Chapter 24: The bigger they are, the more it hurts when they fall on you
Arcturus delivered. To hear him tell it, it took several hours of pestering the Darrex leadership with the most demanding hand gestures he could muster to get them to back our little mission. I think they assumed it was a suicide mission, but then, I'd just managed to survive one of those, so I was feeling pretty lucky. He got what we asked for: a destroyer and a fighter wing. The wing consisted of twenty medium fighters and four heavy bombers. Oh, and the Darrex threw in a corvette that they were about to decommission. All told, it wasn't a terrible little task force. Arc said the fuel and provisions being supplied would keep us going for a few months behind enemy lines. I figured if we were any longer than that, Earth would be screwed anyway, or we'd be dead, or both. So, at least we had enough supplies for the duration.
Arcturus gathered a bunch of us on the command deck of our new capital ship, and we tried to formulate a more specific plan for our ambitious little endeavor. The Darrex kindly supplied us with a skeleton crew of volunteers, the command staff of which was also present. Though Theo could apparently understand spoken communication, thanks to all his years with the Conviers, the others could not. Arc used his hands to relay the same information to them that he was speaking. I paid attention to his hand signals, hoping to learn the Darrex sign language in the event something happened to our friend, Mr. Convier, and I needed to take charge.
"First off, I don't know the exact location of the Koraxian homeworld. I can get us most of the way there, but I think we'll need to trace back through multiple fold vectors to get there. It will take time, but there are various methods we can use to hide from detection while we monitor local traffic. I think we should avoid using the fighter wing except as a diversion, or in the dire circumstances of an all-out firefight. We don't stand a chance against multiple Koraxian crystal ships, so we don't want to draw their attention. We should deliver our planetary infiltration team by way of the corvette and a handful of fighters."
So far, so good. Just getting there would be a lot of the work, I knew. I envisioned their homeworld as some bustling ecumenopolis, gigantic, crystalline spires, billions of Koraxians moving about. And Korath himself would have to be in some enormous palace, a monument to his ego and prowess. Arcturus didn't have more accurate information--it wasn't like anyone he knew had ever been there and returned. It would be difficult to even figure out if we were going the right way. You could monitor a fold vector when it was activated, and discern its end point, but that didn't mean your destination system would have a connection that took you closer to your goal. We were in store for a lot of trial and error. And hiding.
Arc continued. "We'll send a small team down to the planet to locate and deal with Korath himself. If we can't find him, we'll settle for whatever passes for their governing body. If their architecture is built the way their ships are--out of crystals--we can bomb them into smithereens. Between the destroyer, the heavy bombers, and the corvette, we could wipe out a substantial area of the surface. If that's all we can accomplish, I can live with that. It will cripple their war machine and, I hope, delay any reprisals. As a precaution--a decidedly extreme one--the Darrex government is moving as many people as possible underground, and laying waste to the major cities. Those who wish to evacuate the planet will be shipped out of here in a week or so. Those who remain behind shouldn't be of much interest to the Koraxians, since they'll be deep underground and inaccessible. If it works for the Cranions, it should work for the Darrex."
True. The Koraxians never seemed to bother with the Cranions, even though the latter's territory was basically next door. The bug-sucking bastards never built up their surface, lived entirely underground. They liked to hollow out asteroids as their spacecraft. Maybe Arcturus was onto something, there.
"The Darrex should be relatively safe in short order. If they don't hear back from us by the time our provisions run out, they can assume we're dead, we failed, and they should prepare for a fight to the death with any Koraxians that swarm the planet. I don't think it will come to that, but it's a possibility they are prepared to accept."
He went on in some detail about the capabilities of the ships involved, how we could evade attackers, hide from patrols--pretty dry stuff. I kind of zoned out and just recorded it for later processing. The Darrex crew seemed agreeable. Lana didn't really say anything about it. She probably wished she was staying behind. Jeremiah was eager to get underway, hanging on his father's every word. Byron simply didn't give a shit about the particulars of our escapade, preferring to spend her time learning the ship's engine room.
He assigned everyone a task to complete before our next meeting. In my case, it was to check all the weapons lockers, be sure all the rifles and whatnot were in good working order. If it became necessary at some point, a corridor-by-corridor firefight was something we had to be prepared for. The Koraxians didn't board ships themselves, according to Arc, but they certainly had armies of Vansara they could send against us. I even wondered if it would be possible to do for them what Arcturus did for the Darrex. If we could find a way to turn the Koraxians' slaves against them, would we even need to beat Korath personally?
I gave this some thought as I left to get started on my locker checks. Our plan had a lot of moving parts, but it was fairly straightforward. We had to be ready to abandon the mission if the odds looked wildly unfavorable. Some people might get left behind.
Getting everyone back in one piece was a pipe dream. Nobody had to say it for us all to be aware.
Chapter 24
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