Disclaimer: Final Fantasy Eight, and the characters, names, places,
situations and so on, are property of Squaresoft corporation. I own none of
them and am making no money off of them. This story was written purely for
my own enjoyment.
Zell Dincht had the most fascinating knuckles.
He shouldn't have been surprised at that, come to think of it. He used them every day, in training, in combat with whomever SeeD decided to send him up against, even in his admittedly ridiculous habit of shadowboxing. He stared at them intently now. He knew what was coming, but he dared not shift his gaze from the back of his hands as they rested clasped together in his lap to the man whose piercing gaze threatened to burn a hole straight through his head and out the other side.
There was a spot of blood on them, where the stud on his index knuckle met the black leather fabric of his gauntlet.
"Zell."
The voice made his heart shrink, but the blood made the remnants of the panic that had gripped him earlier threaten to take control. He'd tried to wash it off…tried so desperately…but just that one piece had dried and stuck there. He'd scrubbed at it so hard…Hyne, how he'd scrubbed! But still a spot remained to remind him of his failure…
"Zell, look at me."
He'd scrubbed…
"Look at me."
At last he forced himself to painstakingly raise his head and meet the eyes of his interrogator. The eyes he'd felt since he entered the room, head bowed, hadn't waned in ferocity, but the face surrounding them was cold and waxen. And they were rimmed with black and slightly reddened. Panic and sorrow had blazed there once, but now there remained only chill fury, barely checked.
The two remained there, both motionless, Zell wide-eyed and mouthing possible explanations, his opposite totally expressionless. After a brief eternity, though, that tight-lipped countenance relaxed a meagre fraction, only enough to allow human speech, and began, in a voice of death.
"So…tell me, Zell. Tell me, adding in as much detail as you can, exactly how something so simple…so well planned…so…so hyne-damned simple…could have gone so horribly, horribly wrong?"
That crimson spot flared brightly in his mind's eye as he shifted position rubbing that accursedly stained hand along the fine blonde hairs on the back of his neck as he bowed his head again and closed his eyes.
"I…we…our SeeD Hovercraft got to FH alright…with time to…spare…then the mission started…"
Dobe, Lord mayor of Fisherman's Horizon, glared in fury at the quartet of SeeD Agents gathered before him, just recently disembarked on the rusted shores of his town of salvage and scrap. Before him, Quistis Trepe, SeeD instructor and field co-ordinator placed a hand on her hip in a gesture of irritation as the mayor continued his tirade against what he saw as an invasion by a hostile force.
"For the last time, mercenaries," he began, actually for the umpteenth. "We don't want you here. You're a menace and a mindless killing force, and you threaten everything we stand for. You weren't invited and I want you to leave NOW"
Quistis' face always shone on those rare occasions when she smiled, or so Zell tended to think to himself, privately. This didn't happen to be one of those occasions, and the sternness of the gaze with which she regarded the little mayor was grim indeed. Beside Zell, Irvine muttered something about his absolute enjoyment of watching sparks fly from her eyes before stifling a wince as Selphie scowled and kicked him firmly in the shins, reminiscent of one of the three terrorists whom they had come to stop.
"Mister Mayor," Quistis replied calmly, the strain in keeping her tone reasonable showing in the tautness of her back. "I know we were not invited, and I am aware of your philosophy of non-violence. But with all due respect"—she gestured toward the mayor's two storey, albeit modest, house nestled squarely in the centre of the gargantuan solar dish from which Fisherman's Horizon drew its power—"It hasn't seemed to work. I know these people, and I can tell you that in their leader's present state, there is no way they're going to listen."
"We can handle this without violence, Ms. Trepe," the mayor retorted hotly, but he was prevented from blasting the agents once again by a fierce hand gesture from Quistis, a sort of sawing motion, before she placed it, quite visibly, back on the handle of the whip mounted at her side.
