Star Kitten by Purple Hazel Page B

the
attack outside should be sufficient to keep the guards distracted
on one side of the station, while our Porko comrades cut through
the steel. Once through the hole, they can hurl smoke bombs inside
and confuse the occupants long enough to climb in.”
    Perry smirked humbly at his audience a bit,
realizing how vastly more intelligent they were. So he said, “Now
I’m no chemist, but any high school chemistry student knows
Potassium Nitrate and brown sugar is about all you need… three
quarts of Potassium Nitrate and two quarts of raw sugar, to be
exact.” The Slarts just nodded patiently. They understood already
what he was implying, but not exactly how he intended to use this
compound. What Perry proposed was to boil the mixture in a cast
iron vessel until all was liquefied, then poor it into metal boxes
lined with aluminum foil wrappers that came out of large food
ration packages. Before the mixture had set and solidified again, a
fuse could be attached to it. Before tossing the bomb inside, it
could be lit by acetylene torches to ignite the smoke. And what’s
more, Barium salt could also be added to the mixture so that the
smoke would have a green color and be more terrifying to the
trapped guards defending the station.
    Perry clearly enjoyed his moment in the
spotlight telling all about his clever idea, concluding, “Our big
Porko friends, supported by lightning quick Zorgs, can then climb
through ceilings and floors to get safely inside before attacking
and eliminating the last of the guards.”
    The Slarts were impressed. Casualties would
be appalling yes, but this attack plan seemed like it would work.
And… if it was conducted in several parts of the mining network,
against several different guard stations simultaneously, there’d be
no time to send a relief force to quell the uprising before the
Nausties would have captured enough food to supply the rebellion
for a full month. They’d also have a very large cache of automatic
weapons captured for their next assaults on the remaining
depots.
    However… next would come the really hard
part: getting up those long elevator shafts to assault the main
terminal….
    “Very impressive,” said Architeuthis. “And
how do you propose we get all the way up to the command center to
attack and overwhelm the security force protecting it?” he asked
gently. General Hicks again cleared his throat. “Well sir, that’s
where it gets really interesting,” he growled. He gestured toward
the table that the Slarts were sitting around and pulled out a
grease pencil that would usually be utilized in drawing a target
for a power drill or cutting torch. “With your permission,
gentlemen?” he snarled. The Slarts moved back from the table while
the nearly naked tattooed general leaned over to begin drawing a
rough sketch of the planet’s inner network of shafts and tunnels.
As he wheezed and snarled, murmuring to himself, the violent man
meticulously created a rather detailed picture.
    It took several minutes for him to draw it
all; while the Slarts murmured and fluttered their facial
tentacles, apparently quite fascinated.
    What Hicks had
remarkably memorized over the years, was a blueprint diagram of the elevator
network and maintenance shafts used by repairmen in the case of a
breakdown in the enormous elevator mechanisms used to carry
payloads up to the surface. This was because the same diagram was
posted on the inside wall of the guard commander substation near
the Arian Knights’ section of the mine! Over the years of going
inside guard stations to negotiate conditions for his men, Hicks
had learned how ore and crystals were being shipped from the planet
core back to the surface. Now, from wrote memory, he was showing
the Slarts just how they could get back to the surface.
    Hicks said in a low voice,
while he drew a rough cutaway view of this diabolical system, “Long
ago, these freight elevators were constructed in deep shafts
drilled into the planet core. They