The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  Creeping over the top, he saw the valley spread out below. The various domes in the complex glowed invitingly, gentle warm yellow leaking through their transparent tops. Kyle had planned his route to bring him to the backside of the one place in the sector the corporate recruiting literature didn’t brag about. He knew all about the suites and recreational facilities of the rest of the complex. By the process of elimination he had figured out this one undescribed patch had to be where the bigwigs lived.

  A distant shadow to the right caught his eye, but when he stared that direction, he saw nothing. The twilight was affecting his vision, too. Aiming the camera at the dome below him, he scanned it, looking for clues, hints, or just an uncurtained window.

  Stakeouts were a matter of patience. Typically one waited days for something interesting to happen. Kyle had rented the equipment for a week. But when he saw a person standing in an observation deck, looking up at the stars, he accepted his good luck. He felt he was owed some.

  The man was the right height and weight for a twin of Dejae. Clicking the zoom factors up, Kyle narrowed in on the face, running the vid recorder at maximum resolution. And blinked. The man was wearing a mask, an extravagant tribal affair with feathers and glittering gems. He appeared to be having a conversation, but a few minutes of observation convinced Kyle that the man was alone in the room, talking to a comm unit.

  Was he getting ready for a party? Maybe life in the executive dome was one wearying masked ball after another.

  The man turned, as if interrupted, facing a closed door on the other side of the room. The man crossed the room to open the door, his back to Kyle, and as he walked, he took off the mask and hid it behind his back.

  A servant was on the other side of the door. She handed him a drink from a silver tray, curtsied, and left. He closed the door. Before he turned around, he put the mask back on.

  Kyle was dumbfounded. There was clearly no one else in the room. The conversation on the comm unit was over; the man relaxed on a divan, alone, sipping his drink.

  While wearing a mask.

  Kyle recorded the whole insane performance, the masked man finishing his drink, setting down the glass, and wandering out of Kyle’s view. A second later the room went dark. Without backlighting, Kyle couldn’t see through the reflectivity of the dome.

  He popped the data chit out of the camera and stuffed it in his suit pocket. Slotting in another chit, he prepared himself for a long wait. His luck hadn’t changed, after all.

  Why would someone wear a mask, alone in their own house? His futile speculation was cut short by a sound that was not the wind.

  Immediately Kyle began slithering down, trying to escape the view of the dome complex, while looking frantically for the source of the harsh click. To his left a monstrous shape appeared, blotting out the horizon. Kyle jumped, heedless of where he would land, and the hulking brute landed where Kyle had been a heartbeat ago.

  Sparks flew from the ground as stone chipped and sprayed outward. In the momentary illumination Kyle could see glittering fangs, bristly hair, and legs. Too many legs. A spider twice the size of a man, with faceted eyes that revealed no humanity.

  Kyle crashed back to earth, halfway down the hill. The spider gathered itself, a giant barrel sprouting hideous limbs. A meter wide at the body, with legs twice as long. Its claws clattered on the stone, and when it hissed at him, he could see the faint reflection of silver. Its fangs and claws were capped in metal. He could imagine it in the cockpit of the deadly little fighter-craft on Kassa, searching for targets, seeking out men and women to kill.

  And now it was coming for him.

  Kyle had faced many weapons, thugs with guns and knives, and once, a jar of acid. He had stared into the eyes of men who wanted to hurt him, to make him suffer and die. But he had never feared being eaten before.

  The terror was atavistic. Scrambling madly, Kyle plummeted down the hill, seeking escape or just a place to hide, every step in the heavy gravity like wading through a nightmare. He threw himself into the first narrow crevice he found.

  The monster pounced again, sealing Kyle in his tomb. Its fangs gnawed at the narrow lips of stone. It was trying to stick its horrible maw in to bite him, instead of just fishing him out with its legs.

  The radio whispered in his ear.

  “What on Earth is that?” Bobby was on the edge of panic, his voice trembling and wet. Paradoxically, his terror rallied Kyle.

