The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  But Kyle saw something that was significant to a cop.

  A blue stain, on the cockpit floor. On the glass. More on the control panel resting on the snow.

  “Who flies without passive grav-plating? Even in a tactical craft.” Prudence was shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Who has blue blood?” Kyle asked her, pointing to the stains.

  She stared down at the little patches of color, silenced.

  Jorgun had been thinking his own thoughts. Now he leaned over both of them, reached deep into the cockpit, grabbed part of the floor, and pushed.

  It spun, floating freely, a wheel within a wheel. An outer track remained stable, and in the contrast, the pattern leaped out at them.

  Eight resting places. Eight kickplates. Eight legs.

  Kyle glared at the big man, his suspicion flaring out of control. How could simpleness have seen what they had missed?

  Prudence explained, her eyes sparking with secondhand pride. “That’s what he does, Commander. He sees patterns. That’s why he’s on my crew. He can plot a multihop course more efficiently than a computer. They used to call it idiot savant. He’s not stupid. He’s just wired different than the rest of us.”

  “Like you told me, Pru, we all have our own special talents.” Jorgun smiled.

  “Tell me what you see, Jor.”

  Kyle could tell from her voice that she already knew the answer. But she was letting him go as far as he could. Pushing him gently.

  “Eight.” Jorgun announced, but then fell silent. That was all it meant to him, but Prudence nodded in agreement.

  “Eight places to put your feet. Whoever flew this ship had eight feet. The absence of passive grav-plating tells us they don’t suffer from inertial sickness. And that they’re strong—that fusion nozzle must be capable of at least two or three G acceleration. They could stand up through that acceleration, spinning around, looking for visual contact—that’s why there’s so much glass. Which tells us they have impossibly good eyesight, too.”

  “Who has eight feet?” Jorgun asked, confused.

  “Nobody we know,” she said.

  “Fleet needs to see this.” Kyle found himself hoping that authority would know what to do about it.

  “The okimune needs to see this.” Prudence used the old word for the collective human realm, the sum total of civilization, wherever and whatever it might be. A normal person would have said “the world,” meaning his own planet; a sophisticated person would have said “Altair,” the biggest society around. But Prudence thought in wider terms. Like an outsider.

  For the first time in his life, Kyle felt provincial, a country rube fresh off the farm. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, but the novelty of it was astounding.

  “Fleet first,” he said. “We can’t just put this on the evening news. Can you imagine the panic?”

  “Maybe people should be panicking.”

  He stared at her. “How would that help?”

  She waved her hand, in no particular direction, indicating the ruined world around them. “How did this help?”

  “Running scared won’t make it better. You know that.” Was this their plan? To plunge every world within a hundred hops into mindless terror? Oppression always followed fear, like rain after the lightning. He’d studied enough history to know that.

  “We don’t know that, Commander. We have no idea what we are up against. This wreck could be the blow that frightened them off, made them retreat in such a rush they only stopped to grab the pilot. Or it could be such an inconsequential prick that they haven’t even noticed it’s missing yet. Maybe running scared is the only thing anybody can do. Maybe Altair is already dead.”

  “What about Jelly?” Jorgun’s face was creased with worry and concern. The death of civilizations meant nothing to him, only the death of individuals. Kyle was struck by the difference. There were no individuals for him to mourn. Only the ideal of community, not the fact of it.

  “I’m sorry, Jor. We haven’t found her yet. I don’t think we will.” She broke the news to him while he had this shiny new toy to distract him, like a mother to a child.

  The giant puzzled over her words, his lower lip trembling, but he did not cry. Like a boy trying to be a man. Kyle started to reach out to comfort him. Like a father, he stopped.

  Let the boy show his strength. Let him grow into it.

  “Did they take her?” Jorgun asked. “Did they take Jelly?”

  But this child would never grow any taller.

