"You heard me, bitch."
Nolan looked at him.
"And before anything else." Rico crossed his arms. "I know you've been watching me. The whole time. It's kind of hard to relax when there's a goddamn alien with the second biggest Ki signature on the planet staring at you from twenty kilometers up." He tilted his head. "Get a hobby. Is there no Spider-Man in this reality or something?"
Nolan said nothing.
The silence between them had the specific quality of something being measured.
"Okay." Rico's voice shifted. Not louder. Something more precise. "I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while. Genuinely. Big guy, serious face, clearly carrying something heavy — I get it, not everyone's a people person." He looked at Nolan. "But today. Today you sat up here and watched those people die and didn't move. And I want you to understand something about my eyesight."
He let that sit for a second.
"It's stupid good. I could see your face from two hundred feet up." He paused. "You were looking at them like they were ants."
Nolan said nothing. His expression gave nothing. He had the specific stillness of someone who had decided that stillness was the correct response and was committed to it.
"So." Rico put a hand to his chin. "Let me think about this. Government experiment. Ancient deity who woke up and decided to cosplay as a hero." He tapped his chin once. "Or you were sent here by a warrior alien race to conquer the planet and enslave everybody."
Something crossed Nolan's face.
Small. A fraction of a second. Gone.
But there.
"AH HA."
Rico pointed at him.
"Warrior alien race. Genuinely. I have to say — extremely cliché. Very done-before. In my universe we had a whole species that—"
Nolan moved.
No warning, no shift in posture, no tell. Just — gone from where he was, across the distance between them in no measurable time, both hands driving into Rico's face with everything he had. The force behind it was the kind that ended things. Had ended things, many times, on many worlds.
The shockwave expanded outward in a perfect sphere. Every satellite within seven hundred kilometers stopped being a satellite. The flash reached Earth's surface as a pulse that knocked out power grids across three continents for eleven seconds and left Cecil Stedman staring at a blank display with an expression that was doing a great deal of quiet work.
Rico had not moved.
His feet were exactly where they'd been. His head hadn't turned. Nolan's fist was against his face and Rico was looking at him over it with the mild expression of someone who had been handed the wrong order at a drive-through.
"Hm," Rico said. "Cute."
He raised his hand.
"My turn."
---
Nolan left the space around Earth at a fraction of the speed of light. He hit a satellite and the satellite became a debris field.
He kept going.
He hit an asteroid and the asteroid became the asteroid belt's new contribution. He kept going.
Past the orbit of Mars. Through the belt. Past Jupiter. The moons of Saturn growing from points to spheres as he decelerated involuntarily against the gravity of the largest planet in the solar system, and then Titan was coming up fast and he hit its surface with both arms forward and left a crater the size of a city in the ice and rock.
The dust settled slowly in the low gravity.
Nolan lay in the crater for a moment.
Then pushed himself up.
Coughed blood onto the orange surface of Titan.
His left eardrum was gone. The world had a specific tilt to it that would pass, eventually, but wasn't passing yet.
He planted one foot. Then the other. Got upright through the specific stubbornness of someone who had decided not to stay down.
He looked up.
Rico came through Titan's atmosphere like it wasn't there and landed twenty feet away with the easy finality of someone arriving somewhere they'd already planned to be.
He looked at the crater.
Looked at Nolan.
"I'll be honest," he said. "Even I'm a little impressed by that one.Holy Bitch-Slap. Jesus Christ."
Nolan looked at him.
Said nothing. His balance was compromised. His left side was ringing with the specific silence of a damaged ear recalibrating. He ran the numbers with what was available to him — the impact, the distance, the fact that his arm still worked and his spine was intact only because whatever had hit him had been calibrated, had chosen how much force to use — and arrived at a number he didn't like.
This thing is as strong as Thragg.
Maybe stronger.
"So," Rico said, sitting down on a rock with the ease of someone settling in for a conversation. "Reflecting on your life choices?"
Nolan straightened. Found his balance. Set his jaw.
"Do it," he said.
"Do what?"
"Kill me." Even. Certain. "You know what I am. You know what my mission is. I've been compromised." He held Rico's eyes. "You're stronger than me. Kill me and be done with it."