  “GO!” Kyle hissed over the radio. “Get the fuck out of here! While it’s still occupied with me—I don’t think it can catch the buggy. Go, damn you!”

  The creature began flaying the stone with its claws. It was going to dig him out.

  “Is that what attacked my world?” Bobby was asking intelligent questions, and it was pissing Kyle off.

  “Get the fuck out of here! Go get help!” Kyle didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t have room to fight, even if he could get his heart to stop pounding long enough to think about fighting. He couldn’t see anything except the dark bulk of the monster, blotting out the sky.

  It stopped, freezing perfectly still. Its motion had been unnatural, inhuman, alien; now it was almost comical. One leg stretched out, claw-first, reaching down to him. It had finally figured out that all that was required was a single puncture of Kyle’s suit.

  A flare of light. Sobbing in fear over the radio, Bobby unleashed the plasma torch on the creature, having crawled up the hill unnoticed. Instantly the monster reverted to mindless spider, and sprung on him. The two of them rolled down the hill, disappearing from Kyle’s sight.

  He kicked his way out of the crevice. He was too late.

  On the plain below him, the spider straddled Bobby, pinning him with half its legs, rising up on the other half. Futilely Bobby cradled the plasma tank for protection, trying to hide behind it. The fangs descended like a jackhammer while Kyle cried out in helpless rage.

  Sparks of metal on metal, and then the tank exploded.

  The flare was blinding. For a moment Kyle could not tell ground from sky. When contrast returned, all he could see was the horizon, a cardboard cutout standing against a starry background. On his hands and knees he slipped and slid down the hill, every bump rising up to punish him, every hole trying to suck him down.

  He collided with something that was not rock. A leg. Groping, he found another. Scraping his helmet on the ground, he tried to bring the scene into the horizon. Above the legs was nothing. Sparkles slowly began to appear. Parts of bodies were burning, but Kyle’s vision could not identify them.

  His hearing returned, and he realized the clicking sound was not part of the ringing deafness in his ears. Somewhere out there the creature still moved, trying to stand. That it was severely injured was deducible only by the fact that Kyle was not yet dead.

  Crawling on the ground, he picked out the silhouette of the buggy. As much as he wanted to, he could not stand and run, because then he would lose sight of the buggy. As if he could run blind across broken ground, anyway.

  The shadow from before, from on top of the hill, flashed through his mind. It had been to the right. This creature had come from the left. There was another one out there, still stalking him.

  Scrabbling on all fours knees, dipping his head to keep the buggy in sight, he battered his hands and knees without mercy. It was the longest seven meters of his life.

  Crawling into the buggy, he flicked on the exterior headlights. They would give away his position, yes, but without them he simply could not drive. On their brightest setting they revealed only outlines. He could avoid boulders, but crevices would be invisible to him. He would be lucky to survive the first kilometer.

  He was still owed some luck. But he wasn’t sure he deserved it.

  After five minutes he stopped and turned out the lights. Closing his eyes was unbearably hard. Forcing himself to count to one hundred was the most terrifying thing he had ever done.

  When he opened them again, he could almost see. If he drove slowly enough, h
e would not need the lights. The lights would kill him. Driving too slowly would kill him. Wrecking the buggy would kill him.

  There were a lot of ways to die out here, but all of them were the same, in the end. A spider standing over you with shining fangs. Kyle thought about what spiders did with things they caught.

  Bobby might have been the lucky one.

  But he wasn’t. Kyle’s damned luck held out. Gradually he drove faster as his vision returned, and nothing sprang out of the darkness on him. He found a road, and picked a direction at random. After a kilometer he thought to turn the buggy’s navcom back on. It told him he had chosen correctly. It even warned him about upcoming curves and rough spots.

  Damned luck.

  Pulling up to the same air lock he and Bobby had left, he was too tired to be worried. The authorities wouldn’t give him any trouble. Dejae-2 couldn’t afford to let people know he had killer spider guards. Instead, he would send an assassin, somebody who had to work outside the system. That meant Kyle had a little time.

