The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  SIXTEEN

  Fire

  It was impossible to fear the sparkling blue and white jewel that slowly filled the vid screen on the bridge. Solistar was a beautiful planet, and if it hadn’t been for the star’s unfortunate tendency to belch out random storms of radiation, it would have been a friendly one.

  As it was, the planetary network warned them never to go outside without heavy rad-protective clothing, and then made sure they understood by displaying twenty-seven commercials in a row for various forms of it. Kyle had never considered the merits of designer rad-suits, and now that he was exposed to them, he found himself severely underwhelmed.

  “At least it’s safe,” Garcia grumbled. “Not even the spiders would want this place.”

  “We don’t know that,” Prudence countered. “It has a breathable atmosphere. That’s worth something.” The source of that air, single-cell life-forms in the oceans, had evolved immunity to the occasional bursts of silent, invisible death, by the virtue of being absurdly simple. But complex, multicellular creatures like human beings fell apart in an astounding variety of creative ways after one or two exposures.

  “Do we know what the spiders breathe?” Kyle asked. On Baharain they hadn’t cared about the toxic atmosphere.

  “No,” Prudence conceded. “But it has to be oxygen. Everything breathes oxygen.”

  “Baharain doesn’t have oxygen. And the spider I saw wasn’t wearing breathing equipment.” Between the darkness, the terror, and the flash of the plasma explosion he hadn’t gotten a very good look, but he distinctly remembered seeing the creature’s fangs. “I saw its teeth.”

  “Spiders don’t breathe through their mouth.” Prudence could be amazingly contrary when she wanted to. “Maybe it had oxy feeders plugged into its trachea.”

  In Kyle’s opinion, she had spent way too much time studying spider anatomy over the last few days. She kept leaving pictures of various horrible eight-legged monsters on the data screens, and it was creeping everyone out.

  “They’re not actually spiders, Prudence. They just look like them. They have eight legs and fangs. Other than that, we don’t know much.”

  “Except that they’re immune to tetrodotoxin.” Prudence had looked up the name of the stuff that made Baharain poisonous. You didn’t even have to breathe it—just getting it on your skin could be fatal. “And we can assume they are more resistant to radiation than we are. That fighter-craft wasn’t shielded very well.”

  “Then how do we kill them?” Garcia was exasperated. “You’ve ruled out air, poison, radiation … what’s left?”

  “A plasma bomb works pretty well.”

  Kyle hadn’t meant to sound so bitter.

  Garcia matched his bitterness, and raised him by a gallon of bile. “Maybe we have some, then. I’ll just check the cargo manifest … oh, look. We don’t have a cargo manifest. Because we don’t have cargo.” The man seemed less concerned about the fate of millions than he did about the percentages he wasn’t making.

  But Kyle knew it was an act. Everybody wore a persona like a space suit, designed to insulate them from the cold emptiness of life. Most people lived in that suit so long they forgot it was on, like Garcia had. Mercenary profiteering was the only way Garcia knew how to deal with the world.

  “We don’t have plasma bombs,” Jorgun said, confused. “I don’t remember those being on any cargo list.”

  Kyle had to revise his cynical conclusion. Not everyone wore a fake persona.

  “We disguised them as cuckoo clocks,” Garcia said. His voice was laden with withering scorn, but Jorgun was as oblivious to that as he was to sarcasm.

  “I don’t remember any cuckoo clocks.”

  Garcia lashed out. “Do you even know what a cuckoo clock is, you big dummy?”

  “Garcia!” Prudence barked at him, and Garcia bit back whatever comment he was about to add.

  “No, but I know it was never on the cargo list.” Jorgun knew something was wrong, but he stuck to his guns. The kid—because it was impossible to think of him any other way than as a child—was brave.

  “There weren’t any clocks, Jorgun.” Kyle couldn’t stop himself from playing the protector. “Garcia’s just upset. He’s afraid of the spiders, and he doesn’t know what to do.”