"Well, yeah, I guess you can," she replied acidly. "Letting them blow up that little house of yours…along with the dish, your only source of power, is a way of handling things, I guess." She tossed the two strands of hair that hung down over her face, escapees from the tight clasp she insisted on maintaining. "But that would keep you in the dark for weeks whilst being repaired. Not to mention the damage to the fishing industry. Hard to get the tastiest catches to Galbadia or even Balamb without enough power to run your refrigeration units, isn't it?"
The mayor glared at her in silence, then growled, "We'll manage. We always have. We won't pay to have murderers like you in our town!"
"You won't have to," Quistis replied smoothly. Behind her, Irvine raised a curious eyebrow, and a murmured comment about not being paid for their endeavours earned him another affectionate, albeit quite painful, kick from Selphie. "Consider this a repayment for the time you allowed us, a group if 'vicious killers' to dock and rest up while our garden was repaired."
She turned her gaze to the vast solar dish, her eyes narrowing. "And…the terrorists are our business. It's our obligation to bring them back to Garden for judgement." She turned back to the glowering mayor. "Now, please…let us do our job."
The mayor's furious glared remained in place for a while longer as he engaged in a silent battle of wills with the four intruders. Then he spat over the side of the railing separating them from the dish and growled, "If any one of my people is hurt by your actions, none of you will ever again be welcomed anywhere near FH for as long as it stands."
He turned tail and stalked off before Quistis could offer her party's thanks. Sighing, she turned irritably and gave a rueful smile to her three companions.
"Well…I guess it'd be a bad idea to stop here for repairs anytime in the future, huh?"
"Hmm. Typical of her, I suppose. Always has the greater good in sight, even if the person she's dealing with is an asshole. I guess I should know."
In his misery, Zell was quite conscious of his grim companion's use of tenses. He forced himself to keep meeting his gaze, avoiding the spot on his hand and trying to hold himself accountable for the events on FH. An impartial observer probably would have told him that it was hardly his fault, but after what had happened the previous day, neither he nor the other two would have believed that they were not the ones to blame. Not at all.
"Well then. Cid would call that an 'auspicious start'. Carry on, Zell. And remember…don't leave anything out."
Zell shifted again ,averting his eyes to the side. He was caught between two fires, the flames in his interrogator's eyes and the pain of yesterday's events, staring up at him from that miniscule spot on his knuckle. The request hadn't been a threat, but he would wrack his brain nonetheless. He owed both of them that much.
The four had approached the mayor's house with caution. The sun's heat had subsided, now in the late afternoon, but the air still shimmered over the hundreds of thousands of tiles that comprised FH's tremendous solar energy complex, the largest in the world. Even on the long bridge leading from the outer streets to the Mayor's residence, the four could feel the heat of the day, and appreciated exactly why the mayor spent his days in a loose shirt, shorts and sandals. Hardly respectably attire for a man of his standing, but necessary considering he had to endure these temperatures day in and day out.
"Yo, Quistis," Zell whispered. "D'ya know if they've got any hostages?"
"Good thinking, Zell. Nice to know that thoughts of your next meal aren't the only thing to cross your mind," she answered affectionately, but still in a professional whisper. "But no…as far as I know, there aren't any. Apart from the whole town. We have no way of knowing how powerful that bomb is, or even if they have one."
Slightly behind them, Irvine narrowed his eyes and pulled the brim of his Stetson down to shield them from the rays of the afternoon sun. "Seems quiet," he growled. "No sign of any raving lunatics, if you know who I mean. Maybe they just caused enough of a ruckus to get us to come runnin' and look like fools?"
As if Murphy himself was listening in, a faint rumble was heard from beneath them. "Move it!" Quistis bellowed, racing across with Selphie in tow as the rumble turned into a roar and the entire structure lurched. Before Either Zell or Irvine could move a muscle, the section of the bridge once host to Quistis and Selphie erupted upward as a Firaga turned the ten metre section of the bridge into a blistering hail of molten metal and scrap. As the debris rained down, the flames between the two parties leapt up, spewing out a snarling Raijin.
