by

Yanick Champoux (38%)

Lee Watts (18%)

Josip Nað (17%)

Michel Lacombe (16%)

Dorian (4%)

goldkngt55 (3%)

Andrew Avila (2%)

Marten (1%)

Oliver (1%)

Part 45

Michel Lacombe (16/5/2002)

Knowing he was to die anyway, Sergei Visarionovich Godunov would have loved to explain everything. Stand tall as the master of his destiny and all that. Or at least float tall. As far as accidentally setting yourself up to be killed by your own people could be called mastery of one's own destiny.

He was about to say 'It's a weapon' when Maddie pulled the trigger. The word 'it' was actually on his lips as the bullet punched through his forehead.

His audience transfixed by that first assertion, staring at him in awe of the span of Decados ingenuity and cruelty, he would have continued thus:

'Our ultimate weapon. A kraken delivered on-target via portable gate. And the irony, you see, is that we got the idea from a device sent from the future to warn civilization that we would one day invent such a weapon! We actually reverse-engineered most of the Gatekraken technology from analyzing the warning device itself! And we did it all inside of three weeks, within a time-stasis field also deduced from the device!

'But this isn't even the funniest part. Do you know where we found this device? On a scraver boy we fished out of the sewers of Byzantium Secundus because his mind waves were driving out psis insane!'

And then, Sergei would have had his last laugh, and it would have sent a chill up his audience's spines.

But no, the woman with vomit stains on her clothes just had to shoot him before he said a word.

Mercifully, there was only a moment for regret before the mechanisms Sergei used to regret things burst out the back of his skull. His body flipped backwards three times before a wall stopped it.

As his murderers left the room in haste, towing their unconscious friend, Sergei's dead eyes stared ahead at Bolshoi Batiskii breaking away from the condemned Comet.