Chapter 16

A mission months in the making and weeks in the planning should have had more of a fanfare than the soft tink of boots on metal.

Yet.

“Here we are,” Leo said, his voice carried to Gillian and Tessa as they started to segment away the cold, black umbrella that had kept them from telescopic observation – and for a moment, the staggering beauty of his precarious position struck him, all at once.

He was standing on the edge of a titanic sphere of metal – a set of stacked, toroidal shapes that formed the magnetic bottle containing enough raw antiprotons to fuel alien battle fleet. Sprawling below them was the ocher bands and ribboning yellow clouds of Saturn, with the ring system overhead sweeping up and up and up, a cathedral arch three hundred million years in the making. The thick, matte black tendrils connecting the antiproton orbstack to the Leafari staging post vanished between the stars – making the tie between it and them seem intangible and fragile as a butterfly’s wing.

This was the ‘safe’ position of the antiproton fuel. With the bulk of Saturn to protect it from long ranged fire from the inner solar system and with enough distance to use the square cube law to its minimum required effect, the Leafari were in a position to feel as comfortable as was possible with this much raw energy tucked beneath them.

And Leo was about to strap thermite demolition charges to it.

While he stood on it.

“Okay,” Leo said, jerking his gaze from the awe inspiring splendor around himself. “We split up. No radio comms once we disconnect the guide-wires. We meet back here to ride the strand back up to the Leafari station once we’ve placed the bombs. If any of us don’t make it back to this location in...” He checked his HUD. “Three hours, then ... then...” He hesitated.

“We know what to do,” Gillian said.

Each of them had their own detonators. Assuming any of them got their munitions into the right spots, they would be able to set off all the other munitions. If one third of the munitions were planted, it would be sufficient to cause a breach in the orbstack – now, that was where things got hazy. The magnetic bottle containing the antiproton fuel had been designed and was being overwatched by a hazily defined artificial intelligence. The people of the Human Union didn’t know if the Fleetsoul would be able to detect and react to a minor breach quickly enough to save some or even all of the fuel – it was possible there was enough articulation and focusing in the magnetic bottle that they could essentially ‘squeeze’ the escaping fuel through a narrow chunk of the mega-structure and prevent a total collapse.

But if the Fleetsoul didn’t have that capacity, then... boom.

And if we all die, Earth has lost very little but six dumbass twenty somethings and one crappy Leafari frigate, Leo thought, his lips pursed. Earth would be fine. It was his polybond would be the one who was turned into fine particulates.

Leo yanked his connection free and tucked the wire back into his sleeve. Tessa raised her hand in a spacer’s farewell, then started to scramble along the gunmetal gray surface of the orbstack. Gillian paused only a moment longer, her helmeted face impossible to read through the glare shield. She touched her breast, then lifted her hand. Then she turned and started to scramble too – moving with the kind of erratic, jerking push-shove motions of someone in a tearing hurry in a micro-gravity environment. They had cold gas thrust guns, but each use of even that could send up the signal that they were here, and so Leo started to scramble his own way along the cylcopean structure.

Leo didn’t think about his Devonian or Terran lovers. He just thought of placing his hand there, gripping, pulling, pushing with his foot as he came to one of the narrow nodules that jutted from the side of the orbstack. These were heat exchanges and electrical conduits, and the finlike radiators that jutted from their roofs were angled like blades, away from the sphere. They glowed in infrared, but just being near them started to tick the heat sensors on his suit up. Leo ignored it and ignored the fact that if he rebounded wrong and hit that blade of metal, he’d be fried in seconds as the immense heat it was dumping into the vacuum would shift from radiating as infrared light to radiating through contact with his body.

He reached the nodule, took out the first of the thermite charges from his pack, and fastened it to the side of the nodule. He smoothed it down, adjusted the tamper proof devices, then whispered a soft prayer to every god he could think of, from Jesus to Shiva, that no one, no one, no one would touch or even think about touching this thing.

He turned, about to go and set up his next bomb...

