“But you have more masks? Unmodified ones?” Tayel asked.
“There is a small collection of them in my stores,” Locke said. “Many are damaged even for a human’s use. They weren’t exactly handed over, if you understand my meaning.”
“But a patch job doesn’t take long.” Tayel remembered Otto whistling away, a hot glue gun in his hand as he repaired her broken mask all those weeks ago. For a second, she thought she could smell the musty pawn shop.
“I suppose there are a few patchable masks in the mix,” Locke said.
“Then Shy, Fehn, and I could wear them,” Tayel suggested. “We could go with this infiltration team, and when the patrol ship lands, we can use the gas as a smokescreen and move in. The raiders won’t see us coming, and you won’t have to risk the gas not clearing before they take off again.”
A unified, low growl rose in the Varg’s throats. Tayel frowned at their twitching ears and bared teeth.
Balcruf sniffed. “You are confident in your ability to battle raiders?”
“You heard my brother. We’ve fought worse,” Shy said.
“We can’t trust outworlders to defend our own,” a Varg barked.
A grunt of approval rose from the pack, and another joined him, “Our young warriors will not suffer this indignation!”
Balcruf snapped his jaw. “You runts speak out of turn.”
Both dissenters shrunk as if hit in the gut, their ears folding back to their skulls. They sunk into the wall of Varg behind them and disappeared.
“Our kin die in the streets,” Balcruf growled. “Our pups are torn away from their mothers, our mothers are found limp in the rubble of our fallen monuments. In the most sacred of stars, Karun watches his chosen people shrivel into nothing.”
Tayel shot Jace a look, but he shrugged. By the way Karun’s invocation made the Varg’s heads fall, she could only imagine he was some sort of god.
Balcruf bared his teeth in full display. “We did not invite these outworlders here to mock them. Locke has helped our kin through battle, famine, and despair, and his trust in these people demands our respect.” He snapped his teeth. “You will all hold your tongues, or I will bite them off.”
He let the silence linger until no Varg dared to meet his stare.
“Now let us continue the outworlder’s line of thought,” he said. “If you were to be responsible for taking over the landed skycraft, you must understand the importance of slaying the pilot first.”
“Any decent communications system will have a quickly activated red alert protocol,” Locke clarified.
“Of course,” Shy said. “I could handle it.”
Balcruf nodded. “After the gas clears, the rest of our pack can board the vessel and pilot it into the bay of the mother ship.”
“Who’s the pilot?” Fehn asked.
“We have a small number of kin who trained using Locke’s aircraft before it was destroyed attempting to board the mothership. Any of them could do it.”
“I could pilot as well,” Shy said.
“A good alternative. In any case, once onboard, our directive is plain: bring the mothership down from the inside. Locke has devised a signal jammer our pack will carry through the city. Once it’s onboard the Rokkir vessel, it should cut their communications, giving us a better chance against an organized defense.
My pack will first locate our abducted kin within the mothership and retrieve them. With our numbers, we will destroy the ship from the inside and then use the Rokkir vessels to fly down. As we don’t know the details of the interior, our plans have no choice but to be impromptu. We will have to rely on our experience in the field to see us through the situation, and hope luck is on our side. Either way, we cannot fail, and each of us is prepared to die to ensure the vessel falls.”
“If your plan is to make it fall, what happens to the city below?” Fehn asked.
“While the main group of us focuses on hijacking the patrol ship, a second pack will escort the last of our magis to key locations along Cryzoar’s wall, where they will prepare to shield it from the mothership as it crashes downward. Are you all aware of the crashed refugee shuttle?”
Tayel nodded. Every time the Delta shuttle was mentioned, motivation filled her.
“That is our rendezvous point. After all this is done, transports can safely leave the city, taking the wounded — including any remaining refugees on the crashed shuttle — back to Kalanie.”
“Getting a bit ahead of yourself, eh, old boy?” Locke asked.
Balcruf huffed. “You know my priorities. Feel free to divulge yours.”
“Right then. Before the Varg stomp in and gloriously bring down their oppressors, I would like to take a peek at the Rokkir’s data. Aside from limping alongside them, this was to be my primary objective.”
“You want to look at their data?” Shy asked. “You’d risk your life for a peek?”
“Hopefully more than a peek. We’re not sure what information they have onboard. It could be as small as route schedules for Modnik, or as big as war plans detailing their entire takeover of the Igador System. We haven’t seen any other base of enemy operation save for the Elshan council, so such data may very well be aboard this vessel. More than worth risking my life over.”
He pulled a black sphere about twice as large as a magball out of his satchel. “I have created an instrument to extract data from the mothership. Based on research of a crashed Rokkir fighter, I’ve determined they use fiber optic lines in their vessels. Data travels as light along these cables, which, lucky for us, makes capturing information manually less hazardous than using standard bugs.”
He opened the sphere, revealing a core of glass inside, and closed it. “The sphere can open and clamp over the line, severing it and feeding the data into the device. A mirror at the severance point allows the feed to reflect up into the device while not immediately breaking the flow along the main line, meaning there will be a glitch reported in any monitoring system, but no full stop. This could potentially prevent an alarm being triggered. The difficulty will be gaining access to internal systems and then identifying the proper type of cable. Unlike most ships I’ve worked on, the Rokkir don’t seem to denote the types of cables on their furcation tubing. Clamp this over anything electrical and…”
“And?” Fehn asked.
“Well, you’ll fry,” Locke said.
Tayel’s stomach twisted.
“And likely trigger an alarm which ensures the rest of you will fry, albeit not as quickly.”
“Is it worth it? Won’t the data be in a different language?” Fehn asked. “I doubt the Rokkir use our languages in their systems. It will be encrypted, too.”
“We can capture the information nonetheless. It will certainly be encrypted, but we can decrypt it later. We can’t solve a puzzle we do not have. So is it worth it? I believe so. And if none of you feel confident doing it, then I will have to go whether Balcruf lets you tag along or not.”
“That’s stupid,” Shy snapped. “In your condition you probably wouldn’t even make it to the ship at all.”
“This is non-negotiable, Shy. I haven’t spent my—”
“You’re right! This isn’t negotiable because you’re not going!”
Shy’s glare matched Locke’s. Her hands formed fists at her sides.
Jace clicked his beak, interrupting the stare down. “Can I see the sphere?”
“Know much about fiber optics?” Locke asked.
“Sort of. I studied them in an engineering class at school. I couldn’t tell you how to make one, but I can probably identify the right cable at least.”
“Probably?” Fehn echoed.
Jace rapped his talon on the sphere. “If I had a clamp-style volt meter, I’d be more confident.”