The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  “Why do you think the alien problem will restore immigration?”

  The cabbie grinned at her in the mirror. “It already has. Fleet is recruiting. Anyone in Fleet can become a citizen. Many other foreigners are joining Fleet, to become citizens. And who will drive the cabs then? My cousins.”

  A remarkably provincial view of the threat of alien invasion. The inability to credibly project the future was an intractable flaw in the human design.

  But if the cabbie could project the future she remembered, he would be paralyzed by horror. Maybe it wasn’t a design flaw. Maybe ignorance was the only thing that kept people going.

  An hour in the cab left her with motion sickness. It wasn’t the rapid changes in velocity that did it, but the constant rush of objects past the window. In space, the stars did not move. The background was always still.

  She had wanted to close her eyes and ignore it all, but she had to watch for surveillance. After a handful of false destinations, she had directed the cabbie to Jandi’s house. Now they were parked outside, while she tried to decide if it was safe to go in.

  “We were not followed.” The cabbie was grinning conspiratorially again. It seemed to be his only expression. He’d used it even when he was insulting the prime minister. “I drive like a madman. And the government, it cannot put secret cameras in the cab. It is not allowed.”

  Yet, she thought, but kept it to herself. “What makes you think I was worried about being followed?”

  “Pretty girls are all the time taking long cab rides with young men. I won’t tell your rich husband, lady. If I were a rich man and my wife cheated on me, it would be my fault, for not making her feel like a queen.”

  “Don’t they usually end up at hotels?”

  “Yes, lady.” He grinned even wider. “That you come to such a fine house means your husband must be very rich indeed.”

  She tipped him well. He deserved it. Then, gratefully, she put her feet on unmoving ground, and dragged Jorgun after her.

  Jandi’s house was indeed “fine.” Not a mansion, but large enough to be stately, and on a private lot. The entire neighborhood was like that, the street lined with tall, majestic trees. On Kassa trees were cut down as a nuisance. On Altair, they smelled of age, stability, and money.

  On the door screen, the same little green man glared silently at her, holding up a small box with a button in one hand. When she reached to push it, he moved it away.

  She tapped on the center of the screen, ignoring the antics of the little figure. It squeaked at her in annoyance, but she could hear a door chime sounding inside the house.

  “Come in, come in!” The door opened as Jandi hauled on it from the other side. The door was two meters tall and made out of a single piece of wood. Altair must pay their professors quite well.

  “Do you like my door? It’s an import. Something I picked up on a field trip. All of my colleagues thought I was insane to pay the freight charges to bring it home. All of my neighbors are insanely jealous, and think I paid a dozen times what I did.”

  The trader in her couldn’t resist asking. “Why didn’t you import a dozen more?”

  Jandi smiled at her, crinkling the bulk of his face into an impish grin. “The value of the door as a stanchion of perspective was greater to me than a fistful of credit sticks.”

  “I like the cartoon on the front,” Jorgun said.

  Jandi bowed his head in respect. “A discriminating taste you have, young man. That is also an import—said to be an image from Earth itself. Do pardon my speech, I beg you; I am an old man and politeness is such an imposition on my time. I have what is reputed to be a digital copy of the original sequence: the little man, an alien, engages in a comic battle with a Terrestrial rabbit. Would you like to watch it?”

  Jorgun nodded eagerly. Probably the only thing he got out of the speech was the swear word and the idea of watching a possibly naughty cartoon. It was enough, for Jorgun.

  Snapping his fingers, Jandi led them into a large den, where a wall-mounted vid sprang to life. He rattled off some commands and the vid began displaying a cartoon, complete with the strangest music Prudence had ever heard. Its age was undeniable; the graphics were primitive beyond belief. Yet despite their crudeness, they had an innate power, like cave paintings of men hunting deer.

  Prudence had only seen pictures of cave paintings in history books. She wondered what it would be like to see one for real. To view an artifact that had been made by human hands before the exodus. All she had ever seen were digital reproductions of digital recordings.

