troops hesitated, and it cost them.
I raised the brassy melody in my head and the first image that came to my mind was an old street fighting vid game I used to play with my dad. I always chose the blond guy in a red outfit because Dad thought I looked like him when I was little. This could make a big ball of blue energy and would shoot it at his opponents to knock them backward, and that’s exactly the sort of special move I needed right now.
The triumphant music in my mind reached a crescendo and I took a quick step forward as I imagined a huge ball of energy. I pointed my palm toward the Dominion soldiers crowding around the doorway, curled my fingers, and thrust my arm toward them. And I may have said “hayuken!” under my breath—I figured it couldn’t hurt.
A split second after I pushed my imaginary energy ball toward them, they all flew backward as if they’d been hit by, well, a giant energy ball. I still couldn’t believe that worked. Several of them even ended up floating away into the blackness of space.
Kovac leapt out from behind the doorway and began firing his plasma guns at the troopers who I hadn’t blasted, and easily picked them off one by one. We quickly crossed the uneven gray surface of Charon—even Rand, who had figured out how to run while hauling his equipment. As usual, ridiculous-looking, but efficient. Lopez cursed when she got to the access panel. I pulled out Hiller’s command glove and slapped it against the sensor. The doors hissed open.
The hallways were still littered with dead soldiers. Lopez found a nearby monitor and pulled up the station’s schematics. She pulled back her face mask and said, “Shuttle bay isn’t too far. That way.”
After our second or third turn down a hallway, we finally surprised a few Dominion troopers who were on patrol.
The bombastic tune came easily to me and, in my mind, I quickly formed a large, fuzzy ball of energy and shot it toward them.
The troopers flew backward, slammed against the wall at the other end of the hallway, immediately went limp, and slid down to the floor.
At the same time I shot the energy ball, I heard a loud thud and a sliding sound come from beside me. I turned and saw Kovac sitting on the floor, dazed.
“What the hell happened to him?” I asked.
“You happened to him,” Rand said as he bent down to check on our very large teammate.
With a jolt, I realized. Kovac had been standing right next to me when I fired the stone’s blast. I hadn’t focused enough, and part of my blast had knocked Kovac against the wall. If it had been someone smaller, it could have killed them. Maybe I needed to take it easy with this new stone for a while.
Kovac shook off the cobwebs and Rand helped him to his feet. He shook his head again, and when his eyes finally focused, he raised his head toward me and narrowed his eyes.
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I guess I don’t know my own strength,” I said weakly.
Rand put an arm on Kovac’s shoulder. “I believe what Walker was attempting to say was something along the lines of, ‘I apologize.’ Am I correct, Walker?”
I nodded quickly. “Yeah—that’s what I meant.”
Kovac raised an eyebrow, so I continued. “And . . . I’ll try to be more careful next time?”
My large companion nodded his bear-sized head slowly before he picked his plasma rifle up off the ground and started down the hallway.
“Smooth move,” Lopez said as she shot ahead of the group.
“Okay, everyone follow me,” she said.
So much for me being the undisputed leader of the group. Maybe I wasn’t cut out of this sort of thing, after all.
After another few turns, we heard the faint sound of plasma blasts, and as we got closer to the shuttle bay, it was clear that they were coming from that direction.
We all hugged the wall outside the shuttle bay door. When Lopez opened it, we all peeked around the corner at the same time into the enormous hangar.
Inside was the largest firefight I’d ever seen. Lieutenant Patel and her squadron of twenty or so were tradi
ng shots with a hundred or more Dominion troopers. But because the Dominion’s weapons were all powered down, Patel, her soldiers, and their armory’s worth of weapons were more than capable of holding their own.
I took a step forward to join the fight, but Rand grabbed my shoulder. “Now’s not the time for heroics. They’re doing a fine job of distracting the enemy—we need to get to Pluto.”
I shook my head. “But if they’re just using all of the shuttles as super expensive barricades, how are we going to get off Charon?”
“There should be a dock for escape pods just over there,” Lopez said, nodding down the hallway. “Not as comfortable as a shuttle, but they’d be a lot harder to hit with ground weapons.”
