The Kassa Gambit

by M. C. Planck

  Kyle’s stomach got light again. Fleet officers were not supposed to say “but.” It wasn’t the kind of word you ever really wanted to hear. In the context of a space battle, it was positively ominous.

  The comm officer paused for an agonizingly long time before continuing. “Only one is on an intercept vector, Captain. The others are … spreading out.” The officer punched at computer buttons furiously. “They’re ignoring our decoys, and blocking us. All possible escape routes are covered.” He sat back in defeat, disbelief written on his face. “One of them is even covering the node entrance.”

  Stanton stared straight ahead, reviewing the situation through his goggles. Then he took them off and faced Kyle.

  “You should begin preparing your final report, Commander. Our optimal course predicts approximately twenty-seven minutes before impact.”

  Kyle was amazed at the captain’s sangfroid. “You’re giving up? Already?”

  “I am not giving up.” The ice was back, all the more noticeable for its brief absence. “I am explaining the expected outcome. The Launceston is a patrol boat. Our chief defense is maneuverability. I foolishly revealed our maximum thrust while avoiding the first mine. Now we will all die because of my error.”

  Putting the goggles back on, he began determinedly punching buttons on his console. Kyle could almost see him mentally paging through the Fleet tactics manual, trying every trick in the book. If they died here, it would not be from a lack of training.

  “Why?” Kyle asked.

  Stanton did not answer.

  “Why did you reveal that information?”

  Yanking the goggles off of his face, Stanton turned and all but snarled at Kyle.

  “Because I am human and capable of error would seem to be an adequate explanation. Sir.”

  Kyle didn’t believe that for a minute. The man was too much like a machine to claim to be human now. Even with his life expectancy reduced to less than half an hour, Stanton wouldn’t break protocol and actually snarl at a superior officer.

  Following his hunches was what had got Kyle to where he was today. Not that being on a spaceship doomed to destruction was a particularly laudable destination, but it was too late to change methods now. “Did you break some kind of regulation when you took that first evasive maneuver?”

  “No, sir, I did not. But I have already accepted blame for the situation, so I do not understand the commander’s line of inquiry.”

  “Why isn’t there a regulation against what you did?”

  Stanton stared at Kyle. Obviously he didn’t think it was an appropriate time to discuss Fleet regulations.

  But the comm officer had been listening in, and now demonstrated that someday he would earn a command of his own. Assuming he survived this one, of course.

  “Sirs … no known mine system would be able to take advantage of that information.”

  Kyle could see Stanton’s face slowly changing from choleric to puzzled.

  “You said it before, Captain. It’s nobody we know.” Kyle didn’t know how this information would help them, but he was sure it was important. He had to make Stanton realize that.

  The comm officer interrupted. “Captain—I’m picking up another ship. An independent freighter, registered from Altair. Merchant class A, identifies as the Ulysses. It’s in low-orbit around the planet—just broke atmosphere.”

  Stanton frowned at this new piece of the puzzle. “Maybe it’s someone they know. Give me a channel, comm.”

  Kyle didn’t want to pull rank now that the captain was finally treating him like a human being, but he had to. Whoever had sent him on this mission had sent him for a reason. If that freighter was League-friendly, a League officer would have to make the call.

  “I think I better handle this, Captain. It might be politically sensitive.” That was the most hint he dared to give.

  Stanton paused, but only briefly. “Comm, give the commander a line.” Although it was what Kyle had hoped for, it still bothered him that even the suggestion of politics could scare off a Fleet officer so easily. Stanton went back to abusing his console, trying out new strategies.

  Kyle went over to the comm officer’s console and accepted a headset.

  “Ulysses, acknowledge. This is the Altair Fleet vessel Launceston, demanding acknowledgement.”

  “And hello to you, too, Captain.”

  A woman’s voice. Subtly exotic, with an accent he could not place. Cool, but inviting; assertive, but not aggressive.

  Oddly tongue-tied, Kyle fell into a bad imitation of Fleet-speak. “Negative, Ulysses. This is Lieutenant Kyle Daspar, League officer and temporary commander of the Launceston.”

  The voice hardened. Some part of Kyle, deep in the back of his mind, regretted that. “Acknowledged, Commander. This is Prudence Falling, captain and owner of the Ulysses. We’re glad you’ve finally shown up.”

  His knowledge of Fleet jargon deserted him. “What do you mean?”

  Apparently his ability to speak like an intelligent adult had gone with it.

  “We’ve got a disaster on our hands, Commander. Perhaps you noticed? I’ve spent the last sixteen hours ferrying refugees, but there’s more broken here than I can fix. We need a hospital ship.”

  “What happened down there, Captain? Give me as many details as you can.”

  The voice paused. “Why don’t you come down and see for yourself?”

  She was a suspicious one, all right. From one clue she had deduced that there was something important he wasn’t telling her. She was wasted as a freight-hauler; she should have been a detective.

  “We are currently under attack ourselves, Captain. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  The voice turned curt and direct, ignoring his implication. No more gamesmanship. “A mine?”

  “Seven of them, actually.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” A hint of real pity. “We were only tracked by one.”

