by David Liss
“Thanks?” I offered tentatively. Why was Villainic, of all beings, making this pronouncement, like the decision was his?
“Several hundred years ago,” Villainic continued, “a culturally important Rarel city called Obvir was almost entirely destroyed in an earthquake. It shocked the entire world, and soon architects began creating buildings designed to survive such disasters. Were you to visit Rarel today—which I highly recommend, for it is a beautiful place—then you would see the effects of that earthquake in the designs of every large city. You can predict what cities will look like in a few hundred years, and you might possibly be correct. Yet, if a visitor in the past had attempted to predict the course of building design before the disaster of Obvir, those projections would have proved false, because a new factor changed everything.”
“He’s talking nonsense,” the colonel growled.
“No, he isn’t,” I said, looking curiously at Villainic. Inexplicably, he had nailed it. Here I was, arguing that I should participate in a rebellion to get rid of an alien occupation force from my world. A year ago, no one could have predicted that I would do anything like that, but events had changed me. Major events could change entire worlds, entire cultures.
“We don’t have the luxury of worrying about future generations,” the colonel explained. “A bad plan that works is better than a good plan that doesn’t. We have to pursue the lesser of two evils.”
“But the plan I’m talking about isn’t evil at all,” I said. “Isn’t that the side we want to be on?”
Colonel Rage looked away. The others—at least those with faces—appeared impatient. Convex Icosahedron inclined his head in my direction, which might have meant anything.
“Your emotions cannot defeat our logic,” Adiul-ip said. “I’m afraid we will proceed with the destruction of Confederation Central.”
“No,” said Convex Icosahedron. He was busy typing rapidly on a plasma keyboard he had summoned. “These beings have pointed out an error in our projections. We did not run all the numbers. We only calculated for political bodies, not individuals. We also failed to factor in how the example of the destruction of Confederation Central would alter future behavior.”
I blinked to mask my confusion. I couldn’t believe I was right—and that Villainic had convinced Convex Icosahedron that I was right—but mentioning this seemed like a bad idea.
“What does that mean?” Colonel Rage asked. “Are we going to scrap the winning plan because of the risk of collateral damage? People die. That’s a fact of war.”
Convex Icosahedron was still typing furiously. “I have always favored the course that produces the greatest possibility of peace. I believed the destruction of Confederation Central was that course, but I now see that such a course may very likely lead to more bloodshed.”
“You’re going to abandon a clear path to victory because of what some pimply kids tell you?” the colonel demanded.
There was the Colonel Rage I remembered—the guy who would pay any price, no matter how shameful, to complete his mission. He’d seemed reasonable before, when he was getting what he wanted, but now that things were turning in my direction, he was showing his true colors. Besides, my complexion happened to be clear at the moment. His insults were lies!
Adiul-ip looked at Colonel Rage. “We value your martial insights, but we cannot refute the data.”
“The data says that a bunch of kids can’t kick an invading army off a planet,” the colonel said.
“I believe these kids can,” Convex Icosahedron said. “If we aid them, I believe they have the skills and the motivation to do precisely what we need.” He then stopped typing and looked up at me. Or at least he positioned his head so as to suggest he was looking. “However, you will have to do something very dangerous if your plan has a likelihood of succeeding.”
“What else is new?” I asked.
“Give me an hour to prepare a briefing,” Convex Icosahedron said. “Then we will begin the final battle against the empress.”
The mood in the room had changed. The renegades in general looked confused. Colonel Rage chewed furiously on his lower lip. As for my friends, well, I don’t know that we had any idea how to process the information. We had convinced these guys not to destroy Confederation Central, but that meant we were going to do maybe the most dangerous thing we’d ever attempted.
“A moment,” Convex Icosahedron said to me as I stood up. “I wish to speak to you in private.” He drew me aside to a corner of the room while the others exited.
“You are keeping a secret from the others,” he said after they were all gone, “about your Former tech.”
“Most of them, yes,” I said. “It’s to protect them.”
“I suspected as much,” he said. “But if you wish to continue to keep that secret, then you must commit to a course of action. What you will attempt is much more dangerous than you, or the others realize. You had hoped to minimize your risk, but you cannot—not if you wish to defeat the empire.”
Convex Icosahedron told me what I was going to have to do, and really—as these things go—it wasn’t so bad. If I could protect my friends and liberate the Earth, I was willing to follow his plan and risk my life.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
Is there anything about this that bothers you?” Tamret asked as we made our way to the portal.
There had been another strategy meeting that took more than two hours, and it left me feeling more optimistic than I’d been since learning that Ghli Wixxix was a traitor. We had a solid plan, and Convex Icosahedron had given us some useful tech. The odds of our pulling this off actually seemed pretty good. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being set up. Tamret clearly felt it too.
“Plenty,” I said. “There’s no denying that it’s weird that of all the planets they could have built an escape hatch to, it just happened to be Earth. I get that Earth is important to galactic politics right now, but even so. And it’s strange that they just happened to recruit Colonel Rage to help them.”
