By then, Marcus had already gone through the checklist, and all systems showed green—even those that allowed interstellar flight.

He glanced at me, “Do you want to take control?”

“If you want to fly it,” I said, “go ahead. You already got everything going.”

He grinned and grabbed the joystick, “Let’s go.”

The jet moved forward toward the airlock that led to the lake. The doors parted and then closed behind us with a clank. Then the water started to fill the room. Within a minute we were exiting the tunnel to the lake and traveling underwater, surfacing a distance from Grand Lake and erupting out of Lake Michigan.

We might have surprised tourists on their boats in the summer, but it was November. We saw a lake freighter in the distance but didn’t fly over it, choosing instead to leave Earth at the first opportunity.

We didn’t call our flight plan in, relying on the ship’s energy-absorbing force field for stealth. In the current situation, we were best off assuming that the Nine had someone in place ready to “accidentally” fire missiles on us or try to beat us to the moon if they knew we were going.

Not long after that, we left Earth’s atmosphere behind, seeing stars. Pinpricks of light in the blackness of space above the curve of the Earth never got boring. Even in the face of Travis’ death and the possibility that Magnus might soon control a weapon surpassing nuclear bombs by a wide margin, I still owned a spaceship and could fly in space whenever I wanted.

Even if circumstances didn’t lend themselves to Sunday afternoon trips around the solar system, the fact that I could was still amazing—assuming I didn’t trigger Earth’s planetary defenses—such as they were. We’d acquired a few used ships from friendly planets and secretly constructed an unknown number of hidden ships.

I used my implant to interface with our sensor systems, learning that the Jay and Kay, Earth’s best "refurbished" alien ships weren’t currently patrolling between Earth and the Moon.

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They weren’t likely to detect and go after us, but it wasn’t impossible.

Cassie stood up as we neared the Moon and leaned toward the window above the dashboard, watching as the gray landscape grew closer. No secret green area of the Moon had become visible.

She asked, “Where are we going?”

“An Abominator base,” Marcus said, beating me to it.

Cassie raised an eyebrow, “Would that be a good place to hide access to a doomsday device? They were fighting the Abominators only a few years later.”

I checked the ship’s sensors for signs of the base, finding none. It wasn’t on the side of the moon we were seeing, “Technically,” I said, “they didn’t know the Abominators were still alive. If Lee did, he wasn’t telling and it would be a few years until whatever woke up the last Abominators did it.”

From behind me, Rachel said, “Thanks, Mr. Well Actually…”

Jaclyn laughed, but added, “He’s right, though. I read that entry too. I wouldn’t leave an alien superweapon there, but if you were trying to hide it from other people, it would look good in the 1950s. Almost no one could have reached the moon back then, but Lee could. The Russians looted the base in the 1960s, grabbed some Abominator tech, and I don’t know what happened after that. Grandpa told me about it. We might end up breaking into a Russian storage facility by the end of this.”

“No kidding?” Marcus began to loop around toward the Moon’s opposite side. “Grandpa didn’t tell me that story.”

“Yeah,” Jaclyn said, her voice trailing off, “Grandpa wasn’t there. He heard about it from the Rocket and didn’t know any more than that. Did he tell you anything, Rachel? Nick?”

“Not a word on that,” Rachel said. “Nick?”

Still trying to follow the sensor data, I said, “Remember Yoselin?”

“Yoselin?” Rachel frowned and then said, “Oh! Larry’s friend’s daughter. I didn’t see much of her. You played with her and you were both annoying.”

“Her father was Cuban and worked with a Russian, powered armor guy called Russian Victory--I think. They were the guys the Russians sent here. Grandpa and Larry fought them and then became friends, I guess. I don’t know any more than that, but that was the second time Grandpa visited.”

We rounded the moon then, moving from the dark side to the light. Relative to the Earth, we were on the dark side and Russia was below us, something I wanted to point out even though it didn’t matter.

The sensors distracted me. I’d set them to examine the Moon, using my implant’s extensive data on the Abominators. The sensors were showing multiple locations where there might be small amounts of Abominator alloys, but that wasn’t all. In the middle of all the small hints of the Abominators’ presence, it detected something big and dense under the surface near one of the Moon’s mountains.

Giving the data to Marcus through our implants, I said, “Go there. I think I found it.”