  “Make yourself comfortable, lad.” Jandi waved at the various couches sprawling about the room. “My dear, if you would help me in the kitchen?”

  She followed him through the house, feeling the need to reassert some control. “We can talk in front of him. He’s not simple enough to babble to strangers.”

  “I did not doubt his valor,” Jandi responded politely. “But I thought you would not want to disturb him with your speech. I presume you did not really come out here to discuss Mauree Cordial. How is the old rogue, by the way?”

  “He seems happy enough. Zanzibar suits him.”

  “Yes, it would,” Jandi agreed. “Flavor over substance. And none too picky about the cleanliness of the plate it’s served on.” That did describe the planet succinctly, to Prudence’s mind. “But now that we’ve established your bona fides, we can stop sparring. Why did you come? Surely not just for the free meal. I am vain, yes, but not about my cooking.” They had reached the kitchen, and he lifted a pot lid, stirring the contents. Cubes of various vegetable proteins, boiling in a thick broth. Stew, soup, mush, gruel, whatever you wanted to call it. It had a thousand names and flavors on a hundred worlds. Prudence had stopped counting long ago. Jandi’s version at least smelled palatable.

  “I watched you on the Willy Billy show.” She took the bowl he was offering, held it while he spooned soup into it. “I wanted to tell you that you’re wrong.”

  “You believe in space-faring aliens?” He raised his bushy white eyebrows, like snowy caterpillars on parade.

  “I saw the evidence myself. A ship, crashed in the snow. A single-pilot fighter, but not built for humans.”

  Calmly Jandi snapped on the vid screen over the stove, flipped past the cooking channels, and called up a picture.

  The alien fighter craft. Photographed in a warehouse, lit by floodlights. Jandi paged through a dozen shots from different angles.

  “Fleet has been handing out these pictures to their friends. I still have friends at the university, so I’ve received an unofficial copy. I’ve seen the pictures, and I’m still not convinced. Ships are made by men.”

  Prudence fished a plastic bag out of her pocket. Inside was the precious sliver, stained in blue. She offered it to Jandi silently.

  Taking it gently, he held it up to the light. “A nice touch, making it blue. Any idiot can tell it’s not human that way. But why bring this to me instead of the government?”

  “What government? All I’ve seen is the League. There was a League officer on my ship when I found the alien vessel. Then a League officer showed up and claimed the prize.”

  “And you don’t like the League?”

  “I was born on Strattenburg.” She didn’t know if that would mean anything to him, but it meant a lot to her.

  He looked at her sadly. “Are the rumors true?” He was an academic, a member of a university, the one social institution that lived longer than governments. They were the only entities that tried to keep any kind of contact between the far-flung driblets of the okimune. He had at least heard rumors.

  “No. The truth is worse.”

  “You fear it could happen here? The situation does not seem analogous.” He spoke about tragedy in scientific terms. She had to remind herself that he couldn’t help it. He was an academic.

  “All I know is what I feel. And the League scares me.”

  Jandi nodded in acceptance. “I can analyze this without going throu
gh official channels. But it will take time. Yes, I know, you are in a hurry. Young people always are. I am in a hurry, too, my dear. My doctors are terrible liars. Take some soup to your young fellow. Enjoy the cartoon. I will contact you as soon as I can.”

  She left her berth number at the spaceport, and went to find Jorgun. He ate his soup without comment, watching the end of the cartoon. Prudence waited with him, wondering if the police were on their way now, wondering if Jandi had betrayed them.

  “That was funny. But they said the dirty word a lot.”

  “It’s a grown-up cartoon, Jor,” she reassured him. “They’re allowed.”

  Jandi’s voice came over the house intercom.

  “My apologies for being such a poor host. But I have so little time left, and this puzzle needs solving. Please show yourselves out—I’ve already summoned a cab. Do not despair, my brave young captain. I will not fail thee in thy hour of need.”

