Chapter 243

The portal opened onto the bridge of Gabriel Santiago’s ship, and Annie stepped through, ready for a fight.

She didn’t get one.

The bridge was smaller than Sleipnir’s, with a tighter layout and fewer stations. A dozen crew members occupied consoles in a rough semicircle around a central command chair. Every one of them froze the instant the portal materialized.

Augustus came through behind her, wand in hand.

The captain recovered first. He was out of his chair and reaching for the sidearm on his hip before Annie could take a second step. The XO followed half a beat later, pulling something from beneath his console. A security officer near the door went for a panel on the wall.

Augustus swept the wand across the room.

Ethereal hands materialized in clusters. Five seized the captain mid-draw, lifting him off his feet and pressing him flat against the bulkhead. Three caught the XO and pinned his arms to his sides, the weapon clattering to the deck. More appeared across the bridge, grabbing wrists and ankles, immobilizing every crew member in seconds.

The security officer’s hand hit the panel a fraction before three hands yanked him backward.

An alarm blared. A recorded voice filled the bridge. “Security alert. Bridge compromised. All security personnel to the bridge. Repeat. Bridge compromised.”

Augustus lowered the wand. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

Annie laughed. “Getting slow, old man. Grimnir might need to start looking into building a retirement home. Population one.”

“Laugh it up,” Augustus said, gesturing toward the door with his wand. “You get to deal with whatever security complement is currently arming themselves to storm the bridge.”

“Won’t even be a warm-up.”

Someone gasped. Then several others.

Annie turned. Through the bridge’s main viewscreen, a plume of debris was erupting from the space station. Glass and metal and equipment sprayed outward in a silent cascade, glittering against the dark. The station’s atmosphere vented from a massive breach near its center, carrying everything with it.

The bridge went still. Even the pinned crew members stopped struggling to stare.

Augustus pointed his wand at a crewman near the sensor console. “You. Zoom in on that.”

The man’s eyes darted to his captain, still pressed against the wall. The captain looked at the viewscreen, then back at the crewman. He nodded.

The image magnified. The debris field sharpened. And among the tumbling wreckage, a figure in a shredded pink shirt spun through the void. His face was ruined. One side of his jaw was missing. One eye socket was a dark smear.

He wasn’t moving.

Annie stared. “Radiant.”

The word sat there for a second.

“Holy shit.” She spun on Augustus. “THAT was the plan?!”

She punched him in the arm. Hard enough that he winced and started rubbing the spot.

“I can’t believe you kept that from me!” She jabbed a finger at the viewscreen. “I was actually worried about him! If I’d known he was just going to blow up the station, I would have been excited instead of stressed!”

Augustus continued rubbing his arm. “And that, my dear, is precisely why we didn’t tell you.”

Annie huffed and headed for the exit. “Whatever, jerk.”

The door slid open at her approach. Talia’s doing.

Annie stepped through, MetaMetal rippling across her body.

The hallway ahead had a squad of marines, already in position. Two crouched in doorways on either side, weapons shouldered. Two more held the far end, barrels leveled. The last pair were still moving, scrambling into cover behind a bulkhead support.

They opened fire.

Energy bolts sparked off her chest and shoulders, each impact a dull thud she barely registered. MetaMetal redirected the energy across its surface, dispersing it into nothing.

Annie grinned.

She launched forward. The first marine had tucked himself into a doorway on the left. He tried to track her with his rifle as she closed the distance. Too slow. She grabbed him by the collar, yanked him out of the doorway, and slammed the back of his head into the frame. The metal rang. He dropped.

The marine across the hall swung his weapon toward her. She caught the barrel and shoved it upward. The burst hit the ceiling. Her other fist drove into his stomach, folding him over the blow, and she brought her elbow down on the back of his neck.

Two down.

The next pair adjusted, falling back toward their partners at the end of the corridor, firing as they retreated. Bolts pinged off her arms, her face, the bridge of her nose. One caught her in the eye. She blinked.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Annie closed the gap fast. She kicked the first one between the legs. His knees buckled instantly, mouth open in a silent scream, rifle clattering to the deck. She grabbed the back of his head with both hands and drove her knee into his face. Something crunched. He went limp.

The fourth drew a knife as she turned. He was skilled, but the blade came in low toward the ribs, trying to exploit a vulnerability that didn’t exist in her MetaMetal. The knife scraped and skidded off. She caught his wrist, twisted until the blade dropped, then headbutted him hard enough to bounce him off the wall behind him. He slid to the floor.

The last two opened up from the end of the corridor. Full auto, concentrated fire, everything they had. Energy hammered into her in a continuous stream, sparking and ricocheting off MetaMetal in every direction. The walls around her pockmarked with deflected shots.

Annie walked toward them.

One of them stopped firing. His energy clip drained. He stared at her, then at the rifle in his hands, then back at her.

She cracked her knuckles.

He dropped the weapon and raised his hands. His partner kept firing for another two seconds before reaching the same conclusion.

Annie stopped in front of them. MetaMetal gleamed under the corridor lights, looking untouched.

“Smart boys,” she said. “Now take me to the cargo bay.”

***

The stairwell spiraled downward, passing through meters of solid metal where the space station extended into the moon itself. Each step Alexander took rang through the metal, the OACS boots striking the grating with a heavy thunk that echoed off the walls and into the darkness below.

