The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  She needn’t have worried. Mauree’s instincts were sound. “I don’t think the energy coming out of Kassa is conducive to my program of gentle development,” he agreed. “It’s exactly the kind of negative tech I’m trying to rise above.”

  Prudence remembered the image of the alien warship in the snow. Negative tech, indeed.

  TEN

  Crumbs

  He was Robert Anton Wilson for less than an hour. Most of that was in a cab.

  Going to the spaceport was a risk, but it was the only place in the city that rented rooms without asking for ID. People in spaceports didn’t necessarily have Altair-recognized identification.

  The cabbie didn’t ask. The scanner at the spaceport gate was automatic, recording his name but not checking the picture on the card against the man carrying it. The hotel clerk was bored and didn’t care.

  Kyle spent less than thirty seconds in the room. He ruffled the bedsheets, programmed the computer to hold all calls, and flushed the toilet. Then he left, checking that the door was locked behind him.

  Spaceports were interesting places. Kyle had only been to a few, and none of them compared with Altair’s. Soaring glass and concrete towers, gently lit in pastel colors, pronounced Altair’s wealth and sophistication, but that wasn’t what made it impressive. The way you could tell that Altair was an important planet was that its spaceport was always busy. Even in the middle of the night.

  Ships came out of the nodes at all hours, and their occupants could be at any point in their daily schedule. Thus, you could buy breakfast, dinner, or a night of heavy drinking at any time of day in the spaceport. Often in the same establishment. The handful of people in the city who worked unusual schedules, like ambulance drivers and such, tended to come to the spaceport to socialize. As did hip young people, quirky retirees, and pretty much everyone who didn’t fit seamlessly into Altair’s social net.

  Including, of course, those up to no good.

  That was the thing about being an undercover cop. You learned how people got along, undercover. Under the radar, off the grid, behind the shed door, or whatever metaphor you wanted to use. And it wasn’t as simple as snitching somebody’s ID card. It took planning, money, or sheer desperation. Fortunately, he had all of those covered.

  Five minutes of walking brought him to an automated storage locker. This was the most dangerous moment of his journey. The storage locker itself was harmless. It didn’t even ask for ID, just a password. It didn’t check what you stored, as long as it fit into a single cubic meter. And you could pay for the space as much as ten years in advance, using anonymous credit sticks issued by any of a dozen planetary banks.

  This made it the ideal place to store illegal things, like drugs, weapons, or even inconvenient bodies. Kyle had busted plenty of thugs doing exactly that, as had almost every detective on the force. If there were any cops actively staking out the spaceport, they’d be here. The danger was that one of them might personally recognize Kyle.

  The place was also under automatic surveillance, but that wasn’t important, either to Kyle or the hoodlums. People’s ability to outwit cameras was an evolved response, always one step ahead of automation and authority. Kyle didn’t even try. He didn’t care about leaving a record. It would be days before anybody checked the files, and by then it wouldn’t matter.

  He called up his cube and waited patiently for it to be delivered. This was the kind of job that automation was good for. Everything was in its place, nothing changed, so there were no judgment calls. A task like driving a ground car was an insurmountable nightmare, from a robot’s point of view. Anything could happen. Kids and dogs in the road; ice, gravel, or glass; mechanical failures of the vehicle; or just lousy weather. But the storage system was sealed. Nobody could get in or out, so nothing unexpected could ever be in the way.

  Come to think of it, it sounded a lot like how the League thought the rest of the city should be.

  His cube contained a briefcase. The briefcase contained a change of clothes, a handful of credit sticks, a very expensive fake ID, and a gun.

  The gun bothered him. It was unregistered, completely illegal, and he’d stolen it from a crime scene. The League had asked him to, of course. Some low-level blackmailer had gotten popped on a contraband charge. The League had made sure he was on the first team of detectives into the guy’s apartment, so he could remove the weapon before it was entered into evidence.

