It was also designed to be arranged confusingly, with several large factory modules connected by a somewhat labyrinthine network of corridors and miscellaneous infrastructure, partly to confuse OSHA inspectors. It would certainly pass for the interior of a ship for at least a minute or so, until Terrorgorn realized that he’d turned more corners than should reasonably exist.
That time was running out. I turned and made to close the Neverdie’s external airlock, but paused when I saw Blaze and a small throng of star pilots standing around in Salvation Station’s hangar like a pack of deck chairs waiting for arses.
“You don’t have to do this alone . . .” began Robert Blaze.
“Oh, save the plying doint-waving-hero trac,” I snarled, one hand on the airlock door handle. I noticed a figure to the side who, in contrast to the others, was standing with feet together and hands behind his back, wanting to look as uninvolved as possible. “Derby. Great. Fill these guys in on the plan, would you? I’ve got a doint to rescue.”
“Very well,” said Derby, as I resumed pulling the airlock door closed behind me. “Gentlemen. Allow me to explain the premise of what we eventually agreed to call ‘plan AB’ . . .”
The door clanged into place, and I turned my back on it to contemplate the corridor again. A strange feeling washed over me as I digested the preceding few moments and realized that I’d been infinitely happier to see Davisham Derby than Robert Blaze. Maybe I really had finally grown out of star piloting. Although the fact that I was presently risking my life to save another might have undermined that.
Something crunched under my foot as I took a step forward. A moment’s examination revealed it to be a couple of mangled components from Terrorgorn’s slave crown.
“Sturb,” I said, addressing my chest. “Some bits came off the slave crown. Will it still be working?”
“Which bits?”
It was a fair-enough question, I just couldn’t think how to answer it verbally. I knelt, gathered a few of the larger pieces, and held them in front of my torso as if offering a handful of food to a horse. Sturb leaned his pudgy head out of my chest to look. “Hm. I don’t suppose you remember what that looked like before you stepped on it?”
We were wasting time. I shook the fragments out of my hand and let them tinkle back to the floor. “Never mind. Just pass me my gun.”
“Oh, right.” There was some clattering as Sturb fumbled around the various items scattered about the floor of the storage unit, and not for the first time, I wondered why we hadn’t enlisted Nelly for this part of the job. Eventually, Sturb’s hand and my blaster extruded as off-puttingly as ever from the center of my chest. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” I took it by the grip, but Sturb didn’t let go as I gently tugged.
“Not that I want to add on to the pressure you’re under, but the generator powering the force field isn’t going to hold out for very long.”
“Are you going to tell me how long?”
“Twelve minutes, at most. When we were setting this up I was expecting we’d shut it off right after Terrorgorn went into it—”
“Great,” I said, to cut him off. It was by now clear to me that his need to take every opportunity to have his voice be heard was probably some lingering habit from his supervillain days. I gave my gun another tug, but he was still holding on. “What else?”
“Do you mind if I get out of here?”
He finally let go of the gun, and turned his end of the Quantunnel upside down so we could talk face to face as I looked down at my chest. I think he thought it would make the conversation less awkward, which goes to show how overrated he was, as geniuses went.
“You what?”
“It’s just, I feel like I can probably be most useful back on Salvation now. I can leave this Quantunnel on the floor so you can just reach in if you need any of this stuff . . .”
“You mean, you don’t want to have to face Terrorgorn again, or be around if the force field goes down and this entire facility flash-freezes, including me and everything my Quantunnels are connected to.”
“Well, let me just say, I would completely understand your position if you wanted me to—”
I cut him off by waving a hand. I didn’t have the right to endanger him for the sake of whatever the hell I thought I was doing. “Yes, all right, just go.”
“Thank you. Sorry. I, er. I think I’ll go out your back.”
An enormous weight was suddenly added to my harness and nearly gave me a back spasm before I sat down where I was and waited for Sturb to finish squeezing himself out like a bag of custard from a dog kennel. He scampered to the airlock door and returned to Salvation Station, offering me an encouraging thumbs-up before he slammed the door behind him.
