Jack Blank and the End of Infinity (25 page)

Jazen trained a plasma cannon on a Shardwing fighter just over Zhi’s left shoulder and fired. “I’m guessing not very much.”

“Turnabout is fair play,” said Skerren, slicing wings off a few Rüstov gunships of his own. “The trouble is, Jack’s only one person.”

“Actually, he’s two,” one of the Treas said. “Revile’s still down there, remember?”

Skerren grunted. “Even the two of them can’t take out the whole Rüstov fleet at once. There’s too many ships.”

Jack pointed ahead as the
Apocalypse
came into view. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one ship that matters.”

Jack tried to sound confident, but Skerren’s point was well taken. Even with half the Rüstov fleet rendered useless, they seemed to have an endless amount of ships. The armada was far too vast for him to bring down in an hour, even with Revile’s help. That wasn’t how the Imagine Nation was going to win. For that, Jack needed to figure out how the Rüstov bonded with their host bodies. The war, and his own survival, depended on it. Jack used his powers to search out the roots of infection inside both himself and the Para-Soldiers attacking him. If Smart’s nullifier ran out before he unlocked the secrets of his Rüstov connection, it was over. Everything was over.

The
Apocalypse
’s escort of Shardwings fired on Jack and his friends as they approached. A volley of missiles closed in on Jack, and he morphed his arms into fusion cannons. Steam rose from the barrels as he fired on the missiles and the ships that had unleashed them. With every target that burst into flames, Jack felt a pang of guilt for the host body that died with each parasite. The more he investigated his bond with Khalix, the more he felt the presence of people who were still alive inside each Rüstov invader. Jack didn’t want to kill the enemy’s host bodies.
They were innocent victims. He wanted to save them along with everybody else. His own constant blowing up and regeneration caused Jack no physical pain, but the battle itself was starting to take a mental toll.

Skerren seemed to pick up on Jack’s feelings of remorse as they reached the Magus’s ship. “Harden your heart,” he told Jack. “There’ll be time to mourn the dead later. This is war. Like it or not, we kill our enemies to survive. It’s the only way.”

Jack scrunched up his lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “I know.” He was about to blast a new door into the
Apocalypse
’s side, but Skerren grabbed him by the shoulder and made sure he had his full attention.

“It only gets worse from this point on, Jack. You better be ready for this. Tell me now if you’re not.”

Jack looked at Skerren. “I don’t have a choice. I have to be. If there’s any chance I can get Stendeval back, I have to do it. If there’s any way to save Allegra . . .” Jack shook his head. “She backed me up from the beginning. She never once thought about herself. It was always me. She was always right there protecting
me
. I can’t leave her like that.”

Skerren nodded. “You better be ready for what’s necessary in case you can’t save her. In case you can’t save yourself. I don’t want to hear about what choices you have or don’t have. I want an answer. What are you prepared to do?”

Jack took a breath. Everything he’d learned since he came to the Imagine Nation flashed before his eyes in an instant. He used to think a hero was a man in a cape who fought bad guys in a comic book and always won. Now he knew better. A hero was someone who tried to make a difference, even when everyone else thought all hope was lost. Being a hero meant putting the needs of others before your own. Being a hero meant sacrifice.

What am I prepared to do?

Jack raised a fist toward the hull of the Rüstov emperor’s flagship. “Whatever it takes.”

23

The Hero’s Journey

The second Jack blasted his way into the
Apocalypse
, enemy laserfire blasted back out. Once again, he took point. Jack charged ahead and raced down a corridor, crashing into Rüstov Para-Soldiers as he went. He left a trail of broken bodies in his wake and cut a path for his friends to follow. The Magus was on board. Jack could feel his presence. He motioned to his friends. “Come on.”

The ship’s hallways were dark, with only a sporadic placement of bare bulbs to light the way. Jack led the others into a massive hangar bay filled with starfighters and other
Rüstov aircraft. Bright fluorescent lights switched on as they entered. When Jack’s eyes adjusted, he saw a legion of Para-Soldiers lining the walls. There were hundreds of them inside the hangar, but one stood out from all the others.

“Is that Roka?” Jazen asked, pointing up at a figure on a balcony.

Jack pushed Jazen’s arm down. “Not right now, it’s not.”

Glave waved a hand and turned to exit the room. “Kill them.”

