The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  “What?” The vision was clear in Kyle’s mind. Checking his watch just before he stepped out of the patrol car, so he’d know what time to put on the incident report. The data tablet had a clock on it, of course, but he’d learned his lesson by then. You don’t let a machine do your job.

  “I thought I could do more to protect civil liberties from the inside. So I stayed at my desk, even while—”

  Kyle interrupted him. “What time did you say the speech was?”

  “From two until four. With a social hour afterwards. Why, what time did you stop him?”

  The glowing green digits of his watch hovered before Kyle’s memory.

  “Three forty-eight. In the afternoon.”

  Frowning, Rica tapped at his comm unit and showed the results to Kyle. On the tiny display, there was his personal planner entry for that date: PM Speech, 2–4. Notes: WTE!!! end of cr advnce!

  “One of us must be mistaken.”

  Kyle had spent years investigating the events of that day, checking for crimes that could have been committed in the hours before he had stopped Dejae. He had assumed Dejae was running from somewhere he shouldn’t have been. It had never occurred to him to search for where Dejae was supposed to be.

  “I was in fear for my life, Rica. I remember what time it was.”

  “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, however improbable.” Rica grimaced. “There must be two Veram Dejaes. One was bad enough.”

  Kyle shook his head in dismay. “A twin brother? How much does anyone know about Dejae’s past?”

  “Not as much as we should.” Rica shrugged. “He only came on-planet ten years ago. He was wealthy then, and he got wealthier fast. That buys a lot of secrets.”

  “Why bother to hide something like that?” Since when was having a twin brother worthy of state secrecy?

  “A good question, Lieutenant. One of many I have never seen a satisfactory answer to. We’ve sent investigations to his previous planet of residence, Baharain, but they came back with nothing suspicious. Whether they were bought, fooled, or League agents from the beginning, I can’t say. It didn’t seem important. Altair politics are extremely public, with well-crafted checks and balances. One man can’t corrupt the system, not even the prime minister.”

  “Unless we let him,” Kyle said, thinking about how Captain Stanton had knuckled under to a piece of paper. Even Prudence had.

  “What could compel the people of Altair to turn their political security over to a man they hardly know, one that isn’t even a native? What kind of threat could make us give up our clumsy, slow, ineffective, but extremely democratic system?”

  It was Rica’s favorite kind of question—rhetorical. They both knew the answer.

  An alien invasion. The threat of annihilation at the hands—or legs, or claws, or whatever you called spider appendages—of inhuman monsters.

  “He’ll ask for emergency powers,” Rica said. “He’ll get them. Then he’ll simply never release them. As long as the threat of alien attack remains, we’ll go along with it, until we can’t remember how things used to be different.”

  Kyle had seen Kassa firsthand. If the choice was between that and Dejae’s absolute rule, even Kyle would choose Dejae.

  “The aliens are real,” he warned Rica. “They must be in some kind of collusion with the League, but they’re real. Kassa was bombed by lots of ships, too many to not be accounted for. Not even the League can be hiding a private fleet.”

  “Stipulated, Lieutenant. But now we know Veram Dejae is not real—or at least, not what he seems.” Rica reached into his pocket, pulled out several credit sticks, and dropped them into Kyle’s hand. “You need to go to Baharain and find out why there are two Veram Dejaes. That’s our only lead.”

  Rica didn’t know about the blue data pod. Kyle didn’t have it on him; he’d stashed the thing in case he got caught trying to connect with Rica. It was too late to bring it up now. But there was something he could ask about.

  “There’s a ship involved. The Ulysses, captained by a woman named Prudence Falling. I can’t tell if she’s an agent or a hapless civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Tapping at his comm unit again, Rica shook his head in warning. “Fleet records say she claims to be from a place called Strattenburg. That’s an impossible one hundred hops Out. A rather obvious fake identity. The League is getting sloppy.”

  Kyle nodded in agreement. It was the same conclusion he had reached. He understood he would never see her again, except to kill or be killed. Asking Rica about her had been a sentimental weakness, a childish hope that she might be what he wanted her to be. What she had been when her voice had come out of the vacuum of space and saved his life.

  On his side.

  “Not so sloppy they can’t kill you, Lieutenant. Be careful. But don’t contact me again. It’s too dangerous.”

  Nobody was ever really on your side. Life was something you went through on your own. Kyle walked away from the bus stop, alone, as always.

  ELEVEN

  Slivers

  Going back to Altair felt like a very bad idea. Prudence did it anyway.

  Garcia had filled the Ulysses with anise seeds. Zanzibar made fantastic spices but lousy packaging. The whole ship stunk of sickly-sweet licorice. Garcia had spent the entire four days in node-space trying to convince her to spread the rumor that Zanzibar had been bombed, and this would be the last shipment of anise Altair would ever get.

  She told him to spread it himself. But of course no one would believe Garcia. He couldn’t spread butter on toast without people checking their pockets to see if they had been robbed.

