“Hey,” I said. “You’re Gavin, right?”
“How’d you know my name?” He scowled at me.
I shrugged. “Roll call.”
There are a couple of things I want on the record. At this point, though several seconds had passed, I had not addressed him as Mr. Potato Head, nor had I made a sarcastic comment about how those of us with working brains can listen to something like roll call and actually pick up information. I let these things go, because I was in diplomatic mode. I was Diplomacy Man. Conflict resolution was my superpower. I was going to show my friends, the world, the entire galaxy that I could be counted on to get things done without causing wars, explosions, or major political upheavals.
“Gavin, do you mind if I ask why you are throwing spitballs at my friends?”
“Didn’t mean to hit your friend,” he said. “Mostly I was just throwing at you.”
“Okay, good. We’re making progress. We are learning about each other. Why are you throwing spitballs at me?”
“Because I don’t like your stupid face.”
I smiled. I was an ambassador of peace, and ambassadorial people smile and do not take offense. I was playing a role. I was in character. I was like a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent infiltrating a secret organization.
“I get that a lot,” I said. This part was easy, because it was true. “People see me, they want to smack me. They don’t know why, but this kind of feeling can result in their saying things like what you just said. Of course, I don’t have a stupid face, but you are looking for a way to express your feelings.”
“No,” Gavin said. “Your face is actually stupid.”
This was coming from a guy who looked like a starchy tuber, though I did not make this point out loud. Diplomatic. “You know, we have an honest disagreement about my face, but we should set that aside. This isn’t about you and me. It’s about the greater glory of the Phandic Empire. The empress doesn’t care about my face. She needs us both to be the best subjects we can be. Instead of being angry with me, be angry at those who oppose Phandic greatness.”
“No one opposes the Phands,” Mr. Potato Head reminded me—or at least he reminded me of the lies we were told. “No one is strong enough.”
“Right you are,” I said, snapping my fingers and pointing at him. “You are an excellent student of Phandic knowledge. No Planet Pleasant for you.”
“The thing is,” Mr. Potato Head said, lowering his voice, “I hate those alien creeps, and I hate the people who want to kiss their butts even more. So I’m going to keep throwing spitballs at you, because you are a lickspittle.”
Number one, there is absolutely nothing I own that I would not have bet against this guy knowing the word “lickspittle.” That was a plot twist for sure. Number two, he was on the right side of things. He hated the Phands, and I hated the Phands. We should be like brothers or something. In an alternate timeline, the team of Stupid Face and Potato Head could be a thing.
“Your best move is to play it safe,” I said, keeping my voice quiet. “Follow the rules so you don’t get in trouble.”
“Phands captured my parents and put them in a reeducation labor camp,” he said. “I’m not planning on getting along with anyone, especially not a collaborator like you.”
So saying, he pushed me. If I’d had a second to brace myself, my nanotech augments would have easily guarded me against it, but it surprised me, so I went crashing into the next table. Trays and plastic went flying. Cups of water spilled. Lunch trays arced through the air. A few kids actually screamed. From somewhere behind me I could hear Mi Sun saying, “I told you!”
I was scrambling to my feet when someone reached out and grabbed my arm and hoisted me the rest of the way up. It was one of the trustees, the uniformed kids who helped to keep order. I was about to thank him, when his face went weird on me, shifting in an instant from curiosity to surprise to unmistakable happiness.
“Hey,” he said, smiling like he’d just won the tormentor’s lottery. “You’re Zeke Reynolds, the most hated human in the Phandic Empire! I’m totally going to score some major points for bringing you in!”
It was then I decided, no matter how painful the advice, I was going to have to start listening to my friends.
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
How is it possible to go from having a spaceship that can, within all reasonable limits, take you to pretty much any inhabited spot in the galaxy to, less than twenty-four hours later, being trapped on Earth in a facility for insufficiently obedient children? A lot of things have to go wrong, and, though it was small consolation, none of these things had been my fault. There is actually a fair amount of evidence to support the theory that sometimes bad things happen without my direct involvement.
The day before the incident now known to history as the Lunchroom Catastrophe, we had tunneled into Earth’s solar system in our stolen Former ship, emerging among the outer gas giants. That’s where we learned that my home planet was now in the hands of the Phandic Empire. Rather than risk being seen by our enemies, Steve set a course for another quick jump to the nearest star on the ship’s charts—less than half an hour away.
In the meantime, we’d cooked up a plan. We were going to figure out a way to rescue some prisoners from the Phands, a group that included our friends Nayana and Urch. More importantly, as far as the stability of galactic culture was concerned, it included Confederation Director Ghli Wixxix and Captain Hyi of the Kind Disposition. Both had information that could lead to the overthrow of Junup, who had seized power after Ghli Wixxix’s supposed death (at my supposed hands) and then secretly allied the Confederation, or at least his own power base, with the Phandic Empire. Given that the Phands had been at the Confederation’s mercy—thanks to technology stolen by my gang of rebels, I might add—Junup’s alliance was the only thing keeping the empress’s oppressive lights on right now.