For his briefest moment of inactivity, Irvine earned a boot in the face, sending him spinning away, stunned. Zell, quicker on the uptake for once, swung with a heavy fist, eyes watering from the heat of the blast. He felt something connect, and a heavy grunt, and grinned in brief satisfaction. Again he struck, before Raijin could recover, and again, but although his opponent's torso must have been a mass of bruises, Raijin found the strength to lunge forward, pummelling Zell with his sheer mass. Struggling, Zell could do little to stop the blind rush and so was helplessly slammed into the railings and tipped over them.
Acting on instinct rather than letting his normally cluttered mind do the work, he ceased resisting Raijin's rush. Gripping the collar of his sleeveless shirt with both hands, he simply let himself fall.
"What the fu…!" was all the larger man could utter as he found himself tumbling over the railings, defeated by his own momentum, and plummeting the short distance to the mirrors of the solar dish below. He lashed out blindly at his wiry adversary, but the two were in Zell's domain as the smaller man simply twisted himself in mid-air and allowed Raijin to land with a sharp crack of protesting backbone and shattered mirrors onto the surface of the dish, protecting Zell from the brunt of the shock.
Zell rolled tiredly off of his adversary, winded and hurting. But still Raijin wouldn't remain down. Rising to his feet with a terrible, ominous groan, he produced his thick staff from apparently nowhere and towered over Zell's panting form. For his part, the Balamb native could do little but stare up at him.
"Heh…heh…not…bad, little guy, ya…know?" Raijin coughed, a small trickle of blood running from the side of his mouth. He grinned revealing teeth stained with the same substance and raised his staff to pummel the SeeD into oblivion.
Then he screeched in unexpected pain as two shotgun bullets tore through both of his hands in quick succession. Whimpering, he collapsed to his feet, both ruined hands pressed against his chest to staunch the flow of blood, as the pieces of his staff clattered away, sliced cleanly in three by the precisely marked bullets. Not one to let an advantage pass once presented to him, Zell found the strength to leap up, take that enormous head in both hands and intimately acquaint it with his kneecap. The sharp crack he earned, and the senseless sigh that followed, seemed a welcome vindication for the pain he'd suffered before.
Taking a deep breath to recover the ones slammed out of him by Raijin's unusually ferocious assault, he looked up to the ruined bridge and gave a grateful thumbs-up to the figure leaning lazily on it. Irvine touched a finger to his hat and continued rubbing his jaw with a wince. Across the chasm that now separated the SeeDs, Selphie and Quistis got shakily to their feet, still slightly stunned.
Quistis cupped her hands to her mouth. "Zell….you okay?"
Still too winded to make reply, he raised a hand and nodded shakily.
"Perfect." She tossed her perfect hair and jerked a thumb back at the house on their side of the bridge. "Selphie and I'll search Mayor Dobe's residence. You two stay on alert, and Scan the scaffolding under the house and around it. That's the logical place for a bomb…if it went off, it'd take the whole dish with it."
Irvine answered so that Zell would not have to. "Can do, sweetheart! Just watch yerself. Wouldn't want all my dreams to go up in smoke, now."
A brief smile tugged at the corners of her thin lips, then she turned and raced to the house. Selphie's gaze lingered on him for just awhile longer, with an expression that Irvine couldn't quite fathom, before turning without a word or a smile to follow Quistis. Irvine scratched the back of his neck, puzzled, then shrugged in his characteristic manner. He concentrated for a moment. By the time the dazzling sparks of his magic had subsided around him, Zell had hauled himself back up onto their side of the bridge and the cowboy let out a long, low whistle.
He clicked his teeth. An obscenely bright glow emanated from directly beneath the house, seen only by his inner eye. "Oh, shit."
"So there was a bomb."
Zell fidgeted with his hands, all the while avoiding actually looking down at them. He'd half-expected some bitingly sarcastic comment about how good Zell's fighting skills had been, calculated to make him agonise some more over whether he shouldn't perhaps have been even faster. But instead, that dreadful voice mulled over this expected revelation quite thoughtfully, as if it had forgotten the tragic events that had followed. No such luck; the voice hardened again after a moment's pause.
