Inhuman(99)

“Uh, James,” Rich said in a panic, “this son-of-a-nut-job just completely lost his mind! He’s got a crazy look in his eye. I need some help here!”

Within the sim, James appeared out of options, too stunned to formulate a plan.

Aldous, however, had settled on the only course of action that made sense to him. “I’m sorry,” he repeated as he put the assimilator away, back into his pocket and then looked upward, holding his hands above his head, energy beginning to pulsate on his fingertips.

“Aldous! Don’t do it!” Thel shouted as she realized what Earth’s formerly most powerful man’s desperate final bid to protect the universe from Trans-human would be.

She tried to rush toward him, but it was too late. He blasted through the ceiling of the command center, allowing the power of an entire ocean to crash down upon their heads.





4





Jules was the first to grab a handhold, clutching the side of a replicator pod just one level lower than the rapidly disintegrating catwalk. She looked down to see Old-timer’s tendrils wrapping around the wrists of both Samantha and Djanet, while a third tendril burrowed into the side of a pod one level farther below Jules.

“Daniella!” he shouted out as he realized neither of the two people he saved was his wife and he searched desperately with his eyes for her, darting his eyes in every direction. Almost immediately, he saw her, a level below him, Colonel Paine having dropped his weapon to grab the wrist of the ghost that haunted him deeply, saving her, while clutching one of the pods with his other hand.

“Got her!” Paine called up as he looked down into Daniella’s astonished eyes. “But the weight’s getting tough—V-SINN must be getting closer! If that hull doesn’t breach soon—”

“It won’t save you!” Neirbo shouted down to them from his perch, his feet planted on the side of a replicator pod above them. “I have the high ground! None of you is leaving here!” His eyes fell on Old-timer. “Especially not him.”

“Craig, what the hell did you do to that guy to piss him off so much?” Paine shouted up to Old-timer, exasperated.

Old-timer didn’t answer the question, realizing their time was too short, and instead looked up at Neirbo pleadingly. “Neirbo! Goddamnit! We can still get out of here! All of us!”

Neirbo shook his head. “You’re too dangerous to be left alive! This is the only way for me to finally destroy you, Craig Emilson.”

He knows my name? Old-timer thought to himself, surprised.

“Your orders were to take him alive!” Jules shouted out to Neirbo.

Neirbo looked at her before, extremely uncharacteristically, laughing. “My orders?” He gestured with his gun to the destruction around them. “None of us is going to survive this. I think the time for following orders has ended.”

“Where’s your loyalty?” Jules shot back. “The orders came from 1 herself!”

Old-timer’s eyebrows knitted furiously as he made a realization.

“Loyalty?” Neirbo replied, astonished by the concept’s sudden and total absurdity. “In the final moments of my life, you know what I say to 1?” His voice became colder than it had ever been in the hundreds of years he’d lived. “I say go to He—”

Neirbo’s sentence suddenly ended abruptly, his final thought never able to be spoken, as the hand that held his weapon suddenly began moving the gun, its muzzle pointing toward Neirbo’s own temple. His disbelieving eyes darted to Jules as he finally made the same realization Old-timer had just moments earlier.

The muzzle flashed, and Neirbo’s head was cut in half, circuitry and metal suddenly scattering before being abruptly sucked down as though a vacuum cleaner were drawing them toward it. His headless body collapsed a second later, slipping from its perch on the side of the replicator pod and falling past Paine and Daniella, narrowly missing them as it fell at an astonishing rate of descent.

Old-timer looked up at Jules, his face painted with fury, his teeth gritted so hard that he couldn’t squeeze out the words.

“That’s right,” Jules confirmed, answering the unspoken question. “1’s still alive.”

“Is that…” Djanet began to ask, as she tried to make sense out of what she’d seen, “…did 1 make him do that? How? Has she been monitoring us the whole time?”

“She’s not just monitoring us,” Old-timer replied, his eyes fixed on those of Jules. “She’s with us.”

“What?” Djanet asked, her brow furrowing.

“Jules is 1,” Old-timer revealed. “She led us into this trap.”