United as One (7 page)

I don't like this. It feels like we're giving away too much too easily, turning over the Loralite locations to Lawson, not to mention the fledgling human Garde he's so interested in. Still, what choice do we have? Practically speaking, using the Loralite stones is our only way to get a counterattack ready fast.

“We'll help you locate the rest of the Loralite,” I tell Lawson. “Once we're ready to move the cloaking devices.”

Lawson smiles at my reluctant concession but moves on quickly. “That's transport squared away. It still doesn't solve the problem of quantity.”

“If we can't make them quickly enough, we'll just have to get you more,” I say, the beginning of a plan starting to take shape in my head.

Nine flashes me a wolfish grin. “Maybe we should go somewhere that we know will have a lot of them.”

“And where is that?” Lawson asks.

“One of the warships,” I reply.

“Didn't I just explain—?” Lawson snaps, frustration breaking through his patient granddad routine
for a moment. He gets hold of himself quickly. “If we attack them—any attack—we risk them laying waste to another one of our cities.”

“What if we could get in and out of one of their warships without them even noticing?” I pose this to Lawson, but it's Six who I'm looking at. She smiles at me. I smile back. “What if we could get you a battalion's worth of cloaking devices before the Mogs even notice they're missing?”

“That . . .” Lawson rubs a hand across his jaw, considering. “That I could live with.”

HERE'S THE TO-DO LIST.

Sneak aboard a Mogadorian warship.

Steal every cloaking device they've got without tipping off the Mogs.

Arm the governments of the world for one big counterstrike.

Meanwhile, learn every Legacy I can wrap my mind around.

Kill Setrákus Ra.

Not necessarily in that order. Especially not the “learn every Legacy” one. Because if I'm going to sneak aboard a Mog warship the way I'm planning, there's one Legacy in particular I'm going to need first.

I have to learn how to fly.

The meeting breaks up after I promise General Lawson we'll have a plan in place to covertly attack a Mogadorian warship by the end of the day. Hopefully,
Ella was right and Setrákus Ra will be out of action for at least that long. It's barely even noon yet, and I feel like we've already burned too much of the day.

As everyone hurries through the hallways of Patience Creek to go about their tasks, I pull Adam aside. He looks pale as usual, with the addition of some dark circles around his eyes. Everyone at that meeting had a little bit of similar wear on them. Invasion fatigue is setting in.

“You all right?” I ask him. “What did they do to you?”

Adam stares at me, shaking his head. “I'm fine, John. It was nothing. I should be asking how
you're
doing.”

I figured that was coming. Everyone who knew Sarah—from Sam to Walker—all of them keep looking at me like I might fall apart at any second. I hate that. I don't want to be coddled. I want to fight. I was at least hoping that when it came to Adam, I'd get a pass on the sympathy. Never thought I'd be yearning for some cold Mogadorian logic.

“I'm dealing,” I tell him, and am surprised by how much edge is in my voice.

“All right,” Adam replies, obviously getting the hint. He holds up his hands to show me his wrists where the handcuffs are still attached to them. “You mind getting these the rest of the way off?”

“Yeah, sure. Forgot about those.”

“It was more about delivering a message to that Lawson guy than getting me out of chains,” Adam says. “I get it.”

“Well,” I reply with a small smile. “You did look uncomfortable.”

“So did all those soldiers.” Adam laughs. “It was a good move. You showed strength.”

I light up my Lumen again, this time focusing it so that it's limited just to the tip of my index finger. Careful not to burn Adam, I melt through the lock mechanisms on the cuffs until they fall open.

“What kind of questions were they asking you?” I ask while Adam rubs some feeling back into his wrists.

“Like I said, it wasn't so bad. They wanted to know weapon and ship schematics. They wanted to know about the structure of the Mogadorian government and military, which is easy because they're basically the same thing. They wanted to know what will happen to Mog society if Setrákus Ra is killed.” Adam shrugs. “I would've told them all these things even if they hadn't put me on lockdown and kept me up all night.”

“Huh,” I say, thinking for a moment. There was actually a question in there that I'd never thought to ask myself. “What
will
happen when we kill Setrákus Ra?”

Adam smiles at me, appreciating the certainty in my voice. Then he runs a hand through his stringy black hair, looking thoughtful.

“Well, I don't remember a time when there wasn't a . . . ‘Beloved Leader.' I've got no concept of what our world was like before. Hell, I doubt my parents would even remember. Setrákus Ra rewrote our history books, so, according to them, we weren't much more than animals before he came along and ‘raised us up.'”