"I thought there would be. He's not the type to bluff, as I guess you know. How did you get over the chasm? You told me you were on the wrong side."
"I had an Float spell Junctioned…sir." He added the last part swiftly. There was no reaction from the other side of the desk. "Not too accurate, but it was enough to whisk us over there, across the divide. Then we kinda just crawled into the substructure until we got to it. The bomb, I mean."
Irvine let out another characteristic whistle and a muttered oath. He gave the blinking face of the lethal ordnance a look that was equal parts hatred and admiration. "Ain't never seen one o' these. At least, not so well made…"
"Uh…excuse me, cowboy," Zell retorted, crouched and doubled over to fit into a nook in the rusted girders and wires that made up the substructure of the raised platform dead-centre of the dish upon which Dobe had made his abode. Several metres below him, that same dish glared up at him with the reflected shine of the equatorial sun whilst above, the deck of Fisherman's Horizon sagged worriedly, its integrity shaken by the force that the Firaga spell had used to shred the bridge. "But are you gonna complement it on its looks as usual or have you got any ideas on stopping it from blowing us to shreds?"
"Never really been the patient type, have you, Zell?" Irvine murmured as he struggled out of his coat and hung it on a handy girder. From one of its inner pockets, he extracted a small, flat case and gingerly stepped from girder to girder before balancing precariously on a thin, algae encrusted pipe directly in from of the face of the bomb.
"Irvine I'm being serious. Can you defuse that thing or should we sound an evacuation alert?"
Setting down the case atop the over-sized bomb, he opened it to reveal a neat row of screwdrivers, ranging from several inches long to a mere quarter-inch. "Wouldn't have enough time, buddy mine," he answered thoughtfully, surveying the face of the bomb's control panel and noting with implacable calm that he had little more than five minutes to perform his task. After a thoughtful pause, he chose a medium sized tool and went to work on the screws holding the panel shut. "Now shut up for a moment, hey? If it helps, think of me as a tightrope walker and you as a foghorn."
NEXT: It all goes wrong
Zell Dincht had the most fascinating knuckles.
He shouldn't have been surprised at that, come to think of it. He used them every day, in training, in combat with whomever SeeD decided to send him up against, even in his admittedly ridiculous habit of shadowboxing. He stared at them intently now. He knew what was coming, but he dared not shift his gaze from the back of his hands as they rested clasped together in his lap to the man whose piercing gaze threatened to burn a hole straight through his head and out the other side.
There was a spot of blood on them, where the stud on his index knuckle met the black leather fabric of his gauntlet.
"Zell."
The voice made his heart shrink, but the blood made the remnants of the panic that had gripped him earlier threaten to take control. He'd tried to wash it off…tried so desperately…but just that one piece had dried and stuck there. He'd scrubbed at it so hard…Hyne, how he'd scrubbed! But still a spot remained to remind him of his failure…
"Zell, look at me."
He'd scrubbed…
"Look at me."
At last he forced himself to painstakingly raise his head and meet the eyes of his interrogator. The eyes he'd felt since he entered the room, head bowed, hadn't waned in ferocity, but the face surrounding them was cold and waxen. And they were rimmed with black and slightly reddened. Panic and sorrow had blazed there once, but now there remained only chill fury, barely checked.
The two remained there, both motionless, Zell wide-eyed and mouthing possible explanations, his opposite totally expressionless. After a brief eternity, though, that tight-lipped countenance relaxed a meagre fraction, only enough to allow human speech, and began, in a voice of death.
"So…tell me, Zell. Tell me, adding in as much detail as you can, exactly how something so simple…so well planned…so…so hyne-damned simple…could have gone so horribly, horribly wrong?"
That crimson spot flared brightly in his mind's eye as he shifted position rubbing that accursedly stained hand along the fine blonde hairs on the back of his neck as he bowed his head again and closed his eyes.
