Icarus raced to turn on his phone. At that very moment, he was mentally kicking himself for disconnecting completely from the outside world. He’d made the decision before this adventure to move all communication to a device, rather than being always connected via his mind. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do, but he felt like he needed to do something, to stop whatever was going on.

Almost as soon as the device booted up, he received a flood of messages. His phone was going off, and it didn’t look like there was an end in it stopping. Again, he was regretting disconnecting his matrix from the internet because he would have been able to parse all this information quicker than going through a phone.

He was about to begin the task of scanning through the info when he received a video call from an unknown number.

Icarus showed the screen to Atlas and both the Ships.

“Answer it,” Atlas suggested.

Everyone huddled behind Icarus as he answered the phone.

Time seemed to slow down at that very moment. Icarus’s heart skipped a beat, and a strong sense of panic and dread washed over him.

On the other end of the screen was a scene straight out of a horror movie.

On the screen, Icarus saw two Penquins, and they clearly had Atua inside of their chests. One was the Atua that attempted to abduct Atlas and the others—Icarus had become quite adept at differentiating between individual aliens. And the other was one he hadn’t met before.

That wasn’t what worried him the most. There was a third Penquin, this one clearly not sporting any Atua in its chest. It had a collar around its neck, and it was clear one of its flippers was broken. It looked like it was groveling at their feet.

Icarus knew the Penquin, too. It was Atuatuk, the alien who had helped give them a lot of new information when they had been in the cave. The last Penquin they’d talked with right before they’d escaped. Icarus felt sorry for the alien, who looked to be in great pain.

This wasn’t what Icarus’s heart was racing for, however. In the corner of the screen, right above one of the Atua’s heads, was Lex. Most likely his Lex.

They hadn’t gotten away completely free after all. Obviously, they’d captured his escape vehicle after his updated information contained in his matrix was broadcast across the universe.

Icarus wondered whether they had his matrix as well. Lex was meant to self-destruct everything right after sending the data packets. But if they’d managed to halt that self-destruction, then a version of him might have been tortured.

He felt like he had just made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. The Atua obviously didn’t look kindly at aliens—especially those that snuck onto their planet.

“I should have known you were on the glass ring,” the alien that they knew as PBD spat. “Good.” The two aliens looked at each other and made a guttural-sounding click. “You will see the error. We are destroying your ring, and then you will come back to our planet and apologize, and the matter will be considered complete. That’s all we want, an apology. In person. With your Ship.” The video disconnected.

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The words coming out of the alien’s mouth were so at odds with what he knew about the Atua. They were ruthless people. He’d seen it on multiple occasions. Their grip over the Penquins was absolute. Icarus didn’t believe for one minute if he went to apologize that he’d ever leave again. “That’s definitely a trap.”

Then Icarus realized that before PBD had told him and Ship to swing by and apologize, he’d casually mentioned he was going to destroy the ring.

As if on cue, Icarus followed Atlas’s eyes as he looked up toward the metallic mess, which was one of the planetary-defense weapons ripped right out of the ground and now pointed at the ring.

A massive glow was coming out of the head of the machine. It was about to fire.

It was a laser weapon, designed to cut through almost anything. The Rings of Titan were made of a material called Daimond, which would offer some protection. But Icarus wasn’t sure how long it could last. One breach of the hull would probably cause them to lose millions, if not billions, of lives.

“How do we stop this?” Icarus pleaded to no one in particular. He was feeling so helpless.

“I know the operation of those weapons,” Atlas said. “There’s a manual fail-safe that can shut it off completely. It’s right in the very center, underneath the barrel.”

“Can you show me where it is?”

Atlas and his Ship both shook their heads. “Ship, did you do it?”

Ship shook his head. “They’ve completely locked us out.”

“It’s your Starnet. They’ve taken over the running of it,” Atlas said. “I need to shut it down on our end.”

“How do you know it’s the Starnet?” Icarus asked.

“We didn’t see an alien vessel enter this system. So they must have hacked their way in. If I shut down the Starnet on this end, then that will hopefully lock them out completely.”

“What if they’ve set up their own back door?”

Atlas bit his lower lip, thinking some more. “They have to be leveraging the technology somehow. I’m going to try overloading it, sending massive packets of data back and forth.” Atlas pointed up toward the firing machine. “Shut it down.”

“Okay.” Icarus was feeling a wave of panic roll over him. He didn’t like situations like this. He began scanning the edges of the ring wall. He knew there was an air lock somewhere nearby that should allow him to move through it and reach space.

Atlas and his Ship froze. They couldn’t operate their avatars while the bandwidth on the planet was being overloaded.

“Let’s mecha merge,” Ship suggested.

Icarus and Ship had designed their avatars so that they could be merged together. It would allow them both to consume more power and do things that they couldn’t do individually. It was particularly useful in this situation because they were going to need as much power as possible.

Icarus nodded, and the two of them blended into each other. Their combined form looked like a mecha robot or a Transformer.

Their combination made what could only be described as a Transformer-inspired duck. The Icarus-Ship combination looked like it had a duck head over one of its arms, almost protruding out like a gun. It looked like Icarus and Ship had designed it to look a lot like the Grimlocks in Transformers, only instead of including elements of a dinosaur, it was elements of a duck.

There was meant to be accompanying dance as an electric guitar soundtrack played, all crescendoing in an end pose that had the newly combined Icarus and Ship standing with one hand in the air as a light flashed and they bellowed, “Mega Icar-ship!” in a suitably deep and raspy Japanese anime-style voice.

None of that happened, since they didn’t have time to run through the normal preamble, and they had a mission to complete.

Icar-ship looked up quickly and completed the scan of the edge of the glass portion of the ring. He was looking for the air lock exit. There were several air lock doors dotted around, but they were all the consumer kinds, not the emergency ones.

The air locks designed for the general public had no cycle-override functionality, meaning they would have to wait for the air to be completely pumped out. The emergency air lock doors were bigger and able to be forced open, even without all the air pumped out.

Icar-ship spotted the exit he wanted. He fired his engines and raced to the air lock, moving much faster.