“Thorella launched these things?” he heard someone say. “On whose authority?”
“His own, of course,” came a choked reply. “He’s never needed anyone else’s.”
Thorella did not need to hear any more.
“Mackenzie,” he hissed, withdrawing himself from the computer’s innards and pushing past the single-minded drone. His blaster in hand, he quickly made his way aft, to the one section of the ship he had not taken the time to check.
Engineering.
Jodi saw him on the monitor outside the door.
“He’s here,” she sighed, trembling inwardly. “Oh, shit.” She tried to hold the blaster she had taken from the small weapons vault near the door, but her broken fingers could not hold it right. Even with both hands.
“Jodi,” Nicole said from very, very far away, “can he get to you?”
He stood in front of the door, looking straight into the video pickup. Smiling.
“I don’t think so,” she said. But then he held up what could only be a coded magnetic key, and she watched in horror as he swiped it across the door’s access panel. She had no way of knowing, but Borge had made sure Thorella was provided with a proper commander’s key for the ship that could open any door. “Oh, shit,” she moaned. “Yes, he can get in…”
“Jodi, try to–”
The door slid open.
“Game’s over, bitch,” Thorella said quietly as he leveled his blaster at her stomach. He would make sure she died, but he did not want to hurry her along too much.
“Fuck you, you bastard son of a who–”
Something unexpected happened just as Thorella squeezed the trigger. There was a blast of frigid air, a moving shadow, a high keening sound that Jodi thought she had heard before. But only the gun that was pointed at her mattered, the gun with a bore that seemed as big around as an irrigation pipe.
In a slow motion dream she saw Reza appear out of thin air to her left, his mouth open in a snarl of rage that she could not hear, his arm held out before him as if… as if he had… thrown something? In front of her, only a few paces away, she watched Thorella’s face glow in the backlight of the blast his weapon made as it fired. But there was something odd about it, she thought, odd about his hand, the weapon. It took her an eternal moment to realize that they were no longer attached to his arm. Thorella’s hand, still clutching the gun, was falling – so slowly falling – toward the deck, the stump of his arm now shooting blood at her instead of searing energy. Curious, she followed the crimson stream, noting with some small surprise that it intersected a gaping hole where her abdomen had once been. She touched the ragged edge with a numbed hand. Warm. Wet. Oh, God.
Reza stood still a moment, stunned by the horrible misfortune of his timing. A second sooner, he raged to himself, and I could have saved her. He turned his attention to Thorella. “I should have killed you a long time ago,” Reza said softly through the smoke that rose around them from the shot that had smashed Jodi’s body.
“You have to take me back for trial,” Thorella cried as he tried to hold the stump of his arm with his good hand, Reza’s shrekka having severed it just below the elbow. He nodded toward the screen where Nicole’s horrified face still looked on. “You can’t kill me,” he gloated, “not with the whole fleet watching. It’d be murder.”
“Enough.” Reza had long debated how he would kill Thorella: slowly, the way he deserved to die for all the evil he had done, or quickly, mercifully. Reza decided on the latter, not to show Thorella mercy, but because he could simply stand this horrible pestilence no more.
But just as he was about to take Thorella’s head with his sword, he heard a voice that tore open his heart.
“Reza…”
He turned to look at Jodi’s pleading face. He hesitated, only a fraction of a second, but it was enough for Thorella to bolt through the still open door and disappear down the corridor.
“Reza,” Jodi whispered. “How…?”
“Do not speak,” he quieted her as he momentarily pushed Thorella from his mind. He cradled her gently as he fought not to look at what was left of her once beautiful body. For the first and only time in his adult life, he sincerely hoped there somewhere was a Hell like old Father Hernandez had believed existed, and that Thorella would fall there to burn forever. If nothing else, Reza would make sure that he would get to find out. “There is yet time. I can take you to the Empress. She can heal you–”
“No,” Jodi shook her head weakly. “It’s better this way, Reza. I think… my number’s come up… I ought to take it like a lady.” She looked up at him. “Tell me… Nicole will be… safe?”
He nodded. “She will. For always. The Empress will let no harm come to her. Ever.”
Jodi smiled. Nicole would be safe. That was all that mattered.
“Reza?” Nicole’s brittle voice called from the display beside him, yet from hundreds of thousands of leagues away. “You’ve got to get out of there.”
“I cannot leave Jodi–”
“Reza,” Nicole interrupted him, “your sun is going to explode any minute now. You’ve got to get out! We did not know how to tell you, we only found out for ourselves from Jodi before… before…”
“The Empress knows of this,” he told her. “It is part of our future. We await it. But it is time for you and the others to leave here, Nicole.” Reza felt a ripple in his bones. It was about to happen. “Quickly.” He looked at her one last time. “May thy Way be long and glorious, my friend.”
“Detonation!” someone cried on Sandhurst’s bridge. On the main viewscreen, the Kreelan sun flared with crimson brilliance as its corona began to blow outward and the deeper layers of the stricken star began to expand behind it.
“Jodi…” Nicole said, but Jodi was no longer there to talk to. The image had suddenly filled with static. Both of her best friends were gone.
Aboard the Golden Pearl, Reza watched Nicole’s image fade as the dying star’s energy was released, destroying the data link to Sandhurst.
“Reza, you’ve got to leave me,” Jodi implored him quietly. “Please.”
Still holding her gently, he could feel the life running from her body like the last grains of sand from an hourglass. “Do not fear for me,” he said softly as he kissed her hair. “I promised that I would always be there for you, remember?” He closed his eyes, his heart aching for her. “I won’t leave you now,” he whispered.
“Thank you, Reza,” she sighed, cradled against his shoulder. “I… love you.”
“I love you, too, Jodi,” he told her softly, fighting back his tears as he felt her spirit slip away, leaving her body an empty shell. After kissing her tenderly on the lips, he gently laid her body down on the deck.
With a fleeting glance at the display on the engineering console that showed Thorella on the flight deck, Reza smiled grimly at his enemy’s fate, trapped alone on a ship that was doomed by his own hand.
Then he conjured in his mind a vision of his waiting Empress, his love, and vanished from the Golden Pearl to join Her.
All alone now, Markus Thorella hammered at the Pearl’s useless command console as the wall of fire from the exploding star rushed forward to claim him. He was still howling in fear and rage as the ship was torn to atoms.