Kressa and Dahl arrived at the warehouse nearly an hour before the scheduled start of the meeting. A dozen people were waiting already, with more arriving every minute, both on foot and via aircars that landed on the roof and took off as soon as their passengers debarked. Vel’s workers had completed the repairs to the freight lift; it carried the attendees who arrived by aircar quickly and quietly from the roof to the ground floor.

  Kressa worried that so much activity in an abandoned part of the warehouse district would be noticed by the cruiser stationed above Tranur, but Dahl assured her that the sensors on the ship were running a sweep program that ignored all readings coming from the area around the warehouse. The program had been in place for several weeks, installed by a sensor technician loyal to the Esora cause. Tonight at midnight, the program would shut down, restore the original, and erase itself. By that time, everyone would be gone from the building.

  While she waited for the meeting to begin, Kressa mulled over Vel’s plan. The commander had gone over the main points the evening before, and Kressa believed the idea was well thought out, but as it drew closer to the time she would have to face a troop of Patrolmen and willingly surrender, she began to have doubts. Dozens of things could go wrong, not the least of which was the Patrol soldiers becoming a little overzealous in their attack and failing to take all of the rebels alive. And in the back of her mind lurked the remnants of her first impression of the Esora operation: The possibility that it was all an elaborate trap.

  By the time the meeting began, Kressa had gone over all of the arguments for and against her participation and decided she would do it. After all, if the dozens of men and women gathered in the warehouse, as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people they represented, trusted Dania Vel enough to risk their lives following her plan, who was Kressa to doubt her? Decision made, Kressa turned her attention to the meeting and learned the full, impressive extent of the rebel movement on Vsuna, the ground forces that would back up those on board the Cheops.

  After the meeting, Kressa and the rest of the Cheops force—Dahl and Nait among them, the latter accompanied by a young blond boy—gathered near the freight lift for a final talk with Vel.

  “First of all,” the commander said, “I want to thank you all for volunteering to do this and let you know that I’m going to give you a couple of chances to change your mind. No one here will fault you for getting up right now and walking out.” She paused to glance at each of the thirty or so men and women gathered before her.

  No one moved.

  Vel smiled. “That’s what I thought. You’re all as crazy as I am.”

  A smattering of laughter rippled through the assemblage; some of it sounded forced.

  “There are two things I want to go over before I give you your second chance to wise up and get out of here,” Vel said. “First is the people I’ll be bringing here to capture you tomorrow night. Few of them are going to be on our side. How many depends on who the captain assigns to me. While I don’t expect you to give up without at least some token resistance—no one would believe that—you need to remember that these people have orders to meet any show of force with at least twice as much. And while they’ll be under orders to take all of you alive, they’re not going to hesitate to kill anyone they think is serious about killing them.”

  “How do we put up a convincing resistance without looking like we want to kill them?” one of the women in the group asked.

  “I hope to bring such an overwhelming force that you’d have to be completely suicidal to believe you could overcome them. My story is that one of the Esora inner circle is my informant, so I’ll know exactly what I'm going to be up against and will have made plans to be sure I can take you all alive.

  “Now,” Vel continued, “onto the part over which I have a lot less control, and the one I want you to consider very carefully before refusing my second offer to back out. As some of you have probably heard, my commanding officer, Captain Olun Betz, is not the most tolerant soul in the galaxy. He’s also got a sadistic streak about a light year wide. Do not cross him. Don’t even look at him if you can avoid it. He might consider it a challenge and decide to begin your interrogation then and there.

  “I wish there was some way to bring you all onto the ship, march you straight to the bridge, and begin the takeover, but try as I might, I’ve not been able to get enough loyal people transferred on board to make that possible. Until we’ve got you locked up safely in the brig, there will be too many guards for me to dare to try to get you out. I’m going to do everything I can to make your stay in the brig short and keep the captain away from you, but he’s going to be so full of himself for being the CO of the person who brought down Esora that I’m afraid he’s going to want to inspect his prize. My best advice to you if that happens is to endure whatever he does, keeping in mind that he’s going to be the one who suffers the most when we send him back to his keepers without Vsuna or his fleet.”

  “Send him back?” a man standing behind Kressa asked. “Why don’t we just kill him?”

  “Because I want that bastard to suffer for the hell he’s put me through,” Vel said. “Being court-martialed for losing Vsuna will be a good start. Betz is one of those elite officers who didn’t have to attend academy and work his way up through the ranks like most of us. His family bought him his commission and command. Losing it will cost him not only his power in the Patrol but the respect and financial backing of his family, as well. I’m not sure which he’s going to miss more,” she added with an amused lilt.

