Plan b was to use an object that the Artificers had designed to end civilizations. It wasn’t a question of whether that would be bad for us, but whether the effect would be to empower Victor or to infect us.

“Not good,” Jaclyn muttered and her hands twitched, activating a new feature of her suit, which I’d described as “essentially a gumball dispenser.”

With a hand motion, she could cause dense balls of an alien-designed alloy to roll out of her suit and land in her hands. Then she could throw it.

At that moment, I was relieved that I’d thought to factor situations with minimal gravity into the design because the balls landed in her palms as intended.

Then she threw them at the Artificer relic.

They hit it with several tons of force, all centered on a spot only a little larger than a bullet. I wouldn’t have wanted to take that hit. The Rocket suit could theoretically handle it, but with the force she generated any slight imperfection might kill me.

I could only assume the device contained no imperfections because she didn’t destroy it.

Both balls hit, throwing off cascades of sparks. To her credit, they didn’t bounce off. Both embedded themselves into the stone-like material, creating a spiderweb of cracks around them.

Whatever material the device was made of, it had imperfections now.

As the sparks flew, the device’s white glow expanded, illuminating a quarter of the room. It might have blinded us all without our suits’ ability to filter the light.

The glow now included the Starplate.

Victor had been almost impossible to see when we came into the room if not for the Moon dust on his body. He’d become almost solid after that, but in the glow of the Artificers’ strange cone, he became solid and the edges of a dome above the Starplate became visible.

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I didn’t know whether the dome above the Starplate represented a force field or an area in which the Starplate negated Victor’s powers.

Either way, Victor had now begun to glow with the same white light as the cone.

I didn’t like what that implied.

Aiming at the cone, I fired off both my laser and a narrowcast sonic attack, hoping that one or the other would matter. Jaclyn, meanwhile, started throwing a series of balls at the cone.

Cassie had been firing at the monkey boxes, buying us more time, but she fired at the cone now, her hits throwing off waves of blue sparks each time. I hoped the monkeys weren’t reforming, but stopping what seemed to be a device that would supercharge Victor had a higher priority.

All of this had taken place in seconds—which matters because Victor caught my eye and accepted my offer to chat.

Sort of.

When he caught my eye, he screamed, “Free me from Rook’s control!”

Not trusting yet another shift in Victor’s attitude toward us, I shouted back, “How?”

As I asked, the dome I’d seen outlined in the cone’s white light wobbled and disappeared. Victor stood there with his mouth open, panting, a few beads of sweat rolling down his face.

He laughed and then said, “Kill me before I kill you and tell Magnus where to get full access to your device. You have the power. Kill me.”

Then the white light that had been extending outward from Victor changed color, taking on the purple of his skin. In addition, the cone’s white light and Victor’s purple glow began to flash in time with each other.

Over the last few seconds, Jaclyn had been hitting the cone with more balls, extending the spiderweb of cracks to cover half of it, some of the cracks glowing from the inside. In addition, the blue sparks began to shoot outward as far as 20 feet from the cone.

I’d only begun to think that it looked like it might explode when Cassie hit it with a beam from her gun. From experience, I recognized the highest setting, a wide, white beam that illuminated the room. The beam hit the cone, shattering it.

Burning pieces flew in all directions, some hitting the lab equipment.

Any lab equipment in its way shattered and exploded, making holes in the equipment next to it.

With the cone’s destruction, Victor flew, heading straight for the group.

“Wait,” I shouted, “can we skip killing you?”

Landing in front of me, he said, “I have to kill you. Kill me or die!”

Then he punched me and it wasn’t a love tap. It set off error messages in my armor and threw me backward to hit Abominator lab equipment of unknown function.

Judging from the force behind that punch, it was in Jaclyn’s league. My armor wouldn’t stand up to a lot of it. If that weren’t enough, the moment I found myself within the range of Victor’s purple glow, I felt queasy.

I couldn’t name what felt wrong, but I didn’t feel like myself.