The Kassa Gambit

“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.