  It also meant that he had to ditch the fake persona he had been living under. He didn’t think he could even risk going back to his hotel. His documents opened the air lock, but they also marked his presence outside the dome, and every person who returned after the spider died would surely be investigated by Dejae’s agents. He drove in, waited for the scrubbers to cycle the air, and drove out the other side. At least he didn’t have to present a credit stick to pay a fee. All the air locks let you in for free, a reasonable safety precaution. That just meant they charged you double to get out.

  Parking the buggy behind a rowdy bar, he left the keys in it. Maybe someone would do him a favor and steal it. He dropped his old documents into a curbside trash disintegrator, and shoved his pressure suit in after it. The machine choked on it, but after a few well-placed kicks it fired up again and shredded the suit. Kyle idly reflected that you could probably shove a body down the damn thing.

  All he had left were the clothes on his back, two credit sticks, his original Altair ID papers, and the data chit in his pocket. Bobby had died so Kyle could get a vid of a man in a mask.

  Kyle consoled himself with the fact that he would probably die over the same useless vid. Then he found a cheap, cheap hotel room and gave up one of his credit sticks.

  Seven hours in the heavy G had drained him, leaving him brittle like a rag wrung dry and left in the sun to parch. He should have collapsed into unconsciousness as soon as his head hit the disposable foam pillow. But the memory of the young man struggling under the spider would not leave him. That should have been him; would have been, if not for Bobby’s heroics. In the grand scheme of things it was just another casualty of the Kassan war, but this one had been on Kyle’s watch. He had never lost a member of his squad before. He didn’t understand how to deal with it.

  Only the inescapable fact that escaping from this planet would be impossible, and therefore he would soon join Bobby in death, let him finally sink into sleep.

  In the morning he did the only thing he could. It would be what they expected, of course. But he didn’t have a choice. Five minutes in a convenience store and he was deep brown, staining his face with some cheap cosmetic intended to preserve skin in the harsh recycled air, but undoubtedly chemically inert and useless. Then he went down to the docks, to try and find a ride home. A tramp freighter would be his only hope. They would search the passenger liners, like the one he had come on. Not that he could afford a luxury ticket, anyway.

  There didn’t seem to be a lot of tramp freighters on Baharain. He wasn’t sure why, and he didn’t dare consult an official registry or government information kiosk to find out. Instead, he went from bay to bay, looking through the windows to see if there was a ship outside. He was tired, anxious, and angry. That’s how they caught him by surprise.

  He heard a voice behind him. Soft and yet hard, familiar and yet exotic. Fear bit into his belly like the spider, his stomach muscles contracting involuntarily. He spun, knowing what he would see.

  The perfect operative. Always right behind him. Prudence eyed him suspiciously, something glittering in her right hand, while her massive soldier reached out to grab Kyle’s shoulder.

  Kyle struck, sinking his fist into Jorgun’s gut. The man was huge, but Kyle would not die without a fight. Jorgun fell like a tree to the ground.

  The giant stared up at him in anguish, and burst into tears.

  FIFTEEN

  Revelations

  She nearly killed him.

  Stepping deftly forward, the mordant knife shielded behind her body, she was already in motion. The name came to her from ancient fairy tales. Wight. A dead man, returned from the grave to seek vengeance. He looked the part, disheveled and haggard, his eyes dull and flat. His face was the wrong color, his hair untrimmed.

  He couldn’t be a supernatural undead monster, of course. He was just an ordinary, living monster, sent here by the League to intercept her. Covering their bases. She had stumbled too deep into the web, and now they had caught her.

  But not without a fight. Not without cost to themselves. With her left hand extended, covering her approach, she moved into killing range.

  “I’m sorry,” Kyle said to Jorgun.

  “Why did you hit me?” Jorgun whimpered through childlike sobs.

  Kyle’s face was a mask of confusion. Unconsciously Prudence stopped, waiting for the answer.

