The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  “Stupid machines,” she grumbled. It was the closest she could come to an apology.

  The screen clicked off.

  “Damn, Pru,” Garcia said from the ship’s hatch. “I thought that dude was dead.”

  If Garcia had spoken seven seconds earlier, they would have all gone to jail. But it wasn’t luck. Garcia was naturally adept at conspiracy.

  “So did I.” She stared at Kyle.

  “He hit me,” Jorgun offered helpfully. “But then he said he was sorry.”

  “Maybe we should, you know, set the record straight.” Garcia brought his right hand out from behind his body, revealing the splattergun he was holding. “It’s not like anybody is gonna be looking for the corpse.”

  “Put that away, Garcia,” Prudence demanded. With this angle of fire, he was as likely to kill her and Jorgun as he was to hit Kyle.

  “I thought we were against the League.” That was a surprise, coming from Garcia. She hadn’t realized he cared one way or another.

  Kyle laughed. “Then why are you volunteering to finish their job? You won’t even get paid for it.” He was arguing for his life, but he didn’t seem to be trying very hard.

  “Nobody’s going to kill anyone,” Prudence said. Kyle had stopped fighting when Jorgun had started crying. That earned him a chance to explain. “Kyle is going to take a shower. Garcia, you’re going to take Jorgun into the city and buy him a puzzle. Then you’ll start looking for a cargo.”

  “We can’t transport out of here.” Garcia knew they didn’t have a license.

  “Pretend you don’t know that. Act like you’re here for a legitimate reason, for crying out loud. Act normal.”

  “What are you going to do, Pru?” Jorgun asked her.

  “I’m going to get a stateroom ready for Kyle.” One with a drop-bar on the outside sounded like a good idea.

  She and Kyle swiped their IDs again, indicating that they were returning to the ship. Stupid machines.

  While he showered, she went through his pockets.

  Only two items looked interesting. The blue pod from Kassa, and a data chip. She plugged the chip in, but it was encrypted.

  “What’s the keyword?” she asked him as soon as he stepped out of the washroom. He was wearing only a towel around his waist. She could see bruises on his chest, and a nasty scrape on his shin.

  She could also see the breadth of his shoulders, the tight muscles of his belly, the bulge of his thighs. He was solid. Dense, even.

  He was definitely her type.

  She stood up from the screen, stepped away from it, making room for him to type in the key. Keeping her orbit at a safe distance.

  “The password is ‘twin.’ I only encoded it because the camera made me.” He tapped the keyboard, and the screen blossomed with a vid. “I don’t have any secrets left, Prudence. I’m out of money and time. I’m out of secrets.”

  She didn’t believe him. People had secrets they didn’t know they had. No one ever ran out of them.

  “What are we looking at?” He had paused it on a man in an artistic, tribal mask. It was as dull as a tourist’s home vid.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. I thought it would be a picture of Veram Dejae.”

  The man in the photo looked about the right size and shape for that.

  “Why on Earth would the prime minister of Altair wear a mask like that?”

  Kyle grinned lopsidedly. “I didn’t say it was a picture of the prime minister. I said it was a picture of Dejae … one of him, anyway.”

  She glared at him from across the room.

  “There’s two,” he explained. “Five years ago I almost arrested one for making a wrong turn, while the other one was making a public speech on the other side of the city. Now I’m trying to figure out why Dejae needs to hide his twin brother.”

  “The twin is on Baharain?”

  Kyle tapped the screen, and the vid zoomed back to the beginning. A glassy dome set in wind-shaped rocks. “He’s head of RDC, the largest and most productive mining concern on the planet. He also has a hobby. A nasty, vicious hobby.” His face was bitter and hard.

  “What?” Prudence asked, unsure of what to expect. Had Dejae inflicted those bruises?

  “He keeps pets. Spiders, to be exact. Two-meter-tall spiders that kill people that get too close to his dome.”

