Ethan crouched in the dark and smelled the sour tang of his own sweat. There were not many things he could ever do that would make him sweat like this, or to make his muscles ache like they were being torn from his bones by hot, hard fingers. But, if there was ever a person that could figure out how to make him work that hard, how to make him hurt that badly, it was Athena.

  A dense, metal piston as big around as a basketball pressed down on his shoulder. Ethan's arms strained as his hands tried gripping the sides of it, tried pushing it up and off of him to relieve that pressure. He was crouched, his legs bent and straining under him, trying to stand and carry the incredible weight on his shoulders. He was perched in the center of a metal plate, just as dense and hard as the material of the piston. It wasn't steel. A steel plate would have buckled from this pressure long ago.

  "When you are out there in the field," came a voice in the dark, "you are part of a team. You are no longer an individual. Individuals do not complete their mission objectives. Only teams complete the objective. Individuals always fail."

  Ethan felt the sting of the salt of his sweat in his eyes when he opened them. He was looking into the face of a woman. The woman's short, compact figure was hidden beneath a long jacket. Her dark skin was exceptionally well-preserved for her age, but wrinkles were beginning to form at the corners of her eyes and on her brow, all the more noticeable as she frowned at the young man in front of her. Her expression was as hard as the piston that was crushing him, her eyes just as cold. Ethan knew she expected him to hold this eye contact, and so he did. He struggled to adjust the weight of the piston on his shoulders, to alter his grip on the smooth metal.

  The woman crouched until she was almost nose to nose with him. "You are an imperfect man, Ethan Beakerman. You are filled with flaws and shortcomings. If you rely on yourself to complete a mission, you will fail. People will die. Battles will be lost. It's a statistical certainty."

  A bead of sweat tickled its way down his tense, straining neck and onto his chest, where it pooled with others in the creases between lean muscle groups and in the hollows of his joints. The black curls on his head were plastered nearly flat with moisture. His breathing was heavy and hot and steady. He let out a long, hot breath and strained his legs and his arms, succeeding in raising the piston a mere three inches.

  "The world cannot afford for you to be imperfect, Ethan. The world demands perfection. This is why you are part of a team. The team will be strong where you are weak. The team will be smart when you are stupid. If you let it, if you let yourself be a part of it, to lead it, your team will be perfect. Do you understand me?"

  It was then that she must have given some signal, a small, almost imperceptible gesture. Ethan knew this because her final question was punctuated by the piston's weight steadily increasing until the three inches he'd gained were shortly lost. He groaned and tried lifting again, but his legs were refusing to obey his command.

  "Perfection, Ethan," commanded Athena. "You will work with your team, and you will achieve perfection in every way."

  There was an electronic chirp as speakers in the walls far above came to life. "Athena, please report to mission control. Urgency: yellow. Please report to mission control." Then the speakers died.

  Athena sighed and stood to her feet. "Cease exercise," she commanded. "Raise piston and begin shutdown of the Megaton."

  The lights slowly came to life until Ethan could see the controllers at the panels. The Megaton was a complex, sophisticated machine capable of generating more weight than any machine on Earth. It required a team of skilled technicians to operate it safely.

  The pressure on Ethan's shoulder began to ease, and soon he fell back on the cold metal deck and watched the piston raise into its holding position beyond his standing reach. He tried looking up again at his trainer, but Athena was already debriefing the technicians and making her way to the elevator that would take her to the levels above and the mission control room. She spared Ethan no approving look, no congratulations or words of encouragement. She simply called out over her shoulder, "Ethan, get cleaned up and ready for action. We're at yellow, so there's a chance we'll be leaving almost immediately."

  Ethan barely had time to acknowledge her command before she disappeared into the elevator. She'd left him gasping and sweating on the metal floor. The technicians paid him little mind, absorbed in their work of safely shutting down the machine as they were. Ethan was alone.

  He lay there until his lungs stopped heaving like he'd nearly drowned. He made his way to the upper levels of the Ready Room, where he watched from above as the rest of his team finished their own training regimen. A large section of the training area had been partitioned off and developed into a sort of maze of rooms, corridors, obstacles, and target dummies. The lights here were dimmed as well, but Ethan could just make out the movements of three people steadily moving methodically, automatic weapons raised and ready. Their infrared optics made them seem like man-sized insects, monstrous ants clearing room by room, corner by corner of the huge particleboard labyrinth.

