A/N – This chapter is really long. But if you like action, you'll enjoy it! Fasten those seatbelts!

The Anywhere Cannon

A "My Life as a Teenage Robot" Fanfic

Chapter Seven – In the Crosshairs

The tapered missile sliced through interplanetary space like a black arrow. Its silhouette was devoid of harsh angles or straight lines, all the better to deflect away any sensor beams. Its coal-colored paint had been selected to eliminate glints of light that might betray its location. Even the brilliant tail of hot fusion exhaust was channeled through a shaped magnetic nozzle that shielded ninety percent of the heat. The cruise missile was all but invisible to its unfortunate target. Under perfect conditions.

But the long fire-tail was visible from the side, if someone happened to fly close enough. And the formation of four Cluster Hornet interceptors, out on routine patrol, was definitely close enough.

Two Hornets banked into a tight turn and slammed their throttles to the wall, racing to catch up with the swift cruise missile. The other two interceptors took the opposite heading, towards a purple gas giant, and powered up their active scanners.

Somebody had fired that missile. And they were going to find out who.

Drew did a slow pan of the vast chamber, making a count of the rifle barrels that were currently pointed in his direction. One hundred and eighty-three. Just beautiful. Heavy drone troopers, standing three abreast, had him totally surrounded on the platform, with even more soldiers deployed above and below, cutting off all possible avenues of escape. Two more squads of laser-toting drones marched onto the floor, taking up firing positions on him from every conceivable angle. His shoulders slumped with a dejected groan; he vowed right then that, if he somehow managed to survive this screw-up, he'd give the Underground leaders a little lesson on a great Earth scientist named Murphy, and his very famous Law. Then he was going to thank Brad for dumping Tuck on his case, by kicking his weasel-butt into the middle of next Thursday. Drew winced as the little black-haired tormentor fidgeted to get comfortable in his lap, then looked up to meet the triumphant sneer plastered across Smytus' face.

"Heh-heh … 'sup, dude," he croaked, giving the Cluster commander a feeble wave. "Heh-heh … fancy bumping into you again today. Wow. What are the chances, huh?"

"Not nearly as good as the chances of you being reduced to a pile of cinders!" bellowed the robot warrior. "You absurd little slush-brained nano-fool! Did you actually think you could sneak onto my secret asteroid base, sabotage my precious doomsday cannon, and thwart my ingenious plans for total galactic conquest?"

"Uh, well …" – Drew gave his shoulders a meek shrug – "… I was cautiously optimistic …"

"Hey, you know what I just realized?" Tuck – still blissfully clueless as to the amount of true peril he was in right now – snapped his fingers, trying to coax his memory along. "The theme park guys built this Supreme Commander droid to look like someone familiar! Yeah, look at those ugly orange eyes, and that stupid giant zit growing out of the middle of his forehead …"

Electric sparks crackled from the commander's reddening cheeks. "Grrrrrr …"

"… And look at his teeth! Ha, ha, ha, you could kick a field goal through the gap in those teeth! I think he needs to go to the dentist for some robo-braces … oh, wait, that's it! You know who this big doofus reminds me of?"

Drew groaned, and shook his head. "Tuck, say hello to Commander Smytus. Tuck, Smytus. Smytus, Tuck. Groan. You just couldn't sit still for five stinking minutes, could you?"

"Huh? What? You … you mean the real Smytus?" Tuck twisted around, with a confused-puppy expression on his face. "Wha-choo-talkin-bout-Drew?"

Smytus folded his arms across his massive chest, glared down at the boys, and snorted in disgust. "The traitors in the Underground must truly be desperate these days – bad enough they employ an abomination like you, nanodroid, but now they're using trained monkeys, too? How pathetic!" He raised an arm to signal his robotic legions, and snarled at Drew with a cruel grin. "What a glorious day this shall be! In moments, we shall destroy XJ-9, and everyone else on her pitiful planet. And now, nanodroid … ohhh, how you've plagued me these months, like an infuriating pebble stuck in my gears … for all the grief you've caused me, I get to watch you reduced to a cloud of silver flakes! How I will enjoy your cries of agony! Drones! Arm your weapons! Ready! AIM! FI …"

"Commander!" shouted a frantic robot voice.

Smytus convulsed wildly. "WHAAaaAAAAT?" he screamed in frustration.

