by J D Huffman
Angel sported a frown already but Sasha thought the expression became a little deeper at the mention of their friend. “He didn’t make it. You were busy cleaning up the mess in the docking bay and getting everyone out of here, and I didn’t want to bother you. Actually, he died during one of my trips to the incinerator. I went to check on him and he was just gone. He just went down with the next load of bodies,” she said grimly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
Sasha shook her head. “You did everything you could. I suppose I have to get used to the idea that I can’t be there for everyone, all the time. There are too many of us. How are William and… the other two?”
“Art and Jaunie?” Finally, Sasha thought. Art and Jaunie. I need to remember that. Even if I can’t be everyone’s friend, I need to know their names—they need to know that they matter to me. “They’re doing well. Art had some lung damage from what was probably a small crystal fire. Scar tissue. His blood oxygen was a little low. The Totality have drugs for things like that, did you know that? He’ll only need a few more doses and all the damage should be healed. The scar tissue is being absorbed, too. He’ll be a normal kid again before long,” she beamed.
“As normal as any of us could ever be,” Sasha replied, her tone harsher than she intended. She didn’t mean to imply Angel did a poor job, but the words came out as if that’s what she intended.
“Yes, well,” Angel said, straightening up her posture and simply ending the thought there. “Jaunie is fine. She was just dehydrated. And surly. I’ve kept her sedated as much as possible,” Angel admitted. “I don’t need her cursing at me every time I come by.”
Sasha found herself grateful she didn’t have to experience that directly. “Angel, I do want to thank you for everything you’ve done. I doubt you expected to be cleaning up corpses and shoving bodies into incinerators. You’ve been a tremendous help to all of us.”
The woman shrugged. “I won’t say I’ve enjoyed it, but what else can I do? People need me, and I have to help them. I’m sure you know what that’s like.”
Sasha wished she could say she felt so confident. Do they need me? Would they be better off with someone else? “Thanks,” she said instead of challenging her. Remembering their next objective, she decided to get on with business as quickly as possible. “Is William well enough to get up and move around?”
“Ask him yourself,” she said, gesturing toward the man’s bed.
Sasha approached and William’s face perked up when he saw her. “I wondered if you were going to bother saying ‘hello’ when you came over here. Done gossiping about me with Angel?” he smirked.
“Oh, shut up,” she said, which she meant playfully but still found it coming out with too much hostility. “Sorry. I wanted to talk to you about the attack on the weapons depot. Do you feel up to coming with me?”
“Let’s find out.” Pushing himself up with his hands, he moved his body forward and swung his legs over the side of the bed, then carefully slid his feet toward the floor. Gradually, he transitioned his weight onto said feet, rising off the bed and finally applying all of his mass—standing upright once more. He wobbled and held his arms out to the sides, steadying his posture and trying to regain his balance. Sasha darted toward him to keep him from falling. “Don’t!” he barked, moving one of his hands into her path. “I can do it.”
She backed off and let him handle the situation by himself. He took a few steps, every one a near disaster. A few times, she was certain he would fall flat on his face. She thought he might be able to move more quickly after covering a little distance, but he seemed not to improve much from step to step. Angel interceded, giving an explanation that was meant to benefit Sasha as much as William. “Don’t push yourself too hard right away,” Angel said. “You were sedated and bedridden for several days. Your body has done a lot of healing but your muscles have stiffened. You may need a few days—even weeks—to get back to your normal physique. Even that’s not a guarantee.”
William shot her a very displeased look at the last comment. “What does that mean?”
Sasha wondered, herself.
“It means that the diagnostic equipment I’ve had available to me isn’t especially thorough. The Totality beat you half to death, William. I made sure you weren’t bleeding internally and that you didn’t have any major fractures, but it’s possible there’s nerve and muscle damage I couldn’t detect. It’s very encouraging that you can walk, so I wouldn’t panic too much right now.”
William leaned forward, running his hands along his thighs and breathing deeply enough that Sasha noticed. “Is that why I can’t feel the tops of my legs?”
Angel retrieved a small scanner from the medical cart nearby and knelt in front of William, extending a small, metallic probe. Without any prompting, she jabbed it into William’s thigh. Sasha instinctively winced but William didn’t react at all.
“I should have been able to feel that, shouldn’t I?”
Angel nodded, standing up. She checked the scanner’s display. “If you had normal nerve function, you’d have felt some serious pain. You didn’t feel anything?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
“How long have you not had any sensation there?”
“Since I woke up?” he guessed. “I thought it would come back once I was up and walking again.”
“It still might,” she said. Sasha couldn’t tell if that was meant as an encouraging yet empty platitude, or a genuine statement of optimism. “Keep moving around, working on it. I’ll assign an exercise regimen to build up your strength and flexibility again, too, if you’d like.”
“I think I can handle that myself,” he protested. “I always had to keep up my physical training as a Militiaman. I know what works.”
“Just don’t go into it too quickly,” Angel cautioned. “You might do more damage.”