"I…we…our SeeD Hovercraft got to FH alright…with time to…spare…then the mission started…"
Dobe, Lord mayor of Fisherman's Horizon, glared in fury at the quartet of SeeD Agents gathered before him, just recently disembarked on the rusted shores of his town of salvage and scrap. Before him, Quistis Trepe, SeeD instructor and field co-ordinator placed a hand on her hip in a gesture of irritation as the mayor continued his tirade against what he saw as an invasion by a hostile force.
"For the last time, mercenaries," he began, actually for the umpteenth. "We don't want you here. You're a menace and a mindless killing force, and you threaten everything we stand for. You weren't invited and I want you to leave NOW"
Quistis' face always shone on those rare occasions when she smiled, or so Zell tended to think to himself, privately. This didn't happen to be one of those occasions, and the sternness of the gaze with which she regarded the little mayor was grim indeed. Beside Zell, Irvine muttered something about his absolute enjoyment of watching sparks fly from her eyes before stifling a wince as Selphie scowled and kicked him firmly in the shins, reminiscent of one of the three terrorists whom they had come to stop.
"Mister Mayor," Quistis replied calmly, the strain in keeping her tone reasonable showing in the tautness of her back. "I know we were not invited, and I am aware of your philosophy of non-violence. But with all due respect"—she gestured toward the mayor's two storey, albeit modest, house nestled squarely in the centre of the gargantuan solar dish from which Fisherman's Horizon drew its power—"It hasn't seemed to work. I know these people, and I can tell you that in their leader's present state, there is no way they're going to listen."
"We can handle this without violence, Ms. Trepe," the mayor retorted hotly, but he was prevented from blasting the agents once again by a fierce hand gesture from Quistis, a sort of sawing motion, before she placed it, quite visibly, back on the handle of the whip mounted at her side.
"Well, yeah, I guess you can," she replied acidly. "Letting them blow up that little house of yours…along with the dish, your only source of power, is a way of handling things, I guess." She tossed the two strands of hair that hung down over her face, escapees from the tight clasp she insisted on maintaining. "But that would keep you in the dark for weeks whilst being repaired. Not to mention the damage to the fishing industry. Hard to get the tastiest catches to Galbadia or even Balamb without enough power to run your refrigeration units, isn't it?"
The mayor glared at her in silence, then growled, "We'll manage. We always have. We won't pay to have murderers like you in our town!"
"You won't have to," Quistis replied smoothly. Behind her, Irvine raised a curious eyebrow, and a murmured comment about not being paid for their endeavours earned him another affectionate, albeit quite painful, kick from Selphie. "Consider this a repayment for the time you allowed us, a group if 'vicious killers' to dock and rest up while our garden was repaired."
She turned her gaze to the vast solar dish, her eyes narrowing. "And…the terrorists are our business. It's our obligation to bring them back to Garden for judgement." She turned back to the glowering mayor. "Now, please…let us do our job."
The mayor's furious glared remained in place for a while longer as he engaged in a silent battle of wills with the four intruders. Then he spat over the side of the railing separating them from the dish and growled, "If any one of my people is hurt by your actions, none of you will ever again be welcomed anywhere near FH for as long as it stands."
He turned tail and stalked off before Quistis could offer her party's thanks. Sighing, she turned irritably and gave a rueful smile to her three companions.
"Well…I guess it'd be a bad idea to stop here for repairs anytime in the future, huh?"
"Hmm. Typical of her, I suppose. Always has the greater good in sight, even if the person she's dealing with is an asshole. I guess I should know."
In his misery, Zell was quite conscious of his grim companion's use of tenses. He forced himself to keep meeting his gaze, avoiding the spot on his hand and trying to hold himself accountable for the events on FH. An impartial observer probably would have told him that it was hardly his fault, but after what had happened the previous day, neither he nor the other two would have believed that they were not the ones to blame. Not at all.
"Well then. Cid would call that an 'auspicious start'. Carry on, Zell. And remember…don't leave anything out."
