Relative Gravity / Chapter 00 (Text)

CASSANDRA

Velocity Junkie | Deep Space 

Cassandra clipped-in beside the long thin spikes of the comms array the moment she climbed up from the airlock. It was the first thing they taught in basic EVA: always clip-in. 

Space was big, her training officer had warned her, and spacers were very, very easy to lose.

Yet here she was—despite his warnings, the years of rigid protocols, and basic common sense—about to willingly leap into the absolute desolation of interstellar space, light-years away from rescue. 

It was risky, but they'd planned every step, accounted for every contingency. If something went wrong, she had options. 

And if she ran out of options, well, she had options for that too.

Either way, she was prepared. 

Nothing now but to wait for ‘go.’ The hardest part of any mission.

The stars blurred as an anticipatory surge of adrenaline revved her vision. She'd been trained to harness her nerves, but until a target presented itself, she had to keep them on a tight leash. 

She should have been concentrating on the mission, but there was nothing left to check. Nothing to consider now except where she was and what she was about to do.

Cass glanced up. What had been a distant star when she'd climbed up to the ship’s nose only seconds ago was now a small silvery ring, hovering above her. Just out of reach in the stark dark. 

She knew it was an illusion. The skip-gate was massive but still millions of klicks away. Her primate brain was glitching out on scale and shadow across the inhuman distances.   

With the Velocity Junkie’s deck purring up through her armor at a gentle one-g, she didn’t feel their speed. If it weren't for the absolute black in every direction, she could be standing on the roof of a building instead of a giant box of carbon filament and blasteel panels strapped to four fusion thrusters and all hurtling through space at a few thousand kilometers per second.  

Three minutes from now, the ring overhead would dwarf her and the ship. It would blaze with the power of a star to rip a bridge across light-years.

And then she'd jump through it.

Cass’ stomach tightened at the thought. She reflexively released the wad of gum she’d tucked in her cheek and gave it an unsatisfying chew. She always popped a piece of goldberry gum in her mouth before missions, an old habit from her basic training, back when the anxiety before a spacewalk used to have her spinning. 

Chewing gave her something else to focus on, but the soft texture and sharp sweet flavor had turned stiff and dull. She worked the gum with her teeth, pursed her lips, and blew a tight purple bubble she snapped before it got too big. 

It was a delicate skill, blowing a bubble in a sealed helmet. Keeping it small enough not to make a mess of the faceplate but still big enough to give a solid satisfying pop. She'd made that mistake once before. Puffed too hard and ran an entire mission with a big sticky fog over everything. 

Only once, though. She didn’t like to make the same mistake twice.

With another glance up at the ring—now grown to the size of a broomball hoop—she crouched, unclipped, and locked her fingers around the handhold. The tether reeled back onto its spool on her waist, and the hook locked into place. 

Cass knew from the feel alone it was secure, but she checked anyway, scanned down the dark red scales covering her chest to make sure it wasn't dangling loose. 

Her armor, patched and modded as it was, made her a one-woman fire team. But if a loose hook snagged her to the ship and she missed her jump window, the mission would be over before it started. Even the simplest mistake could ruin a carefully crafted plan. They had one shot at this, no second chances. 

She took a moment to close her eyes and draw into herself, to relax into the comforting hiss of the recyclers feeding oxygen into her helmet. With her thoughts directly merged with the machine, her armor felt like an extension of her body. As if this was her true form, not the pale, fragile creature inside. 

She rolled her shoulders, and the actuators moved in sync. She flexed the fingers of her free hand, playing with the fine tensor response. Everything felt solid. Felt right. She didn't need the diagnostics streaming into her thoughts to tell her it was ready.

Her armor was all she had. Her last refuge. The only thing she'd taken when she and her brother had fled Perseverance, with her former team at their heels. 

It had saved her life that day. And a few times since. 

Probably would again today.

"Two minutes," Abel announced over the comm, snapping her back to reality. How could there still be two minutes left? "Last chance to abort,” he added. “You're sure you want to go through with this?" 

Her brother's voice was shaky, a fragile tremble eating away at his words. He was getting worse, unraveling again. No denying it anymore. His personality was as patched and modded as her armor, and the stress of the job was rattling his seals loose.

Still crouched, she opened her eyes. The ring had grown massive.

"Good to go," she replied, keeping her tone calm. She didn't want to trigger him into a meltdown. 

"We can find another way.” His reedy voice was a hair away from pleading. “Something safer."

She knew he was worried about her, but they'd been through this. 

The plan was set. In the end, it would all be worth it. She just needed him to get there with her.

"Good to go," Cass repeated. 

His concern wasn't completely unwarranted. She was about to fling herself off the front of the ship for an untethered spacewalk through a skip-space gate to intercept a UHC transport—that was, at present, more than twelve light-years away and decelerating hard towards Ursa Station—then hijack the gravity lance it was carrying and pilot it out an exit gate without being caught or killed or lost in deep space. 

