The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  An hour passed. Then two. After the third hour Prudence began to consider nominating Garcia for sainthood.

  The comm channel lit up again.

  “Ulysses, this is Monterey Traffic Control. We would like you to return to the spaceport to answer some questions.”

  A human voice, but not recognizable as Dejae’s. Traffic Control didn’t stint on its filters. The monks on Monterey had been concealing their identity for a very long time.

  “I’m terribly sorry.” She was, but not for them. For Garcia. “We’ve already passed turnaround. We can’t abort now. It’s not physically possible.” Garcia had bought them the time they needed.

  “We understand that. However, this is a serious matter. We are dispatching a patrol boat to follow you through the node. We require that you reverse velocity on the other side, and return with the vessel.”

  “I don’t think I can. I’ve already plotted a vector through the next node, and my current velocity presumes making that hop.” She’d been running on maximum acceleration since liftoff. They would streak across X785 like a meteorite, unable to stop before the next node even if they wanted to. There was no margin of error. She was trusting the orbital data from the Launceston with their lives.

  “Our vessel is equipped with grappling lines and fusion power. It will assist you with velocity management.”

  They wanted her bad.

  “If you cannot correct your course, then you will be required to abandon ship and board your crew on our vessel.”

  Really bad.

  “Well, if it’s that important, I guess we’ll have to.” She signed out.

  After a few minutes, they called back.

  “Ulysses, we note that you are continuing to accelerate. This is not acceptable. Begin your deceleration now, or we will be forced to ask the Launceston to intervene.”

  “I’m sorry, Monterey. The Launceston just chewed me out on the regs for course corrections during node approaches.” That, of course, had been the point of Stanton’s little lecture. “I’m not going through that again. We’ll see you on the other side. Ulysses out.”

  She turned off the comm.

  Kyle was grinning, in a very unfriendly way.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  “They’re trying to stop us. That’s good news.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It means we can still hurt them.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Hammer

  Four long days, but not long enough. He didn’t want them to end.

  Not because there was trouble waiting for them on the other side. The Monterian ship would be only hours behind them. The Launceston might well feel compelled to enforce the law. There were many bad things that would start happening once they left the node. But those were not the reasons Kyle found himself resisting the passage of each hour.

  Being with Prudence, a part of her crew, a part of her ship. A part of her family. They were together without friction, without suspicion. For the first time in his life, Kyle wasn’t playing a role, wasn’t trying to present the image he thought others wanted to see. There was no reason to try. Jorgun didn’t care, and Prudence couldn’t be fooled. And the absence of Garcia drew them together, like a hole in the ground that needed to be filled.

  He wanted to win through to the next node for the most selfish of reasons. Because then he would have more time in node-space. Only two and a half days, but beggars could not complain.

  The ancients had been right. Heaven was a place in the sky, where nothing bad could touch you. But not for long; never for long enough.

  “Listen to that.” Prudence played a warbling hiss for him through her comm console. She’d been analyzing the data on his blue pod for the last five hours. He’d helped her with the technical settings, but mostly he’d sat next to her and soaked up her presence.

  “I’m not a computer,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything to the computer, either. But it shouldn’t be there. It’s not cosmic radiation or planetary comm. And it’s at the right time. This signal was sent out by the invading fleet, on a wide beam, throughout the whole system.”

  “Why would they broadcast their presence?” He kept asking why a lot. Everything these monks did was ass-backwards and upside down.

  “I don’t have a clue. It’s an encrypted signal. But Altair should have computers that can crack it.”

  “I’ll hand it over to the Launceston, then. They’ll get there sooner than we will.”

  “Yes, they will,” she said cryptically.

  A yellow light on her console turned on, accompanied by a gentle but insistent tone. It was the worst sound Kyle could imagine. It signaled the end of their vacation.

  “Normal space in fifteen minutes. Put on your best smiles, boys. You need to convince the Launceston to give you a ride.”