  There were hailed the instant they came out of the node. Normally it took a few minutes for the signal to travel out to the node from Altair. For the call to come so quickly, it had to be local. Somewhere out there in the dark hovered Fleet. Running silent, invisible to her sensors. Prudence muttered a futile prayer of commiseration for them. A terrible duty, sitting quietly in a ship full of anxious, edgy spacers, waiting for death to fall out of a hole and eat you. She wondered how much they had been told. Did spiders haunt their nightmares now?

  The Ulysses answered automatically, identifying itself, keeping a twitchy gunner from firing—this time. It was only a matter of probability before some comm glitch got an innocent ship vaporized.

  Her news was now two weeks old. Catching up on the political broadcasts, she was surprised at how calm things were. But independent verification still hadn’t come back. It would be another week before the first wave of free-traders from Altair could return, bringing with them pictures and eyewitnesses and casualty lists.

  Altair spaceport gave her an entry vector and a landing berth assignment without any trouble. She’d been half-expecting a seizure order. On a whim, she typed in a news-search for the dreaded Lieutenant Kyle Daspar. Was he enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame as a heroic rescuer?

  A single headline appeared.

  League Officer Assassinated by Terrorists.

  A picture of a smoking building. A vid interview with the ambulance tech, talking about how the body had been burned beyond recognition. An official statement from the League, lamenting the loss of a good man and darkly hinting that Something Must Be Done. She clicked off the monitor and looked away.

  She told herself the numbness she felt was because of the danger. The League had killed Kyle because of the alien ship. And that meant they would kill her, too, if they knew what she knew. How could she trust that he had not given her up before he died? Why wouldn’t he?

  She remembered his eyes, pleading with her to not reveal their secrets to the Phoenix.

  The alien threat was the least of her worries. There wouldn’t be any arrest warrants waiting for her when she landed. The League was playing for keeps. They would send an assassin to come at her in the middle of the night, with a needle that would make it look like natural causes. Or maybe they’d let her load a cargo and leave, with a bomb
planted in the shipment. A fiery bomb, like the one they had killed Kyle with.

  In her nightmares the fire always followed her, consuming guilty and innocent alike, burning in her footsteps as fast as she ran.

  A rational part of her mind tried to argue. One dead man out of thousands on Kassa, and you didn’t even like him. He was working for the enemy, anyway. One less League officer should be a cause for celebration.

  But she could not escape the recollection of his voice, demanding justice for the Kassans he had never met.

  “No. It’s not good enough,” he had said, and she had agreed with him.

  Whatever twisted rationalizations had kept him in the League had not destroyed him completely as a man. So the League had finished the job. She was not fooled by the babble about terrorists. The only resistance to the League she had ever seen on Altair was talk.

  Not that it mattered. If there was an anti-League, by the time it bombed its way to the top, it would be indistinguishable from the League. When the political process was carried out by daggers hidden under cloaks, it didn’t matter who won. The end was always the same.

  A crematorium for the Other. The enemies of the state. The losers. The nightmare returned, all the worse for being a waking memory.

  She concentrated on breathing. This was not Strattenburg. This planet was not choking in overpopulation. The only infection here was fascism, not eugenic madness. Power and empire were their goals, not a pogrom against those the State named undesirables. There was no reason to think otherwise.

  But as she watched the green planet sparkle below, she could not shake the specter of death.

  “Be careful.” She tried to warn her crew, but it was futile. Melvin was stoned into near-unconsciousness, Jorgun could not understand, and Garcia could not obey. He took risks automatically, like a fish breathes water. Her advice was wasted.

  And hypocritical, given her intentions. If the League was at the stage where they simply killed the people that threatened them, then visiting Rama Jandi would put both their lives in danger. She was going to do it, anyway.

  “Can I come with you?” Jorgun asked. All she had accomplished with her warnings was to scare him. Normally Altair was one of the few ports of call she could let him roam freely. In idle moments she had considered writing a spacer’s guide to planets, rating them according to how many hours you could let a simpleton walk around unescorted before he would stumble into trouble. Altair had been the top of her list. Kassa had been second only because a person could get lost in those ridiculous forests.

  Having that sense of safety taken away hurt physically, like a punch to the kidneys.

  “Sure,” she answered. The fear of entangling him deeper was overridden by the recognition that she would be more worried every second he was out of her sight.

  Walking out of the spaceport in broad daylight, in the middle of crowds, she nonetheless found herself instinctively hiding in his shadow. Circling around him, using him like a shield against the sniper she imagined on every rooftop. Cold, but not cruel. She had to be their first target. They would know that shooting him would only alert her. Surely they understood she was the dangerous one.

  If they killed her first, Jorgun would stand dumbly over her body while they reloaded.

  The people in the crowd didn’t know that. They gave way to Jorgun’s size unconsciously, flowing around the rock instead of trying to move it. With his shades on, he looked intimidating. He looked like a bodyguard. Could she trust that the League had done its homework?

  “Can we go see a cartoon?” her protector asked.

  “In a bit,” she muttered. Standing in front of a public net console, she tried to stop dodging invisible bullets and focus on typing. She hadn’t wanted to search for Jandi from her ship’s computer, in case they were watching. But the public console was anonymous. Not that the locals used it. Virtually every person on Altair had a comm unit in their pocket. She vaguely remembered some government program that distributed them to the financially disadvantaged. And yet they still provided free public consoles.

