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  I had my own thoughts about that problem. “Let’s say we’re able to land safely and quietly. What then?”

  “Then we make our way to the main Phandic outpost, hack into their system, and find our prisoners. Once we have Zeke’s father, our best option is to try to steal a Phandic ship and hope to slip out undetected.”

  “That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Nayana said. “What makes you think you’ll even be able to hack a Phandic computer?”

  “I can do anything,” Tamret said.

  “She can do anything,” I agreed.

  “You can’t simply take that as your motto and expect people to act as though it were true.”

  “I got us this far, didn’t I?”

  “This far,” Nayana observed, “is on a stolen ship on the way to Phandic prison while we just happen to have on board a person they’d really like to imprison. I’m not terribly impressed. And let’s get back to the business about saving the Earth. How are we doing that?”

  “Tamret just told you,” I said. “Our carrier will be detected if we try to leave, so we’ll be grabbing a Phandic ship on the way out. We deliver that to the Confederation; they reverse engineer it and end the technological advantage the Phands have. We change the balance of power in the galaxy, the Confederation becomes dominant, the Phands retreat, and Earth is safe.”

  “If it’s so easy, why hasn’t anyone done it before?” demanded Nayana.

  “Because they haven’t had us before?” Steve ventured.

  Nayana was nearly ready to scream in frustration. “Uhhh! I suppose you can do anything too?”

  “Not quite anything,” he admitted, “but I’m not so bad at a few things. And you see, ducky, that’s the point, isn’t it? I like the Confederation. They’re good blokes, but they’re cowardly custard, if you haven’t noticed. They don’t like to get their hands dirty. They wet their nappies when Zeke here fires a few extra missiles at a ship that attacked first. They have big brains and big ideas, but they don’t have a ton of nerve. Now, you get some of us hooligans together, and you’ve got another story.”

  “This is so stupid,” Nayana said. “Don’t you see what’s going on? Dr. Roop admitted that this is what he intended all along. We’re not rebels and we’re not heroes. We’re pawns.”

  “No,” said Charles. “I don’t think Dr. Roop is that deceptive. If we were pawns, it would mean we were sacrificing ourselves in the service of another, more meaningful assault, and from what we have seen of the Confederation, I think we know that is not the case. They’ve maintained equilibrium for so long that they’ve forgotten how to fight. That’s what we’re for.”

  “So if we’re not pawns,” Nayana asked, “what are we?”

  Mi Sun met her gaze. “The whole game is riding on us. That makes us kings.”

  • • •

  We came out of our tunnel about ten thousand miles from the planet and went to work. If everything we’d learned was true, then our sensors were vastly superior to what the Phands’ have, which meant we were close enough to watch them safely, and as long as no one tunneled out close enough to pick us up, the enemy would never know we were there.

  We monitored and recorded Phandic activity for a complete twenty-six-hour cycle, and then I handed the data over to Charles and Nayana. “Let’s assume every rotation is like this rotation. Study it, find a weakness, and we’ll figure out our next move.” Meanwhile, Tamret had been trying to work her way into their computer system, which she explained was much more sophisticated and had far more safeguards than anything she’d seen in the Confederation.

  “I can overlay a private network onto their planetary grid,” she told me. “That means we’ll be able to communicate through our data bracelets, and they won’t know about it. Unless they are specifically looking for it. But if they’re looking for us, we’ll have bigger problems.”

  I nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, actually, some good news.” She called up a three- dimensional map of the main compound. “Okay, so this big building here is the main prison. I was able to retrieve their personnel specs, and I think we should be able to take them. But that’s not the best part, which is that the only projectile weapons on the planet are in this other building, the main command bunker. I guess they don’t want to risk harming the artifacts, because all their firearms are locked up, and they’re only for emergencies. If we take the bunker, we take the weapons, and we have more or less an insurmountable tactical advantage.”

  “How do they manage a prison if they’re unarmed?” I asked.

  “They’re not exactly unarmed. They have plasma wands, which are essentially high-powered energy sticks. They can be deadly, but on the low setting they’re just meant to hurt—to provide incentive for cooperation. A few guys with plasma wands can control a large prison population, but if we have the PPB pistols and they don’t, they’ve got no chance.”

  Six hours later, after Charles and Nayana had reviewed the planetary security data, we had a plan. We sat down, and they called up a hologram of the planet.

  “That trick you used to cheat us when we did that sim,” Nayana said to Steve. “Did you come up with it by yourself?”

  “I wish I were so clever,” he said. “Dr. Roop wanted to run through a couple of sims together. He taught me that one.”

  “Figures,” she said. “The sun in this system just happens to be extremely active, and there is a great deal of radiation bursting out in regular intervals, just like in that sim. Dr. Roop taught you that little maneuver for when you came here.”

  I lightly smacked Mi Sun’s arm. “I told you. Ender’s Game.”

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. “But yeah.”