I headed around the corner to a section of corridor with a porthole, through which I could see a small part of the facility ahead and a great deal of blank whiteness. We had activated the force field just before we had finished towing the facility into Biskot 9’s gravitational pull, so it had survived reentry and planetfall largely unscathed, and was now sitting at the bottom of a gigantic, perfectly spherical crater in Biskot’s frozen surface. Judging by the power of the blizzard that was still pounding on the force field, both the facility and the crater would be completely erased about half a minute after the power went out. I shivered.
I peered down the perfectly square corridor module to the next turn in the path, then looked out of the porthole again as the force field wavered with a brief brownout. It was entirely possible that it was already too late to rescue Daniel Henderson. If Terrorgorn had shaken off the effect of the slave crown, Daniel could already have been reduced to the thickness of a piece of paper and used to decorate one of the walls.
After a quick look back to gauge how long it would take to sprint to the exit, I decided to risk calling out. “DANIEL?” I shouted in the general direction of forward. “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
Three seconds of silence, but for the distant ominous howling of wind. Then four. Then five. It couldn’t be helped. There was no way to—
“Mr. McKeown?” came a worried, reedy voice from up ahead. “Your ship’s really different to mine . . .”
Trac. There was still hope. “Daniel! You need to come here! Follow my voice!”
“Erm, I think I should maybe go,” said Daniel, more quietly, addressing someone nearby. “Would it be all right if I . . . no? Okay. I think I’d better stay here, actually, Mr. McKeown!”
Double trac and calculus to boot. Terrorgorn was with him. I looked down and checked the readout on my blaster: fully charged. I suspected this meant it would in some way be taken off me very soon, but that was no reason to give up.
Daniel’s voice was coming from a doorway in the next section of corridor marked with a knife-and-fork icon, which on this facility could equally mean a break room or one of the manufacturing centers. I took up position beside the doorway and peered around it.
Beyond was a large, perfectly square room filled with industrial machines for stamping out, cutting, and trimming molded plastic, all connected by conveyor belts and thick overhead pipes for housing cables and transporting raw materials, but there was an open space in the middle of the machine maze where Terrorgorn had made himself comfortable. He was sitting calmly on a bench intended for production line workers to lie on for their mandatory five-minute break, with hands by his sides and legs crossed. He was still wearing the slave crown, although it had been mangled by several more blunt impacts, and now resembled a shiny aluminium flat cap.
Daniel was sitting on the bench at right angles to Terrorgorn’s, looking distinctly less comfortable. He was hunched forward with his arms wrapped around his stomach, and he grimaced sickly at me as I approached, gun drawn.
I stopped as the ceiling lights flickered ominously, and the wind became a notch louder. “Jimi’s monitoring the power cell we used to get the forc
e fields back up,” said Sturb in my ear. “We’re estimating about eight more minutes. Well. Probably closer to seven, now.”
“Okay,” I said, both in answer and to declare the final confrontation officially started. I waggled my blaster so that everyone could see and appreciate that the power dial was set to Solve All Immediate Problems. Terrorgorn gave me a pained smile, then looked away before he could accidentally make eye contact. “Daniel. Are you all right?”
“Erm.” Daniel looked to Terrorgorn. “Am I all right?”
“Mm,” said Terrorgorn.
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“Okay,” I repeated. There was no way of knowing what power level Terrorgorn was operating on, but the fact that I hadn’t yet been divided into strips and fed through the nearest air vent was encouraging. I waggled my gun again. “Don’t move, and this doesn’t have to get nasty. I’m taking Daniel out of here, and you’re staying exactly where you are.”
“Hmmm.” Terrorgorn winced and wrinkled his nose to indicate that he didn’t entirely agree with my version of upcoming events.
