Chapter Fifty-Nine
For as long as there has been warfare, there has been subterfuge. It can be the key to victory.
—Mutati military handbook
Just above the hazy atmospheric envelope of Plevin Four, a podship emerged from space in a burst of translucent green light, having traveled the faster-than-light podways known to the sentient space travelers. It settled into a docking station at the little-used pod station.
A cargo hold opened like a mouth in the side of the podship, and a long black transport ship slipped out into the docking bay, followed by what looked like a red-and-gold merchant schooner.
But this vessel was not that at all.
The Mutati outrider at the controls taxied out into space, and went through the detailed checklist he had learned at the training camp on Dij, just prior to its destruction. He had prepared carefully for this moment, and would only get one opportunity to make good.
Today my life and death meet, he thought, feeling supreme joy at the prospect of his final journey to heaven.
This Demolio suicide mission had been dispatched prior to the attack against the factory by a pair of Human escapees from a Mutati prison moon. The vessel had no long-range communication device aboard, so the pilot didn’t know what had happened. He also could not be called back by the Zultan and diverted to a more significant planet. The timing of the attack had been predetermined, and he had waited in deep space for the moment to arrive.
The pilot looked forward to his own glorious death, and to his ascension into heaven. It would be wonderful, but in a way he wished he might have gone on the Demolio mission later. In recent weeks he’d been hearing intriguing rumors of an instantaneous cross-galactic communication system under development by the Mutati Kingdom. Everyone was curious about how it worked, and how it would enhance the war effort.
But it all seemed like another universe to him, another life. The fate of the galactic communication system was just one of many loose ends he had left behind, along with family, friends, and his career as a construction superintendent.
He would never know that the Mutatis were investigating the Human’s own cross-space nehrcom system, based upon information secretly provided by Jacopo Nehr’s brother. Through their own experiments the Mutatis had confirmed what they were told by the turncoat Human, that nehrcoms only operated between land-based, planetary installations. The only exceptions to this were the lower quality relay transmissions that could be made to and from space stations or spaceships that were near nehrcom planets. At that very moment, the Mutatis were building nehrcom stations on distant star systems, to conduct their initial tests.
Nor would the pilot ever learn the strategy behind his own demise. The Mutati High Command was willing to sacrifice not only terramutati outriders such as himself, but any Mutatis, such as Seatels, who might still reside on Human-controlled planets. He only had a narrow view of his mission, the scant but focused information that had been drilled into his mind by his trainers.
All thoughts faded now. The shapeshifter had completed his final checklist, making all of the necessary settings. The kamikaze torpedo was heading for its target, accelerating.…
* * * * *
From somewhere, Tesh Kori heard a piercing, high-pitched whine that hurt her ears, followed by a rumbling sound, and a huge explosion.