It sounded ludicrous, but they'd worked it all out. Calculated the routes and velocities. Planned the parameters and timings to within milliseconds. Every conceivable variable was accounted for. 

She knew she’d done all she could, but still the second-guessing voice in her head refused to power down.

Alone? In space? it protested. Anything could go wrong. This is suicidal. What good are you to Abel if you’re dead? 

"Don't worry," she said, refusing to indulge her doubt. "I'll be back before you miss me."

"'Don't worry?" Abel repeated, then squeaked a nervous laugh. "'Don't worry,' she says. You're about to be one hundred thirteen trillion, five hundred billion kilometers away, where we can't help you if something goes wrong, and we're not supposed to worry?"

Cassandra clenched her jaw and fought down the rush of guilt. 

This wasn’t the Abel she remembered. She'd once envied his fearlessness, even when it strayed into arrogance. When they were kids, he had been her only competition. Fighting for Father’s approval had toughened them both. She only auditioned for the Strazhi Mira elite forces to prove she was as tough as he was. Now look at him.  

And worse, his present condition was all her fault. She was the reason he was broken. 

Maybe not the only reason. His legendary stubbornness had contributed some. If Abel had just backed down, been reasonable, they wouldn't be on this ship at all. Wouldn’t be exiles from the Collective. And she wouldn't be babysitting his shattered mind while they risked their lives running missions to pay off their debts to the Lotus.  

In the end, maybe losing his terminal obstinance wasn’t so terrible. Maybe— 

She stopped herself. Shook off the dark mood before it could latch on. It wasn't his fault. She had made the impossible decision to capture and digitize his mind, to save his life by turning him into eko. This was all on her.

He might not have been the brother she remembered, but they were alive. And together. Like family should be. That's what was important.

Besides, she was going to fix him. That's why she couldn't quit. She'd failed him once. Never again. 

"Don't fret, Abe, Hun," Vel drawled over the comm. "You can bet your sweet patootie I'll bring her home, safe as puddin’."

Vel was the ship’s AI. It had loaded a splinter of itself into Cass’ armor and was coming along for the trip. And not just for tactical support. If the mission went to govno and Cass ended up drifting through space while her life support ran out, at least she’d have something to keep her company. 

Usually, Vel could ease Abel back from the edge, but he was spiraling. "It's just maybe there's another—" His voice hiccupped, and he let out a pitiful whine.  

Cassandra took a breath. She snapped another bubble rather than give in to her impatience and snap at her brother. 

"We've been through this," she said, keeping it light, "planned it top to bottom. You helped, remember? I need you to pick me up on the other side. Can you do that?"

Abel didn't answer. 

"Sixty-seconds, boss," Vel said. 

"Abel?" Cass prodded.

No response.

"Abel?"

They couldn't afford another meltdown. Not now.

The churn of the Velocity Junkie's engine room filled Cass' helmet as Amari cut in. "Abel, enough now. She’s got work to do." Amari was the ship's mechanic. She’d been maintaining it for years and had stuck around when its ownership had been transferred to the Wandering Lotus. Born in the Assembly, she spoke Collective jiti with the lilting, loose-tongued accent of her native language. 

"Listen to Amari," Cass said. She didn't like leaving her brother, especially when he was like this, but she wouldn't be gone long. And if she was, she knew Amari and Vel would do their best to take care of him. They were like family now. "I'll see you on the other side." 

"Twenty minutes," her big brother finally said, his voice small. "Come back, okay?"

"Here comes the flash," Vel warned.

A few moments ago, the skip-gate had been a tiny dot shimmering in the distance. Now it was gargantuan, with a stripe of brilliant blue-white blazing around its inner surface. The light intensified, and even though her visor darkened to compensate, she had to look away. 

When she turned back, she was looking through a shimmering sphere of overlapped spacetime to a star field light-years away.

They’d borrowed two of the Lotus’ skip-gates for the job, one for the entrance and another for the exit. Each would only be active for a few seconds to help keep the Collective from tracking their origins, but it was still a risk. The Lotus had invested significant resources into the job, trusting Cass could pull it off. If it went wrong, she might be better off lost in space.

"Thirty seconds," Vel said. 

Cass snapped another stiff bubble. The gum had completely lost its flavor, but it had done its work. The pre-mission adrenaline surge always made her mouth taste awful, and the gum covered it up. Better her helmet smelled of goldberries than the rancid stench of anticipation.

As comforting as it was, both the worn-out gum and the now cloying odor were a distraction. She touched the controls on her arm and swiped through the warnings, exhaled to keep her lungs from exploding, then opened her face shield.

The seal cracked with a sharp hiss as air evacuated her helmet, ripping the goldberry smell with it. 

Her skin prickled. 

Sparkles danced across her vision as she blinked the sudden crust of ice from her eyes. 

She stuck out her tongue and it fizzed like popping candy as the moisture boiled away, taking her fear with it.

