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I was about to explain to Rig what I wanted him to fabricate, when the door swung open and FM strode in. She was faintly flushed, tense. Still poised of course, but for FM this was the equivalent of being in a panic.

“What is it?” I said, immediately sitting up.

“Emergency conference called by command,” she said. “The enemy is doing something. I was looking for Rodge, but Jorgen will be glad you were here too.”

I wasn’t so certain about that. Not today. But as Rig scrambled to gather his schematics, I stood up. “Do you know anything more?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Shutting down the enemy’s access to acclivity stonereallygot their attention.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, meeting my eyes, “they’re changing tactics. We can’t be certain; it’s probably too early to tell, but their troop movements indicate…well, they’ve realized they can’t win a long war as easily as they could have before. So instead…”

Instead? I frowned, trying to think what I would do in their situation. They would realize we were going to try to bleed them over time, but they still had vastly superior numbers. So in their place, I’d…

Scud.

17

“All-out assault,” Goro—one of the kitsen generals—said, hovering his platform over to a wall screen and gesturing at the footage we’d been able to gather from across the Superiority. Hyperslugs let us jump ground teams in to spy on the installations Cuna had identified for us.

“Again,” Goro said, hovering to another part of the wall screen, then pointing to a different image, “we aren’tcertain,but this is what it looks like.”

“Makes sense, unfortunately,” Cobb said.

He still refused to sit at the table with us, instead taking an advisor’s seat by the wall. The pallor of his skin and bags under his eyes had me worried about him, but he did seem to be participating more. So maybe he was getting better.

“They understand our strategy,” Cobb continued. “Over time, if we destroy their military in little skirmishes, piece by piece, they could lose control.”

“Right now the Superiority is stable,” Cuna added from their spot at the table. “It’s large enough, and has enough momentum, that few of the common citizens will have noticed anything changing since the advent of Winzik’s reign. However, we are notcathodis.”

My translator pin, set to explain things like this, whispered it was a metaphor for an object that sits on a wall and watches the world pass, never moving. A little like the English phrase “We aren’t sheep.”

“Over time,” Cuna continued, “people will grow increasingly upset at the loss of democracy. They will see through Winzik’s rhetoric about dangerous humans and delvers—and they will ask questions. If we’re destroying his military presence, the more…rambunctious of the lesser species might rebel against his rule. Even those of primary intelligence will begin to move against him.”

“Without his supply depots, Winzik has realized that a long-term engagement against us has grown more risky,” Goro agreed. He gestured toward more footage on the screen. “So, here we see him pulling security forces away from the planet Ooklar, and here, others away from the planet Zip!tak. Here he is calling in ships that were protecting important sublight shipping lanes in the dione twin system from piracy.

“They’re gathering. If he is aggressive in these redeployments, he can bring in some twenty-seven hundred fighters to support his primary fleet. About a third of those will have actual in-cockpit pilots, while the rest are remote drones. Worse, he has access to twenty to thirty capital ships: eight carriers, and twice as many destroyers.”

Scud. Those numbers…

Twenty-seven hundred fighters? Even with our allies, we had barelythreehundred. Yes, a good chunk of theirs would be drones, which were much easier to face. But our force of three hundred included all of our newer recruits and trainees, who had barely any battle experience. And as always, we had no capital ships—though granted, Detritus itself was a giant moving battle station.

Most of our forces were raiders, the modern equivalent of cavalry. We’d survived so far by being fast, striking where Winzik didn’t expect, and—to be perfectly frank—exploiting the fact that he couldn’t devote much of his attention to us. He was busy establishing himself as galactic dictator.

This was coming to a head though. He couldn’t afford to let us keep picking at him. We’d served our purpose, giving him a boogeyman to use as “proof” he needed dictatorial authority. Now he would want a decisive battle where he destroyed us outright. If he couldn’t win the long war, that was his only other option.

Squash us fast. I should haveseenthis.

“Wait,” Rinakin said from his seat at the table, a confused expression on his pale violet face. “Won’t this risk rebellion? If Winzik moves all of his security forces away from his planets, won’t those planets turn against him?”

“Eventually, yes,” Cuna said. “This is a possible problem. But you must understand, we’re not…um…”

“Aggressive?” I asked.

“I was looking for a less charged term,” they said. “I’ve learned it might not be as accurate a word as I would have liked. But in this case, perhaps it will serve: we’re not aggressive.

“We aren’tcathodis,and will not just sit forever and be content with oppression. At the same time, my people—and those they lead—will try other methods first. Bills to enforce the law, motions in governing bodies, editorials in the media. Winzik will need his military forces then, if these movements gain strength, but he has likely seen—and rightly so—that he can spare the forces now. For a short time.”