  “So here’s how it will work,” Nayana said. “The patrolling ship’s orbit is not geosynchronous. It’s not hovering above the prison, but regularly moving all around the planet. That makes things tougher, but just a little. When the cruiser is on the far side of the planet, we wait for the sun to be at the part of its cycle when flares are most active, and then we beeline for the planet. The solar radiation will conceal our ion trail, so we’ll be invisible to the Phands’ sensors. As soon as we hit atmosphere, we do what Steve did in the sim: We cut the engines to drop down hard and fast to the surface so if they notice us at all, we’ll look like a meteor. Once we’ve dropped as far as we can, we fire up the engines and skim under their detection net to a landing site about ten miles from the main prison compound.”

  “That sounds too easy,” Mi Sun said.

  “She is leaving out the most significant problem,” Charles said. “Steve learned how to execute that maneuver on a fairly small moon, which didn’t have nearly as strong a gravity well as an Earth-size planet. This ship’s g-force inhibitors won’t be able to compensate for our approach speed. Have any of you allocated skill points in constitution or endurance?”

  Steve, Tamret, and I all said we had. They were standard spaceflight skills.

  “Who has the most?”

  “Zeke and I,” Tamret said.

  I had no idea how she had applied her skill points, and I had never told her about how I had applied mine, but respect for privacy was not one of her many fine attributes.

  “Our nanites will keep the rest of us from actually dying,” Charles said, “but we will likely pass out. You two have the greatest chance of remaining awake long enough to prevent us from crashing into the surface of the planet and being killed in a fiery explosion.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Tamret said.

  I was less confident, however. “What’s plan B?”

  “Plan B,” Nayana said, “is that we give up and head back to the station. I like plan B, just in case you were wondering.”

  Tamret smiled at me like we were sharing a secret. “Zeke and I can do this.”

  “You know that for sure?” I asked.

  “I
know it for sure.” She met my gaze. This was no joke and no boast. She meant it.

  “Alternatively,” I proposed, “we could try to slingshot around the sun to generate enough speed to produce a time warp, and then rescue the prisoners before they were ever taken.”

  “Is that from a movie?” Mi Sun asked. “I hope you are being a dork, because if you’re not, then you’re a total idiot.”

  “I’m being a dork,” I assured her.

  Once they had finished with their briefing, and we had calculated the time and coordinates for our approach, Tamret walked us through the prison terrain itself. She called up the map of the compound, pointing out the main building and the bunker. The bunker contained a huge underground complex, and it served as the barracks, the armory, and the warehouse for storing Former artifacts.

  Our sensors told us that there were exactly 203 sentient beings on the surface. Based on their movement patterns, which we were able to get the computer to analyze, it seemed that only forty-seven of these were guards. The rest appeared to be prisoners.

  “The real problem will be once we’ve found Zeke’s father,” Steve said. “We can conceal our descent using gravity and radiation, but there’s no way they’re going to miss us when we take off. This whole plan depends on figuring something out once we’re past the point of no return. Otherwise, that Phandic cruiser in orbit is going to stop us before we get anywhere.”

  “We’ve come all this way,” I said, “and it hasn’t been an accident. Dr. Roop picked us for this, and he’s been training us for this. I don’t believe he would have led us here if he didn’t think we could do it, but I have to be honest and say I don’t love going in if I can’t tell you how we’re getting out. You guys have been great, but I can’t force you to do this. If you want to turn around and go home, we will. You can drop me off somewhere first. I’ll find another way back here. But I’m not going to make you take this risk.”

  “Good idea,” Nayana said. “Let’s go back.”

  “For what?” Mi Sun asked. “To be arrested for theft and kicked out of the Confederation? If we don’t come back with that Phandic ship, we’ve done all this for nothing. I say we keep going.”

  Charles tapped my arm excitedly and then pointed at Nayana. “She is the prim, golden robot, and Mi Sun is the beeping, competent, silver robot.”

  I gave him a fist bump. “You have learned much, my friend.”

  “We’ve already done the impossible,” Charles said to Nayana, “and we have been led to it. We may as well see where our streak ends.”

  “Fine,” Nayana said. “But I am going to complain the whole time.”

  • • •

  She was as good as her word.

  The more Nayana thought about it, the more she seemed to hate the idea of coming at a straight dive and plummeting toward a planet at a speed that would render some of us, possibly all of us, unconscious. Admittedly, I could understand her concerns.

  “What makes you think you can pilot a ship well enough to pull this off?” she asked.

  “Look at me,” I said. “What do you see?”

  “A guy who needs a shower?” she suggested. “A twelve-year-old in a stolen spaceship?”

  “Look higher, like above my head.”

  She did, and her eyes went wide. “What? Sixteen? That’s not possible.” The rest of the humans were elevens, proud of it, and had been stuck there for a long time.

  “I applied my unused points before we left the station. I’m level sixteen, and I’ve put every single skill point I have into the piloting track. That means I have the endurance, constitution, and agility to do this.”

  Nayana’s reaction surprised me. She burst into tears.

  Charles moved toward her to comfort her, but she waved him away. “Leave me alone. I want to go home.”

  “You want to go back to the station?” Mi Sun asked irritably. “We already decided this.”