She hadn't always been so comfortable with the vacuum. For obvious reasons. Like most people, she'd grown up taking breathing for granted. Sure, she'd heard the spacer stories about ships losing atmosphere and entire crews asphyxiating in seconds. But it wasn't until she was accepted into the Strazhi that she experienced it firsthand, and learned exactly how terrifying space really was. 

At first, during training, even basic spacewalks had spun her stomach into knots. She'd always been a fearless kid. She’d faced wild kraglin in the swamps of Perseverance and skiff-raced over the rocky waters of the Loveless Caverns. But faced with the inescapable void, she'd almost cracked. 

She’d endured the ship-to-ship boarding drills, simulated station breaches, and external maintenance and repair exercises, but the thought that there was nothing between her and instant death but an eggshell of armor protecting a thin film of breathable air was never not terrifying. 

Then the instructors had taken the recruits though decompression safety, and she'd been forced to confront her fear head on. 

Turned out, it wasn't so bad. 

Eventually, she learned to crave it.

They say space is cold, but it isn't. It isn't anything. Temperature is a measure of energy in matter, and there's no matter in space to measure. You don't instantly freeze because there's no atmosphere to conduct the heat away. Warmth radiates slowly, in the infrared, and that takes hours. 

It’s the air that kills you. Whether by tearing your lungs inside-out as it violently decompresses out your mouth, or the lack of it afterwards. That's the counterintuitive part. Your first instinct is to take a deep breath and hold it, but that'll kill you quicker than anything. 

After you exhale to keep your respiratory system intact, it's unpleasant, but not in a bad way. You've got fifteen seconds or so before your brain runs out of oxygen and you lose consciousness, but in those first few instants—before the swelling and bruising starts as the pressure difference between your skin and space boils the water out of your tissues—time freezes. 

Space is silent. The quietest, most peaceful thing you've never heard. And afterwards your helmet smells like faint sweet metal.

Cass found those fleeting seconds of absolute nothing soothed her, and she took a hit of pure space anytime she could. 

As delicious as it was, a little went a long way. Any more than ten seconds and you're off to the infirmary. Much longer than that and you're dead. 

She flicked the gum off her tongue, watched it drop and bounce off the deck and twirl over the edge, then resealed her visor. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath as her helmet repressurized. Her cheeks stung, space-kissed, and her tongue throbbed like she'd just licked a battery terminal, but when she opened her eyes, her nerves were gone. Scoured clean by the vacuum.

Time to go. 

"Five seconds to jump," Vel warned her. 

Cass flexed and counted down in her head. When she got to one, she jumped. At the same time, Vel hit the retro-thrusters. The ship plummeted out from under her, shrunk to a glowing purple dot, then angled away, changing its path to avoid following Cass through the gate. 

The massive ring dwarfed her. Made her realize just how small she was. She'd flown through skip-gates before, but never naked like this, without a ship. The sheer scale was humbling. Like how early people on Old Earth must have felt when they stepped into a towering stone cathedral. 

Two hundred meters in diameter, the ring was plated with dull gray shielding and powered by the sixteen mega-scale fusion drives studded around its circumference. Compared to the newest skip-gate models the Collective used, this was one of the small ones, with limited range, but it was still enormous. Inside, a distorted sphere of overlapped space bridged here and her destination.   

She gazed through, watching the distant stars ripple as she approached the overlap. One of the pricks of light on the other side was their target: the Begemot, a Collective heavy transport hauling its cargo to the timespace mining outpost at Tartarus. 

Before she could ask, Vel identified the ship on her visor, circling it in blue. A moment later it had calculated the relative speeds and distances and drew a green path between them. 

Right on target. ETA: 372 seconds.

The Begemot was flipped and burning, slowing from its high-g trip through the military skip-lanes from the orbital construction yard at Xīn. An express run to Tartarus, all other traffic cleared. It had one gate left to cross before it fell into orbit at the support station 500,000 klicks from the black hole. 

Vel estimated the ship was already moving just slightly slower than Cass. Except it had giant fusion drives slowing it down, and she had nothing but her suit's thrusters. If she missed the intercept, Abel wouldn't have to choose between an open or closed casket. Fast as she was going, they'd never find her body.

A second later, she hit the overlap and crossed through in a bright blur. The gate closed behind her, and her connection to the Velocity Junkie went with it. 

Cass activated her armor’s passive camo, curled into a ball, nudged the thrusters, and fell into a tumble, turning herself into the profile of harmless space junk. With her waste heat dumping into an internal sink, and her suit absorbing what little light hit her, the Begemot wouldn't see her coming. Not until it was too late to matter.

She blacked out her visor to keep from getting motion sick. She didn't feel the movement, but the spinning stars would have made her woozy. Instead, she tracked her path toward the transport as a green dotted line, with a timer counting down the seconds to rendezvous. 

"Your heart rate's up," Vel said, casual like. 

