by David Liss
“We don’t have to,” I said. “Look, some humans are going to see you, but they already know the planet has been invaded, so they’ll figure you’re just some other kind of invader. They’re not going to look at you and think, ‘I bet that’s some outlaw kid who’s been working against the Phands! I’d better go report this!’ ”
“He’s right,” Tamret said gruffly. She didn’t sound like herself, but at least she was weighing in. “If this isn’t a stealth operation, then we need to go in and get it done as quickly as possible.”
“Why isn’t this a stealth operation?” Villainic asked, clearly irritated that we weren’t doing things his way. “Is there some reason you could not have rescued us under cover of night? Does this planet even have a night?”
“Yes, Villainic.” I sighed. “Earth has a night. It gets dark and everything. Unfortunately, our timetable got pushed ahead.”
“Zeke started a fight with a bully,” Mi Sun said.
“You really must learn to control your temper,” Dr. Roop told me.
I was not going to get into this. “Look, stuff happens. You can’t always control every little detail. What I can control is how awesome we all are. So let’s go steal a ship and get away from this planet, since that’s the only way we’re going to be able to liberate it.”
“So we simply rush ahead, guns blazing?” Villainic demanded. “That sounds like madness!”
“In the absence of Nayana,” Charles observed, “the role of C-3PO will be played by Villainic.”
“Totally,” I agreed. I then sent everyone the data I’d been collecting this whole time. I had tactical layouts of every Phandic position in the park, including military personnel, weapons, and vehicles. “Upload the file into your HUD. All the hostiles we’ll encounter are tagged as glowing red, like in a video game. Our sensors are monitoring their movements, which means we’ll know where they are at all times. We can keep track of every unmanned weapon, barrier, and obstacle, so this should be simple. We raise our personal shields, we go in blasting nonlethal power, and we get out of here. It’s kind of brash, sure, but if anyone has a better idea, then I’m open to suggestions.”
Charles was busy examining the data on his HUD. “This is amazing, Zeke. How did you figure out how to do this? I haven’t had nearly so much success in discovering the specifics of our new abilities.”
I shrugged. “You learn by trying. I hoped there would be stuff like this, so I searched until I found what I thought would work.”
Mi Sun nodded. “Okay, I’m impressed. I hate to say anything nice about you, given how bossy you’re being, but you nailed this.”
I felt myself relax a little. It was good to have everyone on the same side. “We are so used to being outnumbered and outgunned, to always being behind the curve, that we keep thinking like we’re the underdogs. But we’re not underdogs anymore. We’re the overdogs, so let’s go mess with an empire.”
I thought it was a pretty good speech, so I yanked open the side panel of the van and stepped onto the street.
• • •
We made pretty much exactly the sort of splash you would expect. People stared and pointed. There was some screaming. A child pulled on his father’s hand and said he wanted to hug Dr. Roop. We ignored it all and entered the park feeling good about our chances.
That said, I knew things were about to get complicated. The area was too large to dampen all communications without creating some kind of major alert, so there was nothing to do about people snapping photos of us. I figured it would be maybe thirty seconds before our images started showing up on Twitter and Instagram, which meant that any Phands monitoring human communication networks would know we were on the planet. At the very least, they would know unauthorized aliens were on the loose and moving toward their spaceships. The danger dial had just been cranked all the way up.
We entered the park and my HUD showed three Phands patrolling about a hundred feet ahead of us. Steve, Tamret, and I snuck quietly ahead, and we each zapped one of them. Easy enough, but I’d done my homework and knew that Phand soldiers’ status aura would report if they lost consciousness. Their movements were also probably being monitored by some sort of security system, so if three guys suddenly fell asleep, someone was going to notice. Alice and Mi Sun were in charge of tweaking the nanites in their auras to give false readings. Once we knocked them out, the soldiers would continue to register as conscious and mobile indefinitely. At some point, a clever monitoring program would notice that they seemed to be walking in the exact same pattern at the exact same pace over and over again, but I hoped to be very far away before any red flags went up.
We steadily worked our way into the interior of the park. We would advance about a hundred feet, take down Phandic patrols, and alter their status so that no one would know we were there. Then we would do it again. It was slow and methodical work, but it felt familiar, like clearing a level in a video game, and it meant that we were, piece by piece, eliminating all resistance. I wanted to have a little breathing room when we picked the ship we were going to steal. Ideally, we’d want something with long-range capability and strong offensive and solid defensive structures, but also a ship that could be operated with the smallest possible number of beings. There weren’t enough of us to handle one of the larger ships.
After exactly fourteen minutes and thirty-four seconds, according to my HUD, we’d cleared the outer perimeter, and we were ready to move into the main landing area. Seven ships sat on the field, and now there were only four guards remaining. From what I’d been able to binge-learn about Phandic operating procedures, several of the patrols would already be a few minutes overdue, and the remaining guards would soon start getting worried. We needed to move.
The whole time, Steve had been accessing a Phandic database for information on all the ships, and now he gestured toward a saucer-shaped long-range shuttle. “That one’s probably our best bet.”
