“Use the wastebasket, Hong,” Hei-lian said through teeth clenched so hard they squeaked. The tech caught it up just in time. The room filled with the acid reek of vomit.
Hei-lian barely noticed.
“Going back up,” Tom said. If the horrific and pathetic sight affected him his voice gave no sign. Hei-lian wondered what went through his mind.
“I can see a crater ahead of me now,” he said. “Not very big. Maybe fifty–sixty yards across.”
“This cannot be!” the professor exclaimed. “A crater would mean the fireball came in contact with the surface. Vaporized soil and rock would be sucked up and mingled with unconsumed radionuclides. It would produce substantial fallout.”
He took off his glasses and polished them furiously with a handkerchief. “Substantial.”
But the instruments continued to show radiation levels scarcely more than background. Something strange was going on here. Hei-lian felt relief at having a mystery to distract her from the images that kept shambling through her mind.
“I’m coming up to the crater,” Tom said, in effect narrating the action they saw on the screen. “Wait—there’s something down there in the middle of it.
“It’s—a kid. A naked kid. In the middle of the fucking crater.”
Tom Weathers touched down. The heat from the lumpy green glass walls baked his skin and forced him to squint his eyes to prevent their drying out. His Geiger counter chattered; the voices from Kongoville assured him he could endure it for a few minutes without permanent harm.
The boy lay sobbing in the midst of a patch of unaffected sand.
“Hey,” he called. “Hey, kid.” The boy was white—fish-pale all over, in fact, and jiggling chubby. Maybe he spoke English.
The kid had his head on his arms. He kept crying.
“Listen,” Tom said. “It’s okay. I’m gonna get you taken care of.”
“Go ’way!” the boy shouted with a wave of his arm. English. Cool.
Tom squatted down at the edge of the patch of sand. “You want me to just leave you here to the mosquitoes? Not a good plan, man.”
“I—killed them. I kill everybody. I shouldn’t be around people. I didn’t want to do it. I want to die!”
“Hey, buddy,” Tom said. “Just take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”
The boy sat up. His pale belly spilled sadly over plump thighs. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to. But the Highwayman shoved me out of the truck and drove off and then he was gone and these tanks were coming down the road. They started shooting at me. I got scared, and—” He drew in a big shuddering breath and waved his hand around. “This.”
“You did this?”
He nodded. “It always happens when I get scared.”
“Let me get this straight,” Tom said. “You cause nuclear explosions?”
“Yes! Haven’t you been listening? When I get real scared I fucking blow up. Are you some kind of ’tard?” The spasm of anger passed and his eyes gushed tears again. “I wish I was dead. I’m too dangerous to be around!”
The voices in Tom’s head were going ape-shit now. He ignored them. The warm feeling—like the aftermath of a good fuck; that three-way with Hei-lian and Lilith, say—spreading up through his belly from his loins told him what he was dealing with, and what he had, at any cost, to do.
“What’s your name?”
“Drake.” He sniffled and dabbed tears from his eyes. “Who are you?”
“Pleased to meet you, Drake. I’m Tom Weathers. Locally I got hung with some unpronounceable handle. I used to go by the Radical.”
“The revolutionary guy on the posters.”
“That’s me. You can call me Tom. Unless you can say Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Even if you can, call me Tom.”
The fat boy fell over and curled right back into fetal position. “What the fuck?” Tom burst out before he could stop himself.
“You’re gonna kill me!”
“Say what?” Tom was no slave to Western linear thought. Still, he thought that was a pretty funny worry for somebody who’d been announcing his desire to die so loudly thirty seconds ago. “Why the f—Why would I kill you, Drake? I wanna help you.”
“But you’re with the People’s Paradise.”
“Yeah.”
“Before they dumped me, the kidnappers were talking about, about the PPA. I think I just blew up your army.”
“We’ll get more,” Tom said. He imagined steam coming from Doc Prez’s ears at that. But the Indians would give them more tanks. Shit, if he could only bring this kid around, nobody would deny the PPA anything. Ever.
“But there’s only one you,” he said. “Right?”
The boy nodded.
“The People’s Paradise of Africa is a place where people can breathe free and never have to fear oppression again. Hell, I make sure of it.”
A blue eye peeked at him. “Oppression?”
“Shit, yeah. You’ve been oppressed. Wouldn’t you say? I mean, you tell me you got kidnapped, roughed up, dumped out on the road. And shot at by tanks. Sounds like oppression to me.”
“And if I go with you—”
“You’re safe. Nobody picking on you anymore.” Although it struck him you’d have to be an exceptional dumbass even for a jock to pick on somebody who could vaporize you and everything within seventy-five feet of him, toss fifty-ton tanks into trees a mile down the road. “You’d be appreciated. Hell, you’d be a hero. We’ll give you a parade.”
“A parade? Really?”
Tom nodded, solemnly. Fuck, Kitengi’d probably give you his sister’s virtue. And a nerd like you might even go for —
He straightened. “Okay, Drake. Let me help you up. Then I’ll bounce us back to Kongoville, get you cleaned up, get some decent food in you.” Not that the last looked too urgent, but the kid was probably hungry. All the time.
Drake looked past him and his eyes went wide.
Tom had been caught by surprise once. That was one time too many. He stepped quickly left and wheeled.
A man stood in the crater, as muscular as himself. And even more golden: not just his hair but his skin. Even his eyes. He held a scimitar.
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “A teleport, huh. So you’re the sneaky sack of shit that shot me in the back. What, no Kalashnikov this time?”
“Figured it out, did you?” The newcomer had a fruity Brit accent.
“Just now.”
“You’re not so dim as you look. A gun didn’t work so well last time. Beheading’s pretty final, though. If needs must.”
“Needs must?”
“I didn’t come for you,” the golden man said. “I came for the boy.”
“Ah, well then—” As if surrendering, Tom raised his hands.
Fire flashed from both palms. But the man was gone.
Tom threw himself into a forward roll. He heard the scimitar swish behind him.
“Your powers aren’t much use against a teleport,” the man said. He lunged for Tom, sword upraised—
Tom stood twenty feet away. It was as close as he could manage, doing a hyperflight bounce to near Earth orbit and back. Better than he expected, actually. He smelled the soles of his tennis shoes melting on the hot glass.
“Kinda hard to kill someone who can move at light speed, too,” he said.
The golden man glared. Then he smiled. “Ahh. But if one doesn’t know when and from where—”
He vanished.
“—the blow will strike—”
The words came from close behind. Tom looked down his nose to watch the scimitar tip slash beneath his chin. He turned.
His opponent stared at him with eyes like gilded saucers. “The blade,” he said. “It passed right through your neck!”