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The process took eleven hours. Long enough for the crew to sleep—at least as well as they could—and to plan their escape from the system. There was no finesse in it, no clever ruse. Without the ability to safely enter the Cascade and considering the danger of the local defenses when Slip drives were used, they really had only one option: conventional drives. All three ships moved directly away from the planetoid as its hacked gravitational systems reconfigured and locked onto the rogue planet in the distance.
While everyone else manned their stations and watched for any sign of pursuit or the slightest change in sensor readouts that might indicate an attack, Fen sat alone in the mess hall. The vid screen taking up most of one wall was set to feed false-color sensor data showing the space between the planetoid and the world she’d come to think of as Vault. Right now the view was the slowly shrinking surface of the planetoid as they moved away from it. The countdown ticking away on the bottom right corner assured her that would change in ten. Nine. Eight...
When the makeshift Slip drive went active, there were signs. The vast gravitational field emitted by the thing as it held the thin gas of the nebula in place flipped off, sending a slight shimmer through the mix of hydrogen and oxygen, helium and nitrogen. It looked as if a stone were thrown into a pond in three dimensions, ripples in the surface resonating outward before attenuation robbed them of their energy.
The planetoid itself didn’t lurch into motion. Instead it slowly inched out of its relative stop and began to roll down the invisible gravitational channel dented into the fabric of space by Blue’s quick and dirty alterations to the machinery embedded within its crust.
That tipping point was slow by design, an acceleration meant to create the tiniest amount of inertia to keep the second phase from tearing the entire thing to shreds. The system wasn’t meant for this. The titanic amount of energy required to shift so much mass could easily burn its circuits out with the slightest error. Or maybe not even an error. After all, who knew how long the thing had been out here working. Anything could be wrong with it. One imperfect relay, a single worn-out power conduit...
Thirty seconds after the initial push, phase two kicked in. Fen knew as much physics, engineering, and materials science as any ground pounder with her training needed to—which amounted to a fair bit more than people expected. You couldn’t blow up an enemy installation without understanding its basic structure and composition as well as how your weapons would affect them.
She knew the incredible precision needed for the sudden jump in speed to come off without a hitch, and she recognized at once that Blue had pulled it off beautifully. There wasn’t enough energy available in the system to get the planetoid anywhere close to the speed of light, but that didn’t matter. The impact velocity, according to Blue, would be something around twenty percent.
All told, it took less than twenty seconds from the start of phase two until impact.
The ship recorded the event, but Fen was fairly sure she wouldn’t be going back to look at it. Her view was of a dwindling body receding to a vague dot, and then a white light that threw the filters to maximum instantly. The mass sensors being ported over from Blue’s stolen ship rendered the explosion in text; the planet was now a finely distributed cloud of hot particles rapidly spreading across local space. There was little doubt in her mind the strangers had seen the attack coming and raised their shield. Fen was equally certain that Blue was correct in that it could only absorb so much abuse.
She was a soldier, and long experience had drilled into her the necessity of ending enemy lives. The act itself never sat perfectly well with her, and Fen considered that an asset. There was something deeply wrong with any person who could take a life without so much as pondering the act afterward. She took some comfort that any living thing on the surface or below it would have ceased existing instantly, the kinetic strike releasing heat and radiation in a wave that would vaporize everything in its path before nerve impulses had the time to travel to the brain. Painless and quick.
Hard to ask for more than that.
––––––––
She remained mostly separate from the crew as the hours traveling out of the system and into open space stretched on. Her own people were tasked with assisting Batta and Dex with maintenance and the busy work that came with any ship. She was in theory supposed to be keeping ready for any potential ship-to-ship operations, though it seemed deeply unlikely anyone would try to board them so far from anything.