So it was actually pretty simple. Get a small band of kids who didn’t know what they were doing, accompanied by an adult who kept telling them what they wanted to do was crazy, and infiltrate an evil empire, discover the location of a top-secret prison holding beings who were probably the most heavily guarded inmates in the galaxy, and break them out. Sure, there were some leaps of faith hardwired into this scheme, but we’d done crazier things. I know this is not the most convincing argument out there, but I thought it had more going for it than Let’s do nothing and hope everything works out swell.
Besides, we had one serious advantage: We were now maxed-out superheroes. That definitely goes into the plus column. Our last fun-filled excursion through Confederation Central had taken us though the underground Hidden Fortress, an ancient facility established by the mysterious precursor aliens, the Formers. Before escaping, we’d managed to upload nanites that not only gave us the standard Confederation skill tree, but the newly rediscovered military tech tree. As soon as we’d gotten what we wanted, in what may be the worst act of vandalism in the history of the galaxy we destroyed all that Former technology in order to keep it from falling into the wrong hands, claws, or tentacles. If we hadn’t done it, the bad guys might have gotten hold of some unstoppable weapons, so I knew it was the right thing to do, but it still felt like destroying the library of Alexandria times a billion.
Once we had all these skill-creating and -enhancing nanites swimming through our bloodstreams, Tamret hacked in and maxed out both systems for everyone. None of us were entirely sure of all the crazy things we could now do. In fact, the system seemed designed to make it difficult for the user to learn about these skills except by experimenting. There was no clear tech progression, like there was with the standard Confederation upgrades. Instead, skills followed one another in what seemed to be random patterns, and I couldn’t find a list or a map to let me know all the things I could now do. The best I could manage was to search for skills using my HUD and hope the skill I was looking for existed. It was a little frustrating, but I was looking forward to discovering new abilities while simultaneously ma
king every Phand and Junup follower I ran into eat a little plastic cup of humiliation pudding.
Also on my mind was the question of whether or not Tamret, who had done said hacking, was my girlfriend. With all the escaping, destroying, and surviving-against-the-odds we’d been up to lately, we hadn’t had the chance for an honest, heart-to-heart sit-down. The fact that it had been impossible for us to get more than three and a half feet away from her former fiancé had not helped.
Lots of things to juggle, yes, but I knew what we had to do. After what had felt like a long period of helplessness, a sense of purpose felt great. Defy a brutal military empire, redraw the lines of galactic power, rescue my planet, and sort things out with the alien cat-girl I liked. It was going to be a busy week. A good week, but busy.
At least I thought so until everything went wrong—which, honestly, I should have expected.
• • •
Steve piloted us out of Earth’s system in a hurry. We hadn’t had a chance to carefully review the galactic maps, but I figured there should be nothing much happening around Alpha Centauri. I was wrong. There were about a gazillion Phandic ships in the system. Doing what? you may ask. Good question, but no one on my ship was suggesting that we find out before we came up with a way to escape. And yes, a gazillion may be an exaggeration, but I wasn’t counting. The actual tally was more than a few and fewer than infinity.
“There’s like a gazillion Phands in this system, mate,” Steve said in his inexplicable working-class London accent. He flicked his reptilian tongue like he was trying to taste the number of enemies in the air.
“Get us out of here!” Villainic screeched. He was staring at the viewscreen with his eyes wide and his catlike ears pressed back in alarm.
I would not have screeched, personally, and given that he’d been trying to marry Tamret, I wasn’t so inclined to sympathize with Villainic, but I still understood his sentiment. The problem was that interstellar travel doesn’t allow for quick and easy departures. You can’t just zip merrily around from star to star on a whim. Punching a direct, navigable hole in reality and coming out on the other end is not, if I may make an analogy, like dusting crops. It’s more like doing advanced math while playing Jenga on a pogo stick as you try to invent a new musical scale. It can’t be done by normal beings. It can only be done, in fact, by beings who are both naturally gifted and have taken points in the appropriate skill trees while using computers designed by a long-vanished civilization of unfathomable intellect. It doesn’t help when hysterical aliens, beings who are not really in your group of friends and who are trying to marry girls they should not have been trying to marry, are screeching.
Tamret and Charles were busy working the navigation and helm consoles, trying to figure a way out of the system, or at least a place to hide. The first priority had to be avoiding detection by the Phands. Meanwhile, I was warming up the weapons console. Rightly or wrongly, I was considered the go-to guy in our group for making things turn into fiery balls of destruction. Sometimes I only blew up what I was supposed to; sometimes things got a little more creative. All I knew was that the majority of beings I liked in the universe were on that ship with me, and I was not letting the Phands take us without a fight.
“Before we start giving our position away with weapons fire,” Steve said to me, “I might have a bit of a plan.”
“Let’s hear it,” I said. “Better yet, let’s do it, and you can tell me about it after.”
“It’s these new skill implants, yeah?” he said, scratching his Komodo dragon head like he was trying to get a handle on this plan even as he explained it. “I think I may have figured out a way to get us out of here, but I don’t really understand it.”
Dr. Roop, the only adult on our ship, now peered over our shoulders, stretching his long, giraffelike neck between us. “The Formers had navigation skills we have only begun to guess at,” he said in his curiously Dutch-sounding accent. “Your mind must have intuitively picked up on one of these possibilities and is urging you to take it. Perhaps you should listen.”
