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easily sabotage the entire plan.”
    Clarke looked harried and dismayed as he stared at the readouts. He pressed a bulky
    padded headphone against his ear, listening to reports as they came in from the field. “Half of
    our rooftop anti-aircraft guns are non-operational. Several squads assigned to fire at the
    attacking ships have deserted their posts. Sixteen of the main batteries have failed
    disastrously—the big-bore guns exploded the first time they were used. Outright sabotage.”
    “That is the taste of betrayal,” Gray said to Petty with a bitter smile. “I’m very familiar with
    it myself of late.” He looked pointedly at the shackles on his wrists.
    “We have to fight fire with fire.” Petty stalked back and forth in the command-and-control
    center. “Launch Earth’s best military forces—now.”
    “They still don’t respond, sir.”
    “Then shout yourself hoarse. Make them hear. Make them respond. Find a way to get us
    out of this trap.”
    Gray stepped up next to Petty as if he could simply resume his role as President. “What
    about our ground forces? Have the tendrilless landed yet? We need to keep them from getting
    a foothold.”
    “A foothold?” Petty blinked at him. “They’re blowing up every defense we have. We don’t
    have any way—”
    “Contact our space division. As President I set up a full-fledged military force with orbital
    and even interplanetary combat abilities. I planned ahead.”
    The slan hunter raised his dark eyebrows. “A space division? But we don’t have the
    technology for—”
    Gray looked at him mildly. “I’m the President . I have access to technologies that the public
    doesn’t necessarily know about. Even your secret police couldn’t keep watch over everything.
    Use this command authorization.” He spouted a string of code phrases and numbers. Seeing
    nothing else he could do, Petty told the technicians to do as Gray suggested.
    Across the continent, special sharp-winged ships rose up on lifting platforms from hidden
    underground bunkers. Heavy circular doors slid aside from unmarked paved areas to expose
    launchpads. The new ships carried the best weapons that humans had developed over the past
    fifty years.
    During his administration, President Gray had secretly used black money in the budget to
    build defenses against the threat that he knew was out there, the threat he could never admit
    publicly. He trusted very few people, but he did use a handful of slan advisors and he did
    control the strings of many classified programs. While he staged enemy air-raids, while he
    pretended to receive communiqués from the mysterious leaders of underground slan forces,
    Gray had built his own space fleet. Just in case.
    Wide-eyed, John Petty watched the live images piped into the command center’s screens.
    He was both astonished and delighted to see hundreds of well-armed spaceships ready to
    launch. Earth spaceships.
    Gray was pleased to note the man’s surprise. “I knew you were spying on my every move,
    whether I was protecting Kathleen or maintaining the constant state-of-emergency. But I also
    knew how you were prone to the abuses of power, Mr. Petty. I wasn’t going to let you in on all
    of the emergency preparations.”
    “Abuses? I did what was necessary.”
    “If we’re supposed to cooperate for the time being, then let’s not mince words. I had no
    choice but to take precautions without your knowledge. I needed some assistance from my
    small circle of slan advisors, and they designed these ships. It’s decent technology, but
    probably not good enough. Our knowledge is out of date, compared to what all the tendrilless
    scientists have developed over the years.”
    As they watched, the heroic human spacecraft leaped into the sky like a school of angry
    fish, weapons primed and ready to take out the tendrilless vanguard. On the radar screen, the
    new set of blips rose toward the myriad targets still in orbit.
    Jommy was thrilled to see this