  The electronically warbled voice of a loudspeaker announced the end of the exercise and urged the team below to prepare for deployment. Ethan could then make them out individually as they removed their headgear and navigate the maze to its exit. There was Levi Seraydarian, their pilot and field technician. There was Joshua McGuffin, the corpsman, and his twin sister Priscilla, with her fiery red hair and even hotter temper. She was a munitions expert. Ethan thought she was pretty, even if a little frightening, and thought he might ask her out later. Maybe this time she would say yes.

  These were the people he was meant to lead into the worst environments and situations imaginable. This was the team that Athena had promised would perfect him, transform him into a hero and a great leader. They were supposed to be as close as family. He should trust them as much as they trusted him, as he relied on them more than anyone else in the world.

  They also despised him as much as he did them.

  What do you know? he thought, We are like family.

  Ethan contemplated this as he left the Ready Room in search of his own private living quarters. As he wound through the compound's high-security interior, he realized that he didn't know if family members actually did despise one another. He didn't have much of one himself, and he only really had television for a comparison. All he knew about family dynamics, he learned from Will Smith and the Banks family, from the freakish Addams Family, the dysfunctional Simpsons, and the twisted, throne-obsessed Targaryens. Uncle Phil and Uncle Fester were the best male role models he had at the moment.

  Ethan waved dismissively at the security guards posted outside his private rooms. They were the most heavily armed, well-trained babysitters money could buy, and they were changed regularly, so Ethan never had a chance to become too chummy with any of them. The current models were named Flaherty and Binn. He waved to them, and they nodded back.

  "Hey, Ethan, remember we're at yellow," reminded Binn. "Athena wants you ready for deployment."

  Ethan nodded and rolled his eyes. "Well tell mother I'll be up as soon as I've washed my hands."

  The guards shook their heads and shrugged away his impudence. They didn't spare him another glance as he disappeared into his rooms, holding his hands up as if he were trying to avoid touching anything that might soil them.

  Once inside, he kicked off his shoes and slumped onto a couch that faced a massive TV. It was one of the newer models, with the holographic display that jumped up to three feet off the surface of the screen. The whole room was assorted piles of the latest video games, display cases of action figures, and movie and game prop replicas hanging on the walls. It was a boy's best dream, and a mother's worst nightmare.

  Ethan stretched himself out on the couch and looked around the room, and then down at himself. What did Athena think he needed to get ready for? What kind of preparation did she think he needed? He wasn't like the others. They geared up before going into battle. His teammates would roll out with weaponry, body armor, and strength-enhancing combat frames. But what did he need? Virtually nothing more than pants and a radio headset. He was the only one of them that practically went naked into battle. His job was to march into danger and destruction armed with nothing more than communications gear and a smile.

  "Somewhere out there," he sighed into the empty room, "there's some lucky jerk making minimum wage at Taco Bell."

  Taco Bell employees didn't have to live in the restaurant, he mused. They could go home after a measly eight-hour workday and hang out with friends. Have dinner with family. Go on a date.

  Somehow, Ethan's hand had drifted to the lamp stand beside the couch. His fingers fumbled a drawer open, shaking the table and causing a toy robot, a game controller, and an empty chip bag to go tumbling to the carpet. They closed around something inside and held it up to his unfocused eyes.

  It was a folded photograph, and on it was a young man and woman. The creases in the photo converged on the face of an infant in their arms, a hairless, plump little thing with pale eyes. Ethan stared at the photo for a long time, and as he did, he remembered something he did ten years before.

  **********

  10 Years ago...

  He was running as quietly as he could beneath dark trees. He could hear them somewhere behind him. They weren't far away, and they were very, very good at what they did. They would have the best thermal imaging equipment—beyond next-gen technology—made specially to find him in the dark. If they couldn't see him now, they would soon.

