‘This control room is a nerve center, John,’ Adam explains, taking a moment away from typing to
gesture around. ‘Information from all the other bases feeds to here. It is just a matter of accessing it.’
‘Accessing it how?’
‘Hunting the Loric for so many years has made my people paranoid to ever miss a potential lead.
Every operation is recorded. There’s surveillance everywhere.’ Adam strikes a key with a triumphant
flair. ‘Even aboard our own ships.’
The monitors above flicker briefly and then display grainy footage of a runway in the middle of a
swamp.
‘If the Garde are nearby, we might be able to see them,’ Adam explains.
‘If they’re not invisible,’ I say, squinting at the monitor.
Beneath the camera, a handful of Mogadorians look frustrated as they yank engine parts from the
scout ship’s hull. They clean these parts, reattach them and, when nothing happens, start taking apart something else.
‘What’re they doing?’ Sam asks.
‘Trying to fix what I’ve done,’ Adam replies excitedly, seeming pleased that he’s outsmarted his
people. ‘They assume engine failure, not automated systems override. It will take them a while to
catch on.’
Another Mogadorian, this one wearing an impressive-looking uniform similar to the General’s,
approaches them. He yells at the mechanics, then walks offscreen in a huff.
‘Does the camera move?’ I ask.
‘Of course.’
Adam hits a button and the camera begins to scan to the side, following the dressed-up
Mogadorian. At first, there isn’t much to see except pavement and, in the distance, some swampland.
However, after a short walk, the dressed-up Mogadorian disappears into an airplane hangar.
‘Do you think they’re in there?’ I ask.
‘This camera should be equipped with heat vision, if I can figure out how to access it,’ Adam
replies, tentatively tapping a few of the keys in front of him.
Before Adam can figure it out, Five walks through the hangar doors. Even though I’d guessed he
was a traitor from Ella’s vision, I’d been holding on to a foolish hope that it wasn’t true. Or, dark as it might seem, that Five was the one killed in battle. But there he is, in a rumpled Mogadorian
uniform, and with a bandage covering his right eye.
I can hear Sam suck in a breath; he’s stunned. The only part of my visions that I hadn’t told anyone
about was seeing Five, not wanting to smear his name if I was wrong.
‘He’s …’ Sam shakes his head. ‘That son of a bitch traitor. It must’ve been him who told the Mogs
about Chicago.’
‘One of your own,’ Adam says quietly. ‘That is unexpected.’
I have to look away from Five’s image before my blood boils. ‘You didn’t know about this?’ I ask
Adam through clenched teeth.
‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I would’ve told you. Setrákus Ra himself must have been keeping
him a secret.’
I force myself to look back at the screen. I keep calm, studying my new enemy. His slumped
shoulders, his freshly shaved head, the dark look in his remaining eye. What could have brought one
of our own to such a terrible place?
‘I knew there was something off about that jerk,’ Sam says, pacing now. ‘John, man, what are we
going to do about him?’
I don’t reply, mainly because the only solution I can think of at that moment, seeing Five in the
enemy’s uniform, is to kill him. ‘Where’s he going? Follow him,’ I tell Adam.
Adam does. The camera follows Five across the runway until he reaches a ramp that leads on to
the biggest spaceship I’ve ever seen, so massive that its entire bulk isn’t even picked up on camera.
‘Damn,’ I breathe, my eyes widening. ‘What the hell is that thing?’
‘Warship,’ Adam answers, a note of awe sneaking into his voice as he squints at the screen. ‘I
can’t tell which one.’
‘Which one?’ Sam exclaims. ‘How many of those things do they have?’
‘Dozens? Maybe more, maybe less. They run on the old fuel of Mogadore and whatever my people
managed to mine from Lorien. Not the most efficient things. And slow. When I got in trouble as a boy,
my mother would threaten to ground me until the fleet’s arrival …’ He realizes he’s rambling and
trails off, looking up at us. ‘You don’t care about this, do you?’
‘Maybe not the best time for reminiscing,’ I reply, watching as Five boards the ship. ‘But what else
can you tell us about the fleet?’
‘They’ve been traveling since the fall of Lorien,’ Adam continues. ‘Mog strategists believe they’ve
got enough firepower left for one last siege.’
‘Earth,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Adam replies. ‘Then, my people will settle here. Maybe rebuild the fleet if Setrákus Ra
finds a reason.’
‘You mean if there’s any life in the universe left for him to conquer,’ I say.
Sam shakes his head, still marveling at the hulking warship. ‘So they have a secret weakness, right?
Like how you can shoot that one spot on the Death Star and the whole thing blows up?’
Adam’s brow furrows. ‘What’s a Death Star?’
Sam throws up his hands. ‘We’re screwed.’
‘If they’ve been taken prisoner and are aboard that thing …’ I don’t finish the thought, mainly
because a course of action just isn’t coming to me. Taking over a mostly abandoned Mogadorian base
is one thing; finding a way aboard a massive warship is another entirely.
Especially when that massive warship is slowly rising into the sky. Maybe Sam’s right and we are
screwed.
The three of us watch in silence as the warship climbs. Before it’s entirely offscreen, the ship’s
carapace flickers and the whole thing disappears from view. Well, not entirely – the ship’s outline is still vaguely visible, as if the light around it is bending in strange ways. The distortion is almost like trying to focus on an object that’s underwater.
‘Cloaking,’ Adam says. ‘All of the warships have it.’
‘Hey, look at the tablet,’ Sam says. ‘Maybe everything isn’t totally depressing.’
As the now invisible warship floats upward, one of the dots on the tablet slowly pulls away from
the others. Five’s dot. After a few seconds, it begins to flicker erratically across the screen. We’ve now got two Garde indicators bouncing spastically over the map.
‘Just like Ella,’ Sam says, furrowing his brow.
‘The warship must be returning to orbit,’ Adam says. ‘Which means …’
‘Ella is already aboard one of those things,’ I finish the thought. ‘They brought her up to the fleet.’
‘How are we going to get up there?’ Sam asks.
‘We won’t have to,’ Adam responds. ‘The fleet will come to us.’
‘Oh, right,’ Sam says. ‘Worldwide invasion. So we’re planning to just wait for that?’
I tap my finger on the tablet, pointing out the three dots still in Florida. ‘The plan is to get the
others. They’re still there. We just have to –’ I stop myself when I look back at the screen. The
runway is starting to move. ‘I thought you disabled the ship. Why are they moving?’
With a hurried series of keystrokes, Adam cranes the camera down. From this angle, we can see
the crew of Mogadorians grimacing as they push the scout vessel manually towards the hangar.
‘I guess they gave up on getting it started,’ Sam observes.
One of the Mogs runs ahead to slide open the metal doors and there, caught out in the middle of the
empty hangar, are Nine, Marina and Six. Sam lets loose an excited shout that he cuts off quickly, the
harsh math sinking in, that there are three Garde where there should be four, and that Nine is carrying in his arms what is obviously a body bag.