Chapter 9 Zara #2
"Everything's tight." She grins, and for the first time I see the version of Voss that chose this life, the woman who looked at a universe full of corporate control and decided to fly through the cracks. "I like tight. Tight means you're doing something interesting."
We wait for the patrol sweep to clear. Fen runs a final diagnostic on the engines and reports everything at optimal. Kael dims his markings to nothing, a precaution in case any visual sensors are active in the shadow. Voss takes the controls.
"Segment one," she says. "Window opens in... ninety seconds."
The Rust Bucket enters the gravity shadow of the Thessan binary system.
The effect is immediate and physical. The gravitational forces pull at the ship from multiple angles, the two suns competing for dominance, their fields intersecting and interfering.
The ship groans. The structural supports flex.
My stomach drops and keeps dropping because the inertial dampeners can't fully compensate for the complex gravitational gradient.
"Window one. Mark." Voss pushes the throttle forward and the ship slides through the first segment, threading the gap between tidal peaks. It's like driving through a valley between two waves, smooth floor, walls of force on either side.
"Segment one clear. Segment two, thirty seconds."
I'm counting. Every segment, every window, every second of margin. My datapad shows the route in real time, our position a blinking dot crawling through the labyrinth I designed.
"Segment two. Mark."
We fly. Segment by segment, window by window, deeper into the gravity shadow.
The EM interference turns our sensors to static.
We're blind except for Voss's star charts and my calculations.
The ship shakes, steadies, shakes again.
Fen, on the intercom, reports structural stress levels with the calm precision of someone who has been in worse situations, which, given her seventy-one days in a Helix cell, is probably true.
Segment eight. The halfway point. A tidal peak catches us on the edge of a window and the ship lurches hard to starboard. Something in the cargo bay crashes. Kael's voice on the intercom: "I am undamaged. A crate was not."
"Copy that," Voss says, correcting course. "Twelve seconds to segment nine."
I watch my calculations prove themselves.
Each window opens exactly when my models predicted.
Each tidal peak crests exactly where my data said it would.
The binary system is massive, ancient, indifferent to our passage, but its rhythm is knowable.
Predictable. And I know it because I spent four hours reading every dataset ever published on this system and building a model that translates astrophysics into a shipping schedule.
Segment seventeen. The last one. The longest window, ninety-two seconds, as the tidal forces briefly neutralize at a resonance point between the two stars.
"Window open," I say. "Ninety-two seconds."
Voss pushes the throttle to maximum. The Rust Bucket surges through the final segment and out of the gravity shadow into open space. The EM interference drops. The sensors come back online.
The Haven gate is fifty thousand kilometers ahead. The Helix checkpoint is between us and it.
"Sprint time," Voss says, and pushes the engines to full burn.
The ship screams. Full power on a KR-7 is not elegant. It's brute force, the engines converting fuel to acceleration with no consideration for comfort or subtlety. I'm pressed into the copilot seat. The g-forces build.
On the scanner, I see the checkpoint respond. Ships moving. Intercept vectors calculating. They've seen us.
"Fourteen minutes to the gate," I say. "They need eighteen to intercept."
"Then we're fine."
"They're launching fighters."
"Fighters are faster," Voss admits. "But they have to get to intercept range first. If our math is right..."
"The math is right."
The gate grows in the viewport. Huge, ancient, the ring of charged alloy that folds space. It's already active, cycling for a scheduled transit, which is perfect because it means we don't have to wait for activation.
"Fighters at one hundred thousand klicks," I report. "Closing."
"Gate at thirty thousand. Twelve minutes."
"Fighters at eighty thousand. They're accelerating."
"Gate at twenty thousand. Ten minutes."
The numbers race each other. The fighters closing from behind, the gate approaching from ahead. I watch the math converge and calculate the intersection point and it's close, it's so close, the margins measured in seconds.
"Gate at ten thousand. Six minutes."
"Fighters at forty thousand. Decelerating. They're..." I check the data. "They're pulling back."
"What?"
"They're breaking off pursuit. All three fighters decelerating and returning to the checkpoint."
Voss frowns. "That doesn't make sense. They had an intercept window."
"They did. They chose not to use it."
"Why?"
I don't know. But the fighters peel away and the gate looms enormous in the viewport and we transit through with a compression-release that rattles every bolt on the ship, and then we're through, and the Thessan system is behind us.
The Haven sector.
We made it.
"They let us through," Voss says quietly. "That's not Helix protocol. They don't let people through."
"Maybe they decided we weren't worth the fighters."
"Helix always thinks people are worth the fighters." She shakes her head. "Something else is going on. I don't know what."
I don't either. But we're through. The Haven sector stretches ahead of us, the final leg, and somewhere in this stretch of space is a station where people like us go to be safe.
I lean back in the copilot seat and let the adrenaline ebb. My hands are shaking. I fold them in my lap so no one sees.
We made it through the gravity shadow. My logistics held. My math was right.
For now, that's enough.