The wind on the roof was a physical thing.
It screamed across the steel grating, carrying the metallic taste of ozone and smog.
Jason stood at the base of the Babel Spire. It wasn't just an antenna; it was a needle piercing the sky, rising three hundred feet above the penthouse. The maintenance ladder clung to the side like a skeleton's spine.
"This is madness," Einstein shouted over the gale. His white hair whipped around his face. He clutched his notebook to his chest like a bible.
"It's physics!" Jason yelled back. He knelt down. "Get on!"
Einstein hesitated, then climbed onto Jason's back. Jason secured him with climbing harnesses, locking the carabiners with a solid click. The old physicist felt frail, like a bird made of hollow bones.
"Don't look down," Jason ordered. "Look at the stars."
He grabbed the first rung. The metal was freezing. It burned his palms through his gloves.
He began to climb.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Every step was a battle against gravity and wind. The spire swayed. It groaned under their weight.
Fifty feet up. The smog was thick here, a yellow soup that tasted of sulfur. Jason couldn't see the ground. He couldn't see the sky.
"Contact!" O'Malley's voice crackled in his earpiece. "Snipers in the water tower! They see you!"
CRACK.
A bullet sparked off the ladder inches from Jason's hand.
"Keep moving!" O'Malley yelled.
Jason didn't stop. He couldn't.
CRACK. CRACK.
More shots. The Deacon's men were dialing in the range.
"Suppressing fire!" O'Malley roared.
From the roof below, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of O'Malley's heavy rifle answered. He was firing blind into the smog, trying to keep the enemy's heads down.
Jason climbed faster. His muscles burned. His lungs screamed for oxygen in the thin, polluted air.
One hundred feet.
The wind was worse here. It threatened to peel them off the tower.
"Jason!" Einstein screamed in his ear. "The swaying! I cannot stabilize the optics!"
"I'll be the tripod!" Jason gritted his teeth. "Just get the numbers!"
Two hundred feet.
The yellow fog began to thin. It turned gray, then white.
Suddenly, they punched through.
The noise of the city vanished. The smog layer lay below them like a rolling ocean of dirty cotton.
Above, the sky was crystal clear.
It was breathtaking.
Without the light pollution of the dead city, the Milky Way stretched across the heavens in a band of diamond dust. Millions of stars burned in the black void.
"My God," Einstein whispered. The terror left his voice, replaced by awe.
"Focus, Albert!" Jason gasped, locking his arms around the ladder. "Find Cassiopeia!"
Einstein fumbled with the brass telescope strapped to Jason's shoulder. He extended the lens.
"Azimuth!" Einstein muttered, his eyes glued to the eyepiece. "North Star is the anchor! 42 degrees!"
He began to scribble furiously in his notebook, the pages flapping in the high-altitude wind.
"Atmospheric density," Einstein calculated out loud. "Refraction index... 0.04 deviation... Coriolis effect..."
PING.
A bullet hit the telescope.
The brass tube shattered. Glass sprayed into the air.
"No!" Einstein cried out.
"They have the range!" O'Malley yelled over the radio. "I can't hold them down! They're bracketing the tower!"
"We lost the optics!" Jason shouted. "Albert, we're blind!"
Einstein stared at the broken telescope dangling from his strap.
He closed his eyes.
He took a deep breath.
"I don't need glass," Einstein said softly. "I have the numbers."
He tapped his temple.
"The stars do not move, Jason. The math is constant. I saw the alignment. I can extrapolate the drift."
He grabbed Jason's radio.
"Ironwood!" Einstein screamed into the wind. "Listen to me! Vector 7-Alpha! Descent angle 88.4 degrees! Wind shear compensation... minus 3!"
There was static.
Then, a voice.
"Copy, Professor," Ironwood replied. "Coordinates locked. Rod drop initiated. Time on target: Three minutes."
"Go!" Jason yelled.
He didn't climb down. He slid.
He wrapped his legs around the rails and let gravity take them. They plummeted through the smog layer, back into the yellow hell.
Friction burned through Jason's gloves. He smelled burning leather.
They hit the roof deck hard. Jason rolled, shielding Einstein with his body.
"Inside!" O'Malley grabbed them, dragging them toward the stairwell.
Bullets chewed up the concrete where they had just been standing.
They tumbled down the stairs, crashing into the penthouse.
The heavy steel door slammed shut.
"Did we do it?" Sarah asked, looking up from the radar screen. "Did we hit them?"
Jason crawled to the window. He wiped the sweat from his eyes.
He looked at the siege camp.
The Deacon's men were still laughing, eating their bacon. They didn't know death was falling from the sky at Mach 10.
"Three minutes," Jason whispered. "Ironwood said three minutes."
They waited.
The silence in the room was heavy. Einstein was muttering equations, double-checking his mental math.
Two minutes.
One minute.
Thirty seconds.
The clouds above the camp began to swirl. A hole punched through the smog.
A sound like tearing canvas filled the air.
SHHHH-WOOOOM.
A streak of fire, brighter than the sun, tore through the sky.
It wasn't a bomb. It was a telephone pole made of solid tungsten. A Kinetic Rod. No explosives. Just pure physics.
It hit the train.
There was no explosion at first.
Just a flash of white light as the kinetic energy converted to heat.
The ground rippled. A shockwave of dirt and steel expanded outward in a perfect circle.
The train disintegrated. The engine, the cars, the Deacon... they simply ceased to exist. Vaporized.
Then came the boom.
CRACK-BOOM.
The penthouse windows blew out. Jason shielded Sarah from the glass.
The factory shook to its foundations. Dust rained from the ceiling.
When the dust settled, Jason stood up.
He walked to the shattered window.
Where the siege camp had been, there was now a crater. A smoking hole in the earth, glowing red at the bottom.
The rest of the Deacon's men—the ones who hadn't been vaporized—were running. They dropped their weapons. They ran into the wasteland, screaming.
The siege was broken.
"Physics," Einstein said, dusting off his coat. He adjusted his glasses, which were cracked but intact. "It works every time."
Jason looked at the smoking crater.
"We have a weapon," Jason said. "We have the sky."
But as he watched the smoke rise, his radio crackled again.
"Underwood," General Ironwood's voice returned. "Good shot. But that was the last rod in the chamber. The magazine is empty."
Jason's heart sank.
"Empty?"
"We are a deterrent, son," Ironwood said. "Not an endless supply. You bought yourself some time. Don't waste it."
The line went dead.
Jason looked at Sarah. She was staring at the crater, her face pale.
"We have time," Jason said. "But we don't have ammo."
"We have something else," Sarah pointed to the horizon.
Through the clearing smoke, a new signal flag was rising from the south.
Not the Cartel.
Not the Legion.
It was a white flag.
And behind it, a solitary figure walked toward the factory gate.
"A messenger," O'Malley said, lowering his rifle.
"From who?" Jason asked.
"From the only player left on the board," Sarah whispered.
"Hemingway."