“How about that alien having the same shape as the die you have to throw?” Tamret asked. “What kind of being is he?”
“They’re called Geometric Upstarts.”
“How is that a name for a species?” she asked. “It sounds like a gang of math hooligans.”
“Totally,” I agreed. “And there’s more. Dr. Roop told me that it was one of the Geometric Upstarts who took my father off Earth to begin with. Somehow it seems like we’re being toyed with, you know?”
“Do you think they’re manipulating us into doing what we’re doing?”
“I definitely get the feeling that in spite of all our arguing and persuading, we’re doing what Convex Icosahedron always wanted us to do.”
“Maybe it’s just how his alien mind thinks,” Tamret said. “Not all species are going to be as similar as Rarels and humans.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said, even if I mainly tended to focus on how different we were from each other. As far as I knew, the Geometric Upstarts weren’t part of the Confederation. Maybe they’d been left out because they did think differently. Perhaps those differences didn’t bother the renegade Phands because they were more alike. Colonel Rage had always been willing to make deals with bad guys if he believed in the cause, so it wasn’t strange that he had signed on.
I must have looked worried, because Tamret took my hand.
“You know,” I said, “after we win, you could maybe take some time to see if you like life on Earth. If it’s not for you, I can take you home.”
“You’re not going to have access to space travel for years. Remember?”
“Earth won’t, but I will. That was part of my original agreement with Ghli Wixxix. If I did what she wanted, I would get my own ship.”
She scrunched up her face in a way that suggested she couldn’t figure out how I missed something so obvious. “You don’t think the fact that she was a traitor, and therefore lying about every
thing, might alter that agreement?”
“I won’t let anyone cheat me,” I told her. “They are going to give me what they promised. And that means I’ll be able to look out for you.”
“I don’t like anyone trying to protect me,” she said.
“Not protect,” I said. “Look out for. It’s different.”
She smiled and turned away. “We’ll see.”
I didn’t know that we were done with this conversation, but that was okay. At least we were talking, and I knew what had Tamret worried. I knew that I could make her see reason, and that, provided we survived what we were about to attempt, everything between us was going to be okay.
• • •
The portal to Earth was an eight-foot tall metal arch located in the center of town—convenient for anyone trying to escape a planet rapidly collapsing into a black hole. Convex Icosahedron and several other Phands were watching us from about a hundred feet away. I didn’t know if they were giving us a respectful distance or if there was some kind of portal wake they wanted to stay out of.
“Let’s go over this one last time,” I said.
“Seriously?” Mi Sun asked. “It’s not as though it’s a hastily thrown together plan to defeat the most powerful military force in the galaxy.”
“That aside,” Alice said, “I can’t help but wonder if these guys are being straight with us. I mean, if this plan is solid, why are they sending us to carry it out?”
I shrugged. “Most of us are locals, and we know the lay of the land.”
“Colonel Rage is a local,” Charles said.
“But we don’t trust him, so there’s that.”
“Do you think they intend to betray us?” Charles asked.
“That would make no sense,” said Nayana. “If they wished us captured, they needn’t send us anywhere. We are already in their power.”
“I agree,” I said. “It feels more like we’re being tested.”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “I get that. But I think that if they want to see what we can do, I say we show them.”
Everyone but Villainic agreed. He offered no opinion. He’d been much less disagreeable lately, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I was getting paranoid, but it felt like he knew something I didn’t.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s review this one last time.” I called up some holographic projections from my data bracelet and began to review.
There’s a plot device you see in so many Star Wars movies that has spilled over to games, comics, and novels: Whatever facility the good guys are fighting is vulnerable at a single point. The thermal exhaust port in A New Hope, the droid control ship in The Phantom Menace, the Star Forge in Knights of the Old Republic, the Starkiller Base’s thermal oscillator in The Force Awakens. Given that there was a vulnerable spot on Confederation Central itself, these plots had turned out to be surprisingly realistic, but it always felt a little too convenient for me.
I would have gone for that convenience now. The Phands were smarter than their fictional evil-empire counterparts, and they had a system of protective redundancy in place. There were dozens of access points for the subspace energy relay, and they all had to be shut down, almost simultaneously, via an encrypted system. That made a fair amount of sense. Outside of some kind of disastrous emergency, there was no sound reason to shut down the power on which your imperial conquest depended unless you were packing up and going home.
Fortunately, the Phandic renegades had figured out a workaround. Anything that’s made to transfer unfathomable levels of energy across a tear in the fabric of reality is going to have the potential to cause a certain amount of damage should such an emergency occur. The trick, then, was to make the Phandic computers think the relay system was experiencing a catastrophic power surge, one with the capacity to short out the entire system. When that happened, the relay could be shut down at two separate locations. A little bit of redundancy was necessary when balancing the risks of a planet-destroying accident and an angry population that might not like being conquered.