  “Garcia is upset because he’s made one commission in eight hops. Garcia is upset because instead of carrying cargo, we’re carrying a criminal who can’t even pay his own fare. Garcia is upset because that flaming planet is probably crawling with spiders, and we’re flying straight towards it.” Talking about himself in the third person robbed Garcia’s rant of vitriol. Jorgun was smiling again by the end of it.

  “You can get us a transport for Monterey,” Prudence said. “No passengers, though. And try to get something low on mass. We need to be nimble.”

  “Can I ask the brain trust here a question?”

  “Sure, Garcia,” Prudence said. Kyle was amazed at her patience.

  “If we don’t find spiders on Solistar, why are we going to go looking for them on Monterey? Isn’t the point to avoid being eaten by spiders?”

  Prudence answered before Kyle could.

  “Can you guess how much Fleet would pay to know where the spiders’ base is?”

  It wasn’t the answer he would have given.

  “Information is the best cargo, Garcia.” Prudence smiled at the angry man. Kyle felt like getting angry himself. He wanted her to smile at him like that. “Its mass-to-value ratio is infinite.”

  “There’s no profit in being dead,” Garcia grumbled, but he deflated like a balloon with a pinhole in it. Kyle had seen the trick done once. You stuck a piece of clear tape on the balloon, and then you could poke it with a needle and it would slowly shrink, instead of popping. Prudence was a magician, and her crew were her props. Spending days trapped in a bubble of unreal space on a tiny, fragile habitat made management a survival skill. Fleet accomplished it with discipline; corporate liners relied on the promise of money; but the captain of a free-trader had only her wits to work with.

  Garcia left the bridge, grumbling, and Kyle followed after him. He needed to get out of Prudence’s presence before he said something stupid.

  “Tell me the rules again, dummy.” Garcia was blocking Jorgun from leaving the ship.

  “I can’t take off my hat.” Jorgun, like the rest of them, was wearing a rented rad-suit, topped off with a beekeeper’s bonnet. Multiple strips of clear plastic hung down from the broad rim, creating a bubble around the wearer’s head. It was a cosmic irony that air could penetrate the shifting, porous material, but gamma radiation could not.

  “That’s right, because if you do, that stupid star will burp, and then you’ll be ugly as well as dumb. And I’m ugly enough for both of us.”

  “I’m dumb enough for both of us.” Jorgun was grinning, but it made Kyle wince to hear him talk like that.

  Prudence issued orders. “Kyle and I are going to look around. You two go find us a cargo. And a new puzzle for Jorgun. Do you hear me, Garcia? No bars. Puzzle stores. Got it?” She sounded less like a boss than like a mother talking to rowdy children.

  “Yes, mein capitan.” Garcia was as insouciant as a twelve-year-old.

  Kyle shook his head in dismay, watching the two of them walk off. He was too young to be playing the role of father.

  “It’s better than the alternative.”

  She must think he was still upset over Jorgun’s comment. He shrugged it off, but she kept talking.

  “Jor is dumb. He needs to remember that. He needs to tell other people that, so they don’t have an excuse when I make them pay for taking advantage of him.”

  “Okay,” Kyle agreed. “But Garcia doesn’t need to be an asshole about it.”

  “He is what he is.” Now she shrugged. “He won’t sell Jor for a bag of magic beans. He fears me enough to not be that careless.”

  Kyle smiled wryly, but kept his comments to himself. It wasn’t fear that made Garcia obey her. How she could mani
pulate the man so well and yet not understand the source of her power was remarkable.

  Garcia, like every other man that spent more than ten minutes in Prudence’s presence, was in love with her. Thankfully, she was blind to the effect she had on men. Otherwise things would have been even more difficult for Kyle than they already were.

  Time to change the subject. “So what are we looking for?”

  “Information on Monterey. Jandi’s data cube had very little, and it was last updated twenty years ago. The first stop is the public Traffic Control board. I didn’t want to check the registry from the ship, in case they were watching to see who’s looking.”

  “And you’re bringing me along because you need a strong man to back you up? Or because you don’t trust me enough to let me out of your sight?”

  She tried to deflate him. “If I wanted strong, I would have brought Jor.” But it didn’t work. Kyle was just happy to be with her, whatever the reason.