The good news was that Blue had finely tuned all of the gate pylons to be able to access the Cascade using the very limited gravity of a small body. That sweet spot where space was just barely curved was usually found at the outer edges of solar systems. With his help, the Alliance Navy had been tuned to be able to jump using the gravity well of very large asteroids. Apparently he had been holding quite a lot back—they were tracking toward a planetesimal floating just outside the effective range of those interspacial mines, or so everyone hoped. The act of opening a gate so close to the source of gravity would probably destroy the icy rock itself, but if it got them all out, so be it.
Instead of finding something to do, Fen retreated to her quarters on what had been the deck reserved for ground troops and flipped on the heat lamps. Her people were reptilian but warm-blooded, yet their planet of origin was warm and sunny. She stripped off the jacket of her combat uniform and rested on the webbing of her favorite sling chair.
She couldn’t have slept if she tried, but Fen closed her eyes anyway. Today more than most, she felt a stranger in a strange land. Doubly so for considering herself in terms originated by human beings. It didn’t matter that she had grown up around them, learned their language alongside her own, eaten their food and played their games. It didn’t matter that she had been raised in their culture in her little Gitk enclave on the massive multispecies station. At her core, she was as alien to them as they were to her. Their instincts, written and hardcoded at a genetic level on different worlds over the course of millions of years, drove them to think differently from each other.
Most days she reveled in those differences. Fen took an odd sort of pride in seeing how far humanity had come. They were conquerors back when their home world was the only one they’d been to. Spreading to the stars had tempered them, forced the species to reach a new level. For the most part, they cooperated instead of subjugating.
And yet...
The concept itself clashed with her on an almost molecular level. Her people were omnivores; they were not averse to killing in and of itself. But the Gitk evolved without the sort of internal violence that humanity had. They were not pacifists, precisely, but closer to reactives. The concept of harming another of her kind for personal gain rubbed her brain the wrong way. It was simply against her nature. Only when exposed to the wider universe did her people begin to grasp the concept, but it never stopped rankling.
She saw the nature of the defenses here. She understood the ethos behind the design. The strangers were also people forged in a way that inclined them toward defense rather than offense.
When Grant finally found a moment to check in on her as he did every member of the crew after a trying mission, he announced himself with his distinctive knock. Quiet enough that she could ignore it and pretend sleep, but loud enough to make sure she heard it if she wanted to talk.
“Come in,” she said lazily, not getting up from the sling chair.
He entered without the usual human reaction to the sudden wash of heat. “Hey. Didn’t see you out and about. You okay?” He waved a hand at nothing in particular, as if to indicate pretty much the whole of everything. It gave her a wide array of options if she wanted to talk.
“I’m fine,” she said. It was mostly true.
He looked mildly disbelieving. “Glad to hear it, because I’m not. That wasn’t an easy thing we just did. It’ll have consequences.”
Fen had known the man for a good while now, and she understood how deeply he’d changed to focus on the larger picture than the morality of killing a planet however sparsely populated it might be. He still cared, of course. It was just that hard experience forced him to see things from a wider perspective.
“We’ll deal with the brass when we have to,” Fen said, waving away the concern with a clawed hand. “As for the rest...well, it was necessary.”
His eyebrows rose. “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
She smiled. He’d hired her without knowing Fen was Gitk. During a night of bored drinking just before they’d been abducted to train for this mission, Crash mentioned how the good captain had studied up on Gitk culture and history. He thought he understood how she was feeling right now, at least in general terms.
“No, I really am fine,” Fen insisted. “They’re a bit like my people. They design for defense and response rather than aggression. But I’m remembering everything we saw on that shithole down there. All the weapons of war sitting there waiting to be filled with bodies. I don’t know what hit them, but it’s pretty clear that no matter where the attack came from that initially scared them off, it probably prevented an invasion. Just like we did.”
Grant frowned. “Didn’t expect to hear that from you, of all people.”
Fen shrugged. “Maybe because you haven’t considered how far people like that need to be pushed before invasion seems like the only logical possibility. I keep asking myself what it would take to drive my own people to do something like that, and the answers are all very, very bad for us. For all of us.”
Because every one of them implied dire circumstances. The sort that wouldn’t allow the strangers to stop trying to come here.