A blue technician drone ran up and delivered an anxious salute. "Sir, Hornet patrols have detected a high-speed bogey, inbound! It looks like a cruise missile!"

"The Underground," snarled Smytus. He whipped around to face his captives once more, and his barbed forearm began to glow with green plasma energy. "Tell me everything you know about this cruise missile attack, nanodroid … or watch your little pet monkey be vaporized."

Tuck started to shake as a nasty, glowing prong snapped out of Smytus' wrist, and pointed right towards his nose. "B-b-but I'm too young to be v-v-vaporized!"

Drew grit his teeth, and wrapped a pair of protective arms around Tuck's belly. Captured data files and base schematics flickered up in his enhanced vision. His sneaking-around plan had fallen apart like a tower of Popsicle sticks; well, now it was time to improvise. He surveyed the robot troops that surrounded them, noting their positions on a digitized floor plan in his computer mind. "Tuck, when I say so," he whispered into the boy's ear, "add another thousand points to your Bot Buster score. Understand?"

"Th-th-thousand points … huh? Oh!" Tuck clutched his Goop rifle to his chest with shaking hands. He gulped hard, and slipped a white-knuckled finger down towards the trigger … and felt a weird vibration against his tummy. Drew's arms began to warble with subtle patterns of shimmering distortion …

"No more delays, nanodroid," growled Smytus. "You have until the count of ten to talk! One … two …" – his wrist-prong crackled to life with emerald plasma – " … nine …"

"Now!" snapped Drew – as his body dissolved into a curtain of silver-green sludge.

Tuck swung his MegaSoaker 400 up and fired three blind shots, landing the last one right between Smytus' eyes. The Cluster commander staggered backwards a step, and shouted the order to fire at will. Hundreds of robotic fingers squeezed hundreds of triggers on hundreds of laser rifles …

As Drew finished flowing his nanobot body around Tuck, encapsulating him in a spherical shell. A final ripple of distortion smoothed over the sphere's surface, a millisecond before a huge volley of laser blasts roared out in unison. Hundreds of red-hot ruby lasers slammed into the shiny sphere all at once …

And bounced off. Drew had grown a layer of perfectly smooth quartz on the outside of his shell, reflecting the lasers away like a mirror. To the soldiers' horror, beams of zigzagging ruby-red leapt out from their target at crazy angles, carving into equipment, blasting holes into metal grating, and ricocheting into the bodies of their comrades. Sharpshooters who had taken dead-center aim actually managed to shoot themselves in the chest. Coolant pipes burst, cryogenic gas hissed into the air, and monitors exploded into showers of glass. A section of metal plating gave way, sending six drone troopers plunging five stories down to the rocky floor. But the drones kept shooting, not realizing that the return fire was, in fact, coming from their own rifles. Finally Smytus, who had instinctively used an unfortunate technician as a shield, shouted over the suffering and gave the order to cease fire.

A silver-green fist burst through the charred sphere. The shell cracked open; Drew sprang out and hurdled over Smytus' head, with Tuck clinging onto his back for dear life. Freshly-grown claws sunk into the overhead platform – and the terrified android sprinted upside-down on the ceiling, madly dodging left and right in a race for the exit. Still-smoldering drones swung their rifles towards the ceiling, and let loose with a fresh burst of disorganized laser fire. Chunks of metal grating blasted into hot slag all around Drew's hands and feet. Tuck screamed in horror as the world whizzed by, topsy-turvy – then saw the drone-arms swing up at him with grabbing claws …

But Drew jumped sideways, over the metal railing, and grew two of his fingers into long, carbon-fiber cables. He swung clumsily from a support strut, like a stunt man in a bad jungle movie, twisting and flexing his body to shield Tuck from the scattershot laser fire. A well-aimed blast sliced through his cable-fingers, and they fell the last six feet to the Level Four platform. The silver-green blob curled his body around his young passenger, and used their collective momentum to plow over three roach-drones like a giant bowling ball. Dizzy and desperate, and with lasers hitting him in the back, he scrambled through the exit, slapping the big red Emergency Lockdown button on the way through.

