“You can beat him, Cap. You just have to wake up.”
The hooded figure spat out a derisive laugh, but Dodge could see the conflict in his eyes. “Your lies will avail you not. This body does not belong to Captain Falcon. Falcon is a scared rabbit, hiding from my wrath…”
“You are Captain Falcon. The proof is right there on your belt.”
A seeking hand unconsciously snaked beneath the robes and the man that was both the dark god and Captain Falcon removed the object Dodge had glimpsed earlier in the skies over the Congo.
“It’s your hatchet; a family heirloom used by one of your ancestors during the French-Indian War when he fought with Rogers’ Rangers. You’ve carved up more bad guys with that than I can count; Dr. Ragnarok, Rasputin, Kronos… I could go on all day. Our enemy would have known that if he’d paid attention to my stories. You are a hero, Cap, and that’s your trademark — your talisman.”
Falcon held the blade up so that it glinted in the firelight. He stared at it for a moment then looked past the razor-honed edge to where Hobbs lay unmoving in Molly’s arms. His gaze came back to meet Dodge’s stare, and when it did, there was no trace of the dark god in his eyes.
“They’re good stories, Dodge.” His sad smile was just visible beneath the shadow of the hood. He drew in a deep breath, preparing himself for the final battle, then held the hatchet against his heart.
“Wait!”
But Dodge’s plea went unanswered. Falcon had long known that there could be only one outcome to this confrontation. Dodge’s revelations had broken the dark god’s control, but the entity Falcon had unwittingly released from the Abyss was strong; this moment would not last, and it would not come again. Free of fear or hesitation, Captain Zane Falcon closed his eyes and fell forward onto the naked blade.
Dodge raced to his side, but what had been done could not be undone. He rolled the fallen hero onto his back, and was immediately covered in the other man’s blood; the hatchet was buried deep in his chest. Falcon’s eyes were open and bright however. He smiled up at Dodge and whispered a final request: “Save my friends.”
The words brought Dodge back into the moment. Molly!
The battle was won, but the victory would be hollow if the survivors perished in a plane crash. He gently lowered Falcon’s head and rushed to where the girl sat, no longer crying, but simply dumbstruck with confusion at what she had witnessed.
Hobbs didn’t appear to be breathing, but an occasional flutter of the eyes gave Dodge a glimmer of hope. “I think he’s alive but we’ve got to get out of here.”
“How?”
Dodge considered this. With Hobbs unconscious, there was no way for Dodge to bear three passengers on his back. Then inspiration dawned. He rushed back to Falcon’s side and threw back his robes. There, tucked in a secret pocket, was the metal staff with which the dark god had wielded fire, and more importantly, controlled the airship.
Dodge didn’t have the first clue how to use it, but thus far most of the artifacts of the ancient civilization that had built the Antarctic outpost had been controlled simply by the will power of their users. He held the staff up and closed his eyes, letting his mind form a picture of the disc-shaped vessel.
“It’s working!” Molly shouted.
Indeed, a silvery coin had lifted from Falcon’s pocket and moved to the very place Dodge had imagined, growing instantly into a shape large enough to accommodate all of them. Dodge gestured to it, imagining a place for them to enter. “Open sesame.”
The metal peeled back in a pie-shaped wedge. Dodge stuffed the wand into his belt and hurriedly assisted Molly in moving her father and the President onto the airship. As soon as they were aboard, he sealed the gap, plunging them into darkness.
“How about some light?” he asked, addressing the staff, and was rewarded with an incandescent violet glow, but it illuminated only the interior of the disc. He let the flame die and instead tried to imagine something more useful.
The entire body of the airship suddenly became translucent, as though only a thin film of gray separated them from the interior of the X-314. “I think I’m getting the hang of this!”
He gestured with the rod, and immediately their tiny lifeboat slid down the length of the cabin and passed through the gaping wound where the Boeing’s tail assembly had once been.
The airship shot out into the dark sky, barely a hundred feet above the churning ocean. The enormous flying boat continued to corkscrew away beneath them, but the plane’s death-spiral lasted only a few seconds more. The smoking hulk splashed down with such force that the aluminum skin burst on impact. A few fragments of the once mighty plane floated briefly on the surface, but the rolling swells soon drew every trace of the X-314 down into the depths.
They managed to rouse Hobbs a few minutes after their escape. He was surprisingly lucid considering what he had experienced. The reunion was shattered however by an eerily familiar flash of light outside the protective membrane of their craft. A single bolt of white lightning had arced above them and stabbed ineffectually into the sky.
Molly groaned aloud. “I thought we finished this.”
“Don’t worry,” Dodge said, angling the craft toward the source of the blast. “We’ve got a lot more firepower now.”
There was another flash, and another, each one clearly pinpointing the location of the exoskeleton-clad attacker. Dodge fixed the man’s location in his mind and prepared to unleash an assault that would vaporize their foe. The outside of the disc began to sizzle with a gathering charge of electricity.
“Stop! It’s Hurricane!”
Hobbs’ stern command almost jolted Dodge into releasing his blast, but he managed to pull it back before incinerating his friend. Overjoyed beyond belief, he angled the ship toward the hovering figure and lit up the interior so that Hurley could see that it was they, and not the enemy that controlled the airship. The big man was likewise elated to discover that his friends had not perished in the crash of the plane.
Despite the pain in his broken arm, the first thing Hurricane did upon entering the ship was to scoop each of his friends up in a crushing embrace. He held onto Molly perhaps longer than the others, but he saved Dodge for last. “I don’t know how you did it, lad, but well done.”
Dodge grinned, feeling a little foolish. “How did you survive?”
“Well, when he hit me with that blast, it knocked me for a loop. I woke up before I hit the water and managed to stop myself from falling, but I couldn’t fly this thing with my arm all busted up.”
Molly took this as a cue and immediately seized the big man’s arm and commenced probing it to determine the extent of the injury.
Dodge turned to the Padre. “And you. I would have sworn you were dead.”
“I was for a few seconds,” the priest admitted. “That lightning bolt stopped my heart.”
“Then how…?”
“A little trick I learned in India. I put myself into a deep trance state until the shock passed and I could start my heart beating again.”
Dodge chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that you can do that. I’m sure it will come in handy in a Captain Falcon story.”
Even as he said it, he felt a flare of old pain, and saw the same in the Padre’s eyes. “The Cap; is he…?”
The President cleared his throat. “I believe that Captain Falcon arrived to save us from that monster just in the nick of time. Sadly, he made the ultimate sacrifice to save his friends.”