  It was ironic that the only time she had ever used one was when she wanted to avoid precisely the government that had made them possible.

  The first search result was a recorded appearance speech by Jandi, on some daytime babble-fest vid channel. The host, Willy Billy, looked like his normal topic of conversation was which celebrity was snubbing who, but for this broadcast he’d put on his Serious Face.

  “You’re saying, Dr. Jandi, that the aliens aren’t dangerous?”

  Jandi was an old man, small, stooped, and wreathed in a great white mane.

  “I’m saying there aren’t any aliens. I’ve studied nonterrestrial biology for sixty years. We have no evidence of any other intelligent life, let alone space-faring bug-eyed monsters.”

  “Are you serious, Dr. Jandi? No monsters? Then what do you call this?” Willy rolled his eyes as the camera cut to an inserted shot, and his audience duly laughed.

  The screen displayed one of the less absurd mock-ups of a huge spider, a 3-D model allegedly derived from forensic reconstruction. The picture had a government label on it; they were now pretending to confirm their pretend leaks. At least this one didn’t have a half-naked woman struggling in its grasp.

  Jandi was unperturbed. “I call it an artist’s rendering, which is what the government lab that released that picture called it. The overactive imagination of an underpaid academic is not evidence.”

  Prudence shook her head in dismay. The old man was talking above his audience. All they would remember was the picture.

  He was billed as Altair’s resident specialist on alienology, but there were no more public appearances on record. Mauree had described him as being retired years ago. Either he was too old and out of touch to be of concern to the League, or they had already silenced him. The news reports showed there were plenty of working scientists willing to endorse their arachnophobic vision.

  With a little prodding, the console yielded a contact code. When she used it, an automated response filled the screen, a cartoon of a little green man in a plumed helmet.

  In a squeaky voice, it said, “Oh drat these computers, they’re so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them!”

  Then it waited patiently for her response.

  “Dr. Jandi,” Prudence said, “I got your name from a mutual friend.” She stopped, wondering how much she should give away. “Mauree sends his … cordial greetings. If you have some time, I’d like to meet with you.”

  The screen dissolved into Jandi’s lined face. “Time, my dear, is something I have remarkably little of remaining. But what better way to spend it than in the company of a lovely young woman?” The old rogue was still dangerously charming; Welsing would have melted with envy.

  “Is today convenient for you?” she asked.

  “If you are not opposed to vat-grown vegetable protein, then you may join me for lunch. This sad diet is a punishment from my doctors, and misery does love company.” He did something on his end, and an address appeared on the screen in front of her, spelled out underneath his chin. With an arched eyebrow he glanced past her. “Shall I cook enough for your massive young man lurking in the background, as well?”

  Age had not dulled Jandi’s perceptual abilities. Poor Mauree must have been as transparent as glass.

  “Yes, please.” Remarkable that he would invite two strangers into his home. Especially given that he knew she was an off-worlder. He would not have bothered to ask an Altairian if they objected to vat-grown food. Even the wealthy elite ate the stuff for breakfast.

  “I’ll be expecting you at noon.” Jandi smiled what was probably meant to be a friendly smile, but came off as a college professor assigning a particularly wayward student a trip to his office after class. The screen went blank.

  “You want to go for a ride?” she asked Jorgun.

  “To see a cartoon?” Ever hopeful, he was.

  Prudence hailed a cab, a ground car. Part of Altair
’s fetish for growing out, not up. Grav vehicles were restricted to emergency and military use. Prudence didn’t particularly like ground cars. The sensation of speed was magnified when you were that close to the ground, and she always wondered how they avoided running into each other. On the tight, narrow strips of concrete the little cars were often less than a meter apart.

  In the sky, there was plenty of room. Vehicles kept a safe buffer around themselves, never coming closer than a hundred meters for anything the size of a starship. That struck her as a much more sensible arrangement.

  “Do you have a vid?” she asked the driver.

  “Yes, lady.” He was an off-worlder too, with an accent from several hops away. The cab drivers were always foreigners. It made no sense to Prudence. Surely the locals knew their way around better. “The latest news on now. Alien spiders!” The cabbie grinned at her. An incongruous reaction, she thought.

  Inside the cab, she gave the driver an address on the opposite side of the city from Jandi’s house. She had time to waste, and she wanted to see if she was being followed. Jorgun set himself to the vid controls and found a cartoon channel by the time the cab started moving.

  “Aren’t you worried about the spiders?” She instantly regretted starting a conversation with the cabbie. He hardly seemed to be paying attention to the traffic as it was.

  “Yes, of course, lady. But it is good news for me. Immigration is hard. I want to bring my cousins to Altair; the work is easy and the air does not stink. But that whoreson of a dog stopped the immigration. Now, with the aliens, they will have to start it again.”

  She hazarded a guess. “You mean the prime minister?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, as if it were obvious. “The whoreson of a dog. That one. He is an immigrant himself, but does that matter? Not to a dog that eats his own vomit.”

  She hadn’t known that about the prime minister. Or about dogs, either, but that part might just be color commentary.