"We do have a decent window of time," the Other Hardie said. "I can have my handler dispatch a team of double-hard b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out to protect your family as soon as we make contact."

"No. Think of something else."

"There is nothing else. This is the plan. This is what I've been training for."

"Goody for you. We're not doing that. You can just climb back into your fake-food drone there and go back the way you came."

The Other Him just stared at him. Even Hardie knew that was ridiculous. The food drones were one-way delivery vehicles. Once the food was loaded onto the craft, Hardie pushed a b.u.t.ton and the food drone (containing his own personal waste products) was jettisoned back into orbit, joining the billions of other pieces of s.p.a.ce junk floating around up here.

There was no way out for the Other Him. Not until three months from now, when a promised private s.p.a.ce cruiser would dock with the satellite and bring him back home-presumably replacing him with another mook they'd blackmailed into freaky indentured servitude.

"There's no way out for either of us, Charlie," the Other Him said. "You realize this, right? What did they promise you-a year in s.p.a.ce, and all would be forgiven?"

Hardie said nothing. That was exactly what they'd promised.

"Uh-uh," the Other Him said. "They're not going to let you go. You're up here for good ... until you die. And they're kind of counting on you being the indestructible type. That's why you were chosen for this mission. You're Unkillable Chuck, the man who can't be killed."

"That's ridiculous. I can sure as h.e.l.l die."

"Of course. And they know you're not immortal. But they've learned things about you over the years, leading them to realize that if they needed someone to spend an infinite amount of time in this...o...b..ting tin can, that person should be you. Let's say there's a precious jewel at the bottom of a seriously deep lake. Who do you send to the bottom to retrieve it? The person who can hold his breath the longest. For all intents and purposes, out here in s.p.a.ce? That's you."

"What are you talking about? There's nothing special about me. I have the worst f.u.c.king luck of anyone I know. That's about it."

The Other Him grinned. "You really don't know, do you."

"Know what?"

"We don't have time for this. C'mon up and I'll figure a way to strap us both in so we won't both get killed upon im-"

But the Other Him never finished the thought.

Hardie had been in these moments before-these supposedly do-or-die situations.

About a year ago he'd been in such a situation. He'd had a loaded gun in the mouth of one of his primary tormentors, some really smug b.i.t.c.h named Abrams who'd basically sentenced him to rot in a secret prison forever. He could have pulled the trigger. Do or die.

But he didn't.

Instead he found himself up here, in this satellite with a duplicate of himself, informing him what a fool he'd been to believe them, that he was basically sentenced to rot up here forever instead of on earth, where at least he could have had a proper burial.

Each time, every time, when faced with a do-or-die decision ... Hardie always seemed to select the worst and most painful option possible.

His life, a series of bad decisions that led him to this, the worst predicament of all.

So no.

He wasn't going to do it anymore.

Hardie knew how this would play out. No matter what he said, this Other Him will try to take control of the satellite and crash it into the ocean or some such s.h.i.t, promptly sentencing his family to death.

So for once in his life, Hardie decided to preempt the bulls.h.i.t.

While the Other Him was busy talking about strapping the two of them in and not dying on impact, Hardie reached up, grabbed a fistful of fabric s.p.a.cesuit, and yanked him with all of his might back down into the tube. The Other Him never saw it coming.

Hardie guessed that sometimes you really could outthink yourself, couldn't you?

The Other Him's body bounced once, twice ... and then a third time at the bottom of the tube, near the food delivery hatch. The thumps sounded painful, and upon each impact the Other Him let out a strangled cry that sounded strange, because that was essentially Hardie's own strangled cry. But Hardie didn't give a s.h.i.t. He scrambled back up into the control room proper and closed the hatch behind him. Engaged the locks. The Other Him was screaming something down there, but you know what? Too bad.

His body aching from all of the physical activity, Hardie slowly made his way to the main controls and sat down. He just needed a quiet moment to think through his next move.

On the monitor, he could see the Other Him, now standing again, and pounding his fist on the side of the tube, screaming something.

