After a brief stop at the local sporting goods store, Max was back on the road. Her sleek hovercycle cut a swath through the night, heading north. Serenity City was already behind her and outlying farms and expensive country villas doted the landscape along this section of the long speedway to Lake Town a thousand miles away. There was no traffic to impede her at this time of night, so she pushed the speedometer up to 250. The hovercycle surged ahead with unbridled enthusiasm like a racehorse on steroids. Riding a rocket sled.
According to Rick the ruggedly handsome El Taco manager guy, the Boojum owned a small private spaceport a few hundred miles north of the city near the old Vesputian Monastery. If that was indeed where he was headed now in his stolen taxi, she should catch up to him soon.
Max's mind churned. Tracking Danno Chimeron would be so much easier using the sensors aboard the Rocinanté, but that wasn't an option anymore. And after bailing out on the Banshees without any warning, she didn't feel she had the right to go to them for help either, although she knew Lee Carter would be happy to lend a helping hand to her old friend and XO if she could. No... Max had baked her cake, and now she'd have to sleep in it.
She felt old and alone again, and the lonely road disappearing into the dark uncertain infinity in front of her windshield didn't help her mood in the least.
But then, there ahead in the far distance, two orange taillights materialized out of the night mist. It must be the Boojum's car! She pushed the hovercycle's accelerator all the way to the redline.
Max felt her heart begin to beat faster. How did you stop an immortal like the Boojum -- one who was dedicated to evil, who was beyond salvage as a human being? Throw him in prison for all the rest of eternity? Deport him to another part of the galaxy where he'd be someone else's problem? No... Max had no illusions about how their encounter would end. There was only one way to stop an immortal like the Boojum once and for all.
But could she bring herself to kill a child...?
Would that be a deed for which she would ever be able to forgive herself? Which was the lesser or greater evil -- killing Danno Chimeron, or letting him live? Would she be able to live with herself if she killed a child? Would she be able to live with herself if she let his evil remain free?
Max felt a tightening pressure in her chest as her conscience wrestled with the terrible moral impasse. She wasn't used to this sort of ethical ambiguity. As a Starfleet fighter pilot during wartime, her course had always been clearly defined in her mission orders -- find the bad guys and shoot 'em down. It had been simple, requiring no independent thought on her part, and she had been very, very good at it. But now for the first time, the big decision was fully in her hands. The fate of a thousand-year-old boy rested squarely on her shoulders. Her conscience -- her soul -- would have to bear the consequences of whatever she decided.
Was this the dilemma West and Rick the ruggedly handsome manager guy had been trying to warn her about? That had only been yesterday, but it seemed like an eternity ago. Had they known?
Max squeezed her eyes shut, letting the hovercycle steer itself, and fervently willed an easy answer to present itself to her, but the Cosmos remained silent and unhelpful this night.
*What would West do?*
She opened her eyes and made her decision, and hoped she could deal with the consequences afterwards.
The speeding taxi was only fifty yards ahead now. Danno Chimeron had spotted his pursuer in his rear-view monitor and was pushing the stolen vehicle beyond its limits, but there was no outrunning fate.
Max let go of her cycle's controls with one hand and pulled her phaser from its holster. Against the tremendous force of the wind, she raised it and took as careful aim as she could, and squeezed off two shots before the wind buffeting knocked her hand aside.
The first phaser beam went wide, narrowly missing a surprised cow, and turned a tree by the side of the road into a smoking pile of kindling, but the second beam struck true.
The left rear aerofoil of the Boojum's car was sheered off, and as the wreckage pulled away from the body of the vehicle, it tore a long gash in the side. Sparks flew, and, its aerodynamic stability ruined, the taxi swerved wildly out of control straight for the edge of the road. It smashed through the roadway's magnatomic containment railing and careened headlong into an inconveniently located automatic refueling station. The skidding taxi plowed over one of the recharge kiosks, and the many sparks instantly ignited the liberated hydrogen.
Everything inside a hundred foot radius instantly went up in a blistering mushroom cloud that rose into the night sky in a huge orange column. The boom from the explosion was deafening, and the shockwave punched Max in the kidney and knocked into her hovercycle so hard she almost lost control.
Max skidded sideways to a stop at the edge of the conflagration, and the hovercycle's passenger restraints were already retracting before the vehicle was at a complete standstill. Max unfolded herself from the saddle and threw herself headlong towards the Boojum's flaming car wreck, but whether that was to make sure he was dead or to try and save him from being burned to death she was never sure of afterwards, but the intense heat of the burning fuel kept her back.
She yanked her helmet from her head and let it drop to the ground, and peered into the bonfire. The wind from the rising heat whipped her long, brown hair around her face, and she had to squint to see anything from the glare. It was hard to tell if there was movement inside the flames or if the waves of heat refraction were just playing tricks on her eyes, but a moment later her question was answered and her nightmare came true.