  “I thought you were someone else,” Kyle said, shrugging helplessly.

  She tapped him on the chest with her left hand. She could have used her right hand, delivered the fatal blow. She could have gutted him from sternum to throat in one smooth, easy sweep. But she didn’t.

  What kind of wight apologized? What kind of assassin attacked bare-handed?

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Kyle Daspar. The real one.” He grinned lopsidedly at some private joke. “Who the hell are you?”

  “That’s an idiotic question.”

  “And yours wasn’t?” He swayed a little, as if he were dizzy.

  “When I left Altair, you were dead. Burned in your bed. So, no, my question was not idiotic.”

  “They missed me. Bungled it, like they always do. And now here you are, to finish the job.”

  On the edge of her vision, two men approached. Wearing uniforms of gray and blue. Station security.

  She let the knife collapse into a harmless medallion.

  “Are you done?” she said loudly. Bending over, she picked up Jorgun’s sunglasses and put them on his face, hiding his red-lined eyes.

  “What’s the trouble here?” The thick security guard was the first to speak, his voice challenging, like a dog daring you to pet it.

  “No trouble, officer.” She tried to smile sweetly, but under the circumstances, she didn’t think it came off very well. “Just a crew dispute. I don’t allow violence on my ship, so they had to wait for port to settle it.”

  “We don’t allow violence here, either, spacer.” The thick one wanted a fight.

  The skinny one just wanted to make fun of someone. “Why’s the big guy crying like that?”

  “He’s ribbing me,” Kyle answered. “Said I punched like a girl, so he might as well cry like one.”

  The skinny guard guffawed, satisfied with a target of scorn. Kyle reached down and offered his hand to Jorgun. With the glasses on, Jorgun looked like a grown-up. He took Kyle’s hand and stood up, grinning weakly.

  “That was funny,” Jorgun said.

  “Sure it was.” Kyle clapped him on the back. “Just a couple of tough guys, we are. Sorry, officer, it won’t happen again.”

  “Show me your IDs. All of you.” Chubby was angry at being disappointed.

  Kyle reached into his back pocket, pulled out a card, and handed it to the officer. Prudence stood perfectly still, waiting to see what would happen when he ran it through his scanner.

  The officer glared at Kyle.

  “There isn’t a date of arrival for you. Why don’t yo
u have a date of arrival stamped in your file?”

  Kyle shrugged and looked over his shoulder, at the hatch that led to the ship.

  “Guess the system hasn’t updated yet. I mean, come on, I just walked through that door.”

  The guard grunted and handed the card back. He turned to Prudence, took the card she extended.

  “I’m logging a complaint on your file, Captain. Any more of this crap and you’ll be fined.”

  “Yes, officer.” She’d started out disliking this planet. Five minutes on the ground had brought that to a full boil of hatred.

  The three of them waited, doing nothing, while the security team wandered off.

  “Back to the ship,” she ordered.

  “I can’t check out.” Kyle objected. “They monitor every person in and out. You’ll have to sneak me out in a cargo container.”

  As a smuggler, the man was a complete failure.

  “Come here.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him through the hatch.

  Inside the tube-way she banged on the comm panel until the screen lit up.

  “Hey,” she said, before the tired-looking girl on the other end could speak. “You didn’t register my crewman. He just disembarked, walked through the hatch with us, but your damn machine didn’t take his ID swipe.”

  “Ma’am, the machines don’t—”

  “He’s right here. Look, here’s his ID.” She held his arm up so the camera could see the card in his hand. “There’s a fine for this crap. I’m gonna make sure you pay it, unless you fix this right now.”

  Prudence’s conscience twinged when she saw the girl was too tired to even complain.

  “Swipe it again, sir.”

  Kyle obeyed, playing the part of slack-jawed hayseed to perfection.

  “Okay, you’re clear now. Sorry for the trouble, Captain.”

  Prudence wanted to thank her, but she couldn’t break character. If the girl knew that Prudence had just got what she wanted, she might become suspicious.