"I got here as soon as I could," the cryptographer said above the din of the crowd. "What's the situation?"
"Not too good," an FBI agent replied. "He looks like he's caught in some kind of tractor beam, or something, that keeps him from moving."
"I thought those things were only around in space operas," the cryptographer mumbled to himself as he pulled a 12-centimeter disk from his car. He then took a piece of yellow note paper out of his back pocket.
"What is THAT?" wondered the FBI man.
"That," the cryptographer replied, opening the piece of paper, "Is the access code to this thing." He began punching buttons on the grid of the disk according to the paper's specifications. "I finally figured out how this energy gun works. Only problem is that if it hasn't been used for more than about 38 hours, or if it changes owners, the access code has to be re-entered."
He tapped the last key with a gallant finger. "There. The energy bolt generator is now armed and operable."
'I can't move' was the pressing thought running through Jeff's mind. Though he pulled with his every muscle, he couldn't unfix himself. Suddenly, he forgot to strain when he saw what was turning in his direction. A huge object, shaped like a searchlight and three times as big as the thing which immobilized him, rotated until he was looking straight into it. Jeff tried to swallow, but even that was nearly impossible against the petrifying beam he was locked in.
He knew what would happen next, and his courage left him. Energies would generate at the thing's focus, bounce off the parabolic dish, and leap right at him with hundreds of times the power of the ship's main-battery turrets. His armor would cave in, and his body would instantly fry. Then elusive death would surround his form, and spread to the whole human race. And none of that would have happened had he not found the fallen alien that fateful night a month ago.
The emperor smirked in his own alien way. At last, the armored warrior — or at least his human counterpart — would be destroyed beyond any doubt, and the energy field generator would probably go with him. He looked casually at his private compu-display to check on how well the charging process was going; the display registered a time equivalent to ten seconds before the Devastator would be fully charged and ready to fire. He began to count down with the display, waiting in anticipation for the moment when he would shout, "Fire!"
The cryptologist lowered his binoculars, and made his decision. He had to do something to help the man in yellow, even if it was only distracting the empire for a few seconds. Determinedly, he raised the disk with its flat side facing the bottom of the ship, aimed for the spotlight that was holding Tracer still, and put his thumb over the right-hand button on the disk's top. "This one's for you, Jeff Boeing," he said to himself, and pressed the button.
A white-hot ball of energy sprang from the front of the disk and thundered into the craft's underside. He'd missed the green beam generator by only meters.
"What!?!" yelled the emperor when the report reached him a second later. "Who's doing this? Who has a homeworld energy gun?"
Each second the disk fired another bolt, and each time the shots impacted nearer and nearer to the suspension-beam projector. Finally, on the fifth hit, the bolt hit its mark, and the green projector flew apart in a shower of sparks. Tracer seized the opportunity, shot straight up, and cheered, "I'm free!"
He looked down to where his salvation had originated. There was the unmistakable form of the cryptographer wielding the disk like a weapon he'd known about for years. Jeff flipped his thumb up on his left fist in a modern salute.
"Nooooooo!" screamed the agonized emperor. "Get the Devastator on whoever did that! Wipe out every trace of that . . . primitive's . . . existence!"
The searchlight-shaped Devastator traversed to face its new target, still fully charged and ready to fire. The cryptographer, now panicking, tried to take aim at the weapon, but was cut short. A meter-and-a-half wide shaft of blinding blue light bridged the gap between the Devastator and the ground, enveloping the cryptographer and the FBI agent standing next to him in an opaque cloak of energy.
For three endless seconds, Jeff stared open-mouthed at the scene below; then when the Devastator shut off, he needed only a fraction of an instant to see the destruction before he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth in anguish. Nothing remained within the blue shaft's area of effect, and the street's asphault was melted to a depth of half a meter and glowing red-hot.
Tracer maintained his rationality through his confused rage, but just barely. He hardly knew the cryptographer, yet he'd just sacrificed his own life for him. His belly cringed in emotional pain. Seething, he zoomed up to the searchlight that had killed the cryptographer, and punched it with not only the full energy of his armor field, but with every dram of strength in both his fists as well. In a violent flash of yellow, the Devastator turned to dust.
