The Kassa Gambit (31 page)

She tried reasoning with him. “Captain, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. They won’t take no for an answer.”

“This is neutral space. Altair law is as equally valid here as Monterey law. If they want to pick a fight, I’ll give them one.” Stanton obviously had spent too much time floating around in empty space looking for something to shoot at.

“They will pick a fight, Captain. We know something they don’t want you to know. At any cost.”

Now she had his full attention.

“What would that be, Captain Falling?”

So she told him.

He was too professional to display any reaction over the comm link. As a soldier, he was supposed to be used to bombshells. “Do you have any proof?”

“Not a lot.” Prudence looked flustered.

Kyle shook his head in sympathy. Obviously she had expected her mere word to be sufficient to shake governments. A short vid of a man in a mask on one planet, and a tall tale of the same man in a different mask on another planet, and she thought Fleet would follow her anywhere.

Luckily, she had a well-trained police detective on her side. Kyle held up the mask he’d ripped off of the monk, safely bagged in plastic. He’d already gone over it with a magnifying glass and found what they needed. One single hair, stuck on the inside of the mask. A slender thread to drag a fleet by, but DNA did not lie.

“Yes,” Prudence answered the radio, relief in her voice. “We have some vid files, and the physical evidence to back it up.”

“Let me see those files now.” Stanton was still suspicious, as he should be. Between that and the way Stanton had bailed them out of Monterey, Kyle was struggling to maintain his dislike of the man.

Prudence offered them all her secrets. “We also have a recorded signal we could transmit to you. It was taken from a solar observation post on Kassa, at the time of the attack. We don’t know what it means. Maybe your comp can break the code and tell you something useful.”

“Acknowledged, Captain. Send it all over while we close for boarding.” The
Launceston
had already matched their velocity and was drifting only a few kilometers away, but it would take another hour to safely close the gap with the ships. “I suggest you prepare to abandon ship, Captain Falling. We can’t afford to let you fall into enemy hands. We’ll be taking you and all your crew onboard.”

Tapping her console, Prudence sent all of their hard-won data over in an instant. Before Kyle could start breathing again, she started arguing.

“If they see the
Ulysses
drifting, they’ll know to focus on the
Launceston
. I could distract them, make them think you don’t know yet.”

Stanton didn’t answer, presumably watching the vids she had transmitted, so Kyle argued for him.

“Prudence, they’ll assume we talked. There’s probably a dozen ships burning through that node right now. It will only take one to hunt down the
Ulysses
.”

She shrugged him off, speaking into the microphone. “Stanton, I think you should reconsider.”

Still no answer.

Her jaw took on that subtle hardness it wore when something was wrong. Kyle was elated that he could see it now, that he knew every line and curve of her face so well. The emotion jangled with his grief and fear, clanging discordantly.

“
Launceston,
reply please.”

Silence.

On the screen that showed the depths of space, a white light flared and died.

“
Launceston,
reply.
Ulysses
hailing the
Launceston
. Reply, damn it!” Prudence tapped furiously at her console.

Kyle ran over to Jorgun’s console and started working the comm controls.

“They’re still there,” Prudence said. “If they had blown up, there would be debris and gas. They’re still in one piece.”

He couldn’t raise anything on any channel.

“I’m going to take us closer.” Prudence started moving the ship, nudging it towards the
Launceston
’s last position. “If they have casualties, they might need us.”

Two frantic minutes passed, but Kyle didn’t stop checking every possible wavelength. And then he found something, a single quiet voice in the dark.

“Pru—I’ve got a signal. It’s a suit microphone. Somebody in a space suit wants to talk to us.” He flicked it to her chair.

“This is the
Ulysses
. Do you read me?”

“Captain Falling. How nice of you to wait.” The voice was faint. Kyle turned up the volume.

Prudence let her worry show. “Stanton, are you okay? What happened?”

“Don’t you already know, Falling? Wasn’t this part of your plan?”

Now she bit her lip, angry, confused, and scared all at the same time. Kyle wanted to hold her, to wrap his arms around her. Instead, he listened.

“What on Earth are you talking about?” she asked.

