She had thought it would get easier, but four days in the cocoon of node-space only made it worse.
Surprisingly, they had let her go. “They” being the Phoenix, of course. Kassa didn’t have any way of stopping her. Short of guilt, which they had certainly tried. But she had explained that they needed things from off-world to survive the next few months. Things that Fleet would not be bringing. And Fleet wasn’t going to be eager to share the news about what had happened here. They’d want to lock everything down until they knew exactly what was going on—and that could take a very long time.
So she had offered to go out and spread the word, tell every captain she met what Kassa would buy. The tramp freighters would swarm to Kassa, like flies to a corpse. They would overcharge, but they would bring the necessities of life. And the sooner they got started, the cheaper it would be for Kassa.
In any case, there was little more the Ulysses could do for them. The various pockets of refugees had radio contact now and the most isolated groups had been brought into larger settlements. The Phoenix had lent Kassa its launches, so they had functioning aircraft. All she had left to offer was convenience, not survival. The Kassans had believed her, and let her go without resentment.
But Garcia had been livid enough to invade the bridge while they were lifting off.
“Are you insane? We know exactly what Kassa needs. We could charge premium prices. For crying out loud, Pru, I’ve spent days crawling through stinking dockside bars trying to ferret out good cargoes, just to keep us floating. This kind of information could make us rich!”
She took his outrage with a grain of salt, since she happened to know he enjoyed hanging around in those stinking bars. After all, that’s where she’d originally found him.
“We are not going to get rich off of Kassa’s disaster, Garcia.”
“At least tell me you’ll sell that list.” He was whining, which was unlike him. Usually he blustered or threatened when money was involved. Prudence decided he was developing a conscience. Given his past, it was almost certainly a painful process.
“We’re going to do everything we can to prevent anybody else from getting rich off it, too. The news goes out on a public broadcast as soon as we reenter normal space.” It was the best thing she could do for Kassa. The more freighters that knew about it, the less any of them could gouge.
Melvin had been next, paging her from the gunnery console.
“The laser’s still broken, Pru.” He said it like it was her fault. Melvin had become increasingly volatile since his exposure to the wreck. “We’re unarmed. What if we get attacked?”
What good would a stupid mining laser do? They had been lucky the first time. Just a dumb mine. If they met a real combat ship—even one of those little fighters—they would die in the first pass.
“We won’t be attacked, Melvin. There will be Fleet swarming through all the hops between here and Altair.”
Garcia rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath. “Assuming they haven’t already destroyed Fleet.” She’d told him about the alien wreck. She had to; he was part of her crew. He deserved to know.
“What if they’ve already blown up Fleet?” Melvin asked, his voice rising.
She snapped at him through the microphone. “Then we’re better off running, instead of waiting here for them to come back and finish the job.”
Silence from the intercom. He’d turned it off, the most insulting thing he could imagine. That being cut off from him was a relief to everyone else was not the sort of thing Melvin would understand. He couldn’t bear to be unheard, so he assumed no one could bear to not hear him.
Garcia walked out, and left Prudence with Jorgun. For a moment she wished she was still arguing with Melvin.
“Will we come back and see Jelly?” Jorgun asked.
She had already told him the truth, but he kept asking. She could not determine how much he understood, whether he was in denial or simply expressing his grief, holding on to her memory with the only thing he had left. In either case, there was only one thing she could do now.
She lied. “When we can, Jor. When we can.”
It was a double lie. They would never see Jelly again; they would never come back to this planet. She would never put her ship where Kyle Daspar’s impressment papers could reach it.
He had left her bridge when she had told him to. He had left her ship when they landed, running to the whistle of his master on the Phoenix. He had let her go in silence.
All the way out to the node-point, she had pushed the edge of safe velocity, eager to escape before he called her back. She had congratulated herself on slipping out while the Phoenix was too preoccupied to realize its mistake.
But in the seconds before they entered the node, in the last instant that they could still interact with the outside world, she had discovered a part of herself waiting for the comm board to light up. Hoping for a word from him, even if it was only “good-bye.”