“It shouldn’t be possible based on what I know,” Steve explained, “but let’s face it—I don’t know all that much. I have this idea that I can reverse our tunnel, pretty much send us back to where we came from. Pretty close, anyhow.”
“If you think you can do it,” I said, “then it sounds like our best option.”
“What good is that?” Villainic demanded. “We came here in order to escape from Zeke’s conquered system. There were Phands there as well.”
In spite of him having performed some inexplicable Rarel ritual that had made me his brother, I could always count on Villainic to complain about any plan I liked.
“The good thing,” Steve said, “is that no one knew we were there. We tunneled out before they detected us. Here we’re right on top of these blokes, so they’re going to notice us in a matter of seconds. When that happens, they’ll come looking to crack open our ship to get at the nutmeats inside. Do you fancy being the nutmeats, mate?”
Villainic did not answer, but I thought it was safe to take that question as rhetorical. No one in the history of creation has fancied being the nutmeats.
“So we go somewhere else after we get back to our system?” Mi Sun asked. “How do we know it won’t be just as bad?”
“The galaxy is very large,” Charles said, “and the odds of any particular place we choose having a gazillion Phands are relatively small. I say it is a risk worth taking.”
It being a risk worth taking, we took the risk. Steve did a thing that he didn’t understand very well and we understood even less, and with a half dozen Phandic flying saucers moving in with their metaphorical nutcrackers at the ready, we popped right back into tunnel.
Now we had to wait half an hour to get back to the place we didn’t want to be. It made sense to have another destination in mind by the time we emerged so we could reroute in a hurry.
Dr. Roop suggested the nearby Wolf 359 system, but Charles and I vetoed it on the grounds that it was the site of a devastating Federation defeat by the Borg. “It’s courting bad luck,” Charles insisted. Instead we opted for the binary Luyten 726-8 system, which had no science-fiction connotations that I was aware of. It was uninhabited and uninhabitable, therefore with zero strategic value. It seemed as good a place as any for us to catch our breath.
We had to get there first. Once we reemerged from tunnel in my home system, Steve needed to plug in the new coordinates and tunnel out. With the engines hot, and the coordinates ready, we should have been able to evacuate in a matter of minutes.
And that is exactly what would have happened had not something much worse happened instead.
• • •
The trip back to my solar system was a little bit tense, sure. None of us knew exactly what to expect. I spent most of the time sitting at the weapons console, though there wasn’t anything to target while in tunnel.
We were maybe halfway through the trip when Alice came over to me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She was busy taking her mass of nearly colorless hair out of a black elastic and then putting it back in.
Tamret looked up at us from her console but didn’t say anything. Her lavender eyes seemed to glow against the background of her white fur.
I got up, and Alice and I walked to the back of the ship. “What’s up?’
“I don’t know if it’s going to be possible now,” she said, “but if there’s any way you can do it safely, I want you to drop me off on Earth before you go on the rescue mission.”
“What? Why?” This took me by surprise. Alice had been so desperate to get into space that she’d stowed away on a shuttle, risking her life just for the chance to see life in the wider galaxy. Since then, she’d been a valuable member of the team. I knew what we were going to attempt was risky, but no more so than things we’d already done. With our augmentations, maybe it was a whole lot less risky than the things we’d already done.
“Look,” she said, “yo
u guys have been great to me and everything, and I really want to be a part of what you’ve got planned, but there’s an alien army on Earth. I have to believe they’re not going to be too nice to people who used to be in the military. I’m worried about my dad and my Uncle Jacinto.” She rubbed at her eyes, maybe to keep from crying. “Especially my dad.”
Alice’s father had been suffering from PTSD. He drank too much and generally seemed out of it. I knew she’d felt terrible about leaving him behind, but now that things had fallen apart on Earth, he might really need her help.
“The sooner we get the Phands off Earth, the safer he’ll be. I understand if you want to go back, but you could be doing him more good by staying with us.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. But I think he might need me now. With my new abilities, there’s probably a lot I can do to help Earth while you guys are taking care of the big picture. Besides, Tamret doesn’t want me here.” She glanced over at Tamret, who was pretending not to watch us.
“She’ll be fine. She just needs to get used to having you around. If that’s the real reason—”
“It’s a real reason,” she said, “but not the only one. I don’t know if I can have my head in the game if I’m worried about my father the whole time. Getting everyone out of that prison isn’t going to be easy, and you don’t need a team member who’s distracted.”
I understood what it was like to worry about your parents. I’d gone to Confederation Central in the first place because I wanted to help my mom. “I get it. I hate to see you go, but if that’s what you need to do, I won’t try to talk you out of it. I mean, assuming we can even get you to Earth safely.”
“Let’s see how that goes,” she said, “and then we can decide what to do.”
• • •
A few minutes later, Tamret came over to speak to me. Like the rest of us, she was still wearing the clothes in which we’d been wandering around the Forbidden Zone. Most of the dust had worn off by now, though, and somehow she managed to look relatively neat.