The burly white man had no taste for his temporary partner's tone. The way he saw it, you didn't have to be a good man — that was your business — but sneering at good men was crossing a line. Even though this particular matter involved him personally, he felt not the slightest flicker of pleasure.
He steered clear of the subject of Bella altogether.
"Kang, I've done as you asked. I've pulled out every last Algorithm component your future people hid inside the world's nuclear arsenals. Now where's your end of it? When will this filthy world finally be destroyed? My cancer is far along, my eyesight's failing by the day — and I don't see this world showing any sign of collapse!"
The burly white man, Sator, bellowed the words. His outfit was perfectly ordinary — suit, tie, leather shoes — and his English carried a slight accent.
The man called Kang turned his head, not a trace of warmth in his eyes. "Mr. Sator, I'll remind you one more time: call me the Conqueror. Only that title is worthy of my greatness. As for destroying the world?"
His metallic face forced out an ugly smile.
"Whoever told you that destroying a world means a big explosion? What a foolish primitive."
Sator was seething, but he swallowed the anger down. "That's not what you people told me at the start!"
The Conqueror's voice dripped with contempt. "'You people'? Don't lump me in with those delusional lunatics. Many of the scientific theories of the twenty-second century were already exposed as pseudoscience in my era. Do you even understand what I'm telling you?"
Sator went still, then stared at him in dawning horror. "You… you're not the future man who's been contacting me all this time? Where are you from — or rather, when are you from?"
The Conqueror didn't answer. He simply raised a hand and closed it on empty air, and the nine metal components flew to hover before him on their own.
"The Algorithm. In theory the thing is sound — but it's crude, and the way it tears the entire timeline apart is far too severe." He glanced at Sator. "Everything gets destroyed. Then who's left for me to conquer?"
At last it dawned on Sator. "You're here to stop me!"
This time the Conqueror made a show of considering it. "I may be a villain — that's certainly how a great many of them like to define me — but I think you're right. I really am here to stop you."
Sator loosed a roar and charged, lunging for the nine metal components they called the Algorithm. His stride was powerful, his speed real — yet no matter how hard he ran, he couldn't get near Kang. The two of them stood close together, and still, for all his effort, he couldn't close the gap by so much as a centimeter.
"You think I have some kind of power too?" Kang seemed to read his mind. "Wrong. I have no powers at all. What sets me apart from you is that I understand science. Science is the ultimate force in this world — science can make me greater than the gods themselves."
His gaze drifted into the distance. Through the unique imaging system built into his helmet, he could pick out Bella with ease, and 006 at her side.
"Look at the sorry state of them. They believe they hold the truth of the world in their hands, when in reality they're nothing but a pack of pitiful wretches. Ah — that's right, you wanted your rest? As you wish." Kang drew the silver pistol at his waist. A beam of light flashed, and Sator crumbled into a drift of dust. The spot was left spotless — not a drop of blood, not a single trace to prove a living man had ever stood there.
Kang began to work the nine metal components. "Outwitting you primitives really is far too easy. An explosion? Ha, how idiotic. There's a much simpler way — just relocate a few people, a handful of tiny variables, and you can affect the entire world. I'll be taking the Algorithm. Thank you for your help, Mr. Sator. Hahahaha—!"
Milky-white halos rippled across the nine metal components one after another. The Algorithm — a device from the twenty-second century, endowed with the power of entropy inversion, capable of unmaking an entire timeline — had been switched on.
What Kang wanted wasn't destruction but conquest. He worked the Algorithm at speed, drawing countless measures of entropy into his calculations — the formulas of the thirty-first century — and forcibly siphoning out a vast tide of temporal energy.
"Hm? What in the world?" The stirring of temporal energy alerted Bella at once, even at a distance. Different means, same end. Temporal energy was nothing new to her. Before Kronos broke free, the timeline had been stable and solid — but now? Every day she studied it she found fresh signs of decay, to one degree or another. She refused to believe the big shots hadn't noticed. So why weren't any of them stopping it?
Before she could think it through, she saw an immense wave of temporal energy come sweeping toward her. The technique and the pattern were nothing like when she'd banished Loki, but the effect was much the same — except she had flung Loki toward the leading edge of a stable point in time, whereas this turbulence seemed bent on hurling her the other way, beyond the present moment and into the future.
"What is it? What's going on?" Old 006 had no idea what was happening. He sensed danger, but couldn't tell where it was coming from.
Bella had no time to explain. She was already marshaling her psionics to commune with the timestream, anchoring her own temporal coordinates against the enemy's pull through time.
Loki had managed to hold out for a while back then; she figured she'd leveled up since, so surely she could do about as well? The truth was that Loki was stronger than her — a good deal stronger. That day, Loki had weathered the temporal turbulence and still traded a few rounds with her, back and forth. Now Bella lasted just over a second, not even two, before she felt herself beginning to slip.
She pulled her defenses in with everything she had, nailing herself fast to the present moment, hoping to hold on a while and drain the enemy's power — but a few seconds in, she realized something was wrong. What kind of enemy was this? The temporal energy was overwhelming, endless, gushing without the faintest sign of running dry. Was this even a human being?
"Ah!" That was the flaw in being a Psion. Bella's confidence wavered, and the flow of her psionics opened a single gap. With a startled cry she was swept into the temporal turbulence, carried downstream toward the future of the timestream.
The standoff between them had lasted only the briefest moment. Human strength simply couldn't overpower a machine. And that fleeting standoff had swept old 006, right beside her, into the turbulence along with her.
Expressionless, Kang worked the Algorithm, kicking one figure after another — everyone who posed a threat to his rule — out of the present time point. Each time an important figure was removed, the running calculation had to be corrected all over again. That was the machine's limitation: with enough computing power he could banish every last person, but only by recalculating again and again.
And just as Kang was in the middle of one such correction, a magnetic field suddenly clamped down on him, and his every movement turned agonizingly slow.
He looked up at the sky. A figure clad in Iron Lad's psychokinetic armor, its shape not unlike Iron Man's, hovered there, projecting the magnetic field that was jamming his calculations.
The figure lifted his helmet, revealing a somewhat pale young face.
Kang knew that face. Knew it intimately.
It was him — himself, when he was young.