  A shudder of dismay ran through her spine. Jandi had prepared her for double-dealing, some criminal smuggling of tech and weapons. But Kyle was describing a partnership. How could a man turn against his own species? She grimaced in disgust.

  “You don’t look very surprised,” Kyle said, surprised.

  “The spider-ship we found—it was made on Baharain. Or at least, the cockpit glass was. I stole a piece, had it analyzed.” Distressingly, Kyle didn’t look surprised at that. With effort she returned her attention to the screen. “Why is Dejae wearing a mask? Was this at a party or something?” It looked like the kind of extravagance Cinderella’s would love to sell.

  “No, he was home alone. When a servant came to the door, he took the mask off.”

  “Wearing a mask while alone?” That sparked her memory. She’d spent the three hops from Altair reading through the cube Jandi had given her, out of idle curiosity. Now she tapped at the screen, trying to pull the data up.

  “Damn.” The cube was in her stateroom, on a private hookup. “I need to check something in my cabin.”

  Kyle eyed his pile of filthy clothes. “Where’s your washer?”

  She waved at the back of the hall distractedly. Was he going to walk around in that towel all day?

  “Maybe you could get some pants from Garcia’s locker.”

  “Are you serious?” Kyle shook his head. “Have you seen the clothes that guy wears?”

  Prudence felt that rather missed the point that he wore clothes, instead of bathroom accessories. But Kyle was already stuffing his into the machine next to the shower.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Apparently he didn’t see anything wrong with walking into her private stateroom while practically naked. Where was the standoffish, proper gentleman that had stalked off her ship on Kassa?

  His face was still gray with fatigue, but the light was back in his eyes. There was something else, something odd about his mouth. Prudence finally realized he was trying to repress a smile.

  She had to find out why. “What did you mean, in the port? Who did you think I was?”

  He looked at her with those black eyes, a gaze so intent she could feel it on her face. “From the instant I came out of the node at Kassa, people have been trying to kill me, in a variety of unusual ways. I thought you were one of those people. An operative; an agent. But Jorgun … he’s not faking it. It’s not an act. And that means you can’t be acting, either.”

  “But you were.” He had been lies and contradictions from the moment she saw him. No, before that, when he was just a voice on the Launceston.

  “Yes. I am a double agent. I’ve been one for five years, so long I thought I had forgotten how to be anything else.”

  “If you don’t work for the League, then who do you work for?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t have a name. We’re just people that don’t like the League. I didn’t even know there were any others, when I started. I didn’t know there were people like you.”

  “I’m just a tramp freighter captain,” she said, feeling defensive. Jandi’s lecture about heroism echoed in her head. “That’s all.”

  “I know,” he answered, and now he could not hold back the smile. “You’re exactly what you appear to be.”

  It had been a long time since a nearly naked man had smiled so openly at her. And she still had her clothes on.

  Going into her stateroom, she left the door open.

  “Dejae obviously isn’t quite what he appears.” She tried to steer her thoughts back to the topic at hand. “I was told he came from Baharain, but I don’t believe that.”

  “He’s only been here about fifteen
years. He’s been on Altair about ten. I mean, the other one … you know what I mean. But yes, both of them are from somewhere else.”

  She tapped through the cube, searching. The cube was dense, packed with academic information, and not particularly user-friendly. But “private masks” yielded up a single entry.

  “Monterey.”

  Kyle shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

  “Neither have I…” She skimmed through the entry. “A dome world, unknown population, but estimated to be small. Very private … it was originally a religious retreat, funded by a wealthy industrialist. Founded about two hundred years ago.”

  “What does that have to do with spiders?”

  She started paging through node charts.

  “It’s only three hops from Kassa. And they’re dead ones, so no traffic.” A dead hop was a system without a colony, a lifeless and uninhabited star. People tended to avoid those for the same reasons you avoided dark alleys. There was no one there who could help you if you got into trouble, and if there was anyone there, they were probably the source of your trouble in the first place.