Zell shifted again ,averting his eyes to the side. He was caught between two fires, the flames in his interrogator's eyes and the pain of yesterday's events, staring up at him from that miniscule spot on his knuckle. The request hadn't been a threat, but he would wrack his brain nonetheless. He owed both of them that much.
The four had approached the mayor's house with caution. The sun's heat had subsided, now in the late afternoon, but the air still shimmered over the hundreds of thousands of tiles that comprised FH's tremendous solar energy complex, the largest in the world. Even on the long bridge leading from the outer streets to the Mayor's residence, the four could feel the heat of the day, and appreciated exactly why the mayor spent his days in a loose shirt, shorts and sandals. Hardly respectably attire for a man of his standing, but necessary considering he had to endure these temperatures day in and day out.
"Yo, Quistis," Zell whispered. "D'ya know if they've got any hostages?"
"Good thinking, Zell. Nice to know that thoughts of your next meal aren't the only thing to cross your mind," she answered affectionately, but still in a professional whisper. "But no…as far as I know, there aren't any. Apart from the whole town. We have no way of knowing how powerful that bomb is, or even if they have one."
Slightly behind them, Irvine narrowed his eyes and pulled the brim of his Stetson down to shield them from the rays of the afternoon sun. "Seems quiet," he growled. "No sign of any raving lunatics, if you know who I mean. Maybe they just caused enough of a ruckus to get us to come runnin' and look like fools?"
As if Murphy himself was listening in, a faint rumble was heard from beneath them. "Move it!" Quistis bellowed, racing across with Selphie in tow as the rumble turned into a roar and the entire structure lurched. Before Either Zell or Irvine could move a muscle, the section of the bridge once host to Quistis and Selphie erupted upward as a Firaga turned the ten metre section of the bridge into a blistering hail of molten metal and scrap. As the debris rained down, the flames between the two parties leapt up, spewing out a snarling Raijin.
For his briefest moment of inactivity, Irvine earned a boot in the face, sending him spinning away, stunned. Zell, quicker on the uptake for once, swung with a heavy fist, eyes watering from the heat of the blast. He felt something connect, and a heavy grunt, and grinned in brief satisfaction. Again he struck, before Raijin could recover, and again, but although his opponent's torso must have been a mass of bruises, Raijin found the strength to lunge forward, pummelling Zell with his sheer mass. Struggling, Zell could do little to stop the blind rush and so was helplessly slammed into the railings and tipped over them.
Acting on instinct rather than letting his normally cluttered mind do the work, he ceased resisting Raijin's rush. Gripping the collar of his sleeveless shirt with both hands, he simply let himself fall.
"What the fu…!" was all the larger man could utter as he found himself tumbling over the railings, defeated by his own momentum, and plummeting the short distance to the mirrors of the solar dish below. He lashed out blindly at his wiry adversary, but the two were in Zell's domain as the smaller man simply twisted himself in mid-air and allowed Raijin to land with a sharp crack of protesting backbone and shattered mirrors onto the surface of the dish, protecting Zell from the brunt of the shock.
Zell rolled tiredly off of his adversary, winded and hurting. But still Raijin wouldn't remain down. Rising to his feet with a terrible, ominous groan, he produced his thick staff from apparently nowhere and towered over Zell's panting form. For his part, the Balamb native could do little but stare up at him.
"Heh…heh…not…bad, little guy, ya…know?" Raijin coughed, a small trickle of blood running from the side of his mouth. He grinned revealing teeth stained with the same substance and raised his staff to pummel the SeeD into oblivion.
Then he screeched in unexpected pain as two shotgun bullets tore through both of his hands in quick succession. Whimpering, he collapsed to his feet, both ruined hands pressed against his chest to staunch the flow of blood, as the pieces of his staff clattered away, sliced cleanly in three by the precisely marked bullets. Not one to let an advantage pass once presented to him, Zell found the strength to leap up, take that enormous head in both hands and intimately acquaint it with his kneecap. The sharp crack he earned, and the senseless sigh that followed, seemed a welcome vindication for the pain he'd suffered before.