Hardie flicked off the image. Let him cool his heels down there for a while. He should be thankful he didn't machine-gun his a.s.s out the airlock.

The audio receiver was still engaged, and Hardie could hear the anguished protests of the Other Him.

"It's too late! You don't understand! It's too late!"

Hardie stabbed a b.u.t.ton with his finger. "Nope. You're too late."

For once, Hardie thought, he'd pushed back. Show those evil, sneaky, let's-control-the-world b.a.s.t.a.r.ds he was a guy who couldn't be messed with.

s.h.i.t. It was almost a new lease on life.

But then Hardie glanced over at the rows of sensors and controls. Lights he had never seen before were blinking urgently. Stern little warning tones were going bonkers, like a GPS unit that believed you were about to drive into a superhighway column. He'd never seen the s.p.a.cecraft do anything like this before.

Sabotage, Hardie thought. d.a.m.n it, the lookalike p.r.i.c.k had sabotaged him! Hardie wondered if he should try to report this to someone, but of course communication only worked in one direction. They could talk to him; he couldn't say jack s.h.i.t to them.

And his pre-launch question-and-answer session hadn't covered this contingency. Okay, let's just say I'm really soft-brained after all of those months in orbit, and I, you know, kinda accidentally let someone board the craft who looks just like me, even though you told me not to do that, under any circ.u.mstances, no matter who it may be, including my dead grandmother, John Lennon, or Mahatma Gandhi ... but I do, and then this guy makes the craft go all haywire ... um, what do I do then?

Meanwhile Hardie began to become aware of a m.u.f.fled sound. Words. A specific pattern being repeated over and over again. It was faint, but that was only because it was coming from the sealed gun tube.

You, Hardie thought. What in the blue blazes do you want?

That the murmuring was the same string of repeated words led Hardie to believe that his double had something specific to share and wasn't just telling him how he was going to rip off his head if he ever got out of the gun tube alive.

What else could he do? Information was power, after all. Hardie went over to the control panel near the tube and stabbed the audio b.u.t.ton with a finger.

The message came screaming through the speaker: "-our reentry sequence!"

A pause, then the full message again: "I've already started our reentry sequence!"

Oh.

f.u.c.k.

Me.

Hard.

9.

Do you know how they say "f.u.c.k You" in this business? "Trust me."

-Liam Neeson, The Dead Pool.

THIS IS NOT going at all how you planned. Or how your handlers planned. Who can plan for a force of living mayhem like Charles D. Hardie? You might as well try to plan for earthquakes or spontaneous combustion.

Making things worse-at least in your own head-is the knowledge that you are the world's leading expert on all things Charlie Hardie, since you look just like him and have studied him so intensely. You should have called this sequence of events, right?

And now you are inside a steel tube that very soon will eject itself from the main s.p.a.cecraft and you will tumble to your death. Fortunately, you'll most likely pa.s.s out from the intense heat as the tube starts to smash into the earth's atmosphere. Just like falling asleep in a tanning booth, you tell yourself.

This doesn't help.

So instead you do the only thing you can: try to appeal to Charlie Hardie's compa.s.sionate side.

The man has one. You've studied it. You've seen it in real life. On the run from the LAPD, Charlie Hardie risked everything to double back and go into a fire to save a family of four-TV star Jonathan Hunter, his wife, his son, his daughter. Risked everything-saved them, too-only to get his a.s.s shot. He nearly drowned, and was abducted and drugged and put in a trunk and sent to a secret prison in the middle of nowhere and ...

Well, suffice it to say that he knows all about risking everything to help total strangers.

You need him to feel the same compa.s.sion now. Granted, Jonathan Hunter didn't beat the living s.h.i.t out of him inside a steel tube floating in s.p.a.ce. Okay, so maybe compa.s.sion was a bit much to expect.

Brains, though ... Charlie Hardie was smarter than he looked. And even a man with a low-wattage intellect had to appreciate that killing you wouldn't do a thing to save the Hardie family ...

Killing his clone wouldn't do a thing to help his family.