  “On a less personal note,” she went on, her voice serious again, “no one is to be killed unless it’s absolutely necessary. Remember, I’ve been working with these people for years. Some of them are good friends whose only shortcoming is the fact that they were born on a United Galaxy world and believe the crap the Patrol has fed them. If we kill them simply because of what they are, we’re as bad as the United Galaxy and no more fit to run Vsuna than they are.”

  She stood up and began to walk slowly back and forth in front of the gathering. “The raid is scheduled so you’ll arrive on the Cheops around the time the captain goes off duty, and I may have a way to keep him occupied. A brave young woman named Jendora deRas has volunteered to visit him in his quarters. If anyone can keep him busy, she can.” Vel paused to glance at them all before continuing. “I wish I could give you a precise, step-by-step plan of how we’re going to pull this off. Unfortunately, there are too many variables for me to have worked it out that thoroughly. What I can tell you is that, sooner or later, I will get you out of the brig. After that we’ll divide into two teams, one for engineering and one for the bridge. Once we have control of those two places, the Cheops is ours, and we can move onto getting control of the fleet and taking back our world.”

  Vel walked to her chair and picked up her cloak. She swung it around her shoulders and adjusted it before turning back. “Next time we see each other, we’ll be enemies. After that, on board the Cheops, if something goes wrong, I will not jeopardize months of work to save any one of you. If some of you aren’t here tomorrow night, I’ll understand.” She stepped onto the freight lift and slid the heavy grating closed. After a moment, the lift activated with a quiet whir and rose out of sight.

  A long silence hung in the room as the lift progressed to the roof, then came the faint sound of an aircar lifting off and moving away across the water. Slowly, the men and women in the warehouse began speaking quietly.

  Kressa looked around for Dahl. She found him sitting to one side of the room, fingers tapping briskly at his data pad. Curious, she made her way over to him. He smiled at her without looking up.

  She took the empty chair beside him. “What are you doing?”

  “Working.”

  “On what?”

  He gave her another smile, but still did not take his attention from the pad. “Hopefully, whatever it is the commander’s going to ask me to do on board the Cheops.”

  “That doesn’t sound very encouraging.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Don’t you know what she wants you to do?”

  “In theory.” His fingers continued to dance over the pad. “But theory’s rarely the same as reality.”

  “In theory, then, what is it she wants you to do?”

  “Convince the fleet computers to lie.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “If not, we’re all going to be in a lot of trouble.”

  Kressa frowned.

  “I can do it,” he assured her. “Don’t worry.” He gave the pad a few last taps and held it out. “Want to give it a try?”

  “Me? I don’t know how to—”

  “It’s easy.” He leaned forward to point out the controls. “It’s like a game.” On the screen, a three-dimensional representation of a complex lattice-work structure connected a series of glowing red spheres. “This is a program I developed to represent and control a Patty fleet control network. Right now, it’s in simulation mode, but when it’s jacked into a real system, you can use it to affect the computers on that system. The spheres are control points, computers that can accept input, make decisions, control part of the system. The lines connecting them are the primary communication links between them. You can reroute the controlling input point of any of the computers to any other computer by doing this.” He touched one of the red spheres. It turned green. He tapped a second sphere. This one turned a different shade of green, and one of the shorter paths connecting the two spheres began to glow a dim greenish color. An instant later, an identical path appeared alongside the original, creating a double connection between the two spheres, and the entire node took on an intense green color. “That shows you there’s now a control loop. But watch what happens next.”

  New paths, drawn in yellow, began to reach out from the first sphere. They followed existing lines or traced new ones toward the second green sphere. Dahl stroked his finger across one of the growing lines and it stopped. He did the same to a second one. Almost as fast as he wiped away the lines, new ones appeared or old ones lit up again. He kept at it.

  “What you’re seeing now,” he said as he continued to cut off the lines, “is the first computer trying to confirm the reroute command. Patty fleet computers are designed to resist rerouting commands that aren’t strictly internal, so it’s trying to find a way to get to the computer it thinks issued the command, to confirm the order through a security channel. As you can see by the new lines it’s drawing, it’s even creating new communication links to reach the other computer. When I touch any of the lines, it momentarily breaks contact, but that doesn’t stop it from trying that connection again or from continuing to search for new ones.” He paused to concentrate on the pad for a moment. “Each computer has its own… personality, I guess you’d call it, when it comes to searching for new connections. It has to do with how it’s programmed and what its function is. By watching one for a while, you can pick up on its pattern and begin to anticipate what it’s going to do next. If I can keep this up long enough, one of my other programs will work its way far enough in to overcome the computer’s resistance, then it will obey the reroute command.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Kressa watched as he continued to work at the data pad, cutting off lines almost before they began. “Why can’t other programs do what you’re doing?”