She was right. I nodded, she closed the shuttle bay door, and we left the last remaining squadron of Charon station soldiers to battle an entire army of Dominion troopers.
18
WE LEFT THE last squadron of Peacekeepers on Charon to their fate and sprinted down the hallway to the escape pod dock, where we skidded to a stop. Several pods were missing and even more had been destroyed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
Rand pointed to the end of the row. “Those two appear to be functional,” he said.
Lopez ran to an access panel beside the pods and tapped at it a few times. “Okay—the bad news is: these pods are only designed for one person, so it’ll be a really tight fit.”
“And the good news?” I asked.
Lopez looked at me and grinned. “Rand will be flying with me.”
I looked at Rand, but he just shrugged, opened the door to one of the pods, and started loading his frakking equipment.
“Rand—my hammer,” Kovac said, holding out his hand.
I opened my mouth to protest. “I don’t think we have room—”
Kovac looked me in the eyes, but kept his hand out. Rand looked from Kovac to me, and then back to Kovac, as if deciding which of us he’d rather upset. After a moment’s hesitation, he rummaged through his equipment crate and struggled to pull out the vibro-hammer with two hands. Kovac took it from him easily with one hand and grunted. He turned, put the hammer at the bottom of the other escape pod, and began wedging himself into it.
Great—not only did I get stuck sharing a pod with an ogre, but I clearly hadn’t gained the full respect of Kovac and Lopez, even though I’d been saving their asses for the past few hours. So what if I accidentally knocked Kovac into a wall with the purple gem back in there? It was an honest mistake, and it was actually a miracle that I hadn’t done way more damage with these stones while I blasted Dominion troopers. What more would it take to become a hero in their eyes, anyway?
I took the rod-sword off my back and squeezed into the little space remaining in the pod around Kovac. The only way we could both fit was if we faced each other, which was super awkward. Just as I was about to reach back and press the close button, I leaned my head out of the pod and yelled, “How do we steer this thing?”
“You don’t,” Lopez yelled back. “I’ve programmed them both to land just outside of Proserpina at the closest entry point to Peacekeeper HQ. Now shut up and close your door.”
I settled into the escape pod, my face centimeters from Kovac’s. The pod’s door shut with a click and a hiss, and a moment later, we blasted off and were sailing through space above Charon station. A pair of thrusters fired quickly and changed our trajectory.
Kovac and I strained to turn our heads far enough to the side to see out of the escape pod’s single window. We saw Lopez and Rand’s pod flying next to ours, which was vaguely comforting. But then we looked past the pod and saw something else.
“That’s not good,” Kovac grumbled.
Unfortunately, our course was taking us right past the comm relay tower. We could see it pulsing with light, even through its thick walls.
“Can’t we go around it?” I said.
“No steering control.” Kovac shrugged.
So we kept sailing toward the giant explosive device, and all we could do was watch as the tower grew larger and pulsed more quickly. Just as we passed it, I heard a high-pitched whine and then, boom! A shock wave knocked us against the other pod with a loud clang and our two pods went speeding off in different directions, like billiard balls.
“They’ll be okay?” Kovac asked slowly as he twisted his head and squinted to see the other pod.
“I hope so,” I said. “It looks like we’re both still aimed at Pluto.”
“Now we wait?”
“Yeah, now we wait.”
So we waited, both of us staring out the window.
After about a minute, the silence was unbearable. I had to say something. “Hiller was going to retire next year. Did you know that?”
Silence.
A very long minute later, Kovac finally answered.
“No . . . I didn’t.”
After a pause, Kovac said, “He told you?”
I thought about making him wait for my answer, but I felt like I needed to talk to somebody about Hiller’s death, even if that somebody really didn’t like me right now.
“He . . . was going to open a restaurant.” I smiled as I thought of the Colonel Hiller poster from my old bedroom plastered to the wall of his diner. Only this time, Hiller held a giant green Venus squash instead of a plasma canon, and wore a puffy white chef’s hat instead of a flat top.