  “He has a puzzle? Can we play with it?” Jorgun was phenomenally good with jigsaw puzzles. Prudence wasn’t sure why he enjoyed them. All he did was take the pieces out of the box, one at a time, and put them where they belonged. Once she had chastised him for tossing a piece into the trash when he was halfway through a puzzle. Contrite, he had fished it out again, and placed it on top of the duplicate piece already on the table. After that, she had let him do the puzzles his own way.

  “It’s not that kind of puzzle, Jor. But we can go get you one from the store.”

  Outside, they waited for the cab. The cab would take them to her ship, where she would wait some more. Prudence tried to pretend that she was in a node. Those days of enforced waiting never bothered her. They were like vacations from the world. There was nothing that could touch you, and nothing you could do about it. The node was safe.

  Kyle Daspar’s death had proved that Altair wasn’t.

  TWELVE

  Miners

  Baharain was an ugly planet. No wonder Dejae had left it.

  The atmosphere was toxic. Not merely oxygen-free, but actually poisonous. The gravity was heavy, the days were short, and the solar radiation was carcinogenic. As if to celebrate these ugly features, the domed cities were smelly, squat, and dark.

  The planet was rich in heavy metals and closely placed to a node. A hundred thousand people made a living out of these two slightly less ugly features. If you could call artificial light, air, and gravity a living.

  Next to metals, immigrants were Baharain’s chief exports. People came to work, saved their credits, and left as soon as they could. A suitcase full of gold or palladium would fund retirement on any planet.

  Kyle sank into this stream of economic adventurers without a splash. Asking questions and getting answers proved to be more difficult. People here were suspicious of everyone and everything, and with good reason. Kyle had learned that at least one planet used Baharain as its penal system. Crimes were punished by fines measured in kilos of metal, which amounted to years of servitude. The offenders were shipped off to Baharain to earn their redemption, die, or give up and accept permanent banishment. While Kyle could see the advantages for the locals, it was rather an impolite way to treat the rest of the galaxy. Sweeping your trash into your neighbor’s yard wasn’t very neighborly, even if it was historically commonplace.

  Suffering under the peeling, drab dome, watching men and women trudge from their hovels to their pits, Kyle wasn’t sure how many of the men he’d sent to prison on Altair would switch places with these poor drudges. Prison was just another society. Some men took to it, and some didn’t. Some were better once they got out, and some weren’t.

  It was hard to think of Prudence as one of those eternal wanderers, floating without connection from place to place. Was she a criminal, banished from her home? Or had she sent herself into exile, fleeing guilt or shame or simple dissatisfaction? It hardly mattered if she were really from a distant world or not. Star-farer or secret agent, she was cut off from her past just as irrevocably. She could never return to the life she had left. He wondered if she remembered that old life, the way he sometimes remembered his life before the League.

  The wretches on Baharain didn’t think about their past lives. They barely remembered their own names. None of them remembered Veram Dejae. He crawled through the restaurants and bars, looking for a crack in the wall of ignorance and disinterest. He hadn’t bothered with official channels. That had been done before, with no result. Rica had given Kyle a copy of the previous investigator’s reports. What passed for a government on Baharain was a collection of corporations, and they were not interested in discussing where Veram Dejae had come from.

  But he certainly hadn’t come from here. Only the poorest or most negligent parents would try to raise a child on this sorry excuse for a planet. Dejae was too healthy, too smart, too tall to have grown up in this stultifying environment.

  There were no clues to be found in the nooks and crannies of these domes. But Kyle had learned how Dejae worked. The secret would be in plain sight.

  The first step was to find out how Dejae’s money got delivered. Baharain had its own credit system, but nobody took their sticks off-world. They took sticks of precious metals instead. Barbaric, but effective, and harder to trace than even Altair’s anonymous credit sticks.

  He spent three days in dirty clothes and week-old stubble trawling the spaceport. The ships that wouldn’t offer him passage at any price had to be the ones carrying cash payments. The one going to Altair—a beefy freighter three times the size of Prudence’s little ship—had to be Dejae’s. Even Kyle’s Altairian accent couldn’t get him on that ship.