"I just skipped from one point in space to another without traveling the distance in between, and we're about to rip-off the Collective to buy our freedom. Of course, my heart rate's up. I'm excited."

More than anything, she was happy to be moving. All that waiting wasn’t good for her.

"I don't have access to my psychological diagnostic routines," Vel deadpanned. "But I do wonder if maybe you're too excited."

"I think maybe you're not excited enough," Cass shot back. "We get this done, that gets us one step closer to the Free Worlds. You out of your contract. Help for Abel."

"Seems like you've got everyone else taken care of. What about you?"

They'd talked about this before, fantasies of life after the mission, but she still couldn't picture it. So much could happen between then and now.

"Let's get there first," she said. “Then I’ll worry about me.”

She didn't need the illusions of success casting shadows over reality. Besides, it didn't matter what came after. Whatever they did, as long as they were all together, and she had her armor to protect them, she didn't need anything else. 

Her armor, the MK4 neural-integrated combat package, was a self-sustaining, four-environment weapons platform. A rarity in the Collective, it interfaced directly with her neural chip—providing a connection between human and tech that was otherwise strictly outlawed. 

It helped her move like a predatory animal, lithe and powerful, and covered her in interlocking ablative scales tough enough to deflect multiple high-velocity impacts. In it, she could lift a ton. Onboard thrusters were good for a five-minute, four-g burn, or short, in-atmosphere flights. It had seventy-two-hour life support. A med package. A sensor package. Target acquisition and aim assist. A high-speed round launcher on the right arm, seekers on the left—though ammo for the built-in weapons had run dry months ago. She'd managed to source the odd replacement part, patched the scales, even upgraded the autodoc, but ammo was impossible to find. 

In the decade since General al-Jarrah had been awarded the sector Sub-Sovereignty, he had all but choked off the local shadow market. Skip-lane piracy and "lost" weapons shipments from the munitions factories on Oro-Mendon had plummeted. Collective-standard ammunition now had to be smuggled out from Viktra, along the commercial lanes. Few captains were willing to take the risk of losing their ship to a surprise inspection. Those who did could name their price, which was always more than Cass could justify. Especially when Assembly weapons were cheap and easy to come by. 

She'd packed a mag rifle loaded with sixteen armor-piercing rounds and thirty-six shock-slugs, with two fast reloads of each in reserve. Whenever possible, she favored the slugs—bullets were for emergencies and assholes. 

She'd been a Collective soldier once and didn't want to kill anyone if she didn't have to. Not that she was expecting a vigorous resistance. The troopers she'd be facing would likely be kids on their mandatory. Guarding an equipment transport across a secure military skip-lane deep in Collective space didn't exactly require the best and the brightest. They'd be Duty soldiers. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds doing their eighteen months' service. 

The slugs—polymer rounds that hit hard enough to break bones and delivered an electric charge that stunned and messed with electronics—would get the job done. Without leaving any grieving parents back home. She didn't want anyone to exit their Duty Service in a bag. Temporarily debilitated, fine, but nothing permanent. 

And unlike kinetic rounds, since they spread on impact, shock-slugs had the reduced potential for punching holes through the thin skinned, delicate circuitry of the hardware she was planning to steal.

If she was lucky, no one would notice her, and she wouldn't have to fire a shot. That was the optimal outcome. 

She wasn't expecting it. 

The countdown timer ticked past three minutes, and the mono-color profile of the ship grew in detail with every second. The Begemot was a freighter, designed for transporting smaller ships, station modules, and planetary supply drops. No weapons, just a bank of thrusters and reinforced scaffolding with rows of docking hardpoints. Not much different from the Junkie, other than the size. 

It was harmless, but it had an escort: two frigates, one in front and one behind. They were equipped with torpedoes, plasma launchers, defense cannons, and drones. More than enough firepower to challenge anything this side of a strike group. 

But they wouldn't be looking for a single person. And if, by unlikely chance, they did happen to spot her, and thought she posed a threat, she'd be dead before she knew it. 

She was small and dim. Vel had her approaching at an angle that didn't directly intersect with the transport. The escorts shouldn't be a problem. She shouldn't see any resistance at all. Until she landed. 

That's when things could get messy. 

"How we looking?" Cass asked. She was twitchy, eager to reach the target. She could have talked to Vel silently through her implant but preferred to speak out loud whenever possible. 

"No activity yet," Vel reported back. "No sign they've seen us. I think we're clear."

"That won't last once we intercept."

"You'll just have to take care of it then then, won'tcha?"

The green path on her visor pulsed, and she puffed her jets, pulling her out of the tumble. Her visor cleared and suddenly the Begemot was directly ahead of her, its nose less than a klick away. 

The ship was a long matrix of pipes and struts and plating, with purple fire spitting out the far end. Cass was approaching at a narrow angle, but only moving a few kps faster. Close enough to see the ship's name painted down its hull in traditional Cyrillic: Бегемот.

