Cole was alone, but preparing to jump out after the others.
“He’s mine!” someone roared.
A figure stepped forward from the rest, pulling the other beasts away by their shoulders. Cole felt the edge of the platform behind him with one boot. He reached up and wrapped his hand around the grenade, preparing to drop it near the pedestal, to count to three, and then to jump out. His wild plan was coming off without a hitch.
He looked up as the approaching figure began unwrapping his face, revealing blond hair so bright it made the snow seem dingy and gray.
Cole loosened his iron grip on the grenade and watched as the piston responded. He remembered how he had come to possess the hand. He remembered what the Luddites had done to Riggs. He remembered what
Cole let go of the grenade completely, dropping his arm away from his chest. He reached instead for his buckblade, metal wrapping around metal. He peered up at Joshua, the man who had taken his arm, and forgot for a moment the need for his own escape…
Penny fell out of the air with a thud. The second half of her scream, a warning to Cole, remained caught in her throat, cut short by her skip across hyperspace. Several pairs of hands clasped her, dragging her out of the way before they began searching her for damage.
“Send the numbers!” someone yelled.
Penny looked toward the voice. It was Arthur, who stood at the inner edge of a circle formed around the spot she had just fallen through. A group of aliens stood there, waiting for another arrival.
A bright flash of a welding torch blossomed in Penny’s peripheral. She noted the stench of burning metal as some mechanic worked to staunch her loss of fluids.
“Not now,” she told him. She pushed the various worried hands away, the amount of stimuli buzzing on all sides driving her over the brink. She looked around for Mortimor, only to find his legs sticking out from a clustered mob of soldiers pretending to be medics. Scanning the sparse assemblage, Penny realized she wasn’t on a lifeboat full of hope. Whatever group had received them, it wasn’t the basket getting all the best eggs from HQ.
She grabbed the sleeve of one of the men inspecting her various gashes. “Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Three groups are through the rift,” the man said. “We got a bum slot in the queue.”
The man started to say more, but Penny’s mind was already elsewhere. It felt like it had been an hour since she’d vanished from the Luddite village and spilled out across the deck. Surely it had been long enough for the platform to recharge. Where was Cole?
She looked back to the center of the empty circle, her gaze joining dozens of others as they waited for another pop of air.
“Where the hell are you?” Penny asked no one.
Cole could see in his peripheral that he was being surrounded. He could also tell that Joshua would strike down any of his own men who dared attack him first. He put the crowd out of mind, which had him forgetting the potential danger inherent in the jump platform—the ease with which Ryke’s magical device could be used against the ongoing raid above.
He forgot these things and instead took a step forward, raising his sword and trying his best to not limp on his busted ankle. Cole remembered what Penny had told him during their first buckblade lesson: There was nothing heroic about these fights. There were no speeches. It was one slash and then it was over.
Keeping his feet in an orthodox fencer’s stance, he swung his blade through the air like a traditional sword, which elicited chuckles from the tightening circle and forced a smile across Joshua’s face.
The Luddite leader moved fast, darting into range and swinging one of the power angles Cole had hoped for, one designed to cut his torso in half. Cole locked up his new wrist, his elbow, and his shoulder, making his arm a solid extension of the rest of him. He transferred his weight to the ball of his good foot, bringing his blade around to block the attack.
The rebound should have ended him. The like magnetic fields should have thrown his own blade into his knees, taking off both limbs in a gory recreation of his first sparring mistake. Instead, with his stance soft and with all his weight on the ball of one boot, perched perilously atop the icy decking, the force of the magnetic repulsion spun him completely around, his elbow, wrist, and shoulder locked solid.
Cole went full-circle, twirling like a child’s top. He raised his blade as he went. For a brief moment, he was blind to his own attack, facing away from Joshua and his men, watching his hand as it steered the invisible blade through the air in a great circle.
When he completed the pirouette, expecting to slice Joshua in half, Cole felt with disbelief as his buckblade rebounded off Joshua’s sword once again—blocked.
But the rebound was milder the second time.
As the spinning world fell back into focus, Cole saw why: His sword had passed through Joshua’s waist to meet the man’s still-frozen attack on the other side of his body, bounced off, then slid back through the man’s chest once more.
Cole threw both arms out and regained his balance as Joshua fell in pieces.
The wide arc of fur-clad warriors lit up with furious shouts, screams of disbelief and outrage. Cole took a step toward the platform, counting. Several of the men ran forward, their full-throated fury befitting their animalistic garb, their arms high with attacks meant to kill.
When Cole got to “three,” he took a last step back, activating the platform with his weight and dropping a small metal pin before he went.
He left the howling men with a gentle pop of air.
Followed by a very loud bang.
Cole fell out of the air and slammed into the metal decking of the Bern ship. A scattering of snowflakes— caught up in the platform’s energistic bubble—drifted down around him. An alien rushed to his side and began probing for wounds. Beyond, a cacophony of shouts and worried conversations merged into a nervous, indecipherable patter.
The Underground member tending to him said something in a foreign tongue. Cole shook his head. He looked around for Penny and Mortimor as the leg of his combat suit was cut back to expose his injured ankle. In a cluster of confused, trembling bodies to one side, Cole saw Penny’s bright, red mane. She was in the same pose in which he’d first seen her: Leaning over a patient, splattered with blood, a mask of rigid worry on her face.
“Penny!”
She looked up, and Cole read the news in her set jaw. One of Mortimor’s hands clutched the folds of her combat suit just below her shoulder. Cole tried to swallow the lump in his throat; he attempted to stand, but the alien medic forced him back down. The figure held Cole in place while a needle went into his ankle, deep as the bone. Cole clenched his teeth at the pinch and metallic sting. A surge of icy numbness spread through his foot. The alien stood back, still chattering in a foreign tongue.
Cole rose and hobbled over to Penny and Mortimor, practically hopping on one foot. A corner of the hijacked Bern ship’s cargo bay had been transformed into a disorganized operating room. A Pheron knelt on the other side of Mortimor and was just finishing sewing up a wound on his exposed abdomen. The skin all around it was smeared pink from being wiped free of blood.
Cole collapsed by Penny. “What’re we waiting on?” he asked. He glanced toward the cockpit. “We need to get him help. We need to get back to HQ—”
“There’s nothing there,” Penny said, shaking her head. “These are the last of the technicians. Everyone’s out.”
“We need to get through the rift, then.”
Penny nodded toward one of the crewmen. “They say we’ve got about a day of waiting.”
