Nagkmur reflects on his fate. Is he to destroy universes wherever he fares? He murmurs something in pudding-wa, reaches a decision, and steps into his machine. No one else sees exactly how he does this. It is as if a part of his vehicle has become permeable. Once inside, he activates the precessor and then, his needler in hand, goes to stand within the entrance. If things go belly-up, he can reach his seat and pop the clutch before anything can reach him. Without a Patrol shield, no one else can follow him.
He closes his eyes in meditation.
Deep waters in the heavens. Thunderclouds approach from West. The Superior Man nourishes himself and awaits moment of truth. Great success if he maintains his course. He must endure for now this strange mix of apprehension and anticipation. Nothing he does can affect outcome. Everything is submitted to Fates.
Zendahl pulls his service weapon from its holster and chambers a round. Nagkmur has acted prematurely. The strike team has not arrived, he thinks. We are not ready.
“No one ever is,” Janet tells him, and she removes her pistol from her purse, tossing the purse aside.
Annie has no weapon. She is a weapon. Her skin bristles as the MEMS in her shell flex. She watches the directions the others do not. If anyone notices the strange transfiguration, they say nothing for the moment.
There is a moment of Advent: The world in silent stillness waits. Time passes in heartbeats.
Then it is there, seven feet tall and booming like a great organ. Zendahl wets his pants. Janet and Stacey cry out in terror. Nagkmur turns back to his transporter. It is time to run.
Jim-7, alerted by his alarm system, has beamed down to the site of the temporal distortion, and has arrived from a direction no one has been watching; viz., a fourth one. The imprecision of his beamer is such that he cannot materialize only within a radius of uncertainty, but this puts him fortuitously in the midst of the defenders, who cannot loose fire without the risk of hitting one another.
Jim is radially symmetric, which means he needs no one to watch his back. But just as bilaterians will favor their right side or their left, Jim’s people will favor one pendrant or another. Like anyone else, he likes to put his best foot forward.
He grips a disruptor in each hand—that’s five—all of them set to fatal voltages. Recognizing two of his opponents as the stalkers from the warehouse, he immediately disposes of them, discharging a weapon at each. Then he rushes at the one who stands between him and the life-saving precessor. She must not fail. Must not.
Terror grips Nagkmur’s bowels and he takes comfort as always in the ancient books. The enemy is upon you. You wait in blood, preparing yourself for his blows; but your own ability can see you through, if you stand your ground and maintain balance. He draws a ragged breath and raises his weapon.
But yin changes in the fourth line. Flood rises above tallest Tree: Amidst rising tide of folly, the superior man retires to higher ground, renouncing his world without looking back. Any direction better than where you stand. No time for fatal heroics. Remove self from situation now. Find sanctuary. Later, deal with these concerns on your own terms, and from a position of strength.
He turns to run.
“It’s emitting sound at nineteen hertz,” Annie says. “Subsonics in that range induce fear in organic beings.” But Annie Troy is not an organic being, and she attacks the creature from the rear, striking with a fist that can bend steel.
But it is harder to bend rubber, and Jim-7 has no rear. He discharges the disruptor he holds in that hand, but the charge passes across her ceramic body. Certain nodes of hers spark and an induced current disorients her momentarily. Her fist sinks into the thick, blubbery flesh of the headwalker, deep enough to cause some internal damage to its organs and leave a prodigious bruise. It staggers, but is not incapacitated.
Stacey, crouched on the floor from fear, takes heart from Annie’s pronouncement. It is only some sound effect, not genuine fear, and she employs the mental exercises that have seen her through countless incidents in the past, calls upon her confidence, and rises up between the beast and Sidd. She stabs the fearful thing repeatedly with her shanks.
Jim-7 does not have the same organs as a human being or an apkallu. They are not even the same kinds of organs, nor are they located in the expected places, but a number of them are vital in one way or another and more importantly, no creature can exist without pain. Pain is a blessing. It warns the creature of harm; and through it, it learns what to avoid. What Jim feels as the blades sink into its primary air sac is not exactly the same sensation as a human would feel, but it serves the same purpose and it is distinctly unpleasant.
But Jim is psyched. Jim is pumped. And if she does not quite laugh at pain, she resolutely compartmentalizes it. The blows are not fatal; not yet, and she lashes out with her right forward foot—that is “right” and “forward” relative to her favored body sector. The kick catches Stacey under her ribcage, crushing it and tossing her like a rag doll off to the side, where she lands in a broken heap.
Siddhar Nagkmur learns that he does not disdain all phantoms in this mad pseudo-world. Of course, he does not believe Stacey is a phantom and in a certain way he is correct. Whether Justinian fled the riots or not, Maryam brt’ Yarosh would have gone on. She was there in Nagkmur’s world every bit as much as in this one. She is immortal latitudinally as well as longitudinally.
But Nagkmur does not know this. He only knows that the only other putative survivor of his world has been kicked into rubble. He howls and aims his pungshi square into what ought to have been the face of the monster. Only in some rear compartment of his mind does he recall that he is supposed to be saving the phantom world from these phantom invaders. He is only trying to save Stacey Papandreou.
The pungshi vaporizes something akin to a muscle group, laming the creature in her left forward leg. She staggers and shakes Annie from what is not actually her rear just as Zendahl and Janet open fire from her quarters.
“It’s weapon is like a Tazer,” Zendahl cries. “But a very low-powered one.”
“But it obviously considered it a debilitating blow,” adds Annie Troy, who desperately tries to add two and two.
Jim-7 knows the agony of defeat. Hurting from her wounds, surrounded by hostile indigenes, his goal just ahead of him, it makes one last desperate lunge for what appears to be an open doorway.
And Nagkmur leaps aside.
Zendahl snarls and calls him a coward and empties his clip into the massive headball. The creature is like a bomber from the world war, with tail and side gunners operating in all directions. It zaps the colonel again and though it stings rather sharply, he shakes it off and stuffs another clip into his pistol.
Janet Murchison smiles and withholds her fire.
Jim-7 does not know how the two survived her deadly blasts, but he pushes the mystery into a backroom of his mind. The way is clear! Already, she can hear the chords of triumph from her welcoming nest. From the depths of despair, she has seized triumph and the means to return to her folk!
It is just as well she treasures this glorious thought, for it is the last one she forms. When she touches the hull of the strange machine, unimaginable voltages course through her, shorting what she has for nerves, disrupting what serves as brains—there are two of them, actually—and igniting the sacs of hydrogen gas that permeate its body. All thought dissipates into a kaleidoscope of impressions, perceptions, concepts, none of them connected one with another.