The colonel stood silently for a moment, looking out at the twilight sky over the base. It was mutely beautiful, its high-cloud grays brought into deep relief by the sharply angled light, the moment’s peace made it all picturesque and peaceful. His planet, so huge, it had seemed so impregnable to him, so vast and so strong. Now it felt so fragile. Everything hung in the balance and the solidity of the ground had gone from under his feet. As he had the last few months, he found solace in his tactical process, thinking through his response to the all too incisive comments of his prodigy. After a moment’s silence, a distant test engine fired, its contained fury a muted roar echoing across the base, and the colonel’s thoughts fired in unison, focus returning to him with a hidden shiver.

Barrett had assumed that many of his fellow conspirators would have done the same calculations he had, but the unspoken rule had always been that they should just do the best they could. “Captain, since you have been candid with me, I shall do the same for you. As you know, my team, of which you are now part, has tried to balance the need for resources, and to mobilize an effective resistance to the threat we have discovered with the constant chance of discovery and destruction. We’ve done this, as I am sure you know, not just because we don’t want to die, but because we have to assume that if we are discovered, our deaths will mean the end of one of Earth’s few hopes of salvation in the coming conflict. Even worse, there is a chance that if a conspiracy as deep as ours is discovered, the virus may be released before we have any of our plans in place.” He left that statement unfinished, the finality of that concept able to speak for itself. Doomsday. Extinction. A mess for the Mobiliei Armada to clean up, no doubt, but that would be no consolation to an eradicated humanity.

“Now, as long as we remain undetected, we have months, maybe even years to do this properly. As we only have one shot at this, we cannot afford to take risks by bringing too many people into our circle. Because of that we have been more … cautious than we may have liked. This will limit the speed with which we can spread the antigen, but weighed against the risks … well, I’m sure you understand.”

“I do, Colonel, I hope you know that I understand that, but …” he caught his breath, clearly struggling with a demon. Reining it in after a moment, his surface calmed again, and he went on, “Colonel, I have reviewed our plans for dispersion of the devices, I know we have to get about a hundred into a person for them to be effective, and I know that once a group of the cells reaches critical mass in a host the antigen will be able to start using our own immune system to start manufacturing duplicates of itself.”