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“In days,” Martha agreed. “Forget duplication, forget an antidote, forget even getting Garrett and Joan and Mal’ik back here to help.”
“But we know about it now, and we know where it is.” Sebastian put a hand on his hip and rubbed the other one over his mouth as he thought. “We still have air bases all through Southern Tava. We can scramble some fighters…”
Leon shook his head before Sebastian finished his sentence. “They have fighters too. Turner ones. They’ll have better ships, and their pilots will be better trained. We’d never be able to take out the freighter before it crossed into Northern Tava.”
“We don’t have to take out the freighter. We just have to get Sebastian onto it.” Martha pulled out her tablet. “There’s a Turner-affiliated factory near Ralscoln. He can pretend to be one of theirs.”
But Leon still shook his head. “Too many points of failure. Sebastian would have to get into the factory, take a ship, convince the fighters to let him in and not shoot him down, and then take control of the freighter all by himself. All without alerting the ship so that it doesn’t skip subterfuge and just burn down to Northern Tava.”
Sebastian put his hands on his hips and lifted his chin. “You don’t think I can do it?”
“I don’t think I want to bet the future of Southern Tava on it,” Leon replied with a hard look. He turned back to the receiver and stared at it as though it had the answers.
“Well, what’s your better idea?” Martha dropped her tablet down to her side with a razor-sharp tone. “We have three hours to pull something off.”
Leon didn’t reply right away, but Sebastian and Martha both knew better than to push. Sebastian could practically hear the hum of an overheating computer as Leon thought, and for a moment, it comforted him. Leon had always been the thinker. Leon made decisions and then wielded Sebastian to enact them. The arrangement had worked out well for them so far, and for a brief moment, Sebastian thought that Leon would save them again with another brilliant maneuver.
But then he spoke.
“We’ll shoot it down over Kaston.”
Such a strong cold gripped Sebastian that his lungs froze. His throat closed up, his skin went clammy, and a chilling sweat broke out on the back of his neck. He forced down the ball of ice in his throat and shook his head as his denial pushed back on the idea. “How would we even? The moon…”
“It has to leave the cover of the moon.” Leon took Martha’s tablet from her limp fingers. He tapped on it a few times, then turned it around to show them a map. “The moon’s going over the ocean. If they want to get that gas to Northern Tava, and they want to get it soon, which they do, then it has to burn fast from right here”—Leon tapped on the screen at Southern Tava’s border, and then on a place just over into Northern Tava—“to here.”
Martha spoke with a flat voice. “They’ll be vulnerable then. There are some orbital guns between here and Kaston that could hit that range. They’re still held by the Klah’Eel, though.”
“That’s where Sebastian comes in.”
Sebastian could feel Leon’s eyes on him, but he couldn’t take his own off the little dot on the map that said ‘Kaston.’ There were more dots around it too. Cities and towns he had been to. And there were even more that hadn’t warranted a dot on this map, but they were still there.
“Sebastian?”
Sebastian slowly pulled his eyes up to Leon. “You don’t…you don’t actually mean this.”
“It’s got a lot higher chance of success than sending you up there to take that ship.”
“Yes, but…” Sebastian licked his lips. “To bring down a ship that size, that low in the atmosphere, carrying that gas…”
“It’ll devastate the region,” Martha finished for him in that same flat voice.
“We don’t know that,” Leon said quietly.
“Yeah, but we can fucking guess.” Sebastian clenched his fists. His words came more easily as the nightmarish dream quality of reality finally faded away. “It’ll be like dropping a bomb of the stuff on the whole area—”
“It’s a lot bigger than any bomb,” Martha muttered.
“Worse than dropping a bomb.” Sebastian swept an agreeing hand at her. “On our area, Leon. Our cities. Our people.”
“We don’t know what will happen if we shoot down that ship,” Leon growled.
“Yes, we—”
Leon raised his voice over him. “But we do know that if that ship gets through, we’re done.”
“Leo—”
“Do you hear me?” Leon grabbed the front of Sebastian’s shirt, and Sebastian dropped his mouth open in shock. “We. Will. Lose. We will lose everything. The war will be over. The Resistance will be gone. Southern Tava as a concept will be gone.”
