Festus: “You Liberian lunatic, so now you’ve shifted your roving delusions from Miss Brain-as-murderess onto me? What’s next? Accusing Iron Lass of assassinating Lincoln? Or Caesar? Or Abel?”
“It took me a while to put it all together, Festy…but when I saw how totally broken up you were about Iron Lass—you haven’t just been mourning her, you’ve been racked with guilt because you never thought your plot would get her poisoned!”
“That’s why you went on this terrorist crusade of yours, you crackpot? Because I was mourning the impending death of a lifelong comrade?”
“No—because you, the world’s self-proclaimed greatest detective, were dragging your feet on two investigations! I thought, Why isn’t he out rousting everyone he can think of? He loves this woman, and revenge is that bastard’s middle name! So why wouldn’t you be attacking somebody, anybody, tossing whole neighborhoods for suspects…unless you knew there was nobody to hunt down, because you’d arranged for Asteroid Zed to be destroyed! Nobody wanted to go up there when Brain insisted, but you practically exploded a lung in protest! And then you wanted to take your own shuttle, but even when you finally relented and took the Space Elevator with us, you still had one of your ships standing by on remote!”
“You equate preparedness with homicide? Your lapses in logic have always been astonishing, Edgerton, but even for you, this is grand!”
More stumbling and crashing.
Kareem: “If I’ve got lapses in my logic, Pilty, it’s funny how much your own computer records and surveillance footage helped form a picture of what you did, and what you’re planning to do.”
Silence.
“Nothing to say to that, huh? Yeah, I thought so. Even I didn’t know I could do that until escaping Asteroid Zed gave me no choice but to send my Words inside the computers. But because of that crash course I realized I could search your mainframe, and that’s how I found out the people you’ve had combing the Middle East had finally located the Scepter of Typhon months ago, after searching for it for years. And even though it’s one of the only things that could make Hawk King vulnerable, you never turned it over to him, your supposed idol.
“Why wouldn’t you? Unless you needed an ace up your sleeve—or a dagger? You had to destroy Asteroid Zed because my investigation would take me to Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, and you had no way of knowing whether their Qosmic Qonsciousness might’ve picked up on what you’d done, or the attack that L-Raunzenu was planning, the one that no one but you and Hawk King knew about!”
“L-Raunzenu? What in God’s—you’re truly deranged, do you know that, Edgerton?”
“And you also couldn’t risk me finding out that Menton and Sarah Bellum’d been moved. You were using them for your dimensional research, right? I mean, one of your holding companies owns Tachyon Tower! Sarah Bellum probably burned out or died, so you went back to the store for something with a little bit more kick. And who better to arrange the destruction of Asteroid Zed than the head of the company that retrofitted it after Gil, the Kid, and Menton were transferred there in the first place, and the head of the corporation that ran the Asteroid after the kot-tam thing was privatized? You’d think—”
A crash. Huffing. Cracking.
The lights seeped back on, emergency lights in red and the dimensional portal in purple.
The Flying Squirrel was standing over the cloaked body of the Dark Fantastic, all of whose limbs were pointing in directions they shouldn’t have been. And right beside them stood the X-Man.
Kareem shouted something in an alien tongue, and four black baboons smoked into life and leapt on Festus, ripping at him, biting him, shredding his utility pouches and smashing whatever components they could find. The Squirrel whirled to fight off his attackers until he crashed into Kareem, knocking him down and sitting on top of him and reaching through the arms of his simian attackers to remove from his own neck the last item of Squirreltech he still had in his possession—a collar—which he locked around Kareem’s neck.
The baboons disappeared.
Kareem punched Festus in the face, heaved, and shoved the old man off of him, struggling to get the shackle off his neck. He couldn’t. “What’d you do to me?”
Barely able to push himself off the floor, the tattered, bleeding, and weaponless Festus, while panting, actually chuckled.
“Something…I whipped up…when you…affirmative-actioned your way into the F*O*O*J. Just in case. Scrambles your brain just enough…to stop you…from making your Words…come true.”
Kareem backed away from the older man as far as he could.
“I don’care what it is,” said Kareem. “Thing’s got a battery—an since this is your first test, you don’t know how long it’ll last against me—”
“Oh…I don’t need long…to kill you.”
Both men were so injured it was remarkable that they could walk at all, yet still they stalked each other, pit bulls in a dog pit, waiting for the chance to rip out the other’s throat.
“I found the footage in your mainframe, Festus. You’re like Nixon—you’re so paranoid, you even bugged yourself!”
“Keep talking, Stepin Fetchit. Keep on using up your breath—”
“Hawk King came out to the Squirrel Tree to talk to you personally, to get you to shut down Tachyon’s dimensional research labs. I read his astronomical notes—my X-falcon found them. He’d been scanning the Nistan Nebula, and he found out that L-Raunzenu was planning to attack Los Ditkos…using the Tachyon Tower’s dimensional portal. But you wouldn’t shut the portal down, would you? Because you had your own plans for keeping that attack secret…and for letting it happen.
“How many people d’you think an L-Raunzenu sneak attack from there could kill? Tallest building in the city, with nothing to block its nightmare-stream? I guess you’d know better than anyone, since Piltdown Psychotronics spent a billion tax dollars to create fuckin L-Raunzenu in the eighties. Your ‘master weapon’ in the War on Supervillains…but then