  A cold panic washed over him. “What?”

  “Think about it, Kyle. I can’t stop that patrol boat from catching us. What I can do is put Jorgun and you on the Launceston, out of their reach. I’ll surrender, and take the Ulysses back to Monterey. It will be four more days before they find out they were swindled. You’ll be safe by then.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Prudence.”

  “It’s not your choice.”

  “You can get on the Launceston with us.”

  She turned her face partly away. “I’m not leaving my ship.”

  “It’s just a ship! It’s not worth dying for. With the information you have to sell, Altair will buy you a new one.”

  “Kyle, it won’t work. If I’m not on the Ulysses, they’ll know something is up. They’ll attack the Launceston.”

  “So what? It’s armed. It can fight.”

  “But it might not win.”

  Kyle stared at her, unable to rationally cope with the prospect of losing her.

  “Kyle, we can’t take the chance. You have to warn Altair before it’s too late. You don’t understand. You don’t understand.”

  “Psychotic clones are trying to take over my planet. What part do I not fucking understand?”

  She stared past him, into some distant memory.

  “The monks think they won’t kill anyone. But when they have complete power, they’ll forget. They’ll get impatient. There will be problems … and genocide will look like a solution. In twenty years, Kyle, there will be ovens.”

  He reached out, to hold her, but she pushed him away, tears pouring down her face.

  “I can’t lose you and Jorgun that way. I can’t lose another family to the fire.”

  “You can’t stop it by dying!” His fingers were numb, all feeling and strength gone out of his hands.

  “They might not kill me right away. And if you win, then you can rescue me. You can be my knight in shining armor.” She said it with a wan smile, the kind of smile that would have comforted Jorgun. It didn’t comfort him.

  If wresting Monterey from its orbit and casting it into the sun with his bare hands was what it would take to win Prudence back, he would do it.

  But there had to be an easier way.

  “Fake a malfunction. Let the Ulysses drift. While they’re boarding we’ll escape on the Launceston.”

  “They’re not that stupid, Kyle. For Earth’s sake, stop making it hard on me. On us.” Jorgun was whimpering at his station, confused but understanding enough to know something bad was going on. “This is the best plan. I’ve thought about it for days. It’s what we have to do.”

  “I can’t do it, Prudence.”

  “You have to! They will kill you, Kyle. They’ll turn you over to Rassinger, and he’ll kill you, whether Altair wins or loses. And what hope would I have then, locked in my cell, alone on Monterey? How could I bear the days, knowing you could never come for me?”

  Stop it. Stop saying that. He thought the words, but could not speak.

  Impossibly, she dried her tears. Impossibly, she stood without breaking, while the world spun a
round Kyle, colors and shapes turning harsh and unreal.

  “Go pack your bags. That’s an order.”

  Jorgun went, unable to disobey her. Kyle had nothing to pack. Everything he wanted would be remaining on the Ulysses.

  “Take care of Jorgun for me,” she whispered.

  The light turned red, and they were in real space. It didn’t feel any different. The evil had already touched him.

  Stanton, of all unlikely sources, gave him a reprieve. The Launceston didn’t want to play along. When Prudence hailed them to arrange a passenger transfer, Stanton refused.

  “I’m not going to abandon my assigned patrol route to ferry your passengers, Falling. Monterey can’t board you for a few questions. If they want to talk to you, they can bloody well follow you to Altair.”

  She tried reasoning with him. “Captain, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. They won’t take no for an answer.”

  “This is neutral space. Altair law is as equally valid here as Monterey law. If they want to pick a fight, I’ll give them one.” Stanton obviously had spent too much time floating around in empty space looking for something to shoot at.

  “They will pick a fight, Captain. We know something they don’t want you to know. At any cost.”

  Now she had his full attention.

  “What would that be, Captain Falling?”

  So she told him.

  He was too professional to display any reaction over the comm link. As a soldier, he was supposed to be used to bombshells. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Not a lot.” Prudence looked flustered.

