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Cole cursed and grabbed the control stick He gave the accelerator a shove and looked to the side The h the rain as he slu around hih too clearly, Cole thuether, consue any pilot feels after their craft has been dealt a blow The glass came back, and the horizontal rain pelted him as it invaded the interior of his craft Cole didn’t care Pulling his feet up under himself, he steered with the control stick and raced over toward the other skih the stinging rain He watched the beer’s face as he approached at ra speed The look was transfor Cole through the air and onto the deck just forward of their canopy

Were it not for the nonskid on the deck, Cole probably would’ve bounced and slid right across the craft and off the other side Instead, he ed to spread hiin swerving in an attempt to buck him off, but it never happened Instead, the canopy started peeling back once erous cylinder reappearing in his hands

Cole scrambled toward the front of the skimmer, away from the cockpit The two saboteurs yelled back and forth inside the craft The driver jabbed a finger toward Cole, then pointed to hier waved him off and crawled out of the cockpit and onto the flat deck They see hian to run out of rooular craft As they accelerated, solid walls of spray rose up to either side of hilance down at the watery land racing by under the nose of the ship He returned his focus to theever closer, one hand on the deck to steady hi the air ahead with the invisible sword

Cole crept back even further to stay away fro, he reached out and grasped one of the stabilizing arrip on the tubularwater

His quarryhis e the distance, hoping to kill or chase off Cole without putting hi hi for a rough landing Soh several feet of snow But then, the skie of the upco raid His raid And Cole couldn’t allow that

The sword swished through the air closer and closer with each swipe, near enough now to hear it over the pounding rain Itthe airborne drops of water in two Cole looked past the waving arles He gripped the hydrofoil even tighter and leaned back, out over the nose of the ship, his head just inches fro spray And suddenly--he felt the e

His hand!

Glancing back at his furious grip on the foil’s support strut, Cole saw he’d dented and warped theit His hand looked so real, it was easy to forget what it could do The h to hear Death’s nearness steeled Cole’s resolve He tightened his grip on the strut and released his ar crack as solid steel bent and parted The starboard strut snapped off, and the forward foil lurched sideways, folding back on the re into the watery surface As soon as it did, the flat, smooth ride turned into an airborne disaster The nose of the ski below the surface, and the entire craft kicked up, bucking like an injured beast In a mere instant, Cole and his attacker were launched into the air, tu, wet land The skimmer summersaulted below them, the pilot trapped as it smacked and crumbled and skipped across the endless brown lake below

Cole had but a few glile, stretched-out h the sky He flew the sa in space around hily motionless The bizarre illusion of suspended droplets ex-tended that solitary second into an eternity of gliding and falling But the never-ending plummet was an illusion, one that was about to be shattered by the placid wall of solid water rushing up to greet hiles He clamped his real hand over his eyes and threw up his new one to absorb the ih speed, it feltfluid Cole bounced across the surface, his other ar, plowing lier than the flight through the air, and as Cole’s head was repeatedly dunked, he worried asany injury

Finally, though, he slowed to a halt--his body sore but intact His legs sank below the surface He started treading water with his arround beneath hi Cole sith his hands to regain his balance and stood up, finding the water to be a little e of the skimmer and the man with the sword

Both were less than a dozen meters away, and both were in pieces Cole waded toward the ruined hyperskimmer as several chunks of human re drifted past, powered along by an arterial jet Cole thought about whatup in the man’s body as he careened across the water’s surface An arm approached, detached at the collarbone The hand re around an invisible thread of hu power Cole stepped to the side, careful of the sharp nothingness, and grabbed the ar a cobra He twisted the fist to the side, keeping the buckblade pointed away froers off the handle It wasn’t until he powered the blade down that he felt able to breathe easily around the device Penny and Arthur had warned hi in the presence of one felt like standing on a ticking bomb Cole held the cylinder away froust He turned to survey the twisted wreckage of the hyperskimmer

It was hard to believe how lucky he’d been One twist of the skimmer’s hydrofoil, and he’d chunked the swordsman and crushed the driver All for a tweaked knee and a sore back Heit was the only dry place to await rescue while he slightly e itself Out of the canopy burst a fist, theback as if from an unnatural blow Cole stopped in his tracks Beneath his boots, he could feel the surface of hyperspace tre slid below the surface like a thing alive

The hand ripped a large section of plasteel off as if it were narled ed, his face contorted into a mask of fury Cole took a step back and fu to re He held it away from his body with his new hand--just in case--and powered it on When he looked up, he saw thethrough the twisted decking as if it were no more viscous than water

Cole looked at his hand, then back to the unnatural figure thrashing his way toward him

He realized at once that he had his foe out

Part XVI - Decisions

"Tenet, nears the moral compass"

~The Bern Seer~

44

For the second ti approach to Bekkie, flying low and under the barest cover of dawn As theshadows over the dry land, dra the sad and severe differences between that previous flight and the current one Gone were the long, horizontal dust plu up into the sky They had been replaced with vertical clouds of a darker hue--rising columns of smoke that marked the death and destruction that had rained down from the sky the day before

The distant plumes weren’t the only residue froic re before they reached town Molly banked around the odd wreckages dotting the landscape, the twisted re frorass fore halos of fire Each growing circle of blackened grass reular bo it to the void of space

Beyond the dotted plains, Bekkie bore its own unique signs of rained-down hellfire Red lights pulsed throughout the sleepless city, illus with the color of eency and worry Soed shapes, like teeth and broken bone shoved up froround, all visible scars of a town penalized for its importance No other part of Lok had been hit so hard; the shattered hulls were densest around the town It had been logical for the fleet to arrive above the planet’s capital What was unusual was the ht down out of orbit, ignoring the normal parabola of reentry It was as if the town’s iravity, had been temporarily suspended