They planned for three days.
The bunker's main table disappeared under layers of maps, schedules, and the hand-drawn tactical diagrams that Vex produced with the crisp efficiency of someone who'd been planning impossible operations for years. Ren's intelligence data provided the skeleton; Cael's orbital perception added the muscle; Lyra's Hindsight served as quality control, her three-second temporal window catching tactical errors before they calcified into assumptions.
The convoy ran every fourteen days—six armored transports moving through a tunnel network beneath the industrial sector, guarded by a rotating complement of eight OA soldiers with an average orbital count of four. Not elite troops. Supply duty was a punishment rotation, assigned to soldiers who'd disappointed their superiors or lacked the ambition for frontline work.
"They're complacent," Vex said. "Seventeen months of running the same route without incident. Their scanning protocols are lazy, their response times are slow, and their orbital configurations are optimized for suppression, not combat."
"Suppression?" Dorn asked.
"The convoy guards carry Weight and Impact variants calibrated to restrain, not kill. They're designed to pin down Dwarfs who get desperate enough to attack—hold them in place until containment units arrive. Against a coordinated assault by combat-trained Orbiters, they'd be—"
"Outmatched," Cael finished. He was studying the tunnel map, his Sight orbit overlaying gravitational data onto the hand-drawn routes. "But the transports themselves are shielded. Gravity-resistant plating. My Impact won't penetrate without sustained application, and sustained means slow."
"Which is where Emptiness comes in," Lyra said from her perch on the suspended pipe above the table. She'd been quiet during the planning sessions, contributing observations rather than strategies, but this one landed with the precision her Hindsight was known for. "You don't need to break the plating. You need to remove it."
Cael looked at her. Looked at his hands. The Orbit of Emptiness—creating spheres of absolute vacuum that subtracted matter from existence. He'd been treating it as a last resort, a weapon too dangerous for controlled application.
"Small spheres," he said slowly. "Targeted. Just large enough to remove the plating over the transport locks. Then Binding to hold the guards while—"
"While I go in," Dorn said. His voice carried the particular weight of a man volunteering for something painful. "The transports will have secondary containment—gravity nets, probably. I can absorb those while the team extracts the cargo."
"And if the guards call for reinforcements?" Ren asked.
"My Hearing can detect OA communications within a three-kilometer radius," Cael said. "If they transmit, I'll know. And Refraction can keep us invisible to visual surveillance for—" he calculated "—maybe four minutes. Five if I sacrifice Edge and Touch."
"Four minutes is enough," Vex said. "The closest rapid-response unit is seven minutes from the convoy route. We'll be underground before they arrive."
The plan crystallized over the following forty-eight hours, each detail refined until the operation was as clean as Sera Kane's orbital technique—something Cael recognized with an irony he kept to himself. They were learning from their enemy.
Cael would scout the convoy route in advance, using Refraction for stealth and Sight for gravitational mapping. On the night of the operation, he'd disable the transport shields with targeted Emptiness spheres. Dorn would absorb the guards' defensive fire. Lyra would coordinate the extraction team—six Resistance fighters provided by Vex—using her Hindsight to anticipate threats. The entire operation, from first contact to disappearance, would take three minutes and forty seconds.
"And then?" Cael asked, after the tactical details were settled and the maps were put away.
"Then we distribute the stabilizers to every Dwarf settlement in Sectors Six through Nine," Vex said. "Not to maintain the addiction—to manage the withdrawal. We give them the drugs alongside information: how the stabilizers work, what the OA is doing to them, and the existence of the Resistance. We give them a choice they've never had before."
"The choice to fight?"
"The choice to know." Vex's burned face was hard in the tunnel light, but her voice held something that Cael's Sight orbit read as a deep, compressed hope—the same heavy hope he'd seen in Sera Kane's emotional weight, but aimed in a different direction. "Knowledge first. Fighting later. Always in that order."
Cael nodded. Looked at Lyra, who nodded back. Looked at Dorn, who was already mentally preparing his body for the absorption loads to come—a process that involved accepting future pain as a certainty rather than a possibility. Looked at the comm unit where the Hermit's labored breathing provided a constant, fading backdrop.
"We go in three days," Cael said. "On the next convoy cycle."
Three days. Seventy-two hours to prepare for the first act of open defiance against the Orbital Authority by a group of Dwarfs, deserters, and one impossible boy with thirteen orbits and a void whispering in his ear.
The war, Cael realized, had already begun. They were just now deciding to fight it.