3
“Gods, Cole, I wanted you to buy us some time, not instigate them.”
“It was the first thing I thought of,” Cole said. “I figured the grain of truth would help. Can’t they see we’re running with a limp?” He keyed the radio again. “KPR76, Parsona here. We’re having thruster problems, I repeat, we are having thruster problems. Cease fire. Over.”
Molly watched the SADAR to see if another missile would punctuate Cole’s lie. This was the first time she’d seen his charms fail so spectacularly; she’d always thought it’d be an enjoyable experience if it ever happened—but she was wrong. Without doing the math, she could see the missile would reach them well before they got a boost from the star’s gravity.
“Less comms, more chaff,” she said.
Cole keyed up their new chaff modules. “You want me to release early so we have time to arm the second pod?”
Good question, Molly thought. If they waited too long, they were giving themselves only one chance to fool the missile. On the other hand, if they showed their cards too soon, the Navy would see they were dealing with an armed vessel and ramp up the attack.
As a team, Molly and Cole had hundreds of hours in Navy simulators together, facing these exact tactical quandaries. They always tried to pretend the situations were actually occurring—to truly feel the specter of death hovering over them, pressuring them to make mistakes. It was the only proper way to train their minds as well as their reflexes.
Now they were in actual danger. A blinking red light crept across the SADAR screen, making its way to the center of the concentric range circles like a bullet homing in on a bull’s-eye. Only, this time, it wasn’t for keeping score; they wouldn’t get yelled at if they made the wrong decision. That red dot was not part of a game or training exercise—it represented their deaths.
Molly considered all this in a flash and marveled at how calm she felt. Her brain seemed clearer than it had ever been in the simulator. Despite the reversal of roles—her piloting from the left while Cole asked her advice—she felt like this was what they’d trained for. And it was more than just the thousands of hours in the simulator. In many ways, the fear of dying could not match the anxiety of humiliation. Not for her, at least. She considered the approaching missile and the timing on the chaff pods, performing some quick and dirty math.
“Wait for it,” she told Cole. She keyed the shortwave radio and tried a bit of old-fashioned honesty.
“This is KML32 Parsona, Captain Molly Fyde speaking. I’m a former Naval cadet. There are children onboard this ship, I repeat, there’s a crew of five youth aboard this ship. Cease firing. Over.”
A second missile spat out of a neighboring Firehawk.
Cole fired a curse at his SADAR screen. Molly started to protest, but the radio chimed in before she could. “Parsona, Naval Task Force Delta. If you cease thruster burn, we will de-arm both missiles prior to impact. This is your final warning. Cease thruster burn and prepare to be boarded. The missiles will be de-armed. Over.”
Molly pulled her hand away from the mic and rested it on the accelerator controls, contemplating pulling back. “What are our chances here?” she asked.
Cole surveyed the situation on SADAR, watching the second missile speed after its companion. “If both chaff work, we could stop these two and probably get to your slingshot gambit in time. But only if they don’t fire any more in the next few minutes.” He looked over at Molly and raised his visor; she could see the worry on his face, clear as carboglass. “I don’t think it’ll go well for you and me if they pick us up, but we gotta consider the rest of the crew.”
“Trust me, I am thinking about them. They’re the reason I haven’t pulled back on the throttle yet.”
“I don’t follow. And we have about two minutes before we need to decide.”
“You think they’re gonna to be harsh on you and me for Lucin’s death? And Palan? Think about Walter being sent back to his uncle after breaking us out and stealing Parsona from them. Think about what they’ll do to Anlyn, Cole. Or how kindly the Navy will take to Edison after they were run out of the Glemot system. I would poll them if we had the time, but I have a feeling they’d rather take their chances with the missiles.”
“We need to decide,” Cole said.
Molly tried. If it were just her and Cole, she probably would never have run in the first place. She would’ve taken their chances in a Navy courtroom, explaining the sequence of events that had led them to their current predicament, trusting their status as minors, anything to guarantee Cole would live another day. But they all were running from something, her crew especially. Each of the crewmembers had taken a massive risk to get away, placing his or her trust in them. They had to do anything they could to escape.
The radio crackled: “Parsona, Naval Task Force Delta. Advise, you have one minute before impact. Cease thruster burn immediately. Over.”
Molly turned to look at Cole. They were pushing over sixteen Gs, and she could really feel it through her flightsuit and in her neck. Cole’s visor remained up, those hazel eyes of his wide with trust, awaiting an answer.
“Release chaff pod number one,” she commanded.
????
Cole thumbed the defense controls. The new and untested chaff module in the rear of their ship popped open and ejected the decoy. It showed up on SADAR as a second ship with the same signature and mass as Parsona. Molly altered course slightly to see if the missile would follow.
It stayed on its original vector, homing in on the chaff pod.
“How long before the second impact?” Molly asked.
Cole was already working on it. “Under two minutes—damn! Contact. Three more missiles incoming.”
Molly saw them on her SADAR screen. Things were getting ugly.
“They’re gonna reach us after we slingshot,” Cole said, confirmed what her mental calculations already suggested. “If they vector around the star after us, they’re gonna get the same boost we will. They’ll track us down before we get to clear space for a jump.”