Sasha scanned his expression and sensed that he wanted to say something unkind, but kept his mouth shut. At least he has a little restraint. “Angel, is this going to prevent him from helping me plan our attack?”
“I don’t see why it would,” she shrugged. “His brain seems to work fine.”
“Yes, thank you,” he said flatly, then turned to Sasha. “Can we get on with it?”
“Follow me,” she said, heading toward the exit. When she reached it, she rotated to see that he was having a difficult time keeping up. She held the door open so he could proceed, then climbed the steps to the command deck.
William looked up from the bottom, frowning. “This might take a minute.”
She nodded. “Take all the time you need. I’ll wait.”
She watched him carefully lift one foot, plant it on the first rung, grab a side with one hand and then the other against the opposite side, pulling himself up to plant the second foot alongside the first. She stood with her arms crossed, probably looking quite impatient, but she wasn’t in the mood to be diplomatic just then. I doubt he’d like me fawning over him in the first place, she thought.
After a couple minutes, he finally made it to the top, and she proceeded across the command deck to a door on the far side. She stepped within and gestured for him to come inside with her. “This is the commander’s office. It will work fine for our planning.”
Once William was inside, she stepped out to the command area and called out, “Anyone who was interested in helping plan our assault on the Totality weapons depot, we’re having a session in the commander’s office now.”
Several people looked up from what they were doing, then to one another, and she heard some murmuring. She ignored it and went back into the office. An active table was on one side of the room, which could be used to display maps or pull up other information. The other side of the room was occupied primarily by the commander’s desk, which Sasha suspected she would make her own in the near future. She fumbled through the active table’s interface, trying
to bring up a layout of the weapons depot based on the information she, Demeter, and Serim had managed to extract from the database on the Actis facility’s computers. While she worked on that, several others filed in: Fred, Serim, Demeter, and a man she was fairly certain she hadn’t spoken with before. He approached and held out his hand.
For the sake of politeness, she gave it a good shake. “Miles,” he said.
She took it as his name. “Sasha,” she responded with a tilt of her head. “Do you have any experience with tactical planning?”
“I did logistical planning for a materials fabricator before the Totality came,” he shrugged. “I think it might be useful for something.”
“Looks like we’ll find out.” She moved over to the table and everyone else gathered around. “Where’s Janus?” she wondered aloud.
“Keeping us on course,” Fred said. “He knows where we’re going. He said he could handle it himself.”
“I wish we had someone out there watching him.”
“Callum’s got him under control,” Demeter reassured her.
Sasha wasn’t familiar with that name. “Who’s Callum?”
“I met him in the kitchen a couple days ago. Sharp fellow. He used to be a ship systems integrator. He learned how the Totality navigation systems work like a natural, I noticed.”
“That’s good enough for now, I suppose,” Sasha said. “Let’s get to our purpose here. I believe you all know it is my intention to strike the Totality weapons depot here.” She pointed to a dot on the table, and the image zoomed in to bring up a rocky moon orbiting a banded gas giant with a handful of rings. “This is the fifth moon of Leremel VI. The Totality call it Weapons Dump L-6-5-Echelon. To us, it might as well be the richest mine we’ve ever encountered—and we’ll be extracting this one for us.” She tapped again, the image expanding to bring up the facility itself. It was made up of three rectangular structures, one of them quite a bit smaller than the other two. “The small building is the personnel habitat. It’s a lightly-manned facility, according to its database entry. Shouldn’t be more than five or six Totality keeping an eye on it. The large building here,” she said, pointing to one of the bigger structures, “is the powerplant. From what I read, they have a system of automated drones which run down to the gas giant, scoop up some gas, and bring it up as fuel.”
“It must be methane,” Fred commented.
“You’re right,” Sasha confirmed. “They have a virtually endless fuel source right there. Unfortunately, it’s of no use to us. The good news is, since it’s powered by methane, it’s highly explosive. And if we take out the powerplant, there goes any command and control they might have at the depot.”
“The other building must be the weapons dump,” William surmised. He scratched his chin, examining the map and the scale markers. “You’ll want to be very careful blowing up the powerplant like that. Some stray debris and you could set off everything in the dump. It wouldn’t just take out the Totality—it’d get anyone who’s nearby.”
“Well, you are here to help plan this,” Sasha reminded him. “What do you suggest?”
“How do the drones get to and from the gas giant? Do they just fly back and forth?”
“They use an orbital elevator,” Fred explained. “There’s a carbon filament that runs from one end of the powerplant, down into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, then back up to the other side of the plant. It makes a very large circle.”
“That’s a weird way of doing it,” William said, smirking.
“It means the drones themselves don’t need a power source,” Fred explained. “They can use gravitational forces to essentially orbit a point between the planet and the moon.”
William looked unimpressed. “I’ll take your word for it.” He pointed to the entry side of the powerplant. “This faces away from the rest of the facility. We can use that. I would suggest heading down close to the gas giant itself and waiting for one of those drones. When it comes by, attach a small explosive payload to it, timed to go off the moment it enters the powerplant. This will make it look like an accident, as if the drone collided with something. The Totality won’t expect an attack.”
