Static. Then: “Uh… say again?”
“Look out!” Rory hissed.
McKenna saw the air shimmer around him. He felt a prickle of static around his legs. Whipping around, the import of what Rory had reported hit him, and he had time to shout only a single word. He screamed at his men to jump, even as he did so himself… or tried. The instant he attempted to launch himself upward, the pain from his injured ankle flared up again and his leg buckled. He stumbled to one side like a drunk, then fell flat on his back on top of the ship.
Nebraska must have felt the tingling too—either that, or he trusted McKenna implicitly—because he jumped without hesitation.
Nettles, on the other hand… hesitated. Maybe, McKenna thought, his mind was racing and he just needed a moment to process. Unfortunately, he didn’t get that moment. He was still standing on the surface of the ship when the force field blasted on with an ionized sizzling noise—a force field that, although invisible, still sheared neatly through Nettles’ legs at knee-level.
McKenna lay beneath the field, which was just above him, and watched a lock of his hair feathering down, clipped, to rest on the invisible barrier before being carried away by the wind. He also saw Nettles’ foreshortened body falling away, his blood running in a dozen trickling lines across the outer surface of the force field.
Nebraska, meanwhile, came down boots first on top of the force shield. It looked surreal, as if he was standing in midair. He threw himself onto his belly, legs splayed, palms flat, eyes wide with terror as he held on, separated from McKenna only by a meter or so of invisible energy.
Breathless but protected, McKenna lay beneath the shield, and looked helplessly up at his friend. They locked eyes through the barrier, inches apart—then, as the ship rose higher, increasing speed, Nebraska’s hands began to slip. For a second he looked anguished, desperate, and then all at once he seemed to accept his fate and his face relaxed. He looked again at McKenna through the invisible shield, gave him a wry smile and shrugged his shoulders. He mouthed something—McKenna couldn’t quite make it out, but what he thought Nebraska said was: It’s been fun.
Then Nebraska’s body slid away, over the curve of the ship’s surface, and he was gone.
McKenna wanted to mourn him, knew that the memory of Nebraska’s last moments would be seared into his mind forever. But he didn’t have the luxury to grieve now. Nebraska and Nettles had just died trying to help him save his son, and his best tribute to them would be to try to complete the mission.
But how? Desperation mounting, McKenna drew the pistol he still carried. He gripped it tight, steeled himself, and then rolled toward the edge of the ship. Every survival instinct told him to stop, screamed at him that this was lunacy, that it was suicide.
But he kept going.
He rolled right over the curving edge of the ship, and fell.
But not very far.
He hit the inside of the force field and tumbled down an invisible slide, slewing and twisting in what seemed to be midair until he came to a stop, underneath the alien craft. Where his hands touched, where his knees touched, there appeared to be only air. The utter wrongness of that made his brain reject what he saw and caused his guts to churn, so he flopped over and focused on what was above him.
The ship’s underbelly.
He looked around, and a spark of hope ignited in him. Only feet away, he saw the yawning shadow of an empty port, where an escape pod had once nestled. Taking a breath, he rolled again, then crawled on elbows and knees until he reached the opening, before clambering inside. Clinging to a strut inside the opening, he glanced around and spotted a keypad.
“Rory!” he shouted over their commlink. “What’s the sequence? I watched you put it in. Tell me!”
Static, and then: “To the pod? I… I can’t remember!”
McKenna took a deep breath. “Okay, do this. Try.”
“I can’t think! It’s all mixed up in my head!”
“Damn it, son! I watched you! It was one, two, then over three, up two…”
McKenna’s words trailed off. He blinked, staring at the keypad, and realized he didn’t need Rory to remember. “Holy shit,” he murmured. “I fucking know it!” Frantically, he stabbed a finger at the pad, tapping buttons.
“Rory?” he continued. “You know how I always said be a big boy?”
“Yeah?”
“Screw it. Make yourself small, kid.” He tapped the last digits of the sequence into the keypad. “Down! Now!”
The hatch slid open. McKenna lunged inside, gun comfortable in his hand. He unloaded all the grief and fear that he had felt for his men, and for his son. Teeth bared, he targeted every blinking light he saw, blazing away with shot after shot.
Sparks flew from consoles, and the whole ship shuddered. Whatever McKenna had hit, the alien craft was taking it personally.
Shrouded in the gray gloom of the command deck, the massive Predator whipped around, faux-dreadlocks flying. It spotted McKenna, saw the open hatch where the escape pod should have been, and a trilling series of clicks issued from its mandibles as it lifted an arm and fired.
It wasn’t an energy beam that erupted from its wrist gauntlet this time, though. It was a metal cable, which spat through the air like a whirling bolo. One end of the cable embedded itself in a wall panel, while the bolo part wrapped itself around McKenna’s left leg, below the knee, and cinched tight. Jerked off his feet by the Upgrade, he yelled out in pain as the ship dipped and veered, plummeting toward the tree line. He smelled smoke and glanced at Rory, who was clinging for dear life to the walls of the pod he was crouched in. He had disabled the ship, as planned, but at what cost? Had he saved Rory from torture and death at the hands of an alien hunter, only for them both to now die in a devastating explosion when the spaceship crashed?
Alarms wailed as the tops of trees started to rush up fast in the forward view screen. Under other circumstances, the Upgrade might have moved in for the kill, but right now it clearly had other things on its mind. It detached the other end of the metal rope from its wrist gauntlet with the stab of a button and turned back toward the main control panel. As it busied itself at the controls, trying to correct the damage that McKenna had done, McKenna himself picked at the wire wrapped around his leg, trying to work himself loose. Unable to do so, he scooped up his dropped gun and fired at the wall panel that the other end of the cable was attached to. The panel buckled, part of it tearing loose from the wall. McKenna raised his gun again, thinking one more shot might do it, when the ship impacted with something—the top of a tree, maybe—and tilted vertiginously to one side.
Rory yelled out as McKenna started to slide toward the still-open hatchway. The metal cable between his leg and the wall panel went taut, held for a moment… and then the damaged wall panel tore itself loose from the wall!
Now McKenna was yelling too, and clawing at the smooth floor, but he couldn’t halt his slide toward oblivion. He thought of Nebraska sliding off the edge of the ship. Was he going to go the same way? Then he was out of the hatch and falling through space, wind buffeting him as he plunged toward certain death.
The wall panel with the clawed end of the metal cable still firmly embedded in it clattered after McKenna’s falling body—and became jammed in the narrow hatchway. McKenna slammed to a stop, the loops of cable tightening yet further, cutting into his leg, drawing blood. Now he was dangling upside down beneath the ship like the weirdest car ornament imaginable. He swung to and fro, and then to his horror saw the tree line rising to meet him. Next moment he had covered his head with his arms and was trying to protect himself as best he could, as his body was dragged through a mass of branches and leaves.