Molly looked up from the nav screen and had to lower her visor. Her new course had them heading right for the star. The automatic filters in the carboglass handled most of the direct light and all the harmful radiation; the visor in her helmet took care of the rest, allowing her to gaze upon its surface. For a brief moment, she became lost in the sight of the fiery orb, transfixed by the hundreds of black spots on its surface, the “cooler” areas where magnetic disturbances prevented the plasma from mixing properly.
She followed the wide trail of fire that streamed out from the star to the black hole. They were approaching from above, but getting so close that the overall shape and beauty of the spiral had become lost.
Now it was just the massive, deadly, intoxicating details.
“Release chaff pod number two,” she said.
Cole thumbed the controls while she altered course, heading toward one edge of the star. The missile behind them jogged slightly, following Parsona rather than the pod.
“We’ve got a problem,” Cole said.
“I see it.” That was their last chaff pod, and the missile wasn’t fooled. Molly started composing their surrender in her head, losing herself in the beauty of the star and the long, curving river of plasma coursing off the surface. A solar flare had erupted recently, its smaller stream of hot matter jetting out tens of thousands of kilometers, curving close to their current heading.
Very close to their current heading.
Cole’s gift had become a threat, but Molly saw that it could also be their savior.
“Hold on,” she said, altering course slightly toward the thick column of plasma that made up the solar flare. Even the gradual change in direction could be felt at their high rate of acceleration. Molly glanced at the three crew members strapped in on the cargo cam. They were awfully still; she hoped that meant they were doing okay.
After a moment, Cole seemed to get the plan. “How close are you going to try and get to that mess?”
“Not too close. Shouldn’t have to. The heat radiating out from the plasma will detonate the warhead from a distance. Those things can’t carry the shielding we do and still be that fast.”
Cole worked some numbers through the nav computer, his glove fixed to the panel by his side. Molly watched the results crawl across her own screen.
“I hope you’re right,” he said, “because that missile is gonna get to us before we get to that flare.”
She glanced at his calculations and started to agree. His results had them a thousand kilometers short of the solar flare when the missile struck, further away than she had hoped. Then she saw he hadn’t factored in the difference in mass between Parsona and the missile. They were going to get more suction from the combined gravity of the star and the black hole than their little friend was.
“It’s going to be close,” she admitted.
“We’ve still got three more missiles behind this guy, and the fleet is closing in pretty fast. What happened to surrendering?”
It was a lot to think about at once. Even if the plume of plasma set off the first missile, they were going too fast to come to a complete stop and let the heat take out the other three. Besides, any decrease in speed would just bring them in range of the fleet’s lasers. Molly felt completely cornered, as powerless as the coil of fire being sucked off of the star’s surface, rolling across space into the black hole.
The black hole.
“The what?” Cole asked.
Molly must’ve said it out loud.
“Do I get two vetoes per day? ’Cause I’m against hiding in the black hole as well.”
She didn’t have time to explain herself. The missile was half a minute from impact, and the wide column of fire streaking off the star and joining the spiraling river was close enough to see its features. Smaller arcs of plasma leapt up and crashed back into the main body like fiery fish breaking the surface of a lava lake and diving back in.
Cole updated the situation: “Fifteen seconds to impact.”
Molly couldn’t just hold her breath and see if the gambit with the missile would work; she needed to calculate her next dumb idea. She keyed the ridiculously large numbers into the nav calculator with one hand while she gradually altered course with the flight controls. The key was to keep assuming everything would work, like during the Tchung simulation when she’d moved from one audacious move to the next. Only this time, with very real consequences.
She moved Parsona gradually closer to a new heading, using a rough guess while the nav computer struggled with an enormous Lagrange calculation. She wondered if Cole could feel the slight change in their heading and the forces acting on their bodies.
He counted down the second missile’s impact over their private channel:
“Six . . . ”
Molly concentrated on the nav computer, waiting on it to spit out an answer.
“Five . . . ”
She remembered, all of a sudden, that her mother was in there somewhere.
“Four . . . ”
Hopefully the grueling load on the CPU eased her boredom, slowing down her sense of time—
“Three . . . ”
Molly shook the thought out of her head, amazed her brain would even go there right then.
“Two . . . ”
The calculation finally popped up. Molly was impressed to see how close the answer was to her rough estimate.
“Detonation!”
????
The missile behind them expanded into a miniature version of the nearby star. Cole felt a change in his flightsuit as the explosion slewed the back of the ship slightly. He tried to pump his fist in celebration, but they were moving at a blistering pace. The suit could keep his flesh from being crushed—and the gravity panels in the dash could make it easier for his hands to work the controls—but nothing could help him wave his limbs in jubilation.
Then he realized there wasn’t anything to celebrate. Molly had altered their heading, giving up on the slingshot maneuver. Even if the other three missiles exploded from the heat, the fleet was going to catch up to them, engaging them while they were trapped in this crazy system. A red warning indicator flashed on the SADAR screen. It finally struck Cole that Molly’s new vector had problems. Whatever celebratory mood he had felt quickly drained away.