Allison frowned at the brightly colored graphics on the Free Will's large computer display. The missile's trajectory looked to be picture-perfect. Polaris and the others anxiously tracked its progress; she watched as well, but every few seconds she shot an anxious glance towards the rear of the bridge, hoping to see the flash of a spawning vortex. "Okay, Drew …" she grumbled to herself, nervously drumming her fingers. "Any time now …"

Urgent tones rang out from a smaller monitor. Greaser spun his chair around – and yelped in alarm. "Whooaaaa, dudes! There's like, two enemy Hornets heading right for us! And they're locking their weapons! Bogus!"

"Warm up the particle beams!" shouted Polaris. "Get the engines up to …"

The floor heaved up and tossed the Underground robots about the bridge like empty soup cans. The Cluster interceptors had unleashed a barrage of rocket fire upon the Free Will, hitting it broadsides while she was configured for silent running. An explosion ballooned out from the engineering section, and the Hornets looped around for another pass. But the rebels quickly got back to their posts, and they frantically brought sensors and reactors to full power. A vicious exchange of lasers spat back and forth through cold space, as the nimble interceptors buzzed around the wounded cruiser. The forward hull took a direct hit, knocking the targeting computer off-line. Allison alertly plugged her arm into a console socket, letting her adaptive software take the place of the damaged computer – and a blizzard of high-speed shots erupted from the Free Will's particle guns, ripping the Hornet interceptors into metallic shreds.

Sighs of relief arose on the bridge, but Polaris was definitely unhappy. "Great, our engines are down," he grimaced. "And at the risk of stating the obvious – the Cluster knows we're here now."

Smoke still wafting from his back, Drew ran his hands along the sides of the emergency door, letting his nanobots fuse it into the doorframe. Robotic fists pounded on the other side, trying in vain to open the now-solid slab of metal. The substation they'd escaped into was roughly the size of a school classroom. There was an open archway in the far wall; Drew scrambled to the side of room, ripped out a heavy control console, and frantically started to build a barricade to keep Cluster reinforcements from getting in. It would only hold troops at bay for a short time, but that was all that he needed. Feet slipping on the slick concrete, he struggled to push another two-ton console into position – all while trying to settle down his completely freaked-out little stowaway.

"I don't understand!" screamed Tuck. "That's really Smytus? Here? Why would Smytus want to take over the Goop Zone? Can't he just win a giant stuffed hippo like everyone else?"

"Oh, fer the love of …" – Drew rolled his eyes as he ripped a giant monitor from the ceiling, and tossed it on the barricade – "… Tuck, would you just forget about the stupid Goop Zone already, and take off your backpack! Hurry!"

"Unless we're not really at the Goop Zone … but then where could we be …" – Tuck's eyes went wide as dinner plates, and his cheeks drained of color until there was nothing left but gray. He suddenly recalled the words of Smytus' tirade. "Did Smytus say something about a secret asteroid base? A real live secret asteroid base in outer space with a doomsday weapon and laser guns and robot drones and a hangar bay and a giant mutant shark tank for tossing helpless prisoners into?"

Another console tossed on the pile. "Uh, pretty much everything up to the shark tank, yeah."

"AAAIIIIIIGHHHH!" Tuck screamed, running around in small circles. "What are we doing here? What am I doing here? Don't you realize you're jeopardizing a minor?"

Drew pulled two chairs out of the floor, trying to work fast. "Oh, boy … look, I'll explain everything after we get the heck out of here. Now make yourself useful and get my teleporter – and it is my teleporter – out of your backpack, and set the …"

A hideous noise hissed out from the direction of the sealed door. A foot-wide circle of metal was glowing white hot. Then a brilliant cutting beam burst through, spitting droplets of glowing steel onto the concrete, and slowly started to slice through the thick metal.

Smytus shouted at his underlings with the rage of a prehistoric volcano. Critical base equipment had taken damage from the ricocheting laser fire. Scorch-marks pitted the walls of the cavern, still hazy with roiling clouds of dust and smoke. "Move your shells!" he bellowed, as he wiped the last of the goo from his face. "Finish those repairs! I want that Force Field back up! I want all fighters scrambled! And I will not tolerate any delays! You! Status report!"

A laser-scorched roach-drone snapped a shaky salute. "Still working on the force field, sir – but damage to the cannon is minimal. We can fire again in a few minutes! As for the nanodroid, he and the tiny human have sealed themselves off in a substation. We're breaking through now …"

"I want him captured, understand? I want that underhanded no-good silver-green abomination caught and melted down for piston grease!" Smytus deployed a boom microphone from his chest, and shouted over the asteroid's PA system. "Attention all drones! Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the nanodroid HAS been approved!"