“I guess it's too much to ask that they'd just give up and go away,” I reply.

“Without strip-mining Earth like they did Lorien, the fleet doesn't have enough fuel to go anywhere.” Adam pauses thoughtfully. “Over a long enough timeline, though, they might go away. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“For all his bluster in that so-called Great Book of his, Setrákus Ra never actually fixed the fertility problems we trueborn experience. He can grow an endless number of vatborn soldiers. Doesn't change the fact that the trueborn birth rate is totally stagnant.”

“So the trueborn will slowly die off,” I say, trying to keep my voice suitably grim considering the company, but really feeling nothing for the slow extinction of Mogadorians. “And the vatborn?”

“As far as I know, the secret to creating them would die with Setrákus Ra.” Adam sees my smile and holds up a cautioning hand. “You need to realize a few things about my people, John. First, the vast majority completely buy in to Setrákus Ra's twisted idea
of Mogadorian Progress, and all of them believe that Setrákus Ra is unkillable. That's the only thing that's kept them in line all these centuries. When you kill him, you'll cut off the vatborn and maybe get a few of the Mogs like me to lay down their weapons—”

“You think there could be others like you?” I ask, interrupting. I always thought of Adam as unique and considered his seeing the light a side effect of his brush with Number One.

He looks away. “I . . . don't know. I've met others who I thought . . . maybe . . . I'm not even sure they're alive at this point.” Adam waves this off. “The point is, even without Setrákus Ra, you'll still have a heavily armed race of zealots who believe might makes right. How I imagine it going down? First, the trueborn decide who's strongest by blowing each other up with Earth as their battlefield. Then whoever survives tries to pick up where Setrákus Ra left off. There are a lot of generals, like my father, who would think they're next in line.”

“They won't succeed,” I say absently. In truth, I'm thinking about the idea of Mogs blowing themselves up. If only we could speed that part of the process along.

“In the long term, no. That's still years of conflict, John. Here on Earth.”

“Humanity would be collateral damage,” I say,
considering the effects of a Mogadorian civil war. The loss of life would be like New York City all over again. Unless the Mogs did their fighting over cities that were already evacuated . . .

“Anyway, first we've got to actually kill Setrákus Ra, right?” Adam says, patting me on the back. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

“I'm going to throw everything I've got at him,” I say. “And then some.”

“We'll help, too, you know. You've got friends in this.”

I nod. “Yeah. Of course. I know that.”

Adam starts walking towards the elevator and motions for me to follow. “You got another few minutes? There's something else I want to show you.”

I raise my eyebrows and follow after him. The military types coming and going down the brightly lit halls give the two of us a wide berth. I wonder which one of us they're more afraid of.

I did a cursory exploration of the Patience Creek facility when I first arrived, familiarizing myself with the important areas—the officer sleeping quarters where we're staying, the barracks, the holding cells, the gym, the garage—and glossing over the areas where the military are doing their thing. I'm not sure what Adam could've discovered in the brief time he was being held prisoner that I haven't already seen. Then again, a place
built as a hideaway for spies would have a lot of secrets.

“After they interrogated me, they took me down here,” Adam explains as we ride the elevator down two levels. “I guess they didn't have much hope of this project paying off, so they stuck it out of the way.”

The level that we exit onto is mostly storage. I passed it over pretty quickly during my walk through. Half the lightbulbs in the hallway need changing. Adam brings me by a few rooms completely filled with dusty crates of dry rations and boxes of Tang, plus a storage space cluttered with seventies-style beach chairs and a moth-eaten volleyball net. Finally, we turn a corner, and Adam opens a door into a room cluttered with stacks of books. A library. At a glance, I realize that most of these yellowed hardbacks are dedicated to topics a spy might find useful in a post-apocalyptic pinch: volumes on gardening, electronics repair and medical treatment.

I flinch. The small room is filled with the harsh and guttural sounds of Mogadorians barking at each other.

On a desk in the middle of the room, there's a wide piece of electronic equipment that looks vaguely familiar. The Mog voices emanate from that. It's about the size of a car dashboard and covered with strange knobs and gauges. The thing looks like someone recently set fire to it and then dropped it off the side of a building. It's hooked up to a tangled mess of wires and batteries, apparently drawing a lot of power.

