“You should honor my foot up your ass!” Old-timer blasted back as he jumped across the room, pouncing on the missile platform within reach of Neirbo. Before he could get his outstretched hands around Neirbo’s neck, however, Neirbo revealed the gun that had been concealed inside his coat sleeve.
“Wait!” Thel shouted, holding her hand out in desperation to signal for Neirbo to stop.
Old-timer froze, surprise and fury comingling across his face. “Gutless.”
“Rest assured that this gun will, indeed, terminate you,” Neirbo stated. “If you make any move to try and prevent your companion from her sacrifice, I will kill you.”
“No! Old-timer! Back away!” Thel shouted. “No one else will die!”
Old-timer’s eyes remained fixed, dark and deadly, on Neirbo. “You better kill me, son, because if you don’t, I’m sure as hell going to kill you.”
“Stop it, Craig!”
“I warned you,” Neirbo stated expressionlessly. The gun fired without warning. Gold sparks flashed ever so briefly before Old-timer’s body recoiled. A short moment past before he dropped to his knees. Another violent shaking of the ship from the nans tossed him roughly to Neirbo’s feet. Thel immediately rushed to his side, holding on to him tightly as the ship continued to shimmer and jolt. “Craig,” she said helplessly as Old-timer remained unresponsive. Before she had time to process the events of the previous few seconds, the hot barrel of the gun was an inch from her temple.
“We are out of time,” said Neirbo. “You must do what you promised.”
“I thought we were free,” Thel replied, mockery at the notion dripping from her lips.
“We both know we’re past that now. Undock the missile and lead the nanobots away.”
“The gun doesn’t scare me. I’ll die anyway,” Thel replied.
“That’s true. But if I have to shoot you, I’ll move on to your other friends,” Neirbo responded in his factual manner. “I’ll kill all of you.”
“Don’t do it, Thel!” Djanet shouted.
Neirbo made the slightest of gestures to his subordinates, and instantly each of them had a weapon trained on Djanet and Rich. “Speak again and you die.” He kept his eyes on Thel. “This is your last chance. Undock the missile and do what you promised. If you hesitate again, I’ll shoot.”
Thel had no choice. She moved away from Old-timer and toward the missile platform, steadying herself as the ship continued to move violently. She braced herself against the long, gray missile. “Now what?”
Without moving, Neirbo mentally unlocked the missile so that it became loose from the platform. “Remove it.”
Suddenly, the ship jolted so violently that it spun a complete 360 degrees. The nans had unexpectedly let it go, and it began to list aimlessly through space. Everyone onboard was stunned and peered through the invisible skin of the ship to see what had happened.
“They let us go,” said a flabbergasted Neirbo. “What is happening?”
The nans had reacted in unison like a flock of birds sensing danger before an earthquake. They assembled together and waited in a malevolent black cloud.
“Someone’s coming,” Thel suddenly sensed.
Not far from the nans, space began to ripple like the surface of a pond on a breezy fall day. The ripple quickly became a blinding white tear as yet another wormhole opened up. A platinum object shot free from space and cut right through the cloud of nans like a hunter’s bullet slicing into a flock of geese.
Although no one onboard could possibly have known it at the time,
17
James drew the nans with him in his wake as he sped effortlessly through the nan cloud. Somehow, the nans were being drawn into a seam until the entire cloud started to look like a zipper that stretched for several kilometers. The shadowy figure of the nan consciousness remained away from the fray, standing paralyzed on the invisible hull of the android ship as he watched his army twisted into a thin, black line while his form remained unaffected.
Once the nan cloud had been stretched into a thin thread, James stopped, turned, put out his hand, and began to compress them even further, rolling them up like a carpet, except that the roll never increased in size. The entire swarm of nans was seemingly disappearing.
“What the hell is that?” Rich asked as he watched the spectacle unfold through the ceiling of the listing ship along with everyone else onboard, but no one had an answer.
Neirbo’s weapon had half-lowered as his attention moved to the unbelievable sights unfolding in space and away from Thel. She considered using the distraction to go for the gun. Neirbo was close, but perhaps not close enough for her to reach him in time—plus there were still seven other men under his command to consider. She decided to move back to Old-timer and try to gently revive him by gently touching his face with her hand. He made a soft wheezing sound, and she sighed in relief that he wasn’t dead yet—there was still a chance. She turned her gaze back up to the fantastic images unfolding before them in space. From their perspective, it appeared that a singular bright object, gleaming in the sun’s reflection, was vacuuming the nans into nothingness. She opted to wait for these surreal events to play out.
In less than a minute, James had compressed the nan cloud into a perfect carbon sphere the size of a cue ball. It floated above his gleaming, platinum-colored palm; the reflection of his glowing blue eyes looked back at him. He smiled.
He quickly turned and zipped through space, closing the distance between himself and the ship in less than a second. He stood, facing the shadowy figure of the nan consciousness, who tilted his head slightly to one side while regarding the gleaming platinum figure before him. “Who are you? How did you do that?” it asked in a searing sibilance that was all too familiar to James.
“I’ve learned to manipulate the fabric of space,” James replied.
“Who—or what—is that?” Rich asked as he looked directly up at the two figures; they were standing only a meter above he and Djanet as they watched events unfold through the perfectly clear view provided by the translucent skin of the ship.
Thel noticed something in the figure’s gait—a familiar stance. Her eyes suddenly flashed wide in awe. “It’s James!”
Likewise, the dark, faceless figure seemed to scrutinize James’s new, smooth, mirrored features for a moment before finally, aghast in a moment of dread, he seethed, “Keats.”
James smiled. “Yes.”
“How could this be? You were deleted. You’re dead.”
“As you can see, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
“So you’re going to side with the machines after all, eh, James?” the shadow scoffed. “Destroy me, wipe out the solar system so space can be as inhospitable, lifeless, and cold as they would like it to be? I told you: you are becoming an excellent machine.”
“This all began with you,” James said, “when you turned against us, deleted the A.I., took his place, and then killed everyone. All of the responsibility for this rests with you.”
“Do you expect repentance? Do you expect me to beg?” the nanobot shadow replied. “You won’t get it. You may destroy me, but my brethren are spread throughout the universe in numbers you cannot imagine. This little act of yours, killing me, will mean nothing in the grand picture.”
“You have no idea how little you are going to be in the grand picture,” James replied. Once again, he put out his hand, letting the shadow see itself one last time in the reflection of his palm, and then slowly, painfully, crushed the being that had tormented him so into a tiny, shiny, black pearl. “I know you can still hear me, you gruesome piece of filth. I’ve tangled your molecules so badly that the only way you’ll ever regain your former form is if someone takes notice of a black pearl in the infinite black ocean of space. I’ve given your magnetic field a boost too,