I nodded and messaged the others that it was time to move in. The four of us—me, Steve, Tamret, and Mi Sun—took down the guards almost simultaneously. While Dr. Roop and Villainic held back, Charles and Alice were working to tweak their auras and keep what we’d done from showing up on anyone’s monitor. Phandic occupation forces had way more security checks and protocols than anything we’d seen back on the prison world where we’d rescued my dad, and it would be better not to face them. I wanted to be on that ship and heading away from the planet in five minutes or less.
It had been a long day, and we’d accomplished some incredible things, but it had all been so easy. I can’t even say I walked toward our ship. I strutted. I felt equal to anything, and not only was I not afraid of what the Phands might throw at us, but I was looking forward to it.
And then, as we approached our ship, they threw some stuff at us, and I actually didn’t like it all that much.
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
Fire, explosions, sulfuric-acid mists, the ground crackling with electricity: These are sure signs that someone does not want you around.
A lot can go through your mind in a fraction of a second, and a lot went through mine. The Phands had figured out we were trying to steal one of their ships, and they’d worked out we were not your typical troublemakers. You don’t lead with acid mist for a few teens with cans of spray paint.
I couldn’t be too surprised. It seemed likely that Nora Price had informed her security forces about our rescue, and they had figured out—not too hard, when you think about it—that we would be interested in stealing a ship. Now they were taking no chances on letting us get away. They might not have known exactly what we had and what we were capable of, but they knew we were skilled and dangerous. That would explain why they decided to front-load the lethal attacks. I guess they figured we could handle it, but the assaults would knock us back long enough for us to be captured. Either that or they didn’t want us captured and were perfectly content to kill us.
Here’s another thing that went through my hea
d: Protect my friends. With the exception of Villainic, everyone there had the same abilities I did, and I knew they could take care of themselves, but we’d each explored our new upgrades in our own way, and I couldn’t be sure what the others did or didn’t know. I couldn’t depend on their being able to defend themselves against everything the Phands were throwing at us. The instant my security systems warned me about the first micro change in temperature, the first molecules of toxin in the air, I went on high alert, and time slowed down.
I’m not saying that time seemed to slow down. It wasn’t like how you have a whole bunch of thoughts that run through your head in a split second of crisis. I’m not talking about my reflexes growing sharp while adrenaline kicked in—though there was plenty of that as well. No, this was some kind of defensive protocol I didn’t know existed, which caused my senses and reflexes to speed up while creating the illusion that the world around me was moving at about one-eighth normal speed. My best guess was that sometimes the upgrades suggested solutions to problems even when I wasn’t looking for them. Maybe it was like how Steve had known how to reverse a tunnel back when we’d stumbled on all those Phand ships. I hadn’t been searching for a skill to use, but one had popped up on my HUD, and I ran with it.
It was like being in The Matrix. I looked up and saw that two small Phandic assault saucers had spun in from out of nowhere, but I took in every detail from the pitting on their hulls to their wobbly movements as they flew. Paratroopers were leaping out. Light flashed from weapons fire. I instantly activated a defensive bubble around all of us. My HUD was advising I go with a sphere, not a dome, and I wasn’t about to argue. I wanted to kiss my HUD, because I watched as the ground around us sizzled with electricity even as fire and acid rained down and small, intense explosions pocked the ground around us.
Alice and Charles had also set up defensive spheres, but better too much protection from acid than too little. I immediately sent out a message. I wanted the two of them to continue to shield us, and I’d put everyone else on offense. I directed Steve and Tamret to focus on the attacking saucers. Dr. Roop and Mi Sun began to pick off individual fighters.
They came looking to squash us like bugs, but they weren’t prepared for the bugs being unsquashable. Obviously they knew we had upgrades, but they had no idea of the extent of our abilities. They probably thought they were coming in with overkill, but other than almost catching us by surprise, they had nothing we couldn’t handle. They’d had one chance—to hit us before we detected them—but our tech made even that impossible.
The sense of slow motion made everything easy. While I sent individual paratroopers reeling into unconsciousness I was aware of Steve and Tamret, summoning spheres of plasma energy out of the ether and lobbing them at the incoming attack saucers. They seemed to be using a targeting feature, because I saw one of Tamret’s energy spheres hit an engine exhaust directly. Hot metallic chunks of the saucer were ripped away, and the vessel began to spin wildly toward the ground. Another saucer looked like it had been struck by an enormous baseball bat, and it went twirling toward the cosmic fences. My enhanced perception picked up the splash of it landing in the Hudson River.
All the paratroopers were unconscious before they hit the ground. They lay motionless in their protective suits while the fire, acid, and electricity dissipated. We stood silently in our bubble as the flow of time returned to normal, but I felt anything but ordinary. Excitement seemed to tingle across my skin. They’d found us and they’d hit us hard, and we hadn’t taken a scratch.
We remained motionless and silent for more than a minute, until our environmental sensors told us it was safe to shut down the protective bubble. Then, with nothing else to slow us down, we began to hurry toward the ship we’d selected. I’d not gone ten feet before I saw something streaking across the sky toward us. At first I thought it was a missile, that they were looking to take us out with a massive explosion, and I directed my sensor tech to lock onto it.