  “Could the spiders be using Monterey as a base?”

  She linked her screen into the ships’ network, and through that to Baharain Traffic Control.

  “There’s a liner listing Monterey as part of its itinerary, within the last two weeks. Monterey is only two hops from here, through a large colony called Solistar. I can’t imagine the spiders are squatting on a system right next to a heavily populated world, and nobody has noticed.”

  “There are bloody spiders squatting on this world, and apparently nobody has noticed.” Kyle’s face was black with anger.

  She waited, letting him unload the burden at his own pace.

  “I got a kid killed.” He sighed, biting his lip in shame. “He survived the attack on Kassa, came all the way out here to make a paycheck for his family, and I went and fed him to the Earth-damned spiders anyway.”

  It must have happened while he was taking those pictures.

  “Should we go after them?” Jandi would die of shock if she brought him a whole alien, rather than a mere artifact. Actually, he probably would have a heart attack. Maybe she would just show him a leg or two.

  “No,” Kyle said. “I don’t know how many there are, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t poke Dejae’s security net again and expect to leave this planet alive. I’m not sure we can get out of here as it is. And it’s no use going back to Altair. These pictures aren’t enough.” His lips tightened in pain, the jaw underneath set in mulish anger. Those pictures had come at a high cost.

  “Then…” But she already knew the answer.

  “We’re going to Monterey.”

  Garcia had gone straight to a bar and started drinking. Prudence could hardly complain. She’d told him to act normal.

  “Buy a bottle of whiskey from the bartender,” she instructed Jorgun over the comm link. “Tell Garcia he can have it when he gets back on the ship. Don’t let him trick it away from you, Jor. Just hold it high in the air, where he can’t reach it.”

  She was still trying to get clearance to launch when her pied piper came on board dragging his rat. Garcia was cursing savagely, but he pulled himself together when he walked past the open door to Prudence’s cabin. Kyle was in there, still hunched over the data console.

  “You don’t have any pants on, man.” Garcia seemed to be asking for confirmation. He must have been drinking hard.

  Kyle looked up from the screen in surprise.

  “Oh. Right.” He ducked out of the room and headed aft to the shower.

  “That man didn’t have any pants on,” Garcia shouted down the passageway to the bridge. “I leave you for one lousy minute and you get naked with the League!”

  “Jor, give him the bottle,” Prudence shouted back.

  Kyle came onto the bridge, finally dressed. He was going to be a problem that couldn’t be solved with a bottle of free liquor.

  “So how long will it take?” He sounded like a man in a hurry.

  “It’s a three-day hop from here to Solistar, and another five to Monterey. That doesn’t count in-system travel time. And we’ll have to dock at Solistar. We need fuel and cargo. If we show up at Monterey with an empty hold, they’ll be suspicious. So make yourself comfortable, Lieutenant. It’s a long trip.”

  “Call me Kyle. I don’t think dead men have ranks.”

  “You can call me Captain,” she said. In case he might be getting silly ideas.

  “Of course, Captain.” He said it with an exaggeration of his bureaucratic obsequiousness. She was surprised how much it hurt to hear that tone again.

  Jorgun made a mockery of her formality anyway. “Do you want me to look at the cargo lists, Pru?” He was trying to do his job, the one thing he was good at.

  “I’m sorry, Jor, but we don’t have any.” Normally he would examine all the destinations, fees, and expected returns, and put the stops in the best order. It was called the “Traveling Salesman” problem. Computers could solve it, of course, but it was a pain to enter all the parameters and assign the right weightings. Jorgun could do it instantly, and besides, he enjoyed it.

  “Garcia said if we didn’t get a cargo soon, we’d be landed.” Jorgun probably didn’t know what landed meant, but he was upset anyway.

  “Garcia is drunk,” Prudence pointed out. “Don’t worry about it, Jor. We’ve got a lot of money from—” She stopped, not wanting to mention Kassa. “We still have lots of money.” Now she was telling outright lies. “We have enough.”

