Not too hard to find an isolated spot, a full day away from a Gate, a star system with little to recommend and less to profit from.
Not too hard to pause in the shadow of a small moon and prepare to fire the artifact.
Not too hard for Petalia, standing with the others clustered around them in the lounge, to take the Devil’s Gun gingerly in their hands. There was hesitation on their face. Artifacts like this could be—often would be—deadly.
As their fingers closed around the Gun, it lit with a deep blue light from nowhere, a light that could not help but remind those who had been aboard the space moth of the light that had greeted Roxana’s steps. It gave everyone in the room an unearthly cast, as though the light were battling natural color and extinguishing it. Odd patterns were visible on Skidoo’s skin, a thermal lacework revealed for the first time.
Tendrils, fine as whiskers, extended from the glittering tangle, sank into Petalia’s skin, making them gasp with a sensation more like the bite of frost than fire.
“Think of your target,” Jezli said. She had insisted on taping all the enterprise and was standing by the camera drones, watching intently, her fingers straying restlessly over the necklace around her throat from time to time.
Moments stretching endlessly. Their faces, full of light from the Gun’s illumination.
A sequence of sound, singing in their ears, at first soft, then louder and louder, making everyone press their hands, their arms over their ears, Skidoo retracting hers fully but still feeling her flesh battered by that sound, because it was wrong somehow, repeated over and over till they could hardly bear it.
It battered Lassite but he stood fast, prepared for the moment. Atlanta, too, found herself less shaken than the others, although she was not sure. Had Jezli reacted at all?
Then it stopped with staggering suddenness, and the Gun fell clattering from Petalia’s hands.
“What was that?” Niko demanded.
“It was an error message,” Jezli said, shaking her head as though to clear it. “Give me a second to decipher it.” Her fingers strayed over the crystals at her neck.
Then she blinked in surprise.
“It says it cannot be fired because there is more than one target.”
“More than one target?” Niko said.
“What does this mean?” Atlanta asked.
“It means,” Niko said, eyes meeting Dabry’s, “that Tubal Last is not just alive but even more so than one might think.”
She looked out the window at the stars, chewing her lip, before turning back and continuing.
“It means that now there is more than one of him.”