“You and I stop the Icebreaker all by ourselves.”
Before I could reply, a single tone sounded, and three other video windows popped back up on our displays as Lex, Whoadie, and Debbie all joined our call simultaneously, each from a different location.
“Hey, fellas,” Lex said. “Count me in.”
“Me, too!” added Debbie, just before Whoadie shouted, “And me three!”
“What the hell?” my father said. “Where did you ladies come from?”
“Dad, this is my friend, Captain Alexis Larkin,” I said. “We met at Crystal Palace. She figured out how to jailbreak the QComm operating software. I asked her to set things up so they could all listen in on the conference call. She also installed software on our QComms to prevent the EDA from remotely disabling them.”
My father raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Outstanding, Captain. Thank you!”
“You’re welcome, General!” she said, returning his salute.
He froze, seeming lost in thought for moment. “Is there any chance you can tell me what Admiral Vance’s location was when he broke in on the call?”
She nodded. “He’s in Pennsylvania. At an EDA base codenamed ‘Raven Rock.’ ”
My father grinned and then saluted her. She returned it.
Diehl leaned in over my left shoulder, holding Cruz on his laptop screen. “We want in on this operation, too!”
My father studied the faces arrayed before him in silence.
“So what’s the plan, General?” I asked.
We rallied at Starbase Ace.
I drove Cruz and Diehl there in my car, and we pulled up in front of the store just a few minutes before my mother arrived in her own car. My father wasn’t with her.
“Where’s dad?” I asked. “What happened?”
“He drove separately,” she replied, before pointing up at the sky overhead. A second later, my Interceptor swooped into view. My father brought the ship in for a perfect landing in the strip mall’s crumbling parking lot and ran over to greet us. After my mother and I each gave him a quick hug, I introduced him to Cruz and Diehl, who had watched his arrival in awestruck silence.
I unlocked the store and led everyone inside. When my father saw the store shelves, lined with high-end Armada and Terra Firma flight controllers, he broke into a broad smile.
“This is perfect!” he said as he began to grab items off the shelves and hand them to each of us. “I need each of you to build the best rig you can, as fast as you can.”
The moment I finished setting up a makeshift drone controller pod for myself in the store’s LAN party room, my father called me back into the tiny, cluttered room that served as Ray’s office. He was ransacking the place.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He nodded at the QComm on his wrist. It displayed a map of the local neighborhood, with an EDA icon hovering over the location of Starbase Ace.
“There’s a secret access node for the EDA’s hard-line fiber-optic intranet hidden somewhere at this location,” he said. “But I can’t find it.”
I remembered something Ray had told me during our shuttle ride to Crystal Palace. That Glaive Fighter I’d seen outside my classroom window—he’d said it was a scout ship conducting surveillance on the EDA’s hard-line intranet. When I’d spotted it hovering over Beaverton, it had probably been in the process of scanning the “secret” intranet access node hidden here in the store.
But if the Europans knew about the EDA’s backup intranet, why hadn’t they bothered to destroy or disable it before they invaded?
Because their actions have never made any sort of tactical sense, I thought. Why start now?
My father continued to tear through the office. He began to pull books off a nearby shelf one at a time, then suddenly raked the remaining ones off with his arm in frustration. “It’ll be concealed behind an armored access panel—like a safe? Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “We don’t have a safe,” I said. “We never needed one.” I held up my QComm. “But I’ve got Ray’s number.”
“Be careful what you say,” he warned. “Vance could be monitoring your QComm.”
“Not anymore,” I told him. “After Vance broke in on my conference call with the Armistice Council, Lex helped me turn on my QComm’s hidden security mode—the same feature that Vance uses to prevent his own QComm from being monitored.”
“Captain Larkin appears to be something of a genius, doesn’t she?”
I caught him studying my face for a reaction, and blushed involuntarily. I nodded in reply, then pulled up my contacts and tapped the last name listed there: Ray Habashaw. His face instantly appeared on my display. His name, rank, and current location appeared across the bottom—he was at an EDA base in Arizona called Gila Mountain.