When he saw the spider.

It was long limbed, twiggy, and looked to have almost the exact same hue and color as the orbstack. The narrow eye on the front was the only identifying feature beyond its bulbous, gray body, and it glittered in the reflected Saturnlight that shone across the whole of this part of the orbstack. Leo remained perfectly still, thinking: Well. This must be new.

Skar, he was pretty sure, would have mentioned drones if she had known about them.

He raised his hand, then slowly started to wave, his fingers spreading, praying that there was a third alien party involved in this interplanetary tango. The spiderbot regarded him mutely with the camera lens eye, then a voice chirruped into his radio headset, speaking broken but understandable Hindlish.

“Raise hand. No weapon. Arrest.”

Leo sighed, then slowly raised his hand. The spider started to clitter clatter closer.

Then, in a shockingly human motion, it bobbed and waggled as a Devonian girl’s shriek came over the communications.

“Boomb!?”

“Uh, yeah,” Leo said, chuckling. “Bomb.” He reached down and the spider tensed more, then held up a detonator. He waggled it. “Dead man switch. Do you know what that is?”

The spider-bot, from the way it waggled, from the way it’s operator started to speak in rapid fire and deeply furious Leafari ... most certainty did.

“And that’s how the Human Union works!” Bolide said as she sat on the tied up, gagged and bruised looking T’rek, his tail lashing wildly, while in the corner of the room, Skar and Midnight both hastily zipped the dead Leafari up in his own spacesuit, fastening the helmet on and sealing it. They taped his arms and legs together, wrapped him in a blanket, jammed him into the closet, then closed the closet door.

“That suit is gonna keep in the smell,” Skar said. “But it’s got a biofeedback system.”

Midnight reached in, yanked out the suit, then glared at it. “Uh, shit. He said he was going to ask for ... what, two hours of privacy?”

“An hour and forty now,” Skar said.

T’rek kicked and wriggled on the floor.

“Okay. I think I can spoof my biomed data through this thing,” Midnight said. “So long as no one takes a close look and notice the subtle differences in temperature and heart beat cadence, or backtracks the signal, that buys us time.”

“Except the Fleetsoul wanted to talk to him,” Skar pointed out.

“Fuck a duck!” Midnight hissed.

“Well, we can lie, say that he’s drunk and hung over and resting in his room, and then try and distract the Fleetsoul. Will that work?” Bolide asked that of T’rek. She reached down, undoing his gag. He hissed up at her.

“You lie!” he snarled.

“No, I don’t!” Bolide said, sounding hurt. “That is, really, truly, how the Human Union works.”

“Liar!” T’rek hissed.

Midnight glanced at Skar, then whispered. “Go help Bolide. I’ll spoof this.” Softly, muttering. “If I can.”

Skar strode over to T’rek and grabbed onto him, hauling out from under Bolide, who yelped as she almost fell on her ass. Tail lashing, Skar picked T’rek up, then slammed him down on the bed, his rump beneath him. She stepped around to glare at him, while Bolide stood beside her.

“She’s telling the absolute truth,” she said.

“I knew it, I knew it, you lost your master in the fight, and you switched side to the humans,” T’rek said, angrily. “How did they bribe you? Or did you get some bondsnuffed that you started to barely think at all?”

“I bonded with the first Terran I met!” Skar snapped.

T’rek blinked. “What?” he asked.

“I bonded. With. The. First. Terran. I. Met!” Skar said. “Shit, the ... they ... you have to know that the Devonians here, they’re bonded with Terrans. How did you think their society even worked without that?”

T’rek blushed, his striped features concealing most of it. His shoulders hunched. “Since you sent out on your scout run, the Fleetsoul briefings have been getting more...” he pursed his lips. “She says that our initial scans that said that the Devonians here are slaves to the Human Union are wrong – well, they’re not natural slaves at least. They use technology to crack them to their will, to make fake, false bonds.”

“Oh, you’re a quarter right!” Bolide said, causing Skar to glare at her. T’trek laughed.