  The boy was not so well equipped as they. He wore nearly all black. His jeans were not so much black as they were just a very dark blue, and his tee shirt had a big, stylized image of Divinity on it, but he'd turned it inside out to hide the bright colors. His boots and his bag were black and tactical, at least. The bag bounced and clanked in the dark. The can of Pringles chips inside it had been a bad choice. He'd thought the extra clothes he'd packed around it would muffle the sound of his snacks, but he'd been wrong. All his careful preparation and color choices, it seemed, were not enough to hide him from the men who hunted him.

  But up ahead, there was a glint of moonlight on metal. He could barely make out the perimeter fence. If he could make it over that, he might be able to lose them in the city. The fence might even slow them down. He ran hard, sliding to a stop at the foot of the fence. If he simply tore it loose, the others could simply follow him. Instead, he grabbed the chain link near its base where the metal disappeared into the dead leaves and pulled it upward. A gap appeared at the base, and he slipped through, momentarily getting caught on the twisted points on the bottom. He frantically tore his bag loose of it, and the fence sprang back down to the forest floor.

  He turned away from it and sprinted, sure he could hear the steps of the men behind him. But he knew for a fact that they wouldn't be able to simply pull the fence up like he did. They would have to climb it, cut it, or go around, and by then he could disappear into the woods beyond, or maybe even reach a road and hitch a ride with someone.

  He was just beginning to come up with a believable story to tell anyone who might give him a lift when he was suddenly blinded by headlights. Four vehicles, Dark SUVs with silent engines, appeared as he reached the edge of a road. They surrounded him, two of them going off road and behind him to cut off his escape.

  The boy paused, his eyes squinting against the pain of those bright lights. He knew he couldn't wait for his eyes to adjust. By then they would have him. And so he leaped forward, high enough to easily clear the tops of the vehicles. He wasn't even sure which direction he was pointed anymore. For all he knew, he was leaping back towards the fence, but he had to take that risk.

  But it was a bad gamble, as it turned out. His trajectory carried him over the hood of one of the silent vehicles and right onto the head and shoulders of a man who'd just emerged from it. The two of them collided, and the boy twisted in mid-air and landed hard on the pavement. He was unharmed and unhurt. The man he'd collided with, however, crumpled like a paper cup and lay moaning on the ground.

  "Ah, jeez, Ethan! You got to be careful, kid!" shouted another man emerging from one of the other vehicles.

  The boy rolled back to his feet, but he didn't run. His eyes were locked on the man who lay on the ground, the one he'd jumped into. The man was shaking with pain and grumbled, "I think the kid broke my collar bone!"

  The boy knew that voice. "AJ? Oh man, I'm sorry," he said. His voice was high with distress. "I didn't mean to..."

  The man who had spoken before lifted a radio to his mouth. "Moose, this is Hunter. We found the package. AJ is down, so send a medic."

  The boy had his hands in his black hair pulling at fistfuls of his curls. He was trying to apologize more to the man on the ground, but his voice had suddenly become shaky, as though he were on the verge of tears.

  A fifth vehicle appeared in the night, and the man who emerged wore a long coat and a frown on his stubbled chin. He narrowed his slanted eyes at the boy. If the boy looked distraught before this man appeared, he appeared totally and utterly defeated now.

  "What are you doing out here, Ethan?" the man scolded.

  Ethan dropped his hands to his sides, walked to the nearest vehicle—the one he'd leapt over—and dropped his forehead onto the black hood with a metallic thump. "I'm sorry," he said in the quiet voice of a penitent child.

  The man in the coat looked around him at his men, two of whom were kneeling beside their injured colleague and attempting to treat him. "You all can head back to The Farm. I'll take young Ethan back myself."

  The men nodded. Some of them returned to their vehicles, while others continued to treat their friend. The man in the coat began to walk along the road that ran beside the perimeter fence. Ethan raised his head from where it rested on the vehicle, wiped his dripping nose on the sleeve of his shirt, and followed.

  The walked side by side in silence for a while. Ethan's eyes were glued to his boots, and it took a long time for him to finally speak up in a small voice.

  "I've never been outside the fence before."

  Gregory Clawson, the man in the long coat, looked down at Ethan. "You have, but you were so young you don't remember."

  They walked in silence a while longer. The road was narrow and dark with no lights. The two of them were invisible beneath the dark trees to any human eyes that might watch them.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  "Why can't I go outside?" the boy asked. "Why can't I ever leave The Farm?"

