Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

His uncle smiled. “Don’t overdo the pleasantries, Nephew. I’m liable to think you’re plotting my demise.” He handed the gun to one of his goons, his eyes never leaving Walter’s. “Now tell me, Junior Pirate, since you obviously think I’m performing below the watermark—If you were running Hommul clan, what would you do differently?”

One of the goons chuckled. The other looked over the gun before stuffing it into the shadows of his jacket.

“I’d invest in ships,” Walter blurted out. His thoughts on the matter were no secret. He watched the gun—his treasure—disappear.

“You’d sink us with a fleet of ships, would you?” His uncle laughed. “No clan has ever prospered by wasting their spoils on ships.”

“No clan has ever led without them,” Walter said. He looked back to his uncle.

His uncle laughed even harder, his throaty bellow filling the alley and flooding out beyond.

“You think this is about leading?” He pointed out the alley. “Do you think the Smiths own their ships? They don’t. Terran banks own their ships and they own the Smiths with their interest payments. What do the Smiths get in return? The headache of managing this flooding place and the thrill of first recruits, that’s what. You think this is about who’s in charge? Boy, you have no idea. This is about who can pay the rent, who can raid enough to get by. Scrap and salvage, boy, that’s what’ll see us through the rains, not your blasted pirate ships.”

Walter clenched his jaw lest his mouth get him in trouble. His uncle stepped to the side and waved at his apartment’s flood-high stoop.

“Now get along. Go see to my sister in case it’s the last chance you get.”

Walter was glad to. He squeezed past his uncle and between the two towers of goon.

“And no more talk of ships,” his uncle called out after him. “Nobody ever made a dime on the blasted things. They’re just holes in space that suck your money away.”

More laughter filled the alley. It chased Walter up the steps and mocked him for being stupid while he fumbled uncharacteristically with the locks. He hurried with them as fast as he could and took longer as a result. After working the last lock loose, he slipped inside with his mom and the machines, slamming the door shut to block out the awful and humiliating stench in the alley.

35 · The Raid · Two Days Later

Walter concentrated on the locked comm box attached to the back of the Navy building. With another deft tickle from his lockpick, he felt the final tumbler click into place, his torque wrench slide to the side, and then the Human-built Master lock popped open smoothly.

“Who’s the masster now?” Walter hissed. He smiled over at the moderators and pushed the lid closed with a soft click. One of the mods ticked an item off on his clipboard while Pewder switched places with Walter and took his turn at the supposedly impregnable lock. Each kid had two minutes to get the hatch open. Walter had taken less than thirty seconds. He glanced up at the dark and roiling sky and hissed with impatience as Pewder struggled with the mechanism.

After what felt like an hour, the lid to the comm box popped open, and Pewder pumped his fist and turned to beam at Walter. Walter pushed Donal forward, wishing they could just skip to the good part.

It took Donal almost the full two minutes. It felt like longer, but Walter watched as one of the moderators counted down the final seconds with his hands. It was all Walter could do to not reach forward and finish the job himself.

Finally, with seconds to spare, the lock clicked open. Donal started to push it closed again, but one of the moderators caught the boy’s wrist and waved Walter forward.

Walter sneered. Finally. He pulled out his small pouch of electrical gear and freed his alligator clips. First, he placed a button LED inside the comm box and tapped it on. The small lamp put out just enough light to reveal the interior of the box, but not enough to spill past and alert anyone to their presence.

The alligator clips from his card reader were then attached to a set of wires—red to red and black to black. Walter liked to think of the reader as a second type of lockpick, one that slid dexterous programs into the tumblers of electronic firewalls, jiggling them loose. For this final test, each trainee would use their reader to load a hack they’d been working on for weeks. Or, as in Walter’s case, for the last two days.

In one of Walter’s pockets, he had a card with his actual assignment on it, just in case anyone checked. With one swipe, it would bypass four layers of firewall and two security checks before routing a message through the large Navy containment tower a few blocks away. That tower was full of entangled particles whizzing around inside fibermagnetic wires. Those wires were connected to a Bell Phone, which could send the message instantly to Earth, millions of light years away, where the sister entangled particles would accept the transmission. The transmitted code would then seek out and hack a certain mainframe, taking down the Galactic Union homepage and displaying that year’s pwned message for his moderators to validate.

Walter had written the program just that morning, and he knew it would work. But he wouldn’t be using the backup card that held his pristine hack. No, he would be using the one he had written earlier, the one saved on the Navy ID badge pulled from the alley two nights prior, the one that promised to solve Hommul clan’s ship deficiency by making sure no clan had ships.

Walter sneered in the pale light emanating from the comm box. He reached into his favorite pocket and pulled out the card. He held it up to the reader fastened with its alligator clips and prepared to swipe it—

•• TWO DAYS BEFORE ••

Walter hurried down the alley steps to the basement entrance of Hommul HQ. His family’s pirate offices were drastically below flood level, yet another embarrassing result of his uncle’s maniacal drive to cut costs. He pulled out his pick set and knelt down before one of the dozens of locks on the door. If a non-member picked the wrong one—or even threw the tumblers too far in the correct lock—alarms would sound and deadbolts would engage. In order to enter the headquarters, clan members simply had to pick the correct lock and do so gently. There were few things more humiliating than setting off alarms on one’s own door.

Walter clicked the mechanism aside with practiced ease. As with most skilled pirates, fumbling for a key on a crowded ring would’ve taken him longer. It was much slicker in any case to simply carry a single key for every lock, which is how he thought of his pick set.

Pulling open the door, Walter was greeted with a billowing rush of warm air, a sign that the air conditioner was on the fritz again. He stepped inside and yanked the door shut behind him. The thrum of water pumps vibrated through the walls as he hurried through twisting corridors. It was good to hear the pumps running with the rains looming in a day or two. Hommul HQ had been flooded out twice in the nine years they’d been in the new space. Walter frowned at the thought as he snuck past the Junior Pirate bunkroom. The lights inside were off, the darkness bearing an unoccupied stillness. Walter knew where most of the Junior Pirates-in-Training were—he’d just left them around the Rats pit. The Senior Pirates were probably out staking heists and prepping for the upcoming finals. Whatever the reason, Walter felt giddy to have the place to himself.

His mood sank, however, when he entered the computer room. The place was a wreck.

“What the floods?” he hissed.

He waded through an ankle-deep layer of candy wrappers and empty tin cans of Pump Cola. The two computers had been left on; their fans whirred with an annoying clatter, and both machines were adorned with a half dozen twinkling, blue lights. The chairs in front of each were sprinkled with cookie crumbs and the tell-tell orange smears of Chedder Puffs. The room also reeked of sweaty Palan, of worry and agitation. Walter even nosed a bit of raw dread, the sort of smell he associated with the soon-to-be-dead. He’d seen some nasty last minute hack sessions in his time, but the scene before him beat all. As he lowered himself to the edge of the less-ruined chair, he noted someone’s code had been left up on the monitor. One glance, and he pegged its owner for the one reeking of death-dread. The code was more of a mess than the room.

Walter fought the urge to clean the code up a bit, knowing it was an irrational compulsion and very un- Palan-like. He closed his eyes, bent forward, and blew out as hard as he could across the keyboard. Bits of pizza