“Why’re we heading toward the black hole, Molly?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“We aren’t. We’re heading for the L1 in this system.”
“This system doesn’t have an L1, it’s—” Cole realized he was wrong just as he voiced his complaint. It was easy to see the star orbiting the black hole as an anomaly, as if there was only one “body,” and the black hole was just an exotic companion. But they were both just points of gravity to the computer. Lots of gravity in the case of the black hole.
Between the two masses, there had to be a Lagrange point, an L1 where the force of gravity from both objects cancelled out. And Parsona should be close to the L1—it would be much nearer the less-massive star.
Cole looked at his nav screen and saw Molly had already calculated the spot. When had she done that?
“Uh . . . we might be going too fast for a safe jump to hyperspace. We aren’t gonna to be in the L1 for a full second at this speed.”
“I know. So you’d better time it just right.”
“Me?”
Cole looked over the numbers, trying to remember the recommended limitations for their hyperdrive. It wasn’t a question of whether they were exceeding them—he just couldn’t tell if they were tripling or quadrupling the max speed on the warranty card.
“Yeah, you, navigator. And try to anticipate the flinch that’ll probably come just as you thumb the drive.”
Cold checked the hyperdrive. It was still spooled up from his last shift. A glance at the three missiles on SADAR told him they’d be a non-issue—the jump would come before the explosion. Still, the warheads trailing behind were like snarling dogs chasing him toward a high fence, helping to steel his resolve.
Most likely, they wouldn’t come into play at all. Because he was probably going to get them all killed first.
????
Molly smiled to herself, resigned. Just as with the last missile gambit, the die had already been cast. Now she could enjoy the wait while Fate read the pips.
The radio hissed to life, interference from the solar flares garbling the transmission and drowning out every other word in a chorus of pops and hisses. It sounded like the Navy was warning them of the impending danger.
Someone in the command ship must’ve plotted their new course and realized what they were up to. Probably someone right out of the Academy, Molly thought. Someone whose creativity hadn’t been beaten out of them. She pictured a young navigator, maybe someone a class or two ahead of her, possibly even someone who’d picked on her. She could imagine him going to the fleet commander with a sense of excitement, his voice trembling as he explained her wild plan.
The radio crackled loudly, ending the garbled warning message.
“So says the a*sholes trying to blow us up,” Cole remarked.
His voice, and the laughter that followed, sounded good in Molly’s helmet. She checked her nav screen and made sure they were on a perfect line for the L1. It was a shame she had to approach it from this direction—skimming past the star and heading straight for the black hole. It made their window narrower than if they’d come in perpendicular to the system.
She imagined it as a runway in space, stretched out in a wide plane of safe jump points between the star and the singularity of the black hole. Anywhere along that plane, the gravities pretty much cancelled out. But, the way they were moving, that plane was more like a sheet of tissue they would tear right through, rather than a long safe zone they could run down for a length of time. It meant their jump needed to occur the exact moment they bisected it.
They had another problem. A big one, even if it was created by something very small. The actual black hole was probably no larger than a fist, but its effects, its incredible density, spread out before them like a mitt poised to catch a hurtling ball.
“Cole, if that hyperdrive doesn’t fire,” Molly took a deep breath, her chest heavy as the grav suit could no longer remove all the force of acceleration, “I can’t clear the event horizon.”
She could see the invisible border clearly. It formed the edge of a black circle ringed with a halo of light. No stars could be seen through the circle, and any photons that fell in that disc were consumed completely. However, a lot of the stars on the other side could be seen along the rim. Their light bent around the black hole, coming to Molly’s eyes from the edge of the event horizon.
If the hyperdrive didn’t fire, Parsona would be another dollop of mass added to the crushing center. The Gs required to pull up wouldn’t matter; they’d already be in the object’s massive grip.
“I already thought about that,” Cole said, a tenor of calm resignation leaking through the physical strain in his voice.
The radio hissed again. Molly snapped it off with the switch in her glove. She sank back in her chair, allowing the Gs the flightsuit couldn’t handle wash over her. It felt comforting, like a heavy blanket on a crisp night. She’d done all she could, and now it was up to Cole; the next minute could be spent just admiring the rare sight in front of her, the black emptiness that could crush entire worlds.
Beside her, a river of orange and white plasma flowed in a column, arcs of flame licking out as the torrent fell parallel to them, toward the dark beast ahead.
She took it all in as if the sight would be her last. The void ahead loomed larger and larger, a blackness so rich there needed to be another name for it. A new color. A primary color. It was the shade of absence. A nothingness so real, it had an edge.
Molly imagined them falling into a pit in space—a gaping well with no bottom. Then, the bubble of black seemed to expand rapidly, like the ground rush she’d felt the first time she’d trained with a parachute. There’d been a moment when it seemed as if she’d waited too late to pull the ripcord—that the plummet would be to her death.
Just like that first fall toward Earth, the visual spectacle overwhelmed her other senses, the sight of approaching doom drowning out all else.
She didn’t even hear Cole cursing into his mic, yelling with fear as he jammed the hyperdrive switch.