  "What's out there that you want to find so badly?"

  The boy shrugged and said nothing. He walked in silence for a few moments, and then he reached into his pocket. He handed it to Clawson, who took it from him and unfolded it. Even in the dark, he could see it was a picture. He could make out the faintest shapes of a man and a woman, both of them huddled together around something in the woman's arms. He couldn't quite see it, but he was sure it was a baby. Clawson's frown deepened.

  "I think I understand," he said. "You're looking for family."

  The boy shrugged, perhaps out of shame, and gave the faintest nod.

  Clawson folded the picture and moved to put it in his own pocket, but then he thought better of it. Instead, he handed it back to the boy, who took it and stared at it without unfolding it.

  "Kids are supposed to grow up in families, right?" he asked.

  There was silence for a moment, and then Clawson answered, "Yes. They are."

  "But not me," he said. It wasn't a question. He already knew the answer.

  Clawson stopped walking, the sudden cadence of his grinding footsteps on the road filling the space between them with cold, uncomfortable silence.

  "It's true," he said, "that you must go without many things other children enjoy or even need. It's not because you don't need them. There are a lot of things you need that I will never be able to give you, Ethan. And for that, I am sorry. Truly, I am. You must bear burdens that no child will ever have to bear. But that's one of the things that makes someone a hero, isn't it? Selfless duty requires you to sacrifice your own emotional and spiritual needs so you can serve others."

  The boy looked up at Clawson in the darkness. For the briefest moment, he wanted to make eye contact with him. He wanted that connection between the two of them, even if it was only through a look, but Clawson wasn't looking at him. He seemed to be looking at something far away, or perhaps at something invisible in the forest, like some phantom that Ethan couldn't see.

  Ethan gave up trying to meet his gaze, and instead started to walk the road again, the weight of a whole world of people on his shoulders, nameless, faceless people he'd never met, all of whom he was expected to serve, to save.

  "But why me?" asked Ethan.

  "Because there's no one else that could do it. In the whole, wide world, there is only you."

  Their stroll had led them near the front gates of the perimeter fence. There were squat, unlovely buildings on either side of the road that led in and out of the base, and a small guard hut stood in the middle of the road amid a twisting path of concrete barriers. Armed guards stood at attention as Clawson and Ethan approached, one of them heeling a black German Shepherd. None saluted, but the difference to Clawson's authority was no less apparent.

  The faint sound of sirens and the flickering glow of emergency lights carried over the dark trees behind Clawson. Both he and the boy turned and stared out in their direction.

  "What's all that?" Demanded Clawson, quickly shifting his gaze to the boy. He was wondering if the excitement caused by Ethan that night had somehow attracted the attention of local authorities.

  It was one of the guards who answered. "There was a car accident on Airport Road," he said, gesturing with the butt of the shotgun in his hands towards the lights. "Nothing to do with us."

  Clawson immediately relaxed. He shrugged and said, "That's a dangerous road at night."

  Both he and the boy passed the guard station and ambled up the winding road into the base. Clawson stared ahead, his mind turning over the endless tasks that must be done to prepare this boy for the work that lay before him. This was always on his mind.

  Only the boy kept looking back over his shoulder at the flickering lights, now fading as they walked deeper into the secured grounds. Only he could feel the tugging sensation, the barely perceptibly pull that made him feel like he was walking further and further away from something he needed to see.

  **********

  Ethan snapped out of the past with a jolt. Had he fallen asleep? It was a voice that woke him, he was sure of it.

  "Ethan," came the voice again. It was from the wall speakers. "The team is deploying. Are you ready?" Even here, in a place he was supposed to have privacy, they could get to him. But when they did call for him here in his private rooms, it was always only one person that did.

  "Clawson, yeah, I'm totally ready," he lied. "I've got all my gear ready to go. Prepared for anything." He jumped up from the couch as he spoke, scrambling for a pair of sturdy black pants, the sort worn by military in the field, which he pulled from one of several piles of dirty laundry piled beside his bed. He also grabbed a tee shirt from a different pile. It was gray, and on it was printed a cat riding a unicorn through a rainbow, the sort of shirt Clawson would certainly make him turn inside out if he saw it.

