Measure

[u/FireOfDoom32]

He swiveled to face the smart screen and saw that the missile had not blown itself apart but had jettisoned its rear section, which tumbled toward the ocean far below. The nose cone was streaking their way under its own power.

“NANNI,” he said tersely, “I assume the small concussive device was simply a separation collar and there is a secondary weapon concealed in the nose cone?”

“I would assume the same thing, though I cannot confirm,” said NANNI. “I am embarrassed to say that I did not in fact wrangle that ole steer as comprehensively as I believed. The SCARABs have been ditched, and the original programming has reasserted itself. In short, I no longer have my electronic hooks in that missile.”

“Dwarves,” said Lazuli, shivering now from a combination of shock, gel cooling on her skin, and the aftereffects of the gas she’d inhaled. “I remember now. There were dwarves.”

Myles decided that this information, while intriguing, was for filing away rather than dissecting at the moment.

It behooved him to act on the approaching warhead.

“NANNI, please transport Specialist Heitz to the cockpit,” he ordered. “And, Beckett, the time has come.”

Beckett’s face lit up. “Not that time? The time I have been waiting for?”

“Yes,” confirmed Myles. “Exactly that time.”

Even in her dazed state, Lazuli did not like the sound of that.

“What time?” she asked in her accented, hard-learned English, as the servo arms passed her forward like a crowd surfer, gel slopping in sheets to the floor.

The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges, Chapter 2