  He had almost blown his cover then. No amount of investigation could justify destroying evidence related to any kind of crime that involved a gun. Even as he stood at the door, waiting for the building super to unlock it, he had considered doing the opposite—making sure the gun was found and not lost by some other League stooge on the team.

  But inside it had become obvious the contraband was a plant. Kyle figured the gun had to be a plant, too. They were just testing him again.

  So he kept his mouth shut. The unlucky blackmailer plea-bargained a deal, sparing Kyle the need to perjure himself in a trial. Kyle rationalized his participation in the frame-up. The amount of time the guy got for the contraband was a lot less than he would have gotten for blackmailing. The government didn’t have a strong moral stance against people poisoning themselves. But blackmail, that was different. That tended to piss important people off.

  Now he tucked the gun inside his jacket. A nasty little thing, made off-world. His service pistol could fire a variety of ammunition, including stunners and narcos. A thousand-volt discharge or a quick-acting drug could solve a lot of problems, usually without killing people. But this gun only fired one kind of round. Shredders. Horrible little projectiles that came apart when they hit something soft. They turned people into hamburger.

  Walking back to the hotel district, he checked in to the one across the street. An equally bored clerk gave him a room that overlooked his last room. If a security team swooped down on Robert Anton Wilson, Kyle Daspar wanted to know.

  Having set his snare, he settled down to wait again. This was where he would be smarter than the fugitives he routinely caught. He had the patience of a stone.

  Sitting in his room, he thought about loneliness. He had been insulated from the feeling. Staying in the same apartment, seeing the same faces at work, he had not noticed. There was a vase in his living room, a present from a woman he had dated a few times. It was a nice vase, although it didn’t really go with the rest of the room, and he never put anything in it. The vase was three years old.

  No one had moved it, replaced it, or even commented on it. For years he had buried himself in his work, both his day job and his secret job. Wary of every person he met, assuming any woman who showed interest in him was a League spy, treating every man as either a League stooge or a League victim, he had ceased to be human. He wasn’t much better than the robot at the automated storage locker. Everything was in its place, nothing changed, and no one could get inside.

  He woke up with a start. It was midmorning.

  If a security team had come looking for Wilson, they must have been remarkably discreet. Flashing lights and door-breakers should have woken him up. So either the doctor was on the level and really covering for him, or the League had sent an assassin to silence him on the sly. In that case, the assassin would still be out there, waiting for him.

  The ghost of the possibility that they might have sent Prudence made his heart thud. Her perfect cover act hinted at hidden skills. She would be incalculably more dangerous than a common thug.

  His mission was bigger than arresting assassins. He checked out and left the building by a back entrance, avoiding visual contact with the other hotel.

  The first thing he had to do was find out if the League was against him, or if it was just Rassinger’s faction. Paradoxically, the best place to get accurate information about the League was his network of anti-League agents. People in the League were either too stupid or too fearful to do any fact-checking.

  He tossed the gun in a trash can before queuing up at the spacepor
t exit. There was no way he could sneak it past the sensors. It had served its purpose, bought him a night of security. Now the tool had become a liability, and he discarded it without sentiment.

  It was a hideous tool, anyway.

  Choosing a credit stick from a different off-world bank than the one he had paid for the room with, he rented a ground car. Too far away from the spaceport, he might draw attention using non-Altair credits. He didn’t have a whole lot of those in the anonymous variety.

  As prime minister, Dejae had introduced a government plan to reimburse people for stolen credit sticks. Of course, this meant they would have to register their sticks first, thus allowing the government to track every purchase, exchange, and transaction.

  Civil libertarians howled and authoritarians cheered, as they always did, every time this subject came up throughout history and the okimune. And, as always, the issue was decided by the same factor: human laziness. Registering every single transaction was a pain in the ass. Anonymous sticks owed their birth to the lawyers, but they owed their continued existence to the fact that they were just easier to use. There were always some floating around, and there always would be.