  “No, Jorgun.” Kyle used his most reassuring voice. “They didn’t take her. They didn’t take anyone.” There had been no reports of sightings from any of the refugees. The attackers had been as insubstantial as ghosts. Bombs from the sky, but no follow-up; destruction, but no looting.

  It was inhuman. But that was the point.

  “I’m fucking freezing up here.” Melvin, complaining again over the radio. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”

  “Can you fit this in the cargo bay?” It was the first thing Kyle could think of.

  Prudence stared at him. “How? We don’t have any loaders here. Are you going to fly it in? And then fix my ship when it decides to melt down or self-destruct?”

  “If it blows up in the ship, wouldn’t that be bad?” Jorgun didn’t get sarcasm.

  “We can’t leave it here. If this beacon turns off, how the hell can we find it again?” Kyle waved his hands at the blizzard. It was getting worse. In a few hours the alien ship would be buried under clean white snow. The evidence would be lost. A cop’s worst nightmare.

  “That’s not my problem.” Prudence cradled the rifle, like its weight was unfamiliar in her hands. “If your Fleet can’t find one dead fighter craft on a planet’s surface, what good will they be against a host of live ones?”

  That wasn’t the point. He was sure Fleet had the ability to find this ship again, if they really wanted to. It might take days or weeks, but they could just scan the entire continent with short radar.

  The point was that he didn’t know if he could convince them to try. What if they didn’t take him seriously? What if they brushed him off as delusional? A snow-vision by an exhausted cop, a flighty girl, and a simpleton.

  “Screw Fleet. What if those aliens come back and find us?” And a paranoid stoner. Even filtered through the helmet speakers, Melvin’s whine was annoying.

  Kyle would be laughed out of the prosecutor’s office if this was all he could offer in a criminal trial. Altair Fleet would need half as much reason to ignore a League officer.

  While he was trying to think of another plan, he saw her move. Subtly, out of the corner of his eye, the casual swing of her hand. But she was dropping something in her pocket, not the other way around. She was taking, not leaving.

  He let it slide. Better not to confront her now, in the snow, with her men and so many guns. Better not to let her know he knew at all.

  “Then what do you suggest?” he said, giving her the chance to advance whatever plot she and her unknown bosses were trying so hard to make happen.

  “That arctic research station has a transmitter. If we give them a ride out, maybe they’ll let you have it. And we can drop it off here on our way.”

  “What if the beacon fails in the next five minutes?”

  “We can have the autopilot backtrack by dead reckoning. For a short trip, it should get us close enough.”

  She’d prepared for everything. Shown him just enough, channeled his every step. He could wreck her plans, search her pockets and seize whatever she’d had to steal to make this whole scheme fly.

  But she probably had a plan for that eventuality, too, and it might require his being dead. Better to play along for now.

  Like he always did.

  “Okay, Captain. We’ll do it your way.”

  FIVE

  Records

  He was so passive it was scary. At every turn he let her suggest the solution, and went along with it. How could anybody have predicted her actions so well?
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  It was almost like he wasn’t following a master plan, but just winging it.

  Watching him with Jorgun, she wanted to believe that. His gentleness was born out of respect, not pity. She could not reconcile his behavior with the armband he wore and its rhetoric of perfection. Kyle Daspar was a cargo bay of contradictions, and it bothered her.

  But she didn’t dare stir the pot. These people played for keeps, and they already had their claws into her ship. She had to keep her head down, play stupid, and hope they forgot about her.

  What she had done out there, at the wreck, had been foolish. He might have seen. But she couldn’t walk away from the most fantastic artifact in human history empty-handed, not when she expected bureaucratic security clearances to bury it more effectively than any mere blizzard could.

  One quick flip of her nanosharp blade, and a sliver of glass with a smudge of the strange blue blood was in her hand. They wouldn’t miss it. Nobody would put the shattered cockpit glass back together to find the missing puzzle piece. Even if they did, they would just assume it had been lost in the snow.