Then I dropped my gun. I hadn’t consciously wanted to do so, but the fingers of my right hand uncurled nevertheless, pulled by invisible telekinetic force. The trigger guard swung off my extended index finger, then fell off, and the blaster clattered to the metal floor. It was tough, always having to be right.
It felt like a tiny, slender hand had gripped each of my fingers individually and pulled them apart. They were still pulling, and I could feel them straining to snap the bones in my hand, but they couldn’t muster the strength. I tried to crouch, to snatch the gun back with my other hand, but it was like moving through treacle, and shortly Terrorgorn had stretched out the rest of my fingers.
At the same time, my blaster crawled across the floor as if being conveyed by a helpful platoon of Tyrellian worker ants. It stopped at Terrorgorn’s foot, and he bent down to pick it up, skinny arms shaking as he held it up in both hands. Apparently he didn’t have enough telekinetic power to lift it, but that was small comfort.
“Five minutes left,” said Sturb.
“You really think you can get away with this?” I blurted out, it being the first line of the usual script.
“Yeah,” said Terrorgorn, nodding.
An awkward pause later, I tried again. “It’s over, Terrorgorn. Your little game with the Biskottis is done. Salvation’s safe. There’s nothing you can get from holding us here, you might as well just let us go.”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
Another long pause. I coughed. “So that’s it? At the end of all this, petty revenge? We both know you won’t pull that trigger. It’d never be enough for someone like you.”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
I released a sigh, letting my arms flop down in defeat. This was unbearable. It was like being trapped in conversation at a wedding reception with a teenage cousin you’ve never plying met.
“Dude, come on,” whined Daniel miserably. “You could just let us go. You don’t have to be uncool about it. You can’t do much with that thingy on your head, anyway.”
Terrorgorn’s power was reduced, but had apparently been diffused. I could feel every part of my body being lightly probed, seeking a weakness. I felt ill as my organs were jiggled experimentally, and lightheaded as my brain was pressed against the sides of my skull.
Terrorgorn’s head was cocked to one side, considering Daniel’s words. “Nah,” he said finally. “I’m fine.” Then he opened fire.
I saw it coming, from the way the veins in his arms bulged with the effort of squeezing the trigger, but moving out of the way was like pulling my legs out of a waist-high vat of half-melted marshmallow. I fell to my left as a white-hot ball of plasma roared past, banging my head ringingly on the edge of the nearest conveyor belt, which was a welcome distraction from the sensation of my right elbow getting caught by the edge of the blaster shot.
The moment I hit the floor, several ends of my body registered urgent complaints, overwhelming the command center in my mind. I inspected my elbow, and wished I hadn’t. The sleeve of my T-shirt was burnt, and the straps holding my Quantunnels in place were a little warped, although the frames themselves were safe. I wondered briefly what would happen if you broke or reshaped the frame of an active Quantunnel, and concluded I probably didn’t want to be between two of them when it happened.
All of which was distracting me nicely from the state of the flesh on my arm. I could just about see through the smoke that it looked like it would be more at home rotating slowly behind the counter of a kebab shop.
I forced myself to focus on Terrorgorn again, who had just about recovered from the heavy recoil and was about to fire a second shot. Instinctively I rolled to the side, passing under the conveyor belt into the maze of machinery surrounding the room’s perimeter. I scrambled to my feet, almost brained myself on a low-hanging pipe, and leapt into cover behind an empty vat just as a second plasma ball utterly ruined the section of conveyor belt I’d recently disappeared under.
Now that I had broken Terrorgorn’s line of sight, my body was fully under my control again, with the exception of my right arm, which dangled uselessly from the shoulder like a red vinyl stocking full of angry plums. It felt like I’d dunked the entire thing in a vat of liniment cream.
“Just under three minutes.” Sturb’s placid tone of voice was really starting to annoy.
Hugging my chosen piece of cover, I clenched every sphincter I had available and waited for the blaster to fire again, but it didn’t. Instead, I heard what sounded like an altercation between two teenage girls slap fighting over their favorite boy band.