"… Commander! Something else!" The roach-drone pointed at an undamaged monitor. "Two Hornets on patrol have located the Free Will hiding in this system!"

A thoughtful look came to Smytus' face. "The Underground's treacherous pirate vessel," he mumbled, tapping his chin with a clawed finger. "Drones! I'm ordering a change of target!" He strutted to the handrail to address the crowd. "The planet Earth isn't going anywhere. Set targeting co-ordinates for the star cruiser Free Will. I shall eliminate Earth, XJ-9, and those treasonous Underground leaders, all in the same day! MUA HA HA HA HA HAAA!"

Tuck gripped Drew's leg like a baby koala. The cutting beam had sliced half-way around the door, when another horrible thought dawned on him. "Umm, hey Drew … I know that Smytus tends to blabber a lot whenever we bump into him, but I distinctly remember him using the words …" – he yanked hard to bring the android boy down to his frantic eyes – "… cruise missile attack."

"Yeah, in about three minutes." Drew punched numbers into his teleporter. "Anti-matter warhead. Yeee-owtch. There's not going to be enough of this lousy rock left to fill a pothole."

"But I'm on this lousy rock!"

"Well, it's not like I intended to stick around to watch," smiled Drew. He heaved a sigh of relief, pointed the teleporter towards the wall, pushed the red button …

Fzzzzt. Click. Vreeeeeee … The gizmo made a sound like a dying sparrow.

The optimism disappeared from Drew's face in a split second. He mashed the button again and got the same non-result …

"It … it's dead! The power cells are completely dead! How the heck is that even possible? It was fully charged this morning! Geez, to drain a subatomic power cell you'd … have … to …" – he paused, and his eyes slowly turned downward to glare at Tuck like two burning coals – "… make dozens, and dozens, and dozens of hyperspace jumps. Possibly while carrying a Goop rifle."

"Ah-heh-heh … heh-heh …" – Tuck tugged nervously at his collar – "… umm, I think I have some double-A batteries in my flashlight. Heh …"

An eruption of gunfire rang out from the archway, punching a flaming hole in the makeshift barricade. The first drone reinforcement charged through instantly, raised his plasma rifle, and started firing. Drew shoved Tuck under a desk, arced his body through the air in a graceful parabola – and sliced the drone's head off with a hastily grown nano-blade. The decapitated robot collapsed, sending its rifle skittering along the cold concrete floor. A second drone vaulted through the barricade, carrying a strange-looking white tank on its back. He pointed a strange weapon at Drew, fired – and a stream of liquid nitrogen splashed onto the blade-arm, instantly freezing it rock solid. Drew cringed in agony, and the drone prepared to fire at him again – then he reached over, snapped off his arm at the elbow, and flung it at the drone-soldier like a boomerang! The frozen blade smacked the Cluster robot right between the eyes, and it dropped to the floor like a rag doll, spewing sparks from its face.

Tuck shook his head in astonishment, double-blinking. "… Whoa."

Then another drone clambered through the barricade, armed with another of the cryo-guns. Drew was out in the open, still growing his arm back – he was a sitting duck! Cold terror seized at Tuck's poor stomach – until he spotted the plasma rifle that the first drone had dropped. He clenched his tiny fists with resolve, and jumped out from under the desk. "Don't worry, Drew! I'll save you!" He lunged for the rifle, wrapped his hands around the grip, raised the barrel towards the robot soldier …

And fired clear over his head. Tuck could barely lift the gun, let alone aim it. And he had no clue what the power settings on a Cluster rifle meant. Otherwise, he likely wouldn't have shot off a plasma bolt capable of leveling a brick wall. The plasma slammed into the ceiling, rocking the entire room with a bone-rattling explosion. A waterfall of dust and rubble came down on the drone's head, and he looked up … just in time to see a ten-foot-wide chunk of reinforced concrete hurtle down to crush him flat as a flapjack.

Drew stumbled through the dust and picked up Tuck, whose dazed eyes were still spinning like pinwheels. "Way to go, Bot Buster," he said with a sarcastic smirk …

As the cutting beam finished carving the hole out of the emergency door. One second later, fresh plasma fire imploded the barricade completely. They had to get out of there fast. Armageddon was on its way. Clutching Tuck to his chest, Drew crouched deep, and jumped through the smoking hole in the ceiling. There were two hundred furious Cluster soldier drones hot on their tail.