More than two centuries old, the ship had been in service since before the Collective had adopted jiti as the unified standard language, and no one had bothered to repaint it. Likely by design. The military was resolute in adhering to tradition. For a long time, she had felt the same way. 

All except one of the ship's anchor points were empty. It contained a boxy module about the size of a large house, its seamless opalescent coating shimmering in the starlight. A long wide translucent blade jutted out from the top and stretched halfway down the length of the transport. 

A gravity lance. Her target.

Built to fire a coherent pulse of condensed gravitons in a tightly focused beam, a gravity lance was the only way to extract timespace—raw energy in its purest form—from a black hole. 

Gravity lances were strictly regulated and extremely expensive to build. With it, and access to the right kind of black hole, Cass and her crew could mine a timespace core and deliver it to the Lotus, which the flotilla would use to triple the range on their skip-gates and better deliver their message of digital immortality to the citizens deep in the Collective.

It was exactly the kind of thing she used to fight when she was Strazhi, but that was then. With the job done and their debts paid, Cass and Abel and Amari and Vel would be free. Stealing the grav lance was the first step to the rest of their lives.

"I'm about to change heading," Vel informed her. "Let's hope no one's watching."

Vel pulsed the suit thrusters and dropped them toward the Begemot's deck, targeting the surface just ahead of the grav lance. Cass clenched her teeth as the ship rose to meet her. Her armor was tough, but a close defense round would tear a hole clear through it. 

Nothing came. 

Then she was only a meter away and spun to decelerate, creeping closer as she matched the Begemot's velocity. At last, she grabbed one of the handholds and pulled herself in. She gave herself half a second to celebrate, then pressed on.

"Still no alarms?" Cass asked as she unclipped her harness from her belt and clicked it around the safety railing running down the length of the ship. 

"Doesn't seem like it," Vel replied. "But that won't last long."

The ship's thrusters were pushing two-g's, doubling her body weight as she stood on the ladder, but her armor was more than capable of handling the added sense of mass—especially since she was climbing in the opposite direction of the thrust, what felt like down the ship toward the engines. 

After a few rungs she put her hands and feet on the outside of the ladder and let the metal slip up between her fingers, stopping only to clip over between sections. 

In a matter of moments, she had made it to the hardpoint holding the grav lance. She'd gone unnoticed so far, but as soon as Vel started hacking the emergency ejection sequence, the Begemot would know something was up. They'd send drones first, with troopers close behind. 

The plan was to inject Vel into the lance's control panel, have her initiate an emergency jettison, then use the maneuvering thrusters to steer through the exit gate. But with the thrust pushing parallel to the ship's length, the control panel was on what felt like the underside of the module, too far away from the ladder to reach. She'd have to climb out to it.

She started off sideways, finding handholds on the scaffold and using her magboots and thrusters, clipping herself in where she could. She tried to keep herself from looking "down" until the control panel was directly above her head.

With one hand wedged into a crease in the paneling, and both her boots awkwardly magged to the hull, she fished a driver out of a pouch on her suit's leg, hooked the strap to the clip on her wrist, then used it to remove the panel over the data port. 

After the last screw came loose, she stowed the driver, moved herself out of the way, and pulled the panel free. It swung down, dangling by its catch straps. 

She pulled a cable from her arm and plugged in. A few seconds later, Vel had copied itself over.

"Won't be long," Vel said, but Cass wasn't waiting around. She'd already clambered back to the ladder and was hauling herself up alongside the lance's white base. She climbed back up to the top of the module and stepped out onto it, readying herself for the welcome party she knew would be coming.

On cue, a repair drone crawled out of a nearby access hatch and spider-walked down the hull, moving its multi-segmented body on a dozen legs, always keeping three points of contact with the ship. She shot it before it had a chance to get close. That'd be her one freebie. 

The mission timer on her visor had switched to a countdown to the launch window. They needed to have the lance detached and burning away from the Begemot in the next four minutes or she’d be in trouble. 

Cass was already a criminal, exiled from the Collective for her betrayal on Perseverance. If they caught her, they'd execute her. No questions asked.

She’d already decided if it came to that, she’d do the job for them. 

Taste space one last time. 

"How’s it looking in there?" Cass asked, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.

"This dang thing," Vel answered, with the same steady cheer as always. "The docking module's supposed to use standard military encryption, but it's not cracking like it should. Gimme just another sec."

Sometimes Cass envied Vel's unflappable calm. No matter what was happening, its Old Earth twang always came out the same. Unbothered and in control. Most of the time she forgot it was the only way Vel could respond. It hadn't been burdened with the neural pathways for anxiety. Worry wasn't part of its programming. 

Which sometimes sounded like a gift. A life free from nagging doubt and insecurity? Maybe if Cass was like Abel and could edit out the parts of her brain she didn't want, she'd cut it out entirely. 

