Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [18]
After that, they had to negotiate a long, curving corridor. It wasn’t long before Offenburger and Siregar began showing the strain of their efforts. Agnarsson was no lightweight, after all. But eventually, Tarasco was able to guide them through the weapons room doors.
The place was dominated by a pair of missile launchers—dark, bulky titanium devices with long, cylindrical slots meant to shoot atomic projectiles through the void. They were empty at the moment, their payloads safely stowed in a series of obverse bulkhead compartments.
But at least one of them wouldn’t be empty for long.
The captain pointed to it with his free hand. “Put him in,” he told the security officers.
Siregar looked down at Agnarsson and winced at the idea. Offenburger hesitated as well.
“Sir,” the security officer began in a plaintive voice, “there must be a better way to—”
“Do it,” snapped Tarasco, his stomach clenching.
Offenburger bit back the rest of his protest. With obvious reluctance, he and Siregar placed the unconscious engineer in the open launch slot. Then they started to slide the missile door into place.
That was when Agnarsson woke up.
With a cry of rage, he sat up and slammed the missile door open again, filling the room with metallic echoes. Then he vaulted out of the slot and rounded on Offenburger and Siregar.
The captain wasn’t about to let them get hurt—not when he had promised to protect them. Pressing the trigger on his laser pistol, he sent a blue beam slamming into the engineer’s back.
It barely slowed Agnarrson down. He released a bolt of raw pink lightning at Offenburger, sending the blond man flying across the room. Then he did the same thing to Siregar.
Finally, he turned to Tarasco. I told you, he said in that strangely expansive voice of his, you can’t stop me, Captain—not any more than an amoeba can stop an elephant.
And with that, he extended his hand toward Tarasco—not casually, as he had before, but with a certain resolve. The meaning of the gesture was clear. He intended to finish the captain off this time.
Tarasco fired at Agnarsson again, producing another stream of electromagnetic force. But the engineer wasn’t daunted by it. He simply raised his chin and withstood the barrage, and retaliated with a spidery lightning flash of his own.
Fortunately, the captain was ready for it. Ignoring the crushing pain in his ribs, he ducked Agnarsson’s attack and rolled to his right. Then he came up on one knee and fired again.
The engineer actually smiled. I’m getting stronger with every passing second, he observed. You should have done something about me a long time ago. Now it’s too late.
Tarasco saw the wisdom in the remark. He should have done something a long time ago. He should have done the hard thing, the heartless thing, and destroyed Agnarsson as soon as he tampered with the ship.
But that didn’t help him now. He had to find a way to slow the monster down, to give himself and his crew a fighting chance…
Suddenly, it came to him.
As the engineer raised his hand again, the captain fired his laser pistol—but not at Agnarsson, against whom it wouldn’t have done any good. Instead, he trained his beam on the deck below Agnarsson’s feet.
After all, this was the weapons room—and the Valiant boasted two kinds of weapons. One was atomic. The other was a laser cannon system supplied with power by heavy-duty conduits.
And as luck would have it, one of those conduits ran directly under the spot where Agnarsson was standing.
It took a moment for Tarasco’s beam to punch through the deck plating. The tactic caught the engineer by surprise, causing him to stumble. But he didn’t understand what his adversary was up to, or he would have removed himself from the room immediately.
As it was, he simply levitated himself above the ruined spot in the deck. You’re grasping at straws, said Agnarsson, looking regal and supremely confident, his