Empire Reborn (Taran Empire Saga Book 1): A Cadicle Space Opera A.K. DuBoff (guided reading books TXT) 📖

There wasn’t anything she could offer as an explanation. Lexi spotted a table nearby and decided that a physical distraction was her best play. She intentionally hooked her right foot on one of the legs as she passed by, knocking her off-balance.

She went down hard on her left shoulder, pinning her arm at a funny angle. Radiating pain shot from her elbow down to her wrist and up to her back. That wasn’t part of the plan. Fok!

“Stars! Are you okay?” the woman exclaimed.

Lexi rolled to her side and used the table to help herself up. “Only hurt my pride.” She did her best to hide the pain of the injury; any indication of actual harm and she might be forced to see a medic, and she couldn’t afford any delay. Besides, her medical nanites would mend the injury almost as quickly as any other care.

“I can—”

“I’m fine,” Lexi assured her. “Just need to pay closer attention to where I’m going.”

The woman nodded, looking over Lexi with concern, the observation of Lexi’s suspicious behavior seemingly forgotten. She turned back around and left with the person she had been talking to.

Not exactly the way I wanted to handle that. Lexi gingerly opened and closed her hand and rotated her joints. It didn’t feel like anything was broken, but at least a slight sprain was likely. I also need to learn to fake-fall better.

The other people continued to disperse. By the time Lexi circled back to the workshop, she was alone in the room. It was as good a place as any to work on the ‘messaging’ project Oren had assigned her, so it would also serve as a suitable place to sort through the information she had learned.

She laid out the disparate pieces in her mind and started looking for connections.

The two cargo ships had been the most common thought. They were clearly central to the plan in some way—probably carrying valuable materials the Alliance was hoping to claim for itself. Or, she realized, the Coalition as a whole. She couldn’t forget that important tidbit she’d gotten from Oren about the Alliance being a unit within the larger Coalition that Magdalena helped run.

The freighters were massive targets. Despite the resources on board, though, it was an odd choice to seize them. Taking over was one thing, but holding them was quite another. The arrival of a single Guard destroyer would change the equation in a big way.

Unless backup couldn’t arrive, she realized. Except, no backup would mean taking out the nav beacon to make the planet challenging to access via subspace. Shite!

She considered the other snippets of information. There was a shuttle… Small, difficult to detect. A craft like that could get close to a target without drawing too much attention.

Like a nav beacon floating out in space.

She started piecing together the plan. Destroying the nav beacon would temporarily cut the world off from any vessel that wasn’t equipped with an independent jump drive. Of course, one of those ships could bring a new nav beacon to install, but that would take time to initialize. The question was, what was the Alliance planning to do in the interim? It was too large and complex a distraction to pull off for their mission to not be something significant.

What am I missing? She pored over the observations, trying to see the connections between the seemingly disparate pieces. Why would they take out a nav beacon?

Stars, it’s a temporary distraction! It came to her in a sudden moment of clarity. They’re going to hack into the planetary defense network.

It was the only thing that made sense. With control of those orbital weapons, they could take out any ships that were approaching the planet during the moment they were most vulnerable leaving subspace. The best of the military vessels could weather the attack, surely, but how many would it take to overwhelm the defense grid and bring it down? Certainly more than either the TSS or Guard could spare with everything else going on. It wouldn’t be worth the time or effort.

Duronis would be on its own—free to serve as a base of operations for the Alliance and the larger Coalition. Given how well everything else was planned out, the members of the organization almost certainly had access to contraband independent jump drives of their own, so the lack of the nav beacon wouldn’t impact their own transit abilities.

Fok! What can I do? She needed to find out who was supposed to hack into the satellite network. If she could stop them from gaining control there, the rest of the plan would fall apart.

It could be anyone, and they might not even be part of this office. If the plan was going down now, she wouldn’t have time to vet potential suspects.

Except… She had seen a control room in Josh’s mind. That seemed like the kind of place where someone might hack into a defense network. If it wasn’t Josh himself, he might know the person who would lead the act. A flimsy lead, but it was all she had.

Unfortunately, following up on that lead would mean abandoning the work that Oren expected. Or maybe not. She had a lot of material from the previous rallies. A little bit of reworking and embellishment, and there would be a decent narrative to present. Really it was a consolation assignment—the sort of thing given to someone not trusted with important work.

She brought up an assortment of old messaging materials on the workstation and began hurriedly knitting some of them together into a smooth narrative. With some word-vomit embellishments based on the instructions Oren had given her about what this particular piece should communicate, it was a sufficient rough draft. She’d go back to add more polish if there was time. But for now, it would serve its purpose to make