FORTY

Rebellion isn’t an easy thing to pull off when the bad guys are nigh omnipotent alien conquerors. She’d had to take shortcuts. Working with off-the-books parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, for example. Parts and people that’d refused to surrender even after the First turned out the lights. Patriotism, American pride. Exceptionalism. Opportunism. War is good both for hanging onto power and for business.

Nixon. Liddy. Kissinger. Dole. Rumsfeld. Even out of office, they still had keys to the buildings and access to backdoors from which to distribute money, safehouses, and information. Andy and her pals had needed all of it in the early days, when they were on the run in wake of the attack that failed to get the power back on. They needed even more ten years later, when they infiltrated the Artiplanet to steal the vaccine for the fertility virus. They’d traded the means to read First data crystals for the aid.

“That must be how they found out about the device, but I don’t understand how they found the right crystals,” Andy said. “The technology was ancient. Abandoned even before the First went into the caves.”

Demarco and Brooklyn glanced at each other. “Might have some idea where they got ’em,” Demarco said, “but that ain’t the important part now. If First Tech did it, why can’t First Tech fix it?”

It was the scientist’s turn to talk. Andy might have understood some of it, but Brooklyn didn’t. Super flares and extreme coronal mass ejections. Solar winds and geomagnetic storms. Plasma. Dynamos. Magnetic knots. Supernova. A First device in the heart of the Sun, an abandoned experiment, waiting eons for a trigger signal.

Brooklyn was scarcely listening at that point. The city of Cleveland was a crater, and they’d only just prevented something similar happening to Manhattan. The problem there had been big rocks; now they were talking about a star. Billions on Earth, millions more spread out over the Moon, Mars, Venus, and the Belt, and no way to get them to safety.

Douche wrapped up his lecture, which he’d delivered in the dry tones of the worst college professor.

“Well, that’s it then,” Demarco said. “We fucked.”