Shrinking the Showdown: Sarah's Quest for Imperfect Justice

The ship's alarms screamed through the cockpit, echoing across the heaving surface of the planet's crimson oceans. Sarah pressed on the thruster controls, sending their vessel soaring across the waves in a momentary burst of propulsion.

"You're not going to make it!" Kevin shouted over the noise of the engines, as they reached a safe distance from the island where they had landed. The rocky ground of the island was slowly being swallowed by the ocean... and in seconds, would be covered by a layer of water that was hundreds of feet deep.

Sarah slammed her fist against the dashboard, watching in frustration as their target disappeared beneath the waves. "I've never missed before," Sarah replied angrily.

They floated silently for a few moments, watching as thousands of tiny bubbles rose to the surface. "Well," Kevin said calmly, "I guess we'll have to settle for Plan B." He turned around in his seat and pulled out a small black box from his pack.

Sarah looked up from her console. "Plan B? What plan are you talking about?" She opened her mouth to continue when she felt something hit her in the side of her head; it was small and hard, and it tumbled down her body and onto the floor with a clatter. She glanced at it - it was one of their robotic crabs.

"Plan B? How could you possibly have a Plan B?"

Kevin raised an eyebrow at her. "We were just on an island with a nanite reactor that could destroy entire species in an instant. I assume you're not entirely stupid, so why don't you figure it out?" He flipped open his control panel and began tapping away at it madly with his fingers, then paused and looked up at her with a grin on his face that was almost too large for his thin face to support.

She had an idea - but she didn't want him to know that she knew what he'd done. "Oh," she said casually, "I suppose you might have gotten lucky." She flipped open her own control panel and began typing furiously into it while looking out over their surroundings with one eye. She kept an ear trained on Kevin's hasty typing - she hadn't heard any explosions yet.

"Lucky!" he said scornfully as he continued adding inputs into his console. In front of him floated three holographic projections - two showed someone sitting down, but one showed them lying down instead. "I'm eight hundred years old this year! Do you think I haven't learned how to cheat death by now?" He snorted derisively and leaned back in his chair with an air of satisfaction, folding his arms behind his head as if waiting for Sarah to give up and give in to defeat.

The alarms blaring through their ship had finally stopped, but Sarah still couldn't hear anything over all the blood rushing through her ears; she tightened her grip on her console until her knuckles went white and stared straight ahead at nothing in particular while she processed what was going on around here.

The rest of their crew had survived - but only because they'd fled their own ship just before it exploded into a ball of flames when they'd dropped out of warp space right next to Kevin's island fortress (wherever that was). A number of them had lost limbs or suffered burns - including herself - but luckily for them all, most injuries were minor enough that they could be repaired easily once they got back home (assuming there still was one). Most importantly, though... how could Kevin be eight hundred years old? It wasn't possible! No human would survive that long! And anyway... how did he survive? They hadn't seen any colonists on that island! And where did all those robots come from? And who was this mysterious woman they saw standing beside him? And why did he need such advanced tech to build himself a beach house!? None of this made sense!