Sasha glanced at Fred, who seemed to be thinking through William’s proposal. “That is a technically complex approach but it is workable. We’d have to account for the effect the explosives would have on the drone’s momentum. If we launch the payload at the right angle, that will give the drone a slight nudge in the right direction. But we don’t want to nudge it too much—that would cause it to arrive prematurely, which may indicate to the Totality that something is wrong.”
“But something will be wrong,” William said, appearing confused as to Fred’s point.
“If the drone arrives minutes before its normal scheduled return to the powerplant, the Totality may well assume it is part of an outside attack—which it is. We do not want to arouse that suspicion at all. We must make certain it arrives at the same moment it would have if we hadn’t interfered.”
“I assume you can do the calculations for that?” Sasha guessed.
“I can,” the troll sighed. “Someday, I will have to teach the rest of you some calculus.”
“Someday,” Sasha laughed, as if they would ever have time. “Okay, so we hit the powerplant and damage it with one of its own drones. What then?”
“The Totality will rush toward the explosion, I imagine,” William said. “They’ll want to see what happened. This moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, does it?”
Sasha shook her head. “We’ll be wearing environmental suits for this one. No atmosphere.”
“So the Totality will need a few minutes to suit up and see what happened. While they’re doing that, we can move in from the opposite direction.” William drew his finger along the table, toward the weapons dump, moving in from the north. “If we manage to keep quiet, we might be able to get in and out without them ever knowing we were there.”
“Why not just obliterate the base once we have what we want?” Demeter suggested. “Once they determine what was taken, they’ll know someone had unauthorized access and send out an alert. If we destroy the base entirely, they won’t be able to call for help. There isn’t a lot of traffic to and from this facility, is there?”
“There doesn’t appear to be,” Sasha agreed. “I dislike the idea of killing the Totality for no reason, though. You know that.”
“They’ll have no such compunction about killing us,” Demeter reminded her. “I understand your desire not to kill prisoners, but these will be combatants. They will be armed and they will attack. Their entire purpose is to protect this location and its weaponry against outside seizure.”
“I’m inclined to agree with Demeter,” William said. “We’ll never get this uprising off the ground if we leave survivors who can report intelligence about us—our numbers, our weaponry, our tactics, our resources. I would even suggest that whatever weapons we don’t take, we destroy. Then they’ll never be able to account for what was taken.”
That made Sasha think for a moment. She came up with an idea that, she thought, would alleviate her concerns while also meeting William and Demeter’s criteria. “William, you mentioned that we should take care not to send incendiary debris toward the weapons dump. That point is well-taken. What if, once we have finished taking what we want from the depot, we trigger an explosion on our way out? This would destroy the rest of the depot and I think the Totality would be quick to blame it on the powerplant explosion.”
“I believe that could work,” Fred said. “One matter in which we must take some care is the manner of the original explosion. I suggest a device with a payload of methane, so it will not appear any different from the drones themselves. A small ignition spark against a tiny canister of methane should be enough to set off everything inside the drone. Any other kind of manufactured explosive would leave ample residue which would be a clea
r sign that outside parties were involved. The ignition fuse should be all but vaporized in the explosion, leaving no evidence.”
Sasha nodded. “Good idea. Let’s run through this one more time. William?”
“Our first move should be to plant a strike team on the moon. Use the gas giant and other moons as cover, approach from the side of the moon facing away from the base. Hover near the surface and plant our attack team along with as many cargo movers as we have on this ship.” He glanced at Fred.
“We have eight,” the troll supplied.
“Eight cargo movers. That’ll get us a lot of weapons and ammo,” William said. “With the team in place, they’ll march toward the weapons dump while we take the cargo ship out to the orbital wire—whatever you call it. Wait for a drone to approach, then launch our package at it using the proper angles and velocities and everything that Fred calculates. Then we’ll move back into position on the moon and wait for the strike team to return. The strike team will wait for the drone to hit the powerplant, watch for the Totality to respond, then get in and take our prize while the Totality are otherwise occupied. On the way out, set off an explosion using whatever is available in the depot, then move out with our cargo as quickly as possible. Load up the goods and the people, and we’re gone. They’ll never know we were there. It’ll just look like a terrible accident.”
Sasha smiled. “I think we have a solid plan here.” Everyone else nodded in agreement. “William, I want you to manage recruiting people for this mission. You can’t go yourself, considering your current condition, but I assume you’re a good judge of who is fit to fight and who isn’t. I plan to lead the strike team myself.”
His eyes widened, and she wondered why he would be surprised. I’ve led things so far, haven’t I? I’m not about to hand everything to someone else now. “Can I have Demeter assist with the recruitment?” he requested.
“If you must,” she acceded. “I want him by my side for the strike, however. His combat skills are too valuable not to use in a mission like this.”