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Vector was not immune to the effects of the laws of physics, at least not the laws having to do with momentum, and thousands of his bugs were killed by smashing into walls at high speed or being struck by flying bodies and debris.
Bad. Infuriating! But not the end, not by a long shot. Only a few percent of his eyes went dark; the rest, including those outside the train, were intact.
Then, almost simultaneously, came the explosion.
The shell blew up, but it did not spray napalm or even shrapnel aside from the shell’s casing.
Vector had just enough time to think, Hah, you can’t kill me with . . . Then Vector’s eyes started to go dark in waves. Not hundreds, but thousands. Not an easily replaced few percent, but masses, multitudes, a rapidly closing circle of darkness.
Gas, he thought. What he had feared.
Gas!
But the crash had created escape holes, too. Vector sent his surviving parts racing toward fresh air, escaping through broken windows and twisted doors and great gashes in the aluminum body of the cars.
He rose in a wave of millions, still alive, still able to spread disease and terror.
Still Vector!
A part of his mind looked for but did not find the solid object the train had clearly hit. No one had driven a tank onto the tracks. No one had built a wall. The train had simply hit . . . nothing . . . and stopped instantly with devastating results.
Then the first of his insects banged into what felt like glass.
Impossible!
He sent his swarm higher, up and up, but the invisible barrier persisted. It seemed to be curved. Like a bowl. Like an invisible bowl. Like . . .
Like a dome.
The lower edge of his swarm began to go dark now, and his bugs fell in their hundreds and their thousands as the gas slowly dispersed and filled the interior of the dome.
Vector flew his swarm as high as it would go. To the top of the dome, the inescapable dome. From there he looked up, up through his dwindling number of eyes and saw a face looking down at him from the door of the helicopter.
It was a black feline face surrounded by writhing serpents.
The gas rose, and Vector’s bits died.
He switched frantically between views, like a desperate TV watcher whose cable has gone out, looking for active eyes, and finding fewer and fewer and fewer.
No! No! It doesn’t end like this!
In the end he had only a handful left, just four. Four out of his millions. Four insects whose eyes were on leaves and homes . . . outside the dome.
He was not dead but . . . but his mind was . . . he could not quite . . .
Shrinking, that’s what it was like. Like shrinking, smaller and smaller. Like he was a house and someone was walking through that house systematically turning off lights, so that room by room he went dark.
His focus wavered and fragmented, thoughts becoming random, irrational. He should . . . he could . . . He was . . . Lights going out . . . Confusion . . .
I am Vector . . . I am Markovic!
I know who I . . .
Somewhere a voice was shouting.
De-morph, de-morph, over and over again.