“Go! Find cover!” Jack yelled as he flew up into the air, shooting at the Rüstov before they had a chance to follow Glave’s orders. The rotating barrels of his plasma cannons spun like wheels as he unloaded on the Para-Soldiers and drew their fire. Jack jammed as many Rüstov weapons as he could while his friends took shelter behind a group of Shardwings.

“They’ve got us surrounded!” Zhi shouted.

Skerren scraped his swords together. “That’s their problem.” He shot out at the Rüstov like a boulder fired from a Varagog catapult. Skerren’s arms whirled like windmills as he sliced away at the horde of Para-Soldiers. Jazen, Zhi,
Lorem, and Trea watched in wonder as he attacked without fear or hesitation.

Jazen pulled a pair of blasters out from his shoulder holsters. “Kid’s got a point. These punks surrounded the wrong people.” He reached over the top of the Shardwing and fired on a ship that was parked across the room. His shots pierced the ship’s fuel tank, and the resulting explosion took out at least ten Para-Soldiers. He targeted more ships as Zhi, Lorem, and Trea ran out into the fray and took on the Rüstov directly. Jack watched them go as the Rüstov knocked him out of the sky. Their bullets had absolutely shredded his body.

Pieces of Jack scattered across the hangar as he fell. He just grunted and put himself back together. As his arms and legs rebuilt themselves, a Para-Soldier moved in to finish him off. Jack hit it with a faceful of lasers before it got close enough to do any damage. As soon as Jack was back in one piece, he sprang to his feet and charged into a Rüstov platoon. They went down like bowling pins. Another squad of Para-Soldiers shot him in the back, but he took it in stride and spun around to tag them with a laser blast of his own. This one he fired out of the power
core in his chest. A thick beam of red energy poured out of Jack like a jet stream of water gushing forth from an open fire hydrant. The blast burned clean through the squad of Rüstov troops, taking them all out with a single shot.

Jack ripped machine parts off the nearest Shardwing and shoved them into his body wherever he was damaged. He didn’t wait until he was healed to find a new target. He didn’t have time. A swarm of Para-Soldiers had piled on Jazen and was trying to tear him apart. Jack quickly pulled two of them off and tossed them into the air. Skerren cut them in half before they landed. Jazen threw off his other attackers and emptied his blasters into them. Before Jazen could even blink, a fresh unit of Para-Soldiers rushed him from behind, hitting him like a freight train. Jack ran after him, but a new group of Para-Soldiers blocked his path. He took aim at them with his plasma guns, but they all jumped out of the way as their comrades rolled in with a large cannon. A plume of smoke shot out of the barrel as the Rüstov fired on Jack. He tried to use his powers on the missile they had shot at him, but nothing happened. It wasn’t until it hit him in the chest that he realized it was a cannonball.

Jack went flying back into the wall. He hit it hard and
belly flopped down onto the ground, landing right next to a wounded Para-Soldier. It was creeping up on Lorem Ipsum, no doubt looking to trade up to a new host. Jack grabbed it by the shoulder and hijacked the techno-organic armaments that covered its host body, using them to repair his own. The stripped-down Para-Soldier fell in front of Lorem like a toothless tiger. She nodded at Jack and gave him a little salute. Jack returned the gesture and went right back to shooting Para-Soldiers. Lorem did the same, going back to flipping around and fighting Rüstov invaders hand to hand. Her “gibberish touch” powers weren’t much help in this battle, but she was still as agile and deadly as any hero Jack had ever seen. Zhi, who had learned karate at the feet of his mentor, Chi, was just as dangerous. His fists broke Rüstov bones like they were wooden boards in a dojo, and his roundhouse kicks sent Para-Soldiers flying through the air. Trea’s three selves worked together with coordinated attack moves that the Rüstov couldn’t counter, and Jazen kept going no matter what the Rüstov threw at him. Jack and his friends were more than a match for the Magus’s foot soldiers, but they were still outnumbered twenty to one.

“This is taking too long,” Jack said to himself. At this rate,
Smart’s nullifier would burn out long before he reached the Magus, and he still didn’t know how to separate a Rüstov parasite from its host body. He had to speed things up.

