Broken Bow - Diane Carey [60]
Archer gasped, tried to steady his breathing, then spoke. “This chameleon thing ... pretty fancy. Was it payment for pitting the Klingons against each other? A trophy from your temporal cold war?”
An embittered action blew across the room, ultrafast, and slammed Archer again against the wall. But this was different from the weapon shot. This one had pure anger in it. He’d made the intruder angry.
His pistol! His hand was empty! He grabbed around, but the weapon was gone.
Before him was a Suliban, now normalized against the background, its dappled face and skull still looking vaguely unreal. It held his pistol on him. As he stood with his eyes locked on those alien eyes, he recognized this as the leader of the attackers back at the spaceport on Rigel Ten. Not exactly a big surprise, and in a way, its own kind of win. Now he knew who he was up against, if not why.
“I was going to let you go,” the Suliban said.
“Really?” Archer backed away slowly, trying to remember the timing of those echoes. “Then you obviously don’t know as much about me as you thought you did.”
“On the contrary,” the Suliban said, “I could’ve told you the day you were going to die. But I suppose that’s about to change.”
The Suliban opened fire on him with his own phase pistol.
The preecho struck Archer in the chest and drove him back. He brought up every muscle he could control and darted sideways before the actual bolt could strike him. Instead, it missed by an inch and burrowed into the wall. Archer spun behind a bank of alien consoles as the shock wave swept the room, knocking the Suliban down completely.
Archer was ready for that shock and braced against it. “What’s the matter?” he chided. “No genetic tricks to keep you from getting knocked on your butt?”
“What you call tricks, we call progress!” the Suliban declared. “Are you aware that your genome is almost identical to that of an ape? The Suliban don’t share humanity’s patience with natural selection!”
“So, to speed things up a little, you struck a deal with the devil.”
Archer was careful to hide. Assault might work against him. The Suliban’s confusion in this echo chamber could be a weapon in itself, for, as advanced as the Suliban thought he was, Archer was able to adjust to this place. He was getting used to it. As he spoke, he positioned himself between the Suliban leader and the open time-lock. Moving behind the consoles, he slowly removed the communicator from his belt. Carefully, he calculated the next trajectory of the temporal wave, then threw the communicator against a monitor on the far wall.
The monitor sparked. The preecho effect made a dozen communicators sail through the air, drawing the Suliban’s attention. The Suliban, disoriented, aimed clumsily and fired at the sparking monitor.
The shock wave thundered outward from the strike zone. The Suliban tried to brace himself against it this time, and managed to stay on his feet. But Archer had situated himself in the perfect spot to be thrown into the open time-lock vestibule.
He tumbled like a snowball through the door. The door began to close.
At the last moment, the intelligent and obviously strong-willed Suliban plunged toward the door and slipped through. The temporal compression began as the door locked and sealed itself.
Archer was locked in this small place, a place where time was in convulsions, with a Suliban whose plans he had wrecked. Each of them battled to be the first to gain control of his body.
The Suliban was raising the weapon again. ...
Summoning every ounce of muscle control and sheer will, Archer shoved himself off the wall behind him and smashed into the Suliban in this eerie slow-motion chamber. The pistol jarred against his shoulder, dislodged from the Suliban’s hand, and tumbled toward the floor. It struck the deck just as time returned to something like normal, and the fight was on.
Archer realized quickly he was no match for combat with an enhanced alien. He had to get the pistol!
Twisting viciously, he managed to pin the Suliban to the floor and lean on