Taking a deep breath to recover the ones slammed out of him by Raijin's unusually ferocious assault, he looked up to the ruined bridge and gave a grateful thumbs-up to the figure leaning lazily on it. Irvine touched a finger to his hat and continued rubbing his jaw with a wince. Across the chasm that now separated the SeeDs, Selphie and Quistis got shakily to their feet, still slightly stunned.
Quistis cupped her hands to her mouth. "Zell….you okay?"
Still too winded to make reply, he raised a hand and nodded shakily.
"Perfect." She tossed her perfect hair and jerked a thumb back at the house on their side of the bridge. "Selphie and I'll search Mayor Dobe's residence. You two stay on alert, and Scan the scaffolding under the house and around it. That's the logical place for a bomb…if it went off, it'd take the whole dish with it."
Irvine answered so that Zell would not have to. "Can do, sweetheart! Just watch yerself. Wouldn't want all my dreams to go up in smoke, now."
A brief smile tugged at the corners of her thin lips, then she turned and raced to the house. Selphie's gaze lingered on him for just awhile longer, with an expression that Irvine couldn't quite fathom, before turning without a word or a smile to follow Quistis. Irvine scratched the back of his neck, puzzled, then shrugged in his characteristic manner. He concentrated for a moment. By the time the dazzling sparks of his magic had subsided around him, Zell had hauled himself back up onto their side of the bridge and the cowboy let out a long, low whistle.
He clicked his teeth. An obscenely bright glow emanated from directly beneath the house, seen only by his inner eye. "Oh, shit."
"So there was a bomb."
Zell fidgeted with his hands, all the while avoiding actually looking down at them. He'd half-expected some bitingly sarcastic comment about how good Zell's fighting skills had been, calculated to make him agonise some more over whether he shouldn't perhaps have been even faster. But instead, that dreadful voice mulled over this expected revelation quite thoughtfully, as if it had forgotten the tragic events that had followed. No such luck; the voice hardened again after a moment's pause.
"I thought there would be. He's not the type to bluff, as I guess you know. How did you get over the chasm? You told me you were on the wrong side."
"I had an Float spell Junctioned…sir." He added the last part swiftly. There was no reaction from the other side of the desk. "Not too accurate, but it was enough to whisk us over there, across the divide. Then we kinda just crawled into the substructure until we got to it. The bomb, I mean."
Irvine let out another characteristic whistle and a muttered oath. He gave the blinking face of the lethal ordnance a look that was equal parts hatred and admiration. "Ain't never seen one o' these. At least, not so well made…"
"Uh…excuse me, cowboy," Zell retorted, crouched and doubled over to fit into a nook in the rusted girders and wires that made up the substructure of the raised platform dead-centre of the dish upon which Dobe had made his abode. Several metres below him, that same dish glared up at him with the reflected shine of the equatorial sun whilst above, the deck of Fisherman's Horizon sagged worriedly, its integrity shaken by the force that the Firaga spell had used to shred the bridge. "But are you gonna complement it on its looks as usual or have you got any ideas on stopping it from blowing us to shreds?"
"Never really been the patient type, have you, Zell?" Irvine murmured as he struggled out of his coat and hung it on a handy girder. From one of its inner pockets, he extracted a small, flat case and gingerly stepped from girder to girder before balancing precariously on a thin, algae encrusted pipe directly in from of the face of the bomb.
"Irvine I'm being serious. Can you defuse that thing or should we sound an evacuation alert?"
Setting down the case atop the over-sized bomb, he opened it to reveal a neat row of screwdrivers, ranging from several inches long to a mere quarter-inch. "Wouldn't have enough time, buddy mine," he answered thoughtfully, surveying the face of the bomb's control panel and noting with implacable calm that he had little more than five minutes to perform his task. After a thoughtful pause, he chose a medium sized tool and went to work on the screws holding the panel shut. "Now shut up for a moment, hey? If it helps, think of me as a tightrope walker and you as a foghorn."
NEXT: It all goes wrong