  It was unprofessional of him, and he knew it. By now, the rest of his team would have packed rucksacks and prepared weapons and gear, and then quadruple-checked everything just to be sure they were ready for every eventuality. For them, being over-prepared was the only way to be prepared. Ethan was sure that if he'd forgotten anything, he could just snatch whatever-it-was from one of them.

  As soon as he leapt into his pants and dragged the shirt over his head, he dove for a pair of dark boots that were lying in opposite sides of the room. He kept talking as he did, trying his best to sound as though he was doing nothing at all. "I've been ready this whole time," he said as he hopped on one foot, tying the laces in mid-air. "I've just been waiting for you to say 'go'. So where shall we be vacationing this time, oh disembodied one?"

  "You'll be going back to Africa, or almost," answered the Clawson through the speakers. "It's a rescue mission off the coast of Somalia. It's pirates this time. That ought to be a first for you, right?"

  Ethan stopped dead and looked up at the speakers, an expression of awe on his face. Pirates? Real pirates? He silently regretted wishing to trade places with someone in fast food. He was beginning to think he might actually enjoy his job today. After all, there were just some things even Taco Bell employees didn't get to do.

  Before he ran out the door, he realized he still had the folded photograph in his hand. He took one last look at it before storing it inside a cargo pocket of his pants.

  **********

  When sailing along the eastern coast of Africa, one considers piracy a real possibility. Still, Captain Barty Maersk thought he and his crew had taken sufficient precautions. They'd been moving at a good clip, fast enough that any pirates in the area wouldn't have time to make ready and chase them down before they were out of sight. They had armed security guards, though the insurance company had only allowed them four and they weren't allowed to shoot at anyone until fired upon. They had anti-piracy gates installed, steel cages with padlocks that could prevent an armed boarder from coming up the scaffolding on the side of the ship towards the bridge and the engineering areas. Every conceivable precaution the insurance company had suggested, they took.

  Why, then, was there an armed Somali man with an old assault rifle and no shoes standing over Barty on the bridge of his own ship?

  It could have been because all of their precautions were outdated. Pirates nowadays were using drones to scout ships or even to disable security on their targets before they attempted a boarding. Their technology was old as well. The drones were little more than toys operated from a decades-old smart phone, unable to carry more than a few ounces of explosives. That wasn't enough to cripple the ship, but it was enough to injure the guards.

  Barty remembered the pop-pop-pop of tiny explosions as each of the four guards were suddenly blown off their feet by the suicidal little fliers. His men rushed to tell him that three of his security guards had been injured or worse in a series of explosions. The Somalis were already scaling the side of his ship on rusted metal ladders they'd hooked to the side, each pirate slinging an old assault rifle across his back.

  They'd taken control of the ship easily enough. The last guard standing had put up a fight, but four of the pirates had chased him away from the bridge. They traded gunfire with him somewhere towards the stern of the ship, far too far from the bridge for Barty to feel confident about his chances of being rescued by a lone security guard. That had been hours ago, and Barty wasn't confident the last guard was still alive to keep fighting.

  The pirates certainly seemed at ease. Their leader, a man with skin as black as obsidian and who looked both incredibly young and incredibly old at the same time, grinned with a mouth full of crooked, stained teeth as he counted the money from Barty's safe.

  "Don't worry," the man said in his halting English. "Your company pay, you safe. No problem. Don't hurt nobody."

  That came as little comfort to Barty, who'd seen for himself what the pirates' drones had done to his guards. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall of the bridge and peered out the windows at the sky. Armed pirates dressed in ragged, dirty clothes guarded his only escape routes, not that he would have had anywhere to go if he did escape. He'd pressed the emergency beacon, the one used exclusively for ships under attack by pirates, when the Somalis had first come aboard. He'd hoped back then that he and his crew could somehow hold off the Somalis until help arrived, but he knew that was unlikely. He was off the coast of Somalia, after all. What rescue force could reach him all the way out here?

  That's why he didn't understand what he was seeing when a streak of white went across the blue sky outside.

  There was a deafening thump as one of the windows was blown in by an explosion. Barty was thrown to his side, his ears ringing from the blast. Everyone in the bridge, hostage and pirate alike, had been floored by the boom, strewn carelessly across the floor like toys.