  They met up with the other half of their crew on the patio of a busy restaurant, just after the sun went down. All around them people were shedding their rad-suits, revealing fashionable eveningwear and attractive gowns, like butterflies emerging from cocoons. Their waiter offered to take their suits, explaining that the rental company had a drop box there for tourists, and that they would deliver a fresh suit tomorrow morning before sunrise.

  Kyle and Jorgun handed over their suits gratefully. Garcia had already forgotten about his suit, in the fifteen seconds since he’d had it off. He just waved in the general direction of where he had left it, and went back to trying to puzzle out which of the drinks on the menu would get him drunk quickest. Only Prudence hesitated, unwilling to give up her protective clothing.

  “He’s a waiter, Prudence. Not a stranger in an alley. If the suits never make it back to the company, the restaurant will be liable.” Kyle felt odd trying to convince her to act like a civilized person. He was used to thinking of her as the sophisticated one.

  “We’ll have to be home before midnight,” she said. “Or risk turning into pumpkins.”

  “It will be safe until morning, Prudence.” Kyle wondered what a pumpkin was.

  “But not after. If Garcia gets drunk in an alley, he could wake up in trouble.”

  Obviously she wasn’t worried about that. The buildings were all safe, with steel roofs and thick rad-glass windows. It would be illegal to deny someone shelter, and the suit company made deliveries. Garcia would be fine.

  If they were on the run from agents of the League, however, those niceties might not apply. Kyle looked wistfully after the disappearing suits, but it was too late.

  “Are you buying, Pru?” Garcia was focused on more immediate matters. Much more immediate.

  “Food, yes. Booze, no.”

  Garcia frowned, and went back to studying the menu, obviously trying to factor in the constraint of cost against alcoholic effectiveness.

  “I take it you didn’t find a particularly profitable cargo,” Prudence said wryly.

  “No,” Garcia mumbled, distracted by the menu. “Contract shipments. Sealed, no less. The skanky bastiches don’t allow speculation. You fly in with a prepackaged load or not at all. And you’re not even allowed to know what you’re carrying.”

  “Unfriendly skies,” Prudence muttered, shaking her head.

  Kyle didn’t know much about interstellar commerce, but he could recognize a racket when he saw one. “Every planet around here seems to have its node traffic tied up pretty tight. Isn’t that kind of unusual?”

  “It’s not very attractive to free trade,” Prudence agreed. “Most places want new faces to stay in port for a day or so, to make sure there isn’t a warrant on their tail. But Baharain and Solistar don’t seem to want honest independents. They don’t seem to want independents at all.”

  “If they tried an outright ban on unregistered ships, there would be quite a fuss, wouldn’t there?” Freedom of travel was one of the universal rights, inherited from the ancient fear of being trapped on a dying world. Baharain required a license to trade, but they couldn’t stop ships from just visiting. “But by making things unprofitable, they’ve made the independents think avoiding this sector was their own idea.”

  Prudence narrowed her eyes. “So the thicker the web, the closer we are to the center.”

  “You should have been a cop.” Kyle wondered why she was glaring at him, until he realized he’d said that thought out loud. “I mean, if Monterey is even more restricted, we’ll know we’re getting warmer.”

  “Great, then we can go home now.” Garcia looked up from his menu. “Because Monterey is as tight as a bar tab at closing time. I’ve been talking to people while you two were sightseeing. This sealed-cargo crap has been going on so long nobody’s even curious about it anymore. There isn’t a stray credit to be made out of that node. And since Monterey doesn’t connect to any other nodes, it has to be the end of the line.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Prudence corrected him. “It goes through two dead hops to Kassa.”

  “Are we going back to Kassa?” Jorgun asked hopefully.

  “Not right now.” She patted his hand, distracting the big man.

  Kyle forced himself to stop watching her slender, ivory fingers. “This next hop could be dangerous, Prudence. Maybe we should leave some of the crew behind.”

  Garcia snorted dismissively. “You’re not stranding me on this microwave oven of a planet. And if you leave dummy here, he’ll take his hat off and cook his brain.”