A curious desire to hold toward a man she despised. A man that represented her worst nightmare. As much as she detested his authority, she still missed his competence.
Now she sat on the bridge, preparing to reenter the universe. Not entirely certain of what she would find out there, and four days of worrying about it gnawing at her belly. Melvin couldn’t take the strain; he’d snuck off somewhere and hid, no doubt stoned again. Garcia pretended indifference, claiming fate was in the hands of some nebulously defined supernatural entity, but she had seen him drinking heavily in these last few hours. Only Jorgun was immune. Jorgun could not comprehend his own death any better than he could comprehend Jelly’s. He was asleep in his bunk, oblivious.
Prudence had other concerns to occupy her mind. She’d entered the node too fast. An emotional decision, fleeing from the reach of Daspar’s papers, but also a tactical one. Halfway to the node they had already built up too much velocity to abort the run. The Power Law ruled a spaceship’s life; acceleration was constrained by gravity, and gravity weakened by the square of the distance. The farther away from the planet she got, the less she could affect her course. If the Phoenix had tried to call her back, she could have legitimately refused. Their own navcom would have told them she had no choice.
It was a dangerous gambit. If she had missed the node, the Ulysses would plunge helplessly into deep space, without any way to stop.
And the flip side of the coin was just as dangerous. If you came out of a node too fast and in the wrong direction, you might miss the planet. The mathematics of diminishing rates quickly added up to a death sentence, a long, cold journey into perpetual night. On a null-vector you couldn’t even abandon ship. The landing craft was gravitics powered, too.
All you could do then was hope somebody with more money than sense had a ship that was more fuel than anything else, a fusion engine that could make its own force without a planet nearby, and a willingness to come out and try and pick up your crew. Regulations called for all spaceports to have a fusion tug ready to launch within five minutes. But that tug would have its own point of no return, beyond which it could not reach.
The computer would digest it all, grind the numbers together, and spit out a vector calculation. Either it intersected your ship, or it didn’t. If you miscalculated a node exit, you would know within minutes whether you were dead or not, no matter how many days or weeks your life support could keep you breathing.
You had to know going in how you would be coming out: which direction the planet was, and which direction the node pointed. Most nodes faced inward, aligned by the pull of the star. But not all did. And the planets might be on the opposite side of their orbits, too far away to use.
These chancy facts went a long way to explaining why most freight haulers stuck to the same ports of call. A popular, well-traveled route would have up-to-date information available at every stop, allowing traders to calculate how much cargo they could carry, down to the last kilo. Less frequently visited planets would have less accurate information, making them less profitable, which led to fewer visits and less information in a cruelly descending spiral. Nodes that were uninhabited were the worst; in the event of a cosmic catastrophe like a planetary collision or supernova, the inhabited nodes would at least generate a wave of refugees as a warning. The empty nodes, their tragic doom concealed from distant view by the merely ordinary speed of light, would lie in wait like an ant-lion at the bottom of its trap.
Unlikely events to be sure, but seasoned spacers did not settle for mere improbability.
Some ships were designed to handle the risks. Fusion-powered explorers and military boats, like the Launceston. It could creep through the node with virtually no velocity, relying on its atomic engine to accelerate to the next node or back into the one it had just left.
A ship like the Ulysses, though, couldn’t afford to be caught “in irons,” as the old Earth-saying had it, trapped in deep space without velocity or gravity to create velocity. A working ship like the Ulysses couldn’t carry ninety percent of its mass in fuel. People making a living had to use the gravity of the last place to build up the speed that would get them to the next place, and carry enough cargo in between to pay the bills.
Now she worried about too much velocity. But the Ulysses was running light, its cargo no more than a slip of paper—the voucher to be cashed in at Altair. At worst, she would have to spiral around the planet several times to dock. That would earn her a ticket for unsafe navigation. Enough of those and they would take your ship away, for your own good.
Velocity was the porridge of commercial space travel. Too much or too little, and you got eaten by bears.
Her console sprang to life, in touch with the constant field of radio traffic that bathed every civilized star. No warning signals, no red lights here. Just a dozen offers for cargo transshipment, and one limited-time-only special on deck wax.