He meant it. No calculation behind it, no play. Just a man who had run the logic to its conclusion and was presenting it clearly.
Somewhere in the back of his mind — not acknowledged, not examined — the weight of two specific people. The specific shape of a life he had built here that was supposed to be temporary and had become something he didn't have a category for.
He buried it.
Rico looked at him for a long moment.
"...No," he said.
Nolan stared at him.
"What."
"No." Rico leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You haven't actually done anything yet. You watched some people die from a distance, which — I have thoughts about that, significant thoughts — but it's not a capital offense." He tilted his head. "I don't kill without a reason. That's not how I work."
Nolan looked at him.
The model he'd been running since the White House — the threat assessment, the contingency, the careful architecture of how to handle this variable — had just been handed information it didn't know what to do with.
"Warrior race," Rico said. "Viltrumite, right? You're like a Sayajin."
"I don't know that word."
"You wouldn't. Different universe." Rico picked up a rock from the crater floor and turned it over in his hand. "Planet Vegeta. Warrior species. Strong. Built for combat. Made their living conquering planets and selling them to the highest bidder."
Nolan absorbed this. When he spoke, his voice had a particular precision to it.
"We are nothing like that," he said. "The Viltrum Empire does not conquer planets to sell them to other species." A beat. "That would be a very small ambition."
Rico looked up from the rock.
"Interesting word. Small." He set the rock down. "Because the king of the Sayajins — Vegeta — was strong enough to destroy a planet with one hand. And a species with that kind of power available to them spent their time flipping conquered worlds for alien buyers." He paused. "Which, you have to admit, is a pretty limited vision. With that ceiling, you could take the whole galaxy. Why stop at real estate?"
Nolan said nothing.
But something behind his eyes was moving. A thought arriving that he was watching arrive and could not stop.
"Unless," Rico said.
He waited.
The thought finished arriving.
"Unless they weren't the top of the food chain," Nolan said. Quietly. Almost to himself. "Unless there was something else out there that made planet-selling a reasonable limit to operate within."
Rico looked at him.
Said nothing.
"What were they," Nolan said. "The ones above them."
And there it was — the real question, the one underneath everything, delivered without the armor of the previous ones. Not tactical. Not calculated. The specific vulnerability of someone who had just understood that the universe they thought they knew had a ceiling they hadn't seen yet.
Rico's Ki rose.
Slowly. Then with gathering purpose.
Titan noticed.
The ground began to tremble — not the sharp impact of force applied from outside, but the deep structural shudder of a world reacting to something that had no business being present on it. Volcanoes that had been dormant for geological ages vented simultaneously on the horizon. The methane lakes on the surface began to bubble, their orange-brown surfaces disturbed by something moving through the moon's interior like a sound too large for the rock to hold. The sky darkened at the edges. Eruptions flickered in every direction.
Nolan looked around.
At the eruptions. At the bubbling lakes. At the ground deciding whether it wanted to remain in one piece. Then at Rico, sitting on his rock in the center of all of it, looking back at him with a smile that had several things in it at once.
Nolan's fists closed.
*Fight or die.* The only calculus that had ever mattered. The only one that had never been wrong.
He looked at Rico's face.
His fists opened.
He swallowed.
"What happened to the Sayajins," he said.
The ground stopped shaking.
The volcanoes went quiet. The lakes flattened. The eruptions on the horizon winked out one by one until the sky was just orange and still and very far from anything.
The smile on Rico's face changed.
Lost the layers. Became something simpler — genuine, easy, the relaxed smile of someone sharing a punchline they've been sitting on for a while and are genuinely happy to finally deliver.
"They got wiped out," he said. Cheerfully. Warmly, almost. "Every last one. Well — almost. A handful made it. But the species that did it didn't really consider them a serious problem." He tilted his head pleasantly. "More of an administrative decision, honestly."
Silence.
Titan's thin wind moved across the crater between them.
Nolan sat with that for a moment.
"What were they," he said. "The ones that did it."
Rico looked at him.
Then looked up at the sky above Titan. At the stars visible through the orange haze. At the particular direction that, in his universe, had contained a certain planet with a certain emperor.
"You don't want to know," he said.
Not ominously. Just honestly.
"Anyway." He looked back at Nolan. "How's the eardrum? That's going to take a minute."