My stomach grumbled and I remembered the last remaining ration I’d stuffed into my pocket when I left the shuttle. Maybe I had enough wiggle room to fish it out and get it all the way up to my mouth.
My arms were pretty well pinned against my sides, but as I leaned a little farther to my left, my finger grazed the top of the pocket, but I couldn’t quite get inside. Damn.
“It’s just not fair,” I said. “Hiller made it through hundreds of battles across the solar system, getting fired at with every plasma weapon imaginable. And just before he retires, he’s done in on one of Pluto’s moons. By a tiny dagger.”
I shook my head. Actually, I could only wiggle it a few centimeters to each side, but you get the point. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”
“He was brave,” Kovac said somberly .
“Yes, he was.” I swallowed. “But he died because of me. If I hadn’t been so careless and left Sinistra alive, he’d still be with us. And I’m sure he’d have a plan to get us to HQ.”
“I wish . . . ” I said. “I wish I could have done something.”
I shifted my hips, leaned to the left, and reached again for that nasty ration in my pocket.
“Why didn’t you?” Kovac said, interrupting my concentration.
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
Kovac was looking at me now. “You had magic.”
“Dammit, it’s not magic, it’s . . . I don’t know what it is.”
“You used magic. To beat her.”
“I said it wasn’t—never mind.” I turned my head to see how close I was to my pocket. Almost there . . .
“Magic beats daggers.” Kovac continued.
“Yeah, whatever.” I stretched my fingers as far as they’d go. “I was distracted, okay?”
“You have power,” Kovac said forcefully. “You have responsibility.”
I’d heard something like that before—something about great power and great responsibility. I wanted to say it had something to do with insects and red and blue spandex, but that was crazy. Which meant it was probably from a vid or a comic book from Old Earth. God, my parents.
There! I’d pinched a corner of the ration packet between my pointer and middle fingers. I pulled it up slowly and carefully, but after the first couple of centimeters, I lost my grip and it dropped back into my pocket. I couldn’t believe my luck. I just needed a bite—was that too much to ask?!
“Okay, my turn for a question.” I turned my head to lock eyes with him, which wasn’t very hard, since it was right in front of me. “Why do you never say more than three words at a time?”
; Kovac started squirming to reach for something in his pocket.
“Words are hard,” Kovac said deliberately.
“I don’t buy that. What is it, really?”
Kovac tried looking away, but our faces were too close.
“I just can’t—and I’m not—” Kovac exhaled. “Do you promise?
“What?”
“You won’t tell.”
“Sure—I promise.” I was intrigued.
Kovac stared at me for a few long moments, then said, “I’m a poet.”
I suddenly laughed in Kovac’s face. Not to be rude, it’s just there was nowhere else to laugh. “Sorry,” I said, stifling another laugh. “So, you’re a poet?”
Kovac closed his eyes and shook his large head slowly. “I knew you wouldn’t have an understanding heart.”
Wait—what? In the several years I’d known Kovac, I’d never heard the oaf say this many words in a row. Now I knew he was serious.
“Try me,” I said.
Kovac exhaled. “From birth, the world has seem bent on forcing me to be something I am not. I may have been born large, but I was not born a brute.”
I gaped.
“Okay. So . . . you want to do something else with your life.”
“No,” Kovac said, raising his voice. “It’s not what I want to do, it’s who I am. I am a poet.”
His blue eyes sparkled. “I want to celebrate the world and its beautiful ugliness. But if I do, then what?”
Kovac looked down. “I’m afraid no one will listen.”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “You should say what you want.”
His eyes snapped back up. “But what if they don’t want what I have to say? What if they don’t want . . . me?”
I rolled my eyes, which were by far the easiest things for me to move in these cramped quarters.
“Okay,” I said. “Quit being such a baby.”
Kovac’s nostrils flared. Right in my face. “No, you’re the one who acts like an infant. Don’t you see how you’re always flailing and screaming at the world, desperate for attention?”
“Whatever,” I said, looking out the window. “I’m done talking to you.”
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