The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  Kyle dealt with his anxiety the only way he knew how, by fixing other people’s problems. He bullied the waiter into hand-cutting a new slab of protein to the five-pointed stars that Jorgun wanted.

  “You’ll spoil him,” Prudence complained.

  But she didn’t send the new cakes back.

  SEVENTEEN

  Anvil

  Five days of Kyle and she was ready to scream in frustration.

  She seriously considered taking him to bed, just to put an end to her fantasies. He was a man, no different from any other. He had a life back on Altair, family and friends, a place to live and a job to do. He wasn’t going to walk away from all that to live on her ship and fulfill her childish dreams of romance, marriage, and family.

  But alone in her stateroom, with the lights out, she kept remembering him sitting on the edge of the bunk in a towel.

  When the alarm started beeping, signaling that they would be dropping out of node-space in a few minutes, she breathed in relief. The unknown dangers of a possibly spider-infested planet would torture her less than this unmanageable desire.

  The entrance was anticlimactic.

  An automatic beacon logged her ship’s name and assigned them a berth in the spaceport. That was it. No bullying, warnings, gossip, or even advertisements.

  “They don’t have any cartoon channels,” Jorgun complained.

  Kyle leaned over Jorgun’s console and brought up a screen.

  “Tourist information … one page. Wow. They don’t have anything.”

  “Of course not.” Prudence was studying her sensor readouts. “There’s no sightseeing, because there’s nothing to see. The atmosphere is breathable, but opaque.”

  “You mean cloudy?” Kyle stared at the reddish, featureless blob on the main screen.

  “No, opaque. The atmosphere is not transparent to light. So the surface of the planet is always dark.”

  “Earth-fire,” Kyle muttered under his breath.

  Prudence shared the sentiment. Of all the places to live, this was the worst she’d ever seen.

  “A great place to play hide-and-seek,” Jorgun said.

  Kyle and Prudence stared at each other. A great place to hide an entire alien fleet, if you wanted to. A whole surface of a planet under a blanket.

  “We’ll have to land with just GPS and radar. Traffic Control already gave us a vector that will take us straight to the spaceport.” She ran it through her own navcom. “A clean one, too. They didn’t stint on computers.”

  As an experiment, she nudged her controls. The new course would cost her a little fuel and force her to orbit the planet once instead of landing directly. After only a few minutes, she was rewarded with a screeching siren.

  “Warning! Course is not optimal. Unauthorized flybys of the planet are forbidden. Please correct your course and disable all radar imaging hardware.”

  So the neglect was illusionary. Someone down there was watching their every move.

  The comm screen presented her with an option to view the relevant subsection of the local law code. Idly, she tapped it open. Instead of a welter of legalistic gibberish, there was a simple declaration.

  You are not anointed to view the face of the Divine.

  “Look at this,” she said to Kyle.

  He came over to her console, leaning comfortably close. “Holy crap … what the Earth does that even mean?”

  “Local regulations are the super-cargo’s department.” She tapped the screen again, sending the image to Garcia’s console.

  Garcia thought it was funny. “You want me to interpret this?”

  “If doing your job isn’t too much trouble.”

  “It’s pretty obvious, el capitan. The value of religious rules is that you can’t question them. They don’t want you looking around, and they don’t want to explain why. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe they don’t want you to find their super-secret alien base. But hey—that’s just a guess.”

  She kept them on the straight and narrow after that. The ten-hour trip from node to base dragged on, a hundred times worse than the five days they had spent going through the node. Those days had been drifting in perfect safety, where nothing could touch them. This felt like a long, slow fall onto a bed of knives.

  The spaceport was absolutely dismal. The atmosphere wasn’t any more dangerous than a heavy fog, so they didn’t get a gangway tube like on Baharain. Instead, she landed on a concrete platform illuminated by arc lamps, and she and her crew had to walk the fifty meters to the squat, gray building. Of course it was gray. Why paint it when it would always be in the dark?

  It took them fifteen minutes of wandering around the warehouse-like structure to find a clerk. He seemed put out that they would disturb him from the vid he was watching.

