“I knew there was something off about that jerk,” Sam says, pacing now. “John, man, what are we going to do about him?”

I don’t reply, mainly because the only solution I can think of at that moment, seeing Five in the enemy’s uniform, is to kill him. “Where’s he going? Follow him,” I tell Adam.

Adam does. The camera follows Five across the runway until he reaches a ramp that leads onto the biggest spaceship I’ve ever seen, so massive that its entire bulk isn’t even picked up on camera.

“Damn,” I breathe, my eyes widening. “What the hell is that thing?”

“Warship,” Adam answers, a note of awe sneaking into his voice as he squints at the screen. “I can’t tell which one.”

“Which one?” Sam exclaims. “How many of those things do they have?”

“Dozens? Maybe more, maybe less. They run on the old fuel of Mogadore and whatever my people managed to mine from Lorien. Not the most efficient things. And slow. When I got in trouble as a boy, my mother would threaten to ground me until the fleet’s arrival . . .” He realizes he’s rambling and trails off, looking up at us. “You don’t care about this, do you?”

“Maybe not the best time for reminiscing,” I reply, watching as Five boards the ship. “But what else can you tell us about the fleet?”

“They’ve been traveling since the fall of Lorien,” Adam continues. “Mog strategists believe they’ve got enough firepower left for one last siege.”

“Earth,” I say.

“Yeah,” Adam replies. “Then, my people will settle here. Maybe rebuild the fleet if Setrákus Ra finds a reason.”

“You mean if there’s any life in the universe left for him to conquer,” I say.

Sam shakes his head, still marveling at the hulking warship. “So they have a secret weakness, right? Like how you can shoot that one spot on the Death Star and the whole thing blows up?”

Adam’s brow furrows. “What’s a Death Star?”

Sam throws up his hands. “We’re screwed.”

“If they’ve been taken prisoner and are aboard that thing . . .” I don’t finish the thought, mainly because a course of action just isn’t coming to me. Taking over a mostly abandoned Mogadorian base is one thing; finding a way aboard a massive warship is another entirely.

Especially when that massive warship is slowly rising into the sky. Maybe Sam’s right and we are screwed.

The three of us watch in silence as the warship climbs. Before it’s entirely offscreen, the ship’s carapace flickers and the whole thing disappears from view. Well, not entirely—the ship’s outline is still vaguely visible, as if the light around it is bending in strange ways. The distortion is almost like trying to focus on an object that’s underwater.

“Cloaking,” Adam says. “All of the warships have it.”

“Hey, look at the tablet,” Sam says. “Maybe everything isn’t totally depressing.”

As the now invisible warship floats upward, one of the dots on the tablet slowly pulls away from the others. Five’s dot. After a few seconds, it begins to flicker erratically across the screen. We’ve now got two Garde indicators bouncing spastically over the map.