I risked a look around the empty vat, and saw that Daniel Henderson had grabbed both of Terrorgorn’s wrists and was trying to wrestle the gun away from him. Terrorgorn was physically somewhat atrophied, but Daniel had the build of someone who got most of their exercise hammering out exclamation marks on their computer keyboard, and he was sweating copiously with the effort as Terrorgorn’s uncomfortable face was pushed to the limits of passive aggression.
“Daniel?” I said, not entirely sure if I needed to intervene.
“It’s cool, Mr. McKeown!” He gasped, digging in his heels and pulling harder. “I’ve got this!”
It was then that I realized, with instant foreboding, that Daniel was trying to get the barrel of the blaster under Terrorgorn’s chin. I considered breaking cover and dashing over to stop him, but the gun was still a little too close to pointing at me for my liking. “No! Daniel, no!”
“It’s cool! It’s cool!” he grunted, like a mantra. Then he made a final burst of effort, pulled the barrel inwards a good six inches, and clumsily dragged the trigger down.
There was a fiery boom, a flash of pyrotechnics, and Terrorgorn, Daniel, and my smoking blaster all fell to the floor from different angles. I craned my neck out of cover, and saw that Terrorgorn’s entire head had been reduced to an ugly streak of blood, brains, and leathery skin fragments that was still spreading from his burnt neck stump, and the slave crown was little more than a cloud of metal shards.
But only one of those two things was about to regenerate.
“Daniel, run!”
Daniel was sitting on the floor with knees drawn up and head bowed in the classic “thank God it’s over” pose. He looked up. “What?”
“RUN!!”
“No, it’s cool.” He picked up one of Terrorgorn’s arms and held up his limp form. “I shot his head off. Look.”
It was too late. Terrorgorn’s new head burst out from the narrow space between his shoulders like a parsnip being yanked from the ground. It was almost completely white, still greasy with mysterious bodily fluids, and as smooth as a billiard ball, lacking all the wrinkles and weathering of his previous head. It also had two pure black eyes, in each of which glittered a spark of befuddled annoyance.
In
the next instant, Daniel was thrown off his feet by the full force of Terrorgorn’s telekinetic power, and was stopped abruptly at the top of his arc, floating in midair in the center of the machine room. Then Terrorgorn flung him left, then right, creating musical clongs from his head making impact with hollow ceiling pipes, before slamming him to the ground and pinning his entire body down, flattening his legs and arms until he couldn’t even twitch his fingers.
I had one foot on the nearest section of conveyor belt and was peering over the top of the empty vat. Terrorgorn had his back to me, but I could see Daniel over his shoulder, spread across the floor like so much AstroTurf. Terrorgorn slowly cocked his head to one side, and Daniel’s neck began to mimic the motion, albeit in a much more exaggerated and considerably less survivable way.
“Erm, you’ve got one minute left before the flash freeze,” said Sturb. “If you haven’t started your climactic battle yet, it might be too late.”
Thinking about this rationally, not to mention thinking about this in a stark terrified panic, clearly wasn’t working out. I decided to let instinct take over. And no one could have been more surprised than I when instinct decided I was going to clamber on top of the vat and fling myself bodily at Terrorgorn. I had just enough air time to briefly touch base with every poor decision I’d ever made in life, and then my eyes instinctively closed the instant before impact.
I’d been shooting for something in the “wrestle them to the ground to buy Daniel enough time to escape” sort of area, but the next thing I felt was my chin making sharp, painful impact with the metal floor. I’d missed. Perfect. I can shoot down enemy star pilot ships easily enough whenever I’m specifically trying not to, but when it comes to bodychecking one stationary bracket from two feet away, that’s just asking too much. I kept my eyes screwed shut as I waited for Terrorgorn to spin my neck like a merry-go-round.
When an entire two seconds passed without it happening, I risked opening one eye. Then two. All I could see was Daniel, picking himself off the floor in front of me and trying to manually uncrick his neck with both hands. Terrorgorn was nowhere to be seen.
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