  Kyle shook his head in sympathy. Obviously she had expected her mere word to be sufficient to shake governments. A short vid of a man in a mask on one planet, and a tall tale of the same man in a different mask on another planet, and she thought Fleet would follow her anywhere.

  Luckily, she had a well-trained police detective on her side. Kyle held up the mask he’d ripped off of the monk, safely bagged in plastic. He’d already gone over it with a magnifying glass and found what they needed. One single hair, stuck on the inside of the mask. A slender thread to drag a fleet by, but DNA did not lie.

  “Yes,” Prudence answered the radio, relief in her voice. “We have some vid files, and the physical evidence to back it up.”

  “Let me see those files now.” Stanton was still suspicious, as he should be. Between that and the way Stanton had bailed them out of Monterey, Kyle was struggling to maintain his dislike of the man.

  Prudence offered them all her secrets. “We also have a recorded signal we could transmit to you. It was taken from a solar observation post on Kassa, at the time of the attack. We don’t know what it means. Maybe your comp can break the code and tell you something useful.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain. Send it all over while we close for boarding.” The Launceston had already matched their velocity and was drifting only a few kilometers away, but it would take another hour to safely close the gap with the ships. “I suggest you prepare to abandon ship, Captain Falling. We can’t afford to let you fall into enemy hands. We’ll be taking you and all your crew onboard.”

  Tapping her console, Prudence sent all of their hard-won data over in an instant. Before Kyle could start breathing again, she started arguing.

  “If they see the Ulysses drifting, they’ll know to focus on the Launceston. I could distract them, make them think you don’t know yet.”

  Stanton didn’t answer, presumably watching the vids she had transmitted, so Kyle argued for him.

  “Prudence, they’ll assume we talked. There’s probably a dozen ships burning through that node right now. It will only take one to hunt down the Ulysses.”

  She shrugged him off, speaking into the microphone. “Stanton, I think you should reconsider.”

  Still no answer.

  Her jaw took on that subtle hardness it wore when something was wrong. Kyle was elated that he could see it now, that he knew every line and curve of her face so well. The emotion jangled with his grief and fear, clanging discordantly.

  “Launceston, reply please.”

  Silence.

  On the screen that showed the depths of space, a white light flared and died.

  “Launceston, reply. Ulysses hailing the Launceston. Reply, damn it!” Prudence tapped furiously at her console.

  Kyle ran over to Jorgun’s console and started working the comm controls.

  “They’re still there,” Prudence said. “If they had blown up, there would be debris and gas. They’re still in one piece.”

  He couldn’t raise anything on any channel.

  “I’m going to take us closer.” Prudence started moving the ship, nudging it towards the Launceston’s last position. “If they have casualties, they might need us.”

  Two frantic minutes passed, but Kyle didn’t stop checking every possible wavelength. And then he found something, a single quiet voice in the dark.

  “Pru—I’ve got a signal. It’s a suit microphone. Somebody in a space suit wants to talk to us.” He flicked it to her chair.

  “This is the Ulysses. Do you read me?”

  “Captain Falling. How nice of you to wait.” The voice was faint. Kyle turned up the volume.

  Prudence let her worry show. “Stanton, are you okay? What happened?”

  “Don’t you already know, Falling? Wasn’t this part of your plan?”

  Now she bit her lip, angry, confused, and scared all at the same time. Kyle wanted to hold her, to wrap his arms around her. Instead, he listened.

  “What on Earth are you talking about?” she asked.

  “You’ve disabled us, Falling. Right down to the life support. Not that it matters. On this vector, without course corrections, we’ll pass our turnaround point before our air runs out. We’re doubly damned.”

  “Stanton, stop being an idiot. I didn’t do anything to you!”

