Metron did not take Macro’s pronouncement well. “NO!” he shouted. “It can’t be true! You wouldn’t have saved me just now had you lost all hope!”
A note of bitter irony crept into Macro’s ghost-voice. “Ah. That. Bad habit of mine. Someone’s in danger, I try to save him. Genetic, perhaps, though the instinct certainly seems to have died out in my progenitors. Hope, you say? No, you can perish that thought, Metron.”
“There must be something—”
Macro shook his phantom head. “No. nothing. In fact, we’ll actually die quicker here, in the belly of the beast. But less painfully, perhaps; here we can just let ourselves go, be swept up in the warring forces, rather than experience the intense instant of painful annihilation that would be our fate without...” As if to illustrate his words, Macro faded away even more.
Why he did what he did next, Metron could not have said. Desperation to redeem himself in some small way, perhaps, or perhaps just desperation to survive. But he lunged at his colleague’s dying energy form, and he caught it. “Come back here!” he snarled savagely. “I won’t let you give up! You’re new here—you don’t know all the angles! We may have failed, but there’s still Cyd! She’s pulled Peripheral out of worse situations than this—she’s always got another plan!”
Macro’s form strengthened a bit, but his attitude remained the same. “Believe me,” he said, “there’s nothing that could be worse than this. We’re losing time, Metron. All that is left for us is to choose the manner of our dying. Would you lose us even that choice?”
“Listen to me! If there’s even the slightest chance Cyd can pull us out of this, you owe it to her to live! It’s standard practice to go to ground during a breakthrough! So don’t surrender! Get us out of here! Keep us going till there’s no way to keep going!”
Macro sighed. “Go down fighting, eh? Well, that’s certainly one choice. Not that it will do any good. You don’t know what we’re fac—”
“BY THE SOURCERESS! DO IT, DAMN IT!”
Macro responded with a curt nod. And, with a thought, catapulted them both out of the wall.
They were physical again, but the signs of failure were now everywhere, and unmistakable. Arcs of electricity lanced from point to point along the wall, and whole regions were blackened and dead, on fire, or melting down. High up, the whole surface was flowing, cascading down on them.
“Mother Box!” Metron cried, glancing toward the cube embedded in his costume’s shoulder. “You’re alive!”
“Huh!” said Macro. “It seems we’re not the only ones I brought back out of the wall—say!”
“What?”
Macro shrugged. “Just a memory of a recent and rather unpleasant experience involving a similar small and miraculous device. But if you really want to stay alive as long as possible—”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“So you did.” He looked up. “The meltdown is accelerating. Do me the favor of ripping that thing off and throwing it as far as you can from the wall, will you?”
“Why—?”
“Just do it. And prepare to be etherealized again.”
There was no time to argue. Over Mother Box’s jangling objections, he did as Macro bade him. He flung the box arcing away from the wall. And an instant later there was nothing left of him, or of Macro, either.
Physically, anyway.
The box ploughed into the floor and was sent spinning back up from the impact; it came down again, took a shorter hop, and came to rest, pinging softly.
Meanwhile, back where its master had stood mere instants before, the cataract of molten, cascading metal sizzled against the floor. And the Techno-Wall ... imploded, crumbling into ruin as, beyond, the Portlock separating Peripheral from the hordes of the Supers began to flare white hot.
The ground began to tremble.
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Thu Nov 24 02:42:37 2005
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