  As a young cop, Kyle had sided with the government in trying to outlaw anonymous sticks. As a League opponent, he had trembled in fear of the power such a move would give them. As a fugitive, he was immensely grateful the efforts had failed. The innate sloth that allowed the League to advance was, in this case, its most effective resistance.

  A man not on the run for his life might have reflected on the irony. Kyle filed the thought away for another day, when hopefully he would be such a man.

  Standing around outside the skyscraper, he waited for lunchtime. It wasn’t really a skyscraper. It was anchored to the ground. The original Altair charter, in a fit of nostalgic superstition, had forbidden the use of grav-plating in constructing residences. The rule had stuck, and Altair society had spread out over the ground instead of clumping up in the sky. The biosphere of the planet consisted of thoroughly harmless moss and algae that produced a pleasantly breathable atmosphere. There was nowhere you couldn’t build a house, if you wanted to.

  But people like living in groups, so towns and cities formed naturally. You could still go out to the marshes and build yourself a cabin on a plain of flat rock covered in dull green moss, next to a silent sea with nothing but dull green algae in it, but who would want to do that? Kyle had adapted to a life of isolation, but not so much that he found such a prospect palatable.

  Kyle preferred the orderly arrangement of civilization. Even while he was plotting to prevent the too orderly arrangement of civilization. Moderation was the key. That’s why he was wearing a fake beard, absurdly hip clothes from three years ago, and waiting on a fellow plotter.

  Ricarada Baston. Slim, dapper, officious-looking. Probably drank fruity drinks when he went out to the bars, which would be only on holidays. His clothes weren’t hip, but they weren’t out of date, either. He strode purposefully across the plaza, carrying on a one-sided conversation over a headset.

  Kyle tailed him to a nearby fish-and-chips shop. The cheapest of the cheap; vat-grown meat and vegetable material deep-fried in synthetic oil. Rica made plenty of money as a government prosecutor. He could eat lunch anywhere, even at those fancy restaurants that grew actual fish in tanks and real plants in hydroponic chambers. Kyle had never figured out if Rica ate junk food because he was cheap, making a political statement about solidarity with the poor, or merely oblivious to the difference.

  Getting in line behind him, Kyle ordered the wasabi tuna. He didn’t know what a tuna was supposed to be, but it was bland enough to make the burning spice tolerable. Right now he needed something to make him feel concrete sensations, something to anchor his emotions in this new reality.

  “Is the fettuccini good?” he asked Rica, a random stranger striking up a meaningless conversation. Except that fettuccini wasn’t on the menu.

  “Not here,” Rica replied, and moved on, ignoring him.

  Kyle sat by himself in the corner, where he could watch every entrance. Rica only finished half his meal, then abruptly walked out.

  The anti-League conspiracy didn’t have a lot of protocols. Kyle wasn’t sure what the signal meant, but the tuna was bad enough that he didn’t care. They hadn’t changed the frying oil in days. Resisting the urge to write somebody a health-code ticket, he tossed the food into the garbage and left.

  Rica was waiting for him outside, at a bus stop. Kyle sat down next to him on the bench. The noise of the street would make long-range eavesdropping difficult, assuming anybody was watching. Rica must assume no one was, or he wouldn’t dare to be here.

  “Somebody set my bed on fire,” Kyle said. He leaned forward and rested his head in his hands, looking down at the clean, white concrete.

  Rica was having a subdued conversation on his headset. “Did they make you?” He said it so naturally it took Kyle a minute to realize Rica was talking to him.

  “I don’t think so.” If they had suspected him, they wouldn’t have sent him out to Kassa in the first place. “I think somebody upstairs just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about whether I live or die.”

  “Why do housecleaning, unless you’re expecting company?” Rica was being really cryptic with his codes, and Kyle was annoyed by it. He was still tired. Not just from having his sleep disturbed last night, but from all of it. The trip home in close confines with Rassinger, the cloak-and-dagger games with Prudence, the whole disaster on Kassa. The last five years.

