"But the inhibitor remains intact and functional," Jackson said. "I see where you're going with this. Can we disable the warhead from the Saber?"

"Too far away, and the warhead is inside the base." Gruber shook his head. "It's not a perfect Faraday cage, but it's shielding it enough, along with this moon's unique atmosphere, so we can't transmit from here and guarantee we have a solid engagement. The code needs to be transmitted on a continuous loop. If there's more than a twenty second gap, the warhead reverts back to live."

"Ideally, how close would you need to be?"

"Sitting on top of the hab dome would be great," Gruber said. "Or hovering in front of one of the windows to minimize interference."

"Could one of our recon drones be rigged to broadcast the signal? And if so, how do we get confirmation it worked?" Jackson asked. Gruber smiled.

"I forgot we're carrying mission-configurable drones, sir," he said sheepishly. "We barely use them anymore since we have RDS-equipped starships. They absolutely could be configured for this mission. As for confirmation, the warhead will send back a coded confirmation every ten seconds."

"Get to it. I want it done within the hour."

"Aye-aye, sir!" Gruber rushed off the bridge, almost knocking over the oncoming second watch OPS officer as he did.

"You catch all that, Colonel?" Jackson asked.

"I did, Admiral," Beck said over the vid link. "We'll be ready. I'm bringing up the NOVA team and will create a diversion that will allow them to get into the command center. Hopefully, neutralize the threat before they can start killing crewmembers."

"We'll sent the drone's telemetry stream to your command network," Jackson said. "You'll be able to see the warhead has the safeties engaged and execute the op at your discretion. Be advised we are in a bit of a time crunch here. We have reinforcements coming, but there are still twenty-eight ships bearing down on our position, and we're less than two days from when they might start launching missiles."

"Understood, Admiral. Beck out."

"You didn't tell her about the ESA now using kinetic weapons on populated worlds?" Captain Ellsworth asked, his voice low and facing away from the rest of the bridge crew.

"There's nothing they can do about it if the incoming ships fire a bunch of shells at the base," Jackson said. "By the time we detected the incoming fire, they'd have no chance to get to the lifters and evacuate, and we have no weapons that would have much of a chance at intercepting them."

"Still—"

"It's a minimal risk, Captain," Jackson said. "If they wipe out the base, then their entire operation will have been pointless. They want the tech down there. At Brabus, they wanted to deny us a resource by taking out the Mickey crews."

"Understood, sir." Ellsworth was clearly not thrilled about withholding information from his people on the surface, but he was smart enough to not argue the point further.