Old-timer’s mouth fell open in shock and disgust. “What? One of us? This was your people’s plan! Not ours!”
“We’ll have to repair the ship and navigate home! Only we have the technical knowledge to open the wormholes!”
“You rotten piece of filth!” Old-timer shouted, reaching a level of fury that he hadn’t been to in many decades. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? All that bull about how ‘it’s our law’ and ‘only people native to a solar system can destroy it’ was just a ruse to get us out here!”
“That’s not true,” Neirbo responded.
“Shove it!” Old-timer continued to fury.
Thel, Djanet, and Rich looked on in awe, never having seen Old-timer in such a state. “This isn’t your first rodeo! You’ve done this before with other solar systems! You knew the nans were most likely going to be here already, and you brought us here as sacrificial lambs!”
“That is ridiculous!” Neirbo fired back. “You are here of your own free will!”
“Bull! You tricked us!”
“Old-timer! They saved us from the nans! You told us that yourself!” Thel interjected. “Now you’re saying they tricked us?”
“We’re not here freely, Thel!” Old-timer responded. “Look around you! There are two of them for every one of us!”
“You are here of your own free will,” Neirbo repeated.
“We shouldn’t even be considering this!” Thel interjected. “We should be working together to get the power back online!”
“They’ll tear through the ship before we can do that!” Neirbo countered. “One of you has to manually detonate the missile and lead them away!”
“You can manually shove that missile up your ass!” Old-timer spat back.
“If none of you will make the sacrifice, all of us will die!” Neirbo shouted. “One of you must guide the missile toward the sun and lead the nans away from us!”
“And detonate it?” Rich shot back. “That’s a suicide run!”
“It’s a sacrifice to save the rest of us!” Neirbo replied.
“Then sacrifice one of your men!” Djanet chimed in.
“Any loss of one of my men lowers the chance that we’ll be able to repair the ship in time and open a wormhole fast enough to escape!”
“And we’re expendable, isn’t that right?” Old-timer bellowed.
James’s deletion suddenly flashed in front of Thel’s eyes again—vividly. She jolted with the memory. The picture of the shadowy nan consciousness, the figure that finally destroyed the most important person in Thel’s life, blazed in her memory. At that moment, she suddenly realized that she was in its presence once again. She looked up through the invisible skin of the ship, through the dark, smoky swarm of the nans, and saw the shadowy man standing just above her, looking down at the trapped, pathetic people below. The figure had no face, but Thel swore she could see a mocking smile in the blackness.
“We’re running out of time!” Neirbo warned. “They’ll be in here with us in a matter of minutes! Maybe seconds!”
“I’ll do it,” Thel suddenly said, calmly and cooly.
16
“Thel! You can’t!” Djanet exclaimed.
“There is no way in hell that I’m letting you do that,” Old-timer growled.
“You don’t have the right to stop me, Craig.”
“They’re using you like a pawn,” Old-timer replied.
“She has made her choice,” Neirbo stated, a slight sense of relief in his voice. “You should honor her sacrifice.”
“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, James Keats had arrived.
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.