  How could a freighter escape a military-grade mine? Even to Kyle that seemed unlikely. “Then why are you still alive?”

  “It malfunctioned. Gave us a miss.” Just the lightest hint of amusement. Not a chuckle. That voice would never chuckle. But she appreciated the irony of his question.

  Every bone in Kyle’s cop body twinged. This was the point in an ordinary interrogation where he would sit down next to the subject, shake his head sadly, put his hand gently on their shoulder, and quietly explain that lies would only make it worse. Much, much worse.

  But this interviewee could not be intimidated. Kyle wasn’t looming over her, with the power of the State and a few burly beat cops behind him. Whatever truth she was hiding, he would have to lure it out of her.

  “Your luck seems providential. Remarkably so, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?”

  She surprised him, giving up without a fight. “I would agree. My engineer fired on the mine, with a mining laser defocused to a meter spread. But that seems far less likely a source of miracles than a malfunction. I should also note it evaded several decoys, which I was assured were fully effective against all known targeting systems.”

  For a tramp freighter, the Ulysses sounded remarkably well armed. It was like stumbling onto a murder scene and finding a hot-dog seller loitering in the area with a grenade launcher hidden in his cart. It tended to make one suspicious.

  But the comm officer had been listening in with one ear, and had found something interesting enough to intrude on their conversation. “Launceston comm here, Captain. What model were those decoys?”

  She answered him immediately, the bond between spacers obvious now that she was talking to a real one. “Nonstandard. Not from Altair, but Fleet grade. Supposed to work on gravitics, thermal, radio, and cosmic ray detection. I don’t have any better specs for you.”

  “What evasive action did you take, Captain?”

  “Random vector generation. But it didn’t help. Running silent didn’t either. We never figured out how it was tracking us. And then it just stop
ped trying.”

  “After the laser? But you can’t crack the hull on a lifeboat with that kind of spread, let alone a mine.” The comm officer hounded down the stray fact, cutting past all the boring, unhelpful, well-behaved ones. Kyle watched the officer worrying it like a bulldog, trying to squeeze out the answer by brute force.

  “What’s missing?” Kyle asked, trying to help. “How can a laser stop a mine without breaking through its armor?” He had no idea what the answer was. He just knew it was the right question.

  The comm officer silently counted on his fingers, eliminating possibilities. He started over, on the other hand, and then froze.

  “Tracking. Captain, it has to be an optical tracking system. That’s why all the other mines came after us when we turned on the fusion engine—we were the brightest thing in the sky. That’s why the decoys failed—they don’t look like us. And that’s how the Ulysses escaped—it blinded the mine.”

  Stanton spoke up, his voice coming to Kyle both through the headset and from across the bridge. “Captain Falling, could you give us an estimate on your laser’s output?”

  A brief pause before she answered. “Twenty megawatts.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain.” The delay was a clue that there was something interesting in her answer; the dryness of Stanton’s reply confirmed it. That they were trying to hide this from Kyle just made it all the more interesting.

  Stanton cut his link to the conversation, and addressed his bridge. “Gunnery, calculate luminosity for a twenty-meg beam at one meter, and then tell me how wide we can get and still match it.”

  He took off his goggles to face Kyle. “Commander, I have a plan. I intend to make a vector directly for one of the mines. At the last minute we will disable it with laser fire. This will allow us to slip through their screen. Do I have your permission to proceed?”

  Kyle suspended his call to the Ulysses, also. He didn’t want the enigmatic Captain Falling in this part of the conversation. “And if the laser doesn’t work?”

  Stanton didn’t even bother to shrug. “Then we die. In six minutes, instead of twenty-one.”

  “Don’t you think you’re staking an awful lot on a brief conversation with a woman you’ve never met?”

  The contempt was back, deep in Stanton’s eyes. Obviously, he felt no mere police officer could understand or appreciate the fraternity shared by all true spacers. But Kyle was unable to dredge up any sympathy. Kyle had plenty of experience with the alleged fraternity of professions, from cops to robbers to politicians and every shade in between. It had left him severely unimpressed with unwritten codes of honor.

  “Do you have any other suggestions, Commander?”

  If this was what the League had sent him for, then the woman was a League agent trying to save his life. Unless she was a plant, sent to make sure he died. He had enemies in the League—everyone in the League had enemies—and one of them could have arranged this, given the woman this clever story to lure them into making the wrong choice.

  He hated having to make decisions without adequate evidence, but in this case, it was easy. There weren’t any other options.

  “No, Captain, I do not. You may proceed at your discretion.”

  “Then find a place to hang on, Commander. You have thirty seconds.”

  Kyle retreated from the bridge, fleeing to his private stateroom. Over the intercom he asked the comm officer to let him know when the last possible moment to launch a report capsule would be. Strapping himself into a chair, he tried to compose what might be his final message.

  What should he say, and who should he say it to?

  His allies in the police force, the shadowy handful of men and women that sought to thwart the seemingly unstoppable rise of the League, would receive all the message they needed from his death. Anything he might say or even hint to them could only increase their risk of being discovered by the League.