  “Not to the station. Home. Earth. My room. I want my bed and my things and my mother and father and my pet ca—my pet. I don’t want to be here anymore. You’re all brave and crazy, but I’m not. I’m not one of you.”

  Tamret let out a long sigh and sat down next to Nayana. “As much as I hate to say it, you are one of us. And you do belong here.”

  Nayana looked up at her.

  Tamret rolled her eyes. “I don’t like you, Nayana. In fact, I kind of hate you and would like to stick my claws in your eyes.”

  “Focus,” I said.

  “But,” Tamret continued, “you’re the one who realized we needed to be looking at the selection committee. You figured out what was important and what was noise when it came to what we already knew. And that gigantic brain of yours cut through the Phandic patrol patterns like a hot knife through [congealed animal fat]. I don’t know anything about this game you’re supposed to be so good at, but as near as I can tell, it means you’re able to see patterns and figure out strategies, and we need that.”

  Nayana shook her head. “You don’t get it. You’re not afraid of anything, but I’m scared, okay? I am afraid I’m going to die, and I’m totally freaked out.”

  Tamret rolled her eyes. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ll look out for you or whatever.”

  All the lip biting and hand wringing told me Nayana wasn’t buying it. “You say that, but, how do I know you mean it?”

  Tamret sighed, like she was getting ready to jump off a cliff. “Fine. You want a guarantee. How’s this. I invoke the ritual of bonding, and declare before [the first tier deity of family] that you are now my sister. Okay, we’re like family now, so I will have your back. I pretty much have no choice, so have your big-baby cry and get it out of your system, because in about ten minutes we’re going to be falling out of the sky so fast there’s almost no way you’re not going to pee all over yourself while blood vessels burst until you black out.”

  Nayana sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hands. “Thanks.”

  “Sure thing,” Tamret said, and walked away to give Nayana some time.

  I followed her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “That was great. I know that sort of thing isn’t easy for you.”

  “The part about clawing her eyes out was pretty easy.”

  “I know. But that’s a big step, isn’t it? Making her your sister?”

  Tamret shrugged. “Not really. I just have to make sure nothing bad happens to her if I possibly can, which, just between us, I was probably going to do anyhow. Just on principle. But if it helps her pull herself together, then it helps you get your father.”

  Tamret had just made a girl she found painfully annoying a member of her family, and she’d done it to help me. There was no way to thank her, not really, so I just took her hand, and we sat quietly for a little while. Then I turned to her. “Am I completely nuts to go down there, to bring everyone with me? I’m not a soldier. I’m a kid. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  She swiveled in her chair toward me. “Let me ask you something, Zeke. Is that how you feel, or how you think you should feel?”

  I considered the answer to her question. “It’s how I think I should feel.”

  “In your heart, do you believe you can do it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. And it was true. When I thought about what we were planning, what insanity we had lined up, I honestly believed I could pull it off. It wasn’t hope or optimism; it was a weird certainty, like how when you turn on a light switch you expect the light to go on. You don’t think, I sure hope the light comes on this time. I expected to succeed.

  “Why am I so confident?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Don’t overthink it. Go with how you feel. I’ll tell you a secret about yourself,” she said. “It’s something only I know, and now you’ll know it too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not ju
st me,” she whispered. “You can do anything too.”

  “I wish I believed that.”

  “I believe it,” she said, “and that will have to be enough for now.” She gave my hand a squeeze and then let go. “Now let’s go break into this enemy prison I’ve heard so much about.”

  • • •

  We kept on the far side of the planet from the Phandic flying saucer, but as we banked in, we caught a brief glimpse of it out the port-side screen. It was huge, maybe a third larger than the ship we’d fought in the Dependable. Its shape wasn’t silly, and it didn’t put me in mind of an old movie or a comic book or the countless parodies that showed laughable aliens in their absurd ships. No, the Phandic saucer was dark and looming like a predator. I felt my heart pound and my stomach flip. Then the ship was gone from my view. I wished it could be as easily gone from my mind.

  Steve was our best pilot, so he was running helm, but he hadn’t put extra points into constitution. Maybe his Ish-hi toughness would get him through, but we were taking no chances. I was on navigation, and Tamret was along for the ride, but on a ship like this any of the consoles could switch over to helm in an emergency. Our plan required just one of us to remain conscious on the way down. If none of us did, we’d never know, because we’d be obliterated when we hit the ground.

  We were all strapped in as tightly as we could manage. I felt my own safety belts almost squeezing the air out of my lungs. The lights and buttons and icons all glared up at me, and I knew if I let my mind wander, I would be terrified by the torturous complexity of them. It was like when you board a plane and you glance into the cockpit and see those endless dense rows of identical switches and you wonder what they can all mean and how anyone could possibly understand them all. I did understand the console, though, and for better or worse, we were going through with this landing.

  When I was younger, I loved the TV show Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which took its name from a silver-age comic book that always featured team-ups. Each episode of the animated show would have Batman joining up with some other hero or team, and the whole thing had this silly feel to it—totally different from the gloomy tone of just about every other Batman comic or movie.