Stormbreak (Seafire #3) - Natalie C. Parker Page 0,69
crew join us here.” As she spoke, she imagined how that news would land. She imagined fear and mistrust and hope colliding like an explosive star. “You have no reason to trust Tassos, but I am asking you to trust me. Sail to the eastern edge of the Bone Mouth and my people will be there to meet you.”
She released the receiver and turned to Tassos. “How often can you loop that message?”
“As often as you want,” he answered, nodding to the Bullet stationed by the comm, who held a small speaker up to one ear and set to work.
“How far can the signal travel?” Pisces asked. Their own shipboard radios were limited to a range of ten miles, but Hesperus’s comm had been much more powerful. “Can it reach Cloudbreak?”
Caledonia caught the slender flame of hope in Pisces’s eyes and felt it kindle quietly in her own chest. A single name whispered there: Amina.
“On a clear day,” Cepheus answered, stepping closer to Pisces.
Pisces nodded, hiding her emotion by clearing her throat.
“Good?” Tassos was growing irritated. “Now, what in the deepest hell is the rest of your plan?”
Caledonia gestured for them to follow her back into the bowels of the megaship. She said, “We cannot defeat Lir ship to ship, so we’ll have to go about this another way.”
“What way is that?” Tassos asked, falling into step at her side.
“We’re going to take control of those gun towers.”
“But how will we get to them?” Cepheus asked, keeping pace at their heels with Pisces at her side. “You’ve already said we can’t go ship to ship, and the only way to reach them is through the harbor.”
“That isn’t exactly true.” Caledonia turned down a broad hallway, hoping she was leading them in the right direction. “There’s more than one way inside the Holster.”
“You want to flank them? Over land?” Tassos asked, incredulous, as they reached the chamber where the others waited.
Tug and Heron were seated on the opposite side of the room, the former looking more relaxed than the latter, while Oran, Sledge, and Nettle were almost exactly where they’d been before. The only difference was that Sledge had a hand on Nettle’s shoulder, though whether he was holding her back or she him, Caledonia couldn’t tell. Oran was across from them, shoulders squared, chin tucked, using every bit of patience he had to stay put. At the sight of her, he exhaled so subtly only she saw it.
“I don’t see how moving over land helps us,” Tassos continued. “That approach is twenty miles. They’ll spot our troops long before we can get close enough to engage. And those gun towers fire in all directions.”
Caledonia bent over the map and pointed to the eastern border of the Holster, where the five gun towers stood at equal intervals. “I don’t want to send in troops, just a small team. Maybe twenty-five, five per tower, who can move over land and hijack those towers.”
“That’s why you sent out the call.” Tassos bobbed his head in understanding. “To make sure Lir is preparing for a seaborne attack.”
“We’ll have an entire fleet to distract him from what’s happening in his own backyard,” Caledonia confirmed.
“If we control the towers, we control the town, the harbor, everything in range of their fire,” Tug said, studying the map as if it would reveal a solution. “If we got them, we could just destroy the entire town. Boom! No more Holster.”
“The Holster isn’t just a base of operations,” Oran said, shifting his attention to Caledonia. “It’s a city. There are children, elderly. Firing on the city is firing on them.”
“What difference does that make?” Tassos asked.
“We want to take the Holster, not kill it,” Caledonia answered swiftly. “Once we have the gun towers, we aim for the fleet, not the town.”
“I don’t know how you like to fight, but I’ll aim for anyone that aims at me,” Tug said with a condescending smirk.
“I fight to win.” Caledonia pressed her hands flat on the map. “And if we want to win this battle, the fleet is our priority.”
“We won’t have contact with the team that infiltrates. They’ll have to go in dark, and we’d have no way of knowing if they were successful or not.” Cepheus leaned a hip against the table as she spoke, thoughtful and not yet convinced.
“So we send our best,” Pisces said, turning to Cepheus. “And then we trust them.”
“It’s a day’s sail to the peninsula, then another on foot