  “Where do we unload?” Prudence demanded.

  “Didn’t you read the regs? There’s a spot marked on yer landing pad. Yer bleeding responsible for transferring yer cargo inside the painted lines. After that, the machines will take care of it.”

  “Machines?”

  “Yes, Captain, machines. They’ve got an automatic cargo handling system here. It breaks a lot, but that’s not yer problem. Just get yer cargo inside the lines.”

  Prudence was flustered. Her crew weren’t longshoremen.

  “What if we wanted to hire some help?” Kyle asked.

  “Ha.” The clerk snorted derisively. “You’d have to go back to Solistar for that. None of these bloody monks is going to lift a finger for yer.”

  “These monks? So you’re not from Monterey?” Kyle made his interrogation sound like idle conversation.

  The clerk stared at them. “Do I look like a monk?”

  “We don’t know what monks look like,” Kyle answered.

  “That’s the bleeding point, innit?” The clerk laughed at them. “If you know what I look like, I can’t be a monk. The masks, see? You do know about the masks? Tell me you at least know about the masks.”

  Kyle grinned good-naturedly, accepting the ribbing. “The monks wear masks all the time, right?”

  “Bloody yes. Even when they’re doin’ it, right? Or so they say. Not that anybody’s ever seen two monks doin’ it. Not that anybody’s ever seen a female monk. They hide ’em, don’t they. But who cares? Who wants to do it with a bird in a mask? Probably as ugly as a fish.”

  “What if we wanted to see a monk? I mean, talk to one.”

  “Then you need to see a brain-fixer, don’tcha? What would you want to do that for? They don’t come out here, and you can’t go in there. Better for everybody, innit?”

  Prudence intervened. “Surely they must come out to the spaceport sometimes?”

  “Only when there’s a problem. And I get paid to see there ain’t no problems, don’t I? So no. They don’t.”

  The clerk pushed the button on his screen, starting the vid up again, and went back to ignoring them. Out of ideas, Prudence and her crew wandered back to their ship.

  “I’ll get the lander out,” she told them. “We can use it as a forklift. But there’s still going to be a lot of heavy lifting.”

  Garcia groaned as if she had just kicked him in the stomach. “I don’t get paid enough for this. Oh wait, that’s right, I don’t get paid!” Prudence gave him room and board, but he’d chosen a percentage of all their deals instead of a salary. Lately they hadn’t been making a lot of deals.

  “I’m sorry, Garcia, but think about it. This place is the dullest, most uninteresting planet we’ve ever visited. It practically screams, ‘Nothing to see here!’ This has got to be a clue.”

  “It’s a clue, all right.” Kyle’s face was grim. “If I were in charge of Fleet, I’d order a planetary bombardment based on nothing more than that clerk’s bad attitude.”

  Garcia always had to snipe at other people. “But you’re not in charge of Fleet.”

  “No, I’m not,” Kyle retorted. “So we need more evidence, and for that we need a plan. In the meantime, we have t
o act like we know what we’re doing. Jorgun, you and Garcia start lifting, and I’ll go think of a plan.”

  Garcia spluttered while Jorgun and Kyle laughed. Somehow Jorgun had understood Kyle was joking. Prudence wished she could trust him so instinctively, assume that he would always do the right thing, the noble thing, the good thing.

  She envied Jorgun’s simple faith in people.

  It took them seven hours to empty the ship. The lander did most of the work, carrying the sealed crates twenty meters to the unloading zone, but human muscle had to put everything on the lander and then take it off. They were limp with exhaustion, even Garcia, who had worked harder than she had guessed he was capable of. Either he was motivated by Kyle’s example or he had figured out that they couldn’t get off this accursed planet until the job was done.