She touched the switch that made her part of that invisible web. If her orbital calculations were right, she had about three minutes to make a decision.
“Hail, Bruneis spaceport. This is the Ulysses hailing.”
“Prudence? Is that you?”
A quick response for such a small port. They must be hovering over their consoles.
“Yes, Bruneis … Sharon?” She struggled to match the voice to a name. Garcia was so much better at that. “Listen, I have a problem…”
“Hang on, Prudence, the commodore wants to speak to you.”
She hadn’t asked for her favor yet, and the operator was already transferring her up the line. This was either good news, or very bad news.
“Captain Falling?” A more mature voice. Prudence had never had to deal with the head of Bruneis’s space program before.
“Commodore, I would like to request permission for a flyby, to the Carnor node.” It was a lot to ask. She wanted to streak through their system without stopping. That meant no inspection, which meant no cargo fees. Not very polite. “I’m running without cargo or passengers, and there’s an emergency behind me. I have two minutes and eight seconds before I have to abort this course.”
Despite the urgency, the voice hesitated before responding. Prudence gritted her teeth at the dramatics of power.
“On one condition, Captain Falling. You tell us what the hell is going on.”
“Granted, Commodore.” She relaxed in her chair. The course she wanted was already programmed, and the autopilot would make the minor corrections necessary. There were always corrections. Planets followed Newton’s laws inflexibly, but there were so many factors that no simulation could be perfect. The subtle influence of other planets, moons, and even the waves of plasma on the face of the local star all added up. But she had been through here only a few weeks ago, so her navcom’s data was up to date.
The commodore kept talking. “All we know, Captain Falling, is that the Launceston blew through here on a fusion burn. They didn’t bother to ask for permission, either. And they didn’t tell us jackson.” Prudence grimaced in sympathy, but not too much. If the commodore thought she was aggravated at the imperiousness of Altair Fleet, Prudence could tell her a tale or two.
Which focused the issue neatly. How much could she tell them without compromising her invisibility? And how much could she keep from them without endangering them?
Bruneis was a dome world, rich in rare-earth elements but barely habitable. Its population could not retreat to the forests to hide, because there were no plants of any kind. The Bruneisians wore nose-filters and oxygen feeds when they went outside. Other than being utterly devoid of oxygen, the atmosphere was quite pleasant, with a tang that reminded Prudence of baked cinnamon.
But a week without machinery or power would exterminate Bruneis.
“Kassa was attacked, Commodore. Bombed for days by an unknown force. I’ve been flying rescue missions since I got there. The Launceston is allegedly going to Altair to request more help.” And, as she had expected, keeping mum as long as possible. “There’s an Altair cruiser there now, the Phoenix. I don’t know if they came through here, though.” She hadn’t seen the Phoenix arrive, and there were three nodes at Kassa.
“How bad is it?” The commodore was too distraught to even notice Prudence’s subtle question about the Phoenix, let alone answer it.
“It’s bad, Commodore. Perhaps twenty percent casualties.” Ten thousand individual deaths, reduced to a statistic. “But there’s nothing left standing—or moving—on the planet. They hit the infrastructure hard.”
The commodore knew better than Prudence what that would mean for her own world.
“Who? Who did it?”
Prudence bit her lip. “I don’t know.” In a way it was true. “Nobody saw anything but bombs.” Unless Prudence was demoting herself to the status of nobody, that wasn’t true at all. “All I can give you are rumors and speculation, Commodore.” Lies piled on top of lies. If deceit had mass, her ship would be dangerously overloaded.
“Then give them, Captain.”
If she told them what she had seen, if she gave them details that could only have come from the wreck, then Altair Fleet would find out. And if there were a conspiracy here, then they would come after her. Kyle’s last-minute rescue would be wasted.
Prudence said as much as she dared. “If something comes through the node, and it doesn’t speak Terran standard … start shooting.”
Silence on the other end. Prudence kept talking. “That’s just what I heard, Commodore. Nothing was taken; no one claimed sovereignty. They showed up, dropped bombs, and went away. For apparently no purpose that anybody can understand.”