Her reflexive, anti-eko instincts shuddered at the thought of it. She'd come a long way since leaving Perseverance, but not that far. 

Translating Abel’s mind to digital had been one thing, a matter of life and death. She couldn't understand anyone willingly abandoning their body, no matter what they might gain.  

Mercifully, two more drones emerged from the ship's hull, pulling her away from her thoughts. She took them out with quick shots, but further up the ship an airlock light began blinking. Troopers would be coming next. 

And unlike the drones, they'd be shooting back.

The airlock doors slid open, and three troopers dropped out, free-falling towards her, suit thrusters puffing to slow their descents. Except they weren't the junior Duty soldiers in basic white like she'd been expecting. These were Swords, experienced troopers protected by deep-blue armor nearly as good as hers. 

That pesky anxiety tightened her throat. This could be a problem.

She fired two shots, forcing them to scatter, but they didn't shoot back. Probably reluctant to risk damaging the grav lance she was standing on. 

With a swift, practiced motion, Cass hooked her tether to a ring on the lance's upper shelf and jumped off, rappelling down the sloped base towards the blade, firing one-handed. She wasn't trying to hit the soldiers—though she wasn't trying not to. She just wanted to keep them at a distance. 

Luckily, the ship's captain had only sent three. There was no way she could have held off the whole security compliment—she hadn't packed near enough ammo. She just needed them to stay back until Vel finished triggering the emergency jettison.

Cass made it back down to the open control panel, reattached her boots to the deck, grabbed a handhold with one glove, and triggered the autolock on her tether. The hook detached from above and reeled down the length of the base and into her harness.

The timer on her visor ticked past twenty-five seconds to zero.

"Vel...?"

"Thirty-seconds."

Her heart skipped, and for the first time in years she felt the sour cloud of fear wash over her.

"We don't have thirty-seconds," she said, trying to hide her agitation, but Vel would have already seen it in her vitals.

"Just gimme two shakes," Vel replied. "I'm so close."

Cass poked her head above the base of the lance and focused two rounds into the soldier dropping towards her. They both caught him square in the chest and the slugs exploded in blue flashes. He grabbed out against the side of the smooth white base and was forced to scramble on a single working thruster back into cover.

She’d disabled one, but the other two were flanking down the sides. Cass shuffled across the handholds to the right, clipped-in just before the module's corner, switched her weapon to rounds, and fired her thrusters, flinging herself out from cover to catch the approaching Sword unaware. The soldier had clipped-in to the side of the lance and was dropping down to ambush her.

He hadn't expected her aggression.

Cass shot him twice in the visor, shattering it, then fired three times at his tether while he was disoriented. Her last shot severed the cable, and he tumbled past her before he could engage his thrusters to stop himself. 

She kept her thrusters firing and maintained her momentum to swing up the other side of the lance and found a handhold. She unlocked her hook, reeled it in, then reattached to the lance.

Far below, the trooper had regained control and caught the scaffolding, but he'd have to climb back up to get her. They'd be long gone before that. 

And if they weren’t, it wouldn't matter anyway.

She kept watch under her, but it remained clear. The other two were probably below her now, maybe trying to reverse Vel's intrusion into their systems. 

The clock on her visor hit zero and began counting up. A pit opened in her stomach. Maybe trying to steal from the Collective hadn't been such a great idea after all.

"I don't plan on letting the Collective broadcast my execution, so let me know when I should drop and let the engine wash take me instead, will you?" Cass said.

"We're not there yet," Vel replied. "Hold on!"

She locked her boots onto the lance and wrapped the fingers of one hand around a railing. The module shuddered under her as the docking clamps detached. "Down" suddenly swung ninety degrees and yanked, trying to pull her off the lance as the ejection thrusters went full-burn, accelerating at five-g away from the Begemot. 

Vel had finally convinced the gravity lance the transport was in danger of explosive failure and triggered the failsafe. Twelve seconds too late, but they were away.

Even in her armor, it was hard to move against the thrust. She fought hand over hand and pulled herself up and over what had been the side, and was now the top, of the lance. But when she got there, she saw she wasn't alone. One of the other soldiers had held on and was struggling to pull himself up over the edge too. 

With the acceleration pushing up on her at fifty meters per second, getting to her feet was a challenge, but it was just as hard for the soldier. Vel had given Cass a warning to hold on. The trooper was lucky he hadn't slipped off and been cooked by the ejection thrusters. 

Still, she couldn't have a stowaway. The soldier had managed to get his arms and chest over the side but couldn't let go to level his arm cannon at Cass. She had him cold in her sights. Even fighting against the thrust, at this distance, she couldn’t miss. 

For a moment it looked as though he’d try to fight, but immediately reconsidered and let go, pushing off the lance and falling away. He had his suit thrusters, so odds were he'd make it back to the Begemot. Or someone would send a shuttle. 

Either way, he'd survive. 

Probably.

Not that she was so confident in her own survival.