  Prudence hadn’t done any lifting, but she was as exhausted as they were. Seven hours of making the lander dance had drained her. The craft was intended to travel from orbit to ground and back. It was bulky, slow to respond, and unequipped with mirrors or side-viewing cameras. One wrong twitch of the controls and it would crash into her ship like a drunken cow. One really wrong twitch and it could crush one of the men. Through the mass of the vehicle, she wouldn’t be able to feel it, wouldn’t notice the resistance of a human body being pulped against unyielding ground or hull. The knowledge sat on her shoulders and whispered terrible things in her ears, until she wanted to weep with tension. But tears would only blur her vision. So she didn’t.

  She was as grateful as the men when she tucked the lander into its bay for the last time.

  “Now what?” Garcia flopped on the loading ramp, a bottle of whiskey in one hand. Surprisingly, he hadn’t opened it until they were done.

  “I send the signal, and we see what these machines do.” She pressed the button on her pocket comm unit, telling the Ulysses to broadcast the message to the spaceport.

  Kyle borrowed Garcia’s bottle for a drink. “Think of it as a free show. The ballet of the machines.”

  “What’s a ballet?” Jorgun had opened a hot-drink, and was waiting for it to warm up.

  “A very boring evening,” Kyle answered.

  Garcia laughed and took his bottle back. “Join us, mon capitan.” He took a swig before offering it to her.

  For a change, she did. The whiskey burned her throat, but once it was down the hatch it felt warm inside. She was so tired of cold planets.

  A rumbling sound. From the spaceport came a squat ground car, a massive box on six wheels with protruding fangs of steel. It wheeled up to the stack of crates, drove around them three times, and then sat thinking for two minutes.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Garcia said. “This is boring.”

  The machine finally creaked into action again. Driving its forks under a stack of crates, it lifted them carefully, backed up, and drove off.

  Before it came back, a different one showed up. Prudence could tell the difference because this one had a bent headlight frame. The new machine instantly made a selection, grabbed a stack of crates, and left.

  “That’s pretty damn clever.” Kyle was impressed.

  Garcia wasn’t. “Another reason not to employ a workingman.”

  “Somebody’s got to maintain those machines, Garcia. Wouldn’t you rather be paid to fix machines than move crates?” Kyle sounded like an ad for an Altairian educational institution.

  “Not everybody is cut out to fix things,” Garcia said cryptically.

  It took Prudence a second to realize who he meant. Jorgun was sitting quietly, obviously tired, sipping his drink. It occurred to Prudence that he must be enjoying having done an equal share of the work. For once, he had been just another one of the guys, doing the same job.

  “Me, now,” Garcia continued, “I’m cut out for drinking.”

  Kyle got up and walked over to the crates. Pushing one that was on top, he moved it to a precarious balance. Coming back to the ship, he winked. “I guess that means I’m cut out for making trouble.”

  The first machine returned, and stopped, almost as if it were affronted. After a brief moment of staring, it raised its forks and slid them under the offending crate, picking it up by itself. Then it trundled off.

  Garcia snickered. “Maybe you need to find a new career.”

  Ignoring the barb, Kyle went out and moved another crate. Coming back, he pointed to Jorgun’s drink container. “Are you done with that?”

  “Yeah, I was going to throw it away.” He stood up to go into the ship.

  “Let me have it. And get another one, okay?”

  “Sure.” Jorgun smiled and handed over the empty can. “Do you want one, Garcia?”

  “Bring me one of the black ones.”

  Prudence sighed. The black drinks were mild stimulants. When Garcia started mixing them with his booze, he could drink for hours without passing out, getting more and more irrational. On those binges Prudence preferred to stay awake as long as he did. “Bring me one too, please,” she called out.

  Jorgun came back before any of the machines, passing around his bounty.

  The second machine trundled up. It stared at the uneven pile of crates with a little eye, no larger than a data pod, attached to a rod sticking up from the middle of the machine.

  Kyle slipped up to the machine and dropped the empty can over the sensor.

  There was a gentle rattle as the sensor spun in a circle. Then a red light on the body of the machine lit up, and the engine turned off.

  Garcia rolled on the ground, shrieking in laughter. “You killed it! With a plastic can! Who needs Fleet when we have cans?”

