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messages beyond the range of any human or tendrilless technology.

Joanna leaned in, curious about what he was doing.

Now his systems had locked onto a loud beacon. He had not heard the signal when he first

drove into the city two days earlier, but now the pulsing was strong and undeniable. Some

hidden slans were sending out a distress call or an announcement.

“It’s the location of a slan enclave. An active one!” Tracking it, he compared the pinpoint

with the car’s stored guidance maps as well as the details in his own memories. Jommy grinned

when he realized that the signal originated from the same place his father had marked on the

secret-ink maps.

Then the astonishing signal came through the car’s analytical systems, broadcasting to both

Joanna and himself, a voice that Jommy vaguely recognized from his distant past. “My name is

Peter Cross, a slan scientist. If you are receiving this signal, you have been identified as bearing

slan characteristics in your genetic profile. We need you. Your race needs you. Please follow this

signal. I hope you will find us.”

Jommy swallowed hard. He knew his father had been killed when he was only six years

old, but the clear voice, the encouraging words … “We have to go there first.”

“What about the summit meeting? Jem Lorry is bound to lay a trap.”

He felt an ache in his heart, thinking of Kathleen … and then imagining the large slan

enclave, perhaps people who had known his father. “I don’t think President Gray or John Petty

will let their guard down for an instant.” And, even with the disintegrator, he felt weak and

ineffective without his tendrils.

But if he could bring back a full army of hidden slans, other weapons or technologies—then

they would have a fighting chance. And the slan hideout was right here, while Granny’s ranch

was almost a day’s dangerous journey away.

He turned to Joanna. “Help me mount the disintegrator in the nose of the car. We’re going

to have to do some tunneling, take the direct route.”

After he and Joanna installed the disintegrator, they strapped themselves into their seats.

Jommy activated the engines, turned the weapon’s beam downward, then burned a glassy hole

through the ground in front of him. Considering the location of the signal, he would have to go

deep.

He drove forward, carving a direct passage toward the secret slan base.

«
^
»

Standing on the porch, eyes wide with betrayal, Kathleen watched the hornet shapes of deadly

aircraft swoop over the line of mountains. The military ships were heavily armed, their wings

steeply angled, their engines roaring. The armada looked sufficient to obliterate the entire

valley.

“As I said, these negotiations are over.” Jem Lorry sounded very smug, not even bothering

to look at the oncoming ships. He activated a signaling device on his wrist. “I can’t afford to

leave you alive, Gray, to become a rallying point for any annoying resistance movement.” He

smiled at Petty. “And the great slan hunter is as helpless as the rest.”

The ships closed the gap in seconds. Granny had already bolted back inside the ranch

house, but Kathleen couldn’t tear her eyes from the oncoming squadron. Projectile launchers

clicked into place, and the black hollow eyes of gun barrels turned toward them.

John Petty seemed to consider the whole thing a joke. “That’s not exactly true, Lorry. I

knew you would try to trick me, so I played both sides against the other.” He shaded his eyes,

then pointed to the sky. “Look at the insignia closely. Those aren’t your ships after all.”

Standing close to her father, Kathleen recognized the ominous symbol of a scarlet hammer

against a web. “It’s a secret police strike force!”

“Yes, I used the wireless to contact them while you were all asleep. I arranged for this

ambush.” Petty whipped out a large-caliber pistol he had hidden inside his black jacket.

“Lorry, you’re as dead as the rest of these people.”

Jem’s face contorted in disbelief as Petty’s ambush force dropped a flurry of explosive

bombs that pattered around the perimeter of Granny’s property.

“That’s just for practice. Call it an opening move.” Petty held the gun steady as he backed

out into the middle of the wide-open yard, where one of the smaller ships could find a landing

spot and pick him up. The secret police squadron circled back, coming in for their full attack

run. Petty raised his hand, signaling the pilots overhead.

Kathleen turned to her father, trying to drag him back into the house. “We can get

underground. Jommy armored the house, reinforced the tunnels—”

“That won’t save you. None of you has a chance against the tendrilless.” Lorry began to

grin. “Ah, here we are.”

Over the western line of hills streaked a second swarm of ships that headed straight toward

the secret police squadron. The new ships purred rather than roared, using different

propulsion technology, but they looked just as deadly.

Before the secret police could retrieve Petty, the squadron spun about at the last minute to

defend themselves against the oncoming enemy ships. Their large-caliber guns blasted lead

projectiles through the air, stitching fiery impacts against the tendrilless attackers. One of the

new ships spun out of control, its fuel tanks in flames, and crashed like a meteor into the

ground.

Petty dodged out of the way of the explosion, looking just like one of Granny’s panicked

chickens. Angrily, the slan hunter pointed his pistol toward Jem Lorry and began taking

potshots at his arch-enemy, who bolted for the corner of Granny’s house, crashing through her

rose bushes.

Flying in tight formation, the newly arrived tendrilless engaged the secret police ships. The

invaders’ weapons were hot cutting beams that gutted Petty’s squadron. More explosions

blasted the ground. Two secret police ships erupted in a cloud of smoke and metal debris.

Flown expertly, both sets of dogfighting ships raced and dodged like swordsmen in a

deadly duel. A near miss blew off the corner of Granny’s roof and mangled one of her gutters.