Another pause. Then the commodore responded. “I’ve asked my staff some questions about you. They assure me you do not play practical jokes. Nonetheless, I am going to ask you, under oath, to repeat that.”
Prudence exhaled in relief. The commodore had given her a way out, an excuse to shut up.
“Not under oath, Commodore. If you want me to go on record, then all I can tell you are the facts. Kassa is in shambles, and no one knows who or why.”
The commodore surprised her by swearing. “Bullshit. Someone knows why.”
“Then they didn’t choose to share it with me, Commodore. May I respectfully suggest you take whatever measures you can to protect yourself.”
“How many were there? What kind of ships did they attack with? How can we organize a defense without knowing any of this?” The voice was angry, almost petulant. Prudence couldn’t blame her, but it wasn’t her fault.
“All I can tell you is they didn’t land. They just dropped bombs—a lot of bombs. For several days. Kassa had virtually no defenses—only one patrol boat, and I honestly don’t know if it was even armed.”
“You can’t tell me what I need to know—but you can spread rumors of aliens.” Bitterness overwhelmed the commodore’s voice.
“I’m sorry, Commodore. But you can go and see for yourself. I’m sure Kassa would appreciate any assistance you can spare.”
The appeal to humanity took the wind out of the commodore’s sails. When the voice answered, it was apologetic. “Understood, Captain. We’ll dispatch a rescue mission immediately. Can you tell us what they need most?”
“Yes,” Prudence said with relief, “I can. Prepare for a datadump.” She pushed the button that logged her in to Bruneis’s public network, and queued the transfer. Everything else would be automatic. The machines would talk now, without deceit or emotion, sparing Prudence and the commodore their artless fencing.
If only someone would invent a machine that lied for you.
“Pru?” Garcia on the intercom. “Did we exit the node yet?” The transition was undetectable by any sense human beings possessed. Short of looking out a window and noticing that the stars were points of white light instead of spectral streaks.
“We did, and as you may have noticed, we’re still alive.”
“For now.”
She sighed. “We’re on flyby to Carnor. From there it’s one more hop to Altair, where we can cash in this voucher.”
“Assuming Altair still exists.” Garcia had been rattled for days. This was an uncomfortable experience for her. She’d seen him bet his life savings without a twitch, a dozen times.
“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.”
“Put me through to a data channel. I’ll transmit the list. And Wels … don’t keep this a secret. Tell everyone on your list. The long list. This is a humanitarian crisis, not a monopoly-profit opportunity.”
She thought of something else that might be more motivational.
“There’ll be plenty of profit for everyone. Especially if you’re willing to take future-payment vouchers.” Anybody who had the cash to lend could make a profit both on delivery and interest. Welsing was the kind of guy who always seemed to have a lot of cash.
“You don’t want a window?” He was asking if she wanted him to sit on the information until she had time to cut a few deals.
“No, Wels. I don’t think I’m going back there. It was…” It was too much to ask of Jorgun. “I’ve seen enough.” It was too much to ask of her. Kyle might still be there, with his damnable papers and smoky black eyes. “I’m not giving you a window, either. I’ve got a dozen calls to answer, and I’ll be handing out the list to everyone.” The comm station had kept adding them while she had been talking to Welsing.
“Understood, Pru. I’ll spread it around too. Humanitarian, like you said. Um, hate to chat and run, but I need to get some pants on. There’s a bellboy at the end of the hall now, and he doesn’t look amused.”
Probably he just wanted to fill his hold with the prime cargos before the local vendors raised the prices. Welsing wasn’t the kind of guy who worried about bellboys.
“Fair enough, Wels. Although I regret this comm was only audio.”
“Honey, you have the taste to appreciate the unadorned human form. Not like these prudes on Altair. But call me later, we’ll do something naked.”
“Prudence out,” she answered, rolling her eyes at his salaciousness. Constant repetition tended to rob it of effectiveness.
“Welsing out,” and he was gone.
Sighing, she pushed another button at random.