If he sabotaged the craft, maybe he could be forced to unsabotage it.

Hardie yanked open the hatch, mashing the knuckles of his right hand in the process. Gah, c.r.a.p, h.e.l.l. The pain centers of his entire arm lit up. As if he didn't have enough to deal with. He grabbed one of the machine-gun triggers with his left hand, then looked down at his duplicate. The Other Him was bracing himself against the sides of the tube with his arms and legs.

"What did you do to the satellite?" Hardie asked.

"I've already done it. I've initiated the reentry sequence. We're going down."

"What ...? Why? Why in the holy f.u.c.k would you do something like that?"

"I'm not going to lie to you," the Other Him said. "This has always been part of the plan, with or without your cooperation."

"Not going to lie to ... I'll seriously kill your a.s.s dead if you don't tell me how to stop it. And none of this let-me-back-up-into-the-main-craft s.h.i.t. You tell me from there, and you tell me right now. If you don't, I'm going to squeeze these triggers and spray you into little tiny chunks. I'll make it hurt, too."

"Well, then, go ahead and shoot, because it's too late. I couldn't stop the reentry sequence if I was Stephen J. Hawking. We've already been b.u.mped out of our orbit. And unless you let me out of this tube, I'm going to be jettisoned and die."

"I'm not worried so much about you dying. I'm worried about stopping this satellite from crashing into the earth."

"Listen to me," the Other Hardie said. "The satellite will not crash. It is designed for reuse. It will deploy parachutes to slow its descent. It will gently splash down off the coast of California. It has redundancies and backup systems, GPS and iridium locator beacons. This is what it was designed to do. Get recovered."

"You sure about that?"

"Absolutely. We did our homework. But that recovery just applies to the capsule portion. In a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, this gateway tube is going to be blasted away, and I'm going to die, and you will, too, because you have the hatch door still open. And then your family's going to die, and this whole saga is going to have a very, very sad ending."

"Or I could just close the hatch, shoot your a.s.s dead, and take my chances."

The Other Hardie narrowed his eyes. "It'd be the dumbest move of your life."

Hardie thought about it. "No. I don't think so."

Then he slammed the hatch shut. Just before it clanged shut he heard the enraged screams of his double. Hardie did not give a s.h.i.t. Over the past decade he'd made a series of dumb moves. Leading the Albanian mob straight to his partner and his family. Not believing Lane Madden soon enough when she told him there were people trying to kill her. Not pulling the trigger when the gun was inside that evil lady's mouth. Hardie decided he was out of the dumb-move business.

He would pull the trigger now.

Do it, do it, don't hesitate. Hesitation gets you killed.

Hardie wrapped his hands around the dual triggers and squeezed.

And there was nothing but a faint double klik klik sound.

Hardie knew there was no sound in s.p.a.ce-that the booming explosions in Star Wars were bulls.h.i.t. But he should have heard the guns echo through that tube, right? What the h.e.l.l was going on? Hardie pushed the audio b.u.t.ton with one hand and the triggers with the other. Again, a dull klik.

Over the tiny speaker: "I've disabled the machine guns, too, dumba.s.s. Now, are you going to let me up so we can survive this thing? Or are you going to let both of us die?"

Hardie supposed he was still very much in the dumb-move business.

The Cabal's super-secret spy satellite continued its descent toward the surface of the earth.

10.

f.u.c.k you, s.p.a.ceman.

-Dolph Lundgren, I Come in Peace.

OF COURSE THERE was a debate over who should be strapped into the reentry gear. Hardie's double pled his case quickly: He was the one who knew how to signal his handlers for help once they splashed down. He was stronger and fitter and could tow Charlie Hardie to safety in the event of an emergency water evacuation. He could revive Hardie in case he was knocked unconscious due to the excessive g-forces. He could also defend them in case a Cabal recovery ship found them first.

"Wait, wait, wait," Hardie said. "Water evacuation? Knocked unconscious? What happened to all of that s.h.i.t about a gentle splashdown?"