And when that was done, he began punching out the armor around the Devastator's housing, making wide dents in the ship's surface. The thought of killing another man to avenge the death of someone he knew would have made him sick to the solar plexis, but he could feel no mercy for these sub-living, spiteful imperial aliens.
But inside the motionless, battle-damaged craft, the emperor felt the same way about Tracer.
"In this thick nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere our main batteries can't even penetrate his armor. Our Devastator and our tractor beam are destroyed. There must be some way we can stop him!"
"Well," suggested the second-in-command, "There's always the slicers, sir."
"Which are the latest and most effective anti-armored-warrior weapons we have! We use them in desperate situations when surrounded by armored warriors. Against one? Never!"
His compu-display lit up with the updated damage report. The numbers didn't look good.
"Oh, all right," the emperor acquiesced. "Switch on the two forward slicer beams. Take him out with whichever."
Several nods came from the high-ranking weapons officers in the emperor's dimly lit chamber. The computer lights against the dark walls hid their features, but the nods were easily seen.
"Ah," reminisced the emperor, "For the battles when we gunned them down with our main batteries. A few blasts in the right places, and their armor generators would fall — or they would. Now, we have to use the slicer beams against a single, agile local in a later model of armor. I hope the empire won't look down on this, considering how much I've botched it already."
Tracer twisted out of the Devastator's housing in a small arc, his rage relieved. Now, he could plot how to destroy the flagship. Yet while one part of his mind plotted, another part was trying to warn him that something was wrong. The ship's main battery had been firing at him constantly during the battle, but now the guns had stopped, and the ship had taken on a deadly silence.
Tracer caught a motion on the ship's surface, and jumped to the left just in time to avoid a white plane of energy aimed at him. Another similar blast followed the first, coming from the far side of the ship; Tracer had to curl clockwise around this one to avoid it.
It was only out of arrogance and overconfidence that he made his next move. Believing his armor to be invincible against an attack such as a plane of energy, he came about and flew head-long toward the source of the beam. As he approached, the source resolved into a long rectangular box with a flat nozzle on the front, housed in a setting similar to the main turrets'. Just as he came up to deliver the disabling blow, the weapon fired again, and its beam intersected his left side before he could evade it.
He fell from the air, vainly trying to put his hand on his injured waist through two layers of energy-armor. Slowly, he managed to straighten out and come to a hovering stop, his will for survival outweighing the pain in his side. For the first time ever, he was genuinely wounded while in his Tracer armor. He looked up to the adamant monolith once more, seeing its new weapon in a new light.
The weapon itself wasn't all that powerful. It was deadly because it was designed specifically to cut through an armored warrior's energy field. It simply matched the armor's energy, the armor ignored it, and the beam went right on through to injure Tracer's left side.
He scanned the craft with a keen eye, looking for more possible origin points for the armor-penetrating weapons. He knew there were at least two, but from this distance he couldn't discern any more. All he could see was a myriad of unremarkable housings, the place where the Devastator and tractor beam used to be, the first dent he had made when he rammed into the ship, and the dim blue-white glow of the engines.
The . . . engines? Of course! Why hadn't it occurred to him sooner? The engines were the sole places on the craft that couldn't be covered with indestructable armor. If he could fly into the ship through the engines . . . and maybe cause them to explode . . .
He made up his mind. He looked over at the blue-white glow that was his target, and said to himself, "Energy armor, I hope you can hold out against what I'm gonna put you through."
He sped off.
A single slicer beam tried to hit him, but Tracer evaded it skillfully.
"There are rumors of mutiny, sir," the emperor's first officer had been saying. "The crew doesn't like the idea of us committing genocide for no reason."
The emperor was preoccupied with something much more pressing. "He's going for the engines!" he shouted. He bit the fourth finger of his fifth hand for a fraction of a second, then said, "That's just where we can get him. Our rear slicer has twice the power of either of our forward ones. Weapons officer, fire the rear slicer beam!"