  Then it occurred to him that Rica’s obtuseness was a code in itself. The danger level must be high.

  “Yes,” Kyle said, “we’re expecting company. But not the in-laws.”

  “I don’t put a lot of stock in rumors.” Meaning that Rica must have already heard some.

  Kyle didn’t know how to communicate the full impact of his message in code, so he said it outright. “They’re not rumors. I saw.” A curious choice of pronouns. Why was he still trying to protect Prudence and her crew?

  Rica scanned the streets for a moment. A pointless gesture. If they were under surveillance, Rica wouldn’t be able to detect it. All he would accomplish by looking for watchers would be to alert them that he was about to say something important. You’d expect a prosecutor to know these things.

  “Tell me.”

  “I got to Kassa after it happened. But they left some nasty surprises for me. Then I found a real surprise. A ship, fighter-craft sized, lying in the snow. I don’t think I was supposed to find that. It’s not human, Rica.”

  Rica pursed his lips in disapproval. “Fleet headquarters is sealed up tight. No news in or out. Leaves are canceled. The prime minister will be making a speech tonight.”

  Kyle understood his disappointment. Everything was happening exactly as it should. Rica wasn’t the kind of man who appreciated it when his opponent made no mistakes.

  But they had made one. “They sent me there before, Rica. The League dispatched me to Kassa days before the attack happened. And then Rassinger showed up, right on schedule.” He and Prudence had orbited the planet many times, looking for radio signals from survivors. They hadn’t seen the distress beacon from the fighter ship until hours before Rassinger arrived. And it was a strong signal—the Phoenix had found it with no trouble.

  “Why send you at all?”

  It was a good question. The answer couldn’t be just to kill him. Patrol boats were not cheap.

  “They almost vaporized the rest of the Launceston along with me. Maybe they wanted to kill several birds with one stone?” Maybe Captain Stanton did more than just turn his nose up at League armbands. Maybe the man was part of the secret resistance. It was about the level of irony Kyle had come to expect.

  “We don’t have a mutual defense treaty with Kassa,” Rica pointed out. “Legally, we don’t have a casus belli. An attack on one of our vessels would give us justification.”

  That was insanity. “There are ten thousand corpses on
Kassa, killed by aliens. Did they really think they’d need a law to start a war?”

  Rica smiled, a sad little smile of disappointment. “Our friends often seem to underestimate emotional reactions. I used to think they were just arrogant.”

  In all this time, Kyle had never considered the possibility that the League was working for the aliens. It was simply too incredible.

  “I’ve met the prime minister, Rica. He’s a human being. He can’t be working for aliens. Nobody would sell out their own species.”

  “When did you meet him?” Rica was surprised, as he should be. Detectives didn’t usually keep company with prime ministers.

  “About five years ago, when he was just the mayor. Stopped him for a minor traffic violation. I didn’t ticket him, not even a warning. He told me to let it go, and I did. Shortly after that, my career took off.” And his life had gone into the toilet.

  Rica looked at him quizzically. “You let him go? But why?”

  Kyle felt his face flush. “Because I knew he would kill me if I didn’t. He had something to hide; something worth killing for. I’ve spent five years looking for it, investigating every crime committed on that day, from missing person reports to shoplifting charges.”

  “Exactly what day was that?” Rica asked, out of professional habit. Whenever a crime was brought up, the prosecutors asked the same questions: when was it, where were you, did anybody see you there?

  Usually, people could barely remember what they had for breakfast the previous day, but this date was stamped into Kyle’s memory, indelible as an acid burn.

  “The second of August, 785.”

  “Well, I can alibi the prime minister then.” They both smiled at the irony. “From two until four, he was giving a speech to the attorney’s office. I specifically remember making a notation in my daily journal: this is the end of my career advancement. I should have gone into private practice then, but I couldn’t bear to let the thugs win that easily.”