“Do not speak of death. I will not allow it.”
“Then we’d better figure something out or we’ll be the first of many.”
“If I may?” Tor’s calm tone interrupted. I had completely forgotten he was here. Which was insane because I was literally riding around inside his Titan body like a baby joey inside a kangaroo’s pouch.
“Go ahead, Tor. What do you have for us?” I adored Athena, but I had come to greatly respect Tor’s intelligence and experience over the last few hours. Athena was brilliant and new, but Tor had survived things my Titan had not yet imagined.
“I have been inspecting the mechanism by which the twelve satellite ships detach from the core.”
“Wait, can Darius hear you?”
“Of course.”
“Continue.”
If an AI could clear his throat, the odd sound Tor made was the equivalent. “I believe if we can lock four strategically located nodes to lock the ships together for a short time, deploy an initial strike to initiate detachment, and detonate our entire cache of weapons while the joints are under maximum stress, it may be enough to tear their ships to pieces.”
“Only four? There are twelve of these spikes.” Twelve giant, building sized ships all attached to the center like points on an arrow.
Tycho’s voice joined the conversation for the first time and the familiar sound made me tear up again. “Four joints will suffice.”
“Hi Tycho.”
“Our Lily. Greetings.”
Our Lily?He’d never called me that before. I liked it.
“I have analyzed Tor’s plan. I believe he is correct. If we could force the joints to experience extreme torsion prior to detonation, the additional force should be enough to cause hull breaches in each of the twelve attack vessels as well as the core command ship.”
Darius’s entire demeanor had changed from worried to fierce. Determined. “And this ship is a dodecahedron. Each joint attaches three sections. So, if we make sure we choose one joint for each of the twelve, we will be able to affect all of the attack ships from four centralized locations.”
“That is correct.”
They’d lost me at dodeca-what? I hated math and geometry. But I was really good at blowing stuff up from inside a Titan. I was even better at mangling metal with my Titan’s bare hands. And I wanted to go home. I wanted to survive.
I wanted Darius.
“Let’s do this. Tycho. Where do we start.”
“This location is as good as any other.”
Darius and I turned as one to face the tangled mess of beams and unions that made up the ship’s attachment and launch system. “Lead the way.”
Tycho placed markers on my nav grid and we made our way to the first location, a confluence of three massive beams at the central base of three separate attack towers. Each beam came from one side of the giant triangular structure above us.
“Number one?” Darius confirmed.
“Yes. I have marked the towers on your nav grids. This cluster is alpha cluster and this joint is node one.”
I looked at my nav grid and studied the display. Tycho had color coded the towers into four sections and marked the one joint the three shared with a pulsing red light on my screen. Four flashing lights. Four places to somehow prevent the ships detaching. And four places to plant bombs.
Now that we had a plan, I was ready to move quickly and get the hell out of here.
I attached my grappling claw to a nearby beam so I wouldn’t float away and studied the mess of connections, panels and joints in front of me. “Tell me what to do, Tor. How do we keep this thing from leaving home?”
Selected beams were highlighted on my monitors, as well as arrows indicating areas requiring attention.
“So what do we do? Break them?” I wasn’t sure how we were going to do that without alerting the ship to our presence, but we were out of options.