"Yes sir!" replied the weapons officer at his computer terminal. He leaned over the input board, examined the display above it, and was about to enter the command to fire when he was knocked out by a makeshift club.
"No!" came the lower-pitched shout from the female mutineer who'd hit him. She and several others had breached the bridge. "You're not going to kill someone who was never your enemy in the first place! You knew that he wasn't a homeworlder, and that these people couldn't learn anything of military importance from a dead alien, but you still attacked them! We're not going to let you stop him!"
"Are you suicidal?!" the second-in-command bellowed as he grabbed her and threw her away from the weapons terminal. Ignoring the other mutineers, he pulled the unconscious weapons officer from the terminal.
Panicking as he saw the armored form close in on the engines and leave the rear slicer's zone of control, he typed in the aiming command with shaking tendrils. Without hesitation, he entered the well-remembered command to fire the weapon, but by then the delay had become too great. There was nothing to stop Tracer from reaching the engines now.
Straining to see through the electric-blue glare, his senses gripped by the stench of ozone, Tracer could just make out the three huge nozzles that directed the ship's ion thrust. Each was the same size and circular. He picked the center engine to enter, since that would probably have the most devastating effect on the whole ship.
He plunged into the ionic inferno.
The flowing patterns of light were gone from his armor now, replaced by hundreds of spark-flashes that represented the stress the armor was under from all sides. Jeff was beginning to worry that his armor wouldn't hold the load, but he clung to his faith in the aliens who'd built the box he wore on his chest. But the energies outside were increasing. . . .
The sea of bystanders gasped as they cleared the area beneath the spacecraft. Hope for Tracer's survival was in the back of their minds, but more prominent now was the fear of failure. If this trick didn't work, humanity most likely would be doomed.
Agonizing seconds passed, and then the once-motionless ship started to shake. Whatever Tracer was doing in there, it was working. The glow of the engines rapidly grew dimmer as tiny, imperceptible faults began to emerge in the armor plating.
The lethal vehicle heaved and erupted, throwing hundreds of tonnes of scrap metal outward with its last breath. The people below cowered from the rain of space ship parts, most of which glowed an incandescent red.
As the explosion subsided, the smoke and the light lingered, along with everyone's last remaining fear. Was this finally Tracer's last battle? Could his energy armor deflect the full power of the explosion?
But as the scene resolved, the outcome was plain for anyone to see. There was no mistaking the yellow, humanoid form descending from where the ship used to be with his fists raised in triumph. Since he caused the explosion, he had been at its very center — the eye of the storm. What little power had confronted him, his armor had absorbed. He had survived.
The crowd cheered as loudly as before, only now it was the whole world that was cheering and not just Las Vegas. But once again, he told himself, they were cheering for Tracer, with Jeff Boeing left completely out of the picture. That didn't seem to matter as much right now, though.
He started to worry about the empire again, but only for an instant. Most likely, they realized their error in attacking the human race. And even more likely, there late emperor was slightly insane. The emperor must have known that the armored warrior they were fighting was a human, yet the attack on humanity continued. The empire wouldn't be back for a long time, and maybe by then it would have disbanded.
As he descended to visible and audible range, he saw a general of the Air Force arrive and leave his staff car. The general meant to congratulate him, but Tracer had another thing in mind. He flew up to the general and his escorting lieutennant, and said, "Sorry I have to save the world and run, but I have to go find a sunset to fly off into."
And with that, he leisurely departed.
"There goes a fine American," the general said, saluting him.
But Tracer heard that remark, even over the din of cheers. He doubled back and ground to a halt less than a meter from the general.
"I am not your 'Fine American.' I am a living being first, above any nationality. This country is a good one — the best in the world, in fact — but it's far from perfect. Or else . . . why would I be here?"
Once more, the glowing yellow figure turned and left. In the background, he heard the general finally say what he wanted him to: "There goes a fine human being."
He was content with that reply, and even happier about his last statement, simply because that declaration of humanity was Jeff Boeing, all the way.