The Kassa Gambit (11 page)

“The League…” he started, but she cut him off.

“Spare me your rhetoric. I know my place. Now get off my bridge.”

He went. It was what he had wanted. The best possible result. She would be safe, his cover was intact, everything was going according to plan.

Then why did walking away from her feel like surrender, all over again?

SEVEN

Running

She had thought it would get easier, but four days in the cocoon of node-space only made it worse.

Surprisingly, they had let her go. “They” being the
Phoenix,
of course. Kassa didn’t have any way of stopping her. Short of guilt, which they had certainly tried. But she had explained that they needed things from off-world to survive the next few months. Things that Fleet would not be bringing. And Fleet wasn’t going to be eager to share the news about what had happened here. They’d want to lock everything down until they knew exactly what was going on—and that could take a very long time.

So she had offered to go out and spread the word, tell every captain she met what Kassa would buy. The tramp freighters would swarm to Kassa, like flies to a corpse. They would overcharge, but they would bring the necessities of life. And the sooner they got started, the cheaper it would be for Kassa.

In any case, there was little more the
Ulysses
could do for them. The various pockets of refugees had radio contact now and the most isolated groups had been brought into larger settlements. The
Phoenix
had lent Kassa its launches, so they had functioning aircraft. All she had left to offer was convenience, not survival. The Kassans had believed her, and let her go without resentment.

But Garcia had been livid enough to invade the bridge while they were lifting off.

“Are you insane? We know exactly what Kassa needs. We could charge premium prices. For crying out loud, Pru, I’ve spent days crawling through stinking dockside bars trying to ferret out good cargoes, just to keep us floating. This kind of information could make us rich!”

She took his outrage with a grain of salt, since she happened to know he enjoyed hanging around in those stinking bars. After all, that’s where she’d originally found him.

“We are not going to get rich off of Kassa’s disaster, Garcia.”

“At least tell me you’ll
sell
that list.” He was whining, which was unlike him. Usually he blustered or threatened when money was involved. Prudence decided he was developing a conscience. Given his past, it was almost certainly a painful process.

“We’re going to do everything we can to prevent anybody else from getting rich off it, too. The news goes out on a public broadcast as soon as we reenter normal space.” It was the best thing she could do for Kassa. The more freighters that knew about it, the less any of them could gouge.

Melvin had been next, paging her from the gunnery console.

“The laser’s still broken, Pru.” He said it like it was her fault. Melvin had become increasingly volatile since his exposure to the wreck. “We’re unarmed. What if we get attacked?”

What good would a stupid mining laser do? They had been lucky the first time. Just a dumb mine. If they met a real combat ship—even one of those little fighters—they would die in the first pass.

“We won’t be attacked, Melvin. There will be Fleet swarming through all the hops between here and Altair.”

Garcia rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath. “Assuming they haven’t already destroyed Fleet.” She’d told him about the alien wreck. She had to; he was part of her crew. He deserved to know.

“What if they’ve already blown up Fleet?” Melvin asked, his voice rising.

She snapped at him through the microphone. “Then we’re better off running, instead of waiting here for them to come back and finish the job.”

Silence from the intercom. He’d turned it off, the most insulting thing he could imagine. That being cut off from him was a relief to everyone else was not the sort of thing Melvin would understand. He couldn’t bear to be unheard, so he assumed no one could bear to not hear him.

Garcia walked out, and left Prudence with Jorgun. For a moment she wished she was still arguing with Melvin.

“Will we come back and see Jelly?” Jorgun asked.

She had already told him the truth, but he kept asking. She could not determine how much he understood, whether he was in denial or simply expressing his grief, holding on to her memory with the only thing he had left. In either case, there was only one thing she could do now.

She lied. “When we can, Jor. When we can.”

It was a double lie. They would never see Jelly again; they would never come back to this planet. She would never put her ship where Kyle Daspar’s impressment papers could reach it.

He had left her bridge when she had told him to. He had left her ship when they landed, running to the whistle of his master on the
Phoenix
. He had let her go in silence.

All the way out to the node-point, she had pushed the edge of safe velocity, eager to escape before he called her back. She had congratulated herself on slipping out while the
Phoenix
was too preoccupied to realize its mistake.

But in the seconds before they entered the node, in the last instant that they could still interact with the outside world, she had discovered a part of herself waiting for the comm board to light up. Hoping for a word from him, even if it was only “good-bye.”

A curious desire to hold toward a man she despised. A man that represented her worst nightmare. As much as she detested his authority, she still missed his competence.

Now she sat on the bridge, preparing to reenter the universe. Not entirely certain of what she would find out there, and four days of worrying about it gnawing at her belly. Melvin couldn’t take the strain; he’d snuck off somewhere and hid, no doubt stoned again. Garcia pretended indifference, claiming fate was in the hands of some nebulously defined supernatural entity, but she had seen him drinking heavily in these last few hours. Only Jorgun was immune. Jorgun could not comprehend his own death any better than he could comprehend Jelly’s. He was asleep in his bunk, oblivious.

Prudence had other concerns to occupy her mind. She’d entered the node too fast. An emotional decision, fleeing from the reach of Daspar’s papers, but also a tactical one. Halfway to the node they had already built up too much velocity to abort the run. The Power Law ruled a spaceship’s life; acceleration was constrained by gravity, and gravity weakened by the square of the distance. The farther away from the planet she got, the less she could affect her course. If the
Phoenix
had tried to call her back, she could have legitimately refused. Their own navcom would have told them she had no choice.

It was a dangerous gambit. If she had missed the node, the
Ulysses
would plunge helplessly into deep space, without any way to stop.