It wasn’t a missile, though. It was a single-person vehicle—a sort of militaristic hoverboard like the Green Goblin used in the old Spider-Man comics. The being who rode it, however, wasn’t cackling or tossing novelty bombs. I didn’t know what it was doing, and I didn’t care. There was no way to knock the hoverboard out of the sky without killing the rider, and I didn’t want to do that. I also didn’t want to wait around for whoever it was to get closer and do what it intended to do.
“Let’s run,” I shouted, and we all took off toward the ship. We could have gone at superspeed and shaved thirty seconds off our time, but that would have meant leaving Villainic behind, and while I might have said I would be okay with that, actually doing it was another thing.
I held back, making sure the others got on board. Everyone but Villainic had reached the safety of the ship when my HUD warned me of a building energy wave from the hoverboard—it was heating up a weapon that required at least a few seconds before it was ready to fire. I raised a protective plasma shield behind us and grabbed Villainic, but my HUD flashed another warning. The countermeasures I had deployed were not going to be effective. The attacker was using a new kind of weapon, one designed to cut through plasma shields. We’d faced the prototype of this back on the Dependable, and the Phands had nearly destroyed us. This enemy was apparently using a portable model of the same weapon.
There were two things that concerned me. One was that the ship we’d chosen, or maybe even all the ships docked on the field, were going to be damaged to the point of being useless to us. The other was that we would get killed.
It was time to prioritize. I could slow things down to look for a solution, and if there was a countermeasure, I’d be able to find it in time. If a solution didn’t exist, we were cooked. I also knew that I could not send the entire group my message. If Tamret knew what I had in mind, she’d never go for it. She might even interfere with the others, wasting precious seconds. If there was one person I trusted to act in the best interests of all of us, without sentimentality, it was Mi Sun. I told her to get the ship out of the blast radius. I’d slow this attacker, but sticking together wasn’t going to do any of us any good if we didn’t have a way of getting off the planet. Our little infiltration trick had worked because no one had been expecting us. If we didn’t get away right now, the Phands were going to come at us again, and the next attack might destroy any chance we had of getting away with a ship.
Mi Sun acknowledged my transmission, and my temperature sensors registered our ship’s engines warming up. It took long minutes to set an interstellar tunnel course, but only a few seconds to get the conventional engines operational. I had to use that time to distract the Phand on the hoverboard.
The first thing I needed to do was find a way to interfere with the plasma-piercing energy blast that was soon going to be coming my way. With time slowed, I toggled through the simplified data my HUD provided. Back on the Dependable, Captain Qwlessl had had neither the time nor the resources to do what I could now do in a fraction of a second. She’d been too busy keeping her crew alive to try to develop countermeasures. Besides, it would have taken hours, maybe days, to figure out a work-around even if she’d had the analytical capabilities of the Former tech tree, and the Confederation didn’t have anything like it. I could figure out how their shield-piercing tech worked and select from a series of possible counters all in the blink of an eye.
The problem was that they were all possible counters. They all involved tinkering with various subatomic fields in the plasma, and they would all likely be effective to various degrees, but some would be more effective than others, and some would provide more protection to either organic or inorganic matter.
I had an instant to decide. Every part of me wanted to put up the strongest barrier to protect myself, but my friends were on that ship behind me, and that ship was the only way any of us were going to get off the planet. The window of opportunity for escape was closing fast.
I altered my shields to provide some protection for living b
eings, but more for the ship itself. I raised a wall between me and the upcoming blast, and I turned to shield Villainic. I saw the ship just beginning to move out of the way as I turned.
That’s when I saw Alice was no longer on the ship. She’d come to face the attacker. It seemed that since she had no intention of leaving the planet, she’d decided to back me up.
Her faraway expression told me that she was desperately scrolling through options on her own HUD. Maybe she was looking for a shielding solution that I’d overlooked. Whatever she was up to, she didn’t have the time. The blast wave hit us.
I felt myself turned around, my head slamming into Villainic’s stomach. This was pleasant for neither of us. Alice was knocked back onto the ground, driving a divot into the grass before I lost sight of her in my own wild, painful tumble with Villainic.
And then, almost without my even trying, my tech helped me right myself. I was on my feet and turning to face the being on the hoverboard. In that instant, I realized I knew him.
It was Ardov, and now—like the Green Goblin—he was laughing.
• • •
All around me was smoke and heat and scorched grass. Hovering twenty feet above it was Ardov, looking triumphant.
How many times was this guy going to show up at an inconvenient moment? A Rarel, from the same planet as Tamret and Villainic, he had the good looks of a guy from a cat-alien boy band and the smug attitude of a thug who believed he was untouchable. He’d tormented us during our first visit to Confederation Central, but back then he’d been little more than a particularly tough and nasty bully. When we returned to the station, he’d become Junup’s henchman, ready to follow any orders, including killing us. Fortunately, we’d been able to prevent that, but I still felt like we owed him some payback.
“You’ve learned a few new tricks,” Ardov said. “Something you picked up at the Hidden Fortress?”