  Let them put on their stage show. She would play whatever part they wanted, and wait until they shooed her off for the main act. She had her own breadcrumb now. She could pick up the trail after they stopped watching her.

  Cycling through the air lock, she took off her helmet and breathed the warm, familiar air of her own ship.

  “How long before we’re airborne?” Kyle was in a hurry.

  She was, too. “Thirty seconds after the air lock door opens.” The sooner they got to the end of this charade, the sooner she could get him off her ship.

  And out of her life. She didn’t like his contradictions. She didn’t like the way part of her kept wanting to trust him, to turn to him for support. She didn’t like the way his unflappable confidence laid over constant tension, like a tiger perpetually ready to pounce even while it purred. She didn’t like the way it made her feel.

  Not because it made her nervous. But because it made her lonely.

  Unzipping the suit, she encountered a problem. How to empty the suit pocket without his noticing? And she couldn’t leave it here—he could come back and search the suit locker while she was on the bridge.

  The instant she paused, he turned away. Like he was giving her privacy to undress. It was silly. It was just a space suit, and in any case, spacers hardly expected privacy even for showers. Ships were just too small for such formalities.

  It was silly, but it was also touching. Again it sparked uncomfortable feelings. She wasn’t used to being treated like a woman. She was used to being treated like a captain.

  It was easy to pocket the sliver of glass while his back was turned. So easy she almost felt guilty.

  “Liftoff in thirty. Be ready,” she snapped at her crew. Running down the passageway, retreating to her citadel of power, where she could mask her feelings in the necessity of command. Where she could be in control again.

  “Melvin, get a reading on that arctic station.” Barking over the intercom while she powered up the gravitics. The ship felt heavy under her fingers, the weight of snow tangible.

  “It’s not working. Fuck, something’s wrong. Somebody sabotaged the radar!” Melvin slipped back into panic. Maybe he’d never left.

  “Calm down, Melvin. It’s probably just ice clogging the detector vanes. We’ll go orbital and let it cook off.” The boiling point of water in a vacuum was zero. Latent heat from the vanes would melt the ice, and space would do the rest. They could go straight up without losing their position, and then come back down to find the arctic station. A few minutes above the atmosphere and the Ulysses would shake off the touch of the planet.

  But space had its own touch. As soon as they were clear of the sheltering blanket of air, the comm beeped insistently.

  “Ulysses, confirm. This is the Phoenix, hailing the vessel Ulysses.”

  The Phoenix didn’t have to identify itself. The comm station did that, signaling in large red letters that it was an Altair Fleet cruiser.

  “Fleet’s finally here,” Prudence muttered, and put her hand on the comm switch.

  “Wait.” Kyle’s voice leapt across the bridge to stop her.

  Turning in her chair to face him, she waited.

  “Don’t tell them about seeing the alien ship.”

  What kind of game was this? Why show her the evidence, and then tell her to keep quiet? Surely her role in their plot was to validate the alien attack. She would play the straight man, the hardened spacer veteran on the evening news talking with wide-eyed excitement about the aliens. An independent witness, interested only in the truth. A seed of rumor, spreading fear and panic.

  And now Kyle warned her to silence?

  “They’ll interrogate you. This whole thing’s a cluster fuck, Prudence. There’s dead people everywhere, and an impossible alien warship. Nobody knows what to do. So they’ll do everything. They’ll impound your ship, strip search it for clues, and lock your crew in a holding cell for a month. I don’t think you want that.”

  It wasn’t about what she wanted. It was about what she feared. Jorgun would be putty in their hands, manipulated to whatever ends they needed, broken and discarded when they were done. And none of her crew were citizens of Altair. Fleet wouldn’t be particularly concerned about their legal rights.

  If they started asking questions about the Ulysses, what would she tell them? That a dying old man had given a young girl a starship, charmed by nothing more than the romance of her quest to seek out her mother’s world?