She stowed her weapon. "How bad is it, exactly?"

Vel had already charted the course toward their planned exit coordinates, and they were coming up short. The gate out hadn't opened yet, and wouldn't for a few more seconds, but even accounting for the uncertainty as to exactly where it might emerge, their current trajectory had them well outside the probable target zone.

"I'll admit the situation is not ideal," Vel answered.

"Lay it out for me."

"Well, in the wins column, we successfully intercepted the Begemot and liberated the gravity lance."

"Yes, we did. Anything else in that column?"

"You're not dead."

"Not yet" Cass amended. "And in the losses?"

"That list is a fair sight longer." 

Long enough Vel didn't bother to run though the items they both knew were on it.

"You can't squeeze any more out of the thrusters?"

"They're red lining already. Any more and we risk losing one. Or blowing ourselves up."

"Blyat," Cass swore.

"You said it. And we won't know how far off target we are until the gate opens."

The mission timer showed only a few seconds until that happened, so at least they wouldn't have to wait long to see how screwed they were. 

"Anything else?"

"Well, the Begemot has just launched a shuttle at us."

"We can handle that."

"Sure. But you know what comes after."

Cass knew exactly what came after. Fearing the loss of the grav lance and not wanting anyone else to have it, the frigates escorting the Begemot would try to destroy it. On its basic maneuvering sled, the lance couldn't outrun torpedoes. The only question was whether to choose to be on-board when they arrived. 

A bright flash threw everything into a moment of high-contrast shadow, and then a thin glowing halo appeared above them. A tiny, fragile thing that seemed impossibly far away.

"Holy heck!" Vel yelped.

Cass' cheeks tingled with terrible anticipation. "That bad, huh?'

"The gate opened way outside the target zone." 

Cass swallowed the burst of panic that threatened to erupt from her stomach. She began into deciding between her armor's self-destruct or asphyxiation, but there was something in Vel's tone that made her pause. 

"How far outside?" she asked.

"So far, but golly if it didn't work out in our favor. We're only forty meters off course. Too bad they didn't do a worse job. As of now, best I can do gets us just close enough to crash into the gate."

Opening a hole from one point in space to another was never a precise thing, and it was normal for targets to be off by even tens of thousands of klicks. Somehow, this error had been exactly in their favor. But still, as tiny as forty meters was in comparison to the wide expanse of the universe, it wasn't enough.

The lumbering dread in Cass's gut sparked into determination. They were so close. They couldn't give up now. "How maneuverable are we?"

"We have 'thrusters on' and 'thrusters off.'"

Not so helpful. “No orientation jets?"

"I've only cracked the emergency ejection system. The sled's on-board navigation is behind another layer of security. It'll take days to get past that, if at all. The firewalls are far more secure than we were expecting. This is the best I can do."

"There has to be something."

"Not unless you can find us another maneuvering thruster."

A thought hit her. "How much thrust do we need?"

"Not a lot, honestly," Vel said. “A tinge.”

The Velocity Junkie reappeared on Cass' comms. The ship was hundreds of billions of klicks away, but near enough to talk to through that hole in space.

"You there?" Abel's voice said. "We're on track to catch you."

"More or less," Cass replied, "but we've got an issue."

"No," Abel's voice dropped. "Why are there always issues?" 

"We're not going to make the window."

"What can we do?" Amari asked, already jumping into action.

Cass hesitated, watching the Begemot's shuttle approaching. It'd be rocking a full complement of troopers. More than enough to retake the lance after she missed the gate. 

They still had a shot, but she needed to move. "Just be ready to close that gate the second we're through."

Cass reached around and pulled the canister off her back. It was about the size of an air bottle with a jury-rigged mini thruster on one side and emblazoned with black warning decals along the length. It had once been the payload of a counter-electronics torpedo she'd bought from a passing trader who had stopped with the Lotus flotilla. She and Amari had converted it into a targetable, high-yield, EMP grenade. Perfect for disabling small spacecraft at short range. 

She glanced at the approaching shuttle, locked targeting through her visor, then tossed the canister overboard. It tumbled for a moment then straightened with bursts from its orientation jets, kicked on its primary thruster, and shot away, immediately disappearing among the other points of light in space.

The shuttle was only a few hundred klicks away, and the cylinder reached it in seconds. As much as she wanted to, Cass didn't stop to watch it explode and fry the shuttle's electronic systems. She was already running across the top of the lance, burning her suit's batteries fighting the acceleration pressing up under her. 

They needed another thruster, and she was wearing one. Hopefully it'd be enough to rotate the lance without crashing into the gate and killing them all. 

The result was always the same: a massive gravitational rupture, a sinewave of angry spacetime that tore apart anything within a few hundred thousand kilometers on both sides of the gate. The Velocity Junkie would be obliterated, and she'd be compressed to paste inside her armor. 

"Are you really doing what I think you're doing?" Vel asked.

