M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

“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.

He was almost excited when the alarm turned yellow, and Prudence dragged herself wearily to the bridge. True, there was some risk that the enemy would catch up to them here, but they had changed the parameters of the game. They had a fighting chance.

Watching through the screen as the real world came back into focus, the light reaching their sensors no longer distorted by the physics of the node, he marveled at the serene majesty of the starry sky.

Then he frowned.

“What was that?”

A star had winked out. He was sure of it.

Prudence looked up from her calculations.

Another star blossomed, a tiny light in blackness, and died in a heartbeat.

“A course correction,” Prudence said. “That was a course correction.”

Another. Then two more, far apart.

“We’re too late. Their fleet is in front of us.”

There was nothing they could do. Kyle knew enough about piloting to see that for himself. The enemy was halfway across the system, heading for the only node the Ulysses could hope to enter. Prudence could not change her mind now. Her course had been calculated and set days ago. Even with the ship stripped to the bone she had too much mass to turn around.

They could not hope to remain undetected. Prudence had to run her gravitics at full power or accept certain death at the hands of a null-vector. They could not hope to evade. The enemy had fusion boats. They were not ruled by the distant whims of planets and stars.