So, instead of being in dozens of places at once, we only needed to be in three. One so a team could hack into the system and make the computers believe there had been a critical accident, and two other locations to begin the emergency shutdown. Once we cut off the Phandic energy flow, which the invaders needed to power their alien tech, we would send out a broadcast to every television, radio station, computer, and smartphone on the planet giving the people of Earth a heads-up that they needed to pick up a big stick and start swinging at Phands. We would then activate the planetary EMP, shutting down all remaining Phandic—and human—technology, making it impossible for the invaders to restart the system or use their ships, their PPB weapons, or anything else that gave them the ability to dominate a planet using only a couple thousand soldiers.
At that point, we had to hope that the people of Earth would catch on and disarm and capture every Phand they could find. By the time we deactivated the EMP device, the Phands would either be utterly defeated or a battle would then rage for control of the Earth. As for our families and friends in captivity, we had to hope that the Phands looking after them would have bigger things to worry about than exacting a revenge no one would know about.
In order to avoid major chaos, not to mention killing a lot of innocent people, I’d had Tamret hack into the Phandic military communications network and ground all human air traffic halfway through our previous meeting. We agreed that we had to make sure there were no planes in the air when we activated the EMP. The downside was that the Phands would probably decide that the only reason to ground all the humans on the planet was a looming rebellion, so they’d be on high alert.
Steve, Alice, and Charles were in charge of the shutdown station in Beijing. Mi Sun, Nayana, and Villainic were handling the one in London. Tamret had uploaded to their bracelets an algorithm that would basically do the work for them. Their task was to take out any local security by means of a short-range EMP. They’d be deploying the same sort of EMP-insulating technology Ardov had used when disabling our ship, which meant they could still use their weapons and keep communications open. I hoped they would have no problem holding their facilities long enough for us to pull off our operation at the main control station.
The portal allowed us to plug in specific locations, and it was designed with infiltration in mind, so it would find isolated and safe spaces, such as empty rooms or closets, in which to deposit us. The plan was for us to remain in close contact via our bracelets.
“This is probably the most dangerous and stupid thing we’ve ever done,” I said, once I finished reviewing all the logistics. “I hope we don’t all get killed.”
“That’s my kind of pep talk,” Steve said.
Steve led his team through the portal to the Beijing station. A minute later Mi Sun looked at me, rolled her eyes, and led her team to London. Now it was up to me and Tamret.
I set the coordinates of the portal. She looked at me, shrugged, and stepped through.
• • •
“So, why are we pretending we’re in one of these entertainments you like so much?” Tamret asked me.
“It’s not pretending,” I explained. “It’s a safety precaution I learned from a movie—a code. You never know who’s listening.”
She nodded. “Your planet, your rules.”
We’d come through the portal into an empty office in the subspace relay’s control station, which had been set up in a building in east midtown. It was a spacious corner office, so I could see the bolt of energy emanating from the Empire State Building while enjoying a charming view of the East River. I was sure the realtor had described it as the perfect place from which to dominate the globe.
I looked through the window at people on the street, the cars slowly inching their way through rush-hour traffic. It might have been just an ordinary day, except I saw groups of policemen sweeping through the pedestrians, checking IDs. All flight traffic should have landed by now, and the imperial government, l
ed by Nora Price, would be scrambling to figure out what was going on that required the grounding of all human air traffic. Security everywhere was going to be high.
I keyed the communications system on my bracelet. “Beijing, you there?”
“Oi,” Steve said.
“London?” I tried.
“We’re here,” Mi Sun said.
“We’ll be ready to get started in about two minutes,” I said. “I think we’ll need maybe half an hour to finish our tasks, so be ready to go on my mark.”
“You just love this military talk, don’t you?” said Mi Sun.
“Yes,” I said, “I do. It makes me feel extra cool. Now stand by.”
“We’ll need more time than that,” Tamret said.
“No, I won’t,” I told her.
“We don’t even know what we’re going to be facing.”
“It’s not going to matter,” I said. I took out the little bag containing the sample of powder and the die.
“No way,” she said, her eyes wide. She grabbed hold of my wrist. “You can’t do that. It’s not an emergency.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, gently pulling free. “Everything depends on this. Everything. Not just my planet, but yours and Steve’s. Confederation Central. The Confederation itself, and all the planets under Phandic rule. Nothing we’ve done has ever been more important than this. Maybe nothing anyone has ever done has been more important than this. We can’t risk anything going wrong.”
“But it could kill you,” she said, glowering. She was clearly unhappy that I hadn’t talked about this part in advance.
“I have an eighty-five percent chance of not dying,” I said. “And if I get a bad roll, I can still save all those people. If I don’t take the chance, we won’t get this done, and our chances of getting killed are a lot higher than fifteen percent.”
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“Yeah, I do. Convex Icosahedron told me. He said that it was the only way we were going to be able to pull this off. He knew I didn’t want to take the risk if I didn’t have to, that I was going to take a wait and see approach about rolling the die. He said if I did that, we would fail. He told me I had to activate the tech tree if we were going to succeed.”