Jack used his powers to arm all the weapons at his disposal—every gun and missile on every aircraft in the hangar. He set his sights on the field of Rüstov soldiers fighting his friends and unleashed an unbroken string of rapid-fire shots. His connection with each ship’s precision targeting system ensured he hit only the Rüstov. The Para-Soldiers all dropped to the ground and the room got very still. Zhi, Jazen, Lorem, and Trea looked around with unexpected relief. Skerren was all business. He pulled a sword from a Para-Soldier’s chest and nodded to an open door on the far side of the hangar. Jack nodded back and ran through it.

The next group of Rüstov soldiers Jack and his friends encountered put up less of a fight. They were Rüstov nobles and clearly weren’t expecting an assault while on board the
Apocalypse
. Jack and the others hit them hard and fast. They went down easily, but the battle was hard to stomach. The nobles had all taken fresh hosts. They didn’t look like robot-zombies; they looked like people.
Their appearance made dealing with them so much more difficult, but Jack told himself he had no choice.
Until I have another way to fight them, this is it,
he thought. When it was over, Jack knelt down by the fallen nobles to try and learn something from their bodies. He had very little experience dealing with the Rüstov’s upper class. He hoped they could tell him something that the withered Left-Behinds he was used to dealing with could not.

Using his powers, Jack reached out to the few mechanical parts he could find in the dying host bodies all around him. There wasn’t much for him to work with. So far, the virus had only bonded with each host’s nervous system enough for the parasite’s consciousness to take over.

“What’s the verdict?” Jazen asked. He didn’t have to get any more specific than that. Jack knew what he was asking. Was he going to be able to unhook the parasites from their hosts? Was he going to be able to save Stendeval, Allegra, Roka . . . everybody?

Jack shook his head. “Jury’s still out.”

“Jury’s still out?” Skerren repeated.

Jack reached out to every dying Rüstov infection in the room. He could see pieces of the puzzle, but he couldn’t
put it all together yet. “I’m working on it. I just can’t figure out where the Rüstov ends and the person begins. The connection’s too complex for me to unravel in my head. I can’t see it.”

“I don’t understand,” Trea said. “The nullifier’s still blocking Khalix. You’re using your powers on Rüstov technology now. Shouldn’t you be able to see it?”

Jack touched his power core. “I can’t even see it inside myself. I thought I’d be able to, once I let this happen to me, but . . .”

“What’s stopping you?” Skerren asked.

Jack frowned. “Khalix is. Whatever influence he has that isn’t being blocked by the nullifier is hiding this from me. It’s just like with Revile.”

“Not
just
like Revile, right, Jack?” Jazen asked.

Jack didn’t answer.

“Jack?” Jazen said again.

Zhi tapped Jack’s shoulder. “C’mon, Jack. Say something.”

Jack stood up. “The clock is ticking. Let’s move.”

As Jack and his friends pressed on, they heard the sound of rockets launching and explosions going off outside the
ship. “I wonder how it’s going out there,” Trea said.

Jack didn’t have to wonder. That was the other reason he wanted Revile to stay behind. His future self was mostly machine, just like him. Jack reached out with his powers and looked through Revile’s eyes to see how the war was going down on the ground. At the moment, Revile was in Karateka.

Jack saw Chi and his arch nemesis, the ShadowClan shogun, fighting back to back against a throng of Para-Soldiers. The master of the ZenClan ninjas and the lord of the Ronin assassins were working together. Jack could not envision any other scenario in which this could have taken place. Glowing blue lights emanated from Chi’s fists as he hacked away at the Rüstov with his bare hands and threw fireballs into them. Dark black energy flowed from the wicked shogun’s hands as he did the same. He swung out a flattened palm, and black light trailed from his fingertips. Revile joined the Ronin assassins and ZenClan ninjas as they overtook the Para-Soldiers, and Jack broke contact. He turned his attention back to the task at hand. He turned his attention inward. As he and his friends fought their way through the ship, he kept trying to solve
the riddle of his connection with Khalix. So far, he had come up with nothing. It was hard to concentrate amid all the chaos and fire.

Jack smashed open a set of iron doors and found another small army of Para-Soldier shock troops waiting behind it. He fired two shots from his fusion cannons at them and followed that up with a six-pack of missiles, each one no bigger than a Magic Marker. Bright orange streaks of fire screamed across the sky as the minirockets took out the Rüstov’s front line. Jack winced as they exploded. More lives lost . . . but what choice did he have?