The Hornets' afterburners screeched white-hot as they closed the gap on the speedy cruise missile. Their own missiles weren't fast enough to catch it; but nothing could outrun a beam of light, and the drone pilots grew confident as they neared the maximum range of their laser cannons. The first Hornet pilot skillfully worked his thrusters, nudging the coal-black missile into the center of his crosshairs …

Something big and fast and dark flashed by his wing. That confused the drone – there were no other ships on his sensors – then he remembered something, and reached to turn on his radar …

Too late to avoid the mile-wide asteroid rushing directly towards him. The Hornet fighter evaporated on impact, carving out a deep crater filled with fiery shrapnel. The cruise missile curved around the space rock, then dipped to avoid another, gracefully dancing into the thickening field of tumbling boulders. The second Hornet struggled valiantly to match the missile's trajectory, following it deeper and deeper into the asteroid belt. On a direct course for the Cluster base.

The boys scrambled through the hole and ran down a long, dimly lit tunnel, only to be confronted by yet another pair of hostile robot soldiers. As the drones unslung their plasma rifles, Drew lunged forward into a silvery blur. He flung his arms out to form clawed tentacles, each crossing over the other to grasp a drone by the elbow. The drones leveled their rifles at the trespassers and fired – half a second after the silver-green claws gave their elbows a hard tug, yanking them off balance. The rightmost drone spun to the left, the leftmost drone spun to the right – and they blew each other's heads to smithereens.

Tuck stared at Drew, slack-jawed. "So where'd you learn to do that? Wonder Weenie?"

"Gasp … puff … not now, Tuck." He ran a hand through his silvery bangs, trying to organize his jumbled thoughts. "I'm trying to think up a way out of here!"

"You know, Jenny would have just deployed her rocket boosters by now."

"Oh, that's right, I can't grow rocket boosters," Drew snarled back. "Gee, it's a darn good thing I brought a teleporter with me then, isn't it?"

"Hey, hey, chill! I'm just sayin' …"

"Wait a second …" – a light went on it Drew's eyes – "… I may not be able to form rockets, but I know where we can find some! I'm pretty sure the hangar's at the end of this …"

Then they heard the first wave of pursuing drones climb up through the hole. The boys turned and ran as if their hair was on fire. The pounding of mechanical boots echoed behind them. Drew glanced at the running countdown in his vision; two minutes, thirty seconds until kaboom time. The end of the tunnel grew closer, beckoning them with the hope of escape and the ever-growing whine of rocket engines. Drew and Tuck spilled out into a large room with a wide row of plate glass windows – an observation deck that looked out over the expansive spacecraft hangar.

The base's three remaining Hornets had taxied to the middle of the hangar, fully armed, engines running, waiting while the massive roof slowly slid open. They were being scrambled to shoot down the incoming cruise missile. They were exactly what the boys needed to get away from the doomed asteroid.

Slight problem: the boys were five floors up. The hangar entrance was down on the first level.

Drew watched the first Hornet pivot its engine nozzles. It rose off the floor, beginning its smooth ascent.

Shouts rang out behind them. Over one hundred drones were running down the tunnel, closing on them fast. Drew's head snapped left and right, looking for a stairwell, an elevator, anything. Think think think think … Then he looked down at Tuck. He was still wearing those ridiculous Goop ammunition belts on his chest. With the plastic grenades, Tuck looked like a miniature 80's action hero.

"Those things filled with that crazy Goop stuff of yours?"

"Why, yes they are," grinned Tuck, instantly cluing in. He handed two grenades to Drew, took a pair for himself, and they hurled them down the tunnel as far as they could. The grenades bounced twice, clattering to a stop just in front of the closest drones … then they exploded in a disgusting splortch of synthetic green mucus. Stunned drones slipped and slid every which way, vaulting backwards to land on the concrete floor with a titanic crash. Metallic bodies stacked up to form a robotic traffic pileup. Tuck was bursting with sadistic delight. "Yeah, that'll teach you robot wusses to mess with the power of Goop! Yeah, how do you like me now? Huh? How do …"

His trash-talk was cut off as Drew clutched him under his arm like a football. Strangely, his head was flattening and morphing … into a thick metal plate the size of an anvil. Short, stubby spikes sprouted up on top of it.

