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.”

“Sure, kill everyone,” Nettle muttered. “Good plan.”

“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.”