Then it hits me. What I'm looking at is the control console of a Mogadorian Skimmer, ripped out from the rest of the ship. The console is powered on, thanks to some complex wiring, and that means the communicator is active.

Seated in front of the dissected console is an olive-skinned guy who I'd put in his early thirties. His dark hair is cut short, and his cheeks are losing ground to a few days' worth of stubble. I think I've seen him before, although I can't quite place where and when.

“Adam, you're back,” the man says, nodding tiredly. “Been pretty quiet.”

I turn to Adam and raise an eyebrow.

“This is Agent Noto,” Adam tells me. “Formerly of MogPro.”

That's where I know him from. He was part of the group that Walker brought to Ashwood Estates after they turned on the Mogs.

“I was worried you wouldn't be coming back when the soldiers hauled you off earlier,” Noto says. “Got pretty Orwellian for a minute there.”

Adam smiles at me. “See? I told you my detainment wasn't all bad. I made a friend. I've been helping Noto with his Mogadorian language skills.”

“You speak their language?” I ask, taking a fresh look at the man.

“I was liaison to the Mogs during my MogPro days,”
Noto explains. “Picked up a few phrases here and there. I can understand so long as they talk slow and at a kindergartner's level.”

I step farther into the room, peering at the open notebooks fanned out on the desk. They're filled with symbols I recognize as Mogadorian letters, each of those represented by a phonetic translation.

“We're monitoring the communication between the Mogadorian warships,” Adam says. “I've encrypted this module so they won't have any idea we're listening in.”

“With the security you downloaded onto here, we could broadcast back to them, and they still wouldn't be able to find us,” Noto says admiringly.

Now I realize why Adam looks so utterly exhausted. It wasn't just the interrogation keeping him up all night. He's been sitting here listening to these Mog transmissions, knowing he's the only one who can translate them.

“How long does it take to teach basic Mogadorian?” I ask him with a glance at Noto.

Noto rattles off a series of harsh noises. “It's not so tough.”

Adam laughs. “Your accent is getting better, but you just said you'd like a stomach filled with leeches.”

Noto makes a face. “I thought I was asking for some coffee.”

“I helped Noto make a list of key words to listen for,” Adam tells me. “‘Beloved Leader,' warship call signs, ‘Garde'—any time he hears those words, he makes sure to flag the transmission.”

“I'm recording everything in case I need to listen again,” Noto says. “Which I usually do.”

“This is good. It'll be really helpful to know what the Mogs are saying to each other,” I tell them, putting a hand on Adam's shoulder. “Don't burn yourself out, though. We're going to need you.”

Adam nods. “I know. I won't.”

I say good-bye to Agent Noto, then lead Adam into the hallway where we can talk privately.

“So, from what you've listened in on so far, what are the Mogs saying?” I ask him.

“They're freaking out about Setrákus Ra,” he replies. “Well, freaking out as much as Mog trueborns can freak out. There's a lot of concern about why he hasn't ordered the attack or made any announcements to the fleet, but they won't outright question him because to do so is pretty much treason. Mostly, they're like . . . ‘This is warship
Delta
, awaiting orders, requesting guidance from Beloved Leader.'”

“That alone tells you they're freaking out?”

“Mogs don't go around
asking
for orders, John. They do what they're told. They speak when spoken to. They don't passive-aggressively prod their Leader.”

“And there's been no response from the
Anubis
or the West Virginia base?”

“Nothing,” Adam confirms. “Radio silence.”

“Hmm.”

The plan I've been formulating is a little crazy, a lot dangerous, and, you know, that doesn't bother me nearly as much as it probably should. I mull over everything that Adam has told me about Mogadorian culture, in particular the likelihood of them descending into civil war once Setrákus Ra is dead. If they took out each other, that'd make it a whole lot easier on the rest of us. What if there was something we could do to speed that process up? To get the Mogs at each other's throats before Setrákus Ra is even turned to ash? A little bit of psychological warfare.

Before I can give that any more thought, Noto pokes his head out of the library and waves Adam over. “There's a lot of chatter all of a sudden,” he says.

Adam and I jog back into the room. I cock my head to listen to the transmission coming through, but it all sounds like angry barking to me. The Mogadorian who's broadcasting sure is excited, though.

Watching Adam's eyes slowly narrow, I can tell this isn't good news. After a few seconds, he turns to me.

“John, we should get the others,” he says. “Someone's made a terrible mistake.”