The Kassa Gambit

“They didn’t come through here, Garcia. So we have to be ahead of them.”

The two of them had spent many hours poring over the local node-charts. A peculiar kind of map, it laid out all the popular nodes in terms of connections and travel times. The result bore no resemblance to the physical location of the stars. The star Prudence had been born around was actually visible from Altair, a bright neighbor in the spiral arm, even though it was more than a hundred hops away. Bruneis, on the other hand, was deep in the heart of the galaxy, where the stars were old and the planets were chock full of heavy metals. The nodes didn’t care about linear distance, and after their first few hops, people stopped caring, too. A gulf of a hundred light-years was as impassable as a million. But a node was three to seven days, no matter how much space it covered. And no matter how fast your ship was.

“We’re taking the shortest route to Altair,” she repeated, a conversation days old now. She knew what came next.

“Unless they know a node we don’t.” Garcia lived by special exemptions, outs, and tricks. He always assumed other people did too.

It was extremely unlikely. Nodes were not particularly hard to find, with the right equipment. And a sophisticated planet like Altair would have swept their solar system out to a distance of billions of kilometers.

She had pointed all of this out to Garcia, but he refused to be comforted by reason and logic. Instead he’d combined drinking and praying. At least it left him conscious, unlike Melvin.

But consciousness meant more burdens, and the future demanded to be answered. Once they got to Altair, what next? Should they flee as far from Kassa as possible? Or join the resistance, enlist in Fleet, offer their strength to the war effort? The age-old dilemma, flight or fight. Each of her crew would have to make their own decision. Except for Jorgun. She would have to make one for both of them.

Running would be easy. The voucher would fill her hold with trade goods and fuel. And Prudence had spent her life leaving places.

But not to escape. She had been lured outward by a quest of her own choosing, not driven by fear. Other than that first good-bye. The distinction was important to her. She would not be defined by her first act as an adult. She would make her own life, without regard to what had been made for her. She would not run out of habit.

But neither could she sign her life away to the oxymoronic military mind. If she wanted to fight, she would have to find her own way.

Bruneis spaceport staff were not the only ones hovering over their comm stations. Within minutes of entering Altair system, her console lit up. Altair Traffic Control, of course, demanding that she confirm her identity and assigning her a docking bay. That much she expected. Jorgun knew what buttons to push in response, so she let him do it.

But he had barely acknowledged Control’s message before she had a half-dozen other calls. Independent freighter captains, some of them friends, some of them strangers, and all of them competitors.

She took a call from the Starfarer. Captain Welsing had bought her a dozen shots of forty-year-old Scotch one night, sitting in a high-class bar and trying to get her drunk. She’d poured most of them into a container in her purse while he wasn’t looking, but pretended to get falling-down hammered, just to see what he was up to. She was quite flattered to discover he was just trying to seduce her. He wasn’t seeking trade tips or pricing information, just sex.

She’d said no, of course. He wasn’t really her type. Loud and blustery, living the free-trader stereotype to the hilt. It probably worked on civvies.

Later, Garcia had thanked her for the fine liquor, even though it was in a plastic squeeze-bottle. He wasn’t the type to stand on ceremony. She doubted he could tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the cheap hooch he normally drank, but she let him pretend. Probably the most flavorful component in this case was that the booze was free. That was something Garcia always appreciated.

“Captain Welsing. How can I help you?”

The comm beeped, but no one answered. It was an automated call. As she was reaching out to cut it off and select another one, a voice broke in.

“Prudence? Is that you?” Welsing sounded distracted. There were some odd rustling sounds in the background, and then a female voice, raised in complaint.

“Shut up, darling, this is business.” Welsing had muffled the mike, probably covering it with his hand, but Prudence could still hear. “She’s not another girl. She’s a starship captain. Totally different!”

Welsing hadn’t thought that when he was emptying credit sticks for her. But then, Welsing’s definition of “girl” was remarkably plastic.

“Prudence, my sweet. How nice of you to call.”

“You called me, Welsing. At least, your ship did.”

“Right, right. I programmed it to contact anybody on my short list. Prudence, something’s up. Something big. Altair Fleet went into high alert yesterday. They’re canceling shore leaves, putting ships on active duty, and being real pricks about dockside inspections.”

Just as she started thinking how nice it was that he had called to warn her, he went on.

“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Now why do you think I would, Welsing?” She tried not to sound too exasperated. It was his nature, after all.

“Because you left out of here to Carnor, about two weeks ago. And whatever spooked Fleet came here from Carnor, on a patrol boat named the Launceston.”

Damn. She’d passed through Altair with her shipment of threshing machines, now rusting in an abandoned Kassan wheat field. Since she had to log a flight plan with Fleet, her destination would be a matter of record. Fleet felt it was a public service to keep track of the free-traders, and to let everyone know what they were up to. Everyone but the free-traders probably appreciated it.

She was intending to broad-beam her news, anyway. No point in not telling Welsing. She sighed, not because she didn’t enjoy talking to Welsing, but because she hated telling this story. “Wels, you better send the girl out.”

“No can do, Pru, it’s her room. Hang on a second.” Screeching, the sound of something soft being thrown as violently as possible, and then the slam of a door.

Welsing came back on the line. “Okay, Pru, I’m standing in a hotel hallway with no pants on, but I’m alone. Spill.” His voice started out aggravated, but by the end of his first sentence he had returned to his smoothest charm.

“Maybe later would be a better time?” she said, unable to resist teasing him.

“Nonsense. Now that I’ve been reminded of your stunning beauty, how could I possibly settle for that doxy? Just your voice is more sensuous than a dozen Vegas showgirls stark naked in a vat of butter.”

She had to make a face at that. Jorgun laughed at her, although he couldn’t hear what Welsing had said. Jorgun had his own headset on, and was watching something on his console. Probably the last few weeks of cartoons.

Normally he wouldn’t notice anything outside of his cartoons. The atmosphere of tension must be getting to him, too.

“Real butter, Pru, not the synthetic stuff.” Welsing was filling the silence. If she let him go on, he’d start describing the showgirls. “Vegas” wasn’t a real place, just a slang term for high-class glitz and glamour, but she had no doubt his mind was full of very concrete images.

“It’s not nice, Wels. But there’s profit, if you’re fearless. Kassa colony was bombed into the Stone Age. Thousands dead, no machinery, and winter coming on. They need stuff, a lot of stuff. I have a list.”

The inevitable response. Swearing, then the question. “Earth-fire! By who?”

“Nobody knows.” The lie got harder every time she repeated it. “But … Fleet has plenty of reason to be on alert.”

Welsing was a blowhard, but he wasn’t stupid. “Why did you say ‘fearless,’ Pru?”

“If nobody knows why they came, nobody knows if they’ll come back. I don’t want you blaming me when a war-fleet drops out of the sky on your pizza delivery.”

“Damn, Pru. Damn.”