  “They’d have to be too intrusive to be able to both monitor and control all of the communication lines,” he said without looking up. “Some security program would pick them up and wipe them out and set off a whole lot of alarms in the process. As it is, it’s almost too intrusive now, but I’ve been able to put a lot of camouflaging code around it, making it look legitimate enough to get past the monitor programs. Unless someone sends in a sniffer routine specifically designed to find it, it’s subtle enough to get away with doing its job.”

  After several more seconds, Dahl tapped the last line out of existence, and a low, triumphant tune played.

  “You did it,” Kressa said with a smile.

  He gave a nonchalant shrug. “It’s set on one of the lower levels of difficulty, and I was only working on one node. In reality, the connections form much more quickly, and there are generally several nodes you have to worry about at once. Watch.” He tapped a control and restarted the “game.” This time, he began by creating five different connections, each represented by a different color. Almost immediately, the five spheres began tracing paths to the central sphere.

  Moving with amazing speed, Dahl cut off every route the spheres tried to create until, one by one, they stopped trying, and the tune played again. He reset the pad and held it out to Kressa. “Your turn.”

  She took it, studied the screen for a moment, and then tapped two of the spheres. It took her several tries, but she finally got the feel of the game and was able to relax enough to stop trying too hard.

  “You’re really good,” Dahl said after she’d won several games. “You’re nearly as fast as Telsin.”

  “Who’s Telsin?” she asked without taking her eyes from the pad. The games were getting more difficult after each win. Already, she was at a level where she had to create at least four nodes before it would begin.

  “The blond boy with Nait. They’re brothers. Not biologically, of course. They’re members of the Gendzet order. Telsin’s going to be playing that game with the fleet computers on board the Cheops.”

  Kressa finished the current round and looked across the room at the boy. “He’s coming with us? Isn’t he a little young?”

  “He’s twelve.”

  “But he could be killed.”

  “We could all be killed,” Dahl said, “and Tel knows what’s at stake. Besides, I need his help.”

  Kressa continued to watch the boy. She had run away from the San Francisco Patrol Academy when she was ten and spent the next several years living with a street gang in the crumbling remains of the earthquake-shattered old city. She’d been in her first serious fights with rival gangs when she was Telsin’s age.

  “Are you sure he doesn’t think it’s all a game?” she asked. “When I was his age, stuff like this sounded like fun to me, an adventure, until I saw enough of my friends die.”

  “He’s seen plenty of his friends die, Kressa. The Gendzet order was outlawed by the United Galaxy, and most of its members were killed in raids on their compounds. Even now, they’re still being hunted.”

  “Why? What’d they do?”

  “Oh, the usual stuff. Believed in peace, brotherhood, freedom.” He looked across the room at Nait and the boy. “And… other things.”

  “What other things?”

  Dahl returned his gaze to her. “Apparently, their founder was an Ilekian Adept.”

  Kressa's brows shot up. She had heard about Adepts. As with Nepurhans, some Ilekians had developed a proclivity for mental abilities. Adepts devoted their lives to the study and perfection of those abilities.

  “I didn’t realize there were any Adepts still alive,” she said.

  “There are a few, although they tend to keep a low profile, for obvious reasons.”

  Kressa glanced across the room again. Most of the people had left, but Nait and Telsin remained, talking to another man. A data pad similar to Dahl’s hung from the boy’s belt.

  “Do you want to help me and Tel on the Cheops?” Dahl asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With this.” He touched the pad she held. “Play the game.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  He looked at the pad. “This says otherwise.”

  She hesitated.

  “I could really use the help, Kressa. With a second person to work on the routing, I’ll be able to concentrate on the rest of the job.”

  “You mean there’s more to it than this ‘game’?”

  “Much more. Once a computer’s been rerouted, it has to be told what to do in a convincing manner. Plus the computers need to be prevented from reacting to their security programming and kept from listening to other reroute commands sent by people and computers trying to break the original one.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “By sending in programs to change the computers’ behavior, software worms to rot the original programming. And by watching for certain behaviors that can be used to our advantage or altered slightly to get them to do what we want.” He took the data pad from her. “This thing is full of routines I’ve created that can be strung together to get the Patty fleet computers to do what we need.”

  She looked at him for a long time and then shook her head in amazement. “Why in hell is someone with your abilities working as a port supervisor?”

  “To let people like you onto the planet with no questions asked.”

  She smiled.

