She wasn’t all the way wrong, either. A cargo ship that didn’t move cargo wasn’t much of anything.
“Fuck,” he said to nothing in particular and everything in general. He opened a channel to the pilot’s station two decks below. “Annamarie? You there?”
“Am,” his pilot said.
“Give us a quarter g toward the gate, yeah? We’re going to have to do this, clearance or no clearance.”
“Understood. On it,” she said, and dropped the connection. A few seconds later, the thrust correction warning went on. If no one answered him, he’d have to decide whether to put on a braking burn or pass through the gate without clearance, knowing that there was an armada of independent freighters out there making the same calculations as him.
But what the hell, really. Life was risk.
“She’s getting pretty close,” Jim said. “We’re sure about this?”
“We can keep ahead of her,” Alex said from the comms and the deck above. “She knows it. If she gets too close, we’ll speed up, then she’d have to speed up. Or we’ll decide to make a break for it, and she’ll know how close we’re willing to let her get. Right now, she’s willing to dump reaction mass and I’m not. If that changes, it’ll change.”
“You sound very philosophical about it.”
He could hear the smile in Alex’s voice. “I’ve always admired this part. Don’t much care for the killing each other at the end, but there’s a poetry to this part of the conversation. And there are some decisions we’re going to need to make.”
Jim turned his head. Naomi was already looking at him. Teresa and Amos were on the comms from the machine shop.
“Nuriel system is only a ten-degree deflection from our present course,” Naomi said. “We wouldn’t need a braking burn. It has some underground resources.”
“But Tanaka would know we didn’t need a braking burn,” Alex said. “We could pop through the ring space from one end to the other in a few minutes if I get the angle right, but it’ll be like drawing an arrow to where we went. Going in slower means we have a wider range of systems that we might have headed into.”
The ship hummed and rang, the resonances of the drive playing their long, familiar music. On his screen, the Laconian destroyer ticked forward, closing the distance between them. The intercept would still come well after they’d passed through the ring gate and out through some other one. The panic clearing its throat in the back of Jim’s head wasn’t based in anything but itself.
“We also don’t want to go through so fast we dutchman ourselves,” he said, more thinking aloud than to tell the others something they hadn’t already thought. “And there might be other Laconian ships in the slow zone. We can’t be sure there aren’t.”
“I don’t know how to control for that,” Naomi said. “But we can aim for the systems where there are likely to be fewer eyes on us. It’s the best we can manage.”
There were so many risks. If Laconia had a spotter ship in place, they’d be found. If the enemy was watching from the sun-ward side of whatever gate they passed through, the way the Derecho had in Freehold, they’d be caught. If Tanaka, breathing down their necks, had some trick he hadn’t thought of, they’d be caught. If they made the transit too fast or with too many other ships, they’d be dead. If they stayed too long in the slow zone and the things inside the gate boiled out from beyond the ring space again, they’d be dead. And if it all worked out . . . then what? Dead or captured were the failure states. He wasn’t sure what success looked like.
The next step, maybe. It didn’t matter if he knew how it all ended, as long as he always knew what was next. You can drive a thousand klicks if you’ve got one good headlight. Mother Elise used to say that when he was a kid. He hadn’t thought of her in a long time. Having her voice come to him so clearly right now felt like an omen, but he didn’t know what of.
“Cap?” Amos said.
“Yeah?”
“We need to go see the doc.”
He was quiet for a second. “Adro system?”
“The only ships there will be Laconian,” Naomi said.
Teresa answered. “But they’ll all answer to Dr. Okoye. And there’s nothing else there. Colonel Tanaka won’t expect it.”
“We did just gas up,” Alex said. “If we’re going someplace for a long, quiet float, this is the time for it.”