The Kassa Gambit

worm eating its way through the dying ship. They dropped another level into networks of tubes and feeder lines sporadically lit by flickering emergency lights. Prudence led Kyle outward, toward the skin of the ship, trusting to her instincts in the darkness. He followed, trusting her.

At the escape pod hatch, they met another soldier banging on the door, trying to hurry it open.

“This cab’s ours,” Kyle said, grinning like a lunatic. “Go find another one.”

Looking at them in horror, the soldier fled. Prudence and Kyle tumbled into the pod and she pushed the release button. It shuddered, knocking them to the floor, and blew itself free of the ship.

Through the thick glass of the porthole they could see the great ship budding spores as pods evacuated it.

Prudence sat in the pilot’s chair and overrode the automatic controls. The node parameters were burned into her brain from hours spent trying to fly the Ulysses through them in the optimal path, shaving hours and then minutes from each successive approximation.

The pod wasn’t supposed to be flown. It had life support for a week, long enough that if you had to abandon ship while already in a node you’d still be alive when you came out the other side. Dirty, cramped, and possibly homicidal after spending all that time in a tiny room with twenty people, but still alive.

But it couldn’t enter the node on its own. It didn’t have enough mass for that. And its limited gas propulsion system would never undo all the velocity that was hurling them into deep space. A glance at the vector readings and she knew that nothing could. They were closer than she had thought, already past the turnaround point even for the fusion boats. And they were still on course.

The dead hulk of the carrier was going to go through the node anyway. And the spider fleet would follow it. There were no other choices left. For anyone.

Least of all for Kyle and Prudence. She pushed the pod into maximum thrust, rocketing up the side of the ship. If they hit debris or another pod, they would die. If they attracted the attention of the fusion boats that were trying to rescue the other pods, they would die. If she miscalculated a velocity or a mass number, they would die. If she twitched her hand at the wrong time …

Kyle stood behind her, stroking her hair. Waiting for her to be done. Waiting for her, like he had done since he had met her.

She looked at the ship’s hull streaking past her and made a guess. Slowed their velocity. Nudged the pod to start drifting toward the giant corpse.

They floated past the prow of the ship. A used-up party popper, shredded and dark. She pushed the pod in front of the ship, and hit the brakes, adjusting. Watching the solar vector readout like a hawk, waiting for the right instant. When it came, she accelerated again.

And now she was done. They would enter the node just ahead of the corpse behind them, riding in its mass envelope, but with enough velocity to not be sucked back into it, where the resulting chaos would convert them to cosmic radiation. Unless she had calculated wrong, in which case they would hit the node too soon, like a water balloon on concrete and thus becoming a slightly different kind of cosmic radiation.

Kyle did his part now. Leaning forward, he tapped at the pod’s comm console, recording a message.

“Virus attack. Shut down all external comm. Validation is Captain William Stanton, service number ZFX86332.”

He put it on auto-repeat, and turned the broadcast power to full. Then he set it on a timer, to start in four days.

“I memorized his number when I was trapped on his ship. Yes, I hated him that much.”

And then he was done.

They had done everything they could, for the fate of the galaxy.

Kyle opened the supplies cabinet and broke out the drinking water. Wetting a soft cloth bandage from the medical kit, he dabbed at her gently, sponging the blood off. It ran in watery red lines to the drain in the floor. The water from the sponge mixed with her tears, as she wept for all of the things she had lost. Jorgun. The Ulysses. Garcia. Jandi, who would be dead by now, by the League’s hand or the indifference of heartless nature. Her family, on Strattenburg. Who would always be dead.

Whose ashes were now scattered irretrievably to the void. Whose voices had faded with every year, with every hop. The memory of them had protected her at first, kept her whole and sound while she ran and ran, but each new face she interacted with, only to abandon and never see again, had stolen a piece of that memory, until she had only tatters left. Tatters that could not keep out the cold. And nothing new to sew into a vibrant, living whole.

She looked up at Kyle’s face. Battered and bruised, swollen with red and black lumps. When he grinned at her there was a tooth missing.

She reached out and touched his jaw, stroking it lightly with her fingers, trying to convince herself he was real.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Through the portholes she could see the stars turn into rainbow streaks. They would live.

“I love you,” she said.

Then they found they had not done everything they could. There were still things they could do, for each other.

Very good things.

EPILOGUE

The second battle of Kassa was almost as one-sided as the first had been. Altair Fleet, cautious to the point of paranoia, took no chances, and heeded the voice of Cassandra when it came crying to them from the depths of space. Without comm each ship had to fight alone, a single unit instead of a complex whole. But they were ships run by human beings. They adapted.

The robotic fighters were confused, diverted, and crushed in detail. The destroyers were pounded into submission. The captured crewmen talked, telling everything, but they didn’t have to. After the first mask came off, Fleet already knew everything they needed to know.

Dejae—the prime minister one, that is—escaped them at the very end. They found him at his desk, wearing a beautiful mother-of-pearl mask with elegant diamond studding and a small, neat hole drilled through the forehead. The needle pistol was still in his hand.

The monks’ intelligence network was impressive. When Fleet dropped out of the sky on Monterey, they were prepared. Garcia’s voice greeted them, his drawl deeply amused at the ironies of fate and happenstance.

“Admiral, the new Dejae Prime asked me to give you a message. Mistakes were made. They see that now. And they would very much like to make a deal. They’ve hired me to talk for them, as they’re scared pissless of you.”

Fleet responded by sending troop transports instead of fusion bombs. On the way down, they noticed that the main landing pad was cluttered with biological life-forms.

Two dozen naked old men, handcuffed and cowering. They hid their faces, not their bodies, which was pointless since everyone already knew what they looked like.

When Fleet mentioned this curious oversight, Garcia had an answer for them.

“Dejae Prime apologizes for the refuse littering the landing site. He suggests that a brief pulse from your fusion engines should clear the pad.”

Barbaric, but blood called for blood. In a flash of light the previous administration of Monterey ceased to be a trouble to anyone. A new era in monk-human relations began, under the unlikely but inevitable governorship of Garcia Mendezous.

The first rule Garcia imposed was the loss of the masks. Never again could the monks hide their nature from