  Jorgun reached up to his head with both hands, stricken with shame. “I forgot where my hat is.”

  “Jor, it’s okay. Garcia, shut the … shut up. Nobody’s getting left behind. We’re just transporting goods. It’s our job. If we do our job, nobody will look twice at us.”

  “And the uniform here? What’s his job?”

  “Security,” Prudence answered, before Kyle could say anything. “He’s recently retired from Altair police, so we took him on as a security officer. It’s a standard chair. Nothing suspicious in that.”

  “Chair?” Kyle wasn’t sure what she meant.

  Garcia laughed. “Yeah, he’s convincing because he’s so damn familiar with space travel.”

  “It means a seat on the bridge,” Prudence said. “Any decent-sized passenger liner has a security officer at the bridge level. The point is, it’s not unusual for a ship to have someone with your qualifications as part of the crew.”

  “Is he going to take my chair?” Jorgun was having a miserable night.

  “No, of course not, Jor. You’re nav.” Her hand rested comfortingly on his shoulder.

  Kyle watched her easy familiarity, wondering what it would feel like.

  Jorgun recovered quickly, pulling out his sunglasses and putting them on with a grin. “Except when I pretend to be captain.”

  “Maybe you should stop pretending.” Garcia was back to grumbling. “You couldn’t make any worse choices than the current one.”

  Prudence ignored him. “We better not play that game on this next stop, Jor. I think I can handle it.”

  Kyle didn’t ask, but Prudence explained anyway. “Sometimes it’s easier if they think Jorgun is the captain. As if the size of the man was more important than the size of the ship.”

  In Kyle’s opinion, their next stop would require every trick up their collective sleeves. But Prudence obviously wasn’t going to expose Jorgun to a charge of fraud. On a place as regulation-obsessed as Monterey promised to be, innocent games could be dangerous.

  “Did you hear anything about spiders?” Kyle asked Garcia. He’d listened in while Prudence had talked with her fellow captains, but all they seemed to care about was the safety of node travel and the prices of cargo. The concept of war and planetary devastation didn’t seem to connect with them. Maybe the rank-and-file spacers had a different view.

  “I heard it laughed about. Nobody around here takes Altair Fleet very seriously. They figure Kassa was some kind of retaliatory raid by
another colony. All this talk of spiders is dismissed as fancy-pants in gold braid justifying their pensions.”

  A compelling enough excuse. Few planets cared to maintain a fleet, and this explanation would only reinforce their self-identified wisdom.

  Prudence frowned. “If they want to stir up panic, why aren’t the local news services backing the official story? Especially here, where they have more control.”

  “Because they don’t want panic here,” Kyle explained. “Panicked people want to change things. They don’t want change, because everything’s already going according to plan. They want misdirection away from this sector.”

  She put it in her own words. “The web only trembles where the spider isn’t.”

  The restaurant had rolled up its front walls, exposing the indoor tables to the open air. Solistar took full advantage of the brief twilight, while it was safe to be outside but not yet bitterly cold. Without a blanket of vegetation, the naked face of the planet froze in the dark and burned in the day.

  On a vid screen hanging on the wall inside the restaurant, a comedic skit was mocking Altairian panic. One of the characters was plotting to make a fortune selling insecticide, while the other one kept trying to demonstrate his giant-sized bug-swatter.

  The placidness of Solistar society, the absolute lack of concern, was unnerving. In the stillness, Kyle imagined the spider so close he could hear it breathing.

  All of them felt it. Garcia took refuge in his glass, drinking a local concoction called araq. The waiter had sold Garcia on it by swearing three shots would leave an ordinary man incapacitated for three days. Prudence withdrew into herself, silent and unreachable, just when Kyle needed her most.

  Only Jorgun was immune, complaining about his dinner like a cranky child one minute, laughing at the vid the next. As Prudence struggled to moderate the big man’s flittering emotions, Kyle began to see the comfort Jorgun gave to her. The simple giant required her, by virtue of his handicap, to focus on the here and now, the immediate and concrete. The cloying danger of imagined spiders could not compete with the pressing disaster of fried protein cakes stamped in the wrong shape.