Warwick Equinox didn’t have a plan.
Mostly, he just wanted to get out. Get away. Remove himself from the situation aboard the Medici. He didn’t want to be put in a position where he might have to mutiny against his friend.
Instead, yes, he knew, he put himself in a position to be obliterated by forces within the Church who would be more than happy to open fire on a heretic.
And they would, without hesitation, blow him and the thopter to atoms.
But he couldn’t do nothing. He couldn’t sit on his hands while otherwise competent people allowed a blatantly avoidable catastrophe to transpire. So here he was, aboard a hijacked thopter, deprived of his command authority, on a collision course with a giant space saint, almost within weapons range of the outer perimeter of Church ships.
Even if he made it past the guns, assuming the thopter struck its target, at best Warwick might make a comical dent in the statue. Unless…
He activated the sensor display, a holographic fan spread beneath borders of brass. As a child, he’d heard stories about the construction of Saint Kanye by a team of workers overseen by its designer, Leopold Dollar. They had expanded caverns along the “waist” of Saint Kanye to create temporary dwelling spaces. The scan showed the Hollows, as the complex had been called back then, remained intact. The main entrance included a chamber large enough to accommodate the thopter.
If Warwick could make it to the Hollows, he could sabotage the thopter’s reactor. When it reached critical overload, the resulting blast should shatter Saint Kanye – if not into harmless chunks, at least in two large pieces on different trajectories. Maybe one half would drift out into space while the other crashed into the planet. Or maybe both chunks would tumble into the atmosphere giving Da Vinci a one-two punch.
“Still beats doing nothing,” he thought.
He adjusted course.
He started to pray.
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