  Barty looked to the window that had exploded. Outside he could see someone standing, which should have been impossible because there was no walkway outside that window. Whoever it was crouching on some kind of machine, a miniature jet engine that kept the figure hovering in place like a hummingbird in flight. He was dressed in black body armor of some kind, and he could just make out armor plating and some kind of metal frame that clung to his arms and legs. His face was covered by a black mask, its eyes like those of a giant insect. Curls of brilliant red hair sprouted from the back of the mask, and in his arms rested a machine gun that seemed too big for any normal person to carry.

  "Drop your weapons!" his voice boomed, unnaturally amplified as though through a megaphone.

  Many of the pirates on the bridge had already dropped their weapons in the explosion, but at the sight of the flying, armored soldier, several of them were now scrambling to retrieve them.

  Barty knew what was coming. He clamped his hands over his ears and scuttled towards the nearest opening to the walkway outside. Just as he reached it, there was an explosion of gunfire that ripped the air apart.

  The pirates fired back, but wildly. Barty felt something like a punch in his shoulder, hard enough to throw him through the door to the outside and land him in a heap on the walkway. He scrambled to get back to his feet, suddenly aware of the burning he felt on the back of his shoulder, and he ran towards the main deck. His only hope was to hide among the towering stacks of shipping containers there until people stopped shooting.

  But by the time he reached the deck, he could see there were already others there. A dozen pirates were darting between stacks, firing blindly towards someone at the stern of the ship, though Barty couldn't see whom.

  Suddenly he saw something, a black shape moving along the top of the stacks. It was another armored figure, much like the one that had been atop the hovering platform. This one leapt from stack to stack, across impossible distances. As he perched himself above the oblivious group of pirates below, he unslung a combat rifle from his back and began firing down at them with short, controlled bursts of chirping gunfire.

  It was all over in a matter of seconds.

  Barty tried to cover his mouth to stifle a nervous moan. The masked, armored man on the stack seemed to notice him for the first time. Barty started, suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to run when he saw the man leap across the stacks towards him, reaching him in only a few bounds.

  The armored man landed on the walkway with a clang, and Barty saw that his eyes clicked and whirred and telescoped, each one like the lens of a camera. The man seemed to be looking him up and down, as though scanning him.

  "You're in need of medical attention," the man said in a voice too deep to be natural. "Not to worry, sir, I'm a doctor."

  Barty followed the man's gaze to his own shoulder, where he could see an inky stain spreading across his polo shirt. I've been shot, he realized. Suddenly his eyes swam, and he teetered drunkenly despite his grip on the rail beside him.

  The armored man caught him before he fell and lifted him as easily as he would have an infant. Barty thought he could hear the faint whir of motors and the hiss of well-oiled machine joints as the man carried him down the rail onto the flat surface of the deck below.

  The man reached into several hidden pockets in his armored clothing and produced a roll of gauze, alcohol swabs, and other items that would make the contents of a decent first aid kit. His telescoping eye gear spun and clicked, focusing on the wound. If Barty could judge by the quality of poking and prodding he received at the hands of the stranger, he would indeed believe the man was a doctor, albeit one with inhuman agility and a suit of mechanized body armor. Who were these people? Were they soldiers? If they were, he'd never seen soldiers like these.

  There was a clang on the deck beside him, and another face appeared in the sky above him. It was another masked man, though this one wore no armor Barty could see, only a gray, short-sleeved tee shirt with some kind of picture printed on it. Was it a cat and a unicorn? Barty shook his head and tried focusing his eyes. He thought he must be going into shock. Whoever this man was, he appeared to be unarmed.

  "The stern is clear," said the newcomer, his voice young and unaltered, unlike the doctor's. "I've got a bunch of sleeping pirates and one freaked-out guard who seems like he could use a different job."

  Barty rolled his head to the side, looking down the deck towards the stern. He was glad to hear the guard had lived.

  It was then that he saw movement between the stacks of containers. A man was emerging from a door on the stern. He had dark skin, filthy clothes, and a long, green tube with a bulbous, pointed tip on the end. The man stood awkwardly and lifted the heavy-looking tube to his shoulder, pointing the bulbous end right at them.