Before Tuck could ask what he was doing, he broke into a flat-out sprint. Heading directly towards the plate glass window.

He lowered his spiked head like a charging rhino.

Tuck let out a panicked scream as the heavy glass exploded into a million sparkling shards. Drew plowed through the window, feet churning hard until there was nothing left but air beneath them. The boys sailed through the air, howling and lurching and falling and flailing their arms like windmills – until they landed with a hard thud, slamming into the canopy bubble of the hovering Hornet fighter craft.

"Tell those repair crews I want the engines back on-line, now!" Captain Polaris felt the stressful gurgling in his hydraulics again. The Free Will was floating dead in space, just begging for trouble …

The Underground robots balled their fists in anticipation, watching the main display with hawk-like vigilance. "Missile still on course," said Greaser. "Two minutes to fireworks, dudes."

Allison watched the missile track too, but her insides were churning up, like she'd replaced her fuel cells with a blender motor. She glanced to the empty receiving area on the bridge. He should have been here by now. She should call him. No, she shouldn't. It wouldn't do any good, and there's nothing she could do now, anyway. C'mon, you big silver goofball, c'mon …

"Uh oh," said Greaser. New graphics and symbols popped up on the screen. "Whoa, we're like, being totally scanned, dudes. These energy readings are straight out of bizarro world!"

"The Anywhere Cannon," Polaris said darkly. "They're getting ready to fire it again. At us."

Pieces of shattered canopy peeled away, revealing three stunned figures piled on top of each other in a space intended for only one. Tuck snapped bolt upright and vigorously patted himself down, making sure he was still in one intact piece. He'd been sure he was about two seconds away from turning into a floor pizza. But instead he was sitting in a weird alien space fighter, surrounded by beeping and pinging and flashing – and cushioned by a nice, cushy, silver-green gel pillow. He must have jumped fifty feet through the air! "Let's do that AGAIN!"

The silver-green pillow would've made a sarcastic remark if it hadn't been for the pilot-drone whose claws were wrapped around his neck. "Glurkhhh!" choked Drew, as he rammed an elbow into the drone's shoulder. "… Tuck, just shut up, and keep your head down …"

He should have heeded his own advice. A steel fist slammed into his cheek, knocking him off balance. His feet wrapped around the pilot's waist, using the stubby drone as an anchor. Unfortunately, this was all happening in a hovering spacecraft that pitched and bobbed and rolled like a rubber raft on the high seas. Tuck inadvertently leaned against the control stick, and the Hornet's nose pitched up like bucking bronco – catapulting Drew and the pilot-drone right out of the cockpit. They tumbled and somersaulted backwards along the fuselage – heading right towards the fusion engines. Arms lunged desperately for a handhold, and when the world stopped spinning, the sparring robots were clinging desperately to the left weapons pod, fifty feet above the hangar floor!

Drew wrapped one arm around the pod, tried to punch the pilot with the other … then the wings rolled drastically to the left, then back to the right, nearly launching him into the air again. Wait a second … if he was on the wing, and the pilot was on the wing, then who was flying the …

Tuck smiled and waved excitedly from the pilot's seat. Drew's eyes nearly shot clear out of their sockets. "TUCK! Oh, geez, whatever you do, don't touch …"

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a barrage of laser fire, zinging past his nose and filling the wing-skin with smoking holes. A crowd of soldier-drones had amassed at the broken window of the observation deck, treated to the sight of their silver-green quarry, dangling from the Hornet's wing like an apple from a tree. Drew and the pilot twisted frantically to avoid the hail of lasers …

"Yipes!" Tuck yelped, dropping for cover as lasers screamed over his head. Now Drew was in real trouble! Adrenaline and excitement surged in his veins as never before in his young life. There had to be something he could do to help! His eyes scanned the impossibly complex dials and gauges on the panel, looking for possibilities. "Well, if a lifetime of video games has taught me anything," he grinned, "it's that there's no problem in life you can't solve with massive firepower!" The steel control stick between his legs had a red trigger on its grip. He wrapped his hands around the trigger, and squeezed …

And all heck broke loose. Twin fountains of flame blasted out of the weapons pods with a roar as if the world was being ripped in half. Horrifically spectacular plumes of gunfire sprayed into the observation deck, laying waste to dozens of drones and turning Level Five into a cloud of gravel. Windows exploded outward into a blizzard of crystalline needles. Wailing sirens blared through the cavern, drowned out by explosions. Panicked laser shots rang out from the deck and hangar floor. Hysterical worker drones scrambled to avoid the shower of fiery debris. The Hornet's chassis shuddered with gut-churning vibration, forcing Tuck to lock his hands on the trigger while he bounced crazily in the seat, barely able to see over the control panel. "Thhhiiiissss … iiissss … ssssoooo … cooooooolll!"

