don't know. I'm eager to see. Another Moonchild was too much to hope for. Fortuitous enough that they had access to an ace with a combination of powers that gave them some small chance of success.
"Doctor?" The voice rolled around to them like liquid amber, deep and rich. Tachyon walked forward.
The visual impact stopped him in his tracks. Ace as Greek god: tall, elaborately muscled, a jaw like a bridge abutment, a clear green gaze, a nimbus of curly blond hair, all wrapped in a skintight yellow suit with a sunburst blazing on the chest. "I," the vision said, "am Starshine."
"The honor is entirely mine," Tach said reflexively. "Quite correct. You are a militarist, representative of a decadent and repressive civilization. I am about to attempt to avert a horror brought upon my world by your unbridled technology, while you engage in combat with another faction of the same technocratic gang that afflicted Earth with your satanic virus in the first place. Under the circumstances I find it difficult to wish you success, Doctor. Nonetheless, I do so." Tachyon's voice seemed to have vanished, and Baby was making little staticky phosphene pops in his head. "I'm so grateful," he managed at last.
"Yes." Starshine stroked his heroic jaw. "Perhaps I shall compose a poem, about the moral dilemma I face-"
"Hadn't you better go face the asteroid first?" Tach almost screamed.
Starshine scowled like Zeus caught by Hera, but he said, "I suppose so."
The lock dilated. "Farewell," Tach said. "Thank you." He stepped through.
As the outer lock cycled open, Baby transmitted the view from outside very square centimeter of her skin was photosensitive at need-to Tach's mind. Starshine floated out into vacuum, turned his face into the full glare of the sun, now more or less astern, and appeared to take a deep breath. Then he pushed off from the ship, arms and body straightened to a line, and he became a single brilliant yellow beam bisecting eternal night.
"Photon transformation," Tach said, impressed. "Like the tachyon transformation of our ghostdrive, but allowing only lightspeed. Incredible." For a moment he felt almost proud of the wild card.
He shook the sensation off. "I'm going to find it hard," he remarked, "to like that one."
He's sure a prick. I liked the Captain ever so much better.. Tis, they're coming.
Floating, timeless. Pure release, nonexistence/coexistence with all the universe. The final consummation: satori in a laser beam.
But duration must be. Resolution, downward to ego. To matter.
The asteroid awaited. An unlovely lumpish mass of slag, seeming to fall toward Starshine, though his line of sight ran perpendicular to its path.
He rubbed his jaw and frowned. He had a lot more to say to that alien doctor, about the evil his kind had brought the world, about his own culpability in luring that pathetic burnout Trips into wild dangers. But it would have to wait; time passed.
He wondered how much time he had. From the memories he shared with Mark and the rest, he knew the drug lasted an hour. He hoped he could do what had to be done in that time.
He held out a hand. A beam of light leapt from it to Tezcatlipoca's pockmarked surface, dazzling white-hot. A circle of rock raced the spectrum and boiled from the surface in a glowing jet.
He was fabulously strong. But all his strength would not divert the evil mass. Nor did he have the power to destroy the rock. What he could do was use his sunbeam to heat a spot on its flank, so that the stuff of the asteroid flared away like a rocket exhaust at right angles to its orbit. Even now, a million miles from Earth, a tiny deflection would make all the difference.
But even the tiniest deviation in the asteroid's course would require fantastic amounts of energy. And an unknown amount of time.
By increments Starshine increased his output. He felt alive, and huge, and full of power; he could not fail, here before the holy Sun's naked eye, with her energy to sustain him.
At stake was a planet, his planet, Earth, green and gravid.
And, incidentally, his own life, and that of Mark Meadows and the other entities whose existence was somehow locked in his.
At detection's instant Tach knew Hellcat's deadliest weapon was out. The coherent tachyns of her ghost lance would have strewn Baby's component atoms-and his-across a dozen dimensions in an attosecond if it still functioned, and with Baby's ghostdrive gland had also gone her tachyon sense, so they would have had no warning.