  Barty suddenly realized what he was seeing, and his eyes went wide in terror as he let out a high, terrified moan.

  The two men above him both seemed to notice what he did a fraction of a second later.

  "Crap!" cried the one in the teeshirt, crouching his legs and making an impossible leap towards the pirate. He soared through the air, his fist cocked back as though to punch, but before he could close the distance, the Somali let fly the missile with a hollow thump. It streaked through the air and met the man, and they both disappeared in a blinding explosion.

  Barty suddenly found someone on top of him. The doctor had covered Barty's body with his own, shielding him from harm. He could hear the plink of debris bouncing off his body armor. The doctor finally moved just in time for Barty to see the smoking body of the man lying on the main deck and two teetering stacks of steel shipping containers collapse on top of him with the sound of screaming metal that rocked the whole ship. Barty let out a strangled moan. He'd just seen a man suffer a violent, gruesome death. He could feel panic rising in his gullet. If these soldiers or rescuers or whoever they were could be killed, did that mean Barty would soon die with them? Was this rescue attempt, as amazing and unexpected as it was, doomed to fail?

  "Not again," the doctor hissed in annoyance. Barty was surprised to hear such cynicism from the doctor over the death of his fellow. The two of them were certainly colleagues. To boot, this man claimed to be a doctor, and should have felt at least a little regret at seeing the other blasted by a missile and then crushed beneath several tons of wreckage. Instead, he just shook his head and continued with his work on Barty's shoulder, as though the whole incident had been a mild irritation.

  A moment later, the Somali appeared on top of a small heap of containers, the launcher still in one hand. The other held another missile. He began to reload the weapon.

  The doctor saw it just in time to raise his own weapon, a motion so quick Barty almost didn't see it. But he never fired. There was the sound of a screaming jet engine as the other masked soldier appeared above the ship, crouching atop the roaring platform and wielding that huge weapon.

  The pirate shouted in panic as he saw him, firing his missile at him with another hollow thump. The flying soldier dodged the missile without even looking at it and answered with a hail of rattling gunfire.

  The Somali never answered back.

  The platform took him down to the deck where Barty lay. When it touched down, it went silent, and the soldier scooped it up and slung it over his back. It was then that Barty began to realize that he was actually a she. The soldier that flew on the jet-propelled platform with the enormous machine gun and bright red hair was actually a woman. He could just barely make out the hint of a feminine figure beneath the armor, and he only noticed once she was standing next to the doctor. Her voice seemed unnaturally deepened and amplified by some kind of device in her helmet.

  "Where's the kid?" she asked.

  The doctor didn't look up from his work on Barty's shoulder.

  "Under the mess," he answered.

  The woman turned to look at the pile of overturned shipping containers.

  "Figures," she said. "I'm getting really tired of him doing this."

  There was a roar of engines as a matte black cargo plane descended from the sky and came to a hover just above the deck of the ship. The backwash of it's massive jets shook the deck.

  "It's time to go," said the doctor in his deep, impossible bass of a voice. "Let's get the injured on board."

  "Enough screwing around," the woman bellowed towards the debris on the deck with her own artificially deep voice. "We have to leave."

  Barty wondered who she was talking to when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of groaning metal. Barty watched as the pile of twisted containers shifted, shook, and finally moved. Containers bucked aside as a figure shoved his way through them like a child might from a pile of pillows.

  The young man, his teeshirt torn and hanging from his unmarked torso, stumbled from the wreckage, his mask crooked on his face. He grabbed a handful of the fabric and pulled, revealing a youthful face with high cheekbones and a dimpled chin. His short, dark hair was matted to his forehead.

  "I hate it when these things are crooked," he complained.

  "What are you doing?" demanded the woman, her hands raised in exasperated disbelief. "Why are you taking your mask off?"

  The young man shrugged. "Well, he's not going to recognize me on the street, is he?"

  "Both of you shut up and get aboard," urged the doctor. "We can talk about this later."

  Barty wasn't sure if it was the blood loss or the sight of a man emerging unscathed from that wreckage, but he suddenly found himself unable to stay awake. The world went dark around him.