The small black silhouette of Danno Chimeron coalesced out of the fire's glare and strode toward her. The boy was singed and most of his clothing had been burned off, but considering he'd just been at the center of a massive explosion, he looked miraculously unscathed. He stopped advancing once he was away from the worst of the heat and squared off against Max. His oversized disruptor was in his hand.
Max planted her feet apart and flexed her fingers in tense anticipation.
It was a scene out of the Ancient West, or a madman's twisted nightmare of the Ancient West were it transposed to the last Circle of Hell. The roaring flames had spread to nearby outbuildings, and bathed the entire surreal landscape in an infernal, flickering, orange light. The billowing smoke obscured the moon and stars in the sky and hung over the land in a choking umbrella, while smoldering cinders and ash drifted in great flurries and stung their eyes.
"I have to give you credit!" yelled Danno Chimeron above the roar. There was a grudging smile on his face, as if this whole thing -- all the death and destruction -- had been just a game to him. "You're the first one in a few hundred years to get this close to actually killing me!"
"You could come with me peacefully!" yelled Max, unable to completely give up all hope. "You could turn yourself in! No one has to die here tonight!" But she knew that was a lie. One of them would be dead in the next few minutes. Time would tell which one.
Danno shook his head and smiled wider, but it was a smile of pure evil, born of the supreme certitude that he was impervious to anything Max could possibly do, and that he would shortly be adding her name to his very long list of victims.
"To honor a worthy opponent," he called magnanimously, "I'll give you a free shot!"
Max replied with a barely perceptible steely-eyed nod. It was more than she could have hoped for, but that didn't make what she had to do any easier. She tensed every muscle in her body, wishing there was some other way, but finally she couldn't delay any longer.
Before setting out in pursuit of the Boojum, she had stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a small pellet gun. The marble containing the super-secret radiation dampening substance the crippled scientist had developed at the raided R&D facility fit perfectly in the chamber. She suspected the Snark had planned to use it the same way. She had secreted the pistol under her belt at the small of her back.
Now, quick as lightning, she reached an arm around and whipped out the pellet gun. Before Danno Chimeron the Boojum reacted, she took careful aim -- because she only had one shot at this -- and pulled the trigger.
A white puff of expelled carbon dioxide from the muzzle, the pistol's sharp kickback in her hand, the pellet flying towards its target, the impact, the small wound flowering right in the center of Danno Chimeron's chest -- all happening within the span of a single heartbeat.
Danno looked down at his chest and the brand new bullet hole there. The bleeding had already stopped and the surrounding skin was already closing over the wound as his cells regenerated his body at an incredible rate. He grimaced in ecstatic triumph and raised his eyes back up to Max and cackled with unholy glee. He leveled his disruptor at the impotent mortal before him.
"Now we end this," he said in deadly earnest.
But something was wrong! He felt a sharp stab of pain in his chest where the bullet had entered! A confused frown appeared on his face. The pain shot outward like wildfire until it consumed every inch of his body. His muscles jerked in uncontrollable spasms, yanking him around like an epileptic puppeteer's marionette. The disruptor dropped from his unresponsive fingers. The look of confusion on his face was replaced by fear and panic.
Max looked on, horrified and mesmerized at the same time by the powerful effect the strange elixir was having on the boy. A particularly violent spasm shook the Boojum. He raised supplicating arms to the heavens and cried out in utter abandonment and betrayal, then toppled over backwards into the dirt. Max ran to his side.
As she watched, Danno Chimeron's body began to change. Before her unbelieving eyes, he began to age, slowly at first, but the years flew by with increasing speed. As he writhed on the ground making guttural sounds, his thick shock of blond hair turned wispy and gray, his hands bent into arthritic claws, his flesh became emaciated, and his skin turned leathery and stretched over the protruding bones underneath. In thirty seconds he had turned from a twelve-year-old boy to a thousand-year-old mummy.
Once the transformation was over, Danno Chimeron took a long, painful breath and shuddered with the effort. He opened his eyes and stared up at the sky through the thinning smoke. "Finally... I can die," he whispered. The relief in his voice was palpable. "I finally feel... at ease..."
Through the haze of centuries, he caught sight of Max standing over him.
"What is the worst of woes that wait on age?" he quoted in a breathless whisper. "What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, and be alone on earth, as I am now."
Danno Chimeron, the Boojum, turned his head a tiny fraction to look in Max's eyes. "Do you understand?" he whispered. He was without breath, yet his tone was urgent. In his last moments, he desperately needed someone to whom he could bequeath the one great gem of wisdom that he had learned during his long life. "Do you... underst...?"
His filmy eyes drifted closed and his last breath hissed from his lips.
Max looked skyward and saw a fast-moving pinpoint of light. She thought of West and the Rocinanté.
She understood.
