Katy brought the Scout to a stop, the air full of sand like a bomb had gone off. Once the dust settled, the giant tower was laying on its side in the orange earth.
They went back to the base and stared down at the drill, still spinning.
“Wait,” said Katy. And a few moments later it slowed to a stop. “The fuel cells are stored in the tower itself. When it falls, the connection is severed and no power equals no drill.”
“That’s smart,” said Jolo. “The drill would be tough to kill without a shot from an ion cannon.”
They retreated back to a secluded spot at the base of the mountain and stared off towards the tower, laying there like a fallen tree. After a few hours no BG boats had come to investigate, so they headed straight home and Jolo got on the pirate net and soon everyone knew how to take down a listening station. Within hours, towers started to fall all over Duval.
The Score
On Duval
30 days left
Each day on Duval towers went up and towers fell. George kept score. It was a messy, maddening calculation because he had to rely on secondhand, word-of-mouth data from the pirate net. So George would preface each update with “These numbers have a 17% error margin.” How he came up with these numbers, Jolo had no idea. But at the end of each day, George got on the network and gave a brief report that the locals called The Score. It was like a game and everyone expected to win. Jolo watched all of this with little optimism. The most recent update had the BG tower number at 973 and the dead towers at 78. But for the locals, each tower that fell was a triumph and there was hope in the air.
Jolo, Katy, Marco and George stood around the 3D computer image of Duval in the library. George had the dead towers as a red dot on the surface and the working ones in green. Jolo just shook his head. “Too much green,” he said.
“Give it time,” said Marco.
“That’s exactly what we don’t have.”
“Out in Amisk 200 people actually pulled down a tower after blowing the base because they didn’t have a ship. People are coming together,” said Katy.
“Yes, but it took too long,” said George. “I only have a week of data, and the first few days were slow as people figured out how to implement your tower busting plan, but if I extrapolate out I fear we are not going to hit 47%. The BG need about 1382 total towers to hit saturation, so we need to take down 650 towers. Our current output is about 9 per day, so at current rate we’ll only take out about half of what we need.”
“Let’s go,” said Jolo, his arm around Katy. “Use this time to get people off this rock.”
“I’m heading up the early evacuation,” said Marco. “There’s a big boat coming for Bertha’s kids and other boats coming daily to get people off to safer places. But I worry about food and water. It’s easy to say let’s run to Tichel, but once you get there who’s land do you dump them onto? Not to mention most of these people here came as refugees from another place. Most don’t want to leave.”
“You want me to divert a freighter full of Fed rations?” said Jolo. “I’ve never taken a whole ship, but I think we could pull it off if I had my full crew.”
“No, Jolo. I’d like you and Katy to go to Arkas on the other side and show everyone how to take down a tower. We need to take down double our current amount. Some of our people have been killed by the tower laser bots and some folks out in the desert learn faster if they can see it.”
……
Katy piloted the Argossy to Arkos so Jolo almost had his whole crew. George stayed at Marco’s to keep the count and the nightly updates going. They brought the Scout along, safely tucked into the Argossy’s main hold, the place normally reserved for large freighter boxes. Jolo had Katy plot a course along the Kolar chain and they kept low and stayed clear of trouble. They flew right past the tower they’d taken down a few days ago and the ground around it was undisturbed. Jolo watched each standing tower pass and every one he saw he imagined the shite drill boring a hole into Duval. He couldn’t help but feel helpless and frustrated. The crew felt the same: Koba’s face was sour and defeated and Greeley was agitated.
After about the twentieth tower though, Jolo couldn’t stand it anymore and nearly ordered Katy to stop and for Koba to unleash the ion cannons, but he knew that would bring attention to his position and just make things worse. Katy was right, the soft touch seemed to be working.