“You’ve disabled us, Falling. Right down to the life support. Not that it matters. On this vector, without course corrections, we’ll pass our turnaround point before our air runs out. We’re doubly damned.”

“Stanton, stop being an idiot. I didn’t do anything to you!”

“That recorded signal you chose to share with us, Falling. It’s a viral code. It burned through our boards like acid. Every system on the ship went haywire until we pulled the emergency plugs. It even tried to trigger our self-destruct sequence. But I disabled that months ago, when that idiot Daspar came on board. Didn’t want my ship blown up because somebody wanted an asinine League officer dead. Never got around to reconnecting it, sorry to say. It’s a regs violation. Be sure to include that in my file, Falling.”

So Stanton had finally met a regulation he didn’t like.

“I didn’t do that.” Prudence looked ready to cry again, and Kyle watched helplessly, wanting to comfort her. Knowing that he could not. “I mean, I didn’t know it would happen. Damn it, didn’t you listen to my story? Why would I tell you all that if I was working for them?”

Stanton had his own question. “Why didn’t your ship burn out when that virus went through it?”

Finally, something Kyle could say that would matter. He pushed his microphone button. “Because this ship wasn’t made on Altair. You know that. You remarked on it back at Kassa.” And an unkind remark it had been, looking out across that field of refugees to the homely little freighter with ungainly lines.

“Daspar.” Stanton let his displeasure at the ironic coincidences of the universe show through in his tone. “Of course you’re there, too.”

“He’s on our side.” Prudence defended Kyle, making him feel warm inside. “The League tried to kill him. Several times. You can trust him, Stanton.”

Kyle bathed in the feeling, enjoying it despite the terrible circumstances. Prudence was defending him. Prudence. Him.

Out there, in the dark, Stanton was wrestling with momentous decisions, trying to decide who to trust. “So that’s why they didn’t disable us on the other side. You filed landing papers; they knew their trick wouldn’t work on your ship. And I was too close to the node.”

There wasn’t anything they could do to help him, but Prudence tried. “We can match your vector, Captain, and take you and your crew on board. And then make a run for it…”

“Negative, Captain.” Stanton’s voice was strong again. He’d made his choice. “That plan has a zero percent chance of success. Your ship is not fast enough. I was lying, earlier, about how bad it was. Trying to buy time. We have physical backups on board. Regs call for us to be prepared to purge and reprogram our system in six hours. We can do it in three.”

For once, Kyle appreciated the man’s obsession.

“We can’t run, Falling. We’ve lost the vector for that. But we’ll be ready for a fight when they come through that node.”

“What if they send a fleet?” Prudence, who had moments ago been prepared to stay behind and face the enemy alone, was trying to talk Stanton out of it. Kyle thought that was very sweet of her. Futile, but sweet.

“They don’t know you have that recording. So they don’t know we’ll be immune by then. They’ll try to disable us, first, with a radio beam. That will cost them at least one ship. The rest will have to fight us honestly, and that will buy you time.”

“How are you going to become immune in three hours?”

Stanton chuckled. “The old-fashioned way, Captain. I’m going to take a hammer to our external comm feeds. We’ll be incommunicado after that, so don’t expect us to say good-bye.”

“I don’t feel right, leaving you in a disabled ship.”

“Don’t worry about us.” His voice was stern. “There’s something vastly more important you need to do. Half of Altair Fleet is hanging off of Kassa, waiting for the aliens. If they attack with that viral code, the fleet will be destroyed. You have to warn them immediately. Even three minutes of warning will spell the difference between battle and disaster. The enemy could already be on their way, from some other node.”

Half of Fleet destroyed in a single battle? The government would collapse. Dejae would be given any powers he asked for.

“Will they believe us?” Prudence asked. Kyle smiled in appreciation. She only made mistakes once.

“Yes, they will, because they already have reason to. We all noticed something while they were handing out duty assignments. They sent the experienced ships, of course, and kept back the new ships, the ones with noncitizen crews. But they also kept back the ships with League officers on them. We knew they were sending the rest of us to the front lines to die first. We just thought it would be a fair fight. The half of Fleet at Kassa isn’t just any half, Captain Falling. It’s the half that is still loyal to Altair.”