"You have a better idea?" Cass replied as she sprinted off the base and onto the scaffolding protecting the translucent blade. It was much narrower, but still wide enough to run on. 

"Is the shuttle down?" Cass asked.

"And out," Vel replied. 

"How long for the torpedoes?"

"Knowing the Collective, not long."

The frigates weren't that far away. If they fired now and the torpedoes burned at a standard twenty-g’s, they'd arrive in about one hundred seconds. Maybe less. The lance wouldn't reach the gate for ninety. 

They were cutting it close. 

Still, that was something to worry about when they weren't in danger of crashing into the skip-gate and killing everyone she loved. 

Cass grabbed her tether as she approached the tip of the blade. Then, without stopping, she bent, hooked it into the last rung on the scaffolding, took three final steps, and jumped off, triggering the thrusters on her suit at the same time. 

She let the cable spool out behind her until it was taut. Her thrusters weren't powerful. No way could she tow the massive lance any real distance. She couldn't even keep up with the sled. 

But maybe she could angle it. Just enough. 

"At this rate you'll need to pull for twenty hours to drag us far enough," Vel said, always the voice of reason.

Cass didn't answer. She knew her suit didn't have enough power. Or anything close to that much time.

She spun to face opposite the direction of thrust, and pitched down, her tether still tugging on the tip of the blade. At first it felt like nothing was happening, but then the lance began to tilt, its back end rotating up toward the gate as she pulled, arcing their trajectory closer to the opening.

"Holy heck, it's working!" Vel said, its voice still a cheery calm. "But your suit's getting awful hot."

Her thrusters were red lining, eating through fuel, but she didn't dare slow down. 

That's when she saw the torpedoes. Dots of purple fire steadily growing below them. Couldn't be anything but.

“You weren’t going to tell me?” Cass asked.

“Didn’t want to worry you.”

"How long?" Cass asked.

"Twenty-eight seconds," Vel said. "Give or take." 

"And until we reach the gate?"

"Twenty-five," Vel replied. Then added, "Give or take."

Cass blew out a long breath. The gate grew closer, only moments away, but the trajectory on her visor was still showing yellow. They might crash and they might not. The coin was still flipping.

She overrode the safeties on her suit and ate through her remaining fuel as fast as the thrusters would burn it. She hung there, feeling like she wasn't moving at all, but the yellow trajectory path slipped to green. Relief blossomed in her chest. 

"You did it," Vel congratulated her. "We're clear. Four meters to spare."

Then, her old hook, clipped to the scaffolding, snapped. 

It must have been brittle, weakened after years of exposure to cosmic rays and the wild temperature swings of space, and had given out under the strain. She jerked and spun as the broken metal hook came flying past her, dragging the tether with it.

Her breath caught. She was drifting, nearly out of fuel, the sled burning away. 

Vel must have seen her heart rate leap. "What's happened?"

"My tether snapped," Cass said. "I'm not with the lance."

"That's not ideal."

"Not entirely," Cass deadpanned. "I'm open to ideas." 

Cass didn't wait for Vel. She was already planning next steps, working on a solution before the despair could sink in.

The sled's thrusters cut. The gate was just ahead of them, escape only meters away. Even without the acceleration they'd still make the window, and Cass was no longer falling behind. The Velocity Junkie was on a rendezvous course with the lance. If they made it through in one piece, Vel could pilot the ship back to collect her before it picked up the sled. The maneuvering would take some time, but her suit would keep her alive long enough.

Then she saw it. The closest torpedo was gaining faster than it should have been, risking a blown drive to catch its target. Vel's quick math showed the torpedo reaching them the second before the lance cleared the gate. 

Three seconds before Cass.

She waited until her spin pointed her in the torpedo's direction, then ejected her suit's heatsink. It shot out of her back, jolting her forward, radiating a dull glow as it tumbled away. She pulled her weapon, held her breath until she'd rotated for a clear shot, and fired. 

The heatsink was small and moving fast. She missed with her first two rounds, and had to reset after each, but she exhaled, took another breath, aimed carefully, and hit it with the third. The brittle heatsink shattered and expanded into a sphere of hot carbon shards. Right in the torpedo's path.

The torpedo registered the cloud of shrapnel a millisecond too late. It angled thrust but couldn't avoid the shards of hot metal. The torpedo exploded in a purple ball of plasma as the drive containment ruptured, blazing her retinas despite her blackout visor and closed eyelids. Warnings rang as her armor absorbed a sharp wave of radiation, then it was over. 

A moment later the sled cleared the gate, then Cassandra sailed through, trailing behind the cannon's long slender blade, the second torpedo still closing.

"Cut the gate!" she yelled, and for a moment she imagined they'd be too slow, and the torpedo would slip through and kill them all, but the white ring shut down, and the bridge collapsed. With the torpedo still on the other side.

She blew out a long breath. That had been close. 

But it was done. They'd claimed their prize. In the end, the plan had worked.

Now came the hard part.