  “Enough to get us back to Altair?” Kyle wasn’t so easily fooled.

  “Us? You can take a commercial liner back.” Landing on Altair with the renegade dead League officer-turned-betrayer as her cargo would be equivalent to suicide.

  He didn’t argue. “Just get me in and out of Monterey. I’ll take care of the rest. It’s not your problem, Prudence. But I appreciate the help. Altair appreciates it.”

  “I’m not doing it for Altair.” She bit her lip. Why did she have to keep reacting to him?

  “Nonetheless, we appreciate it.” He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. It was so very different from the last time he had stood on her bridge. “Dejae went through a lot of trouble to hide his planet of origin. That means there’s a good chance they kicked him off. If he left enemies on Monterey, we might find some friends.”

  “And if not?”

  Kyle’s smile turned wry. “Everybody has enemies.” That was closer to the man she remembered.

  She tried to keep that man in mind over the next three days. She wanted to remember that Kyle could be false. He’d demonstrated the ability to lie convincingly, wearing a cover persona for years at a time. He was a dangerous man. Not just because he was strong and trained in combat by the police force, but because he was emotionally capable of extreme dedication. She had been mistaken in thinking he was not as hard as a soldier. He was stronger than that. The years of obedience had not left him dulled and useless. They had not killed his passion.

  Right now he seemed passionate for justice. That was a goal she could identify with, despite the attendant danger. Justice was never free, and sometimes it could be quite expensive. If Kyle had to sacrifice her and her crew for the sake of Altair, he would do it. But she was prepared to run that risk.

  What she was afraid of was what came after. Once he had achieved his goal—or figured out it was unachievable—what would he do then? What direction would all that pent-up passion take? A man like that, with so much energy, so much life to recapture, might do almost anything.

  What he did for now was to fit seamlessly into her crew. He played cards with Garcia and vid games with Jorgun. He took his turn in the galley, without being asked, making a credible casserole out of the random contents of their freezer.

  And he kept his distance from her, never pushing, never crowding. But sometimes, when he didn’t think she noticed, she caught him staring at her.

  Jorgun was happy with the
ir new crew member. She was a little surprised to see him playing his favorite vid game, Starfighter, with Kyle. It was one of the things Jorgun and she shared. Garcia had no interest in any activity that didn’t result in exchanges of wealth, and Melvin had been unable to take the game seriously. He’d get stoned and fly around in spirals grooving on the pretty lights instead of shooting the targets.

  “I like playing with him,” Jorgun explained, when she asked him about it in private. “He doesn’t have to let me win.”

  She had developed a careful habit of losing approximately every other game when she played with Jorgun. The game was too similar to the sims she ran to practice her flying skills, so her reflexes were completely dominating if she didn’t rein them in. But she hadn’t realized Jorgun could tell. All those years she had fought to get others to not underestimate him, and she’d being doing it herself.

  The shame mixed with the jealousy to form a biting hole in her stomach, much like Garcia’s absurd chili recipes always did.

  “I’m sorry, Jor. I just thought it would be more fun that way.”

  “You always ask me who won the last one, and if I say you did, then I win.”

  Stupid of her. Of course he had detected the pattern.

  “But Kyle is funny to play with. Sometimes he flies into things by accident. I keep telling him not to fly so fast, but he always forgets. And he doesn’t get mad when he loses, like Garcia does.”

  The litany of Kyle’s perfections exasperated her. She wanted to pretend that she was angry at him for ingratiating himself with the simpleminded member of her crew, worming his way into her affairs through the weakest link, but down the passageway she could hear Garcia laughing with him over one of his stupid police stories.

  She took three steps in their direction before she realized what she was doing. Annoyed, she turned around and went to the bridge instead.

  There she could drown her tiny fears in oceans of dread, staring at the node-charts for hours and trying to guess where the spiders came from. Where they would go next. Where they might be, even now, descending on some helpless world trapped in their web.