Like all criminals, the monks had finally outsmarted themselves. They had gathered all the uncontrollable elements together and sent them into exile, where they could destroy them with one blow. But they had not expected Prudence.

Stanton sent his last transmission. “Go and save my brothers, Captain Falling. Save Altair.”

The
Ulysses
crossed the system in dreadful silence. They had no way of knowing if or when the enemy had come through the node. Or how many. Their sensors were not powerful enough to scan across the entire system. And the
Launceston
was in self-imposed comm blackout, so it could neither send them warning nor boast of victory. The life-and-death drama behind them would play out invisibly.

Likely they would not even see their pursuers until seconds before they died.

Prudence drove Jorgun and Kyle like a slaver, making them transfer every nonessential piece of equipment to the main cargo bay.

“Don’t we need this?” Kyle asked, shoving on a squat, dense air recycler.

“Not if there are only three of us.” Prudence was right next to him, so close they could not help but touch now and again. The sensations kept Kyle going, long after his muscles were ready to quit.

Jorgun pulled from the other side, putting the dead weight back in motion.

“Are we going to leave this at the spaceport?” The giant wasn’t entirely clear on this “flyby” concept.

“I think she’s going to give us a break, Jor. She’s going to dump it in space. So we can just open the cargo doors and let it float out.” At least, he hoped that was the plan.

“No,” she said. “I’m going to dump it while we’re in the next node.”

Kyle stopped pushing. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

“Not as much as screwing with our mass during the entry.”

Jorgun pouted. “We won’t be able to play volleyball with all this junk in the cargo bay.”

“We’re going to seal off the cargo bay, Jor. And vent it. Air is mass.”

That meant they would spend the rest of the trip confined to the living quarters. Kyle couldn’t really complain. It would mean more contact with Prudence. She wouldn’t be able to sneak off and brood like she was prone to do.

“It’s not that much mass, is it?” Kyle asked. Not because he was objecting, but because he was trying to show he could learn about space travel.

“I’m not just going to vent the cargo bay,” she admitted. “I’m going to take a torch and cut it off.”

Kyle was stunned. “What?” She might as well cut off her own arm.

“It’s mass. Every kilo we lose is three seconds less travel time to Kassa. I can accelerate faster, and decelerate from a faster velocity. It adds up.”

“You’re going to cripple your ship?” He was surprised at the level of his own outrage.

“It’s just a ship. It’s not worth dying for. I’m hoping Altair will buy me a new one,” she parroted at him.

He’d been studying spacer manuals since he came on board. “Won’t dumping mass in the node fry us?” Things that didn’t go through the node with exactly the right velocity came out the other end as a spray of cosmic particles.

“Stop pretending to be a pilot. The scrap won’t deviate from our velocity enough to matter. Once we leave the node we’ll accelerate away from it. And it won’t be making course corrections, so it will pass out of the system and be lost to space. So take a good look around. This is the last time you’ll see any of this junk.”

She spoke like a surgeon about to remove diseased organs, but she could not disguise the way she gazed on the bits and pieces of her home.

“It’s going to look kind of funny without a cargo bay.” Kyle tried to imagine it from the outside, and failed.

“It will fly faster. That’s all that matters.”

The physical labor kept them occupied. It was a surprise when the alarm sounded, warning that the next node was imminent. Kyle found himself grinning with anticipation. For the next sixty hours, they would be safe again. And wonderfully close.

Prudence spent most of those hours in a space suit, in the cargo bay, with the doors locked. She wouldn’t let Kyle accompany her.

“Somebody has to stay on the bridge in case of an emergency,” she said. “And it can’t be Jorgun.”

So Kyle spent all his time on the bridge alone while she and Jorgun dismembered her ship. During the six-hour breaks she allowed herself for sleep, she locked herself in her stateroom. Mealtimes were monosyllabic.

Kyle tried not to feel rejected. This had to be hurting her emotionally, in ways she wasn’t ready to share yet. After this system flyby they would have five days in the final hop to Kassa. The work would all be done, the danger would be past, and they would have time to talk. To make plans. To think about a future without spiders and clones.