He descended slowly. His ribs ached with every breath. The blood inside his helmet had begun to dry against his skin, pulling at his lips and chin whenever his jaw moved. His left hand clenched and unclenched at his side, testing the duct tape wrapped around the gauntlet. The HUD confirmed the seal was holding. For now.

Droney drifted beside him. The surviving drones trailed behind in a loose column, fitting themselves into the narrow stairwell single file.

The space that opened before him was the largest he’d seen on the station. A laboratory, stretching the full width of the facility’s lowest level. Chemistry benches ran in long rows beneath overhead lighting that had failed, leaving everything bathed in the red glow of emergency strips along the baseboards. Medical equipment lined the walls. Scanners. Injectors. Monitoring stations with dark screens. Refrigeration units humming on backup power, their contents hidden behind frosted glass.

A dozen bodies lay across the lab floor. Slumped over benches. Collapsed beside their workstations. The same burn marks. The same precision. Radiant had been thorough.

Standing at the center of the lab, his back to the stairwell, was Gabriel Santiago.

He looked older than the last time Alexander had seen him, back at the research facility in Europe. The salt-and-pepper hair had gone mostly silver. The designer suit was gone, replaced by a simple shirt and trousers. But the arrogance remained. Straight-backed and unhurried. The posture of a man who had spent decades as one of the richest and most powerful people on Earth.

Alexander stepped off the last stair and onto the lab floor. His drones spread out above him.

Santiago turned. Sharp eyes swept over Alexander. Lingered on Droney and the swarm of drones overhead. He took it all in with a measured assessment.

Then he shook his head.

“Alexander Rooke. I guess that’s my ship out there, then. I didn’t recognize it on the display.” His voice was calm. Controlled. “If I’d known the trouble you would bring me, I’d have flown to the prison the same day I received the alert that the System redacted you. Then I would have stuffed you into the incinerator with my own two hands.”

Alexander stopped. “Wow, you are every bit the asshole I imagined. Even in your time-travel hypothetical, you don’t just release me back into the world with my average ambitions to become a mediocre local superhero. My alias would probably have been Gadget Man.” He shrugged. “No, you baby-Hitler me instead. You are one messed-up dead guy.”

Santiago’s eyes widened a fraction.

Alexander laughed. “Are you kidding me? You didn’t even consider letting me go as an option in your imagined scenario?”

“I’m not interested in your quips, Mr. Rooke. What do you want? I assume, by the fact that you’re here and Radiant is not responding, that you bought him off somehow.” Santiago held out his arms. “Despite our differences, and the not inconsiderable harm you have done to both my reputation and my fortune, I am entirely willing to pay you whatever you want to be done with this hostility. I can make you far wealthier than you can imagine.”

Alexander’s laugh died.

The anger came from somewhere deep. Somewhere he didn’t visit often, because every other time he’d faced a crisis, there had been something to solve. A problem to work through. A plan to execute. Anger was inefficient. It clouded judgment and wasted energy he couldn’t afford to lose.

But Santiago had just reduced everything to money.

“Differences,” Alexander said. The word came out quiet.

A spark flickered in the air beside him and died just as fast.

He started walking toward Santiago. Each step rang against the sterile floor plating, the OACS boots striking metal in a steady rhythm that carried across the otherwise silent lab.

“You put me in a cell with a bomb strapped to my neck. I sat in the dark for weeks, starving and sleep-deprived, not knowing if the collar would go off while I slept. Not knowing if anyone even knew I was alive. Confused because I’d died and woken up in a world that wasn’t my own.”

Something rattled on the bench to his left. A tray of surgical instruments, trembling against the surface.

“When I got out, it was because someone else attacked the prison. I ran through a warzone in a paper gown, barefoot, bleeding, with only a trickle of power and no plan, because the alternative was dying in a hole you put me in.”

Santiago didn’t move. His eyes tracked Alexander’s approach.

A metal cabinet beside Alexander groaned, its frame warping inward as he passed.

“Then I found your research facility. I walked through the rooms where your doctor tortured sapient beings from other worlds. I watched Felix heal from wounds that should have killed him three times over. I carried Gilly out of a cell he’d been locked in for months, and he flinched because every human he’d ever met had hurt him. Krrsh suffered so much at your hands that he believes we’re owed a life debt.”

Instruments lifted off the benches. They hung in the air, vibrating, turning slowly as he walked beneath them.

His voice dropped.

“Then you placed a bounty on us. Blamed us for what you’d done to the aliens. Framed us for murdering an entire mercenary company. You called us terrorists on the news and forced us into hiding, terrified for our friends and family.”

Monitors along the wall flickered to life. One after another, screens filling with static, casting shifting light across the bodies on the floor. The hum of electronics built beneath his words.

“There are people in your Deep Cells right now. People the world has forgotten, because you made sure they would be forgotten. And you stand here, in a lab full of your own dead employees, employees that your own bodyguard murdered on your orders, and you offer me money.”

All across the lab, cabinet doors bent on their hinges. Equipment strained against its bolts. The floor plating beneath his boots warped and curled at the corners.

Alexander stopped in front of him.

“You call it differences. You say I harmed your reputation and your fortune.” His left hand clenched. The metal creaked. “You still don’t understand what you’ve done. And that is why I’m not taking your money, Gabriel. I didn’t come all the way here for your wealth.”

He leaned close.

“I just need you to stop breathing.”