Yep. You’re definitely going to be a problem.

“Well, I guess there’s no time like now to tell you what we’re doing. Central has been putting up defensive measures for the last week, but they all focus on keeping Cymics out of our safe planets. Any station that was infiltrated was dropped like a hot cake. Until now. This is the very first offensive mission.” She gazed about the room, meeting every set of eyes. “That means we’re going to Station 335, which is on a semi-planet that was recently attacked by Cymics. We’re going to rescue any humans who may still be alive, and throw this little thing”—she pulled a small, square black box out of her pocket—“into the reactor. The planet was a fuel planet. They harvested and refined petrol on it. There are pipes running all over it. And this box is a detonator. If we can get it into the main reactor, get back on the ship, and get a safe distance away, then we’d be able to detonate it and, theoretically, set the entire planet on fire.”

“Cleanse it.” Franc leaned forward, pressing his fingertips over his mouth.

“Exactly. The fire would burn for a couple of days until the fuel ran out. Then the planet should be completely, entirely clean.”

“Is it important?” Adam asked. He had his arms crossed again. “I mean, yeah, it would be nice to kill them, but—”

“Don’t worry your vainglorious little head,” Mitzi said. “It’s plenty important. At the moment, communications between Central and the Meidoscycle system are delayed by up to two days. All of the communication stations between the two systems have been turned, which means we have to use long-wave transmissions, which take forever to reach their destination. As you can imagine, it’s causing chaos. Things are changing so quickly, and there’s no way to share our knowledge and plans. But if we can clean one of the planets between the two systems, we’d be able to parse short-wave transmissions by bouncing them through the intermediate planet. All of a sudden, communication time is dropped from two days to just three hours. The two systems could actually collaborate again.”

“Right,” Skye said, looking excited. “And we’re going with this planet because…”

“Because it’s an easy target, yeah. We set it on fire, it’s guaranteed to be clean. As soon as we confirm the attack, Central will send a construction ship to build a communications station as quickly as possible. By the time their ship arrives, the fire should be all but over.”

“One final question,” Franc said. “Why do we have to do it on foot? Couldn’t we just shoot a missile at some of the pipes?”

“’Fraid not. Central’s already gone through the plans. The planet was designed to be impervious to that sort of attack. It used to house over twelve hundred workers and cost quite a few hundred billion to build. Central didn’t want the whole thing gone in a freak accident or a terrorist attack. It’s got all sorts of measures built in to protect it. If one section of the station does somehow get set on fire, the rest will go into lockdown to contain the damage. Even if you were lucky to get past the anti-missile defences, all you’d do is burn a few hundred square meters of the thing, and the Cymics would reclaim the land as soon as the flames were gone. On the other hand, if we get the detonator into the reactor, the flames will, theoretically, override the lockdown system and spread too quickly for the backup segmentation to contain.”