  She had survived this long by going unnoticed. She was certain her future depended on it. But why would Kyle know that? Why would he care?

  “Let me get this straight. You want me to lie to Altair Fleet?”

  “Not lie, exactly. Just don’t tell them everything. There’s nothing in it for you, Prudence. Direct them to the signal. Let them find it themselves.”

  She stared at him. He was as close to unnerved as she could imagine him being.

  Flicking on the comm, she answered Fleet’s call. “This is the Ulysses, responding to the Phoenix. How can we help you?”

  There was a pause, as if that simple response had confused them.

  A different voice on the speaker. More nasal, and laden with the expectation of obedience. “You can start by explaining what’s going on down there.” Not a spacer’s voice. Apparently, commandeering ships was in season.

  Prudence flicked a glance at Kyle and was startled to see his anger. He obviously recognized that voice, and he didn’t like it.

  “There’s been some kind of attack, Phoenix. A week ago. We’ve been in-system for about thirty-six hours, and running relief operations for most of that. Any assistance you can render would be greatly appreciated.” She shouldn’t have said that, shouldn’t have baited the unknown authority on the other end of the line with her dry sarcasm. But the look on Kyle’s face paid for it. He almost smiled.

  Subconsciously, she’d known he would. That’s why she’d done it. In the sixteen hours they had spent together, he had been scrupulous about not flirting with her. She’d never been around a man, single, married, or homosexual, that hadn’t risked at least one bantering comment for her approval. And now she was performing for his.

  Deeply annoyed at herself, she returned to business.

  “You didn’t get a message from the Launceston?” But of course not. The timing was wrong. They would have passed in node-space, silenced by the inflexible laws of relativity.

  The voice changed direction, avoiding the question. “Ulysses, put your captain on the line.”

  Prudence had dealt with this a thousand times, but it never got any easier.

  “This is Captain Prudence Falling, owner and operator of the Ulysses.” Straining to keep the annoyance out of her voice, all she achieved was to drive the irony deeper.

  But the voice didn’t care. It was immune to subtleties. “Captain, we are on an important diplomatic mission to Bierze, and we can
’t be diverted. Give us some GPS coordinates to rendezvous and we’ll transfer our medical supplies and staff.”

  She answered without thinking. “Phoenix, this planet is in shambles. There’s nothing left standing but hungry, scared people. Whatever stuffed-suit meeting you’re rushing to can wait.”

  Too tired. Making mistakes, losing control of her feelings. Kyle was part of the problem. She wanted to hate him as much as she hated his armband, but he wouldn’t let her.

  Now he stepped up to save her. The voice had just begun squawking, working itself up to a fine outrage, when he walked over to her console and put his finger on the transmit button.

  “This is Police Lieutenant Kyle Daspar, command leader of the League. I have the honor of addressing District Leader Rassinger, do I not?”

  Miraculous silence from the comm. Then curiosity, although it tried to hide under polished indifference. “Daspar? How are—what are you doing out here?”

  “We’re not on a secure line, Leader, so with your permission I’ll spare you the details. I came out here on some League business, but that’s obviously been superseded by what’s happened.”

  Prudence blinked her eyes, jolted by yet another facet of the enigmatic Kyle Daspar. She would never have imagined such diplomacy from that jutting jaw. She could not reconcile those proud eyes with this bureaucratic subservience.

  “What are you doing right now, Command Leader? What is your current status?”

  “I’ve commandeered the Ulysses, and we are on a polar flight to rescue some research station personnel. However, there is a matter that I feel might exceed my competence, and I would appreciate your advice, Leader.”

  Prudence stared at him. He looked like he meant it. The act was perfect, his sincerity unquestionable. If she had not seen him at the alien wreck—if she had not seen his confusion, anger, and gentleness—she would have been convinced.

  But she had. And now she could not guess what this role-playing was costing him. How could his spirit survive, buried under that? Under the weight of the League.