It was far less cool for the robots who were all of twelve inches away from the screaming cannons; Drew could feel his skin scorching from being so close. "TUCK! STOP FIR … sheesh, will you GET LOST, buddy?" – he gave the annoying pilot-drone a powerful kick, knocking him off the pod – and directly in front of the roaring laser cannon. The pilot's demise was as dramatic as it was brief. Drew flipped up and lay dazed for a second, hanging onto the edge of the Hornet's wing …

And saw Hornets number two and three spool up their engines, and float into the air on columns of superheated exhaust. Their wings brimmed with eager weapons.

Tuck saw them too. A fresh surge of adrenaline flowed into his body, kicking in yet more instincts born from hours on the living room couch. He yanked the control stick, lurching the laser-scorched Hornet into a sickening 180-degree turn. The control stick had red buttons on top of it. Bright, shiny buttons.

Drew shrieked like a schoolgirl. "TUCK! DON'T! It's too confined in here! DON'T … ah, crud."

All eight of the Hornet's missiles belched out of the weapons pods in a burst of fire and gray smoke. Five of them slammed into Hornet 2. The spacecraft disintegrated instantly into a billowing cloud of flame and plasma; there one millisecond, gone the next. Two of the other missiles slammed into the far wall, but one clipped Hornet 3's tail, blasting it to pieces just as its doomed pilot fired his weapons. Out of control, Hornet 3 lurched up vertically, as if standing on its tail … and unloaded two missiles into the sliding hangar-roof mechanism. Concussive blasts rang out from the high ceiling, followed by still more explosions as the fiery remains of Hornets 2 and 3 plummeted to the floor.

But Tuck and Drew barely noticed any of this. So many missiles, exploding at near point-blank range, formed a vicious shock wave that slapped the hijacked Hornet like an invisible giant's hand. The wounded Cluster spacecraft slid backwards through the air, crashing forcefully into the smoking remains of the observation deck … and got stuck.

The fighter banked sharply around a dumbbell-shaped asteroid, matching every jinking maneuver of the cruise missile it chased. The pilot-drone fired another shot and missed by mere inches; he was getting so close, so close. The stealth missile pitched down, swerved around another space rock, twisted back the other way … and then leveled off, flying towards a gap between two giant asteroids. The drone pushed his fighter's engines to the red line, rapidly closing the distance …

But the asteroids were moving towards each other. The missile sped through the closing gap, and streaked out the other side. The Cluster fighter tried to follow …

Crunch.

The cruise missile flew onward, its computer brain concerned with nothing more than its radar, its guidance software, and its mission timer. One minute to detonation and counting.

"Force field is still down, Commander!" reported the technician. "And there seems to be some kind of problem in the hangar bay! Hostile missile still inbound!"

"Well, lock our missiles on it and prepare to fire then, idiot!" Smytus was now visibly nervous himself. Threat alarms screamed as worker drones raced to finish repairs on the Anywhere Cannon. The Cannon's generators awoke with a deep, reverberating vrrmmmm. The coils on the giant portal hummed to life. The PA system announced that the cannon would be ready to fire in forty seconds. In forty seconds, the Free Will, and the Cluster Underground, would be a thing of the past.

Smtyus grinned, rubbing his claws together with malicious glee. "Now to deal with this bothersome, futile Underground attack! Defensive missile batteries, FIRE!"

The technician-drone hammered the missile button –

And nothing happened. The drone punched it again.

With a disgusting splortch, a bubble of green Goop oozed out from under the edges of the button. Goop did have a nasty habit of getting into everything. The defense console crackled with short circuits, and the technician drone looked up at Smytus, horrified.