Kathleen grabbed her father’s arm. “Come on! To the hangar shed before it’s destroyed.

Jommy’s rocket-plane!”

Gray immediately understood. “There’s no better time to learn how to fly than right now.”

“Granny! Come with us!” Kathleen shouted back at the house.

Petty shot twice at them as they ran to the hangar shed, but then he ran out of bullets. He

cursed at his gun, then gestured wildly in the air, trying to direct his own ships to bombard the

house. Instead, one of the tendrilless craft began strafing the ground, kicking up hot divots

around him. The secret police chief ran for his life toward the split-rail fence, cursing over the

roar of battle.

As Kathleen and her father raced to the hangar, she saw a defiant Granny emerge from her

home. The old woman stood on the doorstep holding her shotgun, then she marched down the

sidewalk, pointed the shotgun up at the attacking ships in the air, and unloaded both barrels.

She didn’t seem to care which side she was aiming at. “Who said you could bomb Granny’s

property?”

Her blast peppered the underbelly of one low-flying ship, and smoke began to boil from its

engines. Granny busily plugged more shells into her shotgun while the two sides in the

dogfight circled and dropped their bombs. She fired another round at the oncoming ships

before the whole yard exploded around her. The crotchety old woman vanished in a splash of

flames and dirt.

Gray yanked Kathleen’s arm, dragging her along. “Come on! We couldn’t save her.” He

shoved aside the rolling metal door of the hangar shed.

Jommy’s sleek rocket-plane looked like a bird of prey, fully fueled and ready to go.

Kathleen scrambled up the metal-runged ladder into the cockpit while her father operated the

motor that ground open the corrugated metal roof. By the time he swung up beside her into

the cockpit, she was already scanning the controls.

The engines coughed to life, then simmered, building up power. Exhaust shot out in

expanding conical plumes that boiled white inside the hangar. She studied the gauges.

“Warming up. Another five seconds.”

Gray disengaged the landing clamps, and the rocket-plane began to move forward, unable

to contain its own energy. “We’re ready to launch.” He looked up from the readings. “I wish I

had coordinates to tell you, Kathleen. I wish I had an idea of a safe place we could go.”

“I know where to go.”
Another gift from Jommy
. She reminded him about the secret slan

hideout that Peter Cross had described in his notebooks. The exact directions and coordinates

were burned indelibly in her mind. “Jommy would want us to go there.”

She hit the launch button, and the rocket plane burst like an arrow out of the hangar shed.

They streaked away, startling the opposing squadrons of tendrilless and secret police. Below,

the bombardment of the ranch continued. Over half of the ships were now knocked out of the

skies and lay in smoking wreckage amid the burning conflagration of Granny’s house. Even

the armored walls and roof couldn’t withstand it all. She saw no one alive down there.

Before any of the ships could target them, the rocket-plane raced toward freedom across

the sky.

«
^
»

Anthea held her baby on the comfortable cot, alone but at peace. She tucked one of the dark

gray blankets around her, then drifted off to sleep, dreaming about her husband.

She smiled as she dozed, wanting to stay with Davis and his infectious grin, wanting to

forget all the things that had happened. She could never get the echoes of those final gunshots

out of her head. With some part of her, she knew that the tiny boy had joined her like an

eavesdropper in the dreams, getting to know his own father…

She awoke restless. With the bright, steady lights in the underground chamber, she

couldn’t tell whether it was day or night outside. Maybe she would never see open daylight or

breathe fresh air again.

Anthea showered and dressed, putting on a new set of clean clothes she’d found stored in

bins. After being on the run, dirty and weary, she finally began to feel refreshed, able to

consider the future. She and her baby might have to spend years here, live out their lives in an

unknown hideout. This complex had all the necessities she and the baby could ever ask for.

Except for a real life. She couldn’t just surrender like that.

She found a communications monitoring room full of visiplates and speakers tuned to

numerous channels. Anthea listened to emergency reports, gathering background on the

attack. In the past couple of days, she had been so frantic to save her baby, on the run from

slan hunters and looters, that she’d never received explanations about the unexpected war that

had engulfed the Earth.

The base’s sensors and radar systems had detected a much larger occupation fleet

approaching from Mars. Panicked-sounding broadcasters railed about the impending slan

attack, an insidious plot that had been brewing for decades if not centuries.

With all she had learned from the library archives, however, Anthea couldn’t believe that

the surviving slans would choose that course of action. There had to be something more

behind this devastating conflict.

When she came back into the sleeping area and saw the contented baby among his

blankets, she felt an odd thought echo in her mind, a soothing confidence. Though the infant

didn’t even know his name, he somehow assured her that
he
was the key. Even a child, the

right child, could solve such dire problems, given time. Anthea didn’t know what to think, but

she smiled down at her little son.

Suddenly, proximity alarms began to ring, warning systems coming alive. A grating noise

ratcheted like a washboard on her nerves. Anthea didn’t know what to do. The deep hideout

had been discovered! Someone had hunted them down.

She turned away from the deafening alarms, only to see something even more

incomprehensible. One of the hideout’s steel-armored walls began to shimmer and grow hot,

and then it melted in front of her.

With the baby safe in the other room, Anthea ran to grab one of the strange stunner