M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“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.”