“Let me tell you how everything will go if you succeed,” I said. “You’ll become ruler of this world. You’ll hold it in your hands like a beautiful blue pearl. That’ll be enough at first. Just to have it.
“But then you’ll start tinkering. Oh, you’ll have the best of intentions. You’ll fix those little pestering problems the Terrans themselves never could. Hunger. War. Poverty. Those will be easy, a long weekend.
“After that, you’ll struggle against the relentless urges that drive you. You’ll realize, intellectually, that there’s little left to do. But you won’t be able to help yourself. Terra will become your own personal science project until your inevitable nature nearly destroys the world. Several times.
“Now, providing you manage to prevent this, you’ll learn some restraint. But it’ll always be there. That insistent desire, that nagging need. You’ll never be able to suppress it. Not completely. And you’ll find yourself wondering if tomorrow is the day you destroy it, most probably by accident.”
Mark Two said, “I’ll learn from your mistakes.”
“Or you’ll just make slightly different variations of the same ones. Regardless, the Terrans have been through enough under one warlord. They don’t need another.”
A klaxon blared, signaling the final countdown. I pushed a button on my exo, and the station blast shields lowered. Mark Two frowned, realizing that I’d hacked his systems.
Mark Two shook off his confusion and resumed his laughter. “I don’t know what happened to you in the time since you were me, but it doesn’t matter. Terra will be mine, and there’s not a thing you can—”
“I already stopped it. You didn’t think you could hide your operation in Minneapolis from me, did you?”
He smiled. “No, that was merely another decoy.”
“Of course, it was,” I replied. “As were your machinations in Lisbon, St. Petersburg, and Busan.”
His smile dropped.
“I’ll admit you almost had me with Melbourne,” I said. “But the decoy in Geneva was sloppy work, if I may be so bold as to offer some criticism.”
He wasn’t angered. He was curious. He was me, after all. And I was rarely frustrated by my failures. I preferred using them as learning opportunities.
I pressed another button. I kept the gravity and lights on for convenience, but everything else in the station went dead. The countdown ended. The doomsday device, the real device hidden aboard this station, wound down.
Mark Two glared. “How did you—”
“I’m you, remember. Just you with a few more years’ experience. Everything you’ve done, I’ve already thought of. Every contingency plan, every possibility, I already did five years ago before you were even hatched from your tank.”
He hid his incredulity behind a scowl, but I sensed it. If the situation were reversed, I’d have been the same. I hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that I would foil his plans. But I was a humbler guy now than I was when I had been him.
His mottled flesh darkened with rage. I could see where he was coming from. I’d failed before, but I’d never been outwitted. But I’d never had to face off against myself. Now it’d all gone freshwater for Mark Two, as the old Neptunon saying went.
His hulking exoskeleton lumbered forward. “You may have stopped me this time, but you won’t be around to stop me the next.”
He threw a clumsy punch that would’ve pulverized the Ninja-3 if I hadn’t sidestepped the blow. He followed that with a haymaker that I danced under. I glided behind him and used a microfilament blade to slice open the hydraulics behind the exo’s right knee. It wobbled but didn’t fall.
He hadn’t even bothered to change the specs. Perhaps he wasn’t a perfect clone after all.
Mark Two teetered on his damaged leg as he struggled to line me up in his sights, but it was a simple thing for me to scamper up his back. I stabbed a few vital systems along the way. The last thing I hit was the stabilizer. His powerful exo tumbled over, ten tons of scrap metal.
A hatch opened, and he ejected in a smaller exo. The clear, fluid-filled dome that held his head bubbled with his frustration. I’d never lost my temper like that, but then again, I’d never been foiled so effortlessly. Or maybe the cloning process had simply been incapable of re-creating every bit of my pragmatic genius. He must’ve known his backup was no match for my Ninja, but in his anger, he didn’t care. I dodged the blasts he sent my way and dismantled his exo with three efficient cuts. It clattered to the floor in pieces.
He flopped around, glaring daggers. Neptunons could survive out of water for extended periods, but it wasn’t comfortable.
“You can’t stop me,” he gurgled. “I’ll be back.”
“No, you won’t.”
I activated the station’s self-destruct countdown. Just a little something I’d slipped into his blueprints when he wasn’t looking.
“So that’s it?” he asked. “You’re just going to leave me here to die?”
“I’m afraid so. No hard feelings.”
Mark Two undulated in a shrug. “No, I suppose not. I’d do the same to you if the situation were reversed.”
“I guess I haven’t changed so much after all,” I replied.
We shared a laugh.
“Just tell me something. It would’ve worked, right?”
“It would have worked,” I said.
He grinned. “That’s something at least.”
“Yeah, it’s something.”
I made my escape without incident, boarding my automated rendezvous craft, and watched the station explode from a safe distance.
It was quite beautiful.
Then I pondered the small world below, oblivious to its own fragility.
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
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31
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35
extras
meet the author
By A. Lee Martinez
Preview of The Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by A. Lee Martinez
Excerpt from Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain copyright © 2012 by
A. Lee Martinez
Cover design by Chad Roberts
Cover © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-316-22644-8 (ebook)
Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest Page 29