And the flip side of the coin was just as dangerous. If you came out of a node too fast and in the wrong direction, you might miss the planet. The mathematics of diminishing rates quickly added up to a death sentence, a long, cold journey into perpetual night. On a null-vector you couldn’t even abandon ship. The landing craft was gravitics powered, too.

All you could do then was hope somebody with more money than sense had a ship that was more fuel than anything else, a fusion engine that could make its own force without a planet nearby, and a willingness to come out and try and pick up your crew. Regulations called for all spaceports to have a fusion tug ready to launch within five minutes. But that tug would have its own point of no return, beyond which it could not reach.

The computer would digest it all, grind the numbers together, and spit out a vector calculation. Either it intersected your ship, or it didn’t. If you miscalculated a node exit, you would know within minutes whether you were dead or not, no matter how many days or weeks your life support could keep you breathing.

You had to know going in how you would be coming out: which direction the planet was, and which direction the node pointed. Most nodes faced inward, aligned by the pull of the star. But not all did. And the planets might be on the opposite side of their orbits, too far away to use.

These chancy facts went a long way to explaining why most freight haulers stuck to the same ports of call. A popular, well-traveled route would have up-to-date information available at every stop, allowing traders to calculate how much cargo they could carry, down to the last kilo. Less frequently visited planets would have less accurate information, making them less profitable, which led to fewer visits and less information in a cruelly descending spiral. Nodes that were uninhabited were the worst; in the event of a cosmic catastrophe like a planetary collision or supernova, the inhabited nodes would at least generate a wave of refugees as a warning. The empty nodes, their tragic doom concealed from distant view by the merely ordinary speed of light, would lie in wait like an ant-lion at the bottom of its trap.

Unlikely events to be sure, but seasoned spacers did not settle for mere improbability.

Some ships were designed to handle the risks. Fusion-powered explorers and military boats, like the
Launceston
. It could creep through the node with virtually no velocity, relying on its atomic engine to accelerate to the next node or back into the one it had just left.

A ship like the
Ulysses,
though, couldn’t afford to be caught “in irons,” as the old Earth-saying had it, trapped in deep space without velocity or gravity to create velocity. A working ship like the
Ulysses
couldn’t carry ninety percent of its mass in fuel. People making a living had to use the gravity of the last place to build up the speed that would get them to the next place, and carry enough cargo in between to pay the bills.

Now she worried about too much velocity. But the
Ulysses
was running light, its cargo no more than a slip of paper—the voucher to be cashed in at Altair. At worst, she would have to spiral around the planet several times to dock. That would earn her a ticket for unsafe navigation. Enough of those and they would take your ship away, for your own good.

Velocity was the porridge of commercial space travel. Too much or too little, and you got eaten by bears.

Her console sprang to life, in touch with the constant field of radio traffic that bathed every civilized star. No warning signals, no red lights here. Just a dozen offers for cargo transshipment, and one limited-time-only special on deck wax.

She touched the switch that made her part of that invisible web. If her orbital calculations were right, she had about three minutes to make a decision.

“Hail, Bruneis spaceport. This is the
Ulysses
hailing.”

“Prudence? Is that you?”

A quick response for such a small port. They must be hovering over their consoles.

“Yes, Bruneis … Sharon?” She struggled to match the voice to a name. Garcia was so much better at that. “Listen, I have a problem…”

“Hang on, Prudence, the commodore wants to speak to you.”

She hadn’t asked for her favor yet, and the operator was already transferring her up the line. This was either good news, or very bad news.

“Captain Falling?” A more mature voice. Prudence had never had to deal with the head of Bruneis’s space program before.

“Commodore, I would like to request permission for a flyby, to the Carnor node.” It was a lot to ask. She wanted to streak through their system without stopping. That meant no inspection, which meant no cargo fees. Not very polite. “I’m running without cargo or passengers, and there’s an emergency behind me. I have two minutes and eight seconds before I have to abort this course.”

Despite the urgency, the voice hesitated before responding. Prudence gritted her teeth at the dramatics of power.

“On one condition, Captain Falling. You tell us what the hell is going on.”

“Granted, Commodore.” She relaxed in her chair. The course she wanted was already programmed, and the autopilot would make the minor corrections necessary. There were always corrections. Planets followed Newton’s laws inflexibly, but there were so many factors that no simulation could be perfect. The subtle influence of other planets, moons, and even the waves of plasma on the face of the local star all added up. But she had been through here only a few weeks ago, so her navcom’s data was up to date.

The commodore kept talking. “All we know, Captain Falling, is that the
Launceston
blew through here on a fusion burn. They didn’t bother to ask for permission, either. And they didn’t tell us jackson.” Prudence grimaced in sympathy, but not too much. If the commodore thought she was aggravated at the imperiousness of Altair Fleet, Prudence could tell her a tale or two.

Which focused the issue neatly. How much could she tell them without compromising her invisibility? And how much could she keep from them without endangering them?

Bruneis was a dome world, rich in rare-earth elements but barely habitable. Its population could not retreat to the forests to hide, because there were no plants of any kind. The Bruneisians wore nose-filters and oxygen feeds when they went outside. Other than being utterly devoid of oxygen, the atmosphere was quite pleasant, with a tang that reminded Prudence of baked cinnamon.

But a week without machinery or power would exterminate Bruneis.

“Kassa was attacked, Commodore. Bombed for days by an unknown force. I’ve been flying rescue missions since I got there. The
Launceston
is allegedly going to Altair to request more help.” And, as she had expected, keeping mum as long as possible. “There’s an Altair cruiser there now, the
Phoenix
. I don’t know if they came through here, though.” She hadn’t seen the
Phoenix
arrive, and there were three nodes at Kassa.

“How bad is it?” The commodore was too distraught to even notice Prudence’s subtle question about the
Phoenix,
let alone answer it.