  “That recorded signal you chose to share with us, Falling. It’s a viral code. It burned through our boards like acid. Every system on the ship went haywire until we pulled the emergency plugs. It even tried to trigger our self-destruct sequence. But I disabled that months ago, when that idiot Daspar came on board. Didn’t want my ship blown up because somebody wanted an asinine League officer dead. Never got around to reconnecting it, sorry to say. It’s a regs violation. Be sure to include that in my file, Falling.”

  So Stanton had finally met a regulation he didn’t like.

  “I didn’t do that.” Prudence looked ready to cry again, and Kyle watched helplessly, wanting to comfort her. Knowing that he could not. “I mean, I didn’t know it would happen. Damn it, didn’t you listen to my story? Why would I tell you all that if I was working for them?”

  Stanton had his own question. “Why didn’t your ship burn out when that virus went through it?”

  Finally, something Kyle could say that would matter. He pushed his microphone button. “Because this ship wasn’t made on Altair. You know that. You remarked on it back at Kassa.” And an unkind remark it had been, looking out across that field of refugees to the homely little freighter with ungainly lines.

  “Daspar.” Stanton let his displeasure at the ironic coincidences of the universe show through in his tone. “Of course you’re there, too.”

  “He’s on our side.” Prudence defended Kyle, making him feel warm inside. “The League tried to kill him. Several times. You can trust him, Stanton.”

  Kyle bathed in the feeling, enjoying it despite the terrible circumstances. Prudence was defending him. Prudence. Him.

  Out there, in the dark, Stanton was wrestling with momentous decisions, trying to decide who to trust. “So that’s why they didn’t disable us on the other side. You filed landing papers; they knew their trick wouldn’t work on your ship. And I was too close to the node.”

  There wasn’t anything they could do to help him, but Prudence tried. “We can match your vector, Captain, and take you and your crew on board. And then make a run for it�
��”

  “Negative, Captain.” Stanton’s voice was strong again. He’d made his choice. “That plan has a zero percent chance of success. Your ship is not fast enough. I was lying, earlier, about how bad it was. Trying to buy time. We have physical backups on board. Regs call for us to be prepared to purge and reprogram our system in six hours. We can do it in three.”

  For once, Kyle appreciated the man’s obsession.

  “We can’t run, Falling. We’ve lost the vector for that. But we’ll be ready for a fight when they come through that node.”

  “What if they send a fleet?” Prudence, who had moments ago been prepared to stay behind and face the enemy alone, was trying to talk Stanton out of it. Kyle thought that was very sweet of her. Futile, but sweet.

  “They don’t know you have that recording. So they don’t know we’ll be immune by then. They’ll try to disable us, first, with a radio beam. That will cost them at least one ship. The rest will have to fight us honestly, and that will buy you time.”

  “How are you going to become immune in three hours?”

  Stanton chuckled. “The old-fashioned way, Captain. I’m going to take a hammer to our external comm feeds. We’ll be incommunicado after that, so don’t expect us to say good-bye.”

  “I don’t feel right, leaving you in a disabled ship.”

  “Don’t worry about us.” His voice was stern. “There’s something vastly more important you need to do. Half of Altair Fleet is hanging off of Kassa, waiting for the aliens. If they attack with that viral code, the fleet will be destroyed. You have to warn them immediately. Even three minutes of warning will spell the difference between battle and disaster. The enemy could already be on their way, from some other node.”

  Half of Fleet destroyed in a single battle? The government would collapse. Dejae would be given any powers he asked for.

  “Will they believe us?” Prudence asked. Kyle smiled in appreciation. She only made mistakes once.

  “Yes, they will, because they already have reason to. We all noticed something while they were handing out duty assignments. They sent the experienced ships, of course, and kept back the new ships, the ones with noncitizen crews. But they also kept back the ships with League officers on them. We knew they were sending the rest of us to the front lines to die first. We just thought it would be a fair fight. The half of Fleet at Kassa isn’t just any half, Captain Falling. It’s the half that is still loyal to Altair.”