  His father would also be content with the mere fact of his death. They would tell the old man that his son had died in the line of duty, serving the police, the League, and the glory of Altair. That would be enough; that was all his father had ever expected. All he had ever wanted.

  In this last moment, all Kyle had to reach out to was the League. And if they wanted him here, then they didn’t want him recording indiscriminate facts without knowing who would hear them. If he lived through this, he would need their favor. He had to continue to act like a loyal apparatchik. Even now.

  The taint of self-pity disgusted him. He took his hand away from the console, and leaned back into the chair.

  To wait.

  THREE

  Bonds

  Prudence watched the patrol boat touch down without envy. Sleek and lean, its lines appealed to the uninitiated eye. It looked fast, and the array of weapons and sensors it sported made it appear as prickly dangerous as it really was. Its skin was finely painted, smooth, and angular. As a craft of war, she could appreciate it for what it was.

  But what it could never be was a home. It could never offer refuge from a hard day’s work, never be a place where friends gathered for a meal. It could never earn its keep, make people happy with its promise of new goods, bringing presents from faraway places. It would never attract a curious and happy crowd with its mere landing.

  Even now, under these terrible circumstances, its presence only garnered relief. And anger, for its lateness. The refugees waited sullenly for the ship. The weapons it brought were too little, too late.

  She watched as the officers of the Launceston were deluged by the bitter demands of Kassa’s survivors. She had struggled with the angry crowd past the point of pity. They had been in shock, still grateful for any help, any friendly face from the skies. Now that they were beginning to grasp the full extent of the disaster, their personal dismay would be translated into global outrage.

  Prudence would share their outrage, when she was not tired beyond feeling. Nothing electrical was left functioning on the planet. Hardly any buildings were still standing. The extent of the dead was unknown. It would be months before everyone was accounted for. The only good news was that Kassa had prided itself on its outdoorsmanship, almost as if they were primitives. The bulk of the population would still be out there, hiding in the forests. Of all the worlds she had visited, Kassa was perhaps the best capable of surviving a hit-and-run raid. Any dome colonies would have suffered total casualties. Even Altair would have lost vastly more, their densely packed cities sitting ducks for orbital bombing runs.

  Of course, Altair had a fleet of warships that stood between its vulnerable cities and the threat of attack. Not that there ever had been any credible threat of attack before. The nearest planet with enough population to think of itself as competition was too many hops away, too embroiled in its own internal politics to project its power across the tiny stepping-stones between there and here.

  Kassa was one of those tiny stones, too small and poor to be worth stepping on. Kassa had defended its freedom with a volunteer police force and a single fusion-powered rescue boat, and that had been enough, because there was nothing here worth a conqueror’s time.

  But this enemy had come to kill, not to conquer; to destroy, not to possess. The survivors, terrified by this irrationality, shouted at the officers of the Launceston, whose uniforms were the only visible sign of authority and reason left on Kassa.

  “Tell them to pay us.” Garcia was quick to accept the authority of the uniforms, as well. “For our fuel, at least.”

  “Why would they, Garcia? This isn’t Altair soil. They don’t owe Kassa the time of day.”

  Garcia looked over the angry crowd with a new appreciation. “It looks like he’s telling them the same thing. And they don’t like it any more than I do.”

  “He” would be the man in the police uniform. The captain of the Launceston stood behind him, deferring to him. Prudence felt an immediate pang of sympathy for the captain. His government might have the right to seize his ship and hand it over to a political hack—a
fter all, they paid the bills—but it was still painful to watch.

  She couldn’t work up anything but contempt for the cop, though. True, his job right now was as hard as the captain’s—he had to stand there and explain to the Kassans exactly what the price of their freedom was—but the armband he wore trumped her natural sympathy. Law and order were fine things, but what he offered was something else.

  Garcia found something amusing in the scene. “If he’s recruiting League members, this is the right place to do it. Plenty of those farmboys will want to dish out a whipping now.”

  “Against who?” The refugees had seen nothing but bombs. They had no more idea who their attackers were than Prudence did.

  “Do you think they care? They just want to hit somebody back.”

  The officers had finished with the crowd and were making their way over to the Ulysses.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Garcia said.

  “Don’t you mean our turn?”

  “Nope. Them League guys give me the creeps. I’ll be belowdecks. But don’t forget to ask them for money. It can’t hurt.”

  Garcia scuttled away, abandoning Prudence to face the uniforms alone. Jorgun was asleep in his bunk, exhausted after carrying and lifting supplies and injured people for a double shift. Melvin was AWOL, probably locked in the gunnery pod and stoned out of his mind. All of this misery was too much for him to bear. It detracted from his ability to whine about his own suffering.

  That was unfair, she reflected. He’d done what he could, for the first twelve hours. It was only when it became obvious that nothing in his power would be enough that he had given up. Garcia was the one who cared the least, and thus was least scarred by the pain around them. Jorgun was protected by his simpleness. But he kept asking for Jelly, and sooner or later Prudence would have to find an answer for him.

  Knowing what the answer had to be, she had not looked for it.

  She wondered when she got to give up, stop caring, or just trust someone else to take charge. But she silenced that feeling before it grew into a whine. This was the price of command. This was the price of her freedom.