Commander Smytus, the great warrior, the living legend of the Cluster Empire, bravely pressed a little yellow button on his left arm. His personal hover-scooter whooshed up from the floor to a floating stop just a few feet away. He sprang over the platform railing, grabbing his scooter's handlebars as if clinging onto a life preserver. "Uhhh, drone, I am so confident that you're going to get this little problem taken care of, that I'm putting you in charge until I get back from this … er … thing, I just remember I have to go to. Somewhere. Top Secret. Bye!" A beam flashed out from the scooter, carving a hyperspace vortex out of the air. As soon as the wormhole was open, Smytus zipped inside like a scalded dog.

The technician clasped his claws to his chest. "A promotion! Wow! Mom's gonna be so proud!"

Allison fought to keep a stoic expression as she stared helplessly at the yellow dot on the flight path display. A timer counted down the seconds remaining in Drew's life. Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Greaser and the others empathized with her growing sense of foreboding – yet they knew their very lives now depended on that missile reaching its target as soon as possible –

A flickering, multicolored light began to filter in through the bridge's wraparound windows. Polaris rushed forward, and stared out into space with a sense of dread …

A giant hyperspace vortex swirled into existence. Like a demon's eye. Staring right at them.

The wounded fighter shuddered underneath the collapsed ceiling beams, thrashing about like a wild animal caught in a net, but was still lodged firmly in the smoking remains of the Level Five observation deck. Tuck jerked the control stick back and forth, to no avail. He looked out the back of the cockpit – and a cold lump formed in his belly. There was movement in the rubble. Some of the Cluster soldiers had survived his laser onslaught, and were looking to deliver some payback. And the remainder of the drone pursuers were bursting out of the corridor, eager to join the fray. Tuck reached down for his Goop rifle – and saw that the tank was empty. "Ulp. O-o-okay … s-so you wanna go hand-to-hand, do you?"

Then he was pushed back down by a smoldering, silver-green arm. Drew had finally made it back to the cockpit. He grabbed the Hornet's throttle, twisted the handle, rammed it forward …

And activated the fighter's afterburners. Howling torrents of white-hot fusion screamed out of the engine nozzles, transforming the observation deck into a roiling lake of fire. Metallic bodies ignited as if they were made of straw. Flaming drones ran in circles, blazing like torches, howling as their circuit boards melted down into silicon slag. And the teeth-rattling kick from the afterburners wrenched the Hornet free of the wreckage, and shoved it back into mid-air as the deck transformed into an inferno.

A fuel tank on the far side of the hangar erupted with a deafening blast. Two more explosions rocked the artificial roof, destroying its sliding door mechanism. Flaming gears and metalwork plummeted towards the floor. Drew twisted the controls, just barely pivoting the fighter out of the way of the falling wreckage. Bedlam howled all around him; no part of the hangar was left untouched by explosions and raging fire.

"Sheesh, I don't know who I should be more afraid of!" he shouted at Tuck. "The Cluster, or YOU!"

"Never mind that!" Tuck shouted back, pulling his hair. "Just get us out of here!"

Drew spun their limping Hornet around in a wobbly circle, trying to figure out how to do just that. The hangar was filled with fire and black smoke. Concrete support beams and thick slabs of rock crashed down from the walls. The roof was jammed in a half-open position, blocked by flaming metal beams jutting at bizarre angles, like broken bones. He didn't have any missiles left to blast the blockage away. And even if he could get through the roof, he doubted that he'd be able to outrun the missile blast. The Hornet's left engine was on fire, and the flames were spreading to the tail. Half of the right wing was missing; the other half was pitted with laser blasts. His getaway ship felt as if it would fall to pieces in a strong breeze, let alone a nuclear shock front.

The Hornet wheezed and shuddered, hovering closer to the floor.

Its nose rotated towards the large, elliptical tunnel entrance.

"Um … Drew?" squeaked Tuck. "Aren't you kind of going … the wrong way?"

Instead of answering, Drew slammed the engines to full throttle, and braced himself.

The cruise missile flew low over the cratered surface of a cigar-shaped asteroid, slaloming between a pair of small hills, then curved up and away, streaking into a clearer patch of space.

The missile's seeker head spotted a large, rocky sphere. Right where it was supposed to be.

It made one last course correction.

It armed its warhead.

Time to impact, fifteen seconds … fourteen … thirteen …

CONCLUDED in Chapter Eight