  There was no hope of finding out what or who had loaded the ship, of course. Merely asking could prove to be dangerous. Instead, Kyle watched who came to unload it.

  The majority of the cargo seemed to be machine parts. Altair’s highly skilled workforce and advanced technological infrastructure made plenty of those, and a world like Baharain would need them. The bulk of the parts went to a mining corporation called Radii Development Corp.

  One area the local government did pay attention to was corporate filings. For good reason—they charged companies to file them, fined companies for not filing them, and collected a fee from anyone who wanted to look at them. Kyle paid without complaint. It seemed morally less objectionable than bribing an official to give him the information on the sly, like he would have had to do on any other world.

  What he learned was the same thing he’d heard on the street. RDC was an interstellar conglomerate, like all the major players on Baharain, but about fifteen years ago it had started pulling ahead of the competition.

  Scouring years of business records reminded Kyle of why he had never been able to stomach forensic accounting. At least the street criminals were living people, however broken. Corporate lawyers were like zombies. They said as little as possible, took as long as they could to do it, and lied without even realizing it. Kyle began to hate them more than he hated juicers. At least the juicers had fun while eating their own souls.

  Eventually he managed to find out why RDC was winning the game. They had adopted a policy of automation, replacing more and more workers with automated equipment. An unobvious choice, given how cheaply human beings could be hired. The business vids debated the wisdom of RDC’s course, suggesting that the cost of development and maintenance of the machinery would eat into their profit margin more than their increased production would grow it.

  The records seemed to indicate they were right. RDC was taking market share, but not making any more money. Yet RDC went on deploying automation, year after year. This was exactly the kind of uninteresting mystery Kyle was looking for.

  The other fact that he learned from the government database was a detail too old and trivial to filter up from street gossip. Fifteen years ago RDC had acquired a new chief executive officer, from off-world.

  Kyle couldn’t find any pictures of the man, but he didn’t need one. He already knew what the chief executive officer of RDC
looked like, because he’d already met him once. Five years ago, on Altair. In a sporty ground car. Making an illegal turn.

  A shower, a shave, and a fresh suit later, Kyle went to renew that acquaintance.

  RDC’s corporate headquarters were more impregnable than the Fleet War Room on Altair. Kyle didn’t make it past the secretaries.

  Personnel made him fill out forms and said they’d get back to him, but generally they didn’t hire security officers without a recommendation. Investor Relations wouldn’t talk to him until after he purchased at least a thousand shares. Public Relations was willing to talk, but after two hours he knew less than when he’d walked in the door. The only thing he got out of the day was an offer to work as a miner, for about two-thirds the going rate.

  He took it. He was running low on leads and credits. And it had another advantage.

  The job involved leaving the domes, which meant stepping off the grav-plating while wearing a chem suit. He would be exposed to the native environment of Baharain, protected by only a few millimeters of expensive plastic. It didn’t sound fun and it was certainly dangerous, but the company would provide training and equipment. Those were both necessary to fulfill his sudden desire to go sightseeing outdoors.

  This desire sprung from a casual fact he had gleaned while interviewing for jobs. The management of RDC maintained a series of private domes for executives and their families.

  Dejae’s twin would live in one of those. Kyle would never get past security to access them normally, but all he needed was a single photograph. The public domes were transparent on most optical wavelengths, filtering out only the dangerous rays. Letting the local sunshine in was cheaper and more naturally satisfying than purely artificial light. No doubt the executive domes were the same. They would, at the very least, be transparent during the night. Everyone liked to look at the stars. Everyone stared up into the great void from time to time, wondering which insignificant sparkle was the light of ancient Earth. A still-living Earth: humanity had left only centuries ago, and they had traveled thousands of light-years through the nodes. The light from that ancient Earth, if it could be resolved into pictures, would show a shining blue ball painted with strokes of green and white. Oceans teeming with schools of fish. Forests whose branches were alive with troops of monkeys and flocks of birds. Plains where herds of animals thundered in glorious freedom.