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such defeats. Never before had he seen them respond with such passion and anger. He hadn’t believed that they would be able to make the eighteen warships functional in time, nor had he believed that the staff of those ships could be trained in this new method of flight, but it had happened.
    It had happened, but it had cost a lot of energy. It had prevented thousands of sleepers from waking, and he knew that the brood females—the ones who were still healthy—would not be able to raise sufficient nestlings next pass.
    Cicoi felt his eyestalks quiver every time he thought about the destroyed young lives.
    The future of his people hung in the balance. It was up to him to save them. If he did, he would redeem himself.
    There would still be hardship, of course. More hardship than they had ever experienced. But his people were more unified than they had been since the days of the Elders. And now his people knew they could accomplish more during their period of wakefulness than they had ever done in the past. That would help.
    If everything went smoothly.
    Three Passes instead of two meant everything had to go perfectly.
    Cicoi turned his eyestalks toward the image of the third planet. Nothing had gone perfectly during this awakening. But he couldn’t let that defeat him, or he would lose everything.
    Malmur had to survive.
    October 12, 2018
7:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
    29 Days Until Second Harvest
    This conference room was as different from the original one as a conference room could be. The old conference room had had a cramped 1980s design. This one was modern, with shaded glass walls and a feeling of space, even though it was three levels underground.
    Leo Cross had a feeling that this conference room was one he normally would have never seen. The building was unmarked, like the previous building, and a woman in black wearing a security tag had met them at the door. Then he, Britt, and Bradshaw had gone through an elaborate security process that included passing through a high-level scanner and some lasers, as well as the latest airport screening equipment.
    The woman had also had them all place their hands on a print scanner, and a cool sexless digitized voice had identified them. That procedure itself took almost fifteen minutes. When it was completed, a different woman, also wearing black, met them on the other side of the security barrier. She was the one who led them through a series of corridors to an elevator that dropped them three levels in the space of a heartbeat. The elevator opened onto the conference room. They saw nothing else of the building.
    Cross knew that spread out below the entire city were tunnels and secure facilities designed for the president, members of Congress, and other top government officials so that they could keep the government operating during an attack on D.C. As a boy, he had toured the old underground facilities—the ones that had been built during the Cold War—with his parents. The government still acted as if that old series of tunnels was all that remained of such lavish and outdated fears.
    But Cross’s friend, Doug Mickelson, had once commented that the government would be stupid not to plan for any contingency. This building, with its elaborate security procedures and its ultramodern design, made it clear to Cross that the paranoia of those first underground security tunnels had never gone away.
    He only hoped that this place was sturdy enough to withstand attack from the aliens’ nanomachines. It wasn’t new enough to have been designed and built after the first alien attack.
    This building was a good mile away from the last one. It was also farther away from the traditional seats of power, but he had a feeling that General Maddox had chosen this place for reasons besides that. It would be easy for her to get to—she had even less time than the rest of them—and it probably had satellite hookups built into those glass walls.
    “Yuck,” Britt said as the elevator