  In the foggy light, it was hard to tell, but Prudence thought Kyle might be blushing. “It was a bit of a letdown,” he admitted. “Somehow I expected … more.”

  “Aren’t you breaking a law?” she asked. “I thought we agreed we were just going to look around.”

  “The clerk said monks only come out when there’s a problem. So let’s make a problem. It’s either that or go home empty-handed.”

  “If we could get Jor to drink faster, we could conquer the whole planet.” Garcia collapsed into howls of laughter again.

  Jorgun blushed, but he finished his can in one pull.

  “Better let me do it, Jor. We only need one lawbreaker here.” Kyle took the can from him.

  When the other machine returned, it ignored the disabled one. While it was glaring at the crates, Kyle disabled it the same way, with exactly the same result.

  Prudence consulted her pocket comm unit. “We don’t have clearance to take off. We’re grounded until that cargo is in the warehouse.”

  Kyle shrugged. “Then we wait.”

  They had to wait three hours. Garcia fell asleep on the landing ramp, despite the cold. Jorgun brought out some blankets, giving one to Prudence and draping another one carefully over Garcia’s chubby body. Then he sat on the ramp with a portable screen and headphones, watching a cartoon.

  Prudence and Kyle drank stimulants, and waited. There was something comforting about being together without talking. It felt like he was accepting her, without asking for anything. Like being herself and being there was enough.

  Just when she felt ready to talk, when the silence had stretched on to where she was comfortable and ready to open a tiny window into herself, a light flared in the distance.

  A transporter descended on them from the air, cutting through the fog with powerful headlamps. It was smaller than Prudence’s lander, hardly bigger than an air car. To shrink the gravitics to that size had to be outrageously expensive.

  “Showtime,” she whispered, and Kyle blinked awake. She hadn’t noticed when he’d dozed off, but he was instantly alert. He woke up without moving, without reacting until he understood what the situation was. The reserve frightened her, because she recognized it. That was the way she always woke. It made the easy confidence of the last three hours feel irresponsible.

  A man got out of the transporter. In the brief and incurious gla
nce he aimed at them, they could see that he was wearing a simple mask of purple silk. It was plain compared to the extravaganza Dejae had worn in Kyle’s pictures.

  “Hey,” Prudence shouted at him. Grabbing Jorgun’s portable screen, she tapped it into the local network. “Hey, we’ve been waiting on your damn clearance. The cargo’s right there, but it won’t clear us. I should charge you for the downtime.” She stomped over to him, hiding her nervousness with anger. “Damn it, clear us already.”

  She held the screen out to him, expectantly.

  He looked at her. Angry, shamefaced, annoyed, unperturbed—who could tell through that mask? When he turned away and stepped toward the machines, she moved to intercept him.

  “Damn it, I’m serious. You can see the cargo’s all there. Clear us for takeoff already. I’m not going to wait while you fool around with your stupid machines.”

  Kyle came up behind her, his too-casual stroll a beacon of threatened violence and anger.

  The monk might have rolled his eyes, or glared, or something else entirely. Prudence found the lack of a human face or voice disorienting.

  He reached out for her screen, tapped it a few times, and it turned green.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled. She didn’t know what to do next. That was as far as her plan had taken her.

  “You got a voice, buddy?” Kyle could sound like a real low-life thug, when he wanted to. “The lady was talking to you. Say something.”

  “If you compel me to summon law enforcement, you will be extremely unhappy with the result.” The monk’s voice was blurred and distorted, filtered through electronics.

  “Not as unhappy as you,” Kyle said. In his hand was the pistol Prudence kept hidden on the bridge of the ship. She’d hired Kyle as security, and then not told him a damn thing about her security procedures, plans, and backups. Apparently he’d figured some of her tricks out by himself.

  The monk looked down at the wide barrel of the weapon. The mask could not conceal his reaction this time. His authority deflated like a pricked balloon.

  “I want some answers, and I’m willing to kill for them. You understand this, right? You understand that I know about the spiders, I saw the dead on Kassa, and I will blow your fucking head off without hesitation.”