  “In my spare time,” he went on, “I’ve helped design some of the non-standard programs many of the local Patty ships are currently running, like the sensor program on the cruiser up there,” he pointed toward the ceiling, “as well as some security worms and backdoors we’ll be using tomorrow night to get into the fleet computers. Once we’re in, we’ll reroute everything to the Cheops’ bridge and make the fleet think the wrong stuff’s happening at the wrong places. Would you mind if I call Connie and run some of this stuff by her? It would be nice to have someone like her check my work.”

  “Sure. We can go to the ship now. You can run it by her in person.”

  He looked around the nearly empty room. “That might be a good idea. I can upload the information to her tonight and stop by tomorrow after work to go over it. Then we can drive in here together.”

  Kressa nodded. “Sounds good. Let's go.”

  * * *

  Dahl showed up at the Conquest late the following afternoon, and Kressa offered to make him something to eat before they left. While she prepared a meal, he spoke with Connie about the work he’d left the previous night. Kressa listened to their conversation while she cooked, but it made little sense, and she finally turned her full attention to the food she was preparing. By the time she finished, the conversation was over.

  “Was Connie able to help?” she asked Dahl.

  He was sitting at the table in the Conquest’s dining area. She set a plate of food in front of him.

  “She sure was.” He set aside his data pad and centered the plate before him with a grin. “This looks great. Thanks.”

  Kressa began to pick at her own meal.

  “That’s one hell of a computer you've got,” Dahl said between mouthfuls.

  “She had good designers.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “You’re right about that. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. All I did was help design some of her control systems. The important work was done before the Alliance War, long before any of us were born. If I could design a computer like Connie, I’d be rich.” He paused for a moment, as if to reconsider his statement. “Actually, I’d probably be in prison, since AI systems like hers were outlawed decades ago.”

  “The Pattys just don’t like computers that are smarter than they are,” Kressa said with a smile, although she knew the truth was much more complex than that. Problems with various AI systems had triggered a number of different regulations, as well as outright bans on certain AI systems, even before the Patrol came into power.

  “You’re probably right about that,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in selling the ship?”

  “Not on your life.”

  He shrugged. “I probably couldn’t afford it, anyway.”

  “Probably not. It cost Azano over twenty-eight million credits to build her. I wouldn’t sell her for twice that much.”

  “I don’t blame you. And even if I did have her, I probably couldn’t figure out how she works. It took an entire team of people much smarter than myself to make sense of the Alliance designs, and from what Connie’s told me, Azano spent years making further modifications. Too bad there’s no way to bring her along on this mission of Vel’s. She’d be a lot of help.”

  Kressa thought of the many times it would have been helpful to have someone with Connie’s knowledge and quick thinking along with her, as well as the times the computer had managed to save her skin despite being bound to the ship.

  Dahl scraped the last morsel of food from his plate. “That was really good. Have you got more?”

  Kressa pushed her nearly full plate to him. “You can have mine.”

  He studied her for a moment. “Nervous?”

  She forced a smile. She’d spent half of the day trying not to think about what was going to happen tonight. When that failed, she’d spent the rest of the time trying to bolster her decision to participate.

  “What is there to be nervous about?” she asked with feigned nonchalance. “All I have to do is turn myself over to the Patrol and allow them to lock me up in the brig of a heavy cruiser. Happens every day.”

  He continued to watch her. “You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?”

  “Sure I have.” She leaned back in her chair. “Lots of times. It’s just that none of it’s ever been this big. I’ve worked with the Arecian Guard for six years, but Arecia’s a Free World. We’ve never had to take a planet away from a Patty fleet. The most we’ve done is rout out a few nests of Patrol soldiers. Everything was done with small forces and quick strikes, and I helped with the planning of just about every mission I was on. This isn’t going to be like that.”

  “Just play it smart and follow orders, and you’ll be fine,” he said. “The commander knows what she’s doing.”

  Kressa nodded.

  “You know, no one would blame you if you backed out,” Dahl said. “This isn’t your world.”

  “It’s not your world either.” He had confirmed her initial impressions about his Sundaran origins the night they met with a story about growing up near Sundara’s famous shipyards. “Why are you helping?”

  He paused a moment before answering. “Do you know what Esora means?”

  “I heard it was some kind of flower, and a drug made from it.”

  Dahl nodded. “A deadly drug. Suicides use it because the lift you get before you die is supposed to be amazing. Some say you die of pleasure. Because of that, Esora has become a slang term for anything worth dying for